Classes for all the things? - <AUTHOR> http://denibertovic.com/post/classes-for-all-the-things/

<comment><USER2> This article illustrates one of the many ways by which software becomes unjustifiably complex.

Firstly, there is nothing about the problem that calls for object-orientation. As the author realizes, the classes in the class-based implementation are non- contributing baggage.

All the problem description actually calls for is three functions and a conditional clause. The implementation using functions presented here, however, is considerably more complicated than that, possibly because the author chose (deliberately or not) to attempt to mirror the form of the class- using solution.

This code was written for illustrative purposes, but the same sort of thing happens in real-world programming when people make a-priori decisions about the style of a solution, rather than be guided by the requirement. Having an preference for 'sophisticated' styles exacerbates the problem.

A common justification for this sort of complexity is that it makes the code more reusable, and in some cases it is justified. Whenever using that justification, however, one should consider how much simplification is actually achieved, and whether its reuse is likely, and weigh that against the immediate costs of the extra complexity.

Another justification is that it promotes correct use, and again this is sometimes justified. Note, however, that neither of solutions enforce one of the few usage rules of the example: that the normalization function should be applied before the calculation. Anyone creating his own concrete derivation from AbstractCalc has to remember to call the normalization function, and gets no warning if he fails to do so.

<comment><USER3> "A common justification for this sort of complexity is that it makes the code more reusable, and in some cases it is justified."

And as you note, sometimes it's not justified.

And sometimes, the attempt itself either fails or reusability is reduced. An example would be a method or function whose primary concern is a calculation or decision, to which you add the use of that calculation (printing, logging, painting a screen, blowing a horn). Now you can never calculate that decision without _also_ printing, loggging, painting or blowing. You'd made it _less_ reusable.

A technique does not ensure its advertised benefit.</comment></comment>


PHP's hidden strength - <AUTHOR> http://rc3.org/2012/06/30/phps-hidden-strength/

<comment><USER2> I'm meaning to check out Haxe, which is a metalanguage that includes PHP[1] as a compile target. Strict typing and object oriented approach, plus using the same language to target client-side web and native code.

[1] <http://haxe.org/doc/targets/php></comment>


Nudge and Coach App Connects Health Data to a Real-Life Coach - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/nudge-coach-app-connects-health-data-to-a-real-life-coach/

<comment><USER2> Cool idea, I could see some companies paying for a group package for their employees. If health insurance discounts for fitness tracking become commonplace, I could see that taking off even moreso.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi! CTO of Nudge here! If anyone has any questions, comments, things we could be doing better - we'd love to hear it!

<comment><USER3> How's the startup scene in Richmond?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty great! And rapidly growing - lots of new coworking spaces, VC's, incubators, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I made a free service to crowdsource feedback on GitHub commits - <AUTHOR> https://moreeyesplz.com <comment><AUTHOR> Some context: I started learning to code earlier this year and this is the first thing I've shipped. My husband helped with the back-end, and I worked on the front-end.</comment>


How close are we to truly photorealistic, real-time games? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/02/how-close-are-we-to-truly-photorealistic-real-time-games.ars <comment><USER2> I think that the word "photorealistic" should be considered in a more philosophical way.

The goal of games is to create an immersive and convincing environment but that does NOT necessarily mean that it would (or should) be indistinguishable from what a camera/eyeball would see if the environment were "real".

If you talk with computer game artists, you will find out that they deliberately manipulate features, textures, geometry, distances, and colors in a way that is decidedly different from what would exist in reality. The purpose of this, ironically, is to make the environment more convincing (real- looking) to the player when the game is on. It is all about perception.

I think that by looking at what is happening with computer animated films, one can get an idea of what will happen soon with computer games. It will certainly be possible to render an image at high fps such that it simulates with stunning accuracy what would appear on a CCD sensor if a camera were placed in a "real" scene. But then there will be deeper problems. Instead of worrying about the nitty-gritty of ray-tracing fidelity, game makers will be concerned with the same problems that photographers and filmmakers worry about: lighting, focus, focal length, lenses, scene layout. And then there are the well-known problems of "uncanniness" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley>).

In other words, when you watch a great scene in a film with actors, it looks "realistic", but that "photoreality" is actually a very careful and deliberate fabrication-- it is not real.

</comment><comment><USER3> One way the circumvent the need for 5000 teraflops mentioned in the article is to exploit the fact that our eye is only capable of seeing a relatively small area in great detail at any given instant. Per viewer, we only need to finely render a tiny bit of the scene. This of course precludes the same level of realism on a shared screen, but I suspect that viewer-specific devices (e.g. [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=virtual- rea...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=virtual-reality- contact-l) ) will become the norm as we move further towards virtual reality.

<comment><USER4> I doubt that would work. A system like that would have to be able to predict where saccadic land. Otherwise, you would, for a short time after every saccade, look at a part of the screen that is low in detail. Short saccades take about 20ms. So, if the graphics pipeline has higher latency, it would mean that we would have to be able to predict saccades.

I am not familiar Witt the date of the art here, but I do not think that is possible.

<comment><USER5> Just 60 FPS = 17ms per frame. Theres lag with the display response, graphics pipeline, and detecting eye movements, but it doesn't seem unreasonable for future tech.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. To elaborate:

 _Saccades to an unexpected stimulus normally take about 200 milliseconds (ms) to initiate, and then last from about 20–200 ms, depending on their amplitude (20–30 ms is typical in language reading)._

Saccades of 20ms in duration are ones that are very near to the current center of focus (e.g. moving to the next chunk of letters while reading the words of this sentence). This just means that detailed rendering needs to extend to a slightly larger radius, but this is still significantly cheaper to render than an field of view. For larger jumps there is ~200ms during which the computer can attempt to predict the final destination of the saccade, and thus begin to do some preemptive computations. Once the saccade lands at the new location, assuming a rendering speed of 100fps, there would be at most 10ms before the high-res version kicked in, but again, with some degree of preemptive/predictive computation, perhaps a slightly better version could be available immediately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> VERY FAR I think.

Take Transformers 3 for example: "It took 288 hours PER FRAME to render the Driller along with the photo-real CG building that includes all those reflections in its glass."

Less complicated scenes in Pixar films take hours to render just ONE frame, which is why they do it using thousands of powerful computers at render farms working together.

And even then, you can tell the scene is CG.

Maybe in 50 years when we all have the power of a render farm in our graphics cards we'll be able to, but even then. It's just not worth the cost of development. Storing massive textures like that would require an insane amount of hard drive space. Creating textures like, physics engines, character models, worlds, lighting, etc... would exponentially multiply the cost of cost of game development to a point that it's just not worth it.

Is it possible? YES. Is it feasible? NO. Why? Because being able to render a photo-realistic scene with humans in it means being able to develop a game with photo-realistic scenes without the studio going bankrupt.

<comment><USER7> > 288 hours PER FRAME

So it took close to a year to render each second on-screen. I do not believe this.

<comment><USER8> 288 cpu hours.

Divide that by a large number of CPUs.

Most rendering is very parallelizable.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that's a day on a 12-core system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _How close are we to truly photorealistic, real-time games?_

Who cares? Does anyone really want that?

Players don't come back again and again to games like WoW or Farmville because of the graphics.

There's an argument to be made that obsession with higher and higher degrees of pixel-slinging has crippled the triple-A games market, leaving real invention and creativity (and ironically enough, the truly staggering hits, in terms of P/E) to the indie scene.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you're looking for a cutting edge whitepaper on this stuff check this out: [http://maverick.inria.fr/Publications/2011/Cra11/CCrassinThe...](http://maverick.inria.fr/Publications/2011/Cra11/CCrassinThesis_EN_Web.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> IMO, the hard part isn't rendering enough polygons to be photorealistic.

It's crossing the uncanny valley of human facial expressions, so they look natural rather than creepy.

</comment><comment><USER13> > While this scene from Crysis 2 looks pretty good, in a few decades it's > going to look like outdated crap.

Man, in few decades, you hit a button, which blocks your short-term memory and connects your brain to a game simulation that you will consider a reality, not knowing (and not even pondering) how you got there. Real shit™.

<comment><USER14> A Matrix-like scenario seems pretty possible to me. Except that we humans do this voluntarily(No machine threat) because the world will be in a sad state? Something along those lines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Watch some animated or entirely CG movies. They look nothing but real life, but feel far more real than any video game. This isn't due to short-comings in the visual quality of games. It's the believability of the physics of the video game world and the behavior of its inhabitants.

Play any 3D video game on the market and it's almost guaranteed that you'll see blatantly unphysical things happening. In most games, your own character will move in ways such that parts of his body and clothing appear to magically pass through each other without interaction! Run up to a wall and you'll either be stopped by an invisible force or parts of you will go into the wall like it was nothing, or both! Jumping and running and fatigue are almost never even remotely realistic.

As bad as physics are, the behavior of the other creatures and beings you encounter is usually much worse! Even the best RPG's have dialogue and interaction that would be absolutely baffling and weird if encountered in any other setting. Here's a humorous video most Skyrim fans out there have already seen that illustrates the problem nicely.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEMD28MMtNg>

The next major leap in video game fidelity is not going to be graphics. Quite frankly, they're good enough now that you can suspend disbelief. It's the way things move, interact, and how game creatures behave that really needs to improve. Yes, in ten years Crysis is going to seem hilariously bad, but it won't primarily be because of how a static screenshot looks. In fact, I bet in ten years you'll be able to look at a screenshot from Crysis and say, "Gee, that looks pretty good actually!", but when you try to play the game it will feel very primitive.

