China Bans the Word 'Leica' on Social Media - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/china-bans-the-word-leica-on-social-media-1834163199 <comment><USER2> Powerful ad.

My gut feeling is that there will be a day in the future where everything in China is going to boil-over just like any other totalitarian regimes in the past. It could be 20 years from now when Xi dies or some type of student uprising again, or could be from the HK/Taiwan situation.

The behavior of the Chinese government and as they call it "the hand of Beijing" has a self-propelling streisand effect, the more you clamp down, the more it leaks and at some point, it will boil over. Nationalism is tribalism in its glorified, patriotic form. On one hand, we have great men who strive to make the world a better place - journalists, scientists, mathematicians, teachers and community workers and on the other hand we have ugly human tendencies surfacing in a powerful form from politicians.

Every politician should listen to Jiddu Krishnamurthy's UN speech in 1985: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcga8ATBNh0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcga8ATBNh0)

There rest of the world needs to fearlessly criticize Chinese censorship as it is only going to get worse. If the Chinese government is insecure from opening history books, hell even calling Xi Jingpin a Winnie-the-Pooh; that's not the kind of superpower I wish to see in this world.

<comment><USER3> The West is the outlier here. Most of the world has lived under dictatorships for most of history. China is a millenia-old civilization that has never been a democracy. The current regime may fall, but it is not written in the universe that it will progress towards anything resembling a Western democracy.

If I were playing the odds, I'd put money on democracy failing in the west rather than it rising in China in the next century.

<comment><USER4> The West was never a democracy until it suddenly was one. Heads rolled.

<comment><USER5> Heads rolled in France, but that lead to the totalitarian Jacobin regime. Across the channel in Britain, democracy had been growing slowly since the signing of the Magna Carta began the process of subjecting power to the rule of law, divesting the monarch of the claim to absolute power and distributing that power among institutions such as parliament.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In an unfortunate act of self-censorship, the video has been now removed from YouTube.

Update: while the video linked by the article has been removed, here it is: [https://youtu.be/dQpKcw-n330](https://youtu.be/dQpKcw-n330)

<comment><USER7> "Self-censorship" is much scarier to me than the "traditional" censorship.

It's terrible when a government takes away your voice. But it's so much worse when people do it voluntarily to avoid the consequences.

(in this case, of course Leica is a business that doesn't want to lose a market with billions of people, but still... Leicas have been used for a hundred years to expose this type of nonsense, and now they're doing this...)

<comment><USER8> If Leica wasn't run by a spineless board of directors then they would have the power to pursue principle instead of profit.

<comment><USER9> Too bad no one supposes it worthwhile to form a backlash boycott against Leica's toadying stance with China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Chinese are innovating totalitarianism faster than any other country. Take this, for example:

> ... When undergraduate students at Peking University, which was at the > center of the incident, were shown copies of the iconic photograph [of Tank > Man] 16 years afterwards, they were "genuinely mystified." One of the > students said that the image was "artwork." It is noted in the documentary > Frontline: The Tank Man that he whispered to the student next to him "89," > which led the interviewer to surmise that the student may have concealed his > knowledge of the event.

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

The fact that Leica, a foreign company, is now apologizing about the ad (and has deleted it from their YouTube account) shows just how effective the Chinese government has become at their trade. From the article:

> "Leica Camera AG must, therefore, distance itself from the content shown in > the video and regrets any misunderstandings or false conclusions that may > have been drawn," Emily Anderson, a spokesperson for Leica, told SCMP.

<comment><USER11> That reminds me of an interview with a Chinese esports team I saw at a tournament a few months ago. The interviewer was doing a light-hearted game where they showed twitch emotes to the Chinese team and asked what they thought the emotes meant. One of the emotes was a frog (the creator of the game goes by IceFrog), and the Chinese translator said that the players weren't allowed to say anything about the emote. We later found out that they were afraid to say anything because the nickname of the former president of China was "Toad King", and the players were worried that they'd get in trouble if they said anything about the frog emote.

<comment><USER12> Fasinating, I never heard about that one before.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toad_worship_(Chinese_internet...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toad_worship_\(Chinese_internet_subculture\))

searching "膜蛤" on baidu.com yields zero results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another western corporation loses its spine in pursuit of profits. "Hey, sorry we mentioned that time you murdered thousands of your own citizens, it's totally a fake event. Please let us keep selling things in your country."

One day, maybe, this cowardly behavior will end.

<comment><USER14> People like to pretend that corporations aren't political entities when they absolutely are - that's the whole point of capitalism and free market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This has no added value over the article it links as the source: [https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3006817/lei...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3006817/leica- camera-backs-away-promotional-video-depicting-tiananmen)

</comment><comment><USER16> Do any companies secure their confidential information by randomly inserting information or images that would be considered subversive in China?

Like, every other page contains an embedded Winnie the Pooh image, or an insert describing the 1989 incident. Would Chinese agents be afraid to have such materials in their possession?

<comment><USER17> > Do any companies secure their confidential information by randomly inserting > information or images that would be considered subversive in China?

That would be pointless, since it's only forbidden in public discourse. People in trusted positions are able to access subversive information if needed, and anyone hacking foreign organizations for the state are probably in that group.

This article might be enlightening about the situation: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/business/china- internet-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/business/china-internet- censor.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So what's the official Chinese line on Tiananmen?

Did it not happen? Was it a western plot? Student riots?

Banning the word Leica seems to be implicitly admitting that it did happen, and that the Chinese government did something wrong, so I'm guessing the official story isn't the generally accepted story?

<comment><USER19> The official position is "don't talk about that."

<comment><USER2> That's exactly why the rest of the world needs to speak up.

<comment><USER20> To what end? It was 30 years ago. The Eight Elders are all dead. You really think a bunch of westerners tutting at China about lowlights in their history will do anything other than galvanize Chinese nationalism?

<comment><USER21> It needs to be talked about anyways. For every 100 nationals who laugh or scorn, 1 person hears about it and starts thinking "Hm... maybe what I've been taught here isn't so true. Maybe things really are bad here."

We need information to make decisions. One side providing all the info leads to biased thoughts. It's exactly what's happening here in the US. People pick their news source (CNN, FOX, etc) and gradually become polarized to think one way.

The lesson here is: Learn about the counter argument. You should find it isn't as crazy as people tell you.

<comment><USER22> Thing is, for a majority of people, life in China is perfectly normal (other than maybe air quality and population density, but the Chinese government has tried hard to combat those issues).

Most people are able to live normal lives where the government doesn't really have a massive influence. Even if it does, it's usually in terms of infrastructure development (transportation, housing, etc.), which can be done much more rapidly than in, say, the US (look at high-speed rail deployment in China over the past decade or so).

Plus, what's the alternative? China would be trading their fast-paced economic expansion and massive infrastructure investments (necessary to keep pace with the expanding number of people in China) for more... freedom?

And I think that's really the key here. The Chinese government is NOT incompetent and they're able to more than adequately provide for their citizens' needs. So, who would WANT a revolution?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> China continues to force the world to bend to its totalitarian demands: changes to Hollywood movie plots and editing, arbitrary keyword bans and FAANG helping to "accommodate" their platforms to facilitate censorship.

<comment><USER24> All of those parties are free to ignore China's ridiculous demands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> When I was still an undergraduate student in China, the 4hr film The Gate of Heavenly Peace was available in our school's internal torrent network.(Tons of censored content was available there.) I and my buddies watched it together in our dorm, with high expectation. But we were quite disappointed, and wondered why the CCP censor it so firmly at all. The event is neither bloody nor aspiring.

</comment><comment><USER26> > ad agency F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi

Ads do really seem increasingly likely to transport some political/ideological content. Is this happening the customer's explicit request, or are agencies and/or their individual creatives surreptiously hitching a political/ideological ride at their customer's risk and expense?

</comment><comment><USER27> So my guess is that Huawei will now stop partnering with them for their phones? How does China deal with this type of thing?

<comment><USER28> It's not even "China" that's directly responsible for most of these decisions, really. It's each private company individually trying to figure out how to keep the Chinese government happy and on their side. That's why these things are inherently unpredictable. Sometimes you can even see seemingly-coordinated behavior that's actually the result of bandwagoning - e.g. if one company bans "Leica" on their social media site, then everyone else will feel like they have to follow suit. It's quite a mess.

<comment><USER29> That's a good point. What would it even look like if there was an official, authoritative list of things to be censored, with draconian enforcement? Xi Jinping isn't going to personally decide what goes on the list. He's certainly not going to personally adjudicate the myriad edge cases. Inevitably the system must devolve into a lot of individuals making conflicting decisions.

I see no way to have a cohesive, official censorship apparatus with centralized control, unless the method employed simply involves cutting cables. That would be pretty unambiguous.

<comment><USER30> > That's a good point. What would it even look like if there was an official, > authoritative list of things to be censored, with draconian enforcement? Xi > Jinping isn't going to personally decide what goes on the list. He's > certainly not going to personally adjudicate the myriad edge cases. > Inevitably the system must devolve into a lot of individuals making > conflicting decisions.

