Alcatel-Lucent 100Mbps technology on copper lines - <AUTHOR> http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2011/09/22/alcatel-lucent-boost-superfast-fttc-broadband-to-100mbps-via-vdsl2-vectoring.html

<comment><USER2> The problem with virtually all technologies that utilize existing copper infrastructure that was built to deliver analog phone service is that it degrades severely over distance and is heavily dependent on the quality of the cabling. Analog voice quality degrades linearly. It doesn't suffer significantly from splicing, repairs, or bridge taps. For data services delivered over these lines, these factors can be catastrophic.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm tired of these theoretical bandwidth numbers getting further and further away from the real-world bandwidth numbers. On the original UMTS 3G labeled "384 kbit" we got 300 kbit, it was alright. With 7.2 Mbit HSDPA we get something closer to 2-3 Mbit. The same thing with WiFi - I've never ever seen anything anywhere close to the 300 Mbps theoretical rate of 802.11n WiFi. Cable numbers are diverging in a similar manner, and the DSL numbers currently quoted are only possible to achieve when you're 100 meters away from the DSLAM...</comment>


QA from Anybots - the coolest thing you'll see at CES all day. - <AUTHOR> http://sam.bluwiki.com/blog/2009/01/coolest-thing-youll-see-at-ces-all-day.php <comment><USER2> Seems ironic that robots in science fiction were envisioned as menial servants able to do physical tasks too hard or unpleasant for humans, whereas this robot, with it's sleek 35lb body and advanced communication ability yet with no arms seems better suited to play the role of master in a world in which many cultures have regarded abstinence from physical work as a mark of superiority (for example, in asian cultures, very long fingernails was a mark of class because they could only be maintained by a person who didn't have to do manual work.)

</comment><comment><USER3> What does it do? It looks to me like a segway with an LCD screen in the middle.

<comment><USER4> It's for mobile telepresence. E.g. you send this to the factory in China instead of flying there yourself. It has cameras and audio and a fancy laser pointer they built themselves. You drive it via the Internet from an ordinary computer.

It's much lighter than a Segway. Only 35 pounds.

<comment><USER5> iRobot made something similar called the "coworker". It was a spectacular failure. It was shorter and ( i think ) a bit smarter about remote obstacle avoidance. They asked around $5K.

They never answered the question: why is this better than a conference call? This is doubly important considering it has no arms.

I'm certain there is a market for this or a similar kind of robot. It needs to have compelling remote presence, and it needs to be cheaper than $5K.

Adding up motors, computers, cameras, the chassis, plastic modling, etc. can get expensive fast, especially if you haven't ramped up production somewhere fast & cheap like China.

<comment><USER6> Why better than a conference call? It has to be it's mobility. (Although, didn't they mention it needed to be tethered? It has to be because it lacks batteries.)

I think that in situations where data needs to be sucked up in a mobile way but not in a way that the environment needs to be manipulated (no arms), it'll work. Well, when it gets batteries, it would.

<comment><USER7> You're thinking of the old model, Monty:

"Unlike monty, QA is 100% battery powered, and gets 4-6 hours of runtime on every charge. Monty's pneumatics required it to be tethered at all times. Also, its much lighter at around 35lbs. Monty is too heavy to pick up."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sorry for the threadjack, but are there many HN people going to CES?

I'm flying up in a few hours, but only going to be there through tomorrow night.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why did they design it to look like some disfigured woman?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, this isn't "uncanny valley" it's just weird. Arms (even if static) would help. If not, don't give it "shoulders."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Please, for the love of all that is holy, do not give this thing arms. I've looked into Monty's eyes, and I tell you it's evil.

Even without arms, you better watch your back around steps with this thing in the house.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've found a leaked photo of the next version of QA from Anybots, code-named 'Maria':

<http://www.jeffbots.com/maria-large.jpg>

(Compare to Anybots QA: [http://bluwiki.com/images/thumb/7/7b/Anybots- QA.jpg/250px-An...](http://bluwiki.com/images/thumb/7/7b/Anybots-QA.jpg/250px- Anybots-QA.jpg) )

Somebody warn the workers!

</comment><comment><USER13> CISCO is working hard on telepresence and no robots are involved.

On the plus side, this is mobile, but on the down side, it has the connectivity CISCO is working on as prerequisite.

I'm wondering who needs a rolling tv screen?

I have no such wonders with the roomba and the its hardwood and linoleum cleaning cousins, those little bots are damn helpful.

<comment><USER14> The rolling TV screen is less important than the rolling camera.

<comment><USER15> Is the camera in stereo?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think big dog is still cooler:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww>

Asimo too:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfaAiujrX_Y>

<comment><USER4> Imagine something that balanced dynamically like Big Dog, but was a biped like the Asimo, and you'd have:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CQ5AKaEi3U>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnTy_smY3sw>

<comment><USER16> This robot makes small jerky movements. I think the others are much more natural in appearance. Perhaps it is more of a hardware issue than software, as it does seem to have pretty good balance.

<comment><USER4> "more natural in appearance"

Truer than you know. The reason the Asimo's gait looks so smooth is that it's preprogrammed. It doesn't balance dynamically. It looks smooth for the same reason animation does.

<comment><USER5> That's not technically true. Asimo has preprogrammed paths, but not motor movements. Even in a semi controlled environment, a preprogrammed biped would fall.

The difference is between electric motors and pneumatics: today's pneumatics are just jerkier.

And static balancing doesn't mean that it is preprogrammed, just that at any point (unless it is running), all movement could stop and the robot would stay standing.

If humans stop moving, we collapse.

I guess the best reason to say Asimo is not more natural is that no animal in nature is statically stable. All animals with legs have actuators with the characteristics of pneumatics and springs (in humans, tendons are springs).

We can also turn to efficiency. The electric motors on Asimo will _never_ be practical. It takes too much energy for the bot to ever be sold as a product. No animal in nature has a 15 minute battery life :)

<comment><USER4> _static balancing doesn't mean that it is preprogrammed_

Really? That's what I was referring to when I said the gait was preprogrammed. I assumed that static balancing meant that the robot was only willing to traverse certain paths through the n-dimensional space of possible limb configurations, and that since these could be calculated in advance, they would be. But since I know you know about robotics, I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

<comment><USER5> There are constant adjustments made by the dozens of motors in the legs and torso to keep balance, based upon sensors like accelerometers and gyroscopes. That's not preprogrammed.

My point about a reasonably controlled environment is that in the real world, even on a "flat" stage for a show, there are enough irregularities to make complete preprogramming hopeless.

I don't know enough control theory, but it could be stated that an open loop controller will be doomed to fail for a biped.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-loop_controller>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-loop_controller>

Higher level, there are sequences of commands that yield a step forward or to the side. That is almost certainly preprogrammed. When you own an asimo, the api they expose is actually really limited. For example, to lift the arm from the side to the air will only have a few states in between, and you choose which one you want. This is not low level control at all. They do this because they know Asimo is a marketing machine, not a real robot, and they don't want grad students making it fall over on youtube.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Congrats Trevor and everyone at Anybots - I can't wait to see one of these in person.

<comment><USER8> I just saw it this morning... I have to say, it honestly was one of two things that gave me a "holy shit!" moment at CES. First of all, they were the only exhibit really getting much attention in the Sands; and they were getting a TON of it.

Secondly, the description doesn't do it justice. They were doing a demo of it, and there was just something about the way this thing is put together that makes it feel like it came straight out of Star Wars.

Huge props to Trevor and crew for making something so cool - I hope you guys found some deals at CES!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> i think this is cooler

<http://www.notcot.com/archives/2009/01/iosafe_solo_flo.php></comment>


Scientists prove the existence of fourth spatial dimension - <AUTHOR> https://tecake.in/scientists-prove-existence-fourth-spatial-dimension <comment><USER2> Heck of a title. Wish the article was better at explaining what was actually done.</comment>


Detroit's population crashes down 25% from 2000 - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704461304576216850733151470.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

<comment><USER2> This is disappointing news, but I still have a lot of hope for Detroit. The desert southwest is running out of fresh water due to climate change and over- use. Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, even Atlanta, they're all unsustainable. If they're unsustainable, eventually they have to stop.

Detroit, and other cities in the rust belt, generally have plentiful fresh water, not to mention natural infrastructure waiting to be re-used (harbors, rivers, etc). If I was making a 100 year bet, I wouldn't bet on Vegas, I'd bet on Detroit.

<comment><USER3> I agree. In the long run Detroit has potential. But before they can make any economic strides they need to fix their bloated corrupt city government.

If you want to make a real 100 year bet on Detroit, buy some real estate now, it has never been cheaper. In some places you could buy an entire city block for a few grand. You could will it to your grandchildren. I've considered it, but haven't convinced my wife... yet.

<comment><USER4> Rockefeller didn't listen to his wife :)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I ain't Rockefeller.

But the biggest reason I haven't done it is the city government. The above reasons not to invest in Detroit are clear - taxes, unknown assessments, liability. Allowing some of the land to go fallow or zoned agricultural or a long property tax holiday would help tremendously. The most expensive thing about living in Detroit are the taxes and the regulation if you can live through the crime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm also from Detroit and this is really tough to read about.

Detroit does have a great opportunity in all this though - there are a lot of talented people still living in and around the city. It would seem like the ideal location for some truly innovative automotive advancements and with the push for more green and eco-friendly cars, I'm surprised there aren't a few startup communities designed to engage this currently dormant group of potential hackers.

