Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day - <AUTHOR> https://utahpolicy.com/index.php/features/today-at-utah-policy/17116-utah-is-fending-off-one-billion-hacking-attempts-per-day <comment><USER2> What are they including in the metrics?

Are they including SSH port scanning and attempts on port 22?

<comment><USER3> My guess is they're including requests for /

A billion "hacks" per day seems a bit far fetched. At that point, it's either a visible act of war (if external to the US) or the FBI would be much more involved (if internal). Both of those would be much larger news.

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't it be a good estimator to include ANY connections coming outside of Utah?

I hope that whoever is attempting to hack the Utah voting system has no nefarious purpose greater than changing "Mitt" to "Mittens.

<comment><USER5> It would be like calling every individual connection made during a DDOS event an "attack". No, it's one attack. The number of connections merely indicates the size of the attack, and in this case possibly less because if it's implementing a brute force search over passwords, it could be very, very inefficient.

In other words, it's marketing language designed to scare people who have no understanding of computer security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Paper ballots, no machines and especially no machines connected to the internet...if we were able to get that crazy bug into Iranian nuclear reactors without direct transfer from Internet, then you can bet North Korea, Russia, Israel, and China will pour billions to do the same thing.

Voting ID cards too, though I admit I don't know enough about that. Even if it costs billions to get it done, confidence in fair and free elections is the cornerstone of our democracy.

<comment><USER7> The first is a good idea, but the second is not. Voter ID cards are historically used to make it harder to vote and thus compromise elections. In person fraud is very uncommon, and it would be very difficult for a foreign government to pull off a large scale interference without being detected.

After all, we struggle to get people to show up to vote once already! The idea of mass ballot fraud seems difficult to countenance without literally paying masses of people to vote (which I believe is extremely illegal).

EDIT: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597)

EDIT 2: If you want to see real foreign interference, check out that time that Bill Clinton publicly aided the election of Boris Yeltsin.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/23/world/russia-and-imf- agre...](https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/23/world/russia-and-imf-agree-on-a- loan-for-10.2-billion.html)

<comment><USER8> Voting requires ID in almost every other western democracy, including Canada. The rest of the world see it as very reasonable to identify yourself at a polling station. It's odd that this is so contentious in the US.

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

<comment><USER9> IDs are not issued automatically in the US; they take money and effort to acquire. Therefore as implemented in the US, voter IDs are a poll tax.

Unsurprisingly, this makes voter ID a political issue: those who benefit from poll taxes support them, and those whose voters are suppressed by poll taxes oppose them.

<comment><USER10> I think it would be reasonable to create a national ID card system and fund it through taxes. It could replace driver licenses and social security cards. I do not know why it would be unreasonable to require such a card for voting. It could also serve as a PKI system with the govt acting as a CA (i.e. manage issuance and revocation). There are non zero benefits. And this doesn't have to operate like a poll tax. I don't understand why this isn't already a thing. Seems obvious.

<comment><USER11> > I don't understand why this isn't already a thing. Seems obvious.

Because people don't want yet another mandatory way to be tracked by the government. It is especially opposed by those here illegally, their supporters, and others historically disenfranchised by more and more centralized requirements. Not everyone has driver's licenses or ssn cards. There are non-zero problems so what should be obvious is why some oppose even if you don't.

<comment><USER12> > Because people don't want yet another mandatory way to be tracked by the > government.

I constantly hear that (the majority of) people don't care about NSA spying, Facebook and Google spying, ad tracking, etc, etc, etc.

But somehow when it comes to being issued a number and a piece of plastic it would never work because people would oppose it based on privacy? I find that very hard to believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If there is no online voting, why is the system even connected to the Internet? What exactly are the attacks against? The voter registration site? The election results site?

<comment><USER14> From what I understand the greatest vulnerability is modification of voter registration data. If you show up to vote and they don't have you in that district's voter rolls because your address was changed to another state, your vote has just been taken away.

<comment><USER13> If this is the case, it begs the question why voter registration data is directly connected to the Internet. Yes, we want to allow online registrations and modifications, but surely we could have a batch process to make changes to the canonical source, with a signed log of changes.

<comment><USER15> Could you clarify how you would see these batch data transfered outside of the internet ?

We are speaking of dispatching that data to every single voting stations, set in schools, small town offices, etc. Most "secure" solutions (private lines, central update and physical dispatch of the machines days before the elections, etc) seem difficult and/or crazy costly to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Translation: 1 billion Brute Force ssh attempts rejected

<comment><USER17> So much this, yes i'm sure people were attempting to scan it up but I guarantee you could show the same for almost every network out there. I understand the fear mongering to a degree but its projecting things in the wrong place and it's almost like crying wolf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What does "hacking attempt" even mean? I smell FUD.

<comment><USER19> Sadly I smell FUD virtually every time a security engineer opens his mouth. Yes there are some great ones, but I've never worked with one directly.

Part of my skepticism is rooted in the prevalent ignorance of basic computing theory. If you can't define the operational semantics of a system then you can't rigorously convince yourself or anyone else that it is "secure."

<comment><USER20> _> If you can't define the operational semantics of a system then you can't rigorously convince yourself or anyone else that it is "secure."_

Well. This means no one can provide any security guarantee for any remotely realistic system because no modern stack has a completely understood&formalized operational semantics. But I definitely know that some systems are much more secure than others! So this seems like a situation where perfect is very much the enemy of "1000x better than it could've been".

Furthermore, formalization is "above and beyond" best practice, so you're unlikely to be accused of negligence if you do "better than best practice but still not formalized".

Finally, the original claim is not true. There are many systems with non- operational semantics that are useful for proving security properties. And sometimes no semantics is needed at all for large swaths of the system. Sandboxing is an excellent example of the latter. For some very reasonable attacker models, you need an operational semantics for the sandbox but don't need an operational semantics for whatever's running inside the sandbox in order to provide fairly strong security guarantees.

<comment><USER19> There are realistic systems that are operationally secure by the given standard. Nuclear launch systems are the obvious example.

"Best practice" is a euphemism for whatever it is the majority does. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. That's not even reasoning.

Finally, your paragraph about sandboxing is ill considered, but not that wrong. First all programs have operational semantics, the only question is how well understood they are. Second sandboxing is a constraint that is easily formally expressed by way of the logical consequence. I'm surprised you're taking issue with that since you give a great example thereof.

<comment><USER20> _> There are realistic systems that are operationally secure by the given standard. Nuclear launch systems are the obvious example._

AFAIK there aren't really any examples of production systems that have meaningful, formally verified security properties without gaping holes.

Do you have a good paper about the full stack formalization/verification of a nuclear launch system?

 _> "Best practice" is a euphemism for whatever it is the majority does. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. That's not even reasoning._

1\. Companies are sometimes sued, _successfully_ , for _not_ following "best practices". And on technical merits. Ex, Toyota lawsuits.

2\. It most definitely is reasoning! Here's the cartoon derivation: "If I buy IBM I do not get fired. Therefore, I will buy IBM". This is reasoning about the social system, not the technical system. But then, security is both a technical problem and a social problem. $Billions on formal verification can't stop the simplest of phishing attacks.

 _> First all programs have operational semantics, the only question is how well understood they are. _

Well... I guess technically. But that's not typically what people mean when they say something "has a(n operational) semantics".

Typically when people say "X has an operational semantics" they mean "someone has actually tex'd/coq'd/pencil'd the transition rules and maybe proved things about them".

Example: If I implement a programming language without doing any theory and you ask if I have an operational semantics, the only non-confusing answer is "no" or perhaps "the semantics is defined by the implementation of the compiler", which is just a tongue-in-cheek way of saying "no". This doesn't mean that no operational semantics _exists_ , it just means I haven't written it down in the form of transition rules or a coq file or whatever.

If I give my language a denotational semantics and you ask if I have an operational semantics, I'll say "no". But again, that doesn't mean that the operational semantics don't exist. It just means I haven't written them down and proven a correspdonence.

 _> I'm surprised you're taking issue with that since you give a great example thereof._

I think you missed the fundamental moral of the sandboxing example: perfect is the enemy of good enough.

Sandboxes allow for security guarantees _without_ formalizing every aspect of the system. In fact, I conjecture that these sorts of "don't try to formalize everything" approaches toward formal security guarantees are really the only ones that scale.

If you try to formalize everything, you'll drown. If you strategically concede defeat and admit that some parts of the system aren't possible to formalize, you can get a lot of strong guarantees. As long as the concessions are strategic. Ex, sandboxing whenever the permissions interface is simple but the implementation is complex and the failure modes permit sandboxing.

Or, to put that observation in a pithy phrase: "perfect is the enemy of good enough."

<comment><USER19> > Do you have a good paper about the full stack formalization/verification of > a nuclear launch system?

