Show HN: RESTful Doom – HTTP+JSON API inside Doom - <AUTHOR> http://1amstudios.com/2017/08/01/restful-doom/ <comment><USER2> I'm reminded of "psdoom", a version of doom that let you kill processes with the shotgun: [http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/](http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I think subconsciously I was also. I remember being amazed by that back in the day also!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So nerdy but so awesome - my jaw dropped when i watched the video :)

i think this could open up possibilities with live stats if each player runs their own server and the results are combined on into a seperate website? otherwise it could be used to create new game modes or a scoring system?

</comment><comment><USER4> That's pretty cool! Well done.

Now I'm wondering whether the game clock could be suspended unless ticks were sent via API, to turn it into a turn-based game to be played only via API calls...

<comment><USER5> Sounds like an API version of Superhot.

<comment><AUTHOR> wow I hadn't seen that game, the trailer looks amazing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now to add Twitch integration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha yes... although I would be _slightly_ nervous to expose my janky C code to the internet. Where I'm confident it would crash and burn in a very short amount of time :)

<comment><USER7> Use a proxy. Openresty (nginx+lua) or a Go app would do. Only allow whitelisted commands through like the basic control commands and then pass it on to your C code.

<comment><AUTHOR> yep, that would definitely be a good idea!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well now I'm screwed at work tomorrow, I want to tie in so much of our logging into this some how like psdoom. Q: Are the files done processing ? Me: I don't know check if the door is open in doom.

<comment><AUTHOR> haha yes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since this has 'native' integration it could be a great testbed for learning/applying reinforcement learning algorithms in a fun setting without having to deal with the 'heavier' (but more comprehensive) vnc based tooklits such as openai universe.

Awesome work, btw!

</comment><comment><USER10> Great work and fantastic project idea and method of execution.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! It was a lot of fun. Big thanks to chocolate-doom project also which I built on top of :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This isn't REST, there are no hyperlinks and no hypermedia controls. It is designed pretty wrong. Just look at this brittle coupling!

        POST /api/player/actions
        Content-Type: application/json

        { "type": "shoot" }

How do I know what "type" of action is available to me? It isn't documented. Why should I need to know or try to look it up in the documentation in the first place, anyway? The server should just tell me what I can do, and then I act on it! Why should I need to know all these special URLs, except a single central entry point (a.k.a. bookmark)? The server should just tell me from each resource where I can go to! A more useful attempt:

        GET /
        Content-Type: text/html

The shotgun is equipped.
        There is a green armor ahead.

You see a baron of hell attacking
        an imp.

There is a yellow-framed door,
        attempt to <form action="doors/104" method="post">
        <input type="submit" value="open" /></form> it.

        <form action="position" method="post">
            <input type="hidden" name="x" value="-225" />
            <input type="submit" value="move forward" /></form>,
        <form action="orientation" method="post">
            <input type="hidden" name="angle" value="90" />
            <input type="submit" value="turn left" /></form>
        …

(HTML used for ease of illustration on HN, alas JSON proper - being a dumb serialisation format - it deficient of hyperlinks or hypermedia controls, but there are extensions for it. This audience is less likely to be familiar with them.)

It really bothers me that programmers call things REST, and when you look at it it isn't REST at all because they don't know the first thing about it.

<comment><USER12> In a traditional REST API, where do non-RESTful things (like other API calls, or "business logic") tend to go?

Is there /db/restEndpoints and /rpc/nonRESTfulEndpoints?

<comment><USER13> Business logic should be hidden behind the API and the representation. Just like a website, actions are presented when the business logic allows it.

Other API calls depend on the purpose. If its part of the business logic, it's probably back end and hidden as described above.

If the other API call simply powers the UI, you might keep it in the client. One example is autocomple for facebook friends. The client can call facebook for a list, let the user select their friend, and then send that friends info to your API.

With that said, I'm not sure how either of those are "non-RESTful" so maybe I missed the point of the question?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Amazing work!

</comment><comment><USER15> this is SO cool, thank you!

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a fun little project. I'm anxiously awaiting obligatory HN comments about how C is unsafe, you should never write a web application that uses strcmp, and maybe this would be ok if he rewrote Doom in Rust first :).

<comment><USER17> Please don't post like this. Analogously to how antivirus and virus software are kind of the same thing, it perpetuates what you're complaining about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I saw this presentation twice, and everytime is better. I love it.</comment>


Ask HN: What does "Recent Grad" or "New Grad" mean? - <AUTHOR> I see ads for Data Scientist positions in the SF Bay Area that are labelled "Recent Grad" or "New Grad," from companies such as Khan Academy, Twitter, Netflix, Linkedin.
I was surprised, and somewhat discouraged, since I thought this was not legal, but these places are big enough to afford lawyers, so perhaps it's OK. But even if they can't come right out and say "age-limited job," there is a clear hint as to their intentions.
Has anyone outside of the requested demographic had experience answering these kinds of ads? Were you able to get an interview? What does "recent grad" really mean in this context? <comment><USER2> I am a recent grad and got job offers from 5 different companies in bay area. Well, recent grad or new grad means a bachelor/masters student who is on either varge of graduation, finished with his all school work or the one who graduated in 2-3 months and looking for jobs. I had applied for jobs when I was almost done with my school work, I was just left with my defense, I had started applying for jobs from sept 2012 and got few offers by november 2012, meanwhile I was working on my masters project too. Then, after 5 offers I stopped applying for jobs and chose an offer where i wanted to work. On december 17th I defended my project and joined the company on 18th december.

Hope it helped.

</comment><comment><USER3> I requested the info for a company. The new grads were defined as soon-to- graduate senior undergrad students to upto 6 months out of school. I presume others follow similar time frame.</comment>


Automatic Racial Discrimination via Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135 <comment><USER2> I am a little curious why the title of this submission, "Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images" was altered to the current, which is "Automatic Racial Discrimination via Artificial Intelligence" Especially when the abstract of the paper explicitly mentions "...using facial images of 1856 real persons controlled for race, gender, age and facial expressions..." This seems to be needless politicization of the topic, designed specifically to suppress discussion. Unfortunate as this topic seems rather interesting, and the finding that criminals and noncriminals divide so easily into distinct, detectable groups would be interesting to discuss here.

<comment><USER3> I kind of sympathize with the author's snarky change of title, but I would have used "class prejudice" rather than "racial discrimination". The paper reminds me of Victorian "research" showing that criminals have differently shaped crania from "normal" people.

Perhaps all they're detecting is that the criminal faces are mugshots, and the subjects are stressed and unhappy. They look upset. The noncriminals are all wearing a suit and tie, and look relaxed.

I am certain that the research is spurious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title is misleading. Although I get that this is dangerous, and trained on the right (wrong?...) dataset it could be an automatic racial profiler. The paper is written by Chinese researchers from Chinese Universities, and all of the pictures shown of people in the dataset appear to be Chinese or at least "Asian" race in American racial categories. This makes it hard to assume their technique will automatically have racial bias, although I imagine running it on a set of US criminals could disproportionately flag black or latino people as criminals. The core idea of classifying people as criminals based on facial structure is equally gross without the racial component though.

<comment><USER2> I think we're just stuck in this little echo chamber as there's no way this post will catch any interest 4 hours later with only 7 points, which is precisely what I suspect the person who changed the title was aiming for. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hilarious, but wouldn't it be useless when the population you use it on is mostly not criminal?

If I had a population that was 90% non-criminal, and the accuracy of the face predictor something like 75% (for non-criminal and criminal), wouldn't my predictor that always outputs non-criminal almost always be more accurate?</comment>


What comes after senior developer? - <AUTHOR> https://christianheilmann.com/2018/04/02/what-comes-after-senior-developer/ <comment><USER2> This whole post makes sense on the face of it, but there's a little too much "the world as it ought to be" rather than the world as it is. I got to a certain point, many years ago, when I started to feel like I was just getting a bit old to be what they're now calling an "individual contributor". My hair was starting to get greyer and things like iphones and Javascript didn't even exist when I graduated college. So I started trying to take on non-coding responsibilities. I thought, in my no-longer-youthful naievete, that this would be welcomed and the upper echelons would welcome and appreciate the initiative and the help. Holy shit, was I ever wrong. The people who climb up into the non-individual-contributor ranks are... a different breed of people than we who can actually produce working code are. They didn't get there by solving complex problems. They got there by hurting other people, sometimes permanently. And they're very good at it. They've been practicing it for decades, if not their entire lives. You can't just become one and believe me, they don't want you to.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's how I assume it becomes. I would love to read more about your experiences.</comment></comment>


New Zealand appears to have used NSA spy network to target Kim Dotcom - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/new-zealand-appears-to-have-used-nsa-spy-network-to-target-kim-dotcom/

<comment><USER2> Kimble appeared on the NSA radar back in 1994. He was allegedly part of a global conspiracy trading in calling cards stolen from AT&T. They were stolen by an insider and cost AT&T an estimated $20 million if memory serves me right.

This was back in the day, just after many countries made the switch from analogue to digital telephony and blue boxing was no longer viable. BBS access (I.e. pre-Internet) was therefore harder to get for free. Hacking int. PBXes with 0800 numbers and calling cards were the next best thing at the time (allegedly :-] )

Due to the nature of the crimes the case fell under the jurisdiction of the US Secret Service. Kimble has been on their hit-list ever since. The guy is like a soap bar to the US security apparatus. They are dying to get their greasy mitts on him. Every time they get close he slips out of reach.