<comment><USER6> There are a few startup and hacker communities in Detroit, namely DNewTech, i3Detroit, OmniCorpDetroit. DNewTech meets monthly, with a keynote speaker and showcases 5 startups.

<comment><USER7> Check out <http://fundedbynight.com>. There are a lot of passionate people working on building a startup community in Metro Detroit.

Anyone interested should email me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Being from Detroit this brings a tear to my eye but it presents opportunity for many people to establish new companies very cheaply.

<comment><USER8> it seems to me that the issue now becomes talent. a lot of talent has left, and the money you save in starting a company will probably need to be spent in getting talent to detroit.

<comment><USER9> That's where you're wrong. Population of the greater Detroit metropolitan area is 5.4 million and people forget that when they talk about what's happening in the city of Detroit.

The talent is there and there's a large number of people who have left and would return in a heartbeat if the jobs were there.

Michigan's new governor is a former VC and the state is staking their future on startups and entrepreneurs. He's trying to lower taxes, smaller companies will pay zero taxes under his plan.

However Michigan's unions are fighting him tooth and nail even though he is not challenging their power directly like the governors in Wisconsin and Ohio. So despite the voters giving him a majority in both legislatures he may not achieve everything he wants. What there won't be are the huge government handouts to favored companies that the previous governor was fond of using.

<comment><USER10> I think this is a bit disingenuous. I highly doubt Michigan's unions are fighting him tooth and nail on plans to lower taxes and ease the burden for smaller companies.

They are, however, fighting him on the ability to deploy to cities in financial disarray state appointed "emergency managers" who can override elected officials and, most importantly to the unions, cut union contracts. [1]

Now, you could argue that the emergency financial manager plan would eventually result in lower taxes and an easier path to success for smaller companies. You could also argue that there are better ways to achieve that same result rather than said plan.

[1] - [http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/region/wayne_county/governor- ri...](http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/region/wayne_county/governor-rick-snyder- signs-bill-giving-broad-new-powers-to-emergency-financial-managers)

<comment><USER9> I'm in Lansing and believe me they are fighting him, turning out thousands last week and briefly taking over the capital building. They did it with a phone bank from Washington DC (I received one of the calls as a former MEA member) and those arrested in the building were all from out of state.

What the proposed law does is give some bargaining strength to the state's beleagured cities and school boards. Unions are more likely to reach agreement when there's the threat of the governor appointing an emergency manager. I think the reality is that the governor won't use that power often. A large number of the city's in the state face bankruptcy and that's a lot more unpleasant outcome.

We are faced with some very unpleasant choices in the state. We're in trouble because previous governors from both parties kicked the can down the road with paper fixes. The governor is calling for shared sacrifice and those having to recieve less don't like it one bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This has been a disappointing census for a lot of cities. Nearly everyone in St. Louis expected the city to post its first population gain since the 1950s, but the city actually lost nearly 30k people (about 8%).

<comment><USER12> I've been reading comments on this and most of them include something like 'we have all these new downtown condos, I thought we'd see growth from that'. It's simple math though, a condo with 1 single person is not going to help your population grow like a single-family-home with 5 people.

<comment><USER11> You're right, but that's because there was (relatively) _enormous_ growth downtown (up 359%) [0]. Downtown St. Louis looks nothing like it did 10-15 years ago.

[0] [http://www.stlmag.com/Blogs/SLM-Daily/February-2011/The- Top-...](http://www.stlmag.com/Blogs/SLM-Daily/February-2011/The-Top-10-St- Louis-City-Neighborhood-Population-Changes/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> All I can say is "Wow". I knew Detroit was in decline but 25% in 10 years (excluding the greater area)? That's just _staggering_.

For almost all of human history we've only had to deal with issues of growth. There are of course exceptions to this. Some cities that were massive are either small now or have ceased to exist. Some (like London) went through centuries of virtual depopulation before being reborn (between the Roman departure and the 10th-11th century).

But modern city depopulation seems to create some fairly big problems. Cities with significant depopulation (eg Detroit, Baltimore) are known for crime. Some say this causes the depopulation, which may well be true, but it also exacerbates it, as drug addicts and the like move into decaying and abandoned areas.

Going forward, this is going to be a significant problem we'll have to deal with, I believe. The reason I believe that is that it is my opinion that there are simply too many people on this planet. Ultimately it's unsustainable. Either we'll solve this by breeding less or nature will do it for us.

Either way, if this comes to pass, we'll need to figure out how to shrink urban centers effectively. That's going to be painful.

As for Detroit, it's certainly well off its peak in the 50s and 60s. It may be cheap (and thus, arguably, attractive to investors) but it's cheap for a reason. I'm sure Chechnya is cheap too.

<comment><USER14> >The reason I believe that is that it is my opinion that there are simply too many people on this planet. [...] Ultimately it's unsustainable. Either we'll solve this by breeding less or nature will do it for us.

If by breeding less you mean breeding less than the replacement level so that we can get to a "sustainable" size, I think you are wrong. Our sun puts out enough fusion power that, if we could capture a small chunk of it, each of us could personally use the current energy budge of the entire earth. Ultimately population growth at some fixed percentage is unsustainable (population growth at a fixed percentage grows exponentially, our light-cone polynomially), but I don't think earth's current population is.</comment></comment>


Google stole my friend's birthday - <AUTHOR>

My poor friend (and also several million people) was born on a 29th of february. Off course she is tired of listening jokes about her birthday every 4 years, and that's not the story.
The story (or BUG REPORT) is about Google Calendar:
I added her birthday on Google Calendar, and I had to do it on 29th February 2012, all right.
The problem is that when I went to 2013 calendar, the birthday wasn't there. It appeared once again (predictably) on 2016.
Here's my complain: If I can make an event on 29th that repeats dayly, weekly or monthly without problems, why on earth it doesn't work yearly?!?!?!? The thing get worse if you repeat the event yearly a fixed number of times. If you say that you want it 4 times, the event on 29th lasts 16 years, if you do it on 1st march, it lasts 4....
So, come on Google, you can't fail me on this easy one, at least give me a warning before eating her birthday!!!
UPDATE: The calendar also fail to render a series of monthly events if you happen to add the first on the 31st. It's their dialog that says "repeats every one month" and fails. <comment><USER2> This is not a bug. It's common sense. You can't make an event on the 29th of February repeat yearly because the 29th of February doesn't repeat yearly. This isn't Google's fault. Set the event for the day you actually celebrate her birthday. That will repeat yearly. Problem solved.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand your point of view. But she, and also millions of people, are no software guys. They don't get it. Also my complain is about the dialog where you add the event. As I said, If I choose to repeat weekly the calendar has no problem to generate an event every 7 days, but with years it clearly fails.

<comment><USER3> So let's say that Google decided to repeat the event every 365 days, using the analog of a perfect 7-day week as you did above. That means that every 4 years, Google's "birthday" is going to fall one day further behind your friend's actual birthday, which is clearly incorrect. I think the correct answer, as was stated above, is to simply ask someone whether they want this to repeat annually on Feb. 28 excepting leap years OR if they can accept the 4-year cycle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I searched google for anagram the other day and it asked if I meant "nag a ram". Clearly Google is capable of and, I agree, should, handle scheduling leap year birthdays.</comment>


Hard work and practice in Programming - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/12/hard-work-and-practice-in-programming.html

<comment><USER2> A lot of mathematicians who think about how to practice to become better mathematicians draw a distinction between exercises and problems. Both are important, but problems are especially important.

"It is perhaps pertinent to make a comment or two here about the problems of the text. There is a distinction between what may be called a PROBLEM and what may be considered an EXERCISE. The latter serves to drill a student in some technique or procedure, and requires little, if any, original thought. Thus, after a student beginning algebra has encountered the quadratic formula, he should undoubtedly be given a set of exercises in the form of specific quadratic equations to be solved by the newly acquired tool. The working of these exercises will help clinch his grasp of the formula and will assure his ability to use the formula. An exercise, then, can always be done with reasonable dispatch and with a minimum of creative thinking. In contrast to an exercise, a problem, if it is a good one for its level, should require thought on the part of the student. The student must devise strategic attacks, some of which may fail, others of which may partially or completely carry him through. He may need to look up some procedure or some associated material in texts, so that he can push his plan through. Having successfully solved a problem, the student should consider it to see if he can devise a different and perhaps better solution. He should look for further deductions, generalizations, applications, and allied results. In short, he should live with the thing for a time, and examine it carefully in all lights. To be suitable, a problem must be such that the student cannot solve it immediately. One does not complain about a problem being too difficult, but rather too easy."

"It is impossible to overstate the importance of problems in mathematics. It is by means of of problems that mathematics develops and actually lifts itself by its own bootstraps. Every research article, every doctoral thesis, every new discovery in mathematics, results from an attempt to solve some problem. The posing of appropriate problems, then, appears to be a very suitable way to introduce the student to mathematical research. And it is worth noting, the more problems one plays with, the more problems one may be able to pose on one's own. The ability to propose significant problems is one requirement to be a creative mathematician."

Eves, Howard (1963). A Survey of Geometry volume 1. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, page ix.