> I see no way to have a cohesive, official censorship apparatus with > centralized control, unless the method employed simply involves cutting > cables. That would be pretty unambiguous.

Social control and censorship is far more effective than governmental censorship. Being "excommunicated" or ostracized from your social group is enough to prohibit many people from making political expressions (or otherwise).

For a dumb but illustrative example, think about how your posting habits on social media might change if your relatives were receiving those posts.

The best part is that it allows the government to indirectly encourage practices and behavior that would likely receive criticism in the global community if done directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have a question that maybe Chinese people here can answer. How patriotic are chinese people? How critical are they about the government and how many people (especially outside of China) approve of them?

<comment><USER32> Chinese people are critical of the government but when speaking to Westerners, they are tired of being lectured.

It's like, when you want to go wash the dishes, and then someone nags you to wash them and "explains" the importance of keeping things clean.

Almost every interaction with Westerners about the government isn't because they genuinely care about Chinese people, but rather to feel superior, like they are saving the "Chinese" from themselves.

That's what it feels like and why many Chinese don't like talking about it.

Unless of course pandering to Westerners can make them money. Then there are some that will gleefully act the part.

<comment><USER33> I mean, let's just imagine a hypothetical situation where the totalitarian system breaks down, riots happen and 1+ billion people are starving in China. I do not expect the West to sit and wait it out while it happens.

The West will surely only get to hear all the "sorry sorry sorrys" when it's too late.

Unless the many of us who believe that modern democracies ARE better are wrong, in which case China can continue taking IP, threatening foreign companies and claiming oceans while the rest of the world waits for it all to go tits up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone have the mentioned video?

<comment><USER35> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPnnHCeRH3w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPnnHCeRH3w)

<comment><USER36> Thanks for the link. There are tons of comments written in Mandarin so I used Google Translate to see what they are saying. Suprisingly several top rated comments are positive about the ad!

<comment><USER37> > Suprisingly several top rated comments are positive about the ad!

It's not that surprising, Youtube is blocked in PRC

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > "Do you even deserve to collaborate with our patriotic Huawei?" one Weibo > user said about Leica, according to SCMP.

Is this an actual sentiment that Chinese citizens have?

<comment><USER22> China has more than a billion people. It might be the sentiment ONE Chinese person may have, or even a group, but one Weibo user does not represent a significant fraction of Chinese citizens.

And no, I'm not even sure many people know that Leica collaborates with Huawei.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Would it not be better for these idiots to simply apologize for Tienanmen Square and promise not to do it again? And also stop all their asshole human right violations?

<comment><USER40> If you suggesting China adopts a system in which every government systematically apologizes for what previous generations have done, while laying the foundations of the next apologetic generation; then they can't do that. It's copyrighted by the Government of Canada / Gouvernement du Canada.

<comment><USER41> [sarcasm] Oh I'm sure Canada and other Western nations are offering licenses for their model and indeed one might see this entire enterprise as a long effort to sell those licenses, while China just insists on relying on simpler methods.[/sarcasm]

That said, China's unwillingness to mention Tien Ah Min expresses the point that nation has to adopt a "no apologies, don't talk about this and we'd definitely do this again" position because the state ultimately deals in absolutes. This situation indeed implies a certain fragility.

Edit: Just for clarification, I certainly hope a framework of democracy and freedom of speech prevail but I am still clear quite a few Western interests have entirely selfish reasons for wanting this (and the Western model indeed has its flaws).

<comment><USER39> It's funny because China seems to have the mentality that this must be so. And look over to the Japanese and at one time they were similarly minded. And yet look at them now, a pleasure to deal with both on individual and societal level. So it's simply a choice and a mentality which will lead you into all sorts of bad situations. Unfortunately Chinese don't have enough experience with this and instead looking to history to guide their actions, which is a mistake. We simply can't act this way in the world we have built, the consequences are too grave for everyone involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Typical communists.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why are discussions surrounding Chinese Politics permitted but no other political discussions? Seems like a double standard. Just quickly looking at the removals here's a 4 hour old Mueller report thread instantly removed - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19712217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19712217).

<comment><USER44> This is more about how politics affects the tech world, not politics for its own sake. Mueller investigation drama doesn't really have anything to do with tech.

<comment><USER45> That's a weird take, since huge sections of the report deal with Wikileaks, email server administration, and social media manipulation.

<comment><USER44> Do you think a thread like the one linked above would have a rational discussion of those tech-related topics that are kind of connected, or rapidly devolve into a OrangeManGood/OrangeManBad flamewar and moderation nightmare?

<comment><USER46> I recall seeing probably 3 to 5 frontpage stories on Assange after his arrest and Wikileaks, but then the report that specifically talks about him and Wikileaks isn't allowed? Weird!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> lol most serious photo journalists do not use leica cameras

<comment><USER48> What would they have used in 1989m ?

<comment><USER47> canon and nikon. You think journalists would bother shooting a telephoto lens w/ a Leica rangefinder viewfinder? LOL

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> At what point does it all become ridiculous? Until the Chinese government reaches this point I don't see them ever becoming a true superpower.

<comment><USER50> Only more transparent, liberal, open government systems can withstand criticism. The authoritarian models are always and without exception the most fragile, which is of course the exact opposite of how those systems try to project themselves to the rest of the world. You can easily tell how fragile they are, based on their tempers and thin skin when it comes to criticism.

It's unfortunate, China was on a better path. The regressive shift to Xi's authoritarian-heavy model was entirely unnecessary. It was solely done for his own glorification, and he openly pretends it was done for opposite reasons. If that were true of course, Xi wouldn't work so hard to bury Deng's legacy under his, he wouldn't be so susceptible to that intense need for vanity and idolization. Prior to Xi locking everything back down, China had slightly opened up further to internal dissent and criticism, there was far more quasi- free speech 10 and 15 years ago online in China for example than there is today. I agree with the common statement that China's culture may never choose to fully liberalize or adopt Western-style democracy, however I also think they could have easily pushed a lot further toward that direction from the stopping-point of progress where Xi began to deviate the system backwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> > The dramatic video is set in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy > protests that are forbidden to talk about in China.

> the company is now distancing itself from the 5-minute video after Chinese > social media users cried foul

> "Do you even deserve to collaborate with our patriotic Huawei?" one Weibo > user said about Leica

</comment><comment><USER52> So many angles.

Leica is an iconic brand and making politically heated ads is a bad idea: showing up with a Leica following ads like this will put it's own customers in a situation where they will be associated with the company's stand, and that is dangerous; both for them (the customer) and the brand.

Banning the name of an important technology company which is actively present in it current smartphones, lenses, science, etc, will makes things way too complicated.

Youtube(r) removing the ad, besides being a coward act, will only trigger the Streisand effect.

<comment><USER26> > making politically heated ads is a bad idea

Which is why I strongly suspect ad agency creatives did this on their own. Being in Brazil may have made them feel free from client scrutiny.</comment></comment>


Google Street View Logs Wi-Fi Networks, Mac Addresses - <AUTHOR> http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/23/0522228/Google-Street-View-Logs-Wi-Fi-Networks-Mac-Addresses

<comment><USER2> Yawn. This has been known since at least 2008[1]. All that particular story tells me is that the urge to vilify Google is huge.

[1] <http://rotacoo.com/a-couple-of-thoughts-on-street-view>

<comment><USER3> Huge, and consistently pursued by the Register. Don't have time at this moment to dig up links to illustrate, but every time there's an anti-Google story the Register are right up there misinterpreting it to maximum 1984 effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you don't want people to see your WiFi MAC address, don't broadcast it into public spaces. Besides, there is no way to tie a MAC address to a personal identity, so where's the damage?

This is really no different from house numbers printed on paper maps, as they have been for centuries.

<comment><USER5> But now there are services to lookup the owner mapped to the house. It's not apples to apples here. A house is stationary, there is a 1-to-1 mapping: house number to name. But say you have a wifi laptop and it is established that a MAC maps to you with reasonable certainty, then it's certainly possible to track your movements using that information.

IMO, I find that Buzz messages on Google Maps to be extremely creepy and am willing to bet a good portion of people doing so have no idea that they can be visualized that way.

<comment><USER6> It's only 1:1 MAC:House if you're the only wifi network _and_ house in a reasonable range. And in that case, if you're broadcasting your wifi network, you set the 1:1 mapping up yourself.

Frankly, I don't even know if I'm upset with this. If you throw a signal into the public, you don't then get to decide how people use it.

At least, that's the argument we've always used against corporations that try to legally control how publicly broadcast information gets used by those who receive it.

<comment><USER7> Most people don't know they are throwing a signal into the public. They are just setting up a tool to check email, Facebook, and talk on Skype. It's not immediately obvious to them what exactly is happening.

And please don't blame the consumers for their lack of knowledge in this. You don't need to know how a car works to drive, nor how a DVD player works to watch movies, nor is it essential to know how a computer works to use it.

<comment><USER8> What's the threat if someone has your MAC address?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Skyhook Wireless as been doing this for a while. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless>

</comment><comment><USER10> Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but this doesn't, actually, do anything. As far as I knew, your MAC address was only relevant on the given network you are on. So, if you're on a Wireless network, this is useful, Google knows where that access point is, roughly.

