Casualties of the Cashless Society: Those Who Get Seasonal Tips - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/style/seasonal-tips-cash-free-payments.html <comment><USER2> Maybe we should not have tips? There is no actual need or advantage to giving people tips, and there are plenty of countries where tipping is not common (including some where cash is still favored over electronic payments). Why not just pay people a fair wage that they can live on?

<comment><USER3> Because that would cost the companies more and they're happy to get away with paying less. It's really not a mystery.

<comment><USER4> I wish there was a list of Bay Area restaurants that don't require tipping. I discovered one last Friday and look forward to returning for the good food, service, and fair wages.

<comment><USER5> I recently went to Homestead in Oakland, which includes tips. The service was top notch, despite what the include-the-tip naysayers claim will happen.

<comment><USER6> I'm impressed by the pervasiveness of the belief that people won't, for the most part, try to do good work simply for the sake of taking pride in their work. It's such a remarkably pessimistic way to regard other people.

<comment><USER7> Or, just to keep their job! I don't take pride in my work but I make good money and I don't want to risk my job. so I do fairly high quality work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Its time to pay people a living wage, and stop the tipping culture. I hate carrying cash, and It bothers me that I have to carry $1 bills for the tipping extortion.

Im resentful that I have to pay for things as well as bribe the workers. Its disgusting.

<comment><USER9> > I hate carrying cash, and It bothers me that I have to carry $1 bills for > the tipping extortion.

I don't carry cash either, but I just tip with a credit card. If you don't accept tips with card, you don't get tipped. 90% of the time, there's a tip line on the credit card receipt.

But I do agree that we need to increase wages and kill tipping culture.

<comment><USER10> That doesn't help the people that this article is about, like doormen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tipping is often associated with both corruption and racism:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/09/05/study...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/09/05/study- countries-with-more-tipping-are-more-corrupt/)

[http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...](http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=articles)

I have actually almost entirely stopped using Uber after they made tipping part of the app. I've worked in a place with tipping, and my experience directly corroborates those links.

<comment><USER12> Tipping is part of Uber now? That was what I liked about it! Did they at least lower the base rate to compensate?

<comment><USER8> its more expensive than ever. i refuse to tip via uber (of course I get downvoted by the driver due to tip extortion). Screw uber!

<comment><USER13> You can't get downvoted by drivers for refusing to tip. They don't find out if you tipped until after they've rated you, unless you actually tell them, "I'm not tipping you."

<comment><USER14> Some drivers still ask for cash tips ("Uber takes a cut if you tip in the app").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A lot of these jobs that they're bemoaning the loss of tips for, also aren't all that necessary. If establishments want to give off the impression they're upper class, they ought to pay these "professions" considerably more considering they obviously have the money. Otherwise, opening doors and operating elevators are things I'm content to do on my own.

<comment><USER16> The ostensible purpose of the doorman is to add a layer of security. Someone who is always there watching, looking for people who don't belong, receiving packages and securing them, etc. They are basically a crime deterrent.

So is the elevator operator to an extent (although that one is really more just for impression of being fancy).

<comment><USER15> >Someone who is always there watching, looking for people who don't belong, receiving packages and securing them, etc.

Isn't that the job of a receptionist? They should definitely be getting paid more if these are all their responsibility.

<comment><USER17> > Isn't that the job of a receptionist?

Not typically, though a receptionist in a place without a doorman or might do some or all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is it really worth tipping someone to open a door or press a button in an elevator? I never understood the need for this position, let alone why anyone would ever tip them.

<comment><USER19> There are plenty of older buildings with manual elevators (as in direct control of the motor), and they're a bit tricky to line up with the platform accurately. I regularly visit two buildings with such elevators and only one has an operator on staff. If people are being paid to 'operate' modern automatic elevators it is indeed quite silly though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The 'cashless society' is starting to show another dark side here in Sweden in that several banks have started to close accounts for organisations [1] which don't "agree to the bank's ethical foundation" (the Swedish word is "Värdegrund" [2]). While there still are banks willing to take these organisations as customers this is a development in the wrong direction. It does not matter whether you agree with the "ethical foundation" these "banned" organisations have, the important fact is that they operate within the bounds of the law of the land. This used to be the deciding factor to separate 'good' from 'bad', legal from illegal, allowed from disallowed. Cash does not care about politics, it is - by law - as valid for a communist as it is for a priest or a libertarian. This currently does not go for the services provided by banks to enable transactions in a cashless society as can be seen by the Swedish example; there is no compulsion for those banks to take up anyone or any organisation as a customer. In a polarised society like Sweden where the pressure to abide by the "ethical foundation" is very strong this leads to extra-judicial sentences on those who do not abide by or agree to those ethical foundations.

Had those organisations been shunned because of their stance on, say, religion, those banks would be accused of discrimination. Discrimination based on political orientation however is currently not protected by law. If the "cashless society" is to succeed this probably will have to change, doing anything else will only lead to even more segregation where "left-wing" financial institutions refuse to do business with "right-wing" customers.

In short, in a land ruled by law it is the law which should be the boundary between what is allowed and disallowed. As long as an individual or an organisations abides by the law their ideological standpoint should be irrelevant to financial service companies.

[1] [http://www.friatider.se/nordea-st-nger-ner-nationalisters- ko...](http://www.friatider.se/nordea-st-nger-ner-nationalisters-konton-kan- ej-motivera-varf-r-och-l-gger-p-luren)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4rdegrund](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4rdegrund)

<comment><USER21> If only there was a way for society to go cashless, but not to rely on central authorities to decide who has money and who doesn't... Oh, wait.

Joke aside, you just described why blockchain ideologists hope the future will be a global, decentralized system. So no one can unilaterally deny access to your money.

<comment> tuna-piano Correct me if I'm wrong, but by design block chain is also non-anonymous. So if you want to, say, give money to Donald Trump, everyone could know you gave money to Donald Trump.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _Do_ people not carry cash?

Maybe the types who have an apartment with a doorman in Manhattan don't. But I (a "millenial") often go to bars and restaurants that are cash only.

Eventually, I found it was easier keep budget my "entertainment" in cash. Visually being able to see how much I have, how much I'm taking out helps. Being able to see that amount grow if I'm frugal one month feels good too.

I have friends who claim they get value from "points". But unless you're working towards a spending minimum for a sign up bonus, I've found the amount you make (2-5%) from using your credit card is less than the savings from thinking critically about which cash purchases to make.

<comment><USER23> Anecdotally, New Yorkers (of all varieties) carry some cash most of the time. There are just too many places that do not accept cards in NYC for people to go cashless. My friends in Denver and LA almost never seem to have cash, and are always surprised that it is a problem when they visit NYC.

<comment><USER24> New Yorker here, I can't really think of any place that doesn't take cards. Some bodegas have minimums, e.g. $5 or $10, but even those are rare and I typically pay for everything by card and carry no cash.

<comment><USER23> Off the top of my head I can think of: JG Melon (1 Michelin Star), Grimaldis, Tile Bar, McSorleys, Alta, Lil Frankies, Peter Luger (1 Michelin Star), Artichoke Basilles.

Plus at least 2 more restaurants in my neighborhood that I like and are somewhat popular with tourists. And my barber. Really, it just comes down to the fact that I never know if I'll end up somewhere that doesn't take cards, so I prefer to have it. The bodegas where I work are also serious sticklers for the $10 credit card minimums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is the kind of reason I hate tipping culture: I never knew that you were supposed to tip the Elevator Man.

Now, I've only encountered an elevator man once in my life in the US. But still. It never occurred to me that he should be tipped.

And that's my main problem, the ambiguity. There's no consistency in who should get tipped and how much is a decent amount. And that kind of opaqueness always hurts everyone involved but a few lucky ones.

<comment><USER26> And the guy in the bathroom handing out paper towels. What if my wallet is in my jacket at my table?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm reminded of a family friend telling me a story about how last year they were on day trip somewhere and a power outage happened to occur in whatever one-shop town out in the boondocks they were visiting and only one old Grandma had cash to pay for a drink or snack while the power was out, everyone else basically had to starve through lunch waiting for the power to come back on.

<comment><USER12> That's on the business. I used to be a cashier, and during power outages, we had an old carbon copier that we could use to copy credit cards and note the amount, and then enter it in manually later. You lose the instant approve/deny, but we'd also copy ids.

<comment><USER23> How did you copy licenses if the power was out?

<comment><USER18> > we had an old carbon copier that we could use

You know, the kind where you slide the thing across and you don't have to plug it in?

<comment><USER28> That takes an impression from a credit card (although I see more and more that don't have raised lettering) but not from an ID.

<comment><USER29> The impression isn't strictly necessary -- it's for convenience and, if needed, solid proof the physical card was there. At most you write down the license number on the carbon paper. If you lose the machine you can hand-write the card number just as easily.