<comment><USER3> Agree, the absence of authentic problem solving training is severe. Rote learning and practice, even if it's how to solve standard mathematical problems, give you tools with which to proceed but do little to actually teach metacognitive problem solving skills.

<comment><USER4> My friend and his son both enjoy AoPS: <http://www.artofproblemsolving.com>

>Is math class too easy for you? Looking for a greater challenge? You've come to the right place.

My friend laments something like it was _not_ around when he was in grade school (in the Bitnet/Compuserve days, ha!)

<comment><USER2> Yes, the Art of Problem Solving web forum is a very good resource, and there are other great resources available via the main Art of Problem Solving site.

P.S. AoPS is where I first took on my screen name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years <http://norvig.com/21-days.html> by Peter Norvig

</comment><comment><USER6> It's 5349 words and the first half says "practice makes perfect and therefore one should practice a lot". I couldn't bring myself to read the second half. Maybe they should practice writing, so that this stuff is more readable.

<comment><USER2> As Sheridan wrote,

You write with ease, to show your breeding; But easy writing's vile hard reading.

This, by the way, is why I still prefer to read The Economist and Skeptic and other magazines to reading blogs on the same subjects. More learning for less of my reading time, because the writing has been subjected to editing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Jennie is a natural on computers - she [...] has reached a point where she's gaming the cheat codes in Sims, without really realizing that she's actually using the programmer's interface into the program and beginning to learn LUA."

 _Cuuute!_

</comment><comment><USER8> So surely everybody should be good at "thinking", since everyone who has been alive long enough has been "thinking" for 10,000 hours...

I find it a bit miserable though - how can you head into something knowing that it will take a decade of focused practise to be good at it? It's a bit intimidating, and limiting - how many decades do you have left? Wouldn't want to waste them on something not worth it, eh?

<comment><USER2> Quotation dictionaries turn up several versions of a quotation along the lines of "It's amazing what people will do to avoid the hard work of thinking." Most mental reverie is nothing like the "deliberate practice" K. Anders Ericsson researches and writes about.

[http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...](http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html)

Another quotation that I've tried to dig up and verify, but have never been able to find a primary source for, is "Because thinking is the easiest of all things to do, it is the hardest thing to do well." Great thought. I would be very much in the debt of any reader who can help me attribute it to its original author.

As for the danger of misplacing the decade of deliberate practice on the wrong discipline, I advise my children to get to know a lot of different adults, the better to choose a passion to pursue that they really like well enough to devote practice to and become good at. And I think if people learn to truly reach an expert level in something, they can find personal satisfaction and reasonable income doing it. There are a lot of journeymen, but few genuine experts.

<comment><USER9> <http://www.google.com/search?q=thinking+hardest> yields the following attributed to Henry Ford:

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it."

It's reminiscent of your quote, though probably not close enough.

As an aside, I'm skeptical that Henry Ford actually said this.</comment></comment></comment>


Judge Rejects Trump Request for Order Blocking Bolton's Memoir - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/us/politics/john-bolton-book-ruling.html <comment><AUTHOR> "Judge Lamberth wrote that if Mr. Bolton was dissatisfied with the delay, he could have sued the government instead of unilaterally publishing. He said Mr. Bolton had gambled and lost."

The judge is correct from a legal point of view. Totally understandable, that's his job. But the larger truth is that Bolton and his publisher decided that it was urgent that the public get the information in the memoir BEFORE the coming election. This is hardball politics in action.</comment>


SLOPE: A proposal for better time representation - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonhmchan.com/thoughts/2013/4/9/slope-a-new-way-to-represent-time

<comment><USER2> The problem is: unless for statistical analysis of strange phenomena (probably only Physics and geological), the representation of time is inherently HUMAN- centered and this is what gives rise to the very OP's stated CONS.

Unless there is a 'year, month, day', the use of this is probably more theoretical than real.

Don't get me wrong: it is OK as a tool for time-series analysis. But then again, it will lose the Seasons very shortly. And then... A Gregorian update will be needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. You're right - what I'm proposing is not directly human readable, but I don't think that means the use of SLOPE is delegated for extraordinary or scientific use cases alone. I am certainly thinking about it as a way between different technologies to talk to one another. The ISO representation of time, YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ, is certainly far more human readable than a series of unix timestamps S;L;O;P;E. However, this is where the advantage stops - especially for the developer who has to parse and manipulate the ISO string.

Take incrementing the timestamp by one day, for example. Intuition would direct you to split the ISO string into it's components, increment the DD data, and reconstruct it. However, it's far more complicated than that: months have different numbers of days, and it would require modifying both MM and DD if so (leap years taken into account too). You may need to increment the year as well if DD==12. Something this simple shouldn't be so difficult. Most languages have standard libraries that contain methods to handle these complexities, but it's a nightmare to deal with different protocols for each to do so. With SLOPE, the point in time can be incremented easily without confusion: add 60 _60_ 24 (86400) to the "start."

I'm probably going to make a follow-up post to address this one issue (it's a big one). With some code, I think it becomes more clear.

As for the seasons and Gregorian point...well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> With ISO 8601 [1] there is already a standardized way of representing dates, times and intervals.

This suggestion has at least one major design flaw - you can not represent many common recurrences using seconds. Not every day has 86,400 seconds, not every month has 30 days, not every year has 365 days.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm certainly aware of ISO 8601 - in fact, what I'm proposing is a more developer-friendly version of it that is conducive to (what should be) standard manipulations on points, intervals, recurrences, and series of recurrences of time.

When it comes to representing time in seconds, in a development setting, the method is surprisingly rigorous. It certainly can't account for certain kinds of recurrence: i.e. the first Monday of each month, account for leap years, etc. However, for most use cases, it's sufficient.

<comment><USER3> Using seconds is or at least seems convenient for developers but you can not represent many meaningful recurrences. Birthdays? No, because of leap years. A meeting every Monday at the same time? No, because of daylight saving time. Essentially everything beyond »every hour« is broken because one hour is the largest time unit with a fixed length - day, week, month and year do not share this property but are the units most recurrences are based on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What do you think about Square's cube? <https://github.com/square/cube>

<comment><AUTHOR> I like Cube - it's extremely useful for deriving interesting information once you have the "events" that they're talking about (something similar to what I have here).

What I'm trying to do here with SLOPE is something much more basic though. One could certainly represent time as a JSON object, but as I mentioned near the end of the post, it could even be represented as a single string:

> start;length;offset1,offset2...;period;end

With any of the semicolon delimited portions removed in order. So instead of using a typical timestamp in YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSTZ, you use a SLOPE string instead. It makes it much more easy to compute across all situations irrespective of the platform being used.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here - please ask me anything about this. I want to know how this could be improved, what's wrong with it, etc.</comment>


OpenSSL Project Roadmap - <AUTHOR> https://www.openssl.org/about/roadmap.html

<comment><USER2> Sounds good to me. If followed through, OpenSSL and libressl portable could possibly converge on practically identical code bases.

It is a little weird though that it's almost the libressl game plan, verbatim. It could literally just say "do whatever libressl" does.

Some of the specifics, like memory management is dangerous, fips code is tangly, win16 support is obsolete, seem a little too familiar. We haven't really tried to make an exhaustive list of issues to fix in libressl. I know there are things we haven't looked at yet. But for the OpenSSL roadmap to match 100% our public work is weird. They haven't found anything to fix that we've overlooked?

Also, there are definitely some problems in OpenSSL that we've identified, but haven't talked about. I'd expect any independent review/roadmap planning to identify them. They're missing from this list.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like OpenSSL is keeping FIPS in a refactored form and LibreSSL is getting rid of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't expect much to come from rewarding failure. Throwing money away at OpenSSL isn't suddenly gonna make its developers good.

I'll be running LibReSSL, and I expect most Linux distributions to do the same by default once the Linux port is released.

<comment><USER5> There are different degrees of failure. Expecting someone to work for free for you(you as in all the big and small companies making a ton of money) while not inspecting the code for bugs is one of them. Blaming the resource constrained developers accomplishes nothing.

<comment><USER6> I never asked any OpenSSL guys to work for free for me. Btw. I am contributing to FOSS projects before you are accusing me that I never done anything to the community. I totally understand the responsibilities of open source developers. Having software that supposed to provide security is a huge responsibility and in those projects following best practices (not re- implementing malloc badly, etc.) is insanely important. Just because it is free it does not mean that you can throw out everything we know about software engineering, and it does not justify broken software. There is a tendency in the software community that if it is free it can be crap and nobody can complain about it. This is bad attitude. If you can't write great software just please don't do it and try to hide behind the open source flag.

<comment><USER7> Where did he accuse you?

<comment><USER6> "before you are accusing"

English is hard man, I know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great news indeed. At least now we know the OpenSSL developers recognize the problems they have and that they are actively working on fixing them.

This definitely increases my confidence in them.

</comment><comment><USER9> From their news page:

24-Jun-2014: Team status changes including six new development team members

The article listed links to: [https://www.openssl.org/about/](https://www.openssl.org/about/)

Hopefully the new team can deliver on the promise in this roadmap.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely, there is a book written about this topic.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man- Month](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I would not necessarily prioritize this above any of their other concerns mentioned in the roadmap, I would love to see openssl use a more standard build process instead of generating code through perl as part of their build

<comment><USER11> It would also be nice if they tested builds with infrequently used options. I've tried building with documented options, e.g. no-comp (disables compression) and it completely failed. Presumably because the CPP generated something that no longer built using that option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand why a code review system has to take 3 to 6 months. That seems backwards to me: it should be the first step to improving the project. Every one of the changes listed in the roadmap should be reviewed and signed off by at least one other peer in the project.