In the near future I think we're going to see games devoting a lot more processing power to simulating the physics of the environment. We're going to see greatly improved motion capture technology for video game actors bringing much more realistic facial expressions to video game characters. The most difficult task ahead is getting video game creatures and character to behave realistically when they're _not_ reading from a script. That's going to be much harder and will likely take much longer than a decade to perfect.

Incidentally, with video games taking increasingly large amounts of money to develop and now being viewed as a form of art, I wonder if more attention will be made to not just preserving them for the future, but making them upgradeable to utilize the future's technology. e.g. Already we're seeing modding communities springing up to improve various aspects of obsolete games years or even decades after their developers abandoned them. What would happen if video game companies started planning for future re-releases? i.e. Spend some extra time when coding games such that people ten years in the future can easily rip out an out-dated graphics engine or AI behavior module, replace it with something more modern, and then re-release the game for another hit of profit.

This would be, for video games, similar to the advent of home video. Before home video came along, old movies were trash in a film canister as far as the producers were concerned. Most movies, once they'd had their theatrical run, were done making money. Now movies that are a hundred years old can make people money! People do currently play old video games, but on a relatively small scale since the difference between Pong and Skyrim is a _lot_ bigger than the difference between "Battleship Potemkin" and "Inception". When you look at all the wonderful design, art, and acting that goes into a game these days, it seems like an incredible shame that the current state of video game physics should render the whole works primitive inside of ten years. I think the economics of the video game business have reached the point where these assets are too expensive to just throw away on the video game equivalent of a "theatrical run". I think companies are going to start saving stories, performances, artwork, etc. and then release new versions of games in a decade or two.

</comment><comment><USER16> Pretty close actually. The easy part is the hardware and basic software. In 10 or 20 years a long list of technological innovations and cummulative advances will put more than enough processing power on people's desktops, bringing advanced rendering techniques like radiosity and ray tracing into the realm of real-time rendering with commodity resources.

But that's not that the hard, or interesting part. The hard parts will be making content and simulating physics convincingly. It is already hugely expensive to have artists painstakingly recreate textures and models for 3d environments, how much more difficult will it be to do so at higher levels of fidelity? Obviously we need some pretty significant tooling breakthroughs to make this problem even remotely tractable. The physics problem is even harder. It's a lot easier to fake it and just cram things into acepted game mechanics (invisible walls, imovable and indestructable objects, etc.) than to perform robust simulations. Physics may easily require more computing power than rendering.

But a simple immersive photo-realistic virtual 3d world is but a tiny corner of the implications of such technology. Think about augmented reality, for example, integrating smart phone functionality into the world around you convincingly using transparent displays. Or using VR goggles that reproduce images of the real world with overlayed data. Seemlessly integrating infrared or radar data, for example.

Imagine playing a game of cops and robbers except with enhancements that merge it with a video game. Or simply imagine the world being enhanced in a seamless and subtle way with computer data, like a hud but far more sophisticated. Imagine if every single person in the world was not a stranger to you, if you could instantly know their name, their job, their public history, etc. How does that impact society, friendships, business, government, war, etc. The implications are both broad and deep.

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's a nice, short blog article on the subject

<http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2012/01/games-vs-film.html>

"The industry status quo is to push ultra high display resolution, ultra high texture resolution, and ultra sharpness. IMO a more interesting next- generation metric is can an engine on a ultra-highend PC rendering at 720p look as real as a DVD quality movie? Note, high end PC at 720p can have upwards of a few 1000's of texture fetches and upwards of 100,000 flops per pixel per frame at 720p at 30Hz."

</comment><comment><USER18> We won't have photorealistic game for a long time because how way our GPU and 3D graphics works. With a pipeline architecture, every single object inside a game is rendered individually. Things like shadows and reflections in games are all "gimmicks" or "Tricks" to make it seem like shadows and reflections. Until our computational power increase to a point where we can do massive ray tracing in real time, we won't have a truly photorealistic games.

</comment><comment><USER19> Would it be unreasonable to want all that, but also in stereo?

<comment><USER3> Only twice as unreasonable :)</comment></comment>


When Gas Becomes Cheaper, Americans Buy More Expensive Gas - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/upshot/when-gas-becomes-cheaper-americans-buy-more-expensive-gas.html <comment><USER2> I have a psychological model for people buying premium gas when they don't need it, that fits in with the demand for it being quite price-elastic.

Most people don't understand cars very well, but just about everyone understands that they are complicated and they need maintenance. So there's always an anxiety that the car is going to break. I think the way we deal with limited agency in an uncertain environment is to just "do what we can". So when there's an unexpected windfall at the pump (cheap gas), the maintenance- anxiety heuristic says "apply it to maintenance" and people buy premium gas. Because that's good for the car, right? And now they've "done something", so the anxiety is reduced.

Of course, it doesn't actually have any mechanical benefits, but this isn't a mechanical issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> News flash: use the octane rating your automobile requires. (period)

Higher octane is for high compression engines. It's a waste of money to use in in most cars.

<comment><USER4> You can even use a lower octane than recommended since modern cars with computers can compensate.

<comment><USER5> You're one flaky knock sensor away from a very expensive repair _if_ your car has a knock sensor. Knocking, aka uncontrolled (usually premature) detonation can be detected but by then it has already happened and with aluminum pistons it doesn't take much to blow a hole in them depending on when in the cycle the fuel detonates. The higher the compression ratio of the engine the earlier in the cycle this would happen the bigger the chance of a very expensive repair (if not a write-off...).

Don't use a lower octane than what your manufacturer recommends, that compensation is there as a safety precaution, not as a means to allow you to shift the standard octane your engine really needs.

Note that running your engine on fuel with lower octane number than what your manufacturer recommends is also a way to void your warranty (and since the damage is quite specific and the evidence is right in your tank there is a very good chance that will kick in).

<comment><USER6> This is true, but in practice you are one flaky knock sensor _and a lead foot_ away, because detonation really is only an issue at high power levels. I'd wager most people don't really ever go full throttle and if they do, for a few seconds at most, so I suspect the potential for damage is not that great.

If you _habitually_ floor it, though, then yes.

<comment><USER5> That's only partially correct. If your engine 'knocks' regularly you're stressing it in a way that is detrimental to the engine's life-span. If you do it whilst under high power then the risk of damage increases, but doing it over a longer period at lower power level is _just_ as damaging (due to the repeated stressing of the engine materials, specifically the piston heads, the cylinder walls, the gasket material and the valves as well as the head).

An engine that knocks regularly will die, no matter what the power levels at which it takes place simply because it isn't designed to deal with that stress on a regular basis, engines are designed with some leeway but not so much margin that they could take such abuse and still manage the same life-span they'd achieve with normal use.

<comment><USER6> You might be right.

My thinking was this: peak cylinder pressure basically is proportional to torque, so at lower power levels cylinder pressure is overall lower. Even if the engine knocks, which will cause a spike in cylinder pressure, it starts from a much lower baseline, and there's also much less air/fuel mixture in there. Thus peak cylinder pressure for a knocking engine at low torque may not be much larger than that of a non-knocking engine at full power. But this is just speculation on my part, I don't have quantitative data.

It's also possible that it is the sharp pressure spikes that do the damage rather than the overall pressure level, in which case what I'm saying would be less applicable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if these folks are buying higher octane gas than their car needs when gas is cheap, or buying lower octane gas than their car needs when gas is pricey.

<comment><USER8> I drive a car that only requires 87. When gas got down to $2.00/gal, I tried 93 for a couple tanks in a row, just to see what it did for mileage/power. The result: a 4Runner is a big, brick-shaped SUV and will drive like a big, brick- shaped SUV no matter what gas is in it. I switched back to 87.

<comment><USER9> Lower octane fuel actually has more energy per volume, so if your car's compression is low enough for 87, using 93 just gives you less power and worse efficiency.

<comment><USER10> Also can slowly wreck your engine since it burns hotter.

Use the octane your car was designed for!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For my cars I don't care since they go through the gas so quickly. For lawnmowers and the boat, I only buy the more expensive ethanol free gas.

<comment><USER12> My father runs a commercial landscaping business. The ethanol laced fuel wreaks havoc on his fleet of 2 cycle engines.

<comment><USER13> He hasn't switched to natural gas mowers yet? I've seen them everywhere lately.

<comment><USER12> Hum, I might suggest that. Primarily I'm talking about things like leaf blowers, weed eaters, etc.

<comment><USER13> I'd highly recommend they look at electric versions of those devices when possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In modern filling stations the pump is able to mix the fuel so tanks for each individual octane are not necessary.

In older filling stations with a single tank, they solve this by selling "premium" to everybody, whether or not you select 87 or 92.

Gasoline is usually a loss-leader for filling stations to bring people into the store, so I suppose it's a negligible impact on margins.

<comment><USER15> I've been wondering how much "pay-at-the-pump" card machines affect sales of incidentals. If a fraction of customers are going inside and being exposed to the snacks, how's that work out?