This does not, as the article seems to imply, let Google "cross reference the Mac address of a user's connection with their real identity and virtual identity". As far as I know, a website does not have the capability of pulling the Wireless MAC address from a router, through the browser.

(Please note, this may be incorrect, as I am not an expert in networking, or web browsers, however, I have dabbled in both, and have at least a working knowledge of both) A MAC address is used in communication on a Network. It is a unique "code" for each network interface. In theory, it should only be available to those on your direct network. Unless there is some sort of protocol I am un-aware of, routing across networks must be done by IP address, so outside of your own network the MAC address is useless.

Now, when it trying to cross reference a MAC address (tied to the hardware) with a user account, I don't see how Google could find the Wireless MAC address from one of their servers. Unless they use an exploit to run MAC address gathering code from the browser, I can't see any way for them to get that information to cross reference the user.

On top of that, this would only be slightly more accurate than the exist GeoIP databases. Your wireless access point has a range of roughly 100 feet or more. A GeoIP database can be accurate to the block you live on. It seems fairly comparable.

<comment><USER8> I agree.

I could come up with some uses that law enforcement could use the street view data combined with logs from access points to guess the user for a particular MAC address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you use Firefox's geolocation support[0], you're seeing the benefits of this[1].

FWIW, I find that it is FAR more accurate than my iPhone indoors. Without the line to a satellite, my iPhone is generally wrong by a radius of a few blocks, while Firefox is generally within a few meters.[2]

[0]: <http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/>

[1]: <http://www.google.com/privacy-lsf.html>

[2]: NOTE: This is from Los Angeles, a heavily populated area, which probably makes it easier. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER12> >Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said Internet users shouldn't worry about privacy unless they have something to hide.

Is this true? Did he say that? It's hard to believe.

<comment><USER13> Yes. He said it in an interview on CNBC. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6e7wfDHzew>

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines like Google do retain the information for some time, and we are all subject to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information may be made available to the authorities." -- Eric Schmidt

<comment><USER14> Which is quite distinct from "Internet users shouldn't worry about privacy unless they have something to hide."

Rather than telling users not to worry, he's explicitly warning them that search engines, including Google, are subject to inquiries from law enforcement, and thus, should not be considered secure.

<comment><USER15> I like Bruce Schneier's response:

"Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

"We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need."

Snipped from: <http://www.schneier.com/essay-114.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why stop there. They should capture the Bluetooth MAC addresses too. That way they can follow individuals.

Harder to to with the more limited range of bluetooth.

[http://www.indy.com/posts/stealth-09-indy-airport-study- trac...](http://www.indy.com/posts/stealth-09-indy-airport-study-tracked- phones)

</comment><comment><USER17> "recording users' unique MAC (Media Access Control) addresses"

MAC addresses aren't necessarily unique, nor are they permanent. It's pretty trivial to change them using ifconfig.

</comment><comment><USER18> The point is so that phones can know where they are without using as much power. (Wifi is cheaper than GPS, I guess.)

</comment><comment><USER19> I expect soon you'll be able to search for somebody in the world by their mac- address.

</comment><comment><USER20> This has been going on for years. See wardriving: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardriving> and Wigle: <http://wigle.net/> Or is it only a problem when Google does it?

<comment><USER13> What I've seen mentioned in several articles about why this is dangerous, is that Google has a unique ability to cross-reference the information with other data on a massive scale. Most war-drivers don't have nearly as much weight behind them.

<comment><USER8> So, if a user has a laptop on a coffee shop wireless network, access to a log of the MAC addresses registered at the coffee shop could be cross referenced with Google's data to find out where that MAC address was at the time the street view car went by. If you assume that the street view car happened by that MAC address while that user was at home, you could then look up the residents and figure out the identity of the user of that MAC address.

Honestly, it doesn't concern me that much, but I'm trying to figure out what has other people worried.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I just hope a looney follows Eric around, taking photos, publishing everything he can find on him (what's his breakfast, time he gets home, car he drives, how much he earns, etc) . I'm pretty sure he would think a bit more before saying stupid things like: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"

Oh yeah, I forgot, someone already did: [http://www.hackinthebox.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=...](http://www.hackinthebox.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=17679&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0)

Know what, FUCK YOU Mr. Schmidt!</comment>


Ludwig, a code-free deep learning toolbox - <AUTHOR> https://eng.uber.com/introducing-ludwig/ <comment><USER3> Technically, it is not code-free - it is declarative programming in YML. You still have to specify your input_features, output_features, and training architecture/specification. This is not a drag-and-drop UI (although, you could probably layer one on top of this).

This should work well with a Feature Store, where features are already pre- processed and ready for input to model training. With a feature store, this could be like the Tableau/Qlik/PowerBI tool for Data Science.

<comment><USER4> Aren't most popular ml libraries declarative, e.g. keras, you aren't exactly specifying how to transform the state (for example all the specific matrix multiplication is hidden), rather you are declaring the logic of the computation (you list out the layers).

<comment><USER3> TensorFlow has mappers/reducers for feature engineering, and it's Python - <USER2> you will inevitably do what you want in there. But yes, you have a point there. How do you debug this thing, though?

<comment><USER5> You have a good point about debugging. So far my approach has been to write quite long and explanatory error messages (like this [https://github.com/uber/ludwig/blob/9c9e5de56dcad89461c5d2ec...](https://github.com/uber/ludwig/blob/9c9e5de56dcad89461c5d2ecbd2d218e2273bdcf/ludwig/models/combiners.py#L170) for instance) and as detailed documentation as I can and, at least when people used it internally, that has been enough. But I'm definitely open to suggestions here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have attempted to do something similar in 2017 [1]. A couple of issues I noticed:

* The field is evolving quite rapidly, and so most options will require a lot of configuration, which IMO is not suitable for a declarative approach.

* It's hard to debug, eventually you will need to dive into the code at some point.

* Extending the library would mean touching the code anyways.

One major difference here, is that Ludwig tries to expose one interface, that for instance users without python knowledge can use, and inside a company, some machine learning engineers can extend the tool and do support by debugging other users use-cases.

I think at some point such approach can be useful for a very limited mature use-cases.

[1]: [https://github.com/polyaxon/polyaxon- lib/blob/master/example...](https://github.com/polyaxon/polyaxon- lib/blob/master/examples/configs_examples/yaml_configs/alexnet_flower17.yml)

<comment><USER5> Your configuration file looks really good! Why did you stop pursuing it? To your points:

* That may be true, but I think it also depends on the level of abstraction. Fon instance in Ludwig the encoder, although configurable, are pretty monolitic. It's a trade off with flexibility, in Caffe or in your configuration file you are super flexible in specifying each single operation, while in Ludwig that is abstracted from you, but the advantage is that, as long as you trust the encoder implementation, those encoders mimic papers / state of the art models and require much less configuration to be written in order to run (in many cases if you are happy with the default parameters you don't have to configure them at all). So if the field moves and a new text encoder comes in, one can easily add a new encoder to Ludwig too. It's a dangerous game to play catch up, but hopefully releasing it as open source and making it easy to extend may help spontaneous contributions from the community.

* debugging is an issue, that is true, I answered to another post about that, but again, it's a matter of tradeoffs. Debugging is kind of a nightmare in SQL too for instance, or is in TensorFlow (even if the tfdbg improved things a bit).

* extending requires coding, that is also true, but if you have an idea for a new encoder for instance, all you have to do is implement a function that takes a tensor of rank k ad input and output a tensor of rank z as output, and all the rest (preprocessing, training loop, distributed training, etc.) comes for free, which kind of a nice value proposition imho and let you focus on the model rather than all the rest.

Thanks for the interesting discussion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That looks pretty cool. The official website [0] has more examples.

[0] [https://uber.github.io/ludwig/examples/](https://uber.github.io/ludwig/examples/)

</comment><comment><USER8> "identification of points of interest during conversations between driver- partners and riders" Wait...what?! I hope this was an opt-in study.

</comment><comment><USER9> It looks like Uber ai lab don't have anything to show to management to prove their existence. That's why they come up with this kind of (you know what I mean). The code-free toolbox is a myth.

</comment><comment><USER10> Personally I've been working on the same declarative approach over the past couple of years at my company. This year I changed things to make heavy use of scikit-learn's `make_column_transformer` and `ColumnTransformer` capabilities.

It's nice to see other, (much more) reputable engineering organizations taking a similar approach and treating the construction of different predictive models as an exercise in configuration.

Although in my solution I haven't looked at any DL models, and typically default to feeding everything through XGBoost and performing a grid search for the best hyperparameter config there. My product is basically focused entirely around taking a raw dataset and a configuration file and producing an analytic dataset off of which algorithms can be tested.

I'd be _really_ interested in hearing others' experiences with this type of stuff.

<comment><USER11> I make little DSLs using TOML to further hide data wrangling and estimator pipelining "hydraulics" in the context of a specific class of models.

So for example I'll have a section that says "data" and with variables "binned = ['var1', 'var2']" and likewise for log/power-transformed variables, and have some Python code turn that into column transformers. In other examples there's even more custom logic hidden (some stuff from my master's thesis that I'm not at liberty to discuss) so it's not just a matter of reusing scikit-learn.