<comment><USER13> They need to recruit more people to make it possible i guess? I don't know I agree with you. Its absurd to have a project of this scale without code review.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So now we have a third refactor?

<comment><USER15> It looks mostly like they've taken on-board the criticisms from the OpenBSD developers and have decided to get their house in order.

It will be interesting to see whether this turns out to be just words or if they'll stick it through. If the actually implement what they're planning the future for OpenSSL will be a lot better.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tabletone – live looping in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://samgentle.com/posts/2015-04-25-tabletone

<comment><USER2> Cool! But from a musician point of view, it'd be better if the sound would only kick in at the next pattern entry.

At the moment it just seems to just turn off mute.

Then you could add live loading of samples, panning, fades in etc. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, yes, I'd love to do some of that! Actually, having the sound come in on the next loop should be fairly easy - you can just give a start time in the web audio api for when the sample should play.

If you're interested, feel free to leave an issue (or a pull request!) and I'll take a look!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On Firefox 37.0.2:

        The buffer passed to decodeAudioData contains invalid content which cannot be decoded successfully.
        EncodingError: The given encoding is not supported.

And nothing plays when pressing any button. :(

<comment><USER4> Seems to be working fine on my Firefox (same version) on Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was expecting to be able to record myself in each grid tile.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good chiptune! I want to play the tracks myself.

</comment><comment><USER7> Really fun.. spent some time mixing a song. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't work for me.</comment>


Coffee Lake Review: Initial Numbers on the Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8400 - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/11859/the-anandtech-coffee-lake-review-8700k-and-8400-initial-numbers <comment><USER2> "The problem here is the same problem we've seen with big core parts and Windows 10, however: these large processors can only take so much before having to move threads around, to keep both the frequency high and the energy density low. All it takes is for a minor internal OS blip and the single- thread power begins to dissipate. Windows 10 famously kicks in a few unwanted instruction streams when you are not looking, and as a result the average single thread performance seen on the 8700K might be equal or lower than that of the previous generation. It becomes an infuriating problem to debug as a reviewer."

I didn't know this was a big issue with multicore processors, very interesting. Does this mean that if you OC a single core to the limit to get the best single threaded performance, you will see drops in performance when your other cores start getting utilized?

<comment><USER3> I can't quite tell from the current replies if the mechanism of what is going on is clear. Apologies if this is redundant.

What is happening is a thermal management issue. "turbo" lets you boost briefly to speeds that _will_ cause the chip to overheat if run long enough. Their idea to manage this was to play hot potato with which core gets baked. As soon as it reaches critical temperatures, they turbo up another core and the OS migrates threads.

So one part of the chip gets hot while the other cools off, and then they continue back and forth.Personally I'm surprised this doesn't crack silicon or pop bonds.

With regards to overclocking, I guess I didn't know you could overclock a single core? Is this pinned or is it adjusting what the "turbo" frequency is?

In anycase, if there is a differential in speeds among cores, the hot potato thing will probably happen. And if you overclock it will probably happen more.

The only way to combat this would be to either mess with the windows cpu driver and put your cpu at risk, or make the speed homogenous among all cores.

<comment><USER4> > "turbo" lets you boost briefly to speeds that will cause the chip to > overheat if run long enough. Their idea to manage this was to play hot > potato with which core gets baked. As soon as it reaches critical > temperatures, they turbo up another core and the OS migrates threads.

This is not an accurate description of how turbo works. You don't have to migrate away from a core and switch to another.

Turbo simply recognizes that if you have a multi-core processor, and many of the cores stay asleep and don't contribute to power and thermal demands, then the remaining cores can take up the slack. The more cores stay asleep, the faster the remainder can go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another chip, another socket. If you were considering upgrading your CPU in place you can forget it. You're going to need a new motherboard, with almost exactly the same set of chips on it but a very slightly different socket.

This socket is probably only going to stick around for this generation too, the 10nm chips will almost certainly use a new socket.

<comment><USER6> What is the business advantage for Intel? Swapping out a CPU is trivial, the whole MB and CPU is a job and time commitment. Are there that few of us willing to make the upgrade or some major business advantage that outweighs the upgrade market?

<comment><USER7> Moving to 6 cores required different power delivery, so they needed a new socket. It just happens to have the same number of pins as the old CPU. I would be willing to bet the number of people who want upgrade their CPUs and currently have a Kaby Lake CPU would number in the tens of thousands. Engineering around that number of people would be nuts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I took the liberty of comparing the benchmarks online for the i5-8400 vs the Ryzen 5-1600: [https://goo.gl/R4AQZe](https://goo.gl/R4AQZe)

For single-threaded performance, the i5 wins (no-brainer due to the higher turbo clock), but for multi-threaded performance, the ryzen is still a winner, for less money.

Power consumption _is_ higher for the Ryzen though. I'm thinking that the Ryzen is still the best bet for now as far as bang for your buck, considering it has hyperthreading AND can be overclocked, and the i5 does not.

Not sure if the i5 can be overclocked. If not, then the Ryzen will probably beat the i5 in single-threaded performance as well if you OC it.

<comment><USER9> Disregarding brand loyalty and whatnot, there are very few situations in which AMD's Ryzen chips aren't a "no-brainer" over Intel's.

Most _rational_ people should be getting AMD's chips and AMD Ryzen-based devices.

<comment><USER10> I took a hard, rational look at Ryzen for my latest workstation purchase. Ultimately I went with Intel due to all the reports of crashes under heavy SMT load on Linux.

<comment><USER11> That's understandable, but it's also worth pointing out that that issue is now understood and affects only processors manufactured before June 2017. Any affected processor should be returned for replacement or RMA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm looking at building a PC for deep learning, and I'm just learning about the importance of PCIe lanes for GPUs. I'm confused by the Coffee Lake numbers - 16 on the CPU, 24 on the motherboard? Does this mean that you could have 2 GPUs are without slowdown, or does the 'x16 per GPU' advice only take into consideration the CPU lanes?

reference: [https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/869289384687714304](https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/869289384687714304)

<comment><USER13> I'm on the same boat as you, building my first deep learning box as we speak. What I've understood is the following:

if you want to build, or grow your build over time to multi-GPU deep learning machine, you are better off server-targeted Xeon family processors instead of this consumer market oriented Core line. Xeon processors typically support 32-40 PCIe lanes, while Core processors support 16. I read that with typical deep learning loads, utilizing 8 PCIe lanes per GPU is good enough, so with 32-40, you can go up to 4 GPUs.

However, instead of spending tons of money and building a perfect basis for a hypothetical future DL box from the get-go, I decided to just start with cheaper parts and go with single GTX 1080 and Core processor. When I hit the limits of it, I probably know more what I need and likely the technology has advanced too.

<comment><USER14> Go for an AMD chip, you get 60-128 general purpose Pcie lanes.

<comment><USER15> Well, Threadripper AMD anyway.

The key is if PCIe lanes are important, you need to buy a Motherboard that supports a high number of PCIe lanes. AMD's Threadripper is cheap (for a workstation) and supports 64+ PCIe Lanes.

Intel's "extreme" line (both chips and motherboard) are the high PCIe count workhorses, as well as their Xeon chips. But they are much more expensive than AMD's solution. Even then, an Intel 6950X "only" has 40-PCIe lanes. I wonder if Intel's new line of "Extreme" will up the PCIe count to better compete vs AMD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find it fascinating how inexpensive CPU processors really are. You pay approximately same amount of money for top-of-the-consumer-line processor as you pay for 32GB of RAM or 1TB SSD drive. Modern consumer GPUs are twice as expensive.

<comment><USER16> Well the problem might be price fixing of RAM (speculation, btw). There's competition in CPU world but its a different matter in the RAM/HDD world. RAM has actually been getting more expensive.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/6xth78/is_ram_jus...](https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/6xth78/is_ram_just_gonna_keep_on_getting_more_expensive/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It says Socket 1151. Can I just drop a Coffee lake CPU into My 1151 motherboard (potentially after a bios upgrade) or will there be caveats such as chipset model?

<comment> old-gregg No, the socket is LGA 1151 but the chipset is different: 300-series vs 200. You need a new motherboard.

<comment><USER18> Why didn't they just use a new socket number for this? Even something like LGA1151B would have made this clear and easier to search product.

<comment><USER19> Technically its the same socket. But the voltage is different. Coffee Lake consumes more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's the usual step when companies brand their product generations with numbers and they get too big? I can't imagine calling something an "Intel 10400" in two years.

<comment><USER21> 286->386->486->Pentium

Pentium->Pentium II->Pentium III -> Pentium IV -> Core

If history is any guide they'll come up with a completely new naming and numbering scheme soon enough.

<comment><USER22> I thought Pentium was just because the Trademark office was scoffing at registering just a string of numbers. So instead of 586, they called it Pentium.

Core was a total change in design representing a very different lineage than the current at the time Pentiums, so it makes sense that they'd change the name.

I'm not sure that I see a similar external pressure in this case.

<comment><USER5> More to the point, they were running away from the horrible Pentium 4 chips and wanted people to know that their machines wouldn't run like a dog anymore.