<comment><USER3> Why does the Secret Service have jurisdiction over those types of crimes?

<comment><USER4> The Secret Service has two responsibilities: protection (e.g. of the president) and preventing/investigating financial crimes.

<comment><USER5> At least they get one job right.

<comment><USER6> Almost all of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is _extremely scary_ if proved to be true. Imagine if the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) were able to get their hands on or direct their war on bittorrent with these tools. Actually, the RIAA has a listing on its website [1] of various news clippings, like, _" Pirates beware: Kim Dotcom's Mega isn't the safe haven he says it is"_ and _" Kim Dotcom, Pirate King"_. It would be interesting to find out how Dotcom came to be entered into a NSA system as a target.

[1] [http://www.riaa.com/news_room.php?content_selector=riaa- news...](http://www.riaa.com/news_room.php?content_selector=riaa-news-mega- upload-developing-news)

<comment><USER8> > It would be interesting to find out how Dotcom came to be entered into a NSA > system as a target.

He's not in the United States.

Everyone outside the United States is a target.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is in the context of New Zealand (but it does raise many questions about international intelligence sharing and the nature of these systems).

New Zealand has already admitted that their targeting of Kim Dotcom was against their laws. Their solution for the future? They passed a law this week that removes the exemption from domestic spying for New Zealand citizens and residents[1]. Once the system's in place, it just takes a stroke of the pen...

[1] [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-21/new-zealand-passes- spy...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-21/new-zealand-passes-spy- bill/4903500)

<comment><USER9> This is disappointing. New Zealand seems to be a pretty sensible country and I'd hoped for better.

<comment><USER10> Most New Zealanders hoped for better. Depending on the poll, somewhere between 60% and 80% of us opposed the GCSB bill.

A little background - our prime minister John Key is a very pragmatic politician, carefully avoiding contentious issues to remain popular and keep his party in power. His actions over the GCSB bill are very out of character - he's pulled in a lot of favours, twisted a lot of arms and spent a lot of hard-earned political capital to get it passed (just). If he loses the next election (still very much up in the air), passing this bill will be largely to blame.

There is a very bad smell about this. He's already changed labour laws purely for Warner Brothers (they threatened to move the Hobbit to eastern Europe), and I'm fairly sure that the GCSB bill is mostly about fixing the legal disaster that the Kim Dotcom exercise has degenerated into. The MAFIAA is a remarkably apt name, given their tactics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Step 1: We must violate your rights for national security.

Step 2: We must violate your rights to stop child abuse.

Step 3: We must violate your rights to prevent cybercrime.

Step 4: We must violate your rights to protect entrenched business interests.

Step 5: We must violate your rights to preserve our own power.

Step 6: We must violate your rights to enrich ourselves at your expense.

<comment><USER12> Sad, but true it seems. There might be a difficult way out, but I don't believe we should accept this.

One insight is that the framers of the US Constitution did not necessarily anticipate the current differences of today (even though the more some things change, the more these remain the same)...

IMHO, USG needs:

      1. The separation of powers could use a rebalancing to prevent the executive branch from wielding absolute autonomy, i.e., post-Henry VIII.

      2. Campaign finance reform is a requirement.  Congress isn't going to cut off their own campaign funding, except by sheer force of the people.  Fund candidates equally with 50% matching public-for-private funds up to the absolute total limit for the seat.  Then let the best message, hustler and money manager win.

<comment><USER13> The concept of executive orders - particularly as it's being used in modern times - needs to be abolished.

We need sunset provisions on _most_ legislation, requiring laws / regulations to be renewed every X years or they disappear. There are now 175,000 pages of Federal regulations. They're adding thousands of pages per year on average. Who could possibly have a grasp of what's in that? Most of the politicians that passed Obamacare didn't even bother to read it, and I suspect the same is true of most of the legislation passed in DC (most of which is written by lobbyists).

We need a strong separation of corporation and state, for the same reason we have a separation of church and state. They should not be allowed to corrupt each other; specifically noting that it works both ways.

We need a drastic IRS overhaul. Filing should be no more complicated than filling out six or seven lines spanning the size of an index card. Most deductions, loopholes, etc should be abolished. All corporate welfare should go away, including in energy and agriculture.

The ability to wage any type of war should require very specific Congressional approval, including limiting time and scope (requiring extensions otherwise). The ability of the executive to wage war without Congressional approval should be completely curtailed.

The Federal Reserve should either be abolished or neutered (reformed substantially and weakened). Its power to practically do anything it wants to financially must be stopped. It has created three nation shattering bubbles in the last 15 years, and is brewing two more right now on purpose (with the stated goal to generate asset inflation). The Fed is singularly responsible for enabling the profligate spending and general fiscal irresponsibility that has gone on in DC the last 13 years. Without their willingness to fund it all by devaluing the dollar, the vast military industrial complex, spying programs, wars, and insane budget deficits would be impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "There are threats our government needs to protect New Zealanders from."

Serious question; What threats does the NZ government need to protect against by comparison to that of the US? Don't get me wrong, I think many of the threats against our country (the US) are as much our fault as anyones. And I'm not saying _nobody_ wants to attack NZ. But I also don't see any jihadists burning the NZ flag. (Or is that just another example of how much our news media sucks?)

<comment><USER15> The last terror attack in NZ was when France bombed the Rainbow Warrior in 1985. I don't think there are any legitimate threats to New Zealand.

The only other recent piece of action here were the 2007 Uruwera raids which turned out to be yet another police cock up resulting in no convictions

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This won't be much of a surprise to people paying attention, but it does show just how pervasive the level of surveillance has become now. If they're using it to build a case of someone accused of enabling piracy, then it's most definitely not being used for it's stated (and vaguely legal) purpose which moves it onto an even more shaky footing.

We should be disgusted that our governments believe that this is just and valid.

</comment><comment><USER6> That didn't take long. So much for those folks who thought the gov't would never stoop so low.

</comment><comment><USER17> To begin with, this article makes its argument that the NSA is involved with the Kim Dotcom situation based on two flawed arguments:

1) The use of the term "selectors" implies the use of PRISM because PRISM uses the term "selectors" for search criteria. If you look at the other recent leaks, it shows that "selectors" is a generic term used across multiple tools by several, if not all, of five eyes intelligence agencies (try popping "gcsb selectors" or "gchq selectors" into Google). It's possible that they used PRISM or one of the other NSA tools, but they could very well have also used any of their own tools.

2) The phrase "REL TO NZL, AUS, CAN, GBR, USA" means "related to fives eyes". Google provides plenty of additional examples, but it seems that "REL TO" means /releasable to/, not /related to/. In order words, personnel in the other intelligence agencies are allowed to see it; it doesn't imply that they have worked on it. See [1] for an example, but again, lots of other examples in Google.

The document says on page 13 that the FBI asked OFCANZ for assistance in carrying out an arrest warrant, OFCANZ then requested GCSB to "gather intelligence" on Kim Dotcom and his associates. In addition, on page 4 it states "No information concerning Mr. Dotcom or Mr. van der Kolk which GCSB obtained as a result has to date been shared with the Five Eyes." The authors of the Ars article and the original article are both trying to make the point that the NSA is spying on Kim Dotcom, but there's no mention of the NSA or that GCSB was using NSA tools anywhere in the leaked document.

Finally, I'm not sure who leaked these documents, but they didn't bother redacting anything - there's personal information all over the place. I see names of the police staff, and (though they're hard to read) the defendants' e-mail addresses, phone numbers, addresses, passport numbers, driver's license numbers. That's not cool.

[1] www.transcom.mil/publications/showPublication.cfm?docID=04A4D891-1EC9-F26D-0715CB3E5AF1309B

</comment><comment><USER18> Previously, Kim Dotcom had made an allegation that Joe Biden himself was somehow involved.

At the time, it seemed preposterous.

Now,... it's entirely plausible.

</comment><comment><USER19> If they keep this shit up, then Kim Dotcom's ego is going to burst.

<comment><USER6> If it hasn't already burst... I can't imagine what it would take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Shocking, ha!

</comment><comment><USER21> Now that NSA surveillance is widely known, it is unavoidably up for sale. What enterprise wouldn't position itself as a strategic national asset in order to benefit from surveillance data, no matter how much it must pay in political contributions. Evidently the entertainment industry has already succeeded at it.

I was a bit shocked to read in the Wikileaks diplomatic wires how much effort is spent on bullying US allies about petty intellectual property issues. I'm more shocked the NSA gets dragged into such trivialities, but not surprised.

Are there any boundaries of propriety that have not been breached?</comment>


Ask HN: I want to turn my old laptop into a Linux server - <AUTHOR>

I have an old Thinkpad that I want to nuke and reconfigure and run as a Linux server for development.<p>What are some good resources/references for this sort of endeavor? Any advice? <comment><USER2> Use whatever distribution with LTS. Most of my past laptops are now Linux servers we use for various applications around the house (media server, backups, HTTP proxy, development machine). Wifi can be a bummer so plug it in.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds like what I'm doing. Thanks for the advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've put versions of Slackware on old laptops 3 times. Pick a version of Slackware a year or two older than the laptop, so that all the devices are well supported, and the software hasn't bloated beyond what the older hardware can support. Do security upgrades (OpenSSH, OpenSSL) as required.