Think about how an online transaction works -- punch in the number, no ID needed. Believe it or not that didn't _start_ online ;)

Source: took "offline" payments when a retail store's power went down many many years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've had this problem from the other side. I haven't been to the bank to withdraw cash in years. Usually I got all the cash I needed by splitting bills with friends, where I paid on the card and got cash, or Chinese New Year money.

But since having kids (and the invention of Venmo and its ilk), we've stopped going out with friends and splitting checks and when we do it's all digital, and now I have to _give_ the New Year money instead of get it.

We have a house cleaner every couple of weeks that I like to tip, and lately it's been a struggle to find cash lying around for the tip. Also when I get a haircut they give a big discount for cash, and that's been a struggle too. Like the girl in the article, I just forget to go to the cash machine, it's not a priority until the time comes.

I may have to visit the ATM for the first time in a few years this holiday season to give holiday tips.

<comment><USER30> >Also when I get a haircut they give a big discount for cash

"discount" ;) Nice euphemism for tax evasion.

<comment><USER31> Potentially, although do remember that card processing fees are rather high for small businesses, and every transaction that they don't have to lose 3% or 5% of or whatever is extra money they can keep.

<comment><USER32> Unless jedberg is referring to a 3% discount as a big discount, then I think it's quite obvious that it's due to tax evasion, which would allow the merchant to provide deeper discounts. This is common in cash businesses.

<comment><USER16> Well it's $12 instead of $15, so 20% off. But keep in mind that for a small merchant, besides the 3% processing fee, there is also a base fee, and when you talk about a haircut for $15, the base fee eats up a whole lot of the profit.

<comment><USER33> The standard maximum rate is 2.9% + 30 cents. Looks like they're losing over $2 per transaction for doing business in cash, unless, they make us for this _cough_ somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've noticed a big drop in panhandlers in cities, recently. Nobody even _has_ cash any more. I wonder what they've been doing instead?

<comment><USER16> I hope it's because services for them have picked up, funded by both public money and private (digital) donations.

But I suspect the real answer is something closer to "starving and dying". :(

<comment><USER35> I'm aware of donations through apps like GoFundMe, but does there exist any services for making digital donations to homeless people I might encounter on the street? I've thought about how the lack of cash is affecting these people, quite a lot but haven't encountered any solutions.

<comment><USER36> Gift cards? Coffee shops and such have low denomination ones.

<comment><USER16> The problem with that is a lot of those stores will kick the homeless person out. We used to buy meals for homeless people on the street when we were getting fast food in college. Oftentimes they were afraid to come into the McDonalds with us, even though we were taking them in, because they had been kicked out in the past. There's no way they would have gone in to use a gift card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> A lot of the arguments for getting away from tips are for servers.

There's already a solution in place to handle cashless tips for them. They aren't responsible for the transaction fee a lot of processors pass onto the gig economy. It works relatively well, even in the event of loss of internet or power.

The laws of averages work out for an average server, I worked for 5 years in the restaurant industry and two years of that was 100% waiting tables. I averaged $24-$26K between those two years in two different states and 4 different cities. Both of those states are at the US minimum wage of $2.13/hr (for restaurant waiters).

I worked about 30-40 hours a week. We're talking ~$12-$13/hr average. It's was definitely much better than any minimum wage position I could have had.

Anecdotally, the servers I knew who complained most about the wage were also the least responsible ones with their money. We worked at a restaurant that gave you your tips at the end of the night and to many peers, the urge to spend that cold hard cash was too strong. Those responsible but just underpaid were underpaid either way; they still could usually keep it together at $12-$13/hr, still a good wage for someone relatively just getting started career-wise.

Whatever wage you made from the $2.13/hr usually just covered your taxes. Most of my deposited paychecks were less than $10 every other week.

I know that this isn't what other countries do, but it _does_ work and keeps most families and individuals out of the poverty level. The requirements for work are relatively undemanding and most people who want a job serving get a job serving.

</comment><comment><USER38> When I was a kid, we tipped the postal worker and several other "service workers" that didn't need it the way food service does. It's just a nice eway of saying "thank you for your work". The purely logical among you will say "That's what a wage is for" but that's not the point. Kind of like how I don't get Christmas gift because I can't afford socks.

<comment><USER39> And that is fine as long as there is no obligation. But most American restaurants if you don't tip to the formula they treat you like you're robbbng them.

<comment><USER40> Things are different in America - restaurants get a special exemption under labor law [1] that allows them to pay wait staff about 25% of the minimum wage required for all other professions. The social understanding is that patrons are obligated to make up the difference via tips - you have to pay to use their services.

The system sucks but that's how it is, if you don't want to tip then you can always eat at McDonalds or other establishments without wait staff.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER41> > The system sucks but that's how it is, if you don't want to tip then you can > always eat at McDonalds or other establishments without wait staff.

Or you can simply eat at that establishment and not leave a tip.

<comment><USER38> So in the name of changing labor laws, we should cause tens of thousands of people to lose their jobs, effectively. For something like that to work, labor and consumers would have to be on the same page, and do something like a national week of no tipping, which would still hurt only the workers, not the businesses.

This needs to happen in Congress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm bothered by the need to carry cash just for tips, kind of like how quarters function solely as special magic tokens for parking meters. Starbucks, for instance, does not have tipping activated on their electronic check out… Who knows why? I tip with every coffee I get, except when I'm unable to because of payment technology.

<comment><USER43> If you pay Starbucks with their stored-value card linked to their phone app you can tip with it. If you enable notifications from the app you can get a reminder to enter the app and check off the tip amount. You also have 2 hours to change the tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> There is no way we will rid this society of tips. People will need to be paid more to compensate. And not many capitalist want to to give more and earn less. I was just in New York yesterday. Upon seeing the doormen dressed like the guy in Home Alone, I realized that there are people who still want you dressed in a monkey suit for no logical reason. I doubt they're willing to pay them more. I'm certain someone can make the doorman a device that will allow them to easily receive tips via chip card. I've seen boy scouts who use stripe.

On a side note do we even need door men?

<comment><USER23> >On a side note do we even need door men?

At my buddy's old place in Brooklyn the security door for the building broke. It had been broken for about 24 hours before my friend discovered a prostitute giving a john a BJ in the stairwell.

Doormen keep prostitutes from giving BJs in your stairwell, among other things.

<comment><USER45> >Doormen keep prostitutes from giving BJs in your stairwell, among other things.

I don't mind having to step over a dude getting a blowie in the stairwell if it saves the Chinese food delivery guy from having to stand in the cold and saves me from having to put on a jacket to go get my Chinese food.

Stuff like prostitution and drug dealers would only be 10% of the problem they are if people would stop being bothered by them out of habit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Yeah tipping sucks.

In Northern Europe it's it something we do. Unless we want to.

</comment><comment><USER47> Most of the places where I paid with card and added a tip they checked the tip value, took it out of the register and added it to the tip jar

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe we should have an app that allows us to give tips easily? I am still dreaming of a true mobile wallet, maybe Apple Pay</comment>


We're Getting Ripped Off on Health Insurance - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2019/09/health-insurance-us-kaiser-study.html <comment><USER2> If we are going to pay just as much with socialized care through taxes, with less options. Why do we want to switch instead of making changes to the current system?

I think a better option would be to slowly get rid of the insurance companies, since they are a middleman creating bloat and drastically increasing the costs of everything.

The true costs of medical procedures and care would then be charged (and as a result, go down).

The free market would further reduce the cost of surgeries that are common (like Lasik and many plastic surgeries that have reduced in cost over the last decade due to the free market/competition) through competition.

There would still be surgeries that are needed and expensive because there just aren't enough doctors that perform them or the free market hasn't been able to reduce the cost. This would be where insurance comes in and would cover certain surgeries and procedures.

I don't know anything that the government runs well and I certainly don't want them in charge of my healthcare. Socialized care is great for checkups, when you aren't that sick, and are young.

It falls apart when you get old, need specific surgeries/procedures, and are denied by the government because it's not necessary.

I have elderly relatives that live in Canada and use the Canadian system for all checkups, but come over the border for major surgeries because the wait time is just too long.

I lived overseas in Europe and Asia (all with socialized healthcare) and saw many sub-standard hospitals compared to the US.