It's kind of hard for Intel to switch up the numbering on a product that is changed so little between revisions. Plus, having the 10nm chips use the 10 prefix seems like a good coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-r Wake me up when Intel starts offering ECC support in their desktop processors. Until then Ryzen looks very tempting.</comment>


SciDB - A Science-Oriented DBMS at 100 Petabytes - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/4/29/product-scidb-a-science-oriented-dbms-at-100-petabytes.html

<comment><USER2> Not to sound too much like an ass, but I looked at their website:

1\. Open source, but no public source repository?

2\. No link to download a working release, even though their site claims one by March 2010 (it's almost May)?

3\. A list of ambitious goals about what the project will do, but no working code?

Sounds like vaporware.

<comment><USER3> After participating in a few of the XLDB meetups, at which the requirements for and design of SciDB were debated and discussed, I was quite excited about this project. I was kicked off of the mailing list unceremoniously once they decided they wanted to make it a business, and I haven't been allowed back on since. They're certainly abusing the term "open source" for marketing purposes here.

The reason they don't want people looking behind the curtain is that the rhetoric far exceeds the reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first public SciDB release is coming soon - before this summer. It'll be announced through scidb-news and other channels early next week.</comment>


Improving afl's search strategy and scheduling to find more crashes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mboehme/aflfast <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: _AFLFast is a fork of AFL [fuzzer] that has been shown to outperform AFL by an order of magnitude_

The paper: [https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~mboehme/paper/CCS16.pdf](https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~mboehme/paper/CCS16.pdf)</comment>


Automatic Program Repair with Evolutionary Computation [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/p/p109-weimer.pd

<comment><USER2> The link is broken. It's missing an "f" at the end. It should be "www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/p/p109-weimer.pdf".</comment>


Ask HN: Has anybody successfully changed their career to become a writer? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Changed and changed back: I started as a programmer in Summer 1980; by 1994 I was tech writing, and then ghosting business books, and finally ghosting fiction. Seeing the low returns of even really good authors -- for one popular business book, I got $30K to ghost it, the author ended up making only $7K -- I decided to re-tool and learn Web languages. Now I'm a reasonably-well-paid Wiki administrator for a medium-size public medical software firm. I don't think it's one career, it's kinda surfing in place.

</comment><comment><USER3> Andy Weir was a programmer when he wrote the martian: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Weir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Weir)

<comment><USER4> And he may have had more impact as a writer than as a programmer: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/achenblog/wp/2015/05/05/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/achenblog/wp/2015/05/05/andy- weir-and-his-book-the-martian-may-have-saved-nasa-and-the-entire-space- program/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Chandler)

There probably are more at [https://bloom-site.com/about/](https://bloom- site.com/about/) _"literary site devoted to highlighting, profiling, reviewing, and interviewing authors whose first major work was published when they were age 40 or older."_

<comment><USER6> Reminds me of Glenn Cook a celebrated fantasy author who went under the radar for decades. He wrote all his novels manning a console at an auto plant on the night shift. Good stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do you have to change your career to become a writer? I would focus on becoming a writer, and then if it works out change your career.

Also, it depends what kind of writer you want to become - some options are easier than others. For example, would you classify a journalist as a writer? Is technical writing "writing"?

Barry Eisler is a good example of a writer who broke into writing gradually. A former lawyer, it took him 7 years to get his first book published. He wrote in lunch breaks, on flights, after the kids went to bed. He had to re-write that first book at least twice based on feedback from agents/publishers.

Ted Chiang is an example of a technical writer who changed into science fiction writing.

I changed from teaching into technical writing.

How you will change into writing (which I assume is what you want) will depend on your starting point and how far down the road to becoming a writer you already are.

p.s. Have a read of "Big Magic" by Elizabeth Gilbert - I believe there's much of value in her suggested approach.

</comment><comment><USER8> Successfully? Not me but I got the audio version of my book up as a podcast: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/codecaine-scummy-tech- fo...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/codecaine-scummy-tech-for-techie- scum/id1321755882?mt=2&i=1000396467718)

Fiction about 2 devs that sell coke to fund their redundant start up

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/so-you-want-be- writer](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/so-you-want-be-writer)

<comment><USER10> Yeah. I recently wrote a book and got most of it done within a few hours of morning + coffee sessions over a few weeks and one or two airplane rides. It made like $12K in its first year and it was really easy. Thinking this was an incredibly time-efficient way for me to earn money and contribute to society, I tried to write a sequel and have stalled.

The initial book just poured out of me. I had an outline, I knew exactly what I wanted to say and I just wrote the content. In that way it was like tackling a college paper or trello board, but instead, a few hundred pages of text.

Like I've said.. no other ideas have really coalesced into something outlineable and easy-to-market.. I have one manuscript that's 80 pages and sucks, another at 40+, etc etc. Reminds me of the hobbyist programmer population here with tons of unfinished projects.

I really had something to say and felt entitled to say it.

<comment><USER8> How did you publish and promote? I'm sitting on a finished book now and I'm sort of at a loss for what to do with it. I put out some of the audio as a podcast that has done "ok" but haven't pulled the trigger on actual publishing

<comment><USER10> * Self-publishing was with Amazon, draft2digital, and direct sales (sendowl)

* Did cover on Canva.com

* Made a list of podcasts in the programming niche and emailed a bunch of the hosts with suggesting they invite me as a guest

That's about it. I do some ongoing pay per click marketing too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I went the other way. I was a writer, and now I'm a developer because having a family is expensive.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ha! Well I've thought about it ... but first I really need to work out a sound and complete story calculus to make sure his damned thing is self consistent ... then , well the story arc needs to balistically perfect for which I'll really need differentiable characters ... wait maybe I'm thinking about this the wrong ? Hang on let me google to see if someone's come up with a story writing language.

:)

</comment><comment><USER13> I wouldn't say I've changed my career to become a writer. However, I've shifted directions and have began writing a ton more as part of my career.

I'm in marketing, and before was focused quite a bit on social media content which was just quick little snippets accompanied with a photo. Now I write mainly long form content for blogs.

I focus on digital privacy and security at: [https://choosetoencrypt.com/](https://choosetoencrypt.com/)

If you like writing, you can incorporate it into many careers, without having to quit your job and be a starving artist.

</comment><comment><USER14> Charlie Stross did and is now a very successful science fiction author. He wrote about his career changes here: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2009/07/how-i-go...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2009/07/how-i-got-here-in-the-end-my-n.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> I tried, but failed in the career shift. I found myself more draw to the tools than the writing. The problems of the extant tools were too distracting and I felt I was more drawn to solving those problems than the many my writing threw up. Once a code geek, always one, I guess. But, if you're keen give it a go, but it will be unlikely to support you unless you are exceptionally lucky.

</comment><comment><USER16> The Nobel prize winning author J. M. Coetzee worked as a programmer when he was young - he describes it in his autobiographical novel, Youth. The promiment novelist Richard Powers worked as a programmer when he was young - that part of his life is described in the recent book, The Friendly Orange Glow.

<comment><USER17> Michel Houellebecq was doing simple (back in the nineties) web dev for the European Parliament while writing his first novel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Matt Gemmell was quite the prolific developer before he transitioned out of tech into writing: [https://mattgemmell.com](https://mattgemmell.com)

</comment><comment><USER19> Whether technical or creative writing, todays writing cannot be replaced with a full time job. Unless of course you are writing for a huge publication.

</comment><comment><USER20> What kind of writing do you have in mind?

</comment><comment><USER21> Charlie Stross was once a sysadmin/programmer.

Larry Correia was an accountant (and a gun store owner).

</comment><comment><USER22> Keith Winstein was a journalist at WSJ for a short while, I think!

</comment><comment><USER23> I've seen people move to technical writing.

<comment><USER24> This is my plan, how did they like it?

<comment><USER7> I love it. Check my website (see HN profile) or contact me if you want more info.</comment></comment></comment>


CNN.com quietly turned on TLS/HTTPS over the weekend - <AUTHOR> I just noticed this. HTTP 301s to HTTPS. I say "quietly" because I can't find any official announcement. <comment><USER2> Shit, they were my go-to page for signing into hotel WiFi. Where can I go to now?

<comment><USER3> sorry for the stupid question, but how is https a bad thing? and what does this have to do with hotel WiFi?

<comment><USER4> Most hotel wifi networks require opening a browser to connect. Once you open it, the first page you go to is redirected. Because a lot of sites default to HTTPS, that redirect is detected as a MITM by the browser, and prevents you from moving on. [http://neverssl.com/](http://neverssl.com/) is an easy way to get to the portal without an issue.

As noted on NeverSSL:

> [...] it [...] means that if you're relying on poorly-behaved wifi networks, > it can be hard to get online. Secure browsers and websites using https make > it impossible for those wifi networks to send you to a login or payment > page. Basically, those networks can't tap into your connection just like > attackers can't. Modern browsers are so good that they can remember when a > website supports encryption and even if you type in the website name, > they'll use https.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this a big deal? Pretty sure they did this because of SEO reasons

<comment><USER6> Safari just joined the party in displaying a warning if the connection is not using TLS/HTTPS just like other browsers do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> CNN.com used to be my go to website for logging into splash pages that were blocked on HTTPS websites. Now I have to find a new one!