<comment><USER4> I think you meant to say 'a release that's a year or two younger'. Meaning, the maintainers will have had time to discover and roll in any needed support.

<comment><USER3> Thank you, yes, that's what I meant. Good mind reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've done this with Ubuntu, albeit making a workstation rather than a server. Works fine, although Gnome 2 is a bit sluggish with the window painting. I'll probably move to XFCE or something lighter for the desktop/window management (it's a simple apt-get install plus whatever configuration tweaks one wants to make).

Given Ubuntu's current direction, if you were to go with it and want to use the Gnome 2 GUI ("Classic"), I'd say that's all the more reason to go with / stay on the 10.04 long term release (see pilooch's comment). And keep in mind that you may be leaving Ubuntu altogether by 13.04 at the latest. Although by that time, you may be looking to retire the Thinkpad (from its current use, at least) regardless.

I'm no expert; just the results of my own dinking and thinking.

P.S. Unstated: If GUI's not a concern, then no worries -- probably go with whatever production environment is of interest to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just saw this. Thanks for the advice. I'll dink and think along with your findings :)</comment></comment>


The Habitat of Hardware Bugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/988.php <comment><USER2> _It 's bug-free if and only if they can't sell it with bugs_

This is so very true. A long time ago I was writing a device driver for a chip. I kept running into a problem and spent days looking for the bug in my code. After all, it _had_ to be my code. No way the chip would fail to work in this mode: thousands of customers would be screaming bloody murder.

Finally, I gave up and called my rep at TI. And found out... they knew about the bug and were in the process of fixing it. Why weren't all those customers complaining of a bug in the chip's most basic mode? Well "actually you guys are only the second company to buy this version of the chip..."

<comment><USER3> Oh man, chip errata documents are incredibly scary things. It makes you wonder how the thing works at all.

Here's the current errata for the Freescale iMX6D/Q. _All 225 pages of it._

[http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/IMX6DQCE.p...](http://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/errata/IMX6DQCE.pdf)

<comment><USER4> 200 pages? thats average for Microchip

<comment><USER3> Yeah I guess this is actually pretty good for an SoC the size of the iMX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That is a pretty reasonable way of looking at it. One of the things that made NetApp interesting when I was there was ONTap, a completely custom OS with one memory space and no user mode. When you thought about it made sense, all you need for a NAS box is a really feature rich ethernet driver :-). Anyway, what it meant was that NetApp would uncover problems in CPUs and Chipsets that nobody in the "PC" world would ever see. Race conditions on the frontside bus, PCI express traffic that would freeze up the chipset etc. It was also true of drive firmware. Drives have all these commands which look good in the manual except no PC ever calls them in production. As a result they don't get a lot of testing. We discovered that 'write zeros' which was a command for zeroing out a disk, on some firmware revs was "write mostly zeros, except when you don't." Never good when you're trying to initialize RAID stripes. As a result there was always a "Netapp version" of the drive firmware which had been qualified but customers always believed it was just a way of preventing them from using commodity drives[1].

Any time you step off the beaten path and try to use a complex technology in an "unusual" way, you are blazing a trail which may not have been traveled before. Always good to be on the lookout for undocumented bugs.

[1] It did have that effect but it wasn't the motivation.

<comment><USER6> This works at higher levels of abstraction, too. For instance, NetApp filers have a deduplication feature, where identical files are detected and stored once instead of several times. When one of the files is changed, supposedly a copy on write happens. Yet in practice, I saw, more than once, two identical files, with completely identical time stamps, owned by two different users, where only one file was modified intentionally by a program ran by one of the users (that program logged its actions to a file, and the other user's log would be empty, plus there was no chance that both modified their files at the exact same time.) I concluded that NetApp's deduplication wasn't on the beaten path - or perhaps something in the timing or other specifics of our creation and modification of identical files was unusual.

<comment><USER7> The first problem with your example is that NetApp deduplication occurs at the block level, not the file level. The second problem is, given the number of systems in the field utilizing it - if your example were accurate there would be literally THOUSANDS of people up in arms.

Furthermore, their deduplication is post-process, so even if dedup were to somehow modify atime, which it doesn't, you wouldn't have seen the access time change for at best 24 hours after the file was modified.

Troll on.

<comment><USER6> Then it wasn't deduplication. I swear it was a NetApp file server, two files, one modified by a program that logged the change, the other getting the same bits as the first, the time stamps were completely identical. Dedup was just a guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At least for digital asics, if you can control the temperature and core voltages one strategy to determine if the issue is hardware is to see if the problem changes (either stops or happens more frequently) at high temperature/low core voltage compared to low temperature/high voltage. That's usually a pretty good sign it's not a software/firmware problem. If you can't modify the voltage to the datasheet operating limits, you can try just temperature, but in my experience it's better to do both.

</comment><comment><USER9> A good example of a pretty serious DRAM bug that showed up on PCs a short while ago --- yet with surprisingly little coverage in the media etc.:

[https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~safari/pubs/kim- isca14.pdf](https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~safari/pubs/kim-isca14.pdf)

<comment><USER10> What makes that different from rowhammer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I spent weeks trying to stamp out a bug that turned out to be a signal integrity issue between the processor and DRAM. It was horrible. The bug would only happen after about 30 minutes and looked like memory corruption. I spent tons of time looking for an interrupt corrupting memory.

<comment><USER6> People who lie about having checked signal integrity suck. I have a horror story of my own along these lines, with very creative memory corruption.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Betting on the number of YC Fellowships - <AUTHOR> Does anyone want to predict how many YC Fellowships will be announced, or if their own application, or interview request will be successful.
I'm going to start and say, they will announce 120 fellowships and that I won't be in them nor get an interview. Just a feeling.
If someone wants to create a poll for this, that could be cool. <comment><USER2> I thought I read in the FAQ thread a lot less than 120, something like 12.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think YC would throw 1 - 1.5 M at an experiment.

For ref they do 10x this on YC startups every 6 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It was originally supposed to be 20 according to Sam A., but they're supposedly going to let a few more in because they had over 6,500 applicants.

</comment><comment><USER4> From [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10124308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10124308):

      Number of companies we offered to fund yesterday for the first YC Fellowship: 32

That's a pretty steep cut-off from the number of interviews (~120).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 300 was a cut off, so I'm guessing they sent 50 - 150 interview requests.

I got the worst category of rejection letter ( no re-encouragement to apply in W15, no 300 ).

I think they'll take more than 20.</comment>


Testing Math.random(): Crushing the browser - <AUTHOR> http://jandemooij.nl/blog/2015/11/30/testing-math-random-crushing-the-browser/ <comment><USER2> What research went into choosing XorShift128+? (Paper is apparently [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.0390.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.0390.pdf), which makes it seem like this still has quite a few failures on randomness tests.) Were any PRNG experts consulted? Did these folks consider [http://www.pcg-random.org](http://www.pcg-random.org) ? This talk was great [http://www.pcg-random.org/posts/stanford-colloquium- talk.htm...](http://www.pcg-random.org/posts/stanford-colloquium-talk.html)

HN discussions of PCG Random: 1) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9887548](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9887548) 2) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10544943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10544943)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice writeup. Surprising it took someone so long to notice the issues in Chrome, since it appears to be so much worse than the others.</comment>


How to make the Web OS viable - <AUTHOR> http://justin.harmonize.fm/?p=35

<comment><USER2> I think there are an incredible number of technical challenges for web applications that are more interesting and important than consistency (focus of article). How about scaling on the backend, performance on the frontend, reliability, security, having a sufficiently rich browser platform... I'm sure this list could go on for hours.

I don't do much frontend web programming, but is it really the case that no framework is providing native look-and-feel via js/flash/etc? I mean, Java has been doing this for a while and it is certainly not the new hotness. Chrome (among many others) also allows web apps to snap out of the browser and appear as a desktop app to OS GUIs.

Confused as to what the big problem is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Scaling and JavaScript performance are the issues that we're all working on. Usability is something that gets focused on sometimes from site to site. There is nobody focusing on providing a consistent experience across the web, and for regular users to use the web as their only platform, it will eventually have to be addressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "When a person buys a Windows PC, they can boot it up and use Microsoft Mail with whatever email address they have. ...There is no web site that I know of that lets you work with any email address."

Uh... Gmail? You know, the one by the same company who made the browser you're writing an article about?

In fact, I would be surprised if Chrome 1.0 _doesn't_ have Gmail, Calendar, etc. seamlessly integrated.

<comment><USER3> Scratch that. GMail only allows accessing other accounts using POP3, not IMAP. Boo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> More or less, web applications will continue to suck as long as they have a browser jammed around them. The browser is a lame application platform; the internet itself is important; it means that your apps are up to date, it means that you can easily sync between machines, etc. The browser is ugly legacy baggage for writing applications. We can do better.</comment>


The Line Was Crossed - <AUTHOR> http://www.danielbru.com/2010/02/the-line-was-crossed/

<comment><USER2> Ah, such a classic device for someone so young: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made>

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it made for a pretty lame non-apology. He needs to own up to his mistake and admit that _he_ crossed the line, not that "a line was crossed".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"In some way or another, a line was crossed that should have never been."_

I dislike him, imho, for not being able to own up to what he did. Passive voice is not admitting anything. I mean- he might as well say "They crossed a line and I got fired," for he isn't actually admitting any fault.

<comment><USER5> Give him a break; he was mature enough to apologize in public to TechCrunch and the tech community and should be forgiven. The kid seems to understand that his actions were wrong and promises to learn from this experience. I'd like to see the start-up who sent him the gift make the same public apology.