<comment><USER3> Their surgeries must be triaged down to "basically not important" if they have to wait so long. Urgent work gets done.</comment></comment>


Y Combinator as a tattoo - <AUTHOR> http://carlzimmer.typepad.com/sciencetattoo/2008/02/y-combinator.html

<comment><USER2> There are many other nice tattoos on that site. This one is particularly nerdy (in a very good way): [http://carlzimmer.typepad.com/sciencetattoo/2008/03/think- pe...](http://carlzimmer.typepad.com/sciencetattoo/2008/03/think- periodica.html)</comment>


New AI tool serves up creepily accurate assessments of your work - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90314420/this-new-ai-tool-serves-up-creepily-accurate-assessments-of-your-work-style <comment><USER2> And so what does this Chrome plugin do for those of us who have purged any and all presence on LinkedIn?</comment>


Decrypt WhatsApp encrypted media files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ddz/whatsapp-media-decrypt <comment><USER2> The article (the readme on github) takes the following quote wildly out of context:

> A recent high-profile forensic investigation reported that "due to end-to- > end encryption employed by WhatsApp, it is virtually impossible to decrypt > the contents of the downloader [.enc file]

This quote clearly means it is virtually impossible without the key. OF COURSE if you have full access to the device as a logged in user, then you can get access to the key and decrypt things that cannot be decrypted by others who do not have the key. Nothing to see here.

At least to the author's credit the FAQ answers below clarify this, but not after the lead in, which is all most people read, has already done the damage of dramatically planting the incorrect impression that someone has figured out how to break WhatsApp encryption.

<comment><USER3> I think the "end-to-end" statement is also misleading as you don't really know whether the communication is indeed encrypted end to end. If you want true end to end ecryption you can grab a tool that will generate public and private key pair, send public key to your contact and ask them for their public key. Then use tool to encrypt your following messages with your private key and received messages with your contact's public key. Then it doesn't matter whether underlying transport is encrypted or not. Things like Whatsapp give false sense of security. I am pretty sure the messaging can be accessed but nobody will ever admit it. You can make it less obvious that you are sending encrypted messages by using two way binary to English text transcoder, so your messages will appear like an English conversation (although easy to pick as gibberish by a censor)

<comment><USER4> It's entirely possible to examine the compiled app and understand whether it sends the private key or unencrypted messages off the device, there's no need to treat the behavior or Whatsapp like a mystery.

<comment><USER5> The crux of the matter is verifying that the public key you're told is the public key of the other person, is actually the public key of the other person. If you do not verify this out-of-band, then the server can generate a new keypair for each recipient and it would go like this:

\- Alice encrypts message using FAKE public key of Bob (she was told is Bob's key by the server), sends it to whatseverapp server so it can be delivered to Bob when he sign on.

\- Whatseverapp server has FAKE private key for Bob (it generated that one itself, after all), decrypts message and notifies the corporate overlords/government/Russians/AdSevers/Illuminati of contents.

\- Whatseverapp server encrypt message using REAL public key of Bob, sends it to Bob

\- Bob decrypts the message using his REAL public key, reads it.

This out-of-ban verification is nothing you can automate or do once-for-all, like analyzing the binary for bad stuff. Each user has to verify the key of the other users. Which very few people actually do.

Also, you make it sound so easy to analyze an app binary. You can relatively easily prove it does certain things; but to prove a negative, namely that it does NOT do certain things is far more difficult at least and outright infeasible or even impossible in other cases (compare with halting problem). This is why security vulnerabilities happen, and a backdoor is more or less just a security vulnerability that didn't happen by accident or incompetence but deliberately - which may mean whoever put it there might have spent some time to obfuscate it even further to make it harder to find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Funes- TL;DR: This program decrypts encrypted media files _you yourself_ have received through WhatsApp, "in the same way that the WhatsApp app does to display it on the screen." It doesn't decrypt other people's media files, as the title could suggest.

<comment><USER6> > It doesn't decrypt other people's media files, as the title could suggest.

It can be used to decrypt other's files as long as there is physical access to the device and the user's passcode. This was published as a result of the Bezo's phone examination report, where the author stated it was impossible to decrypt the media file. A claim that was largely refuted by the digital forensics community.

<comment><USER7> If you have those, you anyways have access to the messages via WhatsApp, right? Can't you simply export any chat you are interested in then?

<comment><USER8> This does not completely contradict what you are saying but you can only export limited number of messages (10k or 40k can't remember the amount correctly).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not just media, one could extract WhatsApp's cipher-key and message-db (not sure if it works on current versions) without requiring root: [https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2770982](https://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?t=2770982) (2016).

And here's a desktop viewer to search through decrypted files: [https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1583021](https://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?t=1583021) (last updated: 2018).

</comment><comment><USER10> There is an app on the google play store that claims to be an "antivirus/cleaner" app that abused Androids accessibility API's to access WhatsApps media files. The developer called it a "WhatsApp cleaner". The app was removed from the Play store for several weeks but was allowed to return. The developers now claim to PROTECT unauthorized access to WhatsApp's media files. App is affiliated with China's Qihoo that was booted long ago from the Play store for hijacking users WebView with fake virus warnings to boost installs. As this app has been doing every day since 2013.

</comment><comment><USER11> As maintainer of [https://github.com/open-wa/wa-automate- nodejs](https://github.com/open-wa/wa-automate-nodejs)

Every needs to be incredibly careful of being phished of their WhatsApp web logins.

Also, WhatsApp does not respect message integrity regardless of e2e encryption. They WILL mutate your message if required.

</comment><comment><USER12> How some of surveillance tools can access or extract the key just by installing a SPY APP? I thought IOS creates a sandbox for each APP.

</comment><comment><USER13> If only this was available as a apk

</comment><comment><USER14> I thought I'd take this opportunity to describe my recent experience submitting a bug report for WhatsApp on iOS.

When you export a chat, you get a zip file containing the messages as plain text, plus any media files referenced in the chat. The .txt file unfortunately only contains the text-only messages, not the text captions for media items. I reported this as a bug and was told this was functioning as intended.

So this is a warning to anyone who thinks they are backing up their WhatsApp chats via the export feature that their backups are incomplete.

As a workaround, you can get hold of the ChatStorage.sqlite file from an iTunes backup of your phone. All text is in there but you obviously have to query the database and format it into a readable sequence of messages.

This really, really sucks as a workflow and I hope if any WhatsApp engineers ever read this they start working on a real export feature.

<comment><USER15> It seems that WhatsApp has some oddity in how it handles captions on media items.

I forward messages between various groups, but when you forward a media item like an image, it doesn't forward the caption with it. This is incredibly frustrating - sometimes you don't realize you've forwarded a photo of something that has no context, and my recipients have been often clueless until I have to clarify.

<comment><USER16> Also, you can not copy that caption from the image message, you have to type it again.

<comment><USER17> Yet somehow this POS app sold for $19+ billion and it's one of the most popular apps in the world...

<comment><USER18> It's a very reliable app despite some of its flaws. It mainly sold that high due to high market share in some countries.

<comment><USER19> Virtually every IM app I have ever used has been very reliable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _Can you help me decrypt someone 's WhatsApp?_

Answering the most important questions.

</comment><comment><USER21> Somewhat disheartening that the author believes by default that the encryption wasn't tampered with on the proprietary server side of this proprietary client.

<comment><USER22> There's nothing "by default" about it, E2E encryption by definition can't be tampered with by anything on the server side, and the encryption mechanisms of WhatsApp are well understood

<comment><USER23> Which definition? WhatsApp, like a lot of things that claim E2EE, encrypts and decrypts at the clients. The problem is that we have no idea what the client programs are doing. They have not yet performed the required step of showing us the source code in a form that can be compiled to be the same as the distributed binary.

<comment><USER22> We know exactly what the client programs are doing, the bits are right on your device and you can audit them if you want (and it has been done already for WhatsApp by many researchers). Have you audited any of the open source software that you use?

<comment><USER23> >...and it has been done already for WhatsApp by many researchers...

Citation required...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > No. WhatsApp uses iOS Data Protection to encrypt user data files (including > ChatStorage.sqlite) using the device-specific and unrecoverable hardware UID > key as well as a key derived from the user's passcode. It may not be > decrypted without physical access to the specific iOS device that created > the file as well as knowledge of the user's passcode.

Didn't we learn that not to be the case since presumably the device can still flash a new apple-signed firmware that would override this ?

<comment><USER25> If that were the case, one would not be able to decrypt their iPhone backup on another iPhone

<comment><USER24> No. You would still need a signed modified firmware that would make use of the passcode-derived key from the original device, but the point is that an iPhone can accept a new firmware while locked which shouldn't be the case if Apple was serious about non-compromised security.

<comment><USER25> Wait, so I can't restore my iPhone backup without the other phone?

<comment><USER26> When you enter your passcode while enabling backup, you're letting iOS decrypt your data and reencrypt with the key used for the backup.

Local backup key strength depends on the key. iCloud depends on the law.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An effort to bring computer science to all US high schools - <AUTHOR> https://blog.aboutamazon.com/community/mapping-opportunity <comment><USER2> I'd be fine with this if schools taught computer science like art. Essentially a place to build and make cool shit. Unfortunately, I could see it becoming more like how schools teach math, a bunch of rote steps that only a fraction of the class likes because they're good at it. Don't get me wrong, I like math, but most schools are unable to understand the creative, problem solving aspect of mathematics.