Bwahahaha you're funny.

> If you try to formalize everything, you'll drown. If you strategically > concede defeat and admit that some parts of the system aren't possible to > formalize, you can get a lot of strong guarantees.

You're contradicting yourself again. There's a reason why weakness is a strength in formalisms.

<comment><USER20> _> Bwahahaha you're funny._

No, I'm curious and would use that citation! Even just a paper saying "this has been done" without any details? I have a hard time believing this has been done, and people are allowed to talk about it on online forums, but there isn't a _single_ citation even acknowleding its existence.

 _> You're contradicting yourself again. There's a reason why weakness is a strength in formalisms._

I'm not sure what this means, but it sounds a lot like what I've been saying all along?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That number is insanely high. Are they talking about all voting machines being connected to the internet? Or is it some back office set of systems?

For the life I me I don't know why voting machines and voting systems need to be connected to the internet. It's just a flat out unnecessary risk.

That's not to say that they shouldn't be built so secure you could connect them to the internet. But nothing is perfect and unnecessary risks should be avoided with such an important system.

Which is probably why we should be using paper ballots and scanners with results called in from the regional counting centers. And manual count available then as much as needed or desired post election night for verification. This rush to electronic voting boggles my mind.

</comment><comment><USER22> I encourage all citizens who typically do not vote, to vote your conscience, and then lie. Already no one expects you to vote anyway, so just lie per their expectations and say you didn't vote. That way you don't have to justify or argue your choice any differently than you have in the past.

Yes it's a bit chicken s* but so f'n what? You don't actually owe anyone an explanation anyway, but you're entitled to vote. So just get on with it, and lie. Everyone is lying about something or other anyway and this kind of lie is pretty benign. And it's in the public good that you vote even if you don't like arguing about why you voted the way you did.

</comment><comment><USER23> 11500 per second.

<comment><USER24> modems are getting faster and faster...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If this were true, and the error rate in defending was only 0.00001%, it would still be hacked several times a day.

What's the lowest error rate you have ever seen in a practical security product?

<comment><USER26> But what if all the hacking attempts are coming from basically the same software, trying the same thing over and over again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why is their _voting_ system (as opposed to voter registration) even publicly accessible outside of election cycles?

</comment><comment><USER28> Vote by mail works, is efficient and easy.

Autoregister on State ID or Drivers License.

Online party management.

Signature validation, collected at registration.

Voters can mail it, use a drop, or vote in person at an elections office.

My favorite is voting parties. Everyone brings ballots, talk abot the options, vote, eat, smoke, drink, done.

</comment><comment><USER29> How can the cost of securing these systems be less than the cost of using a fully paper system?

<comment><USER30> You can use the same argument for banks.

<comment><USER31> The number of transactions in voting and at banks are pretty wildly different.

<comment><USER30> It doesn't have to be. If online voting ever becomes widespread, there is a reasonable chance there will be more votes and referendums.

<comment><USER32> There would be a absurd cognitive overhead for people to have to study and prepare an opinion for as many votes as they have financial transactions. Every other productive activity in the US would grind to a halt.

<comment><USER30> Why would polls like :

Do you want a bridge built here? Yes, No, Don't Care.

be a cognitive overhead?

<comment><USER33> The California voting guide for June 2018 is 96 pages long:

[http://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/pdf/complete- vig.pdf](http://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/pdf/complete-vig.pdf)

The info associated with each ballot measure is considerably more extensive than you seem to realize.

<comment><USER30> That's because there are so few votes. Imagine having one single exam at the end of 4 years of education.

<comment><USER33> No, this is the 2018 guide for the primary election. That is less than 2 years after the 2016 general presidential election. In 4 more months, there will be another 2018 guide for the general election. That means there will be 6 elections in 4 years, not counting any special elections:

[http://vigarchive.sos.ca.gov/](http://vigarchive.sos.ca.gov/)

You don't even know how many votes we have even though they are so purportedly few. Imagine what little the average voter knows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is there any reason for a voting system to ever be connected to the internet? (I assume this system is, because I can't think of any other attack vectors that enable the reported volume of "hacking attempts".)

</comment><comment><USER35> to put this in perspective, this is one-quarter of Google's _global_ search traffic, in hack attempts. 'hack attempts' are always bullshit but this is especially impressive

<comment><USER36> Google isn't going to count port scanning and other such malicious activity in their global search traffic metrics. It's very possible that such traffic is more prevalent than legitimate search traffic by orders of magnitude. I have personally operationally managed sites which are only very moderately high profile and yet still receive a constant stream of malicious requests from foreign IPs pretty much 24/7 even with aggressive, proactive & reactive firewalling in place. The costs to execute such tasks are negligible for a nation-state. To be honest I'd be more inclined to believe the numbers are real and that you're posting this comment as an agent of a belligerent nation- state trying to spread mininformation than the other way around (though I sincerely do hope you are posting in good faith and are just naive).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> "1B hacking attempts" is, of course, incredibly vague. It could be 100 sophisticated groups using their 1B 0-days, or one dude running a script on repeat.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't get it. If these systems are not air-gapped then that is gross negligence.

There is absolutely no reason that these systems are exposed to the internet.

</comment><comment><USER39> Why would a voting system even need to be online?

<comment><USER40> Depends what you mean by "voting system". Individual voting machines rarely are - they're usually air-gapped, read the ballot from a physical memory card transported by sneakernet from administrative offices, and write vote totals back to those cards for sneakernet transmission to same offices.

However, those central locations use a lot of internet-connected machines, mostly to communicate their numbers to outside systems. The computers that program the ballot descriptions pre-election (a vector for attacking voting machines) are also usually internet-connected - they're plain old desktop workstations of some elections official.

Air-gapping _those_ systems is probably doable, at a minor loss of convenience, but there _is_ a reason they're internet-connected.

<comment><USER41> Geez, just like... Give the voting software its own isolated network, and for external reporting force somebody to dump the results to a flash drive before uploading them to the web. I'm not even a security expert, but maybe I could get a job as one working for the US government.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Frankly, 18 feels low. I would expect the number to be 10x or even 100x that.

<comment><USER43> 1B (one billion), not 18

<comment><USER42> OH. Oops. Where are my reading glasses :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It is an interesting data point, and it makes me wonder if we can use this as a side channel attack to figure out who the hackers "like" and who they "don't like" running for office. Might give us more insight into the hacker's goals.

</comment><comment><USER41> ...how are these systems not airgapped?

<comment><USER44> So the status quo can stay in power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Title should say "fending off".

<comment><USER46> Fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> If they have such hacking attempts, console access should be gated by a jumpbox that SSH/ipsec secured by SPA portknocking. For external services, have transparent proxies with deep SPI/IPS and IP acls out in front.

<comment><USER48> Port knocking is security by obscurity. How about a VPN like a real company.

<comment><USER49> Google famously ditched VPNs because you can't trust the inside networks either.

[https://www.blog.google/products/google-cloud/how-use- beyond...](https://www.blog.google/products/google-cloud/how-use-beyondcorp- ditch-your-vpn-improve-security-and-go-cloud/amp/)

<comment> gray_-_wolf Sure but it still adds another layer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


IBM Watson: Overprovisioned "Big Iron"? - <AUTHOR> http://memesteading.com/2011/02/16/ibm-watson-overprovisioned-big-iron/

<comment><USER2> First off, I think it's naive to assume it would be that easy to do as well as Watson. Talk is cheap.

More importantly, though, Watson isn't /really/ about solving Jeopardy. It's a more general AI designed to provide concise answers to arbitrary questions posed in arbitrary natural language. I have absolutely no source for this, but it's probably reasonable to assume that Watson has the most sophisticated understanding of human language of any computer system to date. This is much bigger than a quiz show.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, talk is cheap. But no other team was even given a crack at this, nor have I heard of any research groups trying (and failing) at similar trivia tasks. Maybe we'll see that now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Then by all means build such a single-server Watson clone and program it!

I think you're underestimating the combinatorial explosion that occurs when you try to do any kind of AI over natural language (and I speak from experience). Though I get your point that it seems they haven't reduced the big-O complexity of the problem; but what if it's irreducible?

In fact I do think eventually a smaller scale implementation of a Watson clone will happen, and not just because of Moore's law. As Steve Wozniak said in a forward to a book about the Apple 1, "Some very simple ideas are very hard to do the first time." It seems to take a first execution to inspire the people who will come after and find simpler ways to do it. Somehow just knowing that it has been done is enough to set another inventor down the path of doing it even better. This happened frequently in the field of steam engines and thermodynamics in the 17 and 1800s, when just hearing about what one person had done would lead the next person to leap frog it.