<comment><USER5> Badly. Gas stations make a considerable portion of their profits from the store. If a station does not make enough money on the store it is one bad season away from being converted to fully automated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Doesn't the higher octane gas also have various additives that claim to make your engine run smoother etc.? I have tried that last time when regular gas was $1.98 and it did seem to make a difference on a long trip - engine felt smoother even when I had forgotten that I had fueled it with the higher octane one.

<comment><USER17> Those are called addpacks, they are unrelated to the octane level. Chevron Techron, Shell V-Power, etc.

<comment><USER18> Where in the supply chain are they added?

Regionally, virtually all petrol (gasoline) for _all_ fuel companies comes from the same refinery, with the same treatment.

<comment><USER17> At the station. This is what differentiates branded gas stations as most aren't even owned by the integrated majors anymore and they aren't required to buy gasoline from their respective brand parent.

<comment><USER18> Thanks. Yeah, as I commented elsewhere, within regional markets, most fuel is sourced from the same refinery, and is effectively identical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Every car I've ever owned, I've done the experiment and compared $/mile (dollars per mile, not per gallon) on premium and regular. Every one of my cars has had a noticeably lower cost per mile on premium compared to regular (I'd love to quote the number but it's been around 10 years since I ran the rest on my current car so all I recall is the outcome). I've encouraged several friends and family members to run the same experiment, and all reported the same result. Significantly newer cars with octane sensors might change this result, but I suspect it holds for most of the used cars on the market out there, so for at least some of us the more "expensive" gas is actually the cheaper gas.

</comment><comment><USER20> I buy the gas that my car recommends. In my people hauler(we've 7 in the family) I run 87 octane at the cheapest price feasible. In my commuter car(2.0 turbo) it wants e85 or 91 octane. Texas sells 89 or 93 octane so I buy 93, with an occasional 89. When I want to get 10% more horsepower for 2/3rds the fuel economy I buy E85. Price doesn't have any effect on what I purchase. I think it only would come into play if regular was 1.85 and premium was 4.00.

</comment><comment><USER21> This describes nobody I know. For my part, I dollar-cost average my gas purchases. I buy a fixed dollar amount regardless of the price. That way I automatically buy more when it's cheaper and less when it's expensive.

I do buy premium for my small engines (lawn mower, etc) because (at least in my area) it's less likely to have ethanol added which is bad for most small engines.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if this is purely a result of calling the high-octane gas "premium" or "super" or whatever. If it was just called "87" and "91", where one doesn't sound obviously better and more exclusive than the other, I wonder if the effect would be the same.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow. I don't think it would ever cross my mind to by higher grade gas, perhaps at least until it was a literally negligible percentage of income. But even then...

Who are these people?

<comment><USER23> Germany somewhat recently added a required E10 fuel mix (10% ethanol), cheaper than normal super, and uptake has been slower than expected (certainly going by compatible cars).

A lot of people, as it turns out, are not particularly bright.

(Now, ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline; right now the gap is 2 cents between E10 and E5, so you might make the calculation if you actually get more energy per buck from E5. It's another story for fuel consumption, though.)

<comment><USER24> E10 fuel is about 3% [1] less efficient than more pure gasoline, and much harder on car engines, even ones designed for it (unsourced, but so my gearhead friends have told me)

So, no, maybe consumers are making the smart choice.

[1] [http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=27&t=10](http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=27&t=10)

<comment><USER23> I've mentioned the _theoretical_ energy density, and notice that this is what the EIA uses to derive the 3% efficiency loss. This is a highly theoretical value; combustion engines are very complex beasts and theoretical energy density is a poor predictor of their efficiency, but what is known is that higher octane ratings are beneficial for fuel efficiency. Since ethanol has a high (>=100) octane rating, it might actually improve fuel consumption despite being less energy dense.

Also, E15 and higher fuel blends have been in widespread use in the US for 10+ years now. I don't think car engines die quicker in the US.

<comment><USER25> [http://feerc.ornl.gov/pdfs/pub_int_blends_rpt1_updated.pdf](http://feerc.ornl.gov/pdfs/pub_int_blends_rpt1_updated.pdf)

Here are some fairly extensive test cycles applied to real-world engines, which found that the effect closely mirrors the theoretical reduction in energy density (3-4% for E10, ~7% for E20).

Higher octane ratings are not generally beneficial for fuel efficiency unless the engine has been designed for them (compression ratio, cam profile, timing, tune). Dropping higher-octane fuel into an engine designed for a lower-octane fuel will generally not affect economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> it seems like this could also be explained by people being more willing to drive luxury/sports cars when prices for gas are cheaper?

running the incorrect octane is at a minimum bad for your mileage and can also be damaging to your engine...

</comment><comment><USER27> articles like these make me feel like a pawn in a JP Morgan Chase's (ie big banks) little game.

</comment><comment><USER28> The author is a moron. Buying more gas when gas becomes cheaper is exactly what economic theory predicts.</comment>


Kelly Slater's New Man Made Wave Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.surfermag.com/features/best-wave-pool-ever/#7iT5elI1rk58Z1c9.97 <comment><USER2> That is incredible -- you could make surfing a "thing" anywhere away from the coast. I'm curious how they did it, and how it differs from traditional wave pools... maybe a better understanding / implementation of the physics that make a good curl?

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, it's amazing, would love to know what the tech is behind it, it seems super secretive. Here's a link to his company who built it: [http://kswaveco.com/](http://kswaveco.com/) \- no details unfortunately.

<comment><USER2> I wonder if he had Jack Johnson's pockets behind it...? (they're neighbors and long-time boys).

It's obvious enough that the normal wave pool flapper / "pump-and-dump" approach doesn't give you a tube. I always kind of intuitively thought it was wind-related, but reflecting on it that doesn't really make sense. Maybe pushing the water out with some sort of cork-screwing instead of a straight- line push? Who knows... anyway, I feel like they may stumbled onto a goldmine. Awesome indoor winter surfing, anyone?</comment></comment></comment>


They're Watching. And They Can Bring You Down. - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/3645ac3c-e32b-11e0-bb55-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Yz2vGYP5

<comment><USER2> One of the stranger attempts to tie crime to videogames:

 _Like many other hacktivists, Gonlag was an avid player of "first-person shooter" games, the protagonist in his own adventures. Digitally attacking MasterCard and Visa elevated that engagement to the real world, a literal dream come true._

Did he also, perhaps, read novels featuring first-person narrators?

</comment><comment><USER3> Of all the things out there _this_ is what I am supposed to be scared about?

Pluueeaase! I am far more concerned about governments operating in the dark and private enterprises supporting governments in hiding their actions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Now I know where the Guy Fawkes mask idea came from:

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/>

<comment><USER5> Given that the practice originated with 4chan users, I think the Epic Fail Guy meme is more likely for a source.

<comment><USER4> I believe that was the drawing and not the actual mask.

Link, please?

<comment><USER6> <http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/epic-fail-guy>

<comment><USER4> V for Vendetta came out in March, 2006. The above link states the meme came about in late 2006.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was a pretty good article and I like that it was written with a level of candor that is fair to both sides and factually telling the information. However, it was very long and I stopped reading half way through.</comment>


Predicting and controlling NetHack's randomness - <AUTHOR> http://taeb-nethack.blogspot.com/2009/03/predicting-and-controlling-nethacks.html <comment><USER2> _You might wonder why we use PRNGs at all; why not use a truly random source for every number? Unfortunately, a computer's pool of truly random numbers is very limited; it has to build up by measuring minute temperature changes or internal timing variations. NetHack, especially being played by fifty people on a public server, would keep that pool empty and harm the game's playability._

Surely there's a more practical solution right here: Seed based on a variable that's a component of the actions of all the users of the server in the last 24 hours. Then, in order to correctly guess the new seed, the hacker would have to be the only person the server for the whole day.

Obviously, alter "24 hours" to be whatever period is long enough to ensure that there will be more than one user on active the server during that period.

That would still not make it leakproof, but would render it considerably harder to hack the PRNG. For many practical situations, making something _uncrackable_ is not necessary. It is enough to make cracking it an insanely difficult proposition. Until we find ourselves faced with science-fiction-like super-intelligences (such as this one: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep> ) willing to use infinite intellectual resources to break into the system, making something really, really hard to crack is enough.

<comment><USER3> "nethack.alt.org has patched the initial seed calculation, but as nethacker Adeon has demonstrated, it's still feasible to figure out the game's seed by observing random effects."

To me the article reads as though this is more than just an issue with poor seeding. If you can figure out the initial seed by observing events then the PRNG itself needs to be replaced.

The article suggests reseeding the PRNG after x random numbers have been generated and to me that sounds like a fairly good solution. It has certainly be the basis of other PRNGs: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortuna_(PRNG)>

<comment><USER2> That is only valid if the new seed is reasonably random and unguessable. Hence the idea of basing that new seed on server activity.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. However often you reseed the generator you need it to be unguessable.

Server activity would be a good source of entropy with the caveat, as you point out, that you need to be sure that there is more activity on the server than just the person receiving the random number. If server activity is the only source you use though you're vulnerable to some attacks. If an attacker can force your server to reboot or can utilise all available connections, locking anyone else out, then they could control all the server activity you're relying on.

The solution is simply to use multiple sources. Server activity plus any other sources of entropy you have available on the server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a pretty epic exploit, killing yourself on DL1 by kicking Wands of Wishing is a great way to show off.