I was fortunate enough to go to a high school that had an amazing computer science curriculum (8 semesters worth of classes). One really intelligent decision the department made was to not just mimic a college curriculum. After all, why teach something kids will learn a few years later? Instead, they mixed in some offbeat courses. They had a software development course that taught Python and basic web dev. They had a graphics course where you built a graphics engine. They even had an intro course with Racket. It's unlikely other schools will be able to replicate this exactly, but I like the concept of fun over "usefulness".

<comment><USER3> Sounds like an amazing high school computer science experience. Which state was this?

My high school has exactly one CS course (AP Computer Science) that teaches more mathematics than computer science. This is something I would love if it existed at my school.

I've been currently self-teaching CS for the portions that seem relevant and interesting, such as ML/DL, algorithms, and data structures.

<comment><USER2> New York. It's not a hard school to guess. In fact, the teacher who started the entire program is on Reddit (maybe HN too). I'm extremely fortunate to have attended it.

<comment><USER4> Brooklyn Tech most likely :). Mr. Turner?

<comment><USER2> Haha you're very close. Not Tech though ;D

<comment><USER5> Another one for the Z team?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Should we be calling this "computer science", or just "computer programming"? After all, those two things, while related, are not synonymous. And I'm not being pedantic, I'm really wanting some clarification!

A true computer science education involves a study in multiple areas, from discrete math, to computer architecture, to operating systems, to algorithms, to finally, both as the pinnacle and the essence of the subject, theory of computing.

Any university would be expected to have these classes as part of their core curriculum for a CS degree, otherwise people begin questioning the rigor of the program.

Obviously, if we are talking about HS rather than University, the subjects are scaled back for necessity. But the content still needs to be there. So are they talking multiple classes, or a long series of classes that will eventually address all of the aforementioned areas?

I'm all for everyone learning Computer Science. I just want to make sure that we are talking about the same thing!

<comment><USER7> > A true computer science education involves a study in multiple areas, from > discrete math, to computer architecture, to operating systems, to > algorithms, to finally, both as the pinnacle and the essence of the subject, > theory of computing.

Similar arguments could be made for physics, chemistry, and biology. But we still say that we teach those subjects in high school, even though the depth and breadth of material is hardly what you'd expect from a university or college. The only broad and deep courses in K-12 education (US-centric descriptor) are math, social science (history, geography), language arts (English-language literature, writing). And none of those really go that deep, or that broad.

We can identify the initial elements of CS that everyone takes before going deeper: Introduction to algorithms and data structures, and some logic/discrete math courses.

Logic is technically covered (or used to be) in geometry courses (in the US). Discrete math presently has no place, so this could be improved. The introduction to algorithms and data structures part is barely separated from programming 101. The difference is that a programming language course (Python 101) is going to go too deep into the weeds of _Python_ and not cover topics that are portable across more languages. An algorithms course should be more portable (at least across a class of languages, like across imperative languages or OO languages).

<comment><USER8> Having a 'computer science' class that teaches programming makes about as much sense as a physics class on rulers and stop watches, a chemistry class on test tubes or a biology class on petri dishes.

High school classes in the other sciences manage to convey some of the breadth of the subject while laying the absolute foundations for further study.

The only non-incidental part of computer science are the theory of computation, the hierarchy of languages and translators/compilers between various languages. Not one pre-university program teaches these, and in recent years many university courses don't teach these either.

<comment><USER7> Computer science consists of a large number of things, theory of computation is part of it. But so are algorithms and data structures.

Practically speaking, the latter (algorithms and data structures) are the most accessible, and allow you to explore the former. Even if we think people should be taught how to express these concepts with a pseudocode, they're still learning to program (in a vague sense). But they can't explore the ideas of CS, outside of a formal approach if they don't program (pseudocode or actual code).

And the formal approach is not understandable (or as easily understandable) without a practical experience with the topic. Do you honestly believe that we should teach students category theory and abstract algebra before we teach them high school algebra? Or perhaps high school algebra before arithmetic? If they have no number sense, they won't be very effective in high school algebra. If they have no sense of the structure of algebra, they'll have a hard time developing an intuition for the more abstract algebra and math concepts.

The same is true for CS. I can sit down and teach someone the hierarchy of computational mechanisms (finite state machines, pushdown automata, Turing machines). But what good is that if they don't understand what those machines actually express? Understanding that regular expressions (not regex) are used to tokenize text, and that PDAs are used to parse text is a great practical introduction to those concepts and provides them with an intuition that they can then use to generalize those machine models to other structures.

So pick a point to start, and work up. Don't start at the formal level and expect it to be effective (unless the students already have a sufficiently advanced background, like a senior university math major could probably start with those machine models and work towards their applications, rather than the reverse).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I am a volunteer & proponent of STEM, I pity the administrators & teachers who need to figure out how to cram so many subjects into students heads. I also pity the students. There is a limited time in a day & everyone has their subjects they feel students need to do more of, including arts, recess, and physical activity which seem to be the most recent cuts.

I think Charlie Munger once said we learn the really important stuff by middle school. I think it would be nice if kids had more control over the direction they are interested in & the subjects they want to really excel at. This of course requires them to try different things. But once they find one they're really passionate about, I believe we should let them go deep into it without requiring as much of other content.

I believe a well rounded education is great but without being able to focus in one area we can't become an expert in anything. Bill Gates & Warren Buffet have both argued that focus is the key to success at anything.

<comment><USER10> I really feel computer science isn't a subject as much as it is a medium.

Once we learn to write, we don't take writing classes, we take grammar classes. Meanwhile, we write to participate in the rest of our classes.

Similarly, computer science should become the medium of participation for STEM classes.

For example, math and physics, would be easy classes to transition to only be taught with Python.

Instead of using a graphing calculator to solve word problems, what if the class was about building a graphing calculator?

You would still learn how mathematical functions translate to graphs, but you would also learn to write software that accurately simulates math, and later physics.

<comment><USER11> I very much agree and I tell every young CS student I meet that Computer Science + Some Other Domain = bright future

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I volunteered with Microsoft's TEALS ([https://www.tealsk12.org/](https://www.tealsk12.org/)) organization last year as a volunteer classroom teacher for an introductory CS Course. The first semester was mostly in this drag and drop language called Snap, similar to Scratch, and the second semester consisted of the basics of Python.

I was worried about teaching at first, I haven't had a lot of experience (none as a matter of fact) but, TEALs had some training classes over the Summer that I attended and they taught me how to be a pretty decent (at least in my opinion haha) teacher.

The school I got placed at was an inner-city school and it was honestly awesome to give these kids a chance to learn about and explore a career path they previously thought well above their ability to reach. I went one day a week for one class in the mornings, I worked with other volunteers each with their own day, so it didn't interfere with my work life at all either.

I didn't learn about programming myself until I hit college so just the fact that these kids are even made aware that this is an actual viable career path is a win in my book.

If you're interested at all in "CS in every high school" mentality and you want to put in some volunteer hours then I think TEALs would be an awesome resource to look into

<comment><USER13> I will second this. I'm currently in my second year volunteering and I absolutely love it. I get to help with both the CSP (intro) and CSA (Java- based) classes. Last year I went just two days a week but this year I'm going three. Honestly, if it wouldn't be such a pay cut I would seriously consider quitting my current job and get into teaching full time. (I know money isn't everything but still).

TEALS is great because it realises that unfamiliar teachers being thrown into teaching CS probably won't turn out well for anyone. But having 'real' engineers from industry in the classroom to help teach and explain things is an invaluable resource. Plus, I've been able to get to know some of the students really well and talk to them about their college plans and beyond. I was a little nervous when I first started but it's been one of the best experiences of my life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> An effort to lower salaries by increasing supply of workers. It's amazing how they play it as a donation when it is a strategic long term investment. Makes me think of tax implications of this kind of gray area between donations and long term bets. Nonetheless, money spent in education is money well spend so props for that.

</comment><comment><USER15> A better approach is that taken by the Bootstrap World curriculum ([http://www.bootstrapworld.org/](http://www.bootstrapworld.org/)). They align their curriculum around algebra. That way you don't have to find time to make a CS class in an already busy schedule. Bootstrap trains Math teachers to use the curriculum. Again, the school doesn't have to hire a CS teacher. The program is entirely online, so the district IT departments don't have to approve/install any software. They are also moving into physics and data science to expand student exposure to programming.

Bottom line, putting pressure on schools to find time and money for a discrete CS offering is challenging. I tend to think of programming as a tool; don't teach programming for the sake of programming, but as a tool to enhance other subjects.

<comment><USER16> > Bootstrap trains Math teachers to use the curriculum. Again, the school > doesn't have to hire a CS teacher.