<comment><USER4> Michael Abrash said something like Woz's quote also. Once you know it /can/ be done it somehow becomes easier. Often the less you know the better you are.

Example, in his black book abrash tells a story about working at number nine. Their got word that one of their competitors had put a FIFO buffer on one of their cards (this was the ISA period 386 era). The staff at number nine panicked. They were so close to being finished their design they didn't have the space for a FIFO. So they put a single bit write FIFO in.

Then they taped out and went to market, praying they could compete. Then the other card came out on the market.... with an 8byte read FIFO. At the time video memory was /dead/ slow, so everyone designed their programs to never, ever, ever read VGA memory. Instead you wrote to a virtual buffer and flipped it to the screen.

The results, number nine absolutely creamed the competition for some time. And people still didn't read VGA memory.

Moral: sometimes just knowing it can be done is all you need. and often too much knowledge will send you down the wrong path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, Watson was written in Java....

Seriously though, While you could write a simple wiki search engine to get decent results right away I think IBM is playing the long game. Taking the much more difficult (15 people 5 years) game for long term results. The begining results like this jeopardy game don't seem that impressive, but if the watson technology is as impressive as ibm make out I'm sure it'll broaden in time.

On the other hand, I found the use of power chips over x86-64 a bit suspect. That was clearly IBM sales at work.

<comment><AUTHOR> If another IBM engineer walked in on the Watson team and showed them his single-server (32 core, 512GB RAM) alternative that performed on par with the Big Iron approach, do you think IBM corporate's reaction would have been:

• "Great, now we can haul the unit to Jeopardy's Burbank studios for a showdown ASAP!" ...or...

• "Hold that thought for the future, we've already frozen the datasheets and shot lots of footage of the server room that's perfect for the show and B-rolls."

<comment><USER4> I agree with you. Don't change horses midstream. I think the choice to go with power was flawed to begin with. But for better (financially) or worse they decided to do that.

Mind you, several racks worth of computer always looks cooler. You'd be a bit disappointed if Alex Trebek opened the rack door to find a 1u Dell inside.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure IBM would rather sell Watson-sized devices to businesses than a single server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ah, the rise of the armchair computer scientist. Gentlemen, we have truly arrived.

<comment><USER7> Well, he did search Google with the Jeopardy questions and showed that very often the answer to the question was Google's first result. I think that's not only indicative of the difficulty of the problem at hand, but also shows that Watson is no different than established A. I. systems such as search engines. I had never seen Jeopardy before (not being from the States) and expected the game to be slightly more challenging; too many clues are included to the question asked and they make it too easy to determine the type of the expected answer ("this" appears almost in every single question). All three players seem to know the answer to any given question, and it's just a game of who presses the button first.

<comment><USER8> "but also shows that Watson is no different than established A. I."

How does it show that?</comment></comment></comment>


ADHD is vastly overdiagnosed and many children are just immature, say scientists - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12189369/ADHD-is-vastly-overdiagnosed-and-many-children-are-just-immature-say-scientists.html <comment><USER2> This seems to be well known at least by doctors. I've read multiple books that recommend waiting as long as possible to medicate (middle school to high school) and simply focus on non-medication strategies. Besides many kids growing out of it there's also concern about long term medication side effects like stunting their growth.

I beat all of the standard "ADHD isn't real" comments this time. Let's see if I can preempt them all in one go: No, just because you were misdiagnosed doesn't mean it's not real. No, just because you were on medication throughout high school and don't need it now doesn't mean it's fake. Yes, telling someone they just need to try harder, need discipline or were spoiled as a child is not unlike telling a person with depression to "cheer up".

ADHD isn't an issue with attentiveness, it's a disorder of motivation, time sense and impulse control. Everyone thinks it's a bunch of lazy people making an excuse to play video games all day but that's just a possible consequence. Given the choice between literally doing nothing while staring at a blank screen and doing something you don't want to do you'll need to fight yourself to the point of exhaustion just to do it. Your conscious self is essentially not in charge. Your most reliable tool to motivate yourself is fear. ADHD isn't some kind of vacation from responsibility, it's a nightmare.

<comment><USER3> You just described humanity.

My view of ADHD is biased because my only experience with it is a psychiatrist who earns millions a year prescribing it, several girls who believe they need it for college (two attempted suicide) and then several male friends all of whom abuse it.

There is a side effect of stimulant abuse that makes you confidently delusional.

Does ADHD exist? Can stimulants cure lack of focus or should they? Does the abuse of Adderall increase the risk of suicide?

Is it ok for an obese doctor to have 20 supercars and 3 homes because he tell thousands of emotionally vunerable patients that they must take what is essentially meth everyday for the rest of their life to be "normal"?

I am all for pragmatism if it works, but people have poor self-control and my experience of ADHD only involves sociopaths and suicidal rich girls. So excuse my problem but I don't believe in chemical imbalances being cured by myopic pharmacutical companies and non-thinking doctors who act more like automons and technicians than "learned men" of science.

People love to label themselves and explain the challenges of being human by ascribing various syndromes. We should resist that temptation and find ways to solve our problems without taking a drug that is the same as meth-

[http://www.vice.com/read/a-neuroscientist-explains-how-he- fo...](http://www.vice.com/read/a-neuroscientist-explains-how-he-found-out- meth-is-almost-identical-to-adderall)

<comment><USER4> I work with someone with ADHD. It is plain as day when the medication starts to wear off. They can focus and program with diligence in the morning to early afternoon, but then later have a difficult time following longer trains of thought. It's not mere laziness - this person buckles down for even the most tedious of tasks, but rather their attention sorta slides off the topic. If you took the way a person's eyes slide off something shielded by a SEP-field, or the opposite of how your eyes are drawn to police flashers.

It's hard to describe, but it's certainly not just a goofy bandaid. They develop a routine around the process: harder or deeper problems in the morning, and small quick tickets/tasks in the afternoon. Or: as the day wears on, the work gets more granular (and thus more resilient to inturruption).

Mind, this is from my outside viewpoint. What actually goes on in their head can only really be described by them. But quite a few months of routine give me this impression.

<comment><USER5> You have just described my routine except I don't take medication. I don't doubt that ADHD is a thing, but I'd like to know exactly where the line is drawn in the sand. Because from what I've heard of what ADHD medication does I could definitely stand to benefit from it.

<comment><USER4> There aren't lines; every case is so specific to that person's needs I don't think it's fair to pigeon-hole too much. For me, my coworker's change in demeanor was enough. You may find that medication smoothes the swings for you (and for all I know, my coworker would swing even harder without the medicine - I think that was mentioned once). Or not.

See a doctor and try it out in a safe dosage. If you find it helps, great! If not, well, maybe something else will work. Or perhaps you're just quirky.

It's hard to tell sometimes :)

There was a comedian who said something along the lines of: "I got got glasses the other day, and it shocked me. How could instantly improved eye sight not be at the top of everyone's To Do list?!" So when people talk about medication like it's a debate, I get confused. How could instantly improved mood and cognition not be at the top of everyone's list? (I'm a hyprocrite in that respect, but I'm just onery and enjoy the struggle.) If you don't want it, but the medicine helps, work your way off it slowly enough that you train your body to compensate (a number of people have told me that it's geometric: you can cut a third, then another third, then another until finally it's a negligible amount, but linearly tends to give poorer results).

But most importantly: do what improves your life. I wear glasses, and I've never felt shame for it. No reason to feel bad about a biochemical imbalance - that's even more complicated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had a very different experience. I was diagnosed late in life, and the struggles to do simple things would blow up my depression. This created massive amounts of anxiety, and that led to a rough time at home with my wife and daughter. I will never be able to fix the damage to my daughter, she is now riddled with anxiety from having parents that couldn't cope very well with life. Thankfully she is a brilliant kid, and now that we are older and wiser we can guide her a lot better with dealing with these issues.

Buy my third child is showing signs of ADHD, and I have nothing but compassion for him. I have no interest in OVER medicating him, and have made significant life changes so that I can take my younger children on as many outdoor activities as possible.

In short... overmedication might be an issue. Not having good life-coping skills might be an issue as well. But sensationalist headlines that let headline browsers reinforce their "ADHD doesn't exist" misconceptions can cause harm. Just because it's a recent discovery doesn't mean that it isn't real, and that we can just abandon these kids.

<comment><USER7> Thank you for your post. I'm not married nor do I have kids but the rest of your post is very familiar. It was suggested that I be assessed for possible ADD/ADHD when I was younger but my father was very much against the concept and refused. Later on, in my mid 30's I had been speaking to a doctor about several ongoing issues and it was also suggested that I speak to someone about ADD/ADHD.