I've been playing for a decade, but I only started ascending this year. Just a couple days ago I had a most pointless death -- "Killed by invisible Famine, while helpless (with the Amulet)" -- [http://alt.org/nethack/userdata/blasdelf/dumplog/1235254709....](http://alt.org/nethack/userdata/blasdelf/dumplog/1235254709.nh343.txt)

Nethack is ultimately an object lesson in humility and patience. Past about 1000 turns, _all_ deaths can be avoided without too much trouble, and when you die there's a sinking feeling of "this is totally my fault". You always know exactly what you did wrong, and what you should have done to avoid it. The RNG exists to reward bravery with death.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As an aside, the source code for Nethack is full of some amazing tidbits - moon phase calculations, code to guess plurals....

<comment><USER5> If you want code to pluralize a noun, have a look at activesupport/lib/active_support/inflector.rb in the Rails source code.

It might make an interesting code kata because you have to decide on a way to represent some declarative knowledge in whatever language you decide to code in, like the fact that the plural of "rice" is "rice".

<comment><USER6> But does it compile on an Amiga?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem with seeds based on time in seconds is you only have a few dozen possible seeds, or a few thousand if you don't know when the game started. Make the seed based on more things, like milliseconds, process id, and hostname of the computer.

The second problem is you can't use just any random number generator, you need a crypto-safe one. For example, the "Mersenne Twister" random number generator used by python's random() is fast but it is _not_ crypto-safe. If you can observe a sequence of 1000 or so random numbers, that's enough to predict all the future ones. But there are better random number generators like stream ciphers that you can use if predicting the PRNG is a problem.</comment>


Ask HN: best practices in running a tech startup? - <AUTHOR>

What resources are there for actually running the business of a tech startup?  Checklists, frameworks, advice - whatever.  Is there anything you've found particularly helpful in putting together and keeping together the actual company you're building (as opposed to the product or service you're selling)? <comment><USER2> interesting thought. i'm not sure if i have a specific answer in mind.

i know the venturehacks and asktheVC archives are two resources in particular that have a lot of great information as your startup takes flight.

in terms of a checklist, i'd venture to say every company is different. you'll figure out with time what your personal checklist will be.

can you elaborate anymore?</comment>


Amazon seller fraud example: relisting product with 4.5 rating as different one - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Temperature-Display-Brightness-Simplicity/dp/B07NQ888QK <comment><USER2> I've been frustrated that Amazon is not interested in hearing about product entries which are obviously bogus. They only want to hear about it if you bought the product and got defrauded.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazon must think that it's an alarm clock _and_ a juicer in one.</comment>


Voltaire's Luck (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/luck/voltaires-luck <comment><USER2> Fortunately, we have research grants now ...

</comment><comment><USER3> > There had been a financial crisis in 1719, and France had nearly gone > bankrupt. The bankers were to blame, having devised financial instruments > that magicked debt away, only for it to return multiplied once it was > discovered that the collateral wasn't there.

For real?

<comment><USER4> Parallels to 2008 and the personalities involved:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_\(economist\))</comment></comment>


Pirate Bay down, not connected to the trial. - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-down%E2%80%9A-but-not-out-090302/

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently the pirate bay is down right now. The defense hadn't given their closing arguments yet so it's not connected to the trial at all.

<http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/thepiratebay.org></comment>


Million requests per second with Python - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@squeaky_pl/million-requests-per-second-with-python-95c137af319#.39tr9zrgo <comment><USER2> Looks great on paper, will try it out for sure,

I wonder tough if these optimisation can be made in GO which of go's HttpServer you used (FastHttp is 10 x faster than standard one I heard)

Thanks for your work,

Would you consider build up on this and use it in production or do you switch up to other ideas ?

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13532935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13532935)

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't count that as "had attention", so a repost is ok: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)</comment></comment>


BTables: A fast, compact format for Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@framedio/btables-a-fast-compact-disk-format-for-machine-learning-f719692e2619 <comment><USER3> HDF5 isn't perfect but it does this kind of job pretty well. The C, C++, and HDF5 APIs are definitely not fun to use, but there are wonderful and intuitive APIs available in some languages---I'm thinking of Python's h5py here.

Let me add that the OP's experience that HDF5 files were less space efficient than comparable CSV files suggest that something was grossly amiss in his use of HDF5.

<comment><USER4> (I'm the author of the library) I'm almost certain you're correct - <USER2> (thought) we had compression enabled on our feature builder and never found the root cause, but regardless we're happy with how BTables ended up for the other reasons detailed. For future use cases we'll definitely be re-evaluating HDF5!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The BTables discussion takes me back to memories of my first college computing class (in FORTRAN). We were asked how we might store a sparse matrix in less memory. The solution was exactly the same as BTables. We thought we'd done something novel when the professor pointed out that it had already been implemented in the 60s.

Great ideas never fade. They do get reinvented :).

</comment><comment><USER6> I haven't tried the BTables format, but I agree with their criticism of HDF5. It seems to be an incredibly over-designed format with under-designed APIs.

(Why would I need a directory tree inside a file that only one process can write to anyway? Why wouldn't I just use the filesystem I already have?)

<comment><USER7> > Why would I need a directory tree inside a file that only one process can > write to anyway? > Why wouldn't I just use the filesystem I already have?

If you have multiple "tables" that belong together and you need one table to interpret the data in the other table, wouldn't you want them to be grouped together? If they are separate files on the filesystem there is always the risk of forgetting something when you share the data with somebody.

If you can put all the data of an experiment into one file, I think that is very convenient. After all, you don't have to read the complete HDF5 file if you are interested just in a subset of the data.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if it weren't more practical to just use sqlite file for data like that. I mean, it's not plaintext, but sqlite is available pretty much anywhere and provides convenient interface for data.

<comment><USER7> HDF5 is much better suited for a lot of scientific data sets. How would you store multidimensional data in sqlite? Not everything is a table or matrix. HDF5 also allows you to pick compression filters that are especially suited for the data you have. If you are looking to replace a CSV file, then sqlite is obviously a pragmatic solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's too bad that this is for sparse data only. ML datasets have differing degrees of sparsity, and when the sparsity gets low enough, it's more efficient to use dense matrices, even when there are still missing values.

Also if you have dense data, you can use mmap, which isn't very space efficient but is very fast. I guess it could also be made to be space efficient if you use a filesystem with transparent compression.

<comment><USER10> If you combine mmap with "filesystem with transparent compression", and want the efficiency of mmap, mmap will only see the compressed data.

If you want your mmap to magically see the uncompressed data, your file system will have to do decompress the data, and that doesn't come for free.

I would try and aim for compression in the application, as data size likely will be the bottleneck in reading and writing such files. If your data isn't very sparse, you could delta encode the indices of the non-zero columns, and use some variable-length encoding for it. Compressing each row of deltas may help after the delta encoding (especially if it is reasonably dense, because you expect the deltas to be small).

Once you go down that route, you have sacrificed simplicity, so you might just as well encode your floats, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wondering why they chose row-major storage. I think it's far more common to only care about a subset of columns than a subset of rows.

<comment><USER12> FTA:

"First, we knew we only cared about row-by-row access over the entire file; we do not need things like random row or column reads."

It sounds like they don't care about subsets of _either_ columns or rows, and are looking to optimize table size and time for full table scans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> interesting how it jumps from csv to rewrite stuff without just doing SQL and be done with it. since csv did the job almost good enough, it seem like SQL would just fine and dandy while easier to manage and implement (minutes, literally)

note: after reading a little more I suspect SQL would be faster, in fact.</comment>


Android Jobs to Surpass iPhone Jobs by Year-End - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/07/android-jobs-to-surpass-iphone-jobs-by-year-end-report-finds.php#.TinNIgsXIqs.hackernews <comment><USER2> I find it rather strange that they count Android as one category but break iOS into iPhone, iPad, and ObjectiveC. It'd be nice to know what the _platform_ numbers are.

They're also trying to extrapolate to the end of 2012 (17 months away!), and they're only counting freelancing jobs (which needs to be reflected in the title, OP).

So, in summary: You can derive pretty much nothing of value from these numbers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I put more faith into Indeed's compiled numbers than Freelancer.com's more limited market view.

iPhone beats Android by a bit, but has dropped recently. Blackberry is on a steady, slow growth trend: [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=android%2C+iphone%2C+black...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=android%2C+iphone%2C+blackberry&l=)

HTML5 dwarfs Android and iPhone: [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=android%2C+iphone%2C+black...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=android%2C+iphone%2C+blackberry%2C+HTML+5%2C+windows+desktop&l=)

.Net dwarfs them all: [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=android%2C+iphone%2C+black...](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=android%2C+iphone%2C+blackberry%2C+HTML+5%2C+windows+desktop%2C+.net&l=)

<comment><USER4> I am betting that this is well placed pr, paid for by freelancer.com. I thought I saw an article on the exact same topic several months ago, also featuring freelancer.com.</comment></comment>


Samsung launches $250 Exynos 5-based Arndale community board - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/26/samsung-launches-arndale-community-board/ <comment><USER2> Censored manual for the Exynos 5 SoC: [http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/downloads/supports/Samsung_...](http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/downloads/supports/Samsung_Exynos_5250_User_Manual_Public.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is enormous, this opens up a huge list of possibilities. Bravo Samsung!