<comment><USER8> I've been using neverssl.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They didn't move everything to HTTPs. There are still subdomains that are still HTTP, such as collection., money., go.cnn.com

</comment><comment> adam-ff Searching for an announcement, I found an ironic result:

[http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/technology/google-chrome- fla...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/technology/google-chrome-flag-non- secure-sites/index.html)

And, despite money.cnn.com being one of the Subject Alt Names on their certificate (as well as plenty of app, api and some staging domain names), that domain in particular rejects connections to port 443.

Maybe their transition is incomplete and they're not ready to announce yet?

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if they'll ever turn comments back on, too?

<comment><USER11> The internet, especially news, is a better place without it.

<comment><USER12> Says a guy commenting on the internet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was seeing this a couple weeks ago

<comment><USER14> I've been seeing it for six months almost. Maybe https-everywhere was doing this but I also used to use CNN as a hotel WiFi sign-in gate so I noticed it back then.

Funny how many people independently ended up in that same situation. How did y'all start?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Strange, given the numerous anti-cryptography articles they've published...</comment>


Google Foo.bar - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/foobar/

<comment><USER2> There was an article about a guy who landed a job at Google through the foobar. Here it is: [https://thehustle.co/the-secret-google-interview-that- landed...](https://thehustle.co/the-secret-google-interview-that-landed-me-a- job)</comment>


Show HN: Illustrator scripts for mobile design - <AUTHOR> http://herkulano.github.com/illustrator-scripts-for-mobile/

<comment><USER2> I think it's better to use a makefile and ImageMagick to integrate this into a build chain. You get something like:

      firstname.lastname@example.com: img.ai
          convert img.ai firstname.lastname@example.com

      img.png: firstname.lastname@example.com
          convert firstname.lastname@example.com -resize '50%' img.png</comment>


Bullet Hole Statistics - <AUTHOR> http://jada.ms/bullet-hole-statistics/

<comment><USER2> I think there is the kernel of a good idea here, but I can't directly see how to apply it. Is there a concrete example available?</comment>


Why so many San Francisco eateries are closing - <AUTHOR> https://abc7news.com/food/local-restaurant-owner-explains-why-so-many-san-francisco-eateries-are-closing/5580162/ <comment><AUTHOR> More restaurants are now closing than opening:

 _" The Golden Gate Restaurant Association looked at numbers from Yelp and found that last year 325 restaurants in San Francisco closed versus 298 that opened. They anticipate this year there will be even more closures, despite what's considered to be a strong economy."_</comment>


The most common phone number: 214-748-3647 - <AUTHOR> http://sharkbait.computerworld.com/node/2585 <comment><USER2> This sounds apocryphal to me. I mean, how would anyone build a system where no number above 2147483647 can be stored and not notice it? I mean, that excludes the vast majority of phone numbers.

EDIT: Maybe I give mankind too much credit. Search for a non-Dallas city here: <http://24hourplaces.com/search.php>

<comment><USER3> I agree, it seems fishy to me that saturation rather than wrap is the integer overflow behavior in these systems.

<comment><USER4> Saturation is standard behavior of C's atoi() and friends. Over/underflow is signalled by returning largest/smallest possible value and setting errno to ERANGE. Many applications dont check for this (as it is not exactly straightforward) and thus get saturation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yikes. People store phone numbers as integers? Why would anyone do that?

Is there some use-case where being able to treat a phone number as an integer value has any usefulness?

<comment><USER6> "A string of characters acting as numbers? Hell no. People could put in anything. '234-fake-num' isn't a real phone number! This way we'll be sure the numbers are real. Besides, look how much space we'll be saving."

<comment><USER7> Bad idea as celoyd pointed out. Besides, to check whether a phone number is real or not we use regular expressions.

<comment><USER8> I don't think zck was arguing for phone numbers as integers. I think he was just dissecting the broken thinking that would cause someone to make that decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Considering I work with graduates who were 10 when the whole Y2K thing was news I am not surprised.

<comment><USER2> Yup. If they were older, they'd realize just how little a deal y2k was.

<comment><USER10> Y2K was such a little deal because so much effort went into fixing it. It's hard to say how big the problem would have been but considering that many financial systems would have been affected it probably would have been fairly significant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems like if this explanation were to make sense, whoever implemented the string-to-number conversion was careful enough to implement saturating addition, but careless enough to not use a numerical type large enough to hold every possible phone number. I don't know if I buy that.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps they just used strtoi() or some such equivalent in their language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you page through the Google results, there's actually less than 400 pages listed.

See: <http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/04/trochee-chart/>

</comment><comment><USER14> "Please press 1 now." Then, after a while: "Press press one now. If it is a person and not a computer calling, press 1 now.". Then, again after a while: "Press one of it will disconnect."

</comment><comment><USER15> why wouldn't it wrap around?

<comment><USER16> Integer overflow behavior varies a lot between languages; it can be undefined, some wrap around, others promote to a larger integer type, others convert the type to something else, and some clamp to the largest (or smallest) value.

For example, if you're using PHP, an integer will turn into a float when it overflows; if you then push the value into a MySQL databse, it'll be clamped.

<comment><USER17> Scary thought: this bug is nice and obvious when the data gets "clamped" to max_int, but what about when it doesn't and overflows to some value in the middle? No way to tell how many systems suffer from that flavor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > there are 1500+ websites with that phone number showing up.

Just to note, article is from 2008. Current figure is: About 316,000 results (0.13 seconds)

Also, he didn't even bother calling the number to see who owns it? Sloppy.

</comment><comment><USER19> [http://www.yellowpages.com/phone/?phone_search_terms=214-748...](http://www.yellowpages.com/phone/?phone_search_terms=214-748-3647)

</comment><comment><USER20> i called it but couldn't figure out what the business actually was.

</comment><comment><USER21> interesting fighting about computer science etc.

i'd say, not to store phone numbers in integer field require just _one_ advice of an experienced colleague, no need in 5 years course (assuming a guy doesnt put boots on his head in other parts of his work)</comment>


Ask HN: What language to learn to get hired... - <AUTHOR>

..by a startup? (For web development that is, so: PHP, Python, or Ruby.)<p>A while ago, I saw a graph that compared the different languages, but can't find it now. <comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure there are startups using any and all of the listed options, along with Scala, Erlang, Clojure, Haskell, Common Lisp, OCaml, Java, C, C++, Standard ML, Prolog, C#, Visual Basic, Ada, Tcl, Perl, COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG/400, APL, Pascal, JCL, PL/I, GW-BASIC, Whitespace, Befunge, Brainfuck, and Intercal.

IMO: Learn something you find interesting, instead of worrying about "what do I learn to get hired." You'll be happier in the long run.

That said, don't underestimate the power of "COBOL on COGS." <http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM>

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.dataists.com/2010/12/ranking-the-popularity-of- pr...](http://www.dataists.com/2010/12/ranking-the-popularity-of-programming- langauges/)

[http://regulargeek.com/2010/12/11/9-programming-languages- to...](http://regulargeek.com/2010/12/11/9-programming-languages-to-watch- in-2011/)

For web dev one needs to understand the whole stack:

\- some back end language: I recommend looking into scala, clojure, F#, erlang besides your 3, which are all terrific languages

\- database design and tuning (SQL relational and otherwise)

\- javascript/CSS and at least) compatibility matrix for IE, firefox and chrome

\- reasonably proficient at linux admin: SSH, iptables, tools like nagios,

</comment><comment><USER4> TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2010

<http://tiobe.com/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> I think PHP is not a bad choice. It's not as cool as Ruby but it gets things done (not that Ruby doesn't). If I were in your shoes, I'd go with Ruby, just because my intuition says so.

</comment><comment><USER6> All three of those are used by various web start-ups. So unless you have a particular employer in mind you'd like to target, just learn whichever you find most interesting.</comment>


Show HN: The Top Websites of 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://statvoo.com/top/sites <comment><USER2> Warning: There is a compulsary wait time for people with adblock on this site.

<comment><AUTHOR> This has been removed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So many ads... but try finding a link to the website.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some blogs whose posts are reviewed by professional experts? - <AUTHOR> I was reading a healthline artice and saw that the post had been medically verified by a doctor.<p>What are more sites like this where the posts have been reviewed and have references? <comment><USER2> [https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience) might interest you.

"The panel is an informal group of redditors who are either professional scientists or those in training to become so. All panelists have at least a graduate-level familiarity within their declared field of expertise and answer questions from related areas of study. A panelist's expertise is summarized in a color-coded AskScience flair."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians](https://www.reddit.com/r/askhistorians) are also fairly good at citing.

Both communities are self-accountable to an extent - If a poster makes a mistake or controversial comment, the other qualified members of the community are likely to correct them or provide a rebuttal.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bruce Schneir's crypto stuff is read by people who participate in NIST algorithm competitions. Maybe that's a good indicator. Look for blogs in your subject field where names you trust comment and respond?

Review is a pretty specific word. Do you think it's really a good fit for blogging? I don't.

Theconversation.com is curated, but non-blog non-peer-review semi-academic writing. It's by academics and research people with cites and comments. Maybe it's more suitable? There are about five editions, each sponsored by a national or local science funding agency, donations, tertiary institutions.

I know this is a non sequitur maybe, but I just think "reviewed blog" is pretty... Wierd. Maybe you've defined a niche I didn't realise existed?