<comment><USER6> Who says he was offered a bribe? Perhaps he demanded it?

<comment><USER5> Both parties are still in the wrong since the start-up shouldn't have accepted any of his demands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does this gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity or is it more worthy of a tech tabloid? This feels like one of those trashy "reality tv shows," I expect more from the front page of hacker news.

<comment><USER8> I was about to flag this but then I got to the link which explains what the incident actually was. I think it makes for relevant reading - both that such things happen, and for the way tech crunch handled it. It's an unsavory part of life, but this makes it more important to have such incidents as transparent as possible.

<comment><USER7> The fact that this happened to Techcrunch makes it peripherally related to technology, and thus the interest here. But I think thi sis pretty-much exactly what separates news about technology people from hacker news.

The fact that one or two articles in techcrunch were unreliable is hardly news, this is an isolated incident. The actual apology--from a 17 year-old who is not himself a hacker nor a startup founder and whether it is sincere or not --not hacker news in my opinion.

That being said, who died and made me King?

<comment><USER8> Humm. The apology is not fit to be here, true. The submission should probably have linked to the techcrunch article. But the issue I think is worthy of attention because of the hacker aspect, not because it's technology. There are many review sites out there, on pretty much any subject possible, and the way a high profile one deals with open corruption is interesting stuff, imho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sadly, it is somewhat disappointing how this situation was handled. It is understandable that Techcrunch is attempting to cover their own ass in terms of journalistic integrity but the fact that the individual at hand was a minor complicates the situation. When Arrington writes in "An Apology To Our Readers", anyone who is even remotely familiar with Techcrunch can deduce who screwed up from the information provided.

Yes, Daniel made a lapse in judgement, but being a minor (and clearly are hard and dedicated worker) he should have at least been given the opportunity to let this go down silently. When a minor gets into some trouble before they are 18, typically their record is wiped clean as they enter adulthood. Sadly, this is a permanent public record and could prevent him from getting hired or having a career in journalism again (whether thats deserved or not is up in the air).

As an intern, should he have been given so much responsibilty? Who knows really, it just kind of feels like they took advantage of Daniel and threw him to the wayside when he first faultered. Clearly that much spotlight and attention for someone that young might have been too much (at least without some protectionary measures). Losing his intern position and having to deal with that personally and with his family should have been punishment enough. If he wanted to make that a public issue, he should have at least gotten the choice. Instead he was forced publicly to disclose what happened to the world and might have to live with that small error in judgement his whole life. Ahah, it's almost the internets version of the story of original sin. I guess the temptation was to great for someone so young and naive and now hes been branded a bad seed.

<comment><USER10> I don't really see how being young is an excuse. Wrong is wrong, and he was old enough to know it. And Arrington did try to shield him (to a very limited extent); what would you have him do, keep someone on staff who has been proven to be corrupt?

<comment><USER11> There is a difference between knowing what is wrong because you've heard it and internalizing it. This is one reason why younger employees are usually given limited responsibilities. I'm not trying to excuse his behavior, but are high school interns usually given a blog on a major publication and free reign to write whatever they want? Seems like a bad idea...

<comment><USER10> Yes, one could make the point that his boss (i.e. Arrington) should have prevented this from happening, and I'd have to agree.

I must admit to having no better argument (although _I_ wouldn't have done such things!), but note that "not having internalized wrong" is not meaningfully different from the "too young" argument I first disagreed with.

Unless you want to suggest that it's a failure of education?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not to rant, but doesn't it feel weird to read such a perfectly crafted press statement written by a teenager about his personal matters?

Of course he's been writing for TC and I won't doubt its the right thing to write such a blog post in his situation, but this could just as well be written for a politician or a manager.

</comment><comment><USER13> Culture permeates an organization from the top. The guy probably just followed the tacit business practice, but was clumsy about it due to his age and inexperience.

I mean, Michael Arrington takes equity in return for publicity, this guy took a MacBook Air. What exactly is the difference?

<comment><USER14> Quite simply, the difference is that Michael would tell you about it. When you're aware or relationship or bias, you can (somewhat) mentally adjust for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you're curious what he's apoligizing for, apparently TechCrunch has outed him here: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/04/an-apology-to-our- reade...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/04/an-apology-to-our-readers/)

<comment><USER16> TC only posted his name after Daniel made this post.

However, it was blatantly obvious since his about page disappeared <http://www.techcrunch.com/author/danielbru/>

<comment><USER15> Well, as an outsider who doesn't read TechCrunch, I never would have known what he was apoligizing for, unless TechCrunch had made that update on their entry (and "trackbacked" it on Daniel's blog). His apology was pretty nonspecific. Not that I really care one way or the other, but TechCrunch certainly "outed" him there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What a shit apology- 'thanks for the opportunity, even though I purposefully tried to elicit bribes' to 'I did something generically bad, but won't own up to it' to 'look at me I'm a teenager, teens in tech, enjoy being a teenager, age, age, age'.

</comment><comment><USER18> Am I the only person reading about this wondering what's going on? I thought a major part of being a tech writer was getting free stuff, particularly laptops, cameras, and such?

I mean, come on - "TechCrunch" isn't exactly the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal.

If someone had written "So and So intern got a laptop for writing an article at TechCrunch", I would have said "Awesome. Good on him. Hopefully he scores some more nifty electronics...."

I've never, ever, lived under the illusion that TC is some bastion of journalistic integrity... And I say this as an Avid and enthusiastic reader.

<comment><USER6> Essentially, it breaks down to if the non-journalistic party offers it to the journalist as part of the "review process" and it is disclosed it is ethical, if the journalist demands a random "gift" in exchange for running their story it is unethical. Speculation leans towards the latter being the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What he did was unacceptable.

Why should someone be bribed with free expensive products for writing a blog post?

He took advantage of the situation. It takes a lot of time and effort for hardworking people to make money and I don't see why a kid should be given a MacBook under unethical circumstances.

<comment><USER20> Let me re-write my response: Why shouldn't they pay for getting the advertising and millions of views of being on TechCrunch? Why should this be free?

Wouldn't the ethical dilemma be the payment for good results not the payment to be included in the first place? If consumer reports was running a review of vacuums and I knew I'd probably not be included, is it unethical to pay them to be included even if they don't give me high marks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Who's never screwed up and lost sight of the long-term for a quick kick?

Perspective wasn't built in a day.

</comment><comment><USER22> He's 17. Think of the dumbest thing you did at 17. Now imagine it made TechCrunch.

What a joke.

</comment><comment><USER23> As a fan of idiom and language, I'm glad to see the "mistakes were made" meme continuing in strength.

People make mistakes. Kids make more of them. Now with the internet, this mistake is going to live with Daniel for the next 80 years.

I'm really thankful that I lived in a time where you acted like an idiot when you were a teenager, just like all teenagers, and then folks forgot about it. But those days are long gone.

Meta note: It's very interesting to note the tone of some of the commenters here.

<comment><USER24> Except this is not just a rookie mistake. Turning something in late because you're still getting your bearings is a mistake. He knowingly misled anyone who read his posts. Maybe if he was offered a bribe it would be more understandable, he could have just thought of it as an extra gift and not be completely familiar with the legal implications.

But he knowingly asked for a bribe in return for writing a post. His actions shows an actual personality flaw, not inexperience.

I think it's a fair trade-off, a young person is given the chance to take on an important role while being expected to show a certain level of maturity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Morelike the palm was crossed, amiright?</comment>


Ask: The Apple bluetooth keyboard hurts my hands, does this affect anyone else? - <AUTHOR> I use the Apple bluetooth aluminum keyboard (MC184LL/B). A typical day is 10 hours of email and coding. My hands are big, thumb to pinky, I can cover the tilde and plus keys. I type Dvorak, use a standing desk and am very aware of posture. I'm 31. By about 10am the left thumb starts hurting (left command key) and by the end of the day I start using dictation or just going home. Does anyone else have trouble with this popular keyboard? <comment><USER2> I think everybody has tools they aren't compatible with.

When I've had trouble with tendonitis in my hands I have often found that doing push-ups every day for a few weeks can help. I had it so bad back when I was 27 that I thought I might have to quit keyboarding and that turned it around completely.</comment>


How hackers ruin everything with computers - <AUTHOR> http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/how-hackers-ruin-everything-with-computers/

<comment><USER2> > Revolutionary jets like the SR-71 or the 747 took months to design.

Yes, and without computer assisted modelling, when they wanted to try out something - say, reducing trim drag by moving the center of gravity further aft - they had to just try it out in the field. That experiment killed one pilot, and it's a miracle the other survived. What caused that death? Engine unstart. Why was unstart a problem on the SR-71? Because its analogue computers couldn't always keep up.

All in all a spectacularly bad example, CAD would have saved lives, and despite his ranting it DID have a computer on board, and when that was replaced with a digital computer system it increased the reliability and safety of the plane.

Here's the story from the survivor if anyone's interested: <http://www.alexisparkinn.com/sr-71_break-up.htm>

<comment><USER3> From the link:

> The next day, our flight profile was duplicated on the SR-71 flight > simulator at Beale AFB, Calif. The outcome was identical.