I use TOML for little languages that are really flexible configuration files, and YAML for situations where there may be multiple similarly-specified objects (because the hierarchical syntax in TOML is somewhat obscure).

<comment><USER10> I've never seen TOML, but I really like it. In my pretty simple pipeline, I've just been using a JSON-like structure that I can easily import into Python:

      strategies = [
      {
          'name': 'column1',
          'kind': 'categorical',
          'strategy': 'ohe'
      },
      {
          'name': 'column2',
          'kind': 'continuous',
          'strategy': 'center'
      }
      ...
      ]

It has worked very well thus far. I received a request from a stakeholder a few weeks back about building a new model using a slightly different target. I told him it'd take a couple of days at least (it was a _very_ similar target), but I had it completed (at least from a re-engineering perspective) in about 5 minutes. I simply changed the target variable config and removed any leaky features after changing the target.

I'm convinced that this approach, coupled with configurations for tree-based models like minimum samples per leaf and max depth, is the most efficient way of building predictive models. Those configurations specific to tree-based model software help to skirt things like the rule of five, etc., IMO.

<comment><USER11> That's basically my approach. TOML is chosen for readability and easy maintenance, as well for the ability to cut and paste some chunks of python defining constants etc. directly which makes the first steps much less bureaucratic.

I'm looking into more general parsing that would allow me to define semi- verbose little languages. In my heart Stata is still the gold standard for rapid fire usability, even at the cost of idiosyncrasy; I'd like to further make the engineering of, say, REST APIs more and more code/language independent and more logically specified, since a lot of the new "data science" crowd coming from stats and applied maths can't code their way out of a Tequila Sunrise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this is really cool. I shall try and see if I can make a Docker image out of it.

</comment><comment><USER13> After scanning the documentation, it's an even higher-level Keras which is good, but in order to make smart use of it, you really need to know all the DL tricks, which makes the push toward nontechnical users misleading.

<comment><USER5> You may be right about that, but also it depends on the requirements that you have. Ludwig gives you a lot of options for those tricks, like for instance gradient clipping or regularizers, or learning rate and batch size scheduling, but those things usually are useful for squeezing that extra 3% performance, and ieven in those cases, having them already implemented is an advantage. My personal experience is that in many cases doing the first step, getting 80% of the final performance, is enough then to convince someone of the value of what you are doing and then you can spend time later improving over it, and with this regard, Ludwig gets you from 0 to 80% really quick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks cool! Is there any particular Ludwig the name is referring to?

<comment><USER15> There are lots of us unofficially taking credit. RIP any googleability I might have had before...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks good. I manage a machine learning team and we write custom models. For data science teams with limited engineering support, Ludwig looks very good.

</comment><comment><USER17> Looks good (non developer product person here)... Could this be used for time series data predictions?

</comment><comment><USER18> Sorry for the laymen question, but, is this language independent or only for English?

<comment><USER5> Text is just one of the possible types of features supported in Ludwig. For those features, no, you can train models on any language, with a couple little caveats: you can train both character based models and word level ones. For character ones you don't really need anything, and you can train also of languages without explicit word separation like chinese. For word based ones, you need a function to separate your text into words. By default a regular expression is used, which generically kinda works for most languages that separate words, but the tokenizer from the spaCy library can also be used. SpaCy provides models for a few languages, and at the moment we are wrapping just the english ones, but it would be extremely easy to add also the other ones supported in spaCy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The polarity of comments between this post, and the driver post, scares me.

</comment><comment><USER20> How might one do speaker (voice) recognition?

<comment><USER21> checkout this [https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenSeq2Seq](https://github.com/NVIDIA/OpenSeq2Seq) \- a similar framework but with voice recognition and voice synthesis.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are important topics for new programmers? - <AUTHOR>

What are some important topics that you feel new programmers should learn about, but are often skipped over? <comment><USER2> Structuring and refactoring code.

Many consider algorithmic knowledge to be the holy grail of programming, but you easily spend 10x more time with basic structuring and restructuring code.

Don't confuse designing algorithms with problem solving; debugging, refactoring, even naming functions are all problems you're solving. Heck, I bet you're not even designing algorithms, you're simply implementing known algorithms (and modifying them to your needs).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd say that after they've gained a basic familiarity with the basic ideas ("hello world", variables, basic control structures, functions), they should really be introduced fairly early on to working with data structures (particularly linked data structures, trees, graphs, and the like) and how to manipulate them. Recursion is critical to manipulating these, and I think getting new programmers to think in that way is a good thing.

I think it's too common to have "instant gratification" tutorials where you learn some trick or some library to make a particular technology do what you want (for example, some little javascript or css snippet so that when you move your mouse over some text, it disappears). That's not real programming. Sure, a lot of work has to be put into learning little tricks and new libraries and whatnot, but real programming is thinking about data structures in an abstract way and manipulating them.

Get them to write a todo list application with the ability to sort the items in the list. The interface isn't terribly important, so try to get them to care more about the data structures.

Also, I've found that implementing Conway's game of life is useful. The map can be stored in several different ways (e.g. simple matrix of cells, two- dimensional linked list of live cells, quadtree as in hashlife) and manipulating each of those structures would give them techniques that are useful in many situations.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some form of test driven development. Helps programmers get a better grasp of what they want to solve while creating some meaningful tests. I sadly only really got into it well after I finished school. Not a good idea to try this out while learning a new language though (makes learning both 3 times harder since your changing code so often)

<comment><USER5> Or learning how to write code you can trust without testing it.

<comment><USER4> that's not feasible in the long run.

Try that on a large or enterprise level project and watch your product fall apart. The effort you save by not testing will be wasted fixing bugs many times over.

Test driven development isn't necessarily the best/right way to test all the time but you have to have some form of testing unless you just don't care about working on the software for over a month

<comment><USER5> You know what is not feasible in the long run? Finding out what obscure corner case in which component was not properly covered, using tests only. Components interact with each other in non-trivial ways, which more often than not cannot be captured in tests. When an error is found in a sufficiently large program, the poor programmer typically ends up applying a patch where the error manifests itself, rather than actually tracking and fixing the source of error. I know this from experience.

On the other hand, if the program (or any of is constituent subunits) is designed right from the beginning keeping in mind that it is fundamentally a transformation from a precondition to a postcondition, from a logical predicate to another, then not only does locating errors become much easier, also testing becomes superfluous.

But it takes education to accept this point of view.

<comment><USER4> well... looks like you're a little full of yourself

Hope whoever gets stuck debugging whatever code you spit out agrees with you viewpoint after spending hours tracing :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Writing clearly and precisely in English. Managing conflicts and expectations. Business and financial matters.

If you can't express yourself clearly to your peers and managers, you won't control your career. If you can't work well with people, you won't control your career. If you don't understand the business context of your work, you won't control your career.

<comment><USER6> Oh, and don't think you are the smartest person in the room. If you find you're the smartest person in the room for real, you need to get a better job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If we are talking about the most used languages then we are talking about object oriented programming. OO is pretty hard for newcomers to wrap their head around. Hell I still have my difficulties with it, really trying to find the "right" way to solve the problem I have.

Just try to get the concept, and know that there are certain patterns you can use for correctly structuring and architecting your code. E.g. factory pattern, dependency injection, observer, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> Most important thing for new programmers: build projects.

Later steps:

Algorithms: Skiena's The Algorithm Design Manual [http://www.algorist.com/](http://www.algorist.com/)

Learning about syntax / theory: SICP [http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/](http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Software engineering. Many people go to theoretical programs (nothing wrong with that) and start their careers at places with underdeveloped software engineering practices. They then view this as unimportant, which in turn hurts them when they try to tackle larger projects.

</comment><comment><USER10> Data structures, algorithms, problem solving, understand the machine and how an OS is working.

</comment><comment><USER11> People skills. Programmers often suck at that. Also modesty - you don't want to fail interviews because of arrogance and you do want your coworkers to like you so you can count on then in business and private matters.

</comment><comment><USER12> "KISS principle" for software development This might applicable not only for new programmers, but also for senior programmers..

</comment><comment><USER13> How to ship a functioning (if rough) product, how to communicate effectively with other people (how to match your words to their background and experience), and how to value their time.

The first will make sure you can do work, the second will make sure that you can explain your work to other people, and the third ensures that you'll be paid well for your work.

</comment><comment><USER14> Testing</comment>


Yes, Money Does Buy Happiness: 6 Lessons on Income and Well-Being - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/yes-money-does-buy-happiness-6-lessons-from-the-newest-research-on-income-and-well-being/267016/ <comment><USER2> I see what they are saying but I don't understand their conclusion that we should focus our effort on increasing wealth.

So as a result of these findings we see that as wealth rises so does happiness... but the thing is the graph becomes logarithmic. Germans are only marginally more satisfied than Brazilians. To increase their satisfaction all they need to earn a _whole_ lot more than they do already.

Doesn't this just prove or enhance the point that we should look beyond economic growth to drive our prosperity?

<comment><USER3> > Doesn't this just prove or enhance the point that we should look beyond > economic growth to drive our prosperity?