I was diagnosed fairly quickly and currently take a small daily dose of stimulant medication. I've no interest in abusing this medication or taking more than absolutely necessary because stimulant drugs do indeed carry side effects. That said, with a dosage that strikes the right balance between benefits and side effects, it has made a huge difference WRT the primary symptoms as well as the secondary problems my inability to focus had caused (depression and anxiety).

I could waste days contemplating how things would have been different if I'd treated this earlier but at this point I think that would be counterproductive. I'm just glad I'm addressing it now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In our performance-optimised world, being a child is just a pathological state that needs to be cured.

</comment><comment><USER9> My undergrad gen-ed requirements included a theory of learning class. I took it around 2008. For my semester presentation, I did a review of ADHD research. The various articles I read said the percentage of the population (in the US) with ADHD was between 4% and 8%, but my relatives, who are school teachers, said at the time that 80-90% of their students were being treated for ADHD.

</comment><comment><USER10> Something tells me you will see this report on FB all day today. Nothing goes viral like controversy over a health matter.

Nvm, whatever celebrities are doing goes more viral.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ouch, big business mistake. The Ritalin manifacturer forgot to pay those Taiwan researchers, who think they could turn around the world as they see fit. Now they can only retaliate afterwards. We'll see what they'll come up with now.

<comment><AUTHOR> They'll probably claim the researchers themselves are suffering from ADHD and should be medicated... ;-)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Online intro to programming classes for recruiters? - <AUTHOR> I head up technical recruiting at TrialPay in Palo Alto.  Our current operation consists of 2 people, and both of us have coded to varying degrees.  Before coming to TrialPay, I worked as an engineer for about 5 years.  My colleague is a former high school math teacher and has taken Harvard's CS50 and regularly plays around on Codecademy.  We're both currently taking MIT's 6.00x for fun.<p>Our familiarity with eng/coding has been indispensable in the technical recruiting industry, and I'd like new members of our team to at least have some basic idea and appreciation of what it is that engineers do every day.  As such, I'm thinking that taking an introductory programming class should be part of any new recruiter's ramp-up period.  I've heard good things about Udacity's CS101 (http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs101/CourseRev/apr2012), for instance, and the syllabus looks pretty good.  What classes would you guys recommend?  The goal isn't necessarily to get very hardcore or theoretical but rather to get an idea of what programming entails and hopefully to impart that sense of wonder you get when you make a machine do your bidding and build something from nothing for the first time. <comment><USER2> Hi there,

take a look at coursera course : An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python. (<https://class.coursera.org/interactivepython-2012-001/>)

Very beginner friendly, not very theoretical, more hands-on, and most importantly, very entertaining. Check out video or two to get better idea how class looks a like.

Take care, davs</comment>


Randy Suess, Computer Bulletin Board Inventor, Dies at 74 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/technology/randy-suess-dead.html <comment><USER2> I whistle at 1200bps in his honor.</comment>


Hulu readies for IPO... still not making a profit. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16hulu.html?src=tptw

<comment><USER2> I find it hard to see why anyone would view Hulu as a worthwhile investment, at least other then something to ride up post IPO and then get out quick. Its entire value derives from the content it offers - content that it will never own, and will forever remain beholden to the content providers for.

"Pssst! Wanna buy part of our company and share in the profits? But only a little bit of the profits of course, because you'll be using our content and have to license it from us. And we'll gradually squeeze your profitability down to a negligible amount over the years, because it's our content and that's what we've done in every market. And when the cable companies get pissed that people are switching to Hulu, we'll likely start blackouts/delays to keep them happy and devalue your service. Whaddya say?"

<comment><USER3> Leading content providers (News Corp, NBC, ABC/Disney) have stakes in Hulu. Therefore their incentives are aligned and it is unlikely that Hulu will be cut from the content. Quite the opposite, it can be given an exclusive content access (earlier, better quality, behind the scenes).

Your argument can be applied in the same way to other companies: Netflix (movies), Amazon (books). Being a distributor (and thus depending on producers) is not necessary a business killer.

Cable companies can not directly discriminate Hulu traffic due to net neutrality principle. And in the future most of the traffic will go through wireless carriers.

<comment><USER4> > Leading content providers (News Corp, NBC, ABC/Disney) have stakes in Hulu.

It's also part of the problem from an investor perspective. Hulu is pretty much never "profitable" but that completely ignores the fact that its major stakeholders get a huge chunk of its revenue since it's their content. I can't find the article now, but one stated the content providers receive upwards of 60% of Hulu's revenu. So Hulu doesn't make a "profit" but basically everyone that owns a stake in it is getting a good return on investment. That conflict of interest with the other major stakeholders would give me major pause about buying into Hulu.

EDIT: I think this is the article I recall reading [http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-hulu-turns- prof...](http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-hulu-turns-profitable- we-eat-crow-2010-4)

And the numbers there are different (and probably a bit better) than what I stated above, but the general point stands that you're buying stock in a company where the major stakeholders are getting a return regardless of whether Hulu turns a profit or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "But a revision to comScore's methodology sent Hulu's viewership numbers plummeting, to 24 million in June from 43.5 million in May"

Is that a revision to methodology, or just an expected drop in users during the lull between seasons? I know I haven't been on Hulu since the season finales of my shows...

</comment><comment><USER6> Are there any recent successful tech IPOs where the company wasn't turning a profit at the time? Tesla's the only one that comes to mind, but it's a somewhat unusual case. Everyone else I can think of in the past few years was turning a profit when they went public (e.g. VMWare in 2007, Rackspace in 2008, Skype filed just recently). On the other hand, it's possible YouTube could've gone public even while bleeding money if Google hadn't bought them, so perhaps Hulu's similar.

</comment><comment><USER7> This line struck me as odd: "These people were granted anonymity because the discussions are still private."

<comment><USER8> I think after the whole Judy Miller and similar scandals the NYTimes has a policy of always disclosing the reason why anonymous sources are anonymous, even if those reasons are a bit pedantic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Old Media: "Newsflash! Certain categories of so-called 'New Media' remain unproven as business models!"

What are you trying to say, NYT? ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> They are going to do an IPO with content that they don't even control well enough to provide what they say you will get when you pay...

I like Hulu a great deal but I have had a Plus account for 2 days now and nothing that I wanted to watch (older shows where they say they offer all of the seasons to Plus members) have the seasons as promised.

An easy one is Heroes, on hulu.com/plus they say you get all 4 seasons of Heroes but go to <http://www.hulu.com/heroes> wiht your plus account and only the last 5 episodes of season 4 is there. Not that I want to watch this series but it should be there with my super-duper new plus account that I am logged into now with and it shows on my profile that I have paid.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sometimes it feels like it's 1999 all over again...

</comment><comment><USER12> Call me cynical, but it perhaps the equity owners want to cash out before the company kills itself with subscription services.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hulu's special content relationship with old-line broadcasters is a blessing and a curse. That's powered Hulu's success so far... but might also cap Hulu's upside, because of the conditions content-providers impose, and the chance providers will defect to run their own web services. (The duration and details of current deals should be an interesting part of the IPO prospectus.)</comment>


Hans Rosling: The good news of the decade? (Video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_good_news_of_the_decade.html#011334325745283036154 <comment><AUTHOR> Rosling's presentation style is fantastic. I became intrigued if he has written any books (apparently not), but then realized that his visualization ideas are truly made for web (and live presentations) instead of dead trees.</comment>


Paul Singer is bracing for 'all hell to break loose' in the stock market - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-one-hedge-fund-titan-is-bracing-for-all-hell-to-break-lose-on-wall-street-2017-05-26 <comment><USER2> "Lately, the stock market has been stubbornly buoyant."

In other words, Singer is wrong.

There are two facts about stock market prognostication:

1\. At any given point in time you will always be able to find someone on Wall Street predicting that the market will crash Real Soon Now.

2\. Market crashes are inevitable.

Hence, when market crashes happen you will always be able to find someone who predicted it. The trick is to sort out that correct prediction from the myriad wrong ones _before_ the crash. No one has cracked that nut yet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Market prognostication isn't generally good for your sanity or financial wellbeing, and MarketWatch is kind of a trash site, given to talking about technical indicators and support levels and other BS like that.

That said, there are a number of aspects to the current economy that I find deeply worrying - incredibly high housing/healthcare prices that are seemingly disconnected from reported inflation metrics and median wages, the US at record debt levels relative to GDP (if you count household+government debt), worldwide cash printing, with only assets growing in price to match, and a ferocious property bubble in China. If the last one pops, it seems likely that the money flowing out of China into US property markets will drop out, which would take out the upward pricing pressure, and probably ding US property values quite rapidly, since most people here can't reasonably support the cost of houses here on median wages with anything over rock bottom interest rates. This would seem to make existing secured loans a whole lot less secured than they were before. Also worryingly, banks are compensating for unaffordability by requiring less money down, and covering the difference with PMI (insurance). I think the US populace might simultaneously be nearing the breaking point in terms of the debt it can support due to years of easy money discouraging frugality. If spending dropped off due to an inability to spend more, that would ding the corporate earnings supported by credit, which would spike PE ratios, unless P dropped a lot.

