Generating music with expressive timing and dynamics - <AUTHOR> https://magenta.tensorflow.org/performance-rnn <comment><USER2> It's refreshing to hear generated piano music that isn't either strictly metrical or entirely freeform, but with patches where you do get a somewhat natural sense of rubato and sensitive dynamic shaping. It's sort of convincingly improvisatory. The constantly shifting harmonic idiom is disorienting in a not very pleasant way – the worst kind of Chopin + Ligeti mashup – especially when you raise the temperature. It would be interesting to use period/style-specific training sets.

To my ears the 5:00 clip does have a larger structure, there are clearly extended passages of building up to and ebbing away from large climaxes, where you get a real sense of sustained intensification, but of course if you follow the detail everything is built up from lots of fleeting and unrelated ideas.

<comment><USER3> > "It's sort of convincingly improvisatory."

I'm not sure if it was the dynamics specifically, but it was clear to me that A was human. Within 30 seconds I was so sure, I hit pause and loaded the answer to see if I was right (I was, and I'm likely the worst pianist on these forums and only a casual fan of music that falls into the 'classical' genre.)

Here's[0] a fabulous physics paper that analyses the 16th notes by a studio drummer widely considered one of the best in his field. IIRC, the paper mentions he couldn't record with a click because it'd throw him off. That being said, the quality of the recording didn't suffer (his 2nd take of the track was more than good enough for the rest of the musicians to record against). So his own 'internal metronome' was more than good enough. The interesting thing wasn't that his syncopation was incompatible with a click track, but rather the skew which evolved throughout each phrase had a mathematical model that fit well against it. The study compared his recording against a corpus of user submissions of the same track and all of these drummers _universally_ followed a similar set of dynamics. So presumably _all humans_ (or at least, all western drummers who elected to submit their recordings) have that _same skew_ intrinsically.

It's interesting whether it's a byproduct of culture (like an accent) or a feature intrinsic to humans. In fact, that itself would be an interesting study -- compare the patterns of a traditionally schooled western jazz drummer vs a tribal African drummer with vs an Indian tabla drummer. The end of the paper suggests additional avenues to explore, but who knows, maybe soon drumming will be 'solved' ?

I'm totally with you on seeing how it would do training against a specific set of recordings from a specific region and/or era. The results would be terribly interesting ! Or training just against some particular virtuoso like Gould on Bach or Horwitz on Chopin.

As I understand it, there are basically just a handful of songwriters out there (Shane McMcAnally is a prime example) who write songs for the major country-pop artists. If you have a listen to this[1], you can really see how similar each song is. (This isn't exclusive to country music - the 90s pop I grew up loving is pretty much the same, as demonstrated by Rob Paravorian[2].) There's probably a lot of money in automated songwriting for Katy Perry & her entourage. Startup idea for any of you kids.

IIRC, there's a startup which is already using pinterest, tumblr, and more obscure sites like lookbook to analyze and generate trends for clothing and interior design which design houses can pay semi-nominal fee to gain access to. H&M is great pumping out high-street fashion copies within a season, but imagine being able to actually beat Tom Ford to market.

There are also interesting sociological implications for this. The Culture of Chess changed with BlueGene. When I first read about AlphaGo I was floored. (I mean really. I had previously thought would be intractable within my lifetime due to the huge configuration space.) As we see these 'good enough' models emerge, this has wide implications on human culture as a whole.

I wonder how it will affect the value of artists (in any genre). An ex of mine who hated basketball (this was during the Kobe/Paul Pierce days) still managed to recognize the genius when I showed her some Michael Jordan clips. Certainly an artist in his craft. I'm not a fan of Lady Gaga[3] but when I saw this performance I could immediately see a significant amount of talent. Walter Murch is an absolutely amazing film editor, will he be reduced to a Final Cut Pro plugin? If I manage to get my hands on the all-22 recordings (for every NFL game, there's an overhead camera which records the whole field to let coaches analyze their opponents) of every American football team, can I out- tactic Bill Belichick ?

==

[0] journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127902 (Seriously, it's a fantastic paper.) [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY8SwIvxj8o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY8SwIvxj8o) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP8SrlbpJ5A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP8SrlbpJ5A)

<comment><USER4> > but it was clear to me that A was human

I believe you're thinking of a different project/article that was on the HN front page a week or two ago (but which I can't seem to find).

This article doesn't have any "which is human" bits (and the results here are a lot more impressive than the one you're thinking of).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems that this model does not have any notion of "cadence" (the punctuation in musical grammar, given by harmony and tonality). The "expressivity" must be correlated to the harmony grammar, else it does not make sense. Unfortunately the samples in the article do not sound very good to me, and I am pretty sure that it is because of that.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is stunning! Great stuff.

Since the input and prediction is a single sequence, did you experiment with beamsearch/stochastic beamsearch decoding (maybe with additional diversity criteria)?

I found that even simple models (markov chains) got a big diversity boost with a stochastic beamsearch - it might avoid the problems with low temperature repetition that could happen in a standard beamsearch. However, my music models are much, much, (much) worse than this, so my relative improvement might be related to that.

Similarly, I am finding really nice results in text (RNN-VAE) with scheduled sampling, it might be worth experimenting with.

I am amazed at how good this next-step sampled output is. The above ideas might just hurt the result, I am having a hard time imagining how it could be better.

What soundfont/midi rendering package is used for this? The piano sound is really rich.

Looking forward to hearing what creative things users will do with this model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Kyle, we didn't try anything more advanced than next-step sampling. You probably have a better sense than I do how much improvement such techniques are likely to yield. My unfounded suspicion is that we're close to the limit of generation quality from this dataset, and so I'm most interested in trying to gather 10-100x more skilled performances, one way or another.

There's also no consensus on whether the high- or low-temperature samples sound better. I've heard both opinions from several people.

Sageev did the final rendering, not sure what he used but I'm pretty sure it was nothing too fancy.

<comment><USER6> A bigger dataset of MIDI with velocity information and performance timing would be really, really great.

High temperature versus low is tough to compare - I find that sometimes low temperature seems better, then I change the random seed and my opinion flips.

Same for stochastic versus deterministic beam search, length/diversity scoring, and so on. I have been meaning to blog on this, will send it your way when I get it posted.

For character text, stochastic seems nicer broadly (maybe due to limited size of markov space, see [0] deterministic vs. [1] stochastic) but for music it depends on the representation I use. However at least in this cherrypicked example, I find the repetition of the deterministic beamsearch hilarious even though it is "worse".

Interesting, I will have to ask him what it was. With that render, at least my bad samples will sound prettier.

Great job on the model again!

[0] [https://badsamples.tumblr.com/post/160767248407/a-markov- arg...](https://badsamples.tumblr.com/post/160767248407/a-markov-argument)

[1] [https://badsamples.tumblr.com/post/160777871547/stochastic-s...](https://badsamples.tumblr.com/post/160777871547/stochastic- sleazy-shakespeare)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could it mean that you could generate music for games that would follow the action and help build up tension?

<comment><USER8> This is already done in a lot of games. But those are precomposed parts that are dynamically morphed into each other when action changes.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, it make sense to do so. Do you know it they use use this approach only in game with a scenario or also in multi-user settings? Because in one case they can use static triggers where in the other case they would need to measure user's sensation or stress. I mean the music could be more intense if you are in abttle and your armor and health are quite low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> that first example is jaw dropping. its just like what good musicians do when they are noodling. damn. well done! probably the best results i've ever heard for this type of effort.

<comment><USER10> I'm curious how many tries it took to get that. I've tried chopping up samples from piano music using onset detection and then recombining samples programmatically. The results were more interesting musically to me actually, but also not as reminiscent of a traditional classical / romantic piano piece.

So, this is probably the best RNN generated music that I've heard too but overall I'm still not extremely impressed.

<comment><USER11> I'm passionate about this subject so here's my take on it. Until neural networks can create music better than humans it will be nothing more than table talk.

Usually for something to gain any real traction it needs to solve a problem or do it better than current solutions. AI generated music does neither.

From a music nerd who loves programming and neural networks I find this stuff very interesting. But I feel that neural networks could be much more useful to composers in other ways.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I make electronic music and I'm really interested in algorithmic techniques as an aid to the composer too.

I have python scripts that just generate many minutes worth of music in an instant, and then I comb through the result and cut out the interesting parts for further processing. It's a really productive technique and you hit on melodies and rhythms that normally a human wouldn't.

<comment><USER11> If AI is used as a tool to help composers become more productive it would be a massive hit. The ability to create new interesting stuff in less time is valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This can generate elevator music that will never repeat. I am up for that ! (Just getting into ML with Udacity, Coursera courses. This is just fascinating)

<comment><USER11> You don't need a neural network for that. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esRdmKYucIw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esRdmKYucIw)</comment></comment>


Carbonhire exposes mysql password + sources in broken landing page. - <AUTHOR> http://www.carbonhire.com/track.php?email=plop

<comment><USER2> No idea what this is about. If it was a phishing email, it was very cleverly contrived, just had a joke with my wife after getting an email which said someone at work had a crush on me.

Looked like it was collecting email addresses?

<comment><USER3> Got the same email, thought the same things.