Get the .com domain name before it's gone...

</comment><comment><USER4> Strictly speaking, there are no blogs that have been reviewed by professional experts.

If an author is going to have their work reviewed, and approved, by an outside expert then they may as well submit it to a publisher so that it can be cited by others.</comment>


Why do students dissect frogs? - <AUTHOR> http://mentalfloss.com/article/49855/why-do-students-dissect-frogs

<comment><USER2> One important reason is to have students "get their hands dirty". There is a skill to performing (and observing) experiments which is different than just reading in books, and a skill in working with biological organisms that is different from chemistry experiments. If every pair of lab partners dissects a frog there is sure to be some organ that some teams don't find, and not every frog will look the same. Experiencing this is an important pedagogical activity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because it would be uncomfortable the other way around.</comment>


Save Airbnb in New York - <AUTHOR> http://action.peers.org/page/s/save-airbnb-in-ny?source=airbnb&type=email&campaign=legalizesharingNY&af=1977852&utm_source=airbnb&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=USGuests_test2_10252013&c=17595

<comment><USER2> It's up to the moderation team, of course, and I am aware that Airbnb is a YC company, but I think there is wisdom in the policy of some other online communities to be wary of submissions that are basically political campaigning. On my part, I'm not going to be signing any petitions on behalf of Airbnb (a company whose services I have never used), and I generally don't lobby on behalf of for-profit businesses, expecting them to thrive or fail based on how they serve their customers.</comment>


Show HN: Render Arbitrary 3D Boolean Functions - <AUTHOR> https://aqnichol.com/apps/solid-trace/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a web demo for creating 3D models in JavaScript. It uses a variant of ray casting that can render any function mapping `(x, y, z) -> bool` in real- time.

It's easy to define very interesting 3D models as boolean functions. In my opinion, it's much easier than creating triangle meshes or composing a bunch of primitive shapes. I had fun making the examples, and I'm curious to see what other people can come up with.

<comment><USER2> You probably should mention the rendering of signed distance fields. The representation is quite similar `(x, y, z) -> double`, and allows for high generative power and more performant ray marching algorithm. You can also get the normal by automatic differentiation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, I'll add a reference to SDFs. Didn't think about the normal-via- autodiff aspect, which would be quite useful.

It seems to me that SDFs are very hard to program from scratch, compared to simple boolean functions. Obviously they are easy to implement for compositions of simple shapes, but for things like my text example (and maybe the corkscrew example, although of course that is still a fairly simple mathematical shape), it's less obvious how to implement an SDF by hand.

<comment><USER2> As a intermediate solution between boolean and SDFs, you can also use some implicit representation defined by a neural network. It could be marched by your current algorithm.

And you can train the neural network with your mathematical boolean function by sampling the space to provide positive and negative samples.

With the neural network representation, you can also build your mesh by iteratively picking points and specifying whether they are in or outs. Or you can specify the distance or the normal. They are much more flexible. They can even do the rendering.

Various representations are always useful to have so you can pick the right one for your current problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> A neural network would have some nice properties for sure, although it'd also have plenty of bad ones. For one thing, I'd guess that the NN wouldn't be great for rendering in real-time, since it's liable to be orders of magnitude slower than the JS function it's approximating. Granted you could use a GPU-- but then again, you could probably compile the JS function into a kernel and get a speedup there too.

If you sample the boolean function enough to train a neural network on it, you've likely sampled more than enough to build a very accurate mesh using marching cubes or other algorithms. Meshes are especially easy to render, plus they can tell you quite a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't have any feedback or strong opinions on this, but the concept of mapping (x,y,z)=>bool and having it produce a 3d object is new to me. This is a very cool demonstration; thank you for sharing.</comment>


Microsoft pitched facial recognition to the DEA - tech-historian https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/microsoft-pitched-facial-recognition-dea-drug-enforcement <comment><AUTHOR> Speaking of racial and class injustice, the war in drugs has incentivized a lot of crime over the years while also brutally punishing poor people who turn to it out of desperation. To propose adding another layer of facial recognition that both attempts to strip privacy from people, but also falsely identifies many black people, is in extremely bad taste by Microsoft

<comment> the-dude War in drugs. Love the typo.

From the other side of the pond, the US fixation on wars is ... remarkable. Marking these policies as wars wouldn't fly in the EU.

Circling back, the use of 'war' for civil matters normalizes the word, making real war easier to swallow.

<comment><USER2> Macron declared that France was in a state of war during a presidential speech at the start of the Covid-19 crisis

EU also has its share of word over utilization

<comment><USER3> Germany's president said in his speech on April 11:

> No, this pandemic is not a war. It does not pit nations against nations, or > soldiers against soldiers. Rather, it is a test of our humanity. It brings > out the worst and the best in people. Let us show each other our best side!

[https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Rede...](https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Reden/2020/04/200411-TV- Ansprache-Corona-Englisch.pdf?__blob=publicationFile)

<comment><USER4> I wish my country had a leader that could speak in full sentences like this.

<comment><USER5> I just wish mine had one who could speak in full sentences

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back in 2012 I was chatting with a co-worker whose side hustle was owning/running convenience store gas stations (he had two and was looking to expand). He was talking about the issues he was facing with shoplifters and I mentioned that Facebook had, in the previous 12 months, acquired the #2 company in facial recognition -- then did it again when the #3 company moved up to #2. I asked him if paying $200/month per store for a digital surveillance system that not only captured video but ran biometric matches against Facebook's database of images would be of interest to him. "Hell yes!" was the answer without any hesitation (I think he would have gladly paid more because insurance rates would possibly go down -- I forget the rest of the conversation).

The point being: whether it's Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, or Yahoo, these services aren't developed just because it's cool but in order to generate revenue at some point. Why is there so much shock and surprise that Microsoft tried to sell a digital security/surveillance/law enforcement tool to the DEA? To me the major story would be if someone internally suggested it and it was nixed on principle.

<comment><USER7> I think people underestimate the degree to which most companies cooperate with the law enforcement.

When I was a teenager working for my Dad's small insurance agency, investigators would come in about once per year and ask for files on customer xyz. When I was old enough, I asked my dad if they needed a warrant. His answer was "Yes, but why the hell would I want to fight that battle?".

In my 30s, I worked for a major financial bank running tech for their US compliance/legal/regulatory departments. The _mountains_ of data that we give local, state, and federal authorities on a daily basis is enormous. I mean you wouldn't believe how much data we handed over - or made available during an inspection. There was a documented official process for both the ad-hoc requests or the regular dumps, but we absolutely never fought with them about what we provided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This wasn't just Microsoft. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/technology/amazon- facial-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/technology/amazon-facial- recognition.html)

Not saying it wasn't wrong pitch to DEA, but it seems strange that it's Microsoft being called out when, concretely, they were probably the earliest adopters of not selling due to human rights concerns [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-ai- idUSKCN1RS2F...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-ai- idUSKCN1RS2FV) [https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the- issues/2018/12/06/facial-...](https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the- issues/2018/12/06/facial-recognition-its-time-for-action/)

<comment><USER9> People are yelling about Microsoft hypocrisy after they made noise on their feel-good achieve-nothing move at Github.

In my opinion, people have been complaining about the change too much, and the hypocrisy too little. The PR was probably positive, when it shouldn't be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is about as evil as it gets for a software company. Using your technology to put people behind bars for victimless crimes

Microsoft products are generally such low quality that I avoid them anyway, but I'm going to try to disable all my Microsoft cloud accounts after this revelation.

<comment><USER11> It's easy to lay the blame on corporations, but where do the voters come into this? They are the ones that get politicians into office. Politicians are the ones with the power to stop the war on drugs, yet they haven't. Should we say that people who vote for politicians that don't get rid of the war on drugs are using their vote to put innocent people in prison?

It just seems odd to me that the two groups of people that could put an end to the whole thing (voters and politicians) seem to be blame-free.

<comment><USER12> "Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth."

-Lucy Parsons (1878-1937)

<comment><USER13> How true, but good luck telling that to those who keep voting billionaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm genuinely curious why some of you think they wouldn't try? They're a company with a product to sell to few industries, even fewer where it can be leveraged as completely as in law enforcement.. so why wouldn't they?

<comment><USER15> Indeed, some comments here are ridiculous. They are a company, they want to earn Money. Contrary to what people might think, just because a company tweets they support the BLM movement, that doesn't immediately mean(in fact, it almost never means) that they're genuinely interested in being benevolent. Stop being naive.

<comment><USER16> I guarantee you MS has enormous software and support contracts in place doing all kinds of work for the federal government with regards to surveillance. There is just too much funding out there to ignore that space.

I can't think of any enterprise IT firm that could be take seriously by shareholders if they planted some stake in the ground that they were going to NOT go after that business. There is no way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Are there any useful applications for face recognition that don't have massive potential for abuse? I have thought about this for a while and it seems all cloud based face recognition can (and probably will) be abused. I think we are building a scary future. Just wait until microphone technology is good enough to listen to every public conversation.

<comment><USER18> What about something like: extremely dangerous, wanted criminal is on the loose. He's known to be a in a large city, and you use facial recognition to find/track him before he can commit a bombing or something like that.