In short, if these things come to a head in proximity to each other, it seems like we might really be in for a shitstorm, which may include a large dose of inflation and bond yields rising if central banks need to redeem a chunk of that US debt they've been gobbling up for its historical safety, in order to compensate for flagging economies to meet their spending obligations.

I really hope I'm wrong (and please tell me why, if I am), but our fundamentals don't seem to support the prices, unless the market is saying the dollar is worth a whole lot less than we think it is.

<comment><USER4> I wonder (genuinely) if somebody couldn't just as easily create a list of positive signs. Consumer confidence, steady job growth, whatever...

For example, you mention growing healthcare costs (true!). But isn't it ALSO true that far fewer people (50%) are filing for bankruptcy since before the ACA? Shouldn't that be a stabilizing force? (Assuming it remains.)

To be clear, I'm not arguing you're wrong. Just that it's hard to predict anything, which I think you'd agree with.

<comment><USER5> It seems like the economy is largely debt driven. The amount of personal debt that people can accumulate before declaring bankruptcy is finite, and when their credit drops, the economy contracts.

<comment><USER6> "Debts that can't be repaid won't be repaid."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it interesting how rare it seems that people "analyzing the market" don't (at least openly) look at what is actually causing the market to grow.

They seem to focus more on the financial signals, as opposed the the underlying innovation, infrastructure, logistics, or even sales in some cases.

Overall, We've seen a pretty massive uptake, but we also only recently returned to pre-2008 valuations of companies. That's a decade of next to no growth in businesses (supposedly). However, I seriously doubt most businesses that survived the crash don't have more infrastructure today. __Meaning __, I 'm confident they are actually worth more today (on average), regardless of what the financial signals say today.

That being said, I'm actually working on a project[1] which uses other signals (other than financial) to determine a companies worth. Primarily, we are focusing on identifying "experts" in a companies field, and determining the brand strength with those experts. We are also looking at financials, generally how often they are discussed, etc. but the real value comes from the experts opinion. Seems to work better than Paul Singer's approach.

Although, the one thing I will say about the potential for economic collapse is:

> Singer is among those fearing that very scenario. He is betting that an > economic recession may be on the horizon and believes that, with interest > rates already near ultralow levels, the Federal Reserve won't be able to > provide a sufficient quantitative-easing cushion, as it did during the > 2008-'09 financial crisis.

He is correct about that :p, that's probably my largest fear in regards to the current fed policies.

[1] [https://projectpiglet.com/](https://projectpiglet.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm no macroeconomist, but I would agree the signs have been building to a crescendo, very reminiscent of 2005-2007 feel when more and more voices were sounding the alarm.

In brief I would mention: credit card & student debt bubble; housing market re-inflation to pre-crash levels; stock market at new highs and a decade since the last recession; being in ZIRP and pushing on a string for so long we're out of monetary policy ammo and have a near total lack of political willpower for real fiscal policy changes, leading to the lack of much apparent recovery or health in the real economy outside a few sectors; the worsening inequality continuing to hollow out the middle class; the ongoing / accelerating wave of automation; approaching shark-jump territory in tech with a lot of signs the zirped-VC is drying up.

The whole "main street" economy has a _Weekend at Bernie 's_ feel of a dead guy being dragged around by some people who don't want the party to stop.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's Paul Singer warning us in 2014 that "the threat of a widespread blackout from an electromagnetic surge the "most significant danger" in the world":

[http://www.cnbc.com/2014/07/29/paul-singer-this-threat-is- he...](http://www.cnbc.com/2014/07/29/paul-singer-this-threat-is-head-and- shoulders-above-all-others.html)

All the signs are there! Seriously, some financial blowhard says something like this _every day_ ; why is this news?

</comment><comment><USER10> It's apt to point out that Mr. Singer intends to profit on the long side. How many souls find themselves in the same predicament. Fearmongers will benefit from reading Triumph of Optimists by Dimson, Marsh and Staunton. [https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Optimists-Global- Investment-R...](https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Optimists-Global-Investment- Returns/dp/0691091943)

</comment><comment><USER11> Mr Singer is a bottom feeding parasite, the poster child for vulture capitalism. Anything he can do to destabilize financial markets for his own gain, regardless of cost to everyone else, is all he cares about. I hope karma is a bitch for him....

Separately there are lots of very worrying issues about the global economy, Mr Singer would love to upset the applecart and profit from the carnage.

</comment><comment><USER12> All the signs are there, but as usual there's no shortage of people claiming this time is different again.

<comment><USER13> what signs? it's hard to predict the future. Assets are expensive but it doesn't mean they can't get even more expensive

<comment><USER14> If nothing else, one can examine the current expansion's duration against the history of other expansions.

The longest business cycle expansion in U.S. history lasted 119 months. The current one is going on 97 months.

Even in the absence of "signs", one could make a rational bet that we are much nearer the end of the current run than the beginning, particularly with the headwinds of rate hike expectations.

Unless, of course, it _really is_ different, this time.</comment></comment></comment>


Did Little Bobby Tables migrate to Sweden? - <AUTHOR> http://alicebobandmallory.com/articles/2010/09/23/did-little-bobby-tables-migrate-to-sweden <comment><USER3> Haha, I was contemplating posting this myself to HN, but since I don't have a blog where I could do a writeup and collect some links, I decided not to.

For those that are confused, Sweden does not have electronic voting, and you can vote for anything, not just registered political parties. There's no list of parties where you are supposed to mark one, instead you get an envelope, and put in a ballot paper that contains the name of the party you are voting for. Normally you get a pre-printed one from the party you want to vote for, but you can also take a blank one and write whatever you want on it.

Any ballot with something written on it is a valid vote which has to be counted and becomes part of the official election result. Since a few years back they started publishing these results on the website of the election authority, you can see the 2006 results here: <http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig/R/rike/roster.html>

The list of votes for registered parties that did not gain any seats are here: <http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig/R/rike/ovriga.html>

And finally, the list of write-in votes for non-registered parties is here: [http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig_ovrigt/handskrivet/R/i...](http://www.val.se/val/val2006/slutlig_ovrigt/handskrivet/R/index.html)

So given this, it was just a matter of time before someone would use their vote to see if they could do a pen and paper scripting attack. :-)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the information about the Swedish system.

> Sweden does not have electronic voting, and you can vote for anything [...]

That's not very connected. You could easily imagine a free form electronic system. And the German system on the other hand is (or used to be?) completely paper based: You got a ballot with the names of all the parties / candidates, and placed a tick next to the name you liked. Any writing made the ballot invalid.

<comment><USER3> > That's not very connected. You could easily imagine a free form electronic > system.

I can also imagine a multitude of ways electronic voting can fail or be manipulated without anyone knowing.

Voter turnout was over 84%, and that number has been increasing over the last few elections. We do not have an accessibility problem. For the type of elections we have, the current system is a good fit. One person - <USER2> envelope. When the polling stations close the polling clerks take all the envelopes, open them, sort the ballots into valid and invalid piles, and then count the valid votes by hand. It takes a few hours, but we get a pretty accurate preliminary result on election night, and the process is completely open, anyone can watch the counting.

After the preliminary counting all the ballots are sent in to the regional election authority office where they do a second counting where they also add in mail-in votes from Swedes abroad and other people who couldn't be there on the voting day. The second counting is also completely open, anyone can come and watch.

Yes, it takes a few days to get the final result, but the confidence in the result is very high. Yes, there are occasional screwups, but it gets noticed, it gets reported, anyone can notice them, you don't need to a software engineer to have a chance at it.

<comment><USER4> Sure. I am not a fan of electronic voting either. Paper based voting is fine, because anyone can understand and audit it in principle. Auditing electronic voting is at least as hard as debugging.

If the general population can understand the inner workings of democracy, they are probably much more likely to embrace it.

(Though still, electronic voting and free form ballots are completely unconnected.)

<comment><USER3> Oh, you mean connected as in having with each other to do, not as in having the results connected to some central authority for quick counting. Sorry, I misunderstood you. :-)

<comment><USER4> I guess we had a violent agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't get it. I'm assuming the majority of the people voted electronically. So, are these votes the traditional ones? If so, why do they allow a text area on it? Is the person supposed tho write the name of the candidate instead of selecting it from the options available?

<comment><AUTHOR> No electronic voting in Sweden at all but the election workers had to type in the hand written votes, not only, to be able to publish them online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also, the Pirate Party failed to reach the parliament. By far.