You're creating a false dichotomy. It does not prove we _must_ look beyond economic growth; on the contrary it shows that economic growth is correlated positively with well-being so we should at least partially concentrate on wealth.

But yes, I agree with you that mean wealth is not everything. As the article points out, inequality also reduces happiness. It's the philosophy behing Bhutan's gross national happiness: take a look at what makes people happy beyond wealth.

<comment><USER2> Yes, exactly this. I didn't intend for my comment to be read as saying we can now forget about positive effect of wealth.</comment></comment></comment>


Trezor - a hardware bitcoin wallet, now open for pre-orders  - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitcointrezor.com/ <comment><USER2> Cool idea, it reminds of an IronKey but for Bitcoin; I'm frustrated that there isn't any solid or easily findable technical information about the device though!

When I click on "About Trezor" it takes me to...a brief overview? I would expect that link to be a much more thorough explanation of _what_ Trezor is, how it works, and why I should buy it.

Why would Trezor be better than an IronKey? Is it a push button interface for sending bitcoins? Does it just store my wallet or is it running a bitcoin client? I read it works with most bitcoin clients, what does that mean? What are the buttons for?

If it's just _storing my wallet_ what kind of encryption is the device using? Does the device have hardware-based tamper proofing (IronKeys will self- destruct after X number of failed passphrase entries, it will self-destruct if someone tries to physically tamper with it)?

<comment> vertex-four What I get from the video is that it stores the wallet - a set of public and private keys for your addresses, along with a list of transactions to/from those addresses - and signs transactions.

Bitcoin clients will implement support for reading the list of transactions to/from your addresses to figure out how much money you have. They will also implement support for using the device to sign transactions, so the private keys never touch your computer, and therefore a compromised computer cannot steal bitcoins without the device prompting the user to confirm the transaction.

As the device is a single-purpose computer, likely running the absolute minimum code necessary to implement transaction signing, it should be significantly more secure than your PC just there. And you can easily physically secure it in any way you want, whether that's carrying it around with you at all times or locking it in a safe. Anything over that is a bonus, in my eyes.

I do not currently use Bitcoins, at least partially due to security concerns, but with this, I would be very interested.

<comment><USER3> The transactions are stored by the bitcoin network, so the device probably only stores the public and private keys for your addresses, nothing else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What happens when it breaks, gets lost, etc?

A paper wallet (copied to several secure locations) seems safer, if less convenient: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet)

EDIT: Thanks to rplnt[1] for the Bitcointalk forum post link[2]. According to one of the apparent Trezor creators, _" No need for periodic backups, writing down the seed to paper during the device initialization will be enough forever"_

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5880849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5880849)

[2] [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122438.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122438.0)

<comment><USER5> Generally speaking, most hardware wallets let the end-user re-initialize the device based on a seed (a random number). So as long as you save this seed securely (eg. printed on paper and stored in a safe) you can clone the wallet and recover your coins if you lose it.

I don't know if Trezor has this feature or not.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for your reply, mrb. When you say that the wallet can be cloned, would it require another physical Trezor unit? If so, that would seem to be a potential downside vs. a regular paper wallet.

<comment><USER5> It would not require another physical wallet. The algorithm creating the Bitcoin addresses from the seed does not need to be made secret, and could be run on a computer, for example, then you could re-import the Bitcoin addresses and the coins into a software wallet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a very interesting idea. However I think the ordering process for this highlights a crucial problem with Bitcoin, instability of value. They aren't planning to deliver the device for four to five months. Using the last four months as prediction of future fluctuation in Bitcoin value (insert usual caveat about past performance predicting future performance), the more expensive version of the device could cost anywhere from $100 to $700 USD when you actually receive the product.

<comment><USER7> If you pre-order with one Bitcoin today, then you paid the dollar value of one Bitcoin today, plus transaction costs. Future fluctuations in Bitcoin value are irrelevant.

<comment><USER3> I would agree with you if it wasn't a pre-order. You pay, you get your goods, deal closed.

With a pre-order on the other hand, you give them the money and you get nothing for four months. Probably longer.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure I see the difference. Once you've commited your 1 Bitcoin at today's value, you have effectively paid that price, irrespective of when you receive the product.

If the value of Bitcoin fluctuates between now and the time you receive your product, then you may "lose" or "win", but that's a chance you take, even with the product in hand. In other words, there is still the possibility that your 1 Bitcoin could have allowed you to purchase something more valuable than the product in hand at some point down the road.

Seems that the only thing you give up with a preorder is the interest potential or use of the money for some period before receiving the value (i.e. product). But, that would be the case with a preorder irrespective of the currency used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1-3 BTC is way too much. This should cost at most as much as a very cheap mp3 player. At the current USD-BTC exchange rate, this means no more than 0.2-0.4 BTC

I understand they have upfront costs, but they could work out a campaign where the cost per unit goes down as they reach certain sales goals.

<comment><USER10> I don't doubt the price will drop as they become more popular (it's probably a few dollars worth of raw hardware), but right now it's a fairly niche product.

"a campaign where the cost per unit goes down as they reach certain sales goals."

That's an interesting idea. It gives purchasers an incentive to promote the campaign, as opposed to "early bird" specials which incentivises early purchasers, but almost disincentivises later purchasers.

This has been done on Kickstarter and software bundles like MacHeist in the form of "unlocking" additional rewards, but I don't think I've ever seen them actually lower the price if they hit certain goals.

<comment><USER11> It seems as though this model will merely deter possible buyers. Why would I pay a premium now when I can wait a few days, let others incur the initial, inflated cost, and then purchase my thing at a substantially lower cost?

This phenomenon, where people wait until the last minute to go in on a product, is already pervasive on Kickstarter. (I'm not entirely sure why, but the most obvious reason is that people want to ensure that the project will definitely be funded or will attain some sort of stretch-reward before buying). Dynamic price-lowering will only exacerbate this trend, discourage initial purchases, and likely produce more failed projects.

<comment><USER9> You got it backwards. Think of a model where you initially commit to pay full price, but everyone gets a discount that increases as sales targets are met. It would be no different than any "refer-a-friend" discount that you see at gym clubs or satellite subscriptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I want one badly, but this is simply too expensive. $100 for that little device in plastic and $300 (3x more) for it in metal? Outrageous.

<comment><USER13> Think of this pitch as being less like a normal retail product and more like a self-organized kickstarter campaign. You are not paying for the device, you are paying for their living expenses and prototyping costs while they spend the months it will take to get the device ready for production. Hardware engineering is an unbelievably slow and tedious process if you are used to software development. On top of that, the material costs can be substantial. It is not uncommon for the cost of a pre-production prototype to be 50-100x that of the final manufactured version.

I happen to be working on a design for a small electronic device in my free time. It is a much simpler device than the Trezor, and the ultimate manufacturing cost per unit will be around $5, despite its simplicity, because I'll only be making a few dozen of them. Cost for the first prototype will be close to $90, accounting for my time at $0/hr. If I get it wrong, I will have to redesign it and build another one. Hardware is expensive.

<comment><USER11> > _Think of this pitch as being less like a normal retail product and more > like a self-organized kickstarter campaign. You are not paying for the > device, you are paying for their living expenses and prototyping costs while > they spend the months it will take to get the device ready for production._

This is why I'm not as infatuated with crowdfunding as everyone else. Because individual customers are supposed to supplant traditional investors, initial costs are much higher for customers because we have to subsidize research, cost-of-living, etc. Moreover, we also incur all of the risk (which is formidable, considering the volume of failed projects and the ubiquity of scams on many crowdfunding sites).

I don't understand why I, as a consumer, would prefer a system where all of the cost and all of the risk are precipitated onto me, instead of onto the country's investment apparatus.

Better all these guys spend some rich VC's money than spend mine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I dont pre order anything bitcoin related after numerous vaporware and the BFL saga which is still ongoing.

<comment><USER15> It's a shame that the standard terms in the Bitcoin world are now 100% paid 6 months in advance preorders. I realize that Bitcoin has attracted a lot of get-rich-quick suckers, but it seems like Bitcoin companies are trying to drive away any non-suckers. Or maybe this is just what a race to the bottom looks like.

<comment><USER16> > It's a shame that the standard terms in the Bitcoin world are now 100% paid > 6 months in advance preorders.

It's not "a shame" because it's what individual market participants each chose to tolerate. If you don't like it, offer better terms and steal their business, but don't complain about other people's voluntary acceptance of transaction terms.

<comment><USER15> I don't think honest businesses can compete on a level playing field with companies that are indistinguishable from scams. Hence stuff like the FTC, although I realize many Bitcoiners would like to try a world without such regulation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It'd be cool if you could do NFC or some other method, so you could couple it with a mobile device. USB is great, but some less wired approach makes this even cooler. (for v2, obviously.)

Something like this makes me think the future of currency is bitcoin, or something like bitcoin.

<comment><USER18> I'm working on an NFC card for Bitcoin for my final year engineering project. Aiming for a credit card sized final product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is one of the first times i've seen the round number price in BTC rather than USD.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't think people need yet another dedicated gadget that is no matter how secure - prone to be lost and potentially misused.