</comment><comment><USER4> Why would I want to buy this when the Exynos 5-based Chromebook is the same price and has most of the same functionality and ports?

<comment><USER5> The Chromebook has serial and JTAG?

(honest question)

<comment><USER4> Probably not, though it wouldn't surprise me if it has JTAG internally yet unexposed, since it's on so many ARM boards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Has anyone been able to successfully order one of these? I realize they're not shipping yet, but when trying to signup on the distributor's site to place an order it keeps throwing an error for me...

</comment><comment><USER6> I wanted a raspberry pi with more ooomph... This may do the trick, but it'd need to be about $99 for me to buy it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Now if only you could get Windows RT as an OEM DVD ;)</comment>


New Google PageSpeed - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/?velocity=1

<comment><USER2> Google still reports it's own hosted services as issues, even when they (+1, Analytics, Google Fonts) are the only issues. Plus one is the worst of them though.</comment>


Ask HN: Keep Last X entries per ID in larger DB - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to figure out the best solution for the following:
* Daily importing of ~500+ million rows of data, with ~250 million unique ids. * I need to only keep the latest X entries per unique ID.  Older entries are discarded after X entries for that id has been achieved. * Monthly will read out the entire dataset for processing
X can be anywhere from 1000 to 3000, it is static over the entire DB just depends on as we determine the best setting.  Since I don't access the data more than once a day, or at the end of the month, I would prefer not to pay for storage.  There are over a billion unique id's which I can partition by prefix or ranges.  Each individual entry per ID is fairly small with only an integer and two decimals stored.
What would you recommend as a data store for this?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Have a job queue running lower-priority DB queries. The queue workers select all records for a given ID, then prune off older records above X.

Insert a fresh record immediately, since you know it's recent. Upon successful insert, fire off a queue request to go check on that ID.

<comment><AUTHOR> At 500 million+ records, even a 0.01 second per lookup/update is going to be too slow at that scale even in parallel, unless the DB is able to process in parallel without lock contention extremely quickly.

<comment><USER2> An index on ID should help.

If it doesn't, then set up a DB replica (good idea in any case), do SELECTs on slave, DELETEs on master.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Storage is cheap, analysis is expensive, sounds like you might be optimizing for the wrong variable. The data store of choice will likely depend on you access patterns during analysis.

Flat files is my best guess for your data? HDFS

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed that storage is cheap, unless it's in a live cluster. Right now I keep 100% of the data in Redshift then use window functions to unload the latest X per id. Keeping it in real time I haven't tried but right now the unloading of the full dataset of last X per id takes multiple days on a 6 node cluster.

The analysis at end of month is simply give me 100% of the data set chunked up by ID. All analysis is done outside of the system.

Flat files is my thinking right now with S3 and prefixes per partition, I'm not sure on file format, since one thing is with each day's data being able to process and update existing data quickly. Current thought is to load current day's data to Redshift -> unload sorted by id -> process concurrently. With multiple prefixes on S3 I won't hit the rate limits. My main worry is if read in, loading/parsing each file will take too long to be scalable at 250-500 million unique id's per day. I wanted to check here before going down that route to see if anyone had a different recommendation.

<comment><USER3> Some things I might try...

        1. Hadoop / HDFS / Spark on an ephemeral cluster with disk snapshots
        2. Group 1M ID's into a single file
        3. If analysis is once a month, save daily then prep data right before analysis.
        4. Consider using Cassandra database
        5. Rent a big machine where the data can fit into memory

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> BigQuery is probably the best price/effort ratio for this.</comment>


What is the Freemium Potential of Your Startup? - <AUTHOR> http://www.freemium.org/freemium/freemium-potential/

<comment><USER2> They didn't talk about Frremium on iPhone apps. In my opinion, that's a classic freemium model to pull in the crowd by the free app, and later sell the (pro) paid app. AdMob reported that, this model really works to get traction to your paid app.</comment>


How Secure Is Your Password - <AUTHOR> http://www.howsecureismypassword.net/

<comment><USER2> Typing your passwords into a third-party's site is not a smart thing to do. At the very least it will be added to a rainbow table, instantly becoming less secure.

<comment><AUTHOR> its js, not sent to server... did check that first ;).

(i'm not affiliated with the site at all btw)</comment></comment>


The FBI 'is manufacturing terrorism cases' on a greater scale than ever before - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-is-manufacturing-terrorism-cases-2016-6/ <comment><USER2> This brings to mind the classic example of "rat hunting". A hundred years ago, the French Government wanted to get rid of the rats plaguing Hanoi, so they offered a bounty for each rat killed. To collect the bounty, the (presumably) dead rat's tail was turned in as proof. As might be expected, the expected then happened:

 _Appealing to both civic duty and to the pocketbook, a one-cent bounty was paid for each rat tail brought to the authorities (it was decided that the handing in of an entire rat corpse would create too much of a burden for the already taxed municipal health authorities). Unfortunately, this scheme backfired. Despite initial apparent success, the authorities soon discovered that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. As soon the municipal administrators publicized the reward program, Vietnamese residents began to bring in thousands of tails._

 _While many desk-bound administrators delighted in the numbers of apparently eliminated rats, more alert officials in the field began to notice a disturbing development. There were frequent sightings of rats without tails going about their business in the city streets. After some perplexity, the authorities realized that less-than-honest but quite resourceful characters were catching rats, but merely cutting off the tails and letting the still- living pests go free (perhaps to breed and produce more valuable tails)._

 _Later, things became even more serious as health inspectors discovered a disturbing development in the suburbs of Hanoi. These officials found that more enterprising but equally deceptive individuals were actually raising rats to collect the bounty. One can only imagine the frustration of the municipal authorities, who realized that their best efforts at dératisation had actually increased the rodent population by indirectly encouraging rat-farming. Evidently, this was not what the French had in mind when they encouraged capitalist development and the entrepreneurial spirit in Vietnam. Faced with such fraudulent schemes, the colonial regime scrapped the rat bounty program._

[http://www.freakonomics.com/media/vannrathunt.pdf](http://www.freakonomics.com/media/vannrathunt.pdf)

If an organization is judged by how many "terrorists" they arrest, one should not be surprised if that organization comes up with a counterproductive means of increasing the number of terrorists arrested.

<comment><USER3> There is actually a name for this. The cobra effect:

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

At the time of British rule of colonial India, cobras where a huge problem and rewards for catching cobras resulted in the locals breeding them instead.

<comment><USER4> This is weird. Humans hunt animals to extinction all the time when have economic value. Look what's happening to elephants or rhinos in Africa.

Yet creating an artificial value to killing them isn't enough? Suddenly humans come up with creative ways of breeding them artificially?

Perhaps these aren't mutually exclusive. Maybe the bounty program worked to reduce the population to the point that farming was more viable. Maybe the bounty was too high, and if they reduced it farming wouldn't be economical anymore.

Perhaps a solution would be to have the bounty in short random bursts. The bounty program only lasts for 1 year, so no one has time to start farms and breed them. Or just investigate the people bringing in lots of cobras, and see if they have a big cobra pit next to their house.

I am very curious about these systems because it seems like a very effective method of eliminating invasive species. Australia is being overrun with cane toads, and my local state is complaining about Asian carp and zebra mussels.

Yet no one is willing to put up money to see if the market can find an efficient solution to cull the population. Partially because of the infamous stories posted above about how these programs create bad incentives. But I believe they could be minimized. And I can't imagine anyone breeding asian carp or cane toads given how prevalent they are in the wild now.

<comment><USER5> > artificial value to killing them

Another way to think about it is an artificial value to keeping the population going. All the animals will eventually die yielding a reward, but if you can keep a population going, the reward will keep coming.

The "solution" for countries who wanted to remove invasive species is to embrace pretty heavy handed comprehensive enforcement. (See [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/canada-declares- wa...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/canada-declares-war-on- rats/))

<comment><USER4> My point is that only applies once the bounty has already worked to reduce the population to a low enough level. After that you can end the bounty and try other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "These people are five steps away from being a danger to the United States."

I'd say they are one step away. They have the motive and opportunity but they lack the means.

It seems to me there's a element of 'scale' in an entrapment defense. The cop tail-gated me so I sped up and then got ticketed for speeding -- perhaps I was entrapped to speed. It's not so hard to push someone over the edge to commit relatively minor offenses. But can you really entrap someone into launching a surface-to-surface missile at a air base? You can certainly _coerce_ someone into that by threatening their life or their family, but that's not entrapment.

I don't see how providing any amount of weapons or money or fake explosives could entrap someone into being a jihadist.

Now, TFA raises the question of mental illness. I think if they are so mentally ill that they went along with the plot without understanding what they were doing, then they are either not competent to stand trial, or insane enough to try it as a defense.

I think it's a very low ROI approach for the FBI and mostly they are wasting their time providing the means for "nobody-wannabe-terrorists" to become actual terrorists, but my understanding is they record these guys actually pushing the detonator on their fake-bombs and they are ready to die to kill civilians, so I can't say I'm sympathetic.

<comment><USER7> With all the bashing FBI receives they are for the most part operating within the framework of the law.

In some countries just conspiring to commit a terrorist act can lead to a conviction, so in a way you can say that FBI is 'forced' to operate this way to get a conviction for a would be terrorist.