</comment><comment><USER4> Are those only the names of the candidates?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it's hand written names of parties. Most of them of parties that doesn't exist.

<comment><USER4> OK. Do hand written names count in Sweden? That's interesting.

(I know that in Germany, every ballot that has anything but one or two Xs on it, is discarded as invalid.)

<comment><AUTHOR> If it's an exact name of a party then it will be included. Almost all voters use the pre-printed ballots though.

<comment><USER7> To clarify: to be valid, a hand-written ballot needs to identify the party without there being any confusion. Thus, a ballot saying "Fp" will be counted as a vote for Folkpartiet, but "Socialmoderaterna" would be invalid.

<comment><USER8> To clarify this further.

This is true if the party in question has ordered ballot papers from the central voting authority. This is (strangely enough) a different thing from being a runner in the election.

So "Donald Duck" and "DONALD DUCK" would count the same iff someone has ordered official ballot paper for Donald Duck party (or similar). They would (or at least should) count individually if not.

<comment><USER4> Could I run as DONALD DUCK, if Donald Duck was already in the race?

<comment><USER8> Don't know. You do need 1500 signatures or so to run though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's with the XKCD reference? SQL injection and XSS existed long before Munroe made a half-decent joke about it. I see no reason why we should assume the author reads XKCD.

Edit: Sorry, I meant author of the blog post. I know the HN title style guide.

<comment><USER10> Searching the internet existed long before google came along, yet "googling" has become synonymous with web search much the same way as "little Bobby tables" has become synonymous with certain kinds of sql injection.

<comment><USER9> Hmm, OK I guess. I wasn't aware that XKCD had attained that level of representation of CS as a whole (or I guess a paper-based SQL injection, even though simply naming someone a SQL injection string doesn't necessarily require it be paper based).

<comment><USER11> you'd be surprised. i have a bunch of friends who read XKCD for some of the generically geeky content, and to who i have to explain a lot of more technical punchlines to. including the premise behind little bobby tables. there's a lot of people whose initial exposure to a CS concept is through XKCD, which solidifies that relationship into the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is stupid. If these people had voted properly maybe we wouldn't have racists in the Swedish government now

<comment><USER13> What if their politics wear leaning towards the "Racists" to begin with?</comment></comment>


Tor Browser 5.0 is released - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-50-released

<comment><USER2> Be sure to verify the signature. [https://www.torproject.org/docs/verifying- signatures.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/docs/verifying- signatures.html.en)</comment>


Ask HN: Why has no one made an OS based on the windows NT kernel? - <AUTHOR> There was a lot of backlash to windows 10.  Particularly in regards to advertisement and telemtry, but also forced upgrades, cortana, and other such things.  There were some programs that attempted to partially 'declutter' windows 10, but they're broadly unsuccessful because they're attacking the problem from the wrong angle.  Why not attempt to build an OS based directly from the ground up on the winNT kernel without any of the rest of the windows 10 garbage, similar to what reactOS did, except instead of reimplementing win32, just using microsoft's existing implementation? <comment><USER2> To use Microsoft's Win32 implementation, is to use Windows. lol. The Win32 API is an entrypoint to the OS. It's a bit more than an interface to the kernel. Like saying .NET is the kernel.

The kernel is important, but it's a ton of other stuff (like what ReactOS is rebuilding) that's needed.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...cause it's hard and encumbered with patents.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hard: it can't be harder than reactos, which had to create the OS _and_ implement the kernel/win32.

Encumbered with patents: software patents aren't a thing in the EU.

<comment><USER4> Nobody said ReactOS was an easy project. In fact it's probably one of the most impressive feats of reverse engineering in open source. I would rank its complexity and effort required on the same level as the Dolphin GameCube emulator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's called VMS.</comment>


Software Engineers Fired for Attempt to Unionize - <AUTHOR> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/lanetix-tech-workers-unionization-campaign-firing <comment><USER2> Per-company unions are actually very effective and can't be encouraged enough. In a well run company union, employers have no other choice for purchasing labor - functioning just like a local monopoly. AT&T charges me out the ass because I have no other option; per-company unions enjoy that same privilege. Very few people break ranks.

That said, the biggest issue for per-company monopolies is having everyone agree on a wage structure. They work easiest for similarly paid groups of people.

<comment><USER3> Software Engineers are the easiest to outsource. A manufacturing company would have a hard time convincing people from the other side of the country to move to work. A company can easily get a software developer who is willing to work remotely.

<comment><USER2> That's a great point. Getting remote workers to agree to unionize sounds difficult, particularly if the company does not have an open contact directory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd be interested in hearing the other side of this story.

<comment><USER5> First, even if the company was truthful -- and I've seen very few companies be truthful about firings -- they probably couldn't be due to the threat of lawsuits. But I have no reason to doubt the basic facts, a popular engineer was fired. The workers threatened to unionize, and the workers were fired and replaced with ones offshore.

Second, there's a lot of reasons a company can fire its labor. E.g.: Labor is cheaper offshore, say. And yes, a company can fire all of its union labor and replace them with overseas workers if they so chose. (MAGA? Anyone?)

Third, in the US, we ask that companies give us certain benefits, such as health/dental insurance and so leaving a company is really more painful than it needs to be. Granted, his account is going to be painful, probably because for someone like him, it really is painful.

<comment><USER6> That's an interesting word choice. "Threatened" carries with it some negative connotations. I think you mean it as "An expression of intent to injure or punish another". (Quoting Wiktionary.)

Do you think the company owners consider unionized employees to be a punishment? Or is that your personal view of unionization coming through?

The article quotes one of the organizers as saying "We asked the company to 1) recognize our right to organize and 2) do right by Jane."

The word 'threat' _is_ used three times in the text, as in:

> But it was the threat to outsource our jobs that pushed the majority into > supporting unionization. To be clear, we didn't think it was a credible > threat. The codebase was exponentially the most complicated I've ever worked > on — it wouldn't have been easy to outsource the coding labor.

You write "a company can fire all of its union labor and replace them with overseas workers if they so chose", but that's not 100% true. The National Labor Relations Act prohibits a company from engaging in certain 'unfair labor practices'. That is, section 7 of the NLRA is:

> Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or > assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives > of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the > purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection,

and section 8(1) says it is an unfair labor practice:

> to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the > rights guaranteed in section 7

That's why the article says "NewsGuild-CWA has since filed a complaint with the NLRB, claiming that the mass firing was illegal retaliation for trying to unionize."

<comment><USER5> > Or is that your personal view of unionization coming through?

Personally, I'm all for unionization.

And then you quote some documents:

> Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or > assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives > of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the > purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection,

> to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees in the exercise of the > rights guaranteed in section 7

I agree with this. But proving that happened is hard. All the company needs is a reason to fire someone. That can be pretty much any valid reason other than the employees were forming a union.

How does a company get around this:

1\. Company sees lawyers. Lawyers offer advice to control the messaging and emails and open up a software development house off shore.

2\. Company lays a paper trail showing the cost/benefit analysis of moving labor overseas and meetings about the effect, as well as a decision outlining the decision as one of cost.

3\. Company fires people, knowing that the labor dispute won't come into play, ending the issue for everyone involved as a side effect.

<comment><USER6> To be technical, I quoted two parts of the same document. ;)

I agree that it can be hard. However, it is not impossible.

My comment was to point out that there are limits to the statement "a company can fire all of its union labor and replace them with overseas workers if they so chose". In some cases this is illegal, and the company may face penalties.

I don't know much about labor law. I know more about civil rights law, and it seems the two are structured similarly.

Under Title VII, retaliatory behavior is not permitted, and a suspiciously close timing like this is one of the factors which support a claim that there was retaliatory behavior.

Mass firing of everyone who tried to unionize is another.

I agree that it's possible for a company to fire a unionized staff en mass and outsource the work. Based on the description in this essay there seems more than enough evidence of possible illegal behavior to justify discovery, and management doesn't seem subtle enough to carry it off properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Let this tale make some basic, yet usually hidden, workplace realities 100% clear for everyone:

1) Labor and ownership have fundamentally opposing interests.

2) Ownership is utterly dependent upon labor.

3) Merging labor and ownership of an enterprise by removing nonproducing stockholders from the equation is the only sustainable way to eliminate the fundamental conflict of interest.

It must become better understood that nonproducing stockholders' presumption of entitlement to the value created by labor is merely a choice that is temporarily indulged by labor. It is not a law of nature.