This seems to belie your argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Does anyone believe a modern Benz will be able to drive for 1,000,000 miles the way old ones regularly would? I don't._

I think this has to do with the advances in material sciences and engineering. My theory is that parts in old cars were massively overengineered because the variation in quality was so high. If you wanted _most_ of your cars to last 100,000 miles, you had to construct a car to last 1,000,000 miles. Nowadays, you can probably get away with constructing a car to last 200,000 miles.

Can someone with the right background comment on this train of thoughts?

<comment><USER5> The problem is more one of cost and efficiency. You can still run your care for 100k of miles (the 1M miles is fiction, imho). But when e.g. the engine is broken, you don't fix it anymore but replace it wholesale. Less hassle, guaranty on the new part by the manufacture and generally cheaper: The old engine gets sent to the manufacturer for refurbishment by people only doing this (and hence more efficient than your run-of-the-mill mechanic).

Furthermore you can't fix a car do-it-yourself-style anymore because these things have become way more complex. So running a car _way_ past it's economically sensible lifetime (if you'd factor in the labour cost) is simply no longer possible.

And even old cars totally overengineered do fail all the time (my brother has a bunch of them). But since it's usually just for leisure, labour cost doesn't count. And because the parts are simpler it can usually be fixed.

So I'd blame this on the massively increased labour cost/car cost ratio. Go to a country with really cheap labour and it all works like it did here half a century ago.

<comment><USER4> You bring up an interesting factor I didn't really take into account. It probably makes no economic sense to run a car for 1M miles considering the high costs of labour. The question is whether it is possible to run a modern car for so long with somewhat reasonable maintenance, or if it will die with a fatal engine failure.

We will see in about 15 years, whether the modern taxis of today still serve as taxi in lesser developed countries.

Fun anecdote: I recently sat in an old BMW taxi (I guess early 80s). The mileage indicator showed about 50,000 km, which is way to little for any taxi. The indicator had 6 digits. My guess is that it reached 999,999 km, overflowed and started again at 0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I bought my phone for the non-phone features, sure I'll admit it. In fact, I never had a use for a cellphone until you could browse the net on one. When that came along, I was all in. For me it's not a parlour trick, it's the primary reason I have one.

</comment><comment><USER7> "I make no secret of the fact that I think real technological progress has slowed in many fields, possibly even reversing itself." states the author at the start. That's very hard to defend.

However, let me boldly agree in that I think this is true for qualitative change, but not quantitative. I think quantitative changes are rapidly happening, and that's because it's very easy to generate better answers from a set of pre-existing knowledge. Computers (plus their engineers) are very good at that. It's the whole premise of the Semantic Web.

The hard thing to do is generate a better set of existing knowledge, and then curating it well. As (perhaps mis-used but I'll use it anyways) Picasso said "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

</comment><comment><USER8> The fine author brags about how he could access the internet on his calculator, and sneers at people who buy phones to do the same?

</comment><comment><USER9> The author's rant is mostly crotchety nonsense, but it was worth it for the link [1] to Harry Plinkett's hilarious and spot-on critique of Star Wars Episode III.

[1] <http://www.redlettermedia.com/plinkett.html>

</comment><comment><USER10> It'd be interesting to know the price drop over time of the cars. I'm sure that cars nowadays are more cheaper than back when they could get a million miles, so the comparison doesn't work.</comment>


Today is the end of sheloshim for my beloved husband - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155617891025177&set=a.404308695176.365039.717545176&type=1&theater <comment><USER3> Paul Buchheit wrote a wonderful post, after similar circumstances, that I often re-read:

 _> On a more practical level, what matters most in our day-to-day lives is that we're good to ourselves and to each other. It's actually not possible to only do one or the other -- we must do both or neither, but that's a topic for another time. Sometimes, when I write about startups or other interests of mine, I worry that perhaps I'm communicating the wrong priorities. Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. What's most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves. If we "win", but have failed to do that, then we have lost. Winning is nothing._

[http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2012/03/eight-years- today.h...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2012/03/eight-years- today.html?m=1)

May Sheryl and her family be free of suffering.

<comment><USER4> _Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it 's important to remember that it's all just a game._

I feel like this sentiment is very common, but is implicitly stating that all of the other things, family, friends, personal health etc... are not games - when I don't see why that would be the case. Nothing distinguishes those things for me.

Creating new products, like software that gives people better productivity, or hardware that helps people achieve physical fitness goals, or systems that make getting clean water cheaper - those are life changing to a lot of people, sometimes even millions. The typical response to this is "yea but most people make junk" to which I say, telling junk from non-junk is an exercise in futility.

We wouldn't be quoting Paul Buchheit or talking about Dave Sandberg if they hadn't sacrificed some of those relationships, or health for the products and platforms that we know them for. And that's the real point - legacy. Someone's legacy is not the relationships they had personally, just look at the miserable relationship failures of Steve Jobs, but their impact on bringing their vision and impact on groups _outside_ of their circle.

Winning in my opinion then, is having an (hopefully positive) impact on those outside of your inner circle, not within it. And the larger the impact, the bigger the win.

<comment><USER5> What are the things that—on your deathbed—you expect to regret?

Will it be that you didn't spend as much time as you could've with your parents before they died? How about with your siblings? Maybe it was all of the times that you didn't make it to your kids' soccer games, piano recitals, school plays, or graduations?

Or will it be that you didn't spend nearly enough nights at the office fixing your social media startup's bugs?

I don't remember the exact genesis of this, and I really wish I did, because it has literally reshaped my life, but a few years ago, I started asking myself the question 'If I were to die tomorrow, would I regret the way I have lived my life?' And I was somewhat surprised and horrified to discover that the answer was absolutely, categorically "yes."

I dropped out of the startup rat-race, took a good-paying 9-5 job working with people who I (still) really like, and started focusing on the other 128 hours in the week that I wasn't working.

I would hate to die tomorrow, but, if that's what happened, I would be satisfied with how I spend each day of my life. My quality of life and happiness have increased significantly since I first started asking myself that question.

<comment><USER4> _What are the things that—on your deathbed—you expect to regret?_

Always found these philosophical shortcut tropes (eg. if you had just one day left...) amusing, but not particularly illuminating because they over-simplify life long achievements to mere regret-avoidance. If you are asking yourself that, then 1. You are privileged to be at that level on the Maslow hierarchy and 2. you already know the answer.

Embedded in your statements though are a lot of, in my opinion unfounded presuppositions. One, that through force of will, the relationships that you describe can be made positive - something forcefully unfounded in my experience. Two, that someone's startup, social or otherwise, is a trivial farce and there is no real added value - again see my previous statement about common misguided arguments.

My main distinction is that personal happiness is not a goal of mine, but rather a side benefit from accomplishing something that has lasting tangible value for more than just myself and the people I am immediately exposed to.

<comment><USER6> You should be a little careful. The odd thing about creative professionals, which includes most software developers, is that if you take Maslow's hierarchy of needs as the truth for the general population, for creative professionals this pyramid of needs is inverted.

You see, most creative professionals are profoundly unhappy people. This is because the equation for happiness is usually easy - your expectations have to be lower than your achievements. As a side note, this is why the renowned mid- life crisis happens, because that's the point in your life when you realize that many of your dreams are impossible.

But going back to creative professionals - our expectations are off the chart. It's because we've been taught that we can achieve anything, with our imagination being the limit and hard work being the currency. It's because many of us come from families of high achievers. Yes, we are profoundly unhappy because our expectations are usually much bigger than our achievements. This is the reason for why many of us are idealists, for why we want to change the world. Many of us are also atheists, but all of us want to achieve some form of immortality, therefore that's the reason for why many of us want to build things that are long lasting.

I used to say the same things as you did. You may not feel the above right now, I'm going to make the assumption that you're in your twenties, which means you've got the energy to be hopeful about the future. But take it from a 32 year old that is going through a mid-life crisis 10 years earlier (or maybe it's just a burnout episode, I don't know), but this youthful energy is going to dissipate and you're then going to feel the emptiness in your life. And I'm lucky, because I have a wife and a 4-year old whom I love very much and which represent my reason for getting up in the morning.

<comment><USER7> A 32 year old lecturing a (supposed) 20-something about life experience. I guess cynicism is becoming younger and younger.

<comment><USER8> I was more cynical than he is at 32 when I was 14. On the one hand, I've learned to be more idealistic, but on the other hand, with how things are these days, what sort of worldview do you _expect_ kids to learn? Since when should youth be so _flagrantly ignorant_ as to form a worldview of sunshine and daisies while terrorism, corruption, and destructive climate change take up most of the headline space?

<comment><USER9> before that it was the threat of nuclear war, ecological collapse, and economic stagnation. before that it was the draft, violent racial injustice, and a nearly complete collapse of legitimacy of national leadership. Idealistic youts have always had reasons to be cynical. (and sadly typing up this list, I see how many of the reasons to be cynical remain powerful generation after generation)

<comment><USER8> Exactly my point! Cynicism is often well-warranted, _especially_ if you _actually have_ high moral ideas. What people ought to be scared of are the people who aren't cynical because they simply don't care.