My school decided to have random (STEM, mostly math) teachers teach computer science classes. It did not go well–not because the teachers were bad at teaching, per se, but because they had not had enough training. It turns out that you can't really learn to teach Java over the summer.

<comment><USER15> Bootstrap does not promise that these math teachers are now proficient coders, but they do walk the teachers through the entire curriculum from start to finish. The teachers act as the students so they get a feeling of what is being asked of the kids. This curriculum is like 25 hours long. Most math teachers use one day a week to work on coding. So I wouldn't call this program CS in the classic sense. Rather it is a brief introduction to coding and how it relates to algebra.

<comment><USER16> That's ok as long as it's understood that these teachers aren't teaching a standard computer science class. But I'm not particularly optimistic that school administrators will understand the difference.

<comment><USER15> It has been my experience that school officials will offer some coding if that is what parents want. Coding, programming, and CS are used so interchangeably that often meaning is lost. So the bare minimum of coding classes will be presented as this massive shift toward STEM/CS, and parents will go along with it.

<comment><USER16> Again, that's ok as long as schools don't try to reuse these teachers to teach actual computer science courses later "because they already know some coding".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think instead of teaching computer science students should be taught tinkering with a lot of different things. Take them apart and understand them, modify them. Call it "hacking". One thing I notice with the young guys coming from college is that they view a lot of things as black box that is either too difficult to look into or it's even not allowed.

I would be very afraid that teaching CS in high school just creates more people that can whiteboard algorithms without any deeper understanding or creativity. Good for Amazon though to get more workers for cheap they can then lay off after a few years to get "fresh" people.

<comment><USER18> This was me. I studied ChemE, and after working at a startup where I worked a more EE leaning project, I've realized this is what I would have liked to study instead. A lot of electronics are much simpler than I ever imagined.

I'm in the process of building my own keyboard at the moment, but once I'm done with that I know I'll be hungry for more electronics related projects. If only I could come up with some good ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure how I feel about the commoditization of my career path.

<comment><USER20> Your path should be to become financially independent and/or a business owner. Its the only way out as businesses attempt to drive down the cost of their labor.

<comment><USER21> As a business owner logically wouldn't your customers also be trying to drive down costs/eliminate you?

Plus this isn't particularly useful advice. Without a large amount of capital, luck, or a compelling concept it isn't trivial for people to become financially independent and or a business owner.

<comment><USER20> Well, yeah, you need luck and either capital or work to become financially independent. You don't need to be intelligent to be a business owner, and you don't have to be a business owner to make an above average wage and invest it.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/style/longterm/books/c...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/millionairenextdoor.htm?noredirect=on)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> And then we'll graduate a bunch of students that have proficiency in programming like I have proficiency in Spanish after 4 semesters.

Right. See, kids that don't care or don't understand the material have to be able to get Cs as a fundamental requirement of high school. A degree for everyone, regardless of ability or passion.

Oh and also all my computer classes in high school were video game free time. So that's a thing.

What a waste of taxpayer money. Just link kids to a BASIC interpreter online and they'll figure it out if they care and have the aptitude.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't know about _computer science_ but all high schools could stand to teach a general familiarity course in _computers, networking, and robotics_.

Suggested curriculum points:

      - Plug the related high school extracurricular clubs
      - Computing on a tight budget
      - Two types of free: gratis or libre
      - Resources to further your own computing knowledge
      - Brief history of computing
      - Careers in computing, networking, and robotics
      - Basic hardware security
      - Basic network security
      - Basic encryption, incl. protocols and certificates
      - Trust, skepticism, and mistrust online
      - Basic system architectures
      - Popular choices in operating systems
      - Microcontrollers, FPGAs, SoCs, sensors, buses, motors
      - Taking control of your own computers
      - Protecting yourself from malware, spyware, and spam
      - Backing up your data
      - How to evade the law online
      - How to catch online scofflaws
      - Open vs. closed source
      - Types and uses of various licenses
      - Technical standards, FUD, and embrace-extend-extinguish

Most people won't need to learn full-blown _computer science_ in high school, just as most people won't need to take a second year of calculus. People will need to know why it's a bad idea to glue a tablet computer to a refrigerator and allow it unrestricted access to your Wi-Fi.

Everyone in the class could leave it with their own Raspberry Pi (or competitor system) and a custom-made peripheral for it.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's so weird and interesting how we have been pushing STEM so hard on HS students. I'm near an area where resources are more abundant (our tax property is actually really overwhelming...), and there's even "tracks" that students can choose. Like a leadership, compsci, physics, and etc. I look forward to more resources provided via online to all area of the US for STEM in early education.

<comment><USER25> Not weird at all. This is Bezos generating hordes of candidates for Amazon to keep wages down for the next century.

<comment><USER26> Or unlocking a massive engine of productivity to raise standard of living across the economy. Did literacy kill the careers of priests and monks?

<comment><USER25> > Did literacy kill the careers of priests and monks?

Actually, it did!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation#Literacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation#Literacy)

Literacy was a major factor in the reformation, and the subsequent decline in the status of clergy. Look even further, and it becomes a crucial factor in modern atheism and the further deterioration of clergy of all denomination.

> Or unlocking a massive engine of productivity to raise standard of living > across the economy.

Sounds great! Just remember the rules of supply and demand. As the supply of programmers increases, since demand won't change (at least not immediately), their price will decline.

That means programmers like you will have to settle for a fraction of their current compensation.

Couple that with tech employers' known fondness for employing the young, and you'll lucky to have a job at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Back in the late 80s, my high school had a decent number of programming courses which touched on logic, sorting algorithms, and so forth. But the most interesting course was with the Pascal teacher who also taught computer literacy 101. This teacher offered everyone who came to his computer club generous extra points. So he was able to fashion a very popular computer club with all the jocks/cheerleaders in attendance. Then [no joke] he would have us practice our social skills in talking to girls, etc while filming it on a video camera and playback on a projection TV for the group to critique.... Fun times!

<comment><USER28> I had a similar experience in High School late 80s (Jamaica HS, NY). We had Pascal, x86 Assembly, Some C. The computer teacher was also our physics teacher.

It was an excellent set of courses that taught some basics of programming and hardware architecture and we learned. There was a computer club where we interfaced with a laser disc player. Some really cool time back then. I was lucky to have my C=64/128 and Amiga 500 to extend my learning experience, with C.

Peace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> As an example, there were technically 4 basic programming classes and a few trade focused ones like A+ certification, web design. Catch is, almost all never had enough people to be offered so when I convinced the requisite 8 people to join (3 later dropped the class after the first week), it became a very "plan and you your own thing".

Compare this to what the elite private coastal schools have, nothing would have been better. Those schools good CS students out of top master's programs with a penchant for teaching. It's no surprise that IOI champions come from these places.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think highschools need to identify kids early on in sort of like a speed dating process when they're younger. If they show interest in highschool have some ways for kids to start building background in say learning about hardware / electronics or software or just DIY building things (woodshop / welding / auto / construction / plumbing / electrical) (these are huge fields, and it's not like it's medically oriented or anything). I realize some schools had ROP for this stuff, but we need more participation by community colleges in life skills, even if highschool is more of a social gathering for people their age, you won't find a lot of highly specialized people teaching at high schools, because the background requirements are just too different. A CS Professor is more likely to be the strange highschool kid, who has an interest in teaching other people their craft, and may inspire others based on the way they got interested. I guess just a lot of PC (politically correct) things going on int he world, and people think that everyone who teaches younger people needs a specialization in educating younger people. That is not how the real world works. People learn from everyone they meet regardless of background.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'll say this much: software is so disgustingly intractable, from week to week, that teaching people how to do it a specific way solves almost next to nothing.

Whatever you teach anyone in September, by June, it may not work. It's a bottomless pit of futility that sucks the life out of you, and even if you find a way to derive some pleasure from it, the rug will be pulled out from under you, and the forces of access denial with lack you out of the things you master only a month ago, for little more reason than bumping a version number.

Go ahead and learn something. Your learning will be so dependent on gigabytes of irrelevent libraries with highly specific build numbers, such that when support is dropped, and those builds are no longer available for download, your acquired skills will be struck down and renderd unusable.

</comment><comment><USER32> An excellent way to make kids as bored or afraid of engineering as they are of mathematics. As a coder who'd only like his wage to get higher this is wonderful news, I fully endorse it.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wish adults were organized enough to a.) call it programming and not Computer Science b.) shift the conversation to STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art & Math) instead of pushing Art out of the discussion and c.) start exposing kids in the tween ages (e.g. 9-13) before a lot of annoying hormones & social pressures kick in together.

</comment><comment><USER34> Cynic in me knows that this is an attempt to increase the long term supply of engineers and suppress wages.

</comment><comment><USER35> It'd be nice if this wasnt tied to Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER36> Reading between the lines, there are not enough good programmers to hire. Supply and demand are driving this effort.