<comment><USER2> I can't work out what they were trying to achieve. They already had the email address. So... ?</comment></comment></comment>


Allahcoin – Peer-to-peer Islamic currency - <AUTHOR> http://www.allahcoin.org/index.php/en/

<comment><USER2> "10% of the gain will be donated to the muslim brotherhood foundation."

Am I they only one alarmed by this?

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of hawala, an interesting money transfer system that doesn't actually involve the movement of money, based on the honor system and with roots in Islamic law: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala)

<comment><USER4> Actually Bitcoin is like hawala, too, when used for cross-border finance transfer: the sender trusts the network that the reciever will be able to exchange the Bitcoins for the corresponding value in local currency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No code, no downloads.

Nothing to see here, just silly bandwagonning.</comment>


Using Twitter to move the markets - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/business/media/using-twitter-to-move-the-markets.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

<comment><USER2> Elon Musk has used Twitter virtuously.</comment>


Ask HN: Will HTML5 ever be universally interoperable? - <AUTHOR>

Ie: is there any realistic end to browser compatibility hell?
The reason I ask: I'm an old fart from the '90s.  Back in the '90s, the problem was Unix interoperability.  There was a solution to Unix interoperability: Posix.  In the future, all Unixen were supposed to converge on Posix, which would be the One True Unix.  Yeah, I know, ha ha fscking ha.
Is HTML5 Posix?  If not, why not?  What I see when I look at HTML5 is a giant pile of Javascript APIs, all different, all being feverishly upgraded and extended, in three or four competing browsers.  Has a situation like this ever resulted in a single universally compatible development environment, ever, in computing history?  How is this effort different from that other effort to standardize a giant pile of APIs - Posix?
And if not, what do we do about it? <comment><USER2> I'd say that in the near future it will be possible to use some of the larger, more widely touted features of HTML5 and related tech. Definitely things like canvas and web sockets as most modern browsers support those now in some form and it looks as if even IE 10 will support web sockets.

The way I see some of the other things: They're coming along, slowly. It will probably be awhile before you're able to use many of the new browser APIs or things like WebGL without some (many?) hacks to ensure that things work properly in all browsers.

<comment><AUTHOR> What scares me is that this is actually a much lower compatibility expectation than Posix ever achieved.

It is possible to use strict Posix APIs, whether "large and widely touted" or not, and always has been. It is not and never has been possible to treat Posix as a single interoperable platform, because every Unix vendor wound up developing their own APIs much faster than the Posix process could standardize this. Also, once vendor APIs diverge in semantics, whether because of implementation errors or spec ambiguities/inconsistencies, these differences become permanent, as no vendor wants to break the existing code of a developer who was loyal enough to target their platform in the first place. And everyone has a motivation to "extend and embrace," of course.

Can anyone name some factors that mitigate these effects in the HTML5 context?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Browsers will probably achieve API compatibility this decade. But there may still be performance problems and slow standardization of new features, which means there will be other OSs or runtimes.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some of the best ways to reach game developers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Attend Indie game conferences.

</comment><comment><USER2> Join an engine community, like Unreal Engine 4: [https://forums.unrealengine.com/](https://forums.unrealengine.com/) Unity: [http://forum.unity3d.com/](http://forum.unity3d.com/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Making games is the best way to reach game developers.

Sounds cliché, but it is the best.

</comment><comment><USER2> In what way?</comment>


Debugging a TCP socket leak in a Kubernetes cluster - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hasura.io/debugging-tcp-socket-leak-in-a-kubernetes-cluster-99171d3e654b <comment><USER2> I have read this near four times now. I can't really find any sustenance -- it appears to be a advertisement for a product wrapped in a unsolved issue.

No mention of lsof, netstat, or tcpdump, the normal tools used for troubleshooting these sort of problems. Without trying to sound to snarky I find it highly concerning that the industry is now working with tools like docker and Kubernties and we some how just throw out the fact that these sit on top of Linux.

Not to mention kubelet's ability to spot one of many turntables reaching a max still would have not solved this problem -- "Fundamentally, the node was unhealthy" \-- is not a proper answer to the problem -- what was done to resolve the memory issue is. That could be increasing the tcp_mem to to support the workload, or finding a faulty user space program who is acting faulty -- all of which we have no clue because no real tools for troubleshooting this were used.

I mainly write this gripe because this appears to be a problemtisement, or a blogtisement. A "helpful" but not informative blog simply to provide a way to advertise your companies service at as the final blurb, leaving us with no real solution, resolution or a closing to the mystery of why tcp_mem was higher than expected.

<comment><USER3> > kubelets ability to spot one of many turntables reaching a max...

Hm...how do you propose kubernetes / kubernetes users solve these kinds of problems? It could be a fairly common error that's hard to catch on a system of large number of nodes where you're not supposed to actively think about the fact that you have nodes. What's the right tooling / monitoring to have on a system of 20nodes where one node is basically screwed?

These kinds of things make me think the entire K8s/container abstraction is just broken.

<comment><USER4> Shouldn't this be a Linux (per process or per namespace) feature to limit resources available to userspace?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems that metrics providing visibility into the "network connectivity was flaky", like looking at response times (particularly 95/99 percentile) and digging into the pod, which gives you the node, would have isolated the problem pretty quickly to a single node. If a problem is isolated to a node, first thing to look at would be node logs. Would that pattern not have worked in this case?

</comment><comment><USER6> Checking the logs should be on everyone mind when dealing with issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed! And when the logs show nothing being wrong? All k8s components were reporting that everything is fine.

<comment><USER6> Because not all problem are userspace related, it's very common on Linux to check for kernel logs. Especially when you know how Kubernetes deals with networking ( using iptables ect ... )</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My final project for my human-computer interaction class. - <AUTHOR> http://cs279finalproject.herokuapp.com/

<comment><USER2> "No such app"</comment>


Ask HN: Commision-based % for sales force? - <AUTHOR>

Currently looking to hire a couple salesmen and a question arose: For those that have a sales force, what % of the sale do you pay them for a PaaS?
I'm leaning towards: 100% of Avg Monthly Revenue per Customer for the first 3 months (read that somewhere) After that: 25% - churn %.
Thanks for your time. <comment><USER2> \- are you hiring remote, or in office?

\- are these affiliates, or "sales people"? (What do they call themselves?)

\- how long is the sales cycle? Does it require person-to-person interaction? How much of it?

\- who are your target customers? Individuals, or companies?

\- does your competition have affiliate programs? What are their commissions? Do they have sales people? Can you poach them?

\- how much money do you have? Can you invest upfront?

\- does selling your product require training?

All relevant questions.

</comment><comment><USER3> All your affiliates care about is that your conversion and commission rates are higher than the competition. All you need to care about is that your lifetime customer value exceeds your costs including commissions.

A great example was a dating site that offered a 200% commission on each sale, because they knew that once people were in their sales funnel, enough would buy buy bigger ticket items to make it profitable. They crushed the competition who was offering 50% commissions on similar products because affiliates chose to get the 200% commissions.

<comment><USER4> I find it hard to believe that no one would figure out how to game the system with shill buyers, once commissions moved above 100%. Could you point such a program out? My google skills have failed me.

<comment><USER5> Most are private, check out cj.com and shareasale.com (you'll have to sign up before you can see those kinds of affiliate programs). But he's right, those kinds of offers are commonplace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Depends. It's all about the nature of the sale, the nature of the customer management, & the types of customers you are dealing with - that will inform your model. I'd be willing to share my experiences offline if you want ckluis [@] gmail.com

<comment><USER7> Not to mention the service cost, your realistic expectations for unit sales per salesperson (and the volatility of that figure) and whether you're paying them a base salary near market rates for their skillset.</comment></comment>


Build a Toy Quantum Computer at Home - <AUTHOR> https://www.dhruvonmath.com/2020/07/19/quantum-computers/ <comment><USER2> This was a great exercise, very well explained!</comment>


How-to sell to enterprise customers (for startups) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/04/selling-for-startups-101---todd-vollmer-on-getting-traction.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking of starting a sales blog using content/framework/stories from Todd (this interviewee). It would be like startupcompanylawyer.com, but for sales. Useful idea?

<comment><USER2> Why don't you get Todd to do it? Seems more logical to me

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd do it together. He doesn't want to do it himself for a variety of reasons.</comment></comment></comment>


Micro-Projects for Fun and Profit - <AUTHOR> http://niftylettuce.com/posts/micro-projects-for-fun-and-profit/

<comment><USER2> Somewhat lame question, but when somebody talks about their 'weekend project', do they mean:

1) A project I started and launched in a single weekend 2) A project that I worked in my free time (aka weekends) 3) Something else.

I've done some small side projects in my spare time, but have never been able to do something start to finish in a single weekend. Maybe my weekends are too busy or my projects too large.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the answer is "Yes."

By that I mean that I think people often mean both. Some projects are obviously hackathon-like projects that were done in (something close to) a single weekend.

Others probably took on the order of 4 days to a few weeks cobbled together over weekends. I worked on [http://lifestyle.io/](http://lifestyle.io/) for probably about 5 days total before launching it, and I've given it additional love since.