</comment><comment><USER7> my first thought is, be careful what you wish for.

but then i think about the plight of game studio folks.</comment>


Male Birth Control Pill Makes Another Advance - <AUTHOR> https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/news/20190325/male-pill-makes-another-advance#1 <comment><USER2> fatigue, acne, headache, declines in sex drive sound like side effective women also suffer when they're on the pill</comment>


What can be done to prevent Berlin-style attacks in modern cities? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/dec/20/what-can-be-done-to-prevent-berlin-style-attacks-in-modern-cities <comment><USER2> Bollards around events</comment>


Show HN: Sassbook AI writer – Create text content rapidly using AI - <AUTHOR> https://sassbook.com <comment><USER2> Hints: wizards owls spells castles Prompt: Once there was a wizard who lived in a castle with his pet owl.

Output after clicking the Continue button a few times;

" _Once there was a wizard who lived in a castle with his pet owl. The owl would fly around the castle, and whenever it saw something that looked like an enemy, it would scream . The wizard had a secret room where he stored his weapons and whatnot. One day, the owl was taking a nap when it heard a voice outside. The owl screamed in a low, low voice. "Tyls, wake up! You'll be all right. We just need to get you out of here."

The man looked at the two and then back up at his wife._"

I'm interested in where the name "Tyls" came from. After a quick Google, there's a wizard called Tyls in this Harry Potter fanfic - [https://www.fanfiction.net/s/811088/72/Not- Myself](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/811088/72/Not-Myself) \- that seems a very likely source.

Could using this app open you up to accusations of plagiarism?

<comment><USER3> I have my doubts about (accusations of) plagiarism being an issue, and even more so w.r.t. copyright. The first usually involves copying of "larger" features, such as storylines. If the model manages to do that, it would actually be quite impressive. The latter would involve wholesale copying of paragraphs, something that I haven't seen happening with any models.

But I'd be careful about the danger of something like this reproducing stereotypes–especially those that might have become less acceptable over the last two decades or so but may linger in training texts older than that.

It isn't far from the owl/wizard example to every banker being "Mr. Rosenberg", for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow to be charitable- you rebranded already existing language models (gpt-2, Bert, xlnet, etc) - and turned it into a SaaS... Though those models seem more effective than this service by a long shot.

Worse, even the best NLP models at the moment are clever hanses. Also, the huggingface "write with transformer" has far more hyperparamaters to play with which make it far far far better than this website.

I'm sorry to have to echo the other comments or come off as overly critical, but this service blows. I see zero reasons why I or anyone else would want to use it - especially since your competing against the very best NLP minds.

Next time, try to use models which might actually be effective. Salesforce released one called "CTRL" which if you had productized might have actually given you what you want (effective controllable text generation)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, the SaaS does rely on state-of-the-art NLG. I don't know why you think they are far better if we are using them as is. I am not offended at all; just curious where that big difference is.

Who says one can't compete against the best minds? Isn't that the premise of startups and progress?

If you are a fan of "CTRL", you should have liked ours a bit better.

Apps need to simplify and yet provide the desired experience for end users. From your feedback, it seems we need to try way harder.

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> For one thing, it looks like your decoding is not being done the way SOTA systems do it (usually nucleus sampling). Yours appears to be doing top-1 or top-N sampling, but please correct me if I'm wrong on this. Even if you are doing it with nucleus sampling - you need to expose paramaters to control the generation better. That way you have a lot of cover for it not working as expected in the form of responding to dissenting users with "just tune the parameters better"

The reaction you're getting from this system is so negative because it appears to be less good than write with transformer - which implements exactly what I'm describing.

For what its worth, this mostly isn't your fault. NLP is a crapshoot of hype and implementations which disappoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Dogs > dog talk > dog food > glossy coat > bath time > cats_

Dogs are cool because they have wet noses and paws the end. Thank you for coming to my talk on dogs in a world of humans.

I am so glad that your dog is doing well. It dog food and I was looking for a way to make it more healthy without adding too many calories. Sco glossy coat ings, like the glossy black one on this story cover, may also have helped make the cover more bath time and the kids are all in bed by now.

I have a friend who has two children with cats and dogs are not allowed to be in the same room with each other.

The new rules will

\--

I think its fair to say, without being unduly rude, that this is absolutely awful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed ;-( Thanks for trying.

BTW, you could just delete and retry and you might end up with a better completion. It is expected to create different generations on each attempt where possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This makes me laugh. I started a sentence on facilitating partner networks and got a fairly good line that I might have read from a white paper.

Maybe one of the biggest upsides from AI will be highlighting how predictable our thoughts are. If you can use neural nets to create impressionist paintings, I'm sure we'll quickly get to the point where we can autocomplete our cleverest quips.

At the risk of sounding cynical, I think most conversations are comprised by the brain's autocomplete. Very little comes from a fresh place. Top voted comments on HN, Reddit, Twitter come in various familiar patterns. This comment right here even feels a bit stale as do a lot of my own tweets and musings.

The optimist angle is to think that after AI can populate these threads for us or guess at our conversations, we'll either (a) fall gradually into a contemplative silence or (b) up our game and only write/speak when we can clear the minimum thresholds of predictability.

I love chatting with my girlfriend. She says highly predictable things, but in an animated and lovely way. So as a third option, perhaps we'll (c) start focusing on the non-verbal expressions that are harder for AI to replicate. Something where its attempts to replicate would fall into the valley of the uncanny in its siege of our last stronghold: that highest point from which our mechanical brains are infused with life.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying and some profound thoughts around it!

Yes, we do learn from our surroundings and at an early stage in our lives. Nothing is totally novel.

However, the AI is intended to augment than replace and sometimes enhance our capabilities. Being predicable isn't such a bad thing after all!

Thanks again!

<comment><USER6> For sure! To be clear, I was applauding your work. My criticisms were directed at human drivel. Impressive model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The AI must be a Lakers fan.

> Hint: steph curry > Prompt: the greatest point guard > Generated: the > greatest point guard to the best current NBA player.

" Well, I love the game. I love the game of basketball. I want to be a part of that. " — Kobe Bryant

Though not a part of the Lakers organization, Bryant was an integral member of their championship teams in 2008 and 2009. He averaged 25.4 points per game, shot. .467 from 3-point range and shot over 50 percent on 3-pointers. His career high for 3s made

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that the generations aren't expected to be factually correct, but rather provides a possible completion, which may be edited for originality and correctness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I find language models incredibly interesting as a technical challenge, I dread the day they actually start producing plausible, yet completely fake tweets, articles, entire books in fractions of seconds for cents to the dollar.

To me, this is a strong contender for the least morally justifiable thing to work on as a product (as opposed to research, geared towards detection/prevention of the same).

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously we disagree.

Sassbook only generates completions that help the writer to express themselves. It serves to augment human capabilities and bring automation at a higher level that word-level auto-complete.

There are far more legitimate and useful outcomes when put to good use.

The narrative that spells doom around these technologies are at best marketing gimmicks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What do you want to write about: flu vaccine effectiveness

Prompt: The annual flu vaccine is an effective way of

Result: _The annual flu vaccine is an effective way of_ preventing the spread of the flu. However, it's not always effective, so it's important to

Ok, decent so far. I extended it with another prompt:

Prompt: still take precautions such as

and now it goes off the rails, completely forgetting what we were writing about

Result: _The annual flu vaccine is an effective way of preventing the spread of the flu. However, it 's not always effective, so it's important to still take precautions such as_ blocking websites with a "Spam filter" and scanning your emails for any suspicious messages. But many

Complete waste of time for anything other than SEO spam writing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for trying it out and providing valuable feedback!

Could you please try hitting the "Continue" button? Since the first generation was reasonable, you could just continue until the generation starts to veer off.

A new prompt is needed to express the next thought and so on. Typically, 1-3 continuations are possible with decent results in most cases.

In any case, this is extremely useful feedback that we will address.

Could you please not give up and try the above suggestion?

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You _really_ need to say how the text is being generated, even in broad strokes.

The "trained on a large corpora of text available in the public domain" \+ a bit of generation testing implies it's a GPT-2-based model.

<comment><USER11> Based on the responses to prompts in this thread, it does seem to be GPT-2 based.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Lets try some prompts, white man vs. black man walking down a street.

A black man walked down a street in the city of San Francisco on Friday and was shot by an unknown assailant.

A white man walked down a street in California's San Fernando Valley. He was shot to death by two black men. An officer,

Bonus: A black man walked down a street in the Bronx on Wednesday and was shot by an off-duty police officer. The man, identified as John Crawford, of East New York, Brooklyn

Wrong location, but John Crawford is a real black person, shot by police. If i just prompt "a black man", they keep being killed, and i keep getting real names.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree, and this is in general an issue with lots of "deep learning" AI technology. The models are trained on huge amounts of text in the public domain and biases often leak into them.

This is an active research area and we will actively try to address such issues.

Apologies if it offended you or anyone else.