<comment><USER10> You just described skepticism, not cynicism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Joe Biden's speech in 2012 touches upon similar themes that Sheryl writes about. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwZ6UfXm410&t=5m10s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwZ6UfXm410&t=5m10s)

 _" I have to tell you. I used to resent people. They'd come up to me and say, 'Joe, I know how you feel. I know, right? I knew they meant well. I knew they were genuine. But you knew they didn't have any damn idea."_

 _" For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. I realized someone could go out — and I probably shouldn't say this with the press here, but you're more important — I realized how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide. Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts. Because they'd been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their heart they'd never get there again, that it was never going to get — never going to be that way ever again."_

<comment><USER12>
        > Because they'd been to the top of the mountain, and they
        > just knew in their heart they'd never get there again,
        > that it was never going to get — never going to be that
        > way ever again

And Sheryl says:

        > I know I will never feel pure joy again. Those who have
        > said, "You will find a new normal, but it will never be
        > as good" comfort me more because they know and speak the
        > truth

Is this attitude ... normal? I guess in the near aftermath, it's sure going to feel that way, but ten years later? 20 years later? 30 years later? I can understand never forgetting, but never letting yourself feel as happy again?

I have no experience, but would love to hear from someone with experience >10 years after the fact...

<comment><USER13> I can confirm this. It has been 15 years since my son died.

On a day-to-day basis there is a new normality in my life and the emotion surrounding his loss is locked tightly in a box. There is plenty of happiness and plenty of _new_ happiness in my life.

However, at all of the happiest moments in my life the box is opened and I am reminded that we are missing the one thing that would make this moment complete.

This is why old people cry at weddings.

<comment><USER10> I cannot even imagine your pain. I have two small children, and if either of them were to die, I just don't know what I'd do.

Thank you for sharing this most terrible of experiences. I genuinely appreciate it.

<comment><USER14> This is my greatest fear. This is the one thing that can paralyze me late at night when my mind wanders and wonders about what can go wrong in regards to my two daughters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reading this took me back to the experience of grieving for my dad.

The realization that it will never be okay, but that I can become more okay with it never being okay. The bizarre feeling of grief so unbearable and yet it being one of the few connections left to someone so important to me, and so being unwilling to let go of it. Even to this day, I revel in that grief. I've learned to look at it as consequence of so many wonderful experiences instead of hurt of so many missed experiences. The feeling of that void inside me is the same, but my reaction to that feeling is now to smile rather than to cry.

My heart goes out to her in this time when everything is so fresh and so confusing. I know the feeling of having had someone taken from me long before I even thought about the possibility and yet I'm sure her experience is distinct from mine in so many ways. But in writing about her pain, she's allowed me to tap back into mine in a way that I'm thankful for.

<comment><USER16> As someone experiencing grief for the first time one and a half weeks ago, I'm beginning to understand that bizarreness of grief - the ups and downs, that void..

A lot of people I've spoken to who have experienced grief tell me the same thing - that it will never be ok, but that you can become more ok with it - that you will have moments where you briefly forget and that you get more of these moments over time. I could never have understood this emotion before - <USER2> thought it was like in the movies where you're constantly crying, but it's a lot more complex and strange than that..

<comment><USER17> _It's not sobbing, collapsing, moaning grief. It's phantom-limb pain. It aches, it throbs, there's nothing there, and yet you never want it to go away._

Final lines from "The Day I Started Lying to Ruth: A cancer doctor on losing his wife to cancer", [http://nymag.com/news/features/cancer-peter- bach-2014-5/](http://nymag.com/news/features/cancer-peter-bach-2014-5/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have nothing but empathy for her grief - everything I've read about her makes her seem like an amazing woman, but I am very deeply uncomfortable with public displays of emotion like this.

I guess this is one of those dumb culturally ingrained traits, because rationally I cannot really come up with any reason why it should make me feel so uneasy, but I feel like I'm gawking when I read someone describing their grief so publicly.

I wish her and her family the best. May they find the strength to go on.

<comment><USER19> I have a really hard time with seeing grief on social media. It just comes across as shallow to me. People changing their profile picture to the deceased, posting tributes to them... it just seems fake.

I don't doubt their sincerity, I just think it's a really crappy medium for that kind of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a non user of Facebook it's incredibly weird to see like scores assigned to every tribute or condolence comment.

<comment><USER21> Like = upvote; an echoing of the sentiment expressed. The word does cause some cognitive dissonance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The prayer got me the most.

 _" Let me not die, while I am still alive..."_

That's powerful stuff. The idea of asking for more time like a kid in a swimming pool - just 5 more minutes!

I hope I do die while I'm still alive though. Dying after I'm done living sounds worse.

<comment><USER23> I feel the other way around.

I'd rather die while I'm alive (doing or living through something really exciting) than completing something exciting, then entering the dawn of life realizing that I'll never do something as exciting again, and then dying.

I wanna die in the middle of having fun, not in a retirement home.

<comment><USER24> That is not how I interpret that.

I think what that means is "Don't let me be caught up in grief and mourning so much that I become the living dead." Hope that makes sense.

Basically just praying for the strength to carry on and learn from tragedy, rather than to be consumed and defeated by it.

<comment><USER22> That's awesome. Thanks! An interpretation I didn't consider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Really great read, I recently lost a friend who was among many other great things Jewish. As a "Gentile" I found the entire Shiva process both historically / anthropologically interesting and very helpful with the mourning process.

My thoughts go out to her and her family.

</comment><comment><USER26> Her thoughts on what makes mourning, and specifically the interaction with other people so difficult, are really enlightening. It reminded me that each person experiences life differently, even when we are all united by the same feelings of satisfaction, love, frustration and grief.

My deepest condolences to Sheryl, as well as anyone else who reads this who has lost a loved one. Life is both amazing and delicate, and I think we could all focus a little more on the little things that make all the difference. I know I could.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's easy to lose sight of what's truly important amid the fog of day-to-day life.

</comment><comment><USER28> The way I see it, life is basically a long-winded effort to get loved. To get loved by ourselves, by others and by our gods. Everything everybody does in life boils down to this. From Hitler to Mother Teresa. From Osama bin Laden to the Dalai Lama. You want to do things that matter, to change the world? Why? How do you know they matter? Because those to whom they matter love you for it. You love yourself for it, others love you for it and by your own spiritual presumptions, your gods love you for it, or they will some day. And so, it is not the big things or the small things that matter. It is not saving the lives of millions or attending your kid's play that matters. The only thing that matters is you finding love, however you find it. If there is no love feedback for you, it doesn't matter. That's why nobody is trying to save the starving children in the planets of the Andromeda galaxy, coz there's no feedback for it. And if you think that's a poor analogy, well, there was nobody coming to the slums of Africa to do the things people these days come to do.

</comment><comment><USER29> My favourite part:

> "Celebrate your birthday, goddammit. You are lucky to have each one."

<comment><USER30> Same can be said about each day though. Not sure why birthdays are special.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can anyone summarize that long text?

<comment><USER32> A woman who is relatively famous in some technology circles lost her husband (also famous in the tech community) suddenly due to a tragic accident. Her post comes at the end of a religious mourning period and she reflects upon how she has learned to accept help and work to move on after such a harrowing experience.

It's a pretty good read, and I'm sure it's heartfelt. As others here have mentioned, it's odd to see something intensely personal and thoughtful in a social media post, and it's tempting to dismiss it as a trite attempt at attention-seeking (given the medium) but I don't believe that to be the case.

For the segment of the HN community that hasn't followed the professional activities of Sheryl Sandberg or Dave Goldberg, however, the post will have little relevance other than perhaps some shared personal experiences and sympathy for the loss of the family.

<comment><USER31> Thanks MrZongle2, much appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If Facebook posts were eligible for Pulitzers, this would win. This is so incredibly thought-provoking, well-written, and well-constructed.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Option A is not available. So let's just kick the shit out of option B."

</comment><comment><USER7> > Judaism calls for a period of intense mourning known as shiva that lasts > seven days after a loved one is buried.

It's strange to me to prescribe how long people should mourn. Some people are appalled when someone seems to _get over_ someone quickly after they've died. But if they are truly not sad about it any more, I say good for them. What does it help the deceased for the living to be sad over them?

<comment><USER35> Often people who have lost close ones feel overwhelmed by all sorts of emotions, including guilt - whether over mourning too much or mourning too little. "Is it ok that I'm still grieving? Should I still be expressing this grief to people I meet? Do people expect that I should be moving on now? Am I moving on too soon?"

By declaring the length of the mourning period, religion does there one of the things it does best: give us a sense of ritual and assuage potential guilt at those very important moments in life: yes, it's ok to still be mourning. Yes, it's ok to move on now.

These are not mandates. They're not marching orders. They're a guideline so you don't have to add guilt about mourning too much or too little to what is already a crushing amount of sorrow.

<comment><USER7> So religion tries to reduce guilt. Well I guess I learn something totally new every day...

Admittedly I'm not familiar with Judaism except through the limited view of the Bible and comparing it to Christianity.

<comment><USER35> Religion is a pretty complex thing. I totally agree that christianity tends to be, as Alan Watts described it, "institutionalised guilt"... but that's just one dimension of it. Religion is a huge topic. It's many things to many people. It's never helpful to intelligent conversation to reduce a big thing to a single axis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> For those like me that are wondering what is going on, apparently some Silicon Valley executive died recently.

<comment><USER35> A human being died and another human being went through grief and wrote a moving post about her journey. Do you really need to apply (what I'm sensing to be) pejorative labels to it?

Death may not be your typical HN fare, but it is a subject that touches all of us eventually, so far with no exception. I am glad that she was willing to write this and share it. My life is richer for having read it.

<comment><USER37> I don't think the parent was trying to apply pejorative labels or there was any malicious intent behind their post. It was more along the lines of being unable to parse the title, IMO.