I wouldn't get hung up on what you can get done in a weekend anyway. Focus on creating real value with what you do if you're intending to profit. (Hint: many of these weekend projects forget that part entirely!) If you just want to have fun, then you definitely don't need to worry about timescales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm really curious about the t-shirt project being a "micro-project". When I heard micro-project, I thought a couple of weekends of working, small niche market, and mostly electronic based. Teelaunch seems to require a large physical component (t-shirt printing and distribution). Even if you print on demand there's still a lot of work to be done there and high capital expenditure.

</comment><comment><USER4> I feel getting the right kind of feedback, or the right kind of information is the trick. How much value do you get from the various quantitative approaches you took? What just felt like navel-gazing?

</comment><comment><USER5> I love this type of shipping mentality. How do you think hackathons could play into this?</comment>


Carnegie-Mellon Public IR/Web Mining Datasets - <AUTHOR> http://boston.lti.cs.cmu.edu/callan/Data/#Web <comment><AUTHOR> I wonder HOW/IF they'll ever release this particular dataset:

        web08-bst.v1

             * Description: A 25 terabyte dataset of about 1 billion web pages crawled in November, 2008.
             The crawl order was best-first search, using the OPIC metric. The crawl was started from about
             25 million URLs that either i) had high OPIC values in a web graph produced from an earlier 200
             million page crawl, or ii) were ranked highly by a commercial search engine for one of 16,000
             sample queries in one of 10 languages. This dataset covers web content in English, Chinese, Spanish,
             Japanese, French, German, Arabic, Portuguese, Korean, and Italian.
             * Creators: J. Callan, M. Hoy, C. Yoo, and L. Zhao.
             * Status: In progress. Expected to be available to other researchers by March, 2009.

I know of several research groups and start-ups that wouldn't mind playing with it.

</comment><comment><USER2> <http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/index.html></comment>


Maybe the Gig Economy Isn't Reshaping Work After All - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/business/economy/work-gig-economy.html <comment><USER3> When I first arrived in London my English was not good enough to speak on the phone, I had no idea what the London job market for developers looked like, I had no idea where should I live and where should I settle.

So for the first 3-4 months, I did some wine waiting as a gig(agency work, no fixed place or hours. Like with Uber, you provide your own gear - <USER2> uniforms, bottle openers etc.) at the finest, the most iconic places in London. I worked at the Shard, I worked at the Cafe Royal, I worked at Four Seasons in events where celebrities like Victoria Beckham or Prince Harry were guests. I did my jubilee at BAFTA's after party, I was the wine waiter for the award-winning team that made the Amy Winehouse documentary. That night I had a chance to meet with pretty much every single celebrity(900+ guests from the industry), I was a huge Breaking Bad fan and I had the chance to speak with Walter White.

How to get into this gig business without ever working in this industry? 1 day of training and boom, I'm a waiter at the fines restaurants in the world.

It was such an amazing experience but whoever imagines living like that forever should have poor judgement. I was there to make some money until I get a real job and open a bank account(really hard to do because of catch 22) and most people who worked with me were either new arrivals like me or Australians who came to the UK to experience Europe for a year or 2(They come just before or after college with 2 year work visa, work for few months and travel Europe).

The world is transforming, the employment contracts are not the driving force. They are a reaction to the new needs. I think it's alright, an equilibrium will be reached.

<comment><USER4> > really hard to do because of catch 22

To expand on what mrtksn means: in the UK, it is difficult to get a bank account without proof of address. It is also difficult to rent a flat without a UK bank account. There are a few ways around this:

\- Have a friend put you on their water bill and use this as proof of address. I suspect this is illegal.

\- Join a flatshare without getting on the lease, pay for your portion of the rent with Transferwise or something, and have your flatmate put you on the water bill. I sure hope this is legal.

\- Find a bank which is a bit lax about proof of address and is willing to accept things like proof of employment. Lloyds used to do this, but I've heard they no longer do.

<comment><USER5> Can anyone comment on why this is the case? It seems ridiculous on it's face.

<comment><USER6> It's a UK thing -- everything has to not work in the most ridiculous way possible.

This also applies to anti-money-laundering stuff: it's better to affect loads of people really badly who are most certainly not money laundering as long as it does not affect the people who are money laundering at scale.

That said, there are people who don't really understand that people on social media paying you for access to your bank account are probably money laundering.

This is in a country where it is perfectly permitted to open several stores of the same chain of gambling establishments in the same street with fixed-odds betting machines and no questions of where the large sums of cash being handed over come from.

<comment><USER7> This is painfully accurate. Buying a house now involves proving that your funds came from bona fide sources (i.e. that you are not a criminal), thanks to new anti money laundering regulations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For most people (not highly sought after programmers), its an erosion of what paltry remnant of their workers rights remains.

Last time wealth inequality peaked, the robber barons had strike breakers and whatnot. This time (with wealth inequality continuing to soar to historically unprecedented heights) they have the 'gig economy'.

<comment><USER9> Did you even read the article? Gig economy isn't taking over, it slightly declined from 2005.

<comment><USER10> Considering they drew parallels with strike breakers, I don't think that was the point.

Many Americans are stuck with dead-end low-wage low/no-benefit part-time jobs (plural) trying to make ends meet - the weak job market offers few alternatives, while the gig economy (ubiquitous temp workers) stands as an implicit threat against workers organizing.

<comment><USER11> A dead-end job is still a job. Unemployment rates are historically low. In the future, most people will become "gig" workers of some sort due to ubiquitous automation.

<comment><USER12> Giving everyone a job is not, and should never be, the goal of a society. In the early twentieth century American workers were killed fighting for the right to support themselves working 40 hours a week but for much the population that option has evaporated. I know people in the bay area working 70 hours a week at dead end jobs barely making ends meet; a fact I consider unacceptable given the wealth they are surrounded by.

<comment><USER13> > I know people in the bay area working 70 hours a week at dead end jobs > barely making ends meet; a fact I consider unacceptable given the wealth > they are surrounded by.

By what means is this unacceptable? "I find myself working 40 hours a week to afford cable and a new iphone. I consider that unacceptable given the wealth I am surrounded by."

Those two statements are qualitively equivalent. Because you move to a nicer neighborhood, you shouldn't have to put up with things other people put up with? Huh?

<comment><USER14> Working 70 hours is much more than 40. In the first case you're working to survive and don't have any time outside of work to improve your situation.

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure you own a cell phone and a laptop.

And most of your things are made by people working comparable hours for much less money and a lower of standard of living. Yet you somehow find that "acceptable" even though you're still complicit in their exploitation.

I fail to see why geographic proximity makes things less acceptable. If we could ship the fruits of their labor from overseas, that would be ok?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It did reshape it. Turns out you can offload your costs to your 'employees' that hardly will organize and project costs and earnings to the future (like a competent business). I've talked with bunch of car sharing drivers who were bamboozled with car loans, get hit by traffic infractions, costs of maintenance and the list goes on and on. I feel that the gig economy preys on people who have not developed that risk management and are lured by the promise of easy money (make $500 this weekend). That can be verified by reading on what kind of game theory the big companies investing in (how to sweeten a deal, making people decide on the spot yes or no, etc). It's an interesting state, but I hope they turn it around. There is potential.

<comment><USER16> Interesting that this thread and the "chatbots aren't so great after all" thread hit the front page on the same day.

Anyone who actually thought people gave a shit about chatbots was either deluded, a chatbot API salesman, or a manager/owner trying to cut costs by downsizing their call/chat support center.

Anyone who actually thought the gig economy was helping anyone but business owners was either deluded or a shill.

<comment><USER17> Or they did the Fiverr ads for the NYC subways. There's one that makes fun of people with white collar careers by calling them "chained down" and declaring that working for Fiverr in the gig economy is better.

<comment><USER18> Saw this on the of a bus in SF and started laughing. Low pay contractor work is the way to get unchained in SF? You won't even be able to make rent unless you're in the top percentile.

<comment><USER19> I saw someone on fiverr offering to install Java on Ububtu Linux starting at 100$. That sounds about right. For the most part these sort of race to the bottom gigs would only work if your cost of living were really low relative to the $ amount. I did Amazon Turk work mainly out of curiosity/boredom, at one point I transcribed a conference call for some UK non-profit. I think it paid like 3-4$ and took me a few hours. I couldn't imagine actually living on that but I'm sure Amazon made some profit.

<comment><USER20> Who is someone who needs Java on Linux, but can't find the download button on Oracle's website, but can figure out how navigate the fiverr app/site?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> People(most people) like to do the same thing every day. Even me, I'm a programmer and have different tasks, but I get most of my work through one client. I would hate to be chasing down new clients all the time.

<comment><USER22> Is that true, do most people like doing the same thing every day? It certainly is not true for me.

EDIT: A few repliers clarified that it's probably about the stable and reliable income, and not about the nature of the work that's done every day. I can agree with that!

<comment><USER23> i think OP meant more along the lines of: people like stability and ones with families can't rely on an inconsistent income that the freelance world generally provides. not actually doing the exact same thing everyday

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's not really surprising at all. The article says the category of workers in "gig" type of jobs went from 11% in 2005 to 10% in 2017. To change this number above some level of statistical significance, people would have to move away from salaried work to gig jobs en masse or vice-versa, but that's not really how skillsets and careers work.