I'd probably steer toward Yubikey as it's more universal and solves the same problem - keyloggers and malware.

<comment><AUTHOR> How does Yubikey protects you from malware? I'm genuinely curious as from the overview it seems to only store passwords?

As for the misuse, the device can be PIN protected (it's not much but saves you some time to transfer the bitcoins).

<comment><USER21> Yubikey does not store passwords, it generates them. It generates one time passwords for two factor authorization that expire very quickly. So if your password is stolen, the attacker would also need your Yubikey to generate a one time password that can be verified by Yubikey with your device. The Yubikey plugs in USB and acts like a keyboard typing in the password when you hit the button

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. So it doesn't protect your private keys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can see firmware updates being a problem.

If the malware can hijack the firmware update process, then it copy itself onto the Trezor (making the device worse than useless.)

I assume it will display a fingerprint of the new firmware and the user will need to press the button (like with a BTC transaction.) Still, a few users will probably be caught out by this.

Unless they Tivoize it (then the "open source" claim is rather dubious, but I think this may be the best solution anyway.)

So don't buy a used one.

<comment><USER13> What firmware update process are you talking about?

<comment><USER23> If there is no firmware update process that may be even more reason to avoid buying a used Trezor. No process to authenticate a device of untrusted provenance, yet bad actors could still figure out a way to tamper with the firmware (see the photo on the site of the unit in development with the cover off and an extra cable attached), or replace the board entirely.

A well-documented, well-understood firmware update process with mutual authentication (firmware and device must both be validated) might improve things for secondhand Trezor buyers.

<comment><USER13> A validation process is a good idea but I'd still feel safer if the device were frozen with no way to update firmware. Many microcontrollers have "e-fuses" which you can blow post-manufacturing to render the program flash read-only, for example. One can also pot the board in epoxy to make tampering more difficult.

<comment><USER22> What if the current firmware has a bug that allows an attacker to steal your keys?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In case anyone is wondering, trezor translates to vault or safe (or even treasury).

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm a bitcoin skeptic, but I guess I don't understand why there aren't bitcoin....coins.

Seems to me it wouldn't be terribly difficult to throw some bitcoin info on an NFC disk.

<comment><USER15> [https://www.casascius.com/](https://www.casascius.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I completely failed to find the sources for this :(

</comment><comment><USER27> Have they got any patents on this?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, and it's going to be open hardware (and software).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hell yeah, I'll give those boys with the funny accents a bitcoin.</comment>


Ask HN: Open source privacy policy? - <AUTHOR>

Are there any open source privacy policy documents that have been put out? I'm looking specifically for auto renewing subscription style policies, but any leads would be great. <comment><USER2> Just curious...have you tried the most obvious first step:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=open+source+privacy+policy](https://www.google.com/search?q=open+source+privacy+policy)</comment>


Seven Tips for Making Good Conversation with a Stranger. - <AUTHOR> http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2009/05/seven-tips-for-making-good-conversation-with-a-stranger.html <comment><USER2> I am always astounded by those who don't have very good "people skills." I guess I take mine for granted.

As much I'd like to say that these tips should be common sense, I have begun to recognize that for many people, social skills need to be practiced.

I'd like to add a Tip 0: Be brave. Recognize that both parties feel an unease and that ultimately someone has to make the first move. I promise you will be happy it was you.

<comment><USER3> > I am always astounded by those who don't have very good "people skills."

Perhaps they don't have "the skills" because they don't think they need them. Spending 10 minutes of one's life chit-chatting with a complete stranger feels like a waste of time to me.

<comment><USER4> But what if that stranger turns out to be another hacker? An entrepreneur? What if you hit it off really well with that stranger and end up being great friends? What if that person ends up getting you your next job?

Granted, the probability any of the above happening is quite low, but just having a chat with someone when you're, say, waiting for a bus is not going to waste your time. You don't have to actively seek out strangers to talk to.

BTW, when it comes to social skills, I give myself 1 out of 10.

<comment><USER5> to me, "whoring" myself around socially has always been about practice and experience of other minds. I like to talk and often bore my friends to tears trying to refine my stock of "interesting things" to babble about, to the point where I sometimes don't get the feedback I require. So just throwing it out there with a complete stranger while having a rollie outside a club can be surprisingly profitable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you improve HN? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I would like a tiny number or symbol next to my username that displays the existence of unread replies to my comments in threads.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ranking algorithm is not the best. Some top quality posts disappear quickly, but some others linger on the front page.

Also some sort of communication mechanism like Reddit. The orangered envelope.</comment>


PX8 – A PICO-8 compatible fantasy console written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Gigoteur/PX8 <comment><USER2> To understand why some people (including myself) are going nuts about Pico-8, here's one random feature: when you save your virtual cartridge as 'mygame.p8.png' it automatically generates a neat cartridge png representation with the screenshot of your choice from the game. Like so: [http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/cposts/1/10022.p8.png](http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/cposts/1/10022.p8.png).

Big deal you say! well, check this out: this png IS the game. It embeds the executable written in LUA. Try it for yourself - take the png I posted above, load it in pico8 then press escape: voila, full source code, sprite sheet, tracker data, etc. Type "RUN" and the game plays.

Pico8 (and its cousin voxatron) also contain an online cartridge browser that lets you discover and learn from everyone who contributed a cartridge.

Pico-8 is choke-full of these incredible little details that make all the difference. Unfortunately it's not open source itself, which some find a bit odd considering it encourages the open sourcing of the cartridge written for it. Good to see some projects such as TIC-80, LIKO-12 and now PX8 mixing things up a bit, that said it's still a nascent environment and let's not forget it's very much the arbitrary, sometimes amusing limitations imposed by the lead dev that makes these things fun.

<comment><USER3> While Pico-8 itself isn't open, the creator has been pretty accepting of emulators for running the game.

I'm pretty interested in open source as a whole, but having pico-8 be a steady stream of revenue has let zep concentrate on it/voxatron, and help do things like maintain the BBS or run the monthly picotachi[0] events to help the community.

Though I wonder if there's more success in a patreon-style model...

[0]: [http://www.picopicocafe.com/?id=picotachi- en](http://www.picopicocafe.com/?id=picotachi-en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just a quick heads up. Ludum Dare 38 is happening this weekend (theme: "a small world"). And I've certainly noticed an uptick in gamedevs targeting PICO-8 and SCUMM-8 platforms. Rather apropos given the theme, no?

A few Gifs of WIPs:

[https://twitter.com/Huginn18/status/855857089960345600](https://twitter.com/Huginn18/status/855857089960345600)

[https://twitter.com/quaIiaa/status/855878802563633152](https://twitter.com/quaIiaa/status/855878802563633152)

[https://twitter.com/topkeki69/status/855743127616970752](https://twitter.com/topkeki69/status/855743127616970752)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dISx_dR6kLI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dISx_dR6kLI)

<comment><USER5> I've been hankering to do a Bolo port on Rust. I'm terrified of change and unable to adapt, being 40, but I will try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I've never heard of the PICO-8 before, but it's _fantastic_! This is exactly what I've always wanted, some ultra-simplified game console/emulator that's easy to create content for and easy to distribute that content. People have even built cool demoscene-esque content for it![2] And some of the games people have made are fantastic, and you can play them in your browser here: [http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?mode=carts&cat=7&sub=2&orderb...](http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?mode=carts&cat=7&sub=2&orderby=rating)

Also, I was a bit confused by the term "fantasy console" so here's what I've been able to learn with some reading: it seems the PICO-8 is a kind of ultra- simple game VM with it's original implementation being in HTML/JS with access being sold by the creator[0]. At some point, the PICO-8 vm was ported by its creator to work on the CHIP computer, and now the PICO-8 VM is pre-installed on all CHIP computers[1].

What the OP link is for is an open source implementation of the PICO-8 VM in Rust. This isn't the only open source implementation of PICO-8.

[0] - [http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php](http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php)

[1] - [https://getchip.com/pages/chip](https://getchip.com/pages/chip)

[2] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTvnYkmtleI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTvnYkmtleI)

<comment><USER7> Is it an actual VM with its own bytecode and so on? As far as I've looked it's more like the _idea_ of a VM built as a set of Lua APIs and memory constraints. However, the creator seems to be doing a Java-like push where the language, runtime, standard library, and development tools are all marketed as one "technology", so it's not especially clear to me.

<comment><USER8> _" a VM built as a set of Lua APIs and memory constraints. However, the creator seems to be doing a Java-like push where the language, runtime, standard library, and development tools are all marketed as one "technology", so it's not especially clear to me"_

Look beyond the technology and you see a tool that allows you to; play games other people make; let you tinker with; or build your own.

<comment><USER7> I'm not trying to suggest that there's something deficient in the approach, just that it makes it harder to answer the sorts of questions I have. I mostly want to know:

1) What does it mean for PX8 (or any other program) to be "PICO-8 compatible" in this context?

2) Does PICO-8 resemble CHIP-8 only in general concept and name, or also in structure?

<comment><USER9> 2) CHIP-8 is a tiny computer with a case, a keyboard, a screen, and PICO-8 preloaded.