</comment><comment><USER37> resources should be spent making sure math teachers are equipped to teach math and not rote memorization.

</comment><comment><USER38> Why computer science instead of just the practical programming and software engineering know how? The theory is pretty irrelevant for most coding jobs.

</comment><comment><USER39> I like that this is being offered--the _opportunity_ should be there.

However, I really wish this sort of effort could be de-coupled from the "CODE" idea and filtered by interest on a per-kid basis, as with other subjects, even algebra. As things stand, people will eventually self-select anyway, so the inevitable change in or out of STEM is simply delayed until it's later, and even more awkward and difficult. For example, during one's sophomore year of university, after a tremendously walled-off personal identity has been constructed on the back of the STEM vision. A school-age child robbed of interests-based focus now easily becomes a societal liability later.

I have three school-age children. If one of them likes STEM, wonderful. Or maybe they will become an animal trainer, or a pawn shop owner or drive a garbage truck. That's fine. Or maybe they will become a counselor for people who are looking to get out of STEM (I am coaching a couple of those people right now).

I'd also like to see the over-emphasized CODE replaced with TECHNOLOGIZE or some broader-minded term that allows talented people to get out of the coding mindset and yet realize they can still be beneficial within STEM, and maybe even realize that technology can be developed by folding pieces of paper together, or by working in the forest. In other words, you can CODE without CODING and people are being tricked and boot-camping their way into dead-ends because they don't know that.

As an example of someone who could STEM in their sleep and never write code, take Richard Feynman. Or Einstein. Could Albert Einstein "code" on an IBM Mark I? Who cares?

Not that coding is bad, just that it's not the only thing by a long shot. And it's emphasized by a lot of people who absolutely will not ever write any code. The "code parents" I know who are falling over themselves to get coding into schools for their kids are the same people who ask their nephews to code things for them, not because they "can't do it but wish they could", but because they are interested in higher-level pursuits. They want their kids to have a tiny bit of exposure to CODE so these kids can run in CODE-type circles, yet still not actually CODE. But some of those kids will not get it and will have nervous breakdowns because they think they are supposed to learn to write CODE.

Further down the STEM path, we get these IT interviews in which the interviewer projects knowledge and experience they themselves didn't have at the interviewee's level onto the interviewee. Even when it's just to get into somebody's head and see how they think, it fails to pass muster at the Psychology 101 level and it's a huge problem that prevents healthy teams from forming. I personally interviewed for one of these jobs, got the job, and then walked into a room full of people who were laughing at how it was possible (luck) that I could have known the answers. Then I went on to learn by experience that the most desirable candidate for the position would have been a politician with some small amount of IT knowledge, someone who could elevate the department in the eyes of the other departments, which were intelligently run at a political level. The STEM-driven department needed the opposite of STEM in order to really become what it could become. Stanford Teamology project results showed something similar--psychological diversity is a huge key to problem solving, and becoming aware of its existence and benefits is the mechanism that turns the key.

In order to create a ramp from CODE to this broader look at tech, it would probably be beneficial to build a more realistic yet still basic model for STEM that completely stomps all over the CODE notion by adding enough nuance that candidates for STEM careers are given additional leverage in non-CODE yet very-much-still-STEM areas. [I am writing CODE in upper case because in the world I'm observing, it's some kind of uberword].

</comment><comment><USER40> Apparently a majority of HN doesn't know what CS is.

Computer science isn't software engineering.

Computer science isn't coding.

<comment><USER41> "Computer science" has always been a problematic term. Actual sciences don't need to put "science" in their name. Most of what computer scientists do is not really science, not that there's anything wrong with that. With all the mathematicians involved, you would have thought someone would have come up with a pleasantly evocative name. (several subjects within mathematics have mellifluous names) "Computation", for example, would have been elegant, but that ship has sailed.

TFA isn't talking about that anyway.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to merge contact info from many sources? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently working on a contact management system that aggregates info from several different sources. Needs to support multiple email inboxes and various social media platforms.<p>What are some best practices for merging? <comment><USER2> These folks have done a lot around contact management. May be worth a read: [https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/contact- versioning/](https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/contact-versioning/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts on teachyourselfcs.com? - <AUTHOR> What are your views on the curriculum at https://teachyourselfcs.com ?<p>I am new to this and will be documenting my experience here: https://www.rkpblog.tech/2020/07/following-the-teach-yourself-cs-curriculum/ <comment><USER2> It is a bit like this guide on how to become a game programmer [https://github.com/miloyip/game-programmer](https://github.com/miloyip/game- programmer) It is a really good guide, and everything is thought out nicely but many people argue on both guides that it is too much stuff to learn. [https://github.com/miloyip/game- programmer/issues/54](https://github.com/miloyip/game-programmer/issues/54) the answer that miloyip gave to the question that it may be to much sums it up for me. These guides contain to much if you want to be a simple programmer and get a job. But if you want to be one of the best in the industry you are going to need read and study all the parts.</comment>


The Magician of Manga - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/25/hokusai-magician-of-manga/ <comment><USER2> What's always fascinated me about manga is the progression of space, rather than time.

<comment><USER3> Can you explain that further?

<comment><USER2> Allow me to gather my thoughts for a moment.

In the West, we are obsessed with the arrow of time. Storytelling in the West is typically concerned with getting characters from point A to point B. The space of the story is of secondary importance to the one way flow of time. The here and now is of central importance.

This is not the case in Eastern cultures. Japanese culture has been heavily influenced by Vedic religions, as well Shintoism and Taoism.

A central concept of Vedic religions is Samsara[1], which can be thought of as a cyclical view of the universe. Time itself is merely an illusion, because ultimately the same cycle of birth, sustainence, and death is repeated infinitely.

That's why space is the focal point in manga. As another commenter stated, certain events are happening in the present. But the next scene may have non- linearly taken place in the future, or perhaps in the past, or even with no reference to the current time period. What ties everything together is the common space.

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

<comment><USER4> afaik there was never any influence of hinduism on Japan at all - barely a contact with it before late 19.century and modern ways of migration.

And it would be the height of irony to call buddhism a vedic religion, as it along with other sramana movements (such as jainism or ajivika) of the time precisely rejected the vedas.

<comment><USER5> > buddhism...precisely rejected the vedas

It's a lot more complicated than that...

<comment><USER4> heh most things are, but I cannot see what complication you may have in mind relevant here.

Vedas don't have any authority in buddhism, just like in other shramana religions, and seem their claim to traditional authority is directly criticized in actual buddhist scripture - literally that this tradition is blind men leading the blind (itself possibly an Upanishadic reference). No doubt there's a decent amount of complication in the matter of various lines of theological influences going between the religions as one would expect, but how is that any justification for calling buddhism a vedic religion? Hindu authors have commonly identified precisely Buddhism, Jainism, Ajivika and the Charvakas, in other words the shramana traditions as being nastika on exactly the basis of their rejection of vedic authority. Now if you'd call it Dharmic religions, sure that works - though is a bit of a strange euphemism in case of Japan where clearly one can only be talking about Buddhism, so why define it in any plurality like "dharmic religions"?

[http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.095x.than.html](http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.095x.than.html)

" Suppose there were a row of blind men, each holding on to the one in front of him: the first one doesn't see, the middle one doesn't see, the last one doesn't see. In the same way, the statement of the brahmans turns out to be a row of blind men, as it were: the first one doesn't see, the middle one doesn't see, the last one doesn't see. So what do you think, Bharadvaja: this being the case, doesn't the conviction of the brahmans turn out to be groundless?"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


iCloud Drive can strip (meta)data from your documents - <AUTHOR> https://eclecticlight.co/2018/01/06/icloud-drive-can-strip-metadata-from-your-documents/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've always been hesitant about trusting iCloud. I remember losing metadata with early cloud storage and networked backup solutions across platforms. This shows me I was entirely justified in doubting the reliability.

Anybody else able to confirm this?

</comment><comment><USER2> Is this really an iCloud issue? My first thought would be its a HFS+ vs APFS issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the impression I got was that if you copied the file by flash drive, for example, that you didn't lose any metadata. But it's a good question, and I don't know. I updated both of my computers, so I can't test either way.</comment></comment>


Earliest known signs of cannabis smoking unearthed in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jun/12/earliest-known-signs-of-cannabis-smoking-unearthed-in-china <comment><USER2> I love this finding, in part because (as the article notes briefly here) it helps back up Herodotus' account of cannabis use in his _Histories_. Specifically this bit from Book 4, 73-75:

"After the burial the Scythians cleanse themselves as follows: they anoint and wash their heads and, for their bodies, set up three poles leaning together to a point and cover these over with wool mats; then, in the space so enclosed to the best of their ability, they make a pit in the center beneath the poles and the mats and throw red-hot stones into it. . . . the Scythians then take the seed of this κάνναβις (kannabis) and, crawling into the tents, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smoulders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor- bath. This serves them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water."