You don't wake up one day and say: "geez, I'm going to stop being a lawyer and go drive for Uber to spend more time with my kids". It is much more likely that a person flipping burgers somewhere might try being an Uber driver and that an Uber driver somewhere else might get fed up and end up going back to one of the low-skill alternatives (flipping burgers, retail, etc) at roughly equal rates.

<comment><USER25> Or people generally don't choose gig work as a first choice, and tightening unemployment has allowed them to get closer to their preferences.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reminds me of the economist Robert Solow's quip:

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

<comment><USER26> This is a good comment. It is interesting to consider how much rhetoric there is about robots and AI and Machine Learning and how these technologies can revolutionize work and lead to big productivity gains. And yet, in reality, the economy shows no sign of this. Productivity growth was very strong in the mid-20th century, but since 1973 productivity growth has been stagnant.

<comment><USER27> I don't know much about the subject. How do we measure productivity? What units do we use?

I ask because it _feels_ like everything has changed since 1973 at least. So I'm curious where my intuition differs from reality.

<comment><USER28> _> How do we measure productivity?_

Productivity as typically reported is a statistic called "Total Factor Productivity" (TFP).

Here's how it's calculated: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity#Calc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity#Calculation)

 _> What units do we use?_

TFP is unitless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The reduction in jobs in the gig economy has to be a direct result of the overall recovery of the economy. We are at a point where there are more jobs than workers to fill the jobs. Why would anyone take a crap gig job if they can get a steady paycheck? There are people that like the flexibility but the pay sux and no benefits for most of those jobs. The gig economy job is the new temp job. Just like temp jobs, they will start to increase as the economy cools. But for now, there's little incentive to get one over one with a steady paycheck.

<comment><USER30> _Why would anyone take a crap gig job if they can get a steady paycheck? There are people that like the flexibility_

I think you're underestimating how important that flexibility is to a large contingent of people. I have talked a lot of Uber/Lyft drivers and have heard a ton of stories about how valuable that flexibility is. It's huge for students who are in school, for people who already work another job but want supplemental income, people who are mostly retired (or never worked) but have some new expense come up (one lady I spoke to recently started driving for Uber just to help pay for her daughter's upcoming wedding), people who are pursuing careers in music or other artistic endeavors, entrepreneurs who need a way to pay the rent while getting their business bootstrapped, etc.

For a lot of people in those situations, the control over their time really is a crucial aspect of what makes Uber/Lyft desirable.

Granted, that's just one aspect of the gig economy, but it seems to be a big one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> NPR covered this yesterday.

[https://www.npr.org/2018/06/07/617863204/one- in-10-workers-a...](https://www.npr.org/2018/06/07/617863204/one- in-10-workers-are-independent-contractors-labor-department-says)

One note from that story was they missed 25M low-income workers.

 _Jennifer Curry, a senior director at Samaschool, a San Francisco training program for low-income contract workers, estimates the government left out 25 million to 30 million freelance or contract workers who do some part-time work._

<comment><USER32> > estimates the government left out 25 million to 30 million freelance or > contract workers who do some part-time work.

Aren't those exactly the type of workers that the NY Times article is talking about? 25 million is about 16% of the total workforce.

So in reality the number of gig workers might have doubled to something around 20% (or higher)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Maybe wave after wave of market fads (like the "gig economy", "chatbots", "voice everything") are just that, fads created to make some execs fatter.

I'd include all the hot air tech like AI, Big Data, and self-driving cars in that (until proven otherwise)...

</comment><comment><USER34> It's easy to get cynical about the gig economy. But I try and remember that the original spirit of it has been largely successful. The promise of the app economy was that you could take an idea like "I wish I could drive people around for extra money" and make it real, and now it's only real, but for people like my driving-averse mom it's revolutionary.

But distortions to the dream have come from all sides. Customers demand the low cost, high quality service that independent contracts inherently don't provide. Customers also fail to recognize that your driver is an independent contractor, but they treat them like any service industry employee. Rideshare companies actively decide to offload employment costs to drivers while treating them just like employees. Drivers too violate the spirit of this idea, many immediately turn it into a full-time gig without organizing larger efforts to improve it. The spirit is that these gigs augment income, not become a sole source of it.

But almost across the board, these are messaging problems, and we as a society are really good at fixing messaging, despite how it feels at time. We are living in a time of massive message correction, and millions of previously marginalized people benefit.

Is the gig economy ideal? No. Eminently fixable? Yes.

<comment><USER35> That's completely revisionist history. No one was going around thinking, "I wish I could drive people around for extra money." No one. You literally just made that up. If you wanted to drive people around for money you became a taxi driver or got a passenger carrier permit and became a private limo driver. Back in 2008 no one was thinking about how great it would be to drive random strangers around for minimum wage while assuming massive amounts of personal liability and destroying their car in the process.

Uber started as a way to fill the downtime that professional drivers had between clients and jobs. They said, "Hey, there is a workforce with 50% of it s hours idle. I bet we can turn the into cash." It was a brilliant idea. Airbnb started with a similar proposition. It was a derivative of couch surfing—find some excess supply and monetize it. People are doing this for free, I bet we can do it better and make a few bucks. And then in morphed into the abomination we have today.

It wasn't until Lyft and the competitive market saw what was happening and people thought, "What if we just ignore safety regulations and licensing by declaring that we are in a new industry? There's money to be made there." That's what the gig economy ended up being. It wasn't intentional. It was a way to avoid COSTS by ignoring safety, training, benefits, licensing, insurance, zoning and minimum wage laws. And that's where 90% of the value comes from. If these companies had to play by the same rules as everyone else they wouldn't exist because there wouldn't be enough money to be made.

<comment><USER36> > Uber started as a way to fill the downtime that professional drivers had > between clients and jobs. They said, "Hey, there is a workforce with 50% of > it's hours idle. I bet we can turn the into cash."

Yeah, black cars with chauffeur licenses only. I remember thinking "a cab to the airport would be cheaper, but I'll pay a bit more to pamper myself -- I've never been in a black car!" just before I ordered my first ever Uber in 2012.

UberX, with "normal people" picking you up in their personal cars, wasn't until April 2013.

<comment><USER35> UberX actually didn't start with normal unlicensed, uninsured drivers. UberX started as a "green" initiative. When UberX first started drivers still had to have a passenger carrier permit (TCP sticker) and commercial driving insurance. They just also had to have a Prius instead of a black car, and the cost was a little bit less. I think it was $10 or $12 minimum instead of $15. It wasn't until Lyft started by allowing any random person to drive at a much lower cost that Uber pivoted and turned UberX into what it is today.

It never even occurred to Uber that it would be possible to let random, uninsured people drivers others around for peanuts, or that people would be so desperate for cash that they'd even be willing to do that. It was purely a function of the financial collapse that made it possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It seems to me that this article (and many others, and the underlying statistics they report on) are lumping together a lot of different things under the same label, that aren't all that similar. I am a contract programmer, but my typical contract is 6-9 months in duration, and I get paid well. Is that part of the "gig economy"? It's not much like driving for Uber, I think, but it is neither part-time nor permanent employment, so it would often get lumped in there. Some truck-drivers work on a per-gig basis, but even though they are driving things for money it doesn't work all that much like Uber, in terms of pay or how you get treated or what your leverage in the market. I think the term "gig economy" is too broad to say anything meaningful about.

</comment><comment><USER38> I have no data for this, but I suspect an ethnographic study of gig workers would find their behaviors mirror that of entrepreneurs. If true, you can probably draw a lot of conclusions about gig work from all the other studies done.

In short, I suspect gig work is much more mentally taxing than typical work, since it isn't reliable or rooted in routine. I think that's why gig work is estimated at roughly the same percentage of the population as entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER39> The state has decided to regulate or even ban the "gig economy". The media is just paving the way shaping the narrative.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think the Gig Economy is supplementing regular economy, provides a good chance for certain people to break off the 9-5 and gives more of a positive social impact than a negative one.

<comment><USER41> While anecdotal and definitely not a high percentage, but I have met quite a few Uber drivers that just like to stay active and meet people. They tend to be the most interesting to chat with. They don't seem to be doing it for the money, more so just to be out and about. Im sure the supplemental income is helpful but it didn't seem like that was the primary reason.

Edit: Aditionally usually those have been the best drivers

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> If you look at Uber, it's just one great app system away from taking over another form of work which was taxi

</comment><comment><USER43> If you read it closely, the article basically says "We don't really know what is going on, in part because our survey isn't really designed to capture data on the gig economy."

I have done gig work for over six years. At the moment, I am working more like a traditional entrepreneur, but I can do that in part because I have the security of gig work to fall back on if I can't drum up enough clients. If I could get the kind of job I want, I would take it.

That last statement is a relatively recent development. I have health issues and doing gig work made it possible for me to have some earned income under really challenging circumstances where that really should not have been possible. Being able to access earned income while I'll and homeless allowed me to work on improving my health, allowed me to make working in my health a priority in a way that regular employment would not have facilitated.

I think this is the real revolution that isn't being talked about. Having a serious career requires you to have your act together in many important ways. You need energy, mental focus, some idea of what you like doing and are good at, etc. Gig work gives people options for muddling through or supplementing your income during difficult transitions.