<comment><USER19> He said that "didn't have potential for abuse", I think the situation you gave defines abuse. Tracking everyone to catch one person is not acceptable in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> End the War on Drugs. Invest in harm reduction and rehabilitation centers. Decriminalize individual possession of small quantities of (most) drugs. Unrestrict researchers from performing research on psychedelic compounds.

<comment><USER21> > _Decriminalize individual possession of small quantities of (most) drugs._

But then you haven't ended the war on drugs. We need legalization, not decriminalization.

<comment><USER20> Eh, maybe in the long-run. We need decriminalization for personal use in the short term (the next 20 years).

<comment><USER21> We don't have twenty years.

It's inhuman and stupid to put people in prison for selling drugs. In the meantime the US is going to crumble under policies like this, while gangs will become increasingly powerful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The cynic in me says that Microsoft/Amazon/Google will not be selling to police agencies, but instead to wholesalers who then sell the services to them.

</comment><comment><USER23> Microsoft is not controlled by a force that leaves sales personal with no responsibility to take action.

Of course someone is trying to sell this, they are hired to sell it

<comment><USER24> I think that's obvious. That value/point of this article for a concerned citizen might be not 'why are sales people doing this?' But instead ask 'should this be happening, will it damage civilian life, us economy/future, bleed into the rest of the world in a damaging way.?'

<comment><USER23> Yes it's obvious. No one should think that any very large company is controlled by one person.

So even though it might seem as a bad move, it's more likely a sales person 'down in EPG that had a good idea, and pitced it'.

I would encourage free action towards making an impact at any given time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I feel like everyone should read up on the War on Drugs, and how people of colour (Blacks and Latinos in particular) are over policed and receive far stiffer sentences (we're talking on the order of decades here) than their white counterparts. Call it social grandstanding, but it's unconscionable that I'd willingly assist in the development of such technologies if I knew it would be used by the DEA and law enforcement. I'd rather be unemployed

</comment><comment><USER26> Company wanting to make money attempts to sell product!

<comment><USER27> People with lots of ways to make money pursue morally questionable market in ongoing futile attempt to collect all of the money.

<comment><USER28> Not a fan of the DEA or any TLA for that matter. However, I believe we need to do this right and police everything which is morally questionable. Including but not limited to health insurers, student loan companies, high frequency trading and wage slavers (which is most retailers).

I think people have their heart in the right place. But the hate shouldn't be directed at MSFT in my opinion but on the legislators and ultimately at the DEA. Boycotting Microsoft for trying to get a government contract will not solve shit. Ultimately, the government can (and does) seed private companies to do their shady tech shit if Microsoft or some tech giant refuses to provide it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe I'm not very creative but I don't really see the use cases for this.

I skimmed the article thinking it would have some and I didn't see one.

<comment><USER30> Use cases that are pretty valuable:

\- Black box that will confirm authority's bias about who is guilty, and who isn't.

\- Black box to absolve authority of accusations of bias by offloading the bias to another biased party.

\- Black box to absolve authority of responsibility, because they were just following the black box's orders.

\- Dragnet identification of people in order to investigate, charge, serve warrants or make arrests.

The latter is their most likely stated reason, there are several reports of law enforcement going through footage and pictures to identify people with outstanding warrants and to issue others with new charges. There is also a strong desire to identify everyone a suspect interacts with, because they must be guilty by association.

Law enforcement is very paranoid, in general, and like most of the general public, think what they see computers do on CSI is real.

<comment><USER24> What are people seeing on CSI that is or isn't real?

I know of the show but have not seen. And I doubt CSI is presenting tech which is as advanced as reality. I have seen black mirror, and reality isn't too far from that. (Referring to the direction/trajectory of our development of ML, sensors etc)

<comment><USER30> Like with a lot of entertainment, there is no distinction between actual engineering or police work, and magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This stands in stark contrast to IBM who announced halting facial recognition offerings, Google who has prohibited use of facial recognition against non- public figures from the start, and Amazon who just announced a moratorium on facial recognition use by law enforcement. Not a good look for MSFT.

<comment><USER5> "Newly released emails show the company has tried to sell the controversial technology to the government for years, including to the Drug Enforcement Administration in late 2017."

I dont think Microsoft is selling it now, even though they might have been in 2017

<comment><USER32> Microsoft should put out a statement clarifying this then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am not fan of the DEA, but this trend of generating bad PR for tech providers of governmental agencies ridiculous. Attack the agency or vote in politicians to change or dismantle them. As of 2020 Millennials are the largest adult generation. They have more voting power than the Boomers, if they actually get out and vote.

<comment><USER34> Voting with your wallet is an extremely powerful and simplistic tool. Generating bad PR enforces the former and informs the latter (actual voting)

You make the process of handcuffing the DEA in any capacity sound easy.... but lets walk through some high level steps:

You would need to formulate enough PR to generate a movement, that PR would probably need to span political parties, those political parties (because we only have two) would need to work well between themselves to systematically allow for such an approval to pass. Ignoring the fact that most voters are no single-issue voters AND ignoring the fact that gerrymandering has removed/hamstrung entire voting demographics.

It's a mind-numbing exercise to think of generating enough support in today's environment to effect serious change though voting.

<comment><USER35> The inability to make "serious" change quickly or at a national level is a feature.

What seems to be missed is how much easier this is at a local level. I'd like to see a lot more advocacy for restrictions on local police departments.

I'd happily support a local law that prohibits police use of facial recognition technology.

<comment><USER34> I guess i'm not sure what you're advocating. Why are we shielding companies from consumer sentiment?

<comment><USER33> I don't really care about the companies here, just on what is effective. Would you rather have a handful of companies put a moratorium on selling to facial recognition tech to governments or state and local ordinances banning their use no matter what company the tech is from?

<comment><USER36> I didn't know they were offering a choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Do NOT misunderstand this. Recognition != Identification. Microsoft just pushed how to detect faces, they don't know who they are.

</comment><comment><USER38> I mean this is good, right? There are a LOT of illegal aliens involved in the drug trade. These people aren't known for their propensity to have correct ID. The only practical way to ID them is with facial recognition, DNA, and fingerprints.

<comment><USER39> Or, you know, just end the War on Drugs altogether? The war is lost and continuing to fight it is a net negative for society.

<comment><USER38> No thanks! Currently China is using drugs to destabilize and damage the USA. Fentanyl is a weapon.

<comment><USER40> > Fentanyl is a weapon

No, it's a drug that has legitimate use cases. It's only being put out there "recreationally" because the illegal drug market is unregulated and "safer" drugs are not accessible.

The War on Drugs was _never_ about protecting people from self-harm. If you think otherwise, you're imposing some sort of moralistic revisionism.

To promote ending this disaster is not the same as promoting drug use. It's about reducing the crime that it creates and make the world safer for everyone.

<comment><USER38> I have to go ahead and disagree with you there on this point. The War On Drugs is intended to hurt violent street gangs, often foreign-based.

<comment><USER41> Have a source for that?

<comment><USER40> That person is either a troll or an idiot; don't waste your time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The myth of the super programmer - <AUTHOR> http://simpleprogrammer.com/2012/08/12/the-myth-of-the-super-programmer

<comment><USER2> It is my belief that there are three components which form the trinity of the super programmer:

* Tenacity

* Working memory size

* Creativity

You need tenacity because seemingly intractable problems come up all the time when programming. There are those who simply throw up their hands and give up, and then there are those who just won't let it go. They'll keep it in the back of their mind, mulling it over, poking at it, discussing with others, until they finally have an epiphany in the shower or on the bus or in a dream. They do great things because they go where others fear to tread. Without tenacity, there's little hope of becoming a great programmer.

If tenacity is the base signal, working memory is the amplifier. The greater your working memory, the more concepts you can hold at once, which means you can break down problems much faster. Your potential is increased significantly.

All of this is capped off by creativity. Tenacity and working memory will allow you to push through a problem, but if you're not stepping back and looking for patterns and meta patterns to exploit, you'll miss any chance of finding novel solutions that save time, space, and aggravation compared to existing practices.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good points! There might be no super programmers, but I think there is still difference to those programmers that have a strong background with Computer Science / Mathematics concepts compared to those who don't. Those have a strong background can understand some concepts like automata, AI, compiler theory, neural networks, etc.

Those people that learn to code just to code an application might not know those concepts.</comment>


Show HN: Productive Work Schedule Generator - <AUTHOR> Hey HN, Want to figure out your most productive work schedule?
Check out the Most Productive Work Scheduler. Know your peak productivity hours based on the science of sleep, productivity & social psychology.
Research & Explanation here: https://www.cowop.org/post/the-secret-to-the-most-productive-work-schedule
Get access here - https://www.cowop.org/quiz/most-productive-work-scheduler <comment><USER2> I feel this is just an unnecessarily complicated newsletter subscription form.

> Great Job! You've finished the audit > To get your results and a full report > on increasing your productivity potential, just let us know where to send > it.

Hm. HTML links work without e-mail, you know… /s

> But first, you need to verify your email. Simply click the link below and > you'll be all set.

The link just leads to a web page without any verification: [https://www.cowop.org/quiz-work-schedule/noon- racher?utm_sou...](https://www.cowop.org/quiz-work-schedule/noon- racher?utm_source=cowop&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=work%20schedule%20generator)

> If you ever change your mind, you can unsubscribe at any time by clicking > the link that's at the bottom of every email I send.

There is no link in this e-mail other than the "noon rancher" one above.</comment>