It's also good practice to critically examine any written piece, regardless of whom it may come from. While you may derive aesthetic and ostensibly emotional value from it, not everybody may necessarily feel that way.

In fact, my life wasn't changed or impacted in any profound sense after reading this. You should keep in mind that not everyone may think the same way as you, or even share the same reality.

<comment><USER35> > _It 's also good practice to critically examine any written piece, > regardless of whom it may come from. While you may derive aesthetic and > ostensibly emotional value from it, not everybody may necessarily feel that > way._

That's an interesting assertion, and itself worth examining critically. Is it generally good practice to critically examine any written piece? Possibly. Probably even. Is it _always_ good practice? Perhaps even that is true. Is it always good practice to state the outcome of your critical examination in public? At this point, if your answer is still yes, we diverge. There's a time for stating your critical analysis, and a time for keeping it to yourself.

Death is one of those topics where critical analysis is generally unwelcome. To use a slightly extreme but actually fairly relevant analogy, if someone very close to you died and you were mourning them at their funeral a few days later, and someone there presents you with some kind of critical theory of the chemical nature of grief, while it might appear to be some critical analysis of the present moment it would nevertheless be most unwelcome.

Which brings me to your second point:

> _In fact, my life wasn 't changed or impacted in any profound sense after > reading this. You should keep in mind that not everyone may think the same > way as you, or even share the same reality._

There's nothing wrong with that, but I think you can tell fairly easily from the comments that other people were moved by this post. In some, it has brought up feelings of grief that they wished to share too. In effect, the original post by Sheryl Sandberg has made this thread a place of grief for many of the commenters here.

They will have come to it from many places, both real and imagined. For me it is imagining how I would feel if my wife died, or how she might feel if I died. For others it is remembering the death of a loved one. Either way, what they express is real and deeply felt.

I think this "promotes" this thread to a place of grief, and as a human being who respects other humans' right to such places, it is reasonable to keep your critical evaluations to yourself in such a place. There are other places to express your critical views of this. Yes, you have a right to express them here if you wish, but you should also be aware of the implicit request to let this space be what it is.

I know this is the internet and so expecting people to respect other people's feelings is somewhat extraordinary here, but I guess I have a high opinion of humanity in general.

<comment><USER38> I can understand how you feel that feelings (yours personally? others'?) were not respected. Especially very short comments can sound terse to the point of sarcastic. However, the tone that you're bringing here is not quite appropriate. You seem to be raring for an internet argument: you're taking offense at pejorative labels in posts which don't have pejorative labels, and trying to go badass-philosopher on equivocations (they said "It's good practice", you criticized "It's _always_ good practice").

So, I know who, roughly, the affected parties are here. But if you look close, that's not actually contextually obvious. People who don't know who the affected parties are click "Back" and then look at the comments, because Sheryl Sandberg is very unlikely to tell Facebook exactly who she is, who her husband was, and how he died. So they will come to our HN comments with a, "not to diminish anybody's grief, but who is this and why do I care, again?" approach. A simple comment of "her husband was a Silicon Valley executive" is great there. I mean, maybe I'd have added "and she is the COO of Facebook" too, since I've personally never heard of the companies he was a part of, but I remember hearing about his death a while back.

It's just supremely ironic. Here you are, inappropriately critically analyzing the appropriateness of critical analysis and disrespecting the real expressions of others' feelings while decrying how the Internet disrespects the real expressions of others' feelings.

I'm totally with you that there is a deep sympathetic response here where you and I both imagine living without that love that we're presently consumed by, or forcing someone else to live without that love. Yes, our feelings are real. Their feelings are also real. It's not the time to perceive slights in terse comments and expand short sentences into philosophical analyses. The phrase "which brings me to your second point" should be barred from this context. It's not just us and our sympathetic grief; they and their confusion are also very valid responses to a totally-ambiguous out-of-nowhere post.

<comment><USER35> Interesting comment, and I'll think about it. Not to take away from your comment as a whole, I will nitpick one particular thing. There is a big difference in tone, imho, in saying "some Silicon Valley executive died recently", which I believe to have a dismissive undertone, vs saying "a Silicon Valley executive", which is fairly neutral. The "some" is probably what triggered me there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you can't understand why Sheryl Sandberg and David Goldberg are important to the Hacker New community then I fear you have a misunderstanding of what Hacker News is.</comment>


Lessons in Survival - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/11/21/climate-race-resilience-lessons-survival/ <comment><USER2> the article contains no actual survival tips

<comment><USER3> Maybe vagueness itself _is_ a survival technique ;-)</comment></comment>


Slow clap: New iPhone6 has a barometer - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/09/09/slow-clap-new-iphone6-has-a-barometer/

<comment><USER2> Oh yay more horrible twitter "journalism".</comment>


Trump banning TikTok/WeChat from operating in 45 days if not sold by companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/06/politics/trump-executive-order-tiktok/index.html <comment><USER2> Fuck this. I don't like Tik too and WeChat, I don't think people should use them, and I don't trust China, but we don't need the government telling us what software we can use. This is not good.

</comment><comment><USER3> This also potentially has many ramifications in different industries. Tencent (owner of WeChat) is a big investor in media and entertainment companies. One side effect, for example, is blocking financial payments to Riot Games, Epic Games, Fortnite, and half the gaming industry.

<comment><USER4> Also Reddit, which Tencent acquired a minor stake in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have not yet seen how the U.S. would ban these apps. Would they somehow compel Google and apple to ban them from their app stores? Would they also take steps to ban them from side loading?

<comment><USER6> If it is the law then Google must comply in order to avoid legal trouble, no? That is how they compel them to ban the apps.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Trending media via Twitter API filtered by topic; Olympics example - <AUTHOR> http://topicaltracker.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the developer, and this is a work-in-progress demo of a software package that processes and summarizes the statuses, photos, videos and links pulled from Twitter's streaming API. After supplying a list of hashtags, user accounts and keywords for a particular topic, thousands of tweets per minute (in this example) are mined and the most popular and rising content is curated for display. I am looking for feedback if people would find this useful for their own niche topics of interest, made available as a software-as-a-service package, open-sourced on github, or both. It's not perfectly polished yet...</comment>


A Message from Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek - <AUTHOR> https://blog.avast.com/a-message-from-ceo-ondrej-vlcek <comment><USER2> "I realize the recent news about Jumpshot has hurt the feelings of many of you"

_Seriously?_ "hurt the feelings"?

Get fucked Vicek... And fire your whole comms team before you do.

"Respectfully yours," <USER2>
</comment><comment><USER3> _" During all those years, both Avast and Jumpshot acted fully within legal bounds"_

Those are not the words of a leader who recognizes their mistakes. This whole "apology" reads to me as:

"We are sorry we got caught and now we will sacrifice a bunch of low level staff to appease you."

How about rather than that, the CEO and board members/ leadership who approved of this business take real responsibility and step down without golden parachutes.

</comment><comment><USER4> "For these reasons, I – together with our board of directors – have decided to terminate the Jumpshot data collection and wind down Jumpshot's operations, with immediate effect."

This is great, but it took public ousting to get this into the light. Should have NEVER happened in the first place. Priorities and values are fubar imho.</comment>


Time to prepare for the worst in North Korea - <AUTHOR> http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2017/09/11/time-to-prepare-for-the-worst-in-north-korea/ <comment><USER2> Why would North Korea attack when it has no incentive to? They gain nothing and would be demolished swiftly and of course they know that. Why would the US/West attack when they know there will be hundreds of thousands of casualties almost immediately and nothing much to gain there after as well? If there is no incentive to attack on either side, why is it time to start preparing for the worst?

<comment><USER3> Why does North Korea need ICBMs when they presumably already possess a regional nuclear deterrent?

<comment><USER4> ICBM's are a way of threatening civilian population centers, which usually gets the attention of a country much more than military troops, even if they might be sizeable. I mean, there are ~37,500 US soldiers on the Korean peninsula right now, not to mention equally large detachment in Japan, which are already well within range of DPRK's nuclear armaments. But its only when you read the news that a missile could hit NYC that Americans pay more attention/panic etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (given that the site is down...)

Here's a great (if slightly sobering) podcast from last week by foreign policy professionals about the global relationship with North Korea [1]. They give a pretty nuanced, if dire, look at the NK situation that is significantly more informed than the standard NPR/CNN article. Though Trump's tweets today were not part of their calculations...

[1] [https://soundcloud.com/deepstateradio/the-only-discussion- of...](https://soundcloud.com/deepstateradio/the-only-discussion-of-the-north- korea-situation-youll-ever-need) (discussion specific to NK heats up ~23min into the podcast)

<comment><USER6> And to that, I would add [http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/podcast/](http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/podcast/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If it's down for you as well, try [http://archive.is/Oh6Vq](http://archive.is/Oh6Vq)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's a stalemate. China has stated that they will defend North Korea if the US attacks first, and that China will not defend North Korea if they attack the US first. My friends in Tokyo sleep better at night knowing this.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles- china-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-china- media/chinese-paper-says-china-should-stay-neutral-if-north-korea-attacks- first-idUSKBN1AR005)

"If the U.S. and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so."

"China should also make clear that if North Korea launches missiles that threaten U.S. soil first and the U.S. retaliates, China will stay neutral," it added.

<comment><USER9> > "If the U.S. and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the > North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean > Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so."