Some years ago, I read a comment that was an A-ha! moment for me. Instead of attributing recessions to mysterious forces somewhere out there in the ether, it attributed them to human nature. It suggested we get lazy and complacent during good times, then work hard to get back on track after things start coming apart at the seams.

I am sure there are also large scale forces impacting people, but I dropped out of college in part because I knew people with college degrees and student loans who were mooching off of relatives and delivering newspapers. I felt I could deliver newspapers without a degree and would be better off for not being saddled with debt. It was very clear to me at the age of 20 that the "promise" I was hearing that a degree was a guaranteed ticket to a serious career and the good life was a myth. There is more to career success than getting X credential.

Large scale trends are not just the result of public policy at the federal level or real world phenomenon like Peak Oil. They are also the cumulative result of many individuals making choices.

The gig economy provides some fluidity and flexibility for workers who are handicapped, have a health issue, are having trouble breaking into their chosen career etc. Yes, I am aware that if gig work is all that is available, this can be a serious problem. But, in the other hand, another observation someone made that was an epiphany for me is that layoffs are part of the price we pay for having stable corporate jobs for some. When there isn't enough work to go around, someone gets shafted because of it. There is no magic way to make that not happen.

I'm aware there are people being shafted here. I think in the US, they are being shafted much more by our lack of universal health coverage than by gigs lacking benefits per se.

Sort of rambly. I don't have a specific point per se. More like thinking out loud, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER44> IMO it's a perfect opportunity to get programs we should already have, like universal healthcare, off the ground

The bemoaning by corporate media is hardly surprising. They want people to stay in one place. It fits the meme they know

But to quite the late Anthony Bourdain, "Open your mind, get up off the couch, move."

Do we really need to babysit this much permanent infra that are massive office buildings and shopping malls?

Surely we need spaces to work and trade physical goods, especially if we're on the g

I think this is the next step of globalization

Look at the Cold War era. Of course it made sense to hunker down. Where were you going to go? Europe and Japan were bombed to hell. The USSR?

This is the last 60 years coming to an end

Time for new patterns around what work and life should look like</comment>


Bitcoin Core: CVE-2018-17144 Full Disclosure - <AUTHOR> https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/ <comment> iso-8859-1 So if I understand this correctly, it was a hard fork in version 0.15 (by the definition 'accepting a subset of blocks than a previous version'), but nobody exploited it. Similar the BDB/LevelDB incident documented in BIP 0050 (which actually had a chain split).[1]

There was a chain split due to a soft fork in 2010: the "value overflow incident".[0] Controversial since the soft fork was announced after the incident was exploited.

[0]: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident)

[1]: [https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...](https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki)</comment>


Are you a developer with speaking anxiety? - <AUTHOR> http://hearyoume.com/

<comment><USER2> To be fair, it wasn't a smart idea to wait and decide who would give a status update with no preparation minutes before a big investor meeting... I think a number of people would be nervous about being put on the spot like that

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true. Still, I can't accept knowing that if I get put on the spot I'll just freeze up like that.</comment></comment>


Unauthorized access to cameras in Safari on macOS and iOS - <AUTHOR> https://www.ryanpickren.com/webcam-hacking-overview <comment><USER2> A much better technical explanation than this 'landing page' edition is here: [https://www.ryanpickren.com/webcam- hacking](https://www.ryanpickren.com/webcam-hacking)

This is amazing work. You'll never see XFO the same way again.

It says that Safari 13.0.4 (macOS) and earlier is required to reproduce; Safari 13.1 was released last week, so if you're allowing macOS to stay up to date, you're okay there. I didn't see a clear answer for iOS, but if they published, it has likely been fixed in iOS as well (or else they'd miss out on a $75k bounty).

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it me or does "webcam hacking" really undersell the bug here?

From the write up at [https://www.ryanpickren.com/webcam- hacking](https://www.ryanpickren.com/webcam-hacking) , the bug chain appears to allow script execution in "arbitrary" domain context, which at first glance seems much bigger than just webcam extraction. Sticking up someone's face is attention grabbing compared to what could be done with that kind of power.

Is it because of the first bug in the chain that only the media-permissions was affected by the context confusion?

For example being able to extract cookies or local storage from other contexts would be a much bigger deal (local storage is sometimes used to store XSRF protection keys or other credentials), so I assume that wasn't at all affected?

Did any other parts of safari use the same broken context awareness as the media permissions or do we know that it was it isolated to media permissions?

<comment><USER4> There's only one way to find out: downgrade your Safari and call document.cookie using the PoC codes.

<comment><USER3> I don't have any Mac devices or emulators or I would give it a try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It says here he was awarded $75,000, instead of the $150,000 listed on the Apple page for this type of exploit. Later on, Apple specifies:

        > Reports that include a basic proof of concept instead of a working exploit are eligible to receive no more than 50% of the maximum payout amount.

Can someone explain to me what would have counted as a "working exploit" here vs. simple proof of concept? They can't mean actually finding it in the wild right? The OP's example seems working enough to me, and this looks like a really bad bug.

<comment><USER2> Please don't use four-space indents to blockquote non-code here. It doesn't wrap and isn't readable on mobile. You can use > * ... * instead, as so:

> _Reports that include a basic proof of concept instead of a working exploit > are eligible to receive no more than 50% of the maximum payout amount._

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the suggestion! I also hate the scrolling and this is much better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems URI/authority/domain parsing for authorization purposes is highly risky and leaves a lot to be desired. Another recent high-impact URI parsing bug in Google's core library that led to Google-wide domain check bypass: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22527842)

</comment><comment><USER7> Good work! People talk about how a webcam cover is essential on laptops but I think iOS side of this exploit is even more crucial. Very few people use camera covers for phones, cause they are ugly and new phones have FaceID etc which makes impossible to use a camera cover daily. More importantly, we take our phones to places more private, like bathrooms. Now that iOS Safari support front facing camera stream, I think this discovery worth more than $75K

<comment><USER8> Every computer controlled camera and microphone should come with an actual mechanical switch that cuts power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> On laptops, there's usually a light that turns on when the camera is active. I (like to) believe that this light is controlled by the camera's firmware, i.e., it can't be manipulated by software? Can someone knowledgable confirm this?

<comment><USER10> > I (like to) believe that this light is controlled by the camera's firmware, > i.e., it can't be manipulated by software?

Hit and miss.

If it can be controlled by the camera's firmware, then it can be controlled by software. All it takes is a bug in the firmware, which is unlikely to ever be updated.

Some camera lights are controlled by the firmware, others are wired onto the data line, so the moment data is going either way, they light up.

However, defeating the light even in the directly wired case is possible, and has been done many times. If you fire up the camera, take a photo, and turn off quickly enough, the light won't be perceived by the victim. (I believe the FBI and the NSA both had tools that did this that became public knowledge a number of years ago).

<comment><USER11> The hardware could easily be designed so that whenever the light is turned on, it cannot be turned off for a second or w/e. Seems like an obvious solution.

<comment><USER12> iirc some laptops do this. As soon as there is data transmitted from the camera, the light will turn on. Another solution would be the sliding camera cover some manufacturers have, but that doesn't really help with the built in microphone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I found 75k for such a severe security issue a low figure, on apple security bounty page the max pay for such exploit is 500k. [https://developer.apple.com/security- bounty/](https://developer.apple.com/security-bounty/)

<comment><USER14> It's a bug in Safari, not in the webcam so that may be why?

<comment><USER15> That could be, but it's still far too low.

I imagine that a Black Mirror type of scandal involving this exploit could do many millions if not billions in damage to Apple's finances. Not to mention what such an exploit might fetch on the black market.

<comment><USER16> I firmly believe that a government intelligence operation would be willing to pay far more than 75k for this.

<comment><USER17> Bug bounty payouts are not meant to match what you can get on the black market.

<comment><USER14> That seems like a major flaw in bug bounties then. What else could they be competing with?

<comment><USER17> There's more to the black market than just money: you often need to deal with unscrupulous individuals (possibly a couple of levels removed) and risk going to jail. The bounty incentivizes researchers to research and disclose, not disincentive people who were going to sell them anyways (who will pay whatever it costs to get these anyways).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I currently use oversight[1] to monitor mic and camera access and permissions. It wouldn't protect against a kernel-mode (or rootkit) level exploit, but provides _some_ coverage at least (at least that is what I tell myself).

[1]: [https://objective-see.com/products/oversight.html](https://objective- see.com/products/oversight.html)

<comment><USER19> There is also Micro Snitch from the makers of Little Snitch:

[https://obdev.at/products/microsnitch/index.html](https://obdev.at/products/microsnitch/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> A somewhat related concurrent news item: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767843](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767843) "Hardware Microphone Disconnect in Mac and iPad"

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure what the conventions are these days, but the $75k bounty seems reasonable for the severity of the problem (even if large compared to others I've seen). What's the record bounty size so far?

<comment><USER22> While I'm glad they didn't give one of those insulting 10k payouts, I'm actually surprised this one wasn't higher.

This isn't a complete remote takeover but accessing a live feed of an unsuspecting person just by them opening a URL seems like a really big deal for a company that is all about privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is why I have a piece of tape over my webcam.