<comment><USER8> I don't think any of the bashing the FBI gets is about suggesting they are breaking the law. Rather, the suggestions are that the law is limitlessly broad and allows nearly anything so it is nearly impossible for them to break the law in the first place (they can, for example, set up entire laboratories dedicated to fabricating evidence and send trained experts who lie on the stand as standard operating procedure with no repercussions).

And given that their powers are so broad and immense, we rely on them acting in good faith and morally (we must, because we have nothing else), so we criticize them when they do not do that.

Preying on mentally ill Muslims and concocting elaborate schemes which exploit their inability to function normally to trick them into "taking part" in (sometimes little more than just 'agreeing to') some sort of plot that doesn't exist and then patting themselves on the back for "getting a terrorist" and locking the mentally ill person in jail for decades is, well, sick, and not a shining example of 'acting morally', so the criticism is well-deserved.

<comment><USER7> That specific case - yes it was a stretch, although this brings a question of a mental health -related detention which is a huge can of worms in and of itself. Also there are no specific details on the mental disease he was allegedly struggling with. Dissolving ppl in acid and burning women refusing to have sex with you is a 'mental disease' in my book which is what isis is doing. Should they be exempt from prosecution?

That said : "Of 508 defendants prosecuted in federal terrorism-related cases in the decade after 9/11, 243 were involved with an FBI informant, while 158 were the targets of sting operations. Of those cases, an informant or FBI undercover operative led 49 defendants in their terrorism plots, similar to the way Osmakac was led in his." So now 49 cases out of 508 were 'led' by the FBI, not clear how many of those had to do with mentally unfit individuals or if Osmakac was the only one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who did _not_ see this coming?

You have FBI beating the Terrorism drum. You have politicians running on being tough on Terrorism. Terrorism is BIG BUSINESS. It makes people rich. It gives the Govt unprecedented POWER of us. How did people _NOT_ see this coming!?

<comment><USER10> Some people did see it coming, and we ignored them. Hell, the politician who pushed those ridiculous TSA body scanners works for the company which made them! Cash rules everything around me, CREAM, get the money, dolla' dolla' bills, y'all.

<comment><USER11> The worse thing is how cash is not a resource, but a standard technology "regulated" by a private institution (that nontheless has the word federal in its name)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is inexcusable. In many of the mass shootings, there's typically someone with mental issues, which you may not expect to properly differentiate between right and wrong.

The FBI is basically seeking these people out, handing them all the weapons and bombs and they need, and then say "see that school over there? Go ahead and lay waste to it. Come on, you'll feel good about it. We'll even give you money to do it!"

This is the danger of having unaccountable authorities that have a profound lack of respect for the rule of law and due process, and think they can do whatever they want to further whatever they think the "mission" is. Eventually _they_ become the enemy of the people and instead of _improving_ public safety, they actively work to undermine it.

If they are so worried about people with mental issues, they should be seeking them out to give them help, not arm them. You'd think that should be common sense. But when civil law enforcement becomes militarized, something like that is anything _but_ common sense.

 _> Karen Greenberg, for example — author of "Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State" — believes that the "tension between security and liberty" that can result from these tactics is a good thing.

> "The amount of money, time and resources that have been put into rethinking > law enforcement since 9/11 has made us safer," she told Business Insider in > an interview. "And now we're sort of trying to figure out where the lines > are."_

I'd like to see some evidence for that. How many mass shootings still happen in the U.S. every year? - "But we don't count _those_ as terrorism!" \- Oh, okay. But you do when it's the government itself that trains these people and encourages them to do these acts against itself?!

<comment><USER13> > This is inexcusable. In many of the mass shootings, there's typically > someone with mental issues, which you may not expect to properly > differentiate between right and wrong.

Of the many mass shootings and terrorist attacks that have occurred over the last decades...

Starting with Columbine: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre)

To Timmothy McVeigh: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh)

To the Beltway Sniper: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks)

To Virginia Tech Shooter: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_shooting)

To the Virginia on-air killing: [http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-34090236](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34090236)

To the Charlestown shooting: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_church_shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_church_shooting)

To the Boston Marathon Bombing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing)

To the Aurora Shooter: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora_shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora_shooting)

Only two of these guys strikes me as "insane", the Virginia Tech shooter and the Aurora Shooter. Everyone else were just assholes. These are just normal people who got stressed out by their peers and then attacked back.

The fact of the matter is, the vast, vast majority of crimes (and even mass- shootings and terrorist attacks) are done by 100% sane people. Assholes for sure, but people who are sound in body and mind.

An insane person rarely has the capacity to plan an attack that will successfully kill people. Seriously. This "mental health" myth needs to die, and people need to realize that NORMAL people are killing others. The big daddy of them all: 9/11 required careful collaboration between four groups of distinct people (four groups, four aircraft. Near simultaneous execution across the country). They had to get pilot training, work together, coordinate an attack at the same time.

Ditto with the Paris and Brussels attacks. This complicated planning and coordination of a large group of people can only happen if all members of the group are mentally stable. It really takes a lot of work to plan a terrorist attack.

The study of "radicalization" says that people become radicalized when they are increasingly isolated from their peers, become stressed to a breaking point to the point where they wish to lash out and attack.

<comment><USER14> Regarding radicalization, it's a term that's only used by talking heads. In security work you assume that everyone is a motivated self-aware bad guy who can find _many_ valid reasons to shoot you. The idea that only simpletons, who go through a "radicalization" process (usually guided by a priest), become "terrorists" is dangerously wrong. In the industry you'd be laughed at for a risk-analysis using that term or even that thought-process.

Many of those killers had a very specific reason for their attacks that was at least as good as our military uses. Not right or wrong, but as well developed and contextually reasonable.

For instance, Timothy McVeigh attacked a military installation because he felt (largely rightly) that they'd illegally and unreasonably conspired to kill his countrymen on trumped up charges. He did the equivalent of bombing an Iraqi military HQ because they'd violated international norms. It's likely that had the initial Waco attack not happened that McVeigh would have had a peaceful life - he wasn't shopping around for targets.

I say this not to forgive him but to explain how suicidally stupid our public discourse on internal dangers is. If we really want to be "safe" we have to realize that these aren't random, unguided, and unskilled, attacks. If we shoot up someone's friends we will get responses. Not from radical crazies, but from sane people who believe they're next.

Because the FBI believes its own rhetoric they're looking for radical-looking people (usually slightly crazy, as a result) and then try to work backwards to the terrorist attack they assume must be cooking in their head. This will never fail to find them funding, but will never make us one iota safer.

The main take-home is that there isn't a special terrorist type that we can find all of, thus making us safe. All of us are potentially terrorists by someone else's definition, French freedom fighters, spies behind Nazi lines, etc. (We now consider those to be "good" but the people on the ground acted from their own initiative at the time, not a comfortable societal safety net which vetted their ideas.)

Security can't protect us from ourselves.

<comment><USER13> Consider Timothy McVeigh vs the Bundy Standoff.

BOTH of these groups were citing the disastrous Waco as a point of their protest. But one of these groups decided to bomb innocent civilians.

While the other was peaceful. (with guns pointed everywhere. But ultimately, the Bundy guys remained peaceful)

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

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

The difference is radicalization. Even if the Bundy folk talk a big talk and point their guns out the window, they really don't want to be killers. And their fingers remained off of the trigger.

In contrast, Timothy McVeigh straight up wanted to kill people because of his beliefs. Neither group was mentally ill. I disagree with both severely from a political standpoint of course, but they aren't sick.

<comment><USER14> > innocent civilians.

Not by the definition we use overseas. Family and business associates of terrorists are legitimate targets.

And most importantly, not innocent by the definition Timothy McVeigh was trained to use in the army. "He said he later was shocked to be ordered to execute surrendering prisoners [...]"

We don't stop to consider if workers in an Iraqi military HQ are conscripts, or have taken their children to work.

We'd have bombed the BATF office, and considered it a righteous kill, if we felt they had hurt us the way McVeigh felt they hurt his people.

> The difference is radicalization.

No, the difference is in their goals. They aren't one-issue simpletons.

Assuming they had the same goals, (which they didn't) the difference is opportunity. Different skills, background, and situations give people different tools.

> Timothy McVeigh straight up wanted to kill people because of his beliefs.

You tell him. That'll keep us safe.

But no, you're wrong. McVeigh could have killed thousands by targeting a sporting event or something. He specifically chose the office of his enemy.

I'm not defending him, I'm saying that the things you're saying are feel-good mantras that would lead us to being totally ineffective if we universally acted on them.

Your virtue signaling is getting in the way of you analyzing people and their motivations.

<comment><USER13> > Not by the definition we use overseas. Family and business associates of > terrorists are legitimate targets.

Erm... right. You realize that's against the Geneva convention and is the definition of a war crime in the US Military. You literally can be court martialled if you did something like that.

When the Navy Seals stormed Bin Laden's home, how many children did they kill? Answer: Zero. Did they kill Bin Laden's wife? No. They didn't. She was let go. The entire family that was staying at Bin Laden's house, hiding with him, were kept safe by the Seals.

What's your military background where you can say this sort of stuff with confidence? Methinks you've been reading a bit too many articles and don't have enough experience on your own to create an opinion.

<comment><USER14> > > legitimate targets.

> You realize that's against the Geneva convention and is the definition of a > war crime in the US Military. You literally can be court martialled if you > did something like that.

Fwiw, I meant 'legitimate _collateral_ targets'. As in, we don't abort a mission if it'll blow up the family of the terrorist.