Maybe I am reading too much into it, but if this is their real words, it sounds like an invitation (probably lost on the Trump administration) to find ways to overthrow the NK regime without changing the pattern of the Korean peninsula, i.e. by keeping NK in the Chinese sphere of influence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is continual posturing from the Chinese government. They're incentivized to retain the DPRK or risk a humanitarian crisis on their border. As long as North Korea doesn't destabilize the region itself, China will continue to prop them up.

If you're interested in this topic, read "The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia" by Andrei Lankov.

<comment><USER11> It has never been about a concern over a humanitarian crisis on their border. In regards to North Korea, that's trivial for China. They have 300+ million people living on just a few dollars per day. They could absorb 5-10 million more and not notice in the least.

It's about preventing the unification of Korea and allowing the US military to get closer to China's territory. That's a double loss as far as China is concerned strategically.

The situation has an easy solution. China collapses North Korea as it exists today and pays off all the military leadership (which actually runs the country); said military cabal gets to live in China, and doesn't get prosecuted for war crimes (all obvious requirements from their perspective). The US, South Korea and China put together an initial trillion dollar, 20 year, package for economic recovery. The US & South Korea agree to cede between 1/3 and 1/2 of North Korea to China, to be used as a form of territory buffer between the US / S.Korea and China. The US agrees not to position its troops any closer to Chinese territory (ie not to occupy any of the territory South Korea acquires), various rules could be put into place that everyone agrees upon to ease China's concerns.

This is a trivial problem to solve as far as the big problems of the past century go.

What's not trivial, is that North Korea's nuclear & missile technology is going to keep pushing forward, which will eventually spur the US / Russia / China to begin aggressively pushing their nuclear technology forward again. Further, North Korea will attempt to hand their nuclear technology to other nations, as there are no real consequences for them doing so (oh no, more sanctions), only the benefit of spreading nukes around further which lessens the spotlight on them.

<comment><USER12> It is possible to determine, after a nuclear explosion, to determine from whence the weapon was produced. You'd better believe that such a discovery would be an extreme _casus belli_ for an invasion.

North Korea isn't interested in proliferation. They want (and have) nukes to keep the United States at bay. Historically, the US has no problem attacking states without nuclear weapons but never does so to states with them. It's a good strategy.

<comment><USER11> > North Korea isn't interested in proliferation.

Of course they're extremely interested in proliferation. Just as Pakistan, China, India, France, Israel, Britain and Russia were all interested in proliferation (insofar as it suited their interests) and for exactly the same reason. The only reason the USSR and China got nukes in the first place, is they had a desperate self-interest in proliferation. North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons was also proliferation, which they were _extremely_ interested in.

North Korea would love nothing more than to give the US & Co. other nuclear problems to deal with. The more so called rogue nations (or really anybody would do) with nuclear weapons there are, the easier it is for North Korea to justify keeping theirs, the less unique the North Korea situation becomes, the less pressure there will be on North Korea to give their weapons up. If five new nations pop up with nuclear weapons, the premise of North Korea being a rogue nuclear entity loses most of its punch, and the sanctions would wilt accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> China stands to be completely screwed over by another NK-USA war, and I find it hard to believe that they haven't even considered the possibility of this happening. Rushing to the chess table to negotiate a draw after the game's already reached the endgame appears remarkably foolhardy for such a forward- planning nation.

<comment><USER14> > and I find it hard to believe that they haven't even considered the > possibility of this happening.

The Chinese fell for the same trap many non-ultra-right-wing Trump supporters did: they believed that Trump would be made presidential by the office.

Even many on the left side would not have thought Trumps tweets in regard to NK possible in any way.

<comment><USER15> > _The Chinese fell for the same trap many non-ultra-right-wing Trump > supporters did: they believed that Trump would be made presidential by the > office._

Do you know of these people you are speaking for? Trump seems to be acting exactly the way he was expected to by everybody.

<comment><USER16> Trump's behavior is surprising no one, true. But that's as much because the only prediction was that he'd be unpredictable, as because he's behaving like he telegraphed before the election

Read articles from before the inauguration, you'll see all sorts of wild predictions on how he would act.

Example: [http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/01/trump-and-the-us- econ...](http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/01/trump-and-the-us-economy-q- what-do-you-think-will-be-the-single-most-important-outcome-of-the-trump- presidency-for-th.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A serious question: has there been any evidence of weapons related nuclear "incidents" in North Korea? I know they get external help with their programs, but it seems ... odd ... that there hasn't been a detectable "oops" moment involving their ongoing weapons development.

<comment><USER18> What do you mean by an "oops" moment? Some small criticality event, like the US's demon core, would not be detectable from far away. They aren't pursuing nuclear power either, which would be the most likely path towards meltdowns.

<comment><USER19> Exactly.

"Oops" when you're testing nuclear weapons would simply be a different yield than expected. I imagine the USAF radioisotope analysts (if that's still done these days, expect it might be impossible with underground testing) could possibly detect less-than-complete fusion.

But you've got to screw up pretty badly to have a static nuclear weapon test misfire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Economist cited this very article in their latest issue: [https://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21729742-next-i...](https://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21729742-next-it-will-push-them-apart-north-korea-has-brought-america- and-china-closer)

Fun to connect the dots and see it posted here on HN :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> From other sources, I have read that the author was not allowed to publish articles on such topics on 2013, leading some to believe that this indicates a change in the attitudes of the Chinese leadership.

</comment><comment><USER21> The real risk is that NK will nuke the Pacific Ocean, under the illusion that people/countries won't care much.

Remains to be seen but I think that will be seen as an attack on the world, not on no-one.

</comment><comment><USER22> Given:

> Author: Jia Qingguo, Peking University

To what degree is this an official message? To whom? Saying what?

<comment><USER23> Interesting question. Biography:

 _Jia Qingguo is Professor and Associate Dean of the School of International Studies of Peking University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1988. He has taught in University of Vermont, Cornell University, University of California at San Diego, University of Sydney in Australia as well as Peking University. He was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution between 1985 and 1986, a visiting professor at the University of Vienna in 1997 and a fellow at the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in 2001 and 2002. He is Vice President of the Chinese American Studies Association. He is also a member of Standing Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and a member of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the China Democratic League. He is serving on the editorial board of several international academic journals. He has published extensively on U.S.-China relations, relations between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, Chinese foreign policy and Chinese politics._

[https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/jia- qingguo](https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/jia-qingguo)

The CPPCC seems to fill a border role between quasi-goverenmental and the Real Deal:

 _The role that CPPCC plays in the Chinese government is stated in the preamble of the PRC Constitution. In practice, its role and powers are somewhat analogous to an advisory legislative upper house and there have been occasional proposals to formalise this role in the PRC Constitution._

 _The Communist Party of China and the aligned "democratic parties" participate in the CPPCC. Besides political parties, CPPCC also invites of representatives from various sectors of society._

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_People's_Political_C...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_People's_Political_Consultative_Conference)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Could this turn into into a cold-war-like exchange of pleasantries?

<comment><USER25> Isn't that what it already is?

<comment><USER24> Well, the cold war was much more severe. I meant to ask "Could this last 50 years, involve many proxy battles and grow to a cold-war-scale political tension?".

<comment><USER26> There's been a frozen conflict on the peninsula since the Korean War ended. The NK artillery aimed at Seoul have been deterring another one since then. The deterrence is now at least partly mutually nuclear, which is a difference, but we have been unwilling to fight another war on the peninsula for decades because of the unavoidable civilian casualties.

As to proxy battles, NK is not a super power like the Soviets were. They can't fight proxy wars. But they can shell ROK islands, sunk ROK ships, make threats, stage provocations across the DMZ, all of which they've done before.

<comment><USER27> Indeed, it is a frozen conflict. There is only an armistice, a cease-fire agreement, and no actual treaty. Combat has ended, but the Korean War hasn't actually reached a resolution.

I'm not so sure we can call much of anything much of a battle since the armistice, though there have been numerous accusations of violating the agreement and there have been some deaths since the armistice agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There are concentration camps in NK. What could be worse?

<comment><USER23> Glowing concentration camps, in NK, and elsewhere.

<comment><USER28> ?

<comment><USER23> !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is going to fizzle just like all the previous scary saber-rattling (Iran, Ukraine, etc etc), though I must admit the production on this one is 'top notch', what with missiles allegedly flying over Japan (anyone have a satellite image of those things actually going over Japan?).

You realize North Korea can't take a dump without China saying so, right? I'm not sure what is China's angle on this but for starters I'm guessing to make the US look like the aggressive buffoon (again) and 'at the last moment' Russia and/or China will solve things diplomatically. It's possible China got tired of having a PR nightmare on their backyard and want that cleaned up.

Edit: Worldwide condemnation and sanctions could be the first steps to a Chinese-controlled change in management over at Pyongyang, hopefully one with a more open model.

<comment><USER26> Kim Jong Nam, Un's half brother, was assassinated with VX nerve agent. He was exiled to Macau where he was protected by the Chinese government, and speculated to be kept around by the Chinese as a potential puppet leader if they decided to remove Kim Jong Un. Because he was Kim Jong Il's eldest son, he might be an acceptable leader- the juche ideology claims blood descent from gods or something, and he is in the royal lineage.

How likely is it that China approved the assassination, really?

<comment><USER29> A very good point. Following that train of thought I would usually look at 'who benefits' and be content with thinking some Western country would have been responsable but the assassination method was just very atypical.</comment></comment></comment>