I really don't need a webcam on my MacBook at all. Kinda like I don't need a microphone on my TV. Why are these not optional on devices? How do we know this is really what consumers want?

It feels like a lesson from the "you can have any color as long as it's black" school of consumer choice.

<comment><USER23> Purism laptops come with a hardware switches for camera/mic and bt/wifi.

(though the switch isn't labeled as to which direction is on and which is off, which might have changed in current models)

<comment><USER14> Haha that's amazing. Finally someone gives us what we are asking for and it still doesn't work!

<comment><USER23> no it works (flip the switch and the USB device disappears). but on and off should be labeled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> At this point, if you're not going to stop reinventing every single wheel to make websites turn into apps, might as well treat every website like an standalone, fully-sandboxed app with its own set of permissions just like every other native app.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder whether any of this code predates the Blink-WebKit fork, and if so whether any of this applies to Chrome/Edge/Brave/etc. I'm guessing no since they're not mentioning it, but a lot of this sounds like deep old stuff.

</comment><comment><USER26> This exploit works by imitating a website which has camera/microphone priviliges, correct?

So could you prevent it by revoking all of said priviliges for all websites in Safari's settings?

<comment><USER27> On a vulnerable version you could do that. For clarity, the bugs that led to this have been fixed in the latest Safari version on all platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Always thought a security issue like this one was about to appear someday. Kudos to the bug hunter.

</comment><comment><USER29> FWIW, Zoom clearly has your microphone on when muted .. because it alerts you that you are muted when it detects noise.

<comment><USER30> Zoom can't mute your mic entirely, only macOS can do that.

What it does is not transmit your voice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> op deserves the $75k! Good work!

</comment><comment><USER30> Excellent work.

</comment><comment><USER32> Everyone should stop writing webpages which require javascript.

Javascript is a security nightmare responsible for the overhelming majority of web-based CVEs .

Javscript's contributes mostly fluff to the vast majority of webpages.

What's worse, some pages check for it and deliver a totally blank page if it's not enabled, just to punish the non-compliant.

Even worse than all of the above is the fact that Javscript is the vehicle through which users are IDed and tracked. It's the reason why telling your browser to dump-cookie at the end of a session is ineffective.

Javascript is popular because people who own websites demand it be enabled. They demand that so they can fingerprint you- no other REAL reason for Javascript's popularity.

Every single person on this particular forum eithers knows or can clearly see what I am saying is true, but their jobs depend on them selling their Javascript skills and that's the reason this post, as you read it, is fading to gray as its downvoted.

Javscript is the instrumentality of the surveillence state. That's 98% of its utility.

All webpages should have a non-Javascript, "here's the info" version available and the fact they don't is a scandal and we are the culprits.

<comment><USER33> JavaScript is not necessary on the majority of pages it's used on, but to say everybody should stop using it on the web is absurd. JS makes Google Docs, Slack, and a thousand other applications possible; without it, they'd need to be native applications instead (which, while needing to be manually installed, almost always don't have the level of sandboxing that browsers normally provide.)

<comment><USER32> "JS makes Google Docs, Slack, and a thousand other applications .."

...I never use.

Take all the JS on all the webpages and throw away every page to which it's not essential. Call the remainder set A.

From set A, throw away every application whose functionality could be _essentially_ be replaced by something like an ASP or JSP/Servlet round-trip hit without it much bothering anyone, as in the olden days. Call the remainder Set B.

Take everything in set B and task yourself with creating a secure methodology of obtaining the same or similar level of utility not involving Javascript or anything less secure.

Compare the effort to do that with the sum total cost of what Javascript has inflicted on the world.

Include in your calculations direct financial losses, expenditures in counter- measures, all the manhours spent in ameliorating all the breaches in security caused by Javascript, all the human toll of being tracked - by Javascript- online...

In fact, let's just keep this simple, forget all that.

Every time any human being in any security agency in all nations the world over is engaged in any activity, offensive or defensive, which has as its ultimate root cause Javascript, just make that the bill you have to pay.

Now look at the net gain (Google Docs!) and the net cost and tell me Javascript is a great idea.

I got some time ago that not everyone shares my hierarchy of values and concerns. You use Twitter and Facebook and Google etc. etc ad naseum... all forks where each time I chose the other path.

But by saying "no" to that steaming pile of shit I don't find I've said no to modernity and I don't find myself disavantaged in any way. Those things are not modernity or even the web- they're gadgets. Gadgets you love and can't imagine living without, that's all, like the smartphone you have, and I don't.

J'accuse our world of the following. We have cost everyone incalcuable wealth, time, opportunity and frankly the attention of some of the best minds of the past two generations all to buy ourselves a very particular, circumscribed and unnecessary kind of interactivity on our computer screens.

We have recklessly trodden very far down a dangerous and even deadly path, step by step, merely because at each point along the way we counted our own sunk efforts and extant artefacts as the measure of all things. This, and we have effectively coerced the world into following us.

<comment><USER34> Maybe computers aren't quite for you. Pen and paper is safer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Frpjs – Functional reactive programming library for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/santoshrajan/frpjs <comment><USER2> Very similar to lazy js[1]. Perhaps its of interest to you to get involved in that or pull some of their work

[1] [http://danieltao.com/lazy.js/](http://danieltao.com/lazy.js/)

</comment><comment><USER3> One problem I notice with both RXJS and even this one is that in reactive programming a lot of (filter - select) is used.

Doing (filter - select) for large views seems an inefficiency - no different than the old way where we walk the DOM trees.

<comment><USER4> Incremental DOM updates cause layout thrashing which, when comlared to making a few additional passes over a set, is a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive.

The point is, walk/filter the data completely prior to updating the view.

Immutable sets may also 'seem' inefficient but compare-by-reference works a of a lot faster than change propogation with compare-by-deeply-nested-values.

In CompSci terms, multiple passes are still O(n) and the data sets aren't large enough for micro-optimizations to matter. Compared to O(holy shit) of triggering many cascading DOM updates, it's a huge improvement.

'Seems' isn't a good enough metric to justify optimization.

<comment><USER3> I am curious to know what you mean by Incremental DOM updates.

Are you talking about changing values of DOM elements,etc.

Or are you talking about destroying elements in DOM and creating new ones ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's are the benefits of this lib over RxJS, Redux, and Flux.

This isn't a criticism. Raher there are aready some well established FRP libs in JS. What's unique about this offering that would make users want to adopt it?

<comment><AUTHOR> RxJS uses the observer pattern and is not really FRP in the Haskell sense of things.

<comment><USER4> #NoTrueScotsman

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FRP is very popular in Haskell. Reflex has had some success in production: [https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex](https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is implemented in pure vanilla JavaScript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice :)</comment>


The Bicycle: Growing Popularity of the New Vehicle (1874) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9B02E6DE1030EF34BC4F53DFB767838F669FDE <comment><USER3> For a year now i drive my bike to and from work in Berlin, about 11km daily. I got a pretty cheap but decent quality single speed bike. It's light (aluminium) and fast, perfect daily driver. It's beautiful because of it's simplicity and efficiency. I am faster than either car or tram over the same route and on top of that it's healthy and fun. When i can't do it for a couple of days or even a week because of really bad weather, i start to feel really guilty and bad :)

<comment><USER4> As they say, there is no bad weather, only bad clothing (and bad tyres...)

<comment><USER5> That is what I used to say when I was living in Madrid, with the lower temperatures in winter being 2-3 degrees under 0(celsius), but sun most of the year.

But living in Germany was a completely different story in winter going under 30 degrees under 0, 3-4 hours less daylight than in Spain or Portugal, and cloudy all day.

It is extremely disgusting to breath fast, like you need when in the bike when the air is so cold. Somebody should invent something for it.

On the other hand, in most of Spain you can't go around in summer with your bike, but it is great in Germany, Austria or Switzerland.

<comment><USER6> -30°C is an exaggeration. If you don't live in the mountains there are usually a couple of weeks with sub-zero temperatures here; I use a ski mask when it gets really cold. That helps a lot with the cold head winds. I absolutely always ride my bike to work (5km each way) in southern Germany, and I kinda agree with the GP ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bicycles are pretty amazing. They're the most efficient form of human transportation over a reasonable surface (road or trail that's not too rough). You can go 100 km on the energy in a plate of pasta that probably costs $2 -if that - in terms of the ingredients.

</comment><comment><USER8> The two main commuter cyclists in my office have belt-drive bikes, so bicycle technology hasn't completely ossified. They also have disk brakes, and seeing how this is wintertime in New England, they're also rocking studded tires. I don't have this, but I'm a fair-weather cyclist. Its like electric cars-- people don't notice how its been slowly moving forward.

<comment><USER9> Oh every 10 years you need a new bike, because there're no parts any more for your old one. It changes pretty fast!

<comment><USER10> Too general, this _highly_ depends on what type/brand/price range of bicycle you buy. My first 'grown up' cycle is now 23 years old and I can get any parts I need to service it in the local bike shop.

Thinking of it, it seems that proven parts just keep existing while the crap gets sorted out during the years. In some subgenres this goes faster and the process is still heavily ongoing I have the impression - take bmx for instance: what you can get now for a similar amount of money is lighter but as strong or stronger and longer lasting.