We'd have dropped a bomb on an enemy government office building despite it having a nursery attached.

> When the Navy Seals stormed Bin Laden's home, [...]

When done by bomb the standards are _much_ lower. Also, that was a mission they knew would be examined by everyone.

> Methinks you've been reading a bit too many articles and don't have enough > experience on your own to create an opinion.

For what it's worth, being on the ground somewhere is not one of the best ways to see the big picture. People fighting in Vietnam were often the least informed and didn't know what went on a few miles away.

> What's your military background where you can say this sort of stuff with > confidence?

Are you saying that all the torturers at Guantanamo have been found guilty? Because otherwise I'm using the same news you have access to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This has been a problem for a while (I remember reading about FBI doing drug busts this way -- convincing an at risk but otherwise innocent to play along in a fake drug deal) -- and it is not a good thing.

Shouldn't the role of government be to better the populace? Instead people are paid a salary and told to go out into the world and _create_ criminals.

<comment><USER15> Is that directly, or via an informant who's setting things (and people) up for their own benefit?

<comment><USER16> both

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How these agencies have manage to thrive for so long, and continue to do so, remains utterly baffling to me. In the US, the FBI, the NSA and the CIA (and I'm sure others) have been caught red-handed on so many occasions and ... nothing happened, and it seems nothing ever will. They'll get a slap on the wrist, sometimes, and maybe some new legislation will be devised, only to be bent again. Of course, it's far from being limited to the US, this happens the world over.

Then you get stories like this one from Adam Curtis about MI5 in the UK [1], which show that these events are not simply pervasive, they're essentially the raison d'être of these agencies and their leaders. The very fact these people think they are not accountable to the public and/or their eleted representatives should tell us right off the bat where their interests actually lie.

Those who seek and abuse power will do so regardless; it seems the least we could do as relatively civilized socities would be to not sponsor those people in the first place. By any morally acceptable standards, these people are criminals and their only legitimacy stems from the government backing they get.

[1] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460)

<comment><USER18> John Gall: "Intrasystem goals come first." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This smells far more like an actual psyops strategy than simple entrapment or career advancement.

If it's _publicly known_ that there is an N% chance that your explosives supplier is a Fed (where N > paranoia threshold), that puts a chilling effect on even attempting your extremist plot.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Today, roughly 67% of prosecutions involving suspected ISIS supporters include evidence from undercover operations, according to the "

According to the what? Is it missing or redacted?

<comment><USER21> This empty <a> tag followed:

        <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism-stings.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0"></a>

Links to here: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism- stin...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/us/fbi-isis-terrorism-stings.html)

<comment><USER22> Thanks @tehwebguy - This is why I like HN.

<comment><USER23> This isn't twitter @burmask

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Having read too many of these stories over the past few years, I have slipped into the habit of mentally expanding _FBI_ to _Federal Bureau of Instigation_.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands At times I feel sorry for some of these agencies because they are in a constant state of catch-22.

If we had rampant mass shootings and bombings like they do in Europe and some of the Middle Eastern countries, people would be rioting in the streets to stop it.But since it only happens once so often, people are up in arms because of the methods used to _prevent_ said acts from happening in the first place.

You then have ask yourself. Do you prefer terrorism to happen and then be reactive, or do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows _before_ they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens?

In my mind, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

<comment><USER25> > rampant mass shootings and bombings like they do in Europe

Europe has "rampant" mass shootings and bombings? They are very rare, despite the media coverage. The U.S. has many more mass shootings, AFAIK.

> do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people > out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent > citizens?

The question is whether many of these people would commit crimes if not for the instigation of law enforcement.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, the US has far, far more mass shootings. They're usually white supremacist or enraged-lone-male (practically a political faction of themselves) rather than carried out by an "organisation" of some sort.

<comment><USER27> Here's a handy website that tracks mass shootings in the US: [http://www.massshootingtracker.org/](http://www.massshootingtracker.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Perhaps we should pay law enforcement based on a lack of crime. Less crime? More pay. More crime? Less pay.

Of course, how are we counting "crimes"? By those they actually arrest? They'll just stop arresting. By the number of complaints reported by citizens about crime? Perhaps?

I bet there's also some unintended consequence even with this scheme, but I'm feeling lazy just now.

</comment><comment><USER29> The original example of this was the WTC93 bombing.

\- The bombing plot started before Ramzi Yousef entered the US. \- It was initiated by Emad Salem, an FBI informant, ran by FBI agents Nancy Floyd & John Anticev. \- Salem famously recorded all his interactions with the FBI, including tapes where he says that he built the bomb that detonated. \- The FBI started him as an agent provacuter, but when he asked for more money etc, they lost faith and cut him lose. Months later the bomb went off, and the FBI re-hired him, paid him a $1 million, to setup more terrorists but this time with a fake bomb.

\- The first place Ramzi Yousef went was 2 Iraqi brothers apartment in NJ. \- Allegedly the Iraqi brothers had an unlisted phone number in the name of Josie Hadaes. This is the same number the so-called "dumb terrorist" used on the truck rental, the one who went back to get his deposit.

The odd thing about WTC93 is that Yousef is considered the spiritual mastermind of 9/11 for Operation Bojinka. And his uncle, is KSM, the actual mastermind of 9/11.

Yet the neoconservatives and a CIA director tried to claim that Yousef's real identity was something else; some Iraqi agent or something.

I don't believe in conspiracy theories but it's hard to understand exactly what happened in 1993. It was certainly a failed sting operation and as one reporter said, the FBI wante to "teach the damn Muslim terrorists a lesson'. Either way, Emad Salem initiated the bombing plot, originally it was a pipe bomb against a synagoguge.

Whoever contacted Yousef, and whoever he is, he is a legitamite terrorist mastermind. Of course, he escaped and went on to commit a variety of other attacks before being arrested. I think his uncle, KSM, was even on CNN at one point (forget the story) while he was being hunted.

On 9/11, it seems pretty clear that the CIA was running a sting operation with 2 of the hijackers in CA, the ones affiliated with the alleged Saudi intelligence agent. At least 50 CIA employees knew about these 2 Al Qaeda terrorists in the US and the CIA withheld this information from the White House according to Richard Clarke- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl6w1YaZdf8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl6w1YaZdf8)

The fact that that video has less than 60,000 views is unfortunate. And Zero Dark Thirty, is allegedly based on the red hair lady who worked for Rich Blee. She is lauded as the person who found Bin Laden but worked for the Alec Station who seemed to inadvertanty allow 9/11 to happen.

Then last year, Cofer Black went public, although he seems culpable too-[http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia- directors...](http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-directors- documentary-911-bush-213353)

Of course, prior to 9/11, there were many warnings and chatter about a terrorist attack. In March 2001, the Lone Gunmen pilot premiered about a government conspiracy of flying planes into the WTC. And conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones & Bill Cooper, both warned an attack was coming. Some of this could be confirmation bias but the point is, a lot of people knew something was going to happen.

And in the WTC93, since the FBI wanted to teach the terrorists a lessons, there's some indications that they wanted a terrorist attack to happen, to motivate the public and government into acting to prevent a mass terrorist attack.

However, the reality is, government agencies like the CIA are highly beaurcratic and limited by their mandates, lawyers etc. Whatever happened on 9/11 has been so obsfucated it's hard to understand.

Wherever Rich Blee is, he needs to answer some questions. And the 28-pages need to be declassified- [https://28pages.org/](https://28pages.org/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Given that Al-Qaeda and ISIS recruit aggressively online, I'd rather that the FBI get to these sickos before they do.

<comment><USER31> I'm afraid there are plenty of potential victims out there for both FBI and Al-Qaeda. So one organization does not really interfere with another.

<comment><USER30> Victims? Were the guards at Auschwitz victims too? Someone who tries to slaughter civilians to spread terror is not a victim, they are the enemy. No one would ever call a neo-Nazi a victim. The moral double standard toward minorities in the West is ridiculous. It's the soft bigotry of lowered expectations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Real foreign terrorists are rare.

American terrorists, while plenty, are undesired as media objects so they don't have the scaremongering effect of foreigners.

Solution: make up fake foreign-looking terrorists and sell them to the American people to scare them. It works wonders!

Solution 2: Take domestic terrorists and pretend they're foreign (see San Bernardino). Americans are too stupid to know the difference. Also works wonders.

<comment><USER33> I don't buy your logic, the terror "busts" rarely make a the news more than just a passing mention these days. So I doubt it has much psychological effect on the public. Also very few, outside of maybe conservative talk radio, said the San Bernardino shooters were "foreign." The line was always "home grown terror with possible ties to (or inspired by) ISIS."

Pretty much everyone I've seen recognizes the risk of terror is far greater among people already living inside the U.S. (or Europe), "sleepers" or otherwise, usually first or second generation immigrants.

In terms of "far right" terror groups, that's a different story entirely, and usually those groups are vocal in their communities (making them easier to track;) with the exception of "lone wolves," which are harder to track because they usually don't have international connections or travel records (or domestic ties to groups) that would raise flags.

<comment><USER14> Sleepers are agents specifically embedded with future actions in mind. There's no such thing as a second-generation sleeper agent - that's called a citizen.

And if you have teenagers, ask yourself how likely they'll follow in your crufty old plans.