What's especially fascinating to me is that Herodotus wrote that account circa 440 BCE, within a few decades of when this find has been dated, and his "Scythians" were probably part of a larger cultural group of Indo-European nomads stretching to what is now Western China.

<comment><USER3> What is a "Greek vapor bath"? In this context it sounds like it would compete with cannabis.

Maybe a reference to something like what got the Oricle of Delphi high? Is it just reference to a regular Greek hot bath?

<comment><USER2> I would think he's just referencing public steam baths, not unlike hammams or saunas today. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Baths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Baths)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Residues of high potency cannabis found in the burners_

I wonder what they mean by high potency. I was under the impression that cannabis strength has increased a lot in the past 30 years. Do they mean that this ancient cannabis was of a strength similar to modern cannabis or just that it was higher in THC concentration than a natural plant would be?

<comment><USER5> The best stuff [0] is still obtained by simply rubbing flowers between the hands until enough resin accumulates, it wouldn't surprise me if they had already figured that one out.

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

<comment><USER6> We have much better extraction methods these days using solvents.

<comment><USER5> More efficient maybe, which isn't really top priority from a user perspective. Personally, I prefer my smoke without a touch of solvents.

Bubble Hash (mixing with ice and filtering frozen resin) is a natural alternative that comes close, but the processing still lowers the quality.

<comment><USER7> The solvents are evaporated off if you process your hash correctly.

<comment><USER8> And with solvents like CO2 that evict the chamber without any intervention under STP, it is actually even more certain that the solvents leave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a fascinating documentary called: 'The Lost History of Cannabis'. It goes through how religion seems to be intertwined with cannabis. For instance the 'anointment oils'. How it probably wasn't Mer gifted by one of the Three Wise Men (I tend to agree).

Found it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2p6qFT_Zjg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2p6qFT_Zjg)

<comment><USER10> I could imagine why religion was so much more popular in early history now.

<comment> xkcd-sucks I mean yeah all religions start out as nutty cults and calcify with age

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article from 2008 seems to predate it. It also talked about sensimilla crops (separating males from females for cultivation).

[http://www.nbcnews.com/id/28034925/ns/technology_and_science...](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/28034925/ns/technology_and_science- science/t/worlds-oldest-marijuana-stash-totally-busted/#.XQHbeHtlA6g)

</comment><comment><USER12> It's really interesting how stable CBN is after oxidizing from THC... it also apparently has a strong anti-anxiety effect similar to benzos. It is currently in a lot of cannabis sleep aids.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here is the area the article discusses, the Pamir mountains: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Sa...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/SakastanMap.jpg/800px- SakastanMap.jpg)

It is in present-day far western China, an area which is historically in the Indian/Iranian sphere of influence.

</comment><comment><USER14> I often thought that the parts of the bible that talk about burning incense could be speaking of intoicating effects such as cannabis.

Fascinating find.

</comment><comment><USER15> So do the Chinese call it "820" ?</comment>


Guy builds nightvision drone to hunt feral pigs - <AUTHOR> http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1478852. <comment><USER2> i like, very cool idea and relatively cheap. don't think it would be a good idea to mount a gun as you need to ensure a clean kill and be 100% sure of what you are killing.

another technique that has been very successful with pigs and goats is to release a pig with a tracking collar. pigs and goats are much better then human at tracking down other pigs and goats. mounting the tracking collar receiver on this system would be of great assistance.

<http://www.feral.org.au/tag/judas-pig/>

<http://www.publish.csiro.au/paper/WR96109.htm>

<comment><USER3> _don't think it would be a good idea to mount a gun as you need to ensure a clean kill and be 100% sure of what you are killing_

Regardless, I was disappointed when I didn't see/hear PEW PEWs.

<comment><USER2> yeah i felt pretty cheated as well.

maybe you could mount a paint ball gun with fluro pellets :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And here is the guy's Something Awful thread:

[http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=343...](http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3431642)

</comment><comment><USER5> I have some relatives that have the same problem in central Alabama. It got so bad that the local officials have allowed the use of scoped night vision weapons to let farmers hunt the pigs.

Also, this same relative says he doesn't walk around at night without a 0.50 caliber pistol and a shotgun. Apparently these pigs can be pretty unfriendly

</comment><comment><USER6> This is probably way more efficient than just going out stalking but with something like 3 million feral pigs in the USA it is going to take a lot of effort to bring the problem under control. Perhaps something like the Judas Goat, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat> with an infra-red strobe (so you don't end up shooting it) might be more (cost) effective.

</comment><comment><USER7> As a hacker who lives and codes from his ranch in Texas that has problems with feral hogs, I give this two thumbs up!

One thing to add for those not familiar with feral hogs... these animals are a non-native species and highly invasive. They can have at least 4-6 piglets at a time, 3 litters a year. They damage crop and farmland, carry disease, and compete with native wildlife for food.

</comment><comment><USER8> Would it not be easier to add motion sensors or something like this?

Depending on how huge fields they have this might be hard though..

</comment><comment><USER9> _Guy builds nightvision drone to hunt feral pigs_

Federal government shows up to help ;)

<comment><USER10> no no. It's literally feral pigs; I can see how you might be confuse though ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What costs more raising a pig or shooting one in the wild? If the answer is the latter perhaps someone can make a fun business out of it :)

<comment><USER7> The most effective way of removing feral hogs is by trapping since you can catch multiple animals at a time. Shoot one and the others scatter.

Feral hog meat, unlike typical pork, is a deep red and can have a wild-game taste. It makes for great sausage and barbecuing but you wouldn't necessarily want a ham sandwich everyday in your lunch.

Many outfitters charge both the hunter for the opportunity to hunt and the farmer for the removal service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Might be interesting to some of you: <http://diydrones.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> What about mounting infrared cameras to weather balloons?

He seems to have a problem "lingering" over the right area.

<comment><USER14> Weather balloons do not provide a stable visual platform for the optics, nor are they maneuverable. Recovering your $4,500 FLIR sensor also becomes a challenge.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, I meant "tethered" weather balloons. Which I assume would solve the "recover-ability" issue. No idea on "stability".

<comment><USER10> A quadrocopter would probably be a better bet for hovering/stability

<http://www.quadrocopter.us/>

<comment><USER15> I don't know how well those fly at ~650ft (he was consistently around this altitude in later videos). Perhaps a traditional RC helicopter might work as well, but the noise would probably be a problem (I think he has electric planes).

However, if you just want to get rid of the pigs, not kill them, I could imagine that you could do pretty well herding them with a loud RC helicopter... perhaps even herd them into a trap or kill-zone.

<comment><USER10> Fair point. I am not 100% sure how high these fly; but you can put together an open-source arducopter for a lot cheaper than in that link (about $300 or so) and they can be programmed/automated.

So if you could get them high enough for the noise not to be a big issue, and to give them a reasonable coverage with the camera, you can easily put a few of these up in a network on autpilot (with way points) and just watch several screens at once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this just for spotting? I can't tell if it has any weaponry equipped.

This is a very cool build indeed.

<comment><USER17> Equipping it with weaponry would almost certainly be illegal, let alone the fact that it would be next to impossible to aim if you don't use very expensive weapons.

<comment><USER18> Why illegal? Are there specific laws about mounting a firearm to an aircraft, or is the problem the automation of the weapon?

<comment><USER19> It seems that 'remote hunting' has been banned in various US states, although not all of them: [http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/hunting/2011/02/north- da...](http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/hunting/2011/02/north-dakota-mulls- banning-remote-hunting-internet)

Obviously it would be illegal in most of Europe and probably elsewhere too.

This is something I've spent a fair few idle afternoons daydreaming about, and to be honest I'm quite worried about the future possibility of semi-autonomous weaponised drones. The average HN reader probably has the knowledge and access to resources necessary to build a basic manually-controlled drone. An iPhone or even an Arduino would provide the necessary computing power for semi- autonomous activity (and a whole bunch of useful sensors, including GPS, camera etc.) and it can't be long before someone builds some open source software to enable these things to fly basic missions (go to these coordinates, film for 30 minutes, return to base, avoid obvious obstacles whilst doing so). Mounting some kind of weapon on there is a fairly simple step. You could even print the weapon parts with a 3D printer...

What really scares me is the arms race that will occur when law enforcement has to deal with this kind of thing.

<comment><USER20> If you're building this for purposes law enforcement will be concerned with, a flying bomb / guided makes far more sense than a gun platform IMHO. Build a few kamikaze drones, load them up with semtex and shrapnel, put them into a steep dive from altitude over your target...

(I should stress I'm a very peaceful chap with no revolutionary or violent inclinations whatsoever!)