<comment><USER9> Ok, so you can't get _cost-effective_ parts. Cheaper to buy a new bike, than keep buying hard-to-find expensive parts.

Anyway, the subject was, how fast bikes change. That's unrelated to how clever we are at finding old parts - the fact is, new bike parts are invented every year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> More history and images of the bikes described: [http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/JSH/JSH1999/JSH2603/JS...](http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/JSH/JSH1999/JSH2603/JSH2603e.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> The article cites a race where the bikes were ~50 and 36 pounds. That sounds like a lot. Even a cheapo bike from Walmart is half that. But over time, its going to be the bearings that suck the most energy. I wonder what those were like compared to today.

<comment><USER13> In the late 1980s, early 1990s, sub-30 lbs was the reference for a high- quality off-road bike. That'd be aluminum alloy rims, steel frames (cro-mo alloy) and aluminum bars/stems/seat-posts. A principle that applies at all times (1800's, 1900's, 2000's), is that rotational mass is what kills you; Roughly, if you can save 1 lb on the wheels, or 1.5 lbs on the frame, save on the wheels. It's mass that has to be accelerated/decelerated, versus (eg) the frame, which is 'static'.

Edit: qualify "at all times", "late 80s, early 90s"

<comment><USER14> Can you explain the physics of rotating mass savings being more important? The top of the wheel moves twice as fast as the bike, but the bottom of the wheel doesn't move at all so don't they balance out? The frame isn't static - <USER2> still have to accelerate it frame along with the wheels when you're speeding up.

If your route has a lot of uphill, then I'd expect that 1.5:1 ratio to get closer to 1:1 where the work you do is more fighting gravity than inertia.

<comment><USER4> It takes energy to make things rotate:

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

The wheels have a rather large diameter and go pretty quickly. Both diameter and angular velocity are quadratic terms. You could now do the math to see how much energy it takes to accelerate a bike to a given speed.

But you're right, going uphill or at steady speed completely changes the picture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anybody who knows the history of cycling know if this is talking about "high wheel" (penny farthing) bikes or modern bikes with equal sized wheels? Changes the context rather if they mean high wheel bikes. The reference to bigger wheels and general suggestions of impracticality makes me think they might.

The illustration on this piece suggests 1874 is still high wheel bike territory: [http://www.oldbike.eu/museum/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/1874...](http://www.oldbike.eu/museum/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/1874_The_Graphic.jpg)

<comment><USER16> As you suggest, "a driving wheel 58 inches in diameter" is a big clue here. The safety bicycle (basically what we tend to ride nowadays) was invented in 1876, at least the version which became most popular. The so-called "penny farthing" bikes were often called just "wheels" by their owners, hence "riding a wheel" and "wheelers". Some modern clubs are still called "Something Wheelers", e.g. "Bolton Wheelers", presumably because they have a history going back to the 19th C.

There is a surprising evolution to the bicycle, leading not least to the invention of the first automobiles. See Carlton Reid's book "Roads Were Not Made for Cars" for a history of this from both a UK and US perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder what was the technical limitation that prevented bikes being invented much earlier...unless it was simply that no-one did it. Steel piping? Lightweight wheels? Affordability?

<comment><USER18> Steel for spokes.

Rubber pneumatic tires.

Ball bearings.

Then if you want to get a safety bicycle rather than a penny farthing, you need a cheap process for bike chains.

<comment><USER9> Belts work for bike chains. Using those on steam engines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have a perfect bike commute from my house to the train station.

however I've found that the bike ride is 1hr longer than driving my car round trip, each day. That 1hr is time I don't want to loose being at home with family.

I can ride faster, but I'll by very sweaty when I get to the office.</comment>


A tiny Python exception oddity - <AUTHOR> https://aroberge.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-tiny-python-exception-oddity.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> I'm impressed by the humility here from someone who (a) is writing a library to replace core traceback behavior in pypi; (b) has doubtless read both cpython and pypi code; (c) nevertheless writes "While I have some general idea of how the CPython interpreter works, I absolutely do not understand well enough to claim with absolute certainty how this situation arise".

Jeepers, who WOULD be qualified to explain for sure how this works?

<comment><USER3> > Jeepers, who WOULD be qualified to explain for sure how this works?

Guido?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If 99.999% of Python programmers won't care about this, and there are approximately 8.2M Python programmers in the world [1], then only 82 people will care about this. Given the number of upvotes you've covered them all.

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+python+programmers+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+python+programmers+are+there+in+the+world)

<comment><USER5> Thank you. I actually thought I was overestimated the interest. Then again, I did not think that my blog post would attract the interest of the HackerNews readers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious why this is reported as a SyntaxError. This doesn't seem like a syntactical problem to me, but a semantical one.

<comment><USER7> Python's grammar is so very rich. Many programs are rejected for "syntactic" reasons if they do not fit into the abstract syntax [0]; I suppose that this could be some sort of "AbstractSyntaxError", if Python had such a thing.

For some examples:

        x == not y

Rejected by the parser itself.

        not x = y

Accepted by the parser and AST builder, and only rejected by the bytecode compiler.

        f(*xs,)

Rejected by the parser itself.

        ...

Rejected somewhere between the parser and the AST builder. Valid uses of Ellipsis are actually special-cased; it is not a standard part of the abstract syntax.

[0] [https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Parser/Python....](https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Parser/Python.asdl)

<comment><USER8> Why is x == not x rejected by the parser? In many other languages this is perfectly valid and, depending on the semantics, may allow the compiler that into false. (Of course this can't generally be the case where operators are user-overloadable.)

<comment><USER9> Because that's how the grammar is defined:

[https://docs.python.org/3.8/reference/grammar.html](https://docs.python.org/3.8/reference/grammar.html)

The RHS of the == (comp_op) has to be an expr. You can force "not x" to be an expr by parenthesizing it:

      x == (not x)

<comment><USER8> That interesting. On the other hand,

        not x == x

is totally valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was impressed by the quality of PyPy errors!

</comment><comment><USER11> I seem like i'm alone in this but I think I would prefer the CPython handling of this "Syntax Error".

I am not a "Programmer" so having feedback on the original problem line would be more beneficial than returning the second.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm wondering if this case will be handled differently by the new pegen

[https://github.com/gvanrossum/pegen](https://github.com/gvanrossum/pegen)</comment>


Benchmarking Tornado's sessions - <AUTHOR> http://milancermak.posterous.com/benchmarking-tornados-sessions-0 <comment><USER2> The title of the blog post implies that Tornado has support for sessions. This is not the case. The author of the blog post is benchmarking his own extensions to Tornado.</comment>


Resilience may be neurobiological - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-11-resilience-neurobiological.html <comment><USER2> Lord Moran, Churchill's physician said courage was a volume. When spent, it cant be summoned from nowhere.

It's like water behind a dam you call on and not all people have the same sized dam wall and depth of stored courage.

[https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/32453377?q&versionId=39449396](https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/32453377?q&versionId=39449396)

<comment><USER3> The analogy seems deeply flawed from my personal experience. I find that courage is strongly correlated with awareness, and that correlation is not linear.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps you have never plumbed the depths? I mean, he wrote of men's experiences in the trenches under continuous bombardment for days, and again in WWii. I don't mean to diminish anyone's personal experiences, but do you think absent being on the receiving side in raqqah or the like, current armed forces routinely undergo anything comparable?

I write as somebody quite timid. I am sure contextually informed or not, I do not have the resiliency others have in prologued states of stress and fear.

<comment> another-one-off Being bombarded in a trench for days and still being partially functional as a soldier is pretty much the gold standard for courage. Nevertheless 'water behind a dam you call on [with different sizes for different people]' is a very arguable metaphor.

There are vanishingly few people stupid enough to subject themselves to stress and fear voluntarily just because. They either see themselves as having no choice (possibly correctly) or because they perceive a reward to be had (possibly one related to validating who they see themselves as). It basically follows ( _handwave_ ) that courage is a combined ability to either not feel stress (or fear) in some situation - which does not run out - or to push or regardless of stresses in pursuit of some higher goal.

In the latter case, once someone decides that it isn't worth it they aren't going to come back again, acting a bit like a dam running out of water. But their ability to act courageously will change depending on the circumstance, and in some instances they may be significantly more courageous if they don't really see themselves as having a choice. Eg, a parent defending their child vs a parent defending random strangers would be completely different in terms of how much punishment they endure.

<comment><USER4> It evidently _can_ be argued that people have different levels of resilience.

People with low resilience are going to fail often and early in all stressful situations.

Comparing the same person in different situations is probably not the best metric. Comparing different people across the same / similar situation is probably closer to experimentally valid.

<comment><USER5> > People with low resilience are going to fail often and early in all > stressful situations.

This isn't an argument, though, just a restatement.

> Comparing the same person in different situations is probably not the best > metric. Comparing different people across the same / similar situation is > probably closer to experimentally valid.

It's not reasonable to assume the same relative value for success in two different people facing the same situation, no matter what criterion you use to choose the people, including if that criterion is what they self-report. Usually experiments like this are done for a token value, guaranteed to be close in absolute value between participants just because those valuations are insignificant. You can't do an experiment that could measure the amount of "courage" and how it drains, or even measure through natural observation without access to internal states that don't have organs called "courage" that we can examine.