Sleeper agents are movie-plots.

Essentially, if you're thinking about security and you recognize yourself thinking any terms you've heard on CNN ("Lone wolf", "sleeper", "radicalized", etc) you're doing it wrong. Those are silly TV terms and are usually after- the-fact descriptives, not warning signs.

(ie, you only catch one guy with no leads to others, so the media labels him a Lone Wolf. That's useless wrt finding him in the first place.)

<comment><USER33> I never said they'd get their instructions from their parents. My point is that first or second generation immigrants often feel neglected by the society they live in and are interested in the culture their parents/grandparents lived in. So they revert, or visit those places and become radicalized, usually with absolutely no support from the parent because that's what they were trying to escape. Then the cell will "activate" them, again, this has no barring on their parents.

There is one common aspect to most "lone wolves" and other types of terrorists is that they don't feel like they belong in their current society.

The rest of your argument is a bit of a straw man to what I was actually stating; however if you think disaffected youth aren't "radicalized" (because they feel they finally belong to something), you're wrong. And it's not just a TV term, the FBI and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies use these terms, so I don't really see your point.

<comment><USER14> If they weren't planted, they aren't sleepers. You're spending more time shoehorning people into TV-word boxes than you are in understanding them.

I've seen this before - people fighting to justify calling someone a Lone Wolf despite their having outside assistance. Why? Because it sounds dangerous. It's a trial and judgement all in one. "There, I labelled Osama as 'crazy', I've done my part."

Maybe after the fact you can sort people by how radical they seem (it's a subjective measure), or how much outside support they had, but it's a worthless thing to think about beforehand, and anyone who does it is _absolutely_ disconnected from making anything more secure.

> And it's not just a TV term, the FBI and the rest of the alphabet soup > agencies use these terms, so I don't really see your point.

The FBI is dangerously worthless in this regard. If they say something and someone on TV latches onto it you can be assured that it's wrongheaded. To the degree that their profiling could actually be useful, it has to ignore epithets. (Yes, you hate terrorists, you're a good citizen, I get that. But stop insulting them long enough to actually study their actions.)

Real security doesn't involve labeling people, it involves looking for flaws in defenses, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Isn't "terrorism" a source of spreading power and control both nationally and internationally, without which we wouldn't be able to justify our act? It's not an eye opener report that is telling something we already don't know. Then why bother reporting it?

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash I doubt this will be received well but here goes:

People choose to commit violent acts or agree with those that do. Whether these people are psychologically impaired or clear-headed and bloodthirsty, they could just as easily _STOP_ glorifying terrorism, watching execution videos, communicating with terrorists and terrorist supporters...nobody is forcing them to _want_ to be terrorists.

Is the FBI overstepping its bounds by providing weapons to whom they will soon arrest? Maybe. But if they had simply stopped bothering with their investigations, who's to say they wouldn't commit acts of terror with more primitive means?

Someone with aims of terror could smash a container of bleach against a container of ammonia in the middle of a crowded shopping mall and kill dozens of people - with stuff you could buy at any hardware or grocery store. No permit, no license, no FBI investigator involved.

In the end, there is only one question you need to ask yourself: am I at risk of an FBI entrapment sting?

Since I do not condone terrorism or make any effort to communicate with terrorists or terrorist supporters, the Bureau will not bother me. And the same, I hope, will go for you.

<comment><USER27> _> Since I do not condone terrorism or make any effort to communicate with terrorists or terrorist supporters, the Bureau will not bother me. And the same, I hope, will go for you._

Isn't that the classic "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" argument?

And maybe you _do_ communicate with terrorist supporters: Are you absolutely sure none of the people you communicate with support terrorism?

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Yes it is that argument exactly and it is a case where it works.

Nobody is contacting me on terrorist matters. Even if someone did I would ignore them and/or report them to the Bureau.

I don't see how this is a problem for anybody here. Unless you are literally planning an attack, you have done nothing wrong, you are not in the process of doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.

Unless you have an anectode about being personally harassed by the FBI then I submit that you are getting worked up over something that is not and should not ever be your problem.

<comment><USER35> The red scare. The civil rights movement. Anti-war movements during WWII.

People distrust the FBI for very good reasons.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scaling a Web Service: Load Balancing - <AUTHOR> https://blog.vivekpanyam.com/scaling-a-web-service-load-balancing/ <comment><USER2> I haven't built anything that requires load balancing (no users) my thought was to use something like public cloud where it's 0.01cents/GB or something.

Not sure how I could easily "make an image" copy of my stack/code and possibly this is where serverless is nice, you just need to throw code/traffic to something.

Again something I have to cross at some point.

<comment><USER3> load balancing at application level with nginx is pretty easy and well documented. The bigger problem is to write your application in a way that enables clustering.

in order to utilize load balancers, you'll need to have your application running simultaneously after all. This ultimately means that you'll most likely need to outsource your jobs into a queue tool such as RabbitMQ and have your cluster nodes fetch them.

lots of refactoring if you didn't plan for such a scenario from the start.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I've primarily been developing for myself/not with a lot of users in mind/concurrency so I have yet to figure that out. I mean I have built say templating "engines" that produce pages for different people using the same db but I couldn't say update a database (like importing) and keep the live one active/not be affected as I only have one instance running.

I have yet to use nginx/only using apache at this time but have heard/looked into it.

Thanks for the tip on RabbitMQ, is this different from using say CRON (for scheduled tasks) or are you talking just processing the large amount of real- time requests, which at this time for me is just first-come-first-serve as far I'm aware.

I suppose it depends on what you application does. I have not used web sockets yet personally but have some experience with them, currently figuring out how to use web workers. Yeah lots to learn still.

No reason to bring up web sockets but some applications may have real time updates or push notifications.

edit: I want to get to the point where I have backend statuses telling me how much applications are running (resources) that would be cool and then hitting thresholds do something.

Anyway thanks

<comment><USER3> > Thanks for the tip on RabbitMQ, is this different from using say CRON (for > scheduled tasks) or are you talking just processing the large amount of > real-time requests, which at this time for me is just first-come-first-serve > as far I'm aware.

oh, I never realized that they're both task schedulers with different meanings (I'm not native...^^)

cron is meant to fire off a command at a specific interval or date. RabbitMQ creates a schedule of what should be done in what order.

You generally only use cron for tasks outside of your application context, however. (i.e. creating backups, flushing old temporary files, maybe fetching updated files/data from a third party)

RabbitMQs use-case is much closer to your application: say one of your users wants to export some data. Your frontend application would just add this task to the task schedule and your next worker/cluster node would start processing it as soon as it has resources available.

this decouples the actual web application from what's being done on the server and lets you scale indefinitely, depending on how far you go on that front.

it, however, creates a lot of administrative overhead and is IMO not necessary until your project is already quite large. It might also be possible to scale in another way - it depends entirely on the application you're building.

a shared calendar, for example, wouldn't need this, because there are almost no resource heavy tasks that have to be done.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the explanation/comparison.

I keep hearing about "messaging" but not as in messaging each other but process messaging. When I looked up RabbitMQ I saw messaging.

At any rate thanks a lot for the info/your time.

<comment><USER3> oh, thanks for pointing that out. we always called it task scheduler at work - but that doesn't seem to be the correct term for it. TIL :)

<comment><USER2> I think of it as task scheduling, I'm not sure what "messaging" is that RabbitMQ refers to but I've heard of it else where as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC : Is Zend Framework good enough for a startup? - <AUTHOR>

I want advice on weather zend framework is good enough for a startup. <comment><USER2> I'm curious as well, we've decided to go with php for our project, (although there's been some debate on python, and ruby) So I'm curious about frameworks such as Zend and CakePHP.</comment>


NYC cops did a work stop, yet crime dropped - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/nyc-cops-did-a-work-stop-yet-crime-dropped/?amp=1 <comment><USER2> >During the slowdown, police continued to respond to calls, and the arrest rate for major crimes (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand theft auto) remained constant. But the arrest rate for non- major crime and narcotic offenses dropped, as did the number of stop-and-frisk events. It took until mid-January for things to begin to return to normal.

Wait, the police stopped arresting people, and fewer people got arrested? Am I missing something here?

This reminds me of when we turned off our logs, and recorded far fewer errors than usual.

<comment><USER3> > they found something surprising: reports of major crime dropped during the > slowdown period.

Reporting of major crime dropped, whilst the arrest rate for major crime remained constant.

It's more like you turn off your logging for minor issues and find that you're also logging fewer major issues.

To me, it sounds as if the publicised slowdown resulted in fewer people reporting things that didn't happen. Attention seekers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The _arrest rate_ for "minor crimes" (and narcotics) went down. That is not the same as proving that _crime_ dropped.

For example, the arrest rate for car burglary in San Francisco is very low, yet streets everywhere are littered with auto glass chunks.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a very unpopular reason for this which is that policing broken windows incites major crime.

<comment><USER6> Possibly infinitely many, but that doesn't say much :P</comment></comment>


Samsung is shutting down Note 7 sales worldwide - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/10/13236400/samsung-shutting-down-note-7-sales-worldwide <comment><USER2> Only move they had left really.</comment>


Google releases new Android SDK (screenshots) - <AUTHOR> http://www.helloandroid.com/node/258

<comment><USER2> It's really ugly. If you don't mind me saying.

</comment><comment><USER3> meh</comment>