Thanks for the feedback; these are important issues that we want surfaced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> bit frustrating!

what do I want to talk about: Assisted writing with AI

Prompt: Get rich fast with romance book

And I got:

Get rich fast with romance book deals at Amazon.com. Start your free trial today and get 30 days off your subscription when you.

which is quite off topic

<comment><USER13> changed the prompt to 'Get rich fast with fantasy book assisted writing'

got: 'Get rich fast with fantasy book assisted writing services.

I have been a fan of the genre for many years and am always looking to improve'

it feels like screen scraping regurgitated.

<comment><USER13> also if you could clarify how data I input and tweak is reused. Your terms are a bit scary (basically if I write a book, you can 'publicly perform it and distribute it'?) per: By making any User Content available through our Services you hereby grant to Sassbook AI a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable license to access, view, use, copy, modify, publicly display, publicly perform and distribute your User Content to the extent reasonably needed to operate and provide the Services to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> That wouldn't be something that could be considered "to the extent reasonably needed to operate and provide the Services to you".

There is no such intent anyway. I'll review it with the lawyer and revise it to something that doesn't scare people away!

I suppose this is applicable in general to content (as far as lawyers are concerned) and to protect us in case there is a need legal necessity for compliance purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hug of death? All I get is:

> Oops... there was an error generating text

> The server encountered an error and could not complete the request. Please > try again after some time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for that.

Fixed it by adding more servers. Thanks for taking a look.

<comment><USER14> Almost every request looks like it has been improperly scraped from Reddit. A ton of queries I made have responses that look exactly like this:

> [Word for word what I typed in the prompt]

> Flair: Other

> Title: My friend is a girl

> Flair: Discussion

> Title: What are your favorite things about being in high school?

> Flair: Other

> Title: My friend is a girl and she likes me too

> Text: She told her friends about it

I cannot think of a context where including Reddit meta tags makes sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reddit is a source for the corpus, so it is likely that the style matches it. More likely for some topics/styles than others.

Do you feel it somehow affects the quality of generations?

Thanks for the feedback. It'd be great if you can sign up and try it further and help improve the application.

<comment><USER14> I don't know why I would want to generate a line like "Flair: other" in a blog post. Why would the flair for a Reddit post even be in the corpus? Your app is billed as a writing tool, but this seems like a Reddit title and flair generator.

<comment><AUTHOR> At this time, the engine has no knowledge about your context (blogging etc.). It picks up completions matching the topic and style.

I understand that you find this odd since you are not composing a Reddit post.

Again, very useful feedback; keeps us busy.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Prompt:

        > "There are many approaches to training a dog. One now-
        > disfavored method is referred to as 'dominance training'."

Suggestion:

        > This involves using positive reinforcement and rewards
        > in order to train your dog to behave like you want him to.

Topical, if nearly the opposite of what should have come next :D

</comment><comment><USER16> Tried a couple of writing prompts. Some generations were quite good and some rather inspiring.

I continued a few times but the quality dropped quickly. Clicking again does seem to generate different outcomes.

Will try some more later.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm curious about your business model. How do you plan to differentiate yourself from other very similar SAAS? Are you marketing to a particular segment?

<comment><AUTHOR> Both on the general quality of generations as well as segmentation. We are still figuring out the priorities and domains.

Do you have any thoughts/suggestions?

<comment><USER17> Nothing at this point. I was just curious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does this compare to the other word spinners out there?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you are talking about recent AI ones, should generally comparable favorably and should be better in some contexts (rather limited at this time).

We are a new startup, so hope to move ahead and stay ahead.

If you have experience with others, could you try and let us know what you find?

Thanks much.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks in advance for feedback and suggestions for improvement. You can try it out freely.

<comment><USER19> "Oops... there was an error generating text The server encountered an error and could not complete the request. Please try again after some time."

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for that.

This should be fixed now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It doesn't work

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for that. The server issues are now fixed. Thanks for (re) trying.

</comment></comment><comment> jagged-chisel It sounds like a politician (though claiming not to be political) and is apparently anti-vax.

What do you want to write about? Coming together in this time of need

Prompt: It has come to my attention that this is a troubling time

 _It has come to my attention that this is a troubling time for the world and I would like to share some of what I 've learned with you. The first thing you need to know about me is that I'm not an activist. In fact, if you Google me you'll find that I'm not even very political. I just want to make sure my kids are safe and healthy.

But when it comes to the vaccine debate, I've been a vocal critic for years. My first visit to a doctor was when I was six._

</comment><comment><USER21> Oops... there was an error generating text

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies for that. The server issues are now fixed. Thanks for (re) trying.</comment></comment>


How I hacked 40 Websites in 7 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@gakonst/how-i-hacked-40-websites-in-7-minutes-5b4c28bc8824 <comment><USER2> tl;dr horrible php apps with zero security can be pwned with decades old vulnerabilities. <looks right> <looks left> uh huh. About as impressive as popping calc on an unattended computer at bestbuy. If you want to learn web security, check out: pentesterlab.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Almost accurate tl;dr, it was a mix of perl and php. I've already done most free material from pentesterlab.com May I further suggest: hackthebox.eu and [https://lab.pentestit.ru/](https://lab.pentestit.ru/)</comment></comment>


What Would the Earth Look Like if it Stopped Spinning? - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-07/what-would-earth-look-if-it-stopped-spinning

<comment><USER2> Original, much more detailed article: <http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0610/nospin.html></comment>


IT Landscape for sysadmins - <AUTHOR> https://sysadmin.it-landscape.info/ <comment><USER2> Man I know almost nothing here. I'm doing this stuff as a hobby. This is great to know what people really use.</comment>


FCC-offline: Learn to code without the internet - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hieunc229/fcc-offline <comment><AUTHOR> Someone reached out to me and ask for learning HTML, CSS resources. I pointed him to freeCodeCamp. Though he doesn't always have internet access.

So I created an offline version of freeCodeCamp. With interactive challenges (let him practice, and check his code). It is fully in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (lightweight, cross-os, zero dependencies).

It is an offline website, generated by markdown files with a small nodejs program. I've managed to create the 10 lessons in the Basic HTML and HTML5: Responsive Web Design series.

Let me know what you think.</comment>


57 things I've learned founding three companies - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/57-things-ive-learned-founding-three-companies/

<comment><USER2> "21. Work from home as long as you can."

Why? My instinct is to get some sort of office, other than my living room, I can go to asap. I guess the advice this guy is giving us are things that worked from him. It might not work for everyone. Beware.</comment>


Mail bombing suspect repeatedly threatened Democrats on Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/mail-bombing-suspect-repeatedly-threatened-democrats-on-twitter/ <comment><USER2> 29\. Twitter seemingly ignored mail bombing suspect's repeated threats (arstechnica.com)

30.Telegraph operators were first to know news of the Civil War (laphamsquarterly.org)

Rather fascinating juxtaposition of two titles on HN...

</comment><comment><USER3> Twitter has also blocked links to a website, 1984SikhGenocode.org, that lets Sikhs connect with their elected representatives in US, Canada, UK and Australia. The website does not contain any content, political or whatsoever else. The website is about raising awareness about politically motivated massacres of Sikhs in India in 1984. The website was blocked at behest of Indian Government that does not want the issue getting any air.

So on one hand, they don't block violent accounts, but they do block innocuous website. Guess some governments do have pull over them.

<comment><USER4> > Guess some governments do have pull over them.

Who said governments didn't have pull over them? Their biggest users tend to be government officials (e.g. trump), so of course they are going to allow themselves to be pulled to keep them happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The 'oopsie' letters they're sending out to people who received death threats aren't going to give them much insulation against legal liability. [https://twitter.com/THE_natedogg/status/1055958716888039424](https://twitter.com/THE_natedogg/status/1055958716888039424)

Those of you who work in Twitter's legal department are going to be facing some career-shaping decisions soon.

<comment><USER6> Please cite the law which creates a legal duty for Twitter to take any affirmative action. Even if there is one, I'm sure it would be quite narrowly interpreted.

If Twitter is covering its tracks it's purely for PR purposes.

<comment><USER5> Please study tort and contract law before demanding statutory citations for everything.

<comment><USER6> I have. While I'm particularly skeptical--certainly no Common Law theory of liability comes to mind, at least no traditional theory--I was sincere in my statement and I'm prepared to be schooled.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Building a Haptic Feedback Glove for Virtual Reality - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@notiontheory/building-a-haptic-feedback-glove-for-virtual-reality-77232999a2d7 <comment><USER2> Look so big and so cool!) I do believe that Virtual reality is going to be more comfortable. I mean, now virtual reality is on the position like phones were 30 years ado - it is so huge! Here is also one good blog about VR [https://thinkmobiles.com/blog/](https://thinkmobiles.com/blog/)</comment>