<comment><USER7> I'm talking about this:

> CHIP-8 is an interpreted programming language, developed by Joseph > Weisbecker. It was initially used on the COSMAC VIP and Telmac 1800 8-bit > microcomputers in the mid-1970s. CHIP-8 programs are run on a CHIP-8 virtual > machine. It was made to allow video games to be more easily programmed for > said computers.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My first thought is that such a focused environment for the code to run in might make this a helpful tool to teach kids programming in a fun and engaging way. I sincerely believe that game creation is the single best vector to get children interested in programming, and this seems like a cool possible vector. (Python is a great beginning language!)

<comment><USER11> Pico-8 already has great licensing for schools [0], and honestly, in that environment, its easier to say "Buy this" than "this is free".

[0] [https://www.lexaloffle.com/info.php?page=schools](https://www.lexaloffle.com/info.php?page=schools)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Be sure to get the PICO-8 bundled with Voxatron for only a few bucks more!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In case anyone is interested in learning more about PICO-8 and it's "clones", I started one of those 'awesome lists' for that last year.

[https://github.com/felipebueno/awesome- PICO-8/](https://github.com/felipebueno/awesome-PICO-8/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm reminded of Intellivision for some reason. LibGDX is awesome for 2d mucking around too.</comment>


Alan Turing's Universal Computing Machine - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@calhoun137/alan-turings-universal-computing-machine-be69c052c6fd

<comment><USER2> For those who want more details about Turing Machines and the Halting Problem, including a look at Turing's original paper, my usual advice is to read "The Annotated Turing" by Charles Petzold [ [http://theannotatedturing.com/](http://theannotatedturing.com/) ].

Here's a review of the book by the Notices of the AMS [ [http://www.ams.org/notices/201108/rtx110801120p.pdf](http://www.ams.org/notices/201108/rtx110801120p.pdf) ]</comment>


Show HN: My first mobile app in flutter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/valtlfelipe/statuscenter <comment><AUTHOR> Hi I launched my first mobile app! =D

Status Center is an app where you can manage your statuspage.io pages. Hope you like it.

Cheers, Felipe</comment>


Faraway, so close: doing global iPhone dev from New Zealand - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/sell-in-america-live-in-new-zealand.ars

<comment><USER2> Where are you based? I live up in the Bay of Islands where it's about as isolated as you can get and still have DSL.

It's been an interesting last few years freelancing from that situation. The isolation from like-minded technologists can have an impact which Skype is only partially able to alleviate. But it's worth it, waking up to the Palm trees and Pohutukawas, being minutes from the ocean and an hours drive from the nearest traffic light (Whangarei):-)

<comment><USER3> I'm based in central Auckland so I get a decent exposure to other technologists. Living in the Bay of Islands would be awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a fellow Kiwi all of that really hits the mark, although I'm not involved in iOS development most of it still applies. Especially the attitude towards our own work.

Would love to be able to go to the MIX conference this year but really can't afford it. Thankfully though for MS developers in NZ Tech Ed does make its way down here.</comment>


Elon Musk is annoying the hell out of people who work with self-driving cars - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/elon-musk-tesla-robo-taxi-lidar-skeptics/ <comment><USER2> He not wrong though. Most people made bets that self-driving with basic ML can be done with LIDAR by 2020 a year early is fine. And he's right about LIDAR. Theres a bunch of paper outlining that pseudo LIDAR can make an equal projection about depth based on the KIIT metric LIDAR measures themselves against. That with a fraction of Tesla's data. Its overzealous but it if he shows it working 99% its going to cause a lot of heads rolling.

</comment><comment> mellow-lake-day He also the annoyed the hell out of ULA, Boeing, Roscosmos, and ESA.

The next few years will definitely be interesting for Tesla and the self- driving industry as a whole.</comment>


How Pedialyte Muscled Out Gatorade to Win the Adult Hangover Market - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/10/17819358/pedialyte-hangover-marketing-strategy-instagram-influencers <comment><USER2> How are these things different from home-made rehydration solutions? Basically it's sugar and salt in a specific proportion, right? Or are the salts more complicated than what you have available in your average kitchen cupboard?

<comment><USER3> Oh it's special, you can't possibly make Pedialyte at home without a laba- we'll really it's piss easy. Sugar, salt, water and... that's it. If you want get fancy and include the classic flavors and colors, add powdered drink mix to taste or juice.

That's literally it.

The ratio is 4 cups of water (make three cold and one hot, mix the sugar and salt into the hot water then mix it all together.)

2 tablespoons of sugar

1/2 teaspoon of salt

Optionals:

1/2 teaspoon baking soda for upset stomach

1 teaspoon Kool Aid or Jello Powder.

The end.

Oh, and it won't cure a hangover, nothing does. Dehydration is part of a hangover, but by the time you have the hangover the damage is done. Other factors are metabolic stress from your liver handling the alcohol and metabolic intermediaries, congeners, and vascular reactions. Drinking water and eating normal food will keep a hangover from being worse than it has to be, but there is no cure. There are things you can do to prevent aspects of it, such as drinking at least a unit of water per unit of alcohol _while you're drinking_ , avoiding sugar (competes with alcohol for metabolism), and avoiding darker liquids (which have more congeners). If you're pre-med hanging a banana bag helps, but it's not really then responsible thing for most to do.

In short, once you're hungover, only time will help.

<comment><USER4> > drinking at least a unit of water per unit of alcohol

What's a unit of water? Presumably not the same as a unit of alcohol which is is 10ml.

(Am currently drinking approximately 6.5 units of water/grape-juice per unit of alcohol on that basis, and am not holding out much hope for hangover avoidance)

<comment><USER3> Sorry that was massively unclear of me, and the answer is 8oz of water is a serving, unit, whatever. Aka ~120ml.

Just water though, not juice, or soda or coffee. The first is loaded with sugar which competes with alcohol for liver time, and the latter two often contain caffeine which is a diuretic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What about the pediatric hangover market?

</comment><comment><USER6> Dioralyte sachets are gaining traction in the UK, they work quite well.

<comment><USER7> They also work great if you are actually sick. I had some British family visiting and they left me some and it was a great relief to my ailing guts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A few cups of water before bed does wonders for me.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is Pedialyte getting famous because it's actually used for hangovers, or is it getting famous because it's associated with some drug consumption (either as an ingredient or as something available at festivals, etc.) ?

<comment><USER10> It's getting famous primarily because doctors are recommending it for dealing with the flu, and because HS and college kids are using it during sports training. People using it while rolling or whatever might have some cultural cachet, but there's no way that accounts for more than a nominal amount of their annual sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Adult" hangover market. Humorously redundant wording, haha.

</comment><comment><USER12> Pretty sure Ibuprofen and brunch is winning the adult hangover market

<comment><USER13> Ibuprofen (and other OTC painkillers, especially paracetamol) are not risk free, they'll screw your liver seriously when used too often.

edit: yes, Ibuprofen messes up the _kidneys_ , not just the liver, sorry for the inaccuracy. Still: don't overuse the stuff, people, it's dangerous. Having "ibuprofen and brunch" basically a meme is absolutely irresponsible.

<comment><USER14> Ibuprofen is metabolized by kidneys; but as for the liver, yes its action can be affected by acetaminophen (paracetamol).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great native ad.

</comment><comment><USER16> Since when was Gatorade used for hangovers?

<comment><USER17> Personally, I can say 1997

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Because it actually works?</comment>


Why SEO Disgusts Me  - <AUTHOR> http://www.webpronews.com/why-seo-disgusts-me-2011-06

<comment><USER2> I think it is time to divide SEO into two parts. One part where you optimise your site, you change ugly long urls to prettier easier to understand. Decrease the loading time and think about how and what you write. And similar things that mostly increases the experience for the users.

And then the other part where you buy links and other crap.

SEO has started to become asociated with evil. It can be, and it is often easier to do it the evil way. But to some extent it can be done in a good way. You can give customers an awesome experience so they blog about it. Give away free stuff and so on. Its not only evil.

<comment><USER3> Most people call this "black hat SEO" and "white hat SEO." As with most things, it's not quite so binary a situation.

Even so, breaking it into white and black hat ignores the likely larger problem of ignorant SEOs - those who think they know what they're doing but are completely worthless. In my experience, most SEOs who take "black hat" tactics tell their clients. It's the ignorant SEOs that waste the time and money of legitimate businesses and earn a bad reputation for the industry.</comment></comment>


Nazi Detector - Chrome Plugin - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/selfagency/nazi-detector <comment><USER2> This plugin (((and its counterpart))) make me long for the bad old days of browser-helper objects and Visual C++.

They'd have enough time to think better of it -- way before getting "Hello World" to build.

</comment><comment><USER3> Funny as this is names are unique identifiers. There are certainly individual names that probably correspond to hundreds of individuals.</comment>


GitHub Launches Package Registry - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/10/github-gets-a-package-registry/ <comment><USER2> Existing discussion and a more direct link: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19881709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19881709)</comment>


Review my app, TurnKey Hub - cloud deployment simplified - <AUTHOR> http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/hub-private-beta

<comment><USER2> The service is still in private beta but anyone can launch a demo session and get a good feel for the UX. Also, 100 of the first invitation requests from HN will be granted as soon we get them. At this point only a subset of the planned functionality has been implemented but the minimal viable product is there I think. We've been working on this for a few months now. Mostly we're looking for high-quality feedback and we expect our best shot at that is the HN community, which has been a major source for insight and inspiration for us during development. Thanks in advance for taking a look. Hope you find this useful!