<comment><USER18> > _(I should stress I'm a very peaceful chap with no revolutionary or violent > inclinations whatsoever!)_

That's how it starts...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> cool. how about getting those angry birds on this.. :P

</comment><comment><USER22> Is he shooting the drones out of a giant slingshot perhaps? ;)</comment>


Announcing Skynet Beta - <AUTHOR> https://siasky.net/GADwbULtGj2NuBXJrQPBkivr6etO5uD4BSToixUUSCVhGw <comment><USER2> We already have tech brands named iRobot and Soylent. I guess we might as well have Skynet now, too.

<comment><USER3> There's a couple of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet) products</comment></comment>


Hams try to re-carve the amateur radio spectrum - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/05/amateur_radio_spectrum/ <comment><USER2> Awful article that misses the point.

Vendors like Yaesu and D-Link have introduced digital modes that are proprietary and/or patented, but not encrypted. The NSA will have no trouble decrypting these symbols, but hams who have D-Link radios can't read the Yaesu transmissions and vice versa.

Hams are doing a lot of interesting stuff that is open in terms of "digital" modes that work like teletype -- today these are more spectrum efficient than the old Morse code and make it possible to communicate between modest stations by bouncing signals off the moon. The problem is with proprietary protocols for fitting digital voice in narrow channels.

BTW, that Rappaport guy might be the #1 researcher in the field of millimeter wave radio these days

</comment><comment><USER3> In general, amateur radio transmissions ought to be open and unencrypted -- the equivalent of GPL or public domain. There are some instances where the legal ban on encryption is an issue, such as when HAMs come to the aid of emergency management after a natural disasters and cannot pass personally identifying information or patient information in the clear without violating HIPAA. A common-sense exception allowing encryption in these cases makes complete sense and is something the FCC commissioner could probably approve by edict in lieu of legislation on the matter.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I don't really get where this article is going. All digital signals are required to publish how to decode and D-Star that was called out was designed specifically by hams.

My guess is this is just a push back against pactor and the non ham usage that tends to happen. Either way ham isn't going to be breaking any data rates soon as the frequency used is to small for faster symbols(and they're also prohibited but current laws).

<comment><USER5> The voice codec for Dstar is proprietary and patented. Luckily it's about to expire and I've seen at least one reverse engineered implementation.

Still, it completely goes against the spirit of a hobby and is an intentional legal and technical barrier to decoding transmissions, today.

<comment><USER6> Yes. D-Star is the poster-child for the kind of coding scheme that should not be allowed in Amateur Radio. If I can't access the documentation required to do a compatible open implementation, then it is a no-go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are two different issues we don't want to conflate. Encrypted traffic is a problem because once you allow it, there is no way to police abuse of the spectrum (in the same way you can tunnel almost anything over ssh). If you allow encryption, then the ham spectrum just becomes an open free for all.

The second issue is proprietary protocols. If the goal is to support experimentation and emergencies then all protocols used should be non proprietary so that all who want can learn and be involved.

</comment><comment><USER8> The biggest problem I see is this big push into proprietary digital modes is that it creates incompatibility. These digital modes splits the market up into incompatible segments that damages the ability to communicate. This splintering reduces the desirability of a new radio, and reduces sales. Reduced sales means vendors spend less on R&D.

Who wants to buy a digital radio that can only communicate with a small fraction of other digital radios?

I've talked to dozens of hams, and their most hated feature is accidentally entering digital mode on their radio and not being able to communicate with anyone. Similarly the majority of repeaters are analog only, because who wants to put up a repeater that only a small fraction of the radios can use?

If the FCC required only open systems being used then any radio could use open software to be able to communicate and help ham radio become a more modern radio system.

</comment><comment><USER9> As a counter argument to keeping everything open there's a bunch of things you want encrypted. Radio controlled things. This is even a problem for the people that are trying to create HAM internet connections. You can't use any SSL. Though it'd be slow, I'd love to see a world wide internet that could be accessed by HAM. I can't think of anything more world changing than having an open internet that everyone can reach with a $10 device.

So I think there are cases where being able to use encryption would be nice. But there are also plenty of cases to keep things open. So maybe we need to talk about some compromise. Maybe keeping certain bands open and others not.

<comment><USER10> The rule against encryption on ham bands doesn't prohibit digital signatures. It just prohibits encryption of message content.

For radio control a protocol that sends commands in the clear but signs them should be sufficient to let you securely control something without violating the rules.

<comment><USER9> From my understanding because of this limitation you can't send encrypted passwords.

<comment><USER11> Which is why you have to use other protocols and key authentication. Whatever the current equivalent of Cram-MD5 or just plain public key HMACS. I wrote about this 15 years ago in April 2004 - [https://rietta.com/blog/2009/08/17/authentication-without- en...](https://rietta.com/blog/2009/08/17/authentication-without-encryption- for/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ham radio been a regulatory success because the transmissions are open. Self- policing of the ham bands has always been an essential part of the hobby. Any transmissions using unpublished algorithms make that impossible.

In today's climate, the fact that long-established (and offshore) gear makers are creating such a threat is not surprising but is dismaying. _One_ serious criminal mis-use could cause serious damage to goodwill generated over decades. It could lead to more draconian regulations.

Emergency use is a side-issue. We should not allow ourselves to be divided by it.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am an Extra class licensee in the US and while I have a lot of respect for the Ham community, deeply entrenched thinking places the future of amateur radio in jeopardy. If we only allow CW and SSB phone as truly open and accessible operating modes a whole world of technical innovation and integration will be lost. While the letter of the FCC rules might exclude some of the more recent digital modes listed, the traffic is not encrypted. With all the strong encryption out there in the world, it's hard to buy amateur radio as a threat to national security unless we're worried that a bunch of 80 year olds are going to take up arms against the republic.

To me it sounds like some operators have sour grapes because they can't immediately listen to everybody's traffic. In short I support Ham moving forward and not becoming even more antiquated than it is.

I do think the headline of the article is poorly written as I don't think this is about spectrum allocation in any way.

<comment><USER14> The article is rather badly written, but the actual petition for rulemaking is broadly reasonable. The proposed language change to 97.309 is as follows:

 _An amateur station transmitting a RTTY or data emission using a digital code specified in this paragraph may use any technique whose technical characteristics have been documented publicly, and the protocol used can be be monitored, in it's entirety, by 3rd parties, with freely available open source software, for the purpose of facilitating communications_

As I see it, the essential goal is to close the loophole whereby theoretically-open but practically-closed protocols can be used on amateur frequencies.

There is a broader debate in amateur radio about the use of automated data stations and the possible increase in the bandwidth limit, both of which represent delicate balances. There's clearly a cohort of geriatrics who want to keep double sideband voice and ban data, but there are also genuine issues with the behaviour of some data mode users.

A significant number of WSJT users are now transmitting at high power, creating significant issues with interference. WinLink is an absolute nuisance - it has always been illegal in the UK and I really can't see how it's legal in the US.

[https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/100918881206/PETITION%20FOR%20R...](https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/100918881206/PETITION%20FOR%20RULEMAKING.pdf)

[https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7521098786.pdf](https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7521098786.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, are we sure this article wasn't written in 1980? The idea that encrypted radio is a national security threat makes zero sense in the age of VPNs and Tor. If someone wants to get a secret message overseas an encrypted HAM transmission is probably the single hardest way to do that short of trying to train a carrier pigeon with a portrait of Vladimir Putin.</comment>


Women in Tech - A Practical Need - <AUTHOR> http://www.flaskofespresso.com/2012/12/females-in-tech-an-eye-opening-experience/

<comment><AUTHOR> Prior to founding <http://www.getgumball.com/>, I was impartial to most calls for more women in technology. Now I'm pretty convinced.</comment>


Ask HN:Kindle Popularity and the affect of physical books - <AUTHOR>

Has anybody else noticed the cost difference between physical books and kindle books on Amazon seems to have shrunk significantly?
As an example, Guy Kawasaki's book Enchangement is more expensive as an e-book than a physical book.
http://www.amazon.com/Enchantment-Changing-Hearts-Minds-Actions/dp/1591843790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298425537&sr=1-1
Was this inevitable??
Do you think we will likely continue to see an increase in the price of e-books? <comment><USER2> Ebooks and print books have different markets. Ergo, we should expect pricing to be correlated, but different.

Consider: The economics of producing a hardcover book and a trade paperback are not as different as their prices suggest. The hardcover costs a bit more to print, but not significantly much more, because most of the cost of producing a book is in the writing and editing and marketing. The difference between hardcover and paperback is an artificial marketing distinction: Hardcovers seem more substantial, and (more importantly) they come out earlier, so they sell to the people with more money than patience and with a taste in bookbinding. They are therefore priced higher to take advantage of those folks' willingness to pay.

I suspect that so long as e-readers cost hundreds of dollars (and, more importantly, e-books have DRM and can't be borrowed or resold) they will naturally tend to be priced like hardcovers, or worse.</comment>