What one patriot might call courage in a trench, an otherwise courageous person in that trench may call patriotism. They might run out out of "courage" to stand up to the army overrunning their position and decide to surrender, but never run out of "courage" defending their children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unrelated to the usefulness of the research (it sounds pretty interesting and novel to actually measure which brain networks are involved with resilience), but the title feels a bit like saying "air might be gaseous in nature". I mean, isn't all form of thought neurobiological in the end?

<comment><USER7> It might be written better as, "Cardiometabolic resilience may be neurobiological." Of course, mental resilience being neurobiological would be a banality, however, they are talking about the strength of a specific brain network breaking down an association between poorer cardiometabolic health and neighborhood violence. Definitely a little more interesting, that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Like previous studies, we find that youth living in neighborhoods with high > levels of violence have worse cardiometabolic health than peers from safer > communities.

I find these results intuitive and not hard to accept, but I see no mention of an attempt to rule out confounding elements that may correlate to violence, such as poverty. And with only 218 subjects there may well not be enough statistical power to do so.

Of course I can only see the abstract without paying $10, so it may be buried in the details.

<comment><USER9> Paper is downloadable free on SciHub [http://sci- hub.tw/10.1073/pnas.1810067115](http://sci-hub.tw/10.1073/pnas.1810067115)

TLDR version: it's controlled for a few neighbourhood factors such as median household income, distance from nearest food outlet and ethnic mix and a few individual factors like personal experience of violence and behavioural evaluations. But ruling out all the confounding factors is hard. The authors are cautious about causality in their summary though

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The cause of neuro-resilience might be explained by attachment theory. Unlike winning the hereditary lottery, better parent-child bonding is more attainable.

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

<comment><USER11> Parent-child bonding is the outcome of the hereditary lottery as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Of course, because everything is neurobiological as uncomfortable as that makes us feel.

<comment> wu-ikkyu You're falsely presenting theory as fact, as is quite common in psychological/psychiatric discussions; social and environmental factors seem to have very strong effects/influences as well.</comment></comment>


Actions needed to address cybersecurity risks facing the electric grid (2019) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.gao.gov/assets/710/701079.pdf <comment><USER2> Worked on this problem 10 years ago, power distribution companies were sleepy enterprise environments with workforces who were just not equipped to respond to internet technologies, let alone threats. Even the lightweight requirements of NERC/CIP were treated as alien. The best security was in the smart meter infrastructure, which was designed around redundancy and combating fraud, but certainly not national security.

I don't think this is something we fix, it's something we evolve and move on from. My impression was the only real future relative to a grid security crisis is in storage and renewables, with more localized generation. The alternative is basically nationalization.

<comment><USER3> I worked on it back then too. As you say, the power companies have neither the money, the talent, nor the will to fix the problem. Getting a private company to spend money to prevent a hypothetical bad thing is always a tough sell, and most of the US grid is operated by private companies.

<comment><USER4> This could be fixed by a dramatic demonstration. Pick a medium sized metropolitan area, and authorize pentesters to try and take down the grid to the point of a (short) blackout - and make sure people know how it happened, and that a foreign adversary could do it to us.

(Perhaps an occasional electrical blackout is good for a society in the same way an occasional fast is good for a human body).

<comment><USER5> This was done a few years back in Switzerland by national television. With the approval of everyone involved, a pentester was supposed to shut down the street lights in a medium-sized town.

The pentester got in, got to the correct controls and "failed" because the UI bugged out. It was rather funny to see the journalist/moderator be relieved, while the rep from the energy company and the security specialist both clearly knew that that was sheer luck and with a little more time the pentester could've gotten around the bug too.

Edit after checking the story again: The hacker thought he found the main control but was wrong and only turned the lights off in a tiny side street. So it did work and the "bug"/"luck" was that the UI was so confusing that the attacker got it wrong :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is one of those things that I hear the security community talking about a lot, but it has very little mainstream traction.

This actually surprises me because I would intuit that people would be drawn to hysterics about massive grid failures. Look at what happened in New York City.

And there are many smaller things that get even less consideration. Like the Tesla Powerwall Hack [0]

Either some big incident is going to happen that makes us shape up real quick, or we're going to have a little foresight and proactively upgrade the security of our critical infrastructure.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21610981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21610981)

<comment><USER7> The senate passed a bill to study moving various electrical digital systems back to analog/manual control:

[https://www.utilitydive.com/news/senate-passes- cybersecurity...](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/senate-passes- cybersecurity-bill-to-decrease-grid-digitization-move-toward/557959/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is poor decision making putting power systems on the internet.

All power companies have end to end land access and already have scada etc physical links between all switchyards and can run their own microwave links where necessary so no need for ANY infrustructure to be accecible from the internet.

Its lazy cheap decision making.

</comment><comment><USER9> Have they ever given consideration to not connecting the Electric Grid to the Internet?

<comment><USER10> How would I turn the power back on when it goes out? It would be a 6 hour drive for me to the power plant. I'll take my odds with the VPN and satellite internet connection! If someone wants to cause an outage they can drive their car in to a power pole, have an earthquake drop rocks off a bank and crush the pen stocks, have a river change its course and take out 10 poles, send little animals on to the insulators to cause short circuits, have branches fall on the power lines, have droughts make the power plant run out of water... all those things already happened. if some nerd hacks in to my PLC they can't do anything worse than I've already done! Someone physically breaking in to the building could cause a lot more damage, they could just burn it down!!

<comment><USER11> > send little animals on to the insulators to cause short circuits

You don't even need to do that as it happens organically. At my company, we had a comms outage to a wind farm for several days (and the outage was wide enough where even surrounding wind farms outside of my company were affected) and just two days ago, the LEC (Frontier) discovered a bird build a nest in one of the junction boxes which links up to all the plants. All of this happened in a span of five days or so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Somewhat related, but the book Countdown to Zero Day is about both the Stuxnet worm and the potential for digital attacks on infrastructure. Very good read and intro to the topic. [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KEPLC08/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KEPLC08/)

<comment><USER13> There's actually a more recent book, Sandworm, which is specifically about cyberattacks on the power grid (in Ukraine). Recommended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sadly it looks like they have won so comprehensively.... they have stopped boasting...

[https://cybersquirrel1.com/](https://cybersquirrel1.com/)

The cybersquirrels have won.

<comment><USER15> This is my favourite: [https://web.archive.org/web/20150827145912/https://au.news.y...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150827145912/https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/regional/gascoyne/a/25996725/sheeps- head-dropped-by-eagle-blamed-for-power-outage/)

I remember reading a commentary on the cybersquirrel1 site introducing this "event" along the lines of: "In one of our more unusual operations..."

What this site beautifully illustrates is the entirely lax physical security of power substations and other distribution infrastructure that hundreds or thousands of households depend on. A distributed, coordinated human effort could destroy enough infrastructure to cause multiple days if not weeks of no electricity for a significant area. The kind of damage that would require the infrastructure to need rebuilding from scratch, or close to it.</comment></comment>


Tell HN:  Experience-based pivot for the musical industry - <AUTHOR>

In a nutshell: computer-generated hologram artists realtime A/B testing musical performances using the audience's mood as a feedback channel, maximized for enjoyment.
So, you start with some seed-music -take an upcoming (but yet unlicensed) performer, or an old music where the license is already expired.
Add some randomization, instruments, mutation, pay other artists, what have you.
Point is, do real, but 100% software-based performances on stage, and start A/B testing it against the crowd.
It kinda snowballs from there; because while most artists do test, their performance-hours are massively limited by the expectation of their physical presence.
It's 1, scalable; 2, non-replicable-able in home enviroments; 3, unique experience
Note: I'm not in the position to take action on this idea -just want to get this off my brain. Feel free to steal, copy, or improve :) <comment><USER2> No reason, go for it. Seems like fun. I don't think you'll ever change the "musical industry", but a city bar would work wonderfully.</comment>


Death of Kodachrome belies technological leap it represented - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/06/death-of-kodachrome-belies-the-technological-advance-it-represented.ars

<comment><USER2> Kodachrome You give us those nice bright colors You give us the greens of summers Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah! I got a Nikon camera I love to take a photograph So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away!

</comment><comment><USER3> The discontinuation for us K-14 film fans was a sad moment, yeah. Worldwide stocks of K64 depleted in two days.. Not sure what I do when my last few dozen rolls are out - maybe should ditch color photography altogether :)

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill Sad too is that Kodachrome was something that Kodak could have exploited as a market differentiator, but didn't. No other slide film had the same process or the same archival quality. Supposedly someone had invented a one-hour K-14 process or machine, but Kodak would not license it to be used.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is sad news. I really hope a company emerges with some resolve to support those who continue to shoot on film as an artistic choice. I'm all for jumping headlong into the digital world, but fact is film still has that little bit of something extra that you just can't get anyplace else.

</comment><comment><USER5> My Dad took thousands of slides of family events through the years, all kodachrome. When the family was contemplating scanning them and putting them on CD or other media for backup, I said that the best archival material was likely to be kodachrome itself.</comment>