</comment><comment><USER3> Signed up.

Some comments: For the servers page, it would be better if we can group/sort by functions/region/instance type.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We will be implementing server "tagging" soon, which will allow you to sort/filter the servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds good! What about pricing?

<comment><USER2> For now everything is free but at some point we'll probably be adding premium services in an open source friendly freemium model that ensures we have the resources to sustain TurnKey and keep the project healthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> i read it as turkey hub and now im hungry</comment>


Obama's legacy: He sparked hope – and got blindsided - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/09/opinions/obama-historian-legacy-roundup-opinion-zelizer/index.html <comment><USER2> Obama can blame Republicans all he wants, but the reason Democrats lost their majorities and Obama lost the confidence of his voters is that they chose to stand squarely on the side of banks and big business in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, rather than that of the people who were victimized.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm afraid history will not judge him kindly. Well intentioned perhaps, but largely inneffective.</comment>


CloudSim Plus: A Full-Featured Java 8 Framework for Cloud Computing Simulation - <AUTHOR> http://cloudsimplus.org <comment><AUTHOR> Working on cloud computing research? Check out CloudSim Plus, a simulation framework that has a lot of exclusive features, including: joint power- and network-aware simulations, Google Cluster Data simulations, highly accurate power and network modules with lots of bug fixes, vertical and horizontal VM scaling, fault injection and more. It's alsy way easier to use and is actively maintained.

Check it out at [http://cloudsimplus.org](http://cloudsimplus.org) and give us a star at GitHub. Please don't forget to share it in your social networks to help promoting the project.

Thanks for your support.</comment>


Census insights - <AUTHOR> http://censusinsights.co.uk/ <comment><AUTHOR> Get instant insights from the ultimate source of UK census data

Census Insights is an easy to use and blazingly fast API that allows instant access to UK census data in minute detail. Combining our advanced query tools like drivetime isochrones with our proprietary algorithms, we provide incredibly accurate localised insights on the places we live and work in.</comment>


Show HN: Looking for name ideas for your App? - <AUTHOR> https://deepnamer.com/ <comment> benm-au Great idea for startups! Finding a catchy name, where the domain name is also actually available... especially when several people are involved... is super time consuming.

Good luck. I think it will do well if you socialise it in the startup community.</comment>


What Happened to Canada? - <AUTHOR> http://nplusonemag.com/what-happened-to-canada

<comment><USER2> I don't know who Marianne LeNabat is, but she's either very confused or trying very hard to create a story out of thin air.

 _The country is helmed by a prime minister, Stephen Harper, known for his brazenly right-wing views and executive unilateralism._

Brazenly right-wing? Ok, he's part of the Conservative party; but he's one of its most moderate members. Executive unilateralism? That's mostly about keeping the right-wing nuts in his own party in line -- Harper refuses to allow members of his own party to put forward any legislation which would place any restrictions on abortion or gay marriage, for example.

 _the undermining of the country's universal health care system_

Federal funding has increased at a rate of 6% per year for the past decade. Starting next year, it will increase at at a rate equal to nominal GDP growth. When did "increasing funding every year" turn into "undermining"?

 _In reality, Canada Post has netted a profit for sixteen of the last seventeen years_

Only if you subscribe to the notion that future pension obligations will be paid for by the magic public pension fairy.

 _Services are "delisted," i.e. taken out of universal medicare coverage, but private supplemental insurance becomes available to cover them._

I have no clue where this is coming from. Seriously, I can't think of even one service which has been delisted in the past 30 years. (And in any case, Canada's constitution says that health care is a matter of provincial jurisdiction, so if such a delisting had happened it wouldn't be the federal government's fault.)

I could go on, but I think I've made my point.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't call Harper a moderate conservative, not even close. We are talking Canadian Alliance side of the split. As for his stance of abortion and gay marriage, that's just not a good measurement in Canada, a place where it would appear as if John Baird is being groomed to be our first gay prime minister.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Harper is that most frightening conservative (for liberals), an arch- conservative who recognizes how far his values are from the centre AND can create and execute a strategy for implementing his vision bit-by-bit, piece- by-piece, so that most folks don't appreciate how radical is the gradual change.

Thems of us with memories and a willingness to look forward and back see a very scary voyage to the right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author represents a socialist view of Canada that idealizes a period from '75 to '95 when federal parties spent lavishly on the social system funded via national debt. This resulted in Canada's own debt crisis (peaking at 70% of GDP), which we were able to resolve by devaluing our currency and running surplus for most of the next decade (now hovering below 40% of GDP). This is epitomized by her statement:

"Since the 1990s, the centrist Liberal Party has embraced a hysteria about balanced budgets and debt repayment to justify cuts to social welfare programs and taxation"

The widespread "right-wing conspiracy" amongst the media & political class is rooted in the reality that any Canadian politician that actually increased taxes to fund social programs was quickly & loudly removed from office.

The current Conservative government has been removing environmental restrictions, silencing the federal scientists tasked with regulating them, and slowly reducing federal environmental research. These actions appear to be designed to spur more resource development & resulting government extraction fees. Its important to note that this Conservative leadership came from the province of Alberta, which has benefitted from a two decade resource boom. Alberta has had the strongest economic growth and lowest tax rates in Canada. A template for success in some eyes.

</comment><comment><USER6> First-past-the-post voting and a united right facing down a split left. Also, our biggest trading partner tanked their economy in tandem with our oil industry taking off.

Finally, over a decade of previous easy success left the liberal party flabby and complacent.

<comment><USER2> _a split left_

No such thing. The Liberal party is centrist, not left-wing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> nothackernews

</comment><comment><USER8> any welfare state cannot go on indefinitely

<comment><USER9> Why not? You've made a bold statement, but provided no reasons.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What online tool do you use for data cleaning? - <AUTHOR> Been looking for an online tool that's easy to use for tabular data cleaning such as date parsing and formatting, column split, etc. Couldn't find anything so I created Data Janitor (https://www.csvjson.com/datajanitor) to scratch my own itch.<p>Wondering what people out there use. I prefer an online tool - don't want to install anything. Also a point tool - don't want to have to sign up. <comment><USER2> This looks like a nice ShowHN. Look for the details and format in [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

Use a title like " _Show HN: Data Janitor - Online spreadsheet cleaning and transformation_ "

(Wait for resubmitting until Dec26. Nobody reads HN during Christmas.)

Some questions/remarks:

\- It's not 100% clear that you must click in Clean & Transform to edit the transformation script

\- If you edit the process script but don't click on "Run", then nothing happens (obviously). Perhaps you can add a small warning in the main page "Outdated results. Please click "Run" to process your data with the new script"

\- Does the process happen in the browser or in your server? How private is the data I upload? (I'm pessimistic and assume not private at all.)

\- How long do you keep the saver versions? Are you doing some filtering to prevent spam/overuse/ilegal content?

(Once your site is big enough to get some spam/abuse/ilegal content, you can write a nice post about how you combat it.)

</comment><comment><USER2> In an article, pati11 recommended SheeUS. [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and- implementati...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and- implementation-of-csvexcel-upload-for-saas/) HN discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8960280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8960280) (107 points | Jan 28, 2015 | 35 comments)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that really helps.</comment></comment>


Here's why your farmed salmon has color added to it - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/358811/heres-why-your-farmed-salmon-has-color-added-to-it/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email <comment><USER2> Stick with sockeye salmon - it's always wild and the cleanest.</comment>


The best Chromebook ever: Google's 2015 Pixel - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-best-chromebook-ever-the-chromebook-pixel-2015/

<comment><USER2> I found it 'interesting' to see they speak of the dual-core i5 and i7 as an upgrade, never mentioning the number of cores. All 5th gen mobile i7's are 2-core. [http://ark.intel.com/products/family/84979/5th-Generation- In...](http://ark.intel.com/products/family/84979/5th-Generation-Intel- Core-i7-Processors#@Mobile)

</comment><comment><USER3> Jesus christ, Google certainly got right certain things when it comes to laptops. For example the screen ration is really good and some elements of the interior but this guy really ...

</comment><comment><USER4> From the article: "Yes, I know, I know, many of you think that a Chromebook is just a Chrome Web browser on a laptop. Sure, and a Porsche Cayenne is just a car.

The 2015 Chromebook Pixel's 2.4GHz Intel Core i7 is as fast a processor as you'll find on any laptop today. By comparison, Apple's brand new MacBook tops out with a 1.3GHz dual-core Intel Core M processor. It's like comparing a dirt-track car with a Formula One racer."

Stopped reading right there.

<comment><USER5> I thought that was an odd comparison too. Given it's price and size, shouldn't it be compared with the MacBook pro?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not even remotely objective, but a decent enough propaganda piece that highlights the major high points of the Pixel.</comment>