A Tool Will Let You See Anyone's Email Address on LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/tech/this-sneaky-tool-will-let-you-see-anyones-email-on-81301057402.html <comment><USER2> I have a suspicion this app is harvesting all your LinkedIn contacts, uploading them to the app.sellhack.com server, and then as a "reward" for you giving up all that info, you can pull other contacts back out of sellhack.com.

If so, this is basically a Chrome virus.

<comment><USER3> Yup, that's exactly what it's doing. It's grabbing mailto's, email addresses, twitter handles, etc off pages you see -- from you & your connections -- and sending them back to its server.

[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b15b1e3f6cfb8497e8f0#file-...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b15b1e3f6cfb8497e8f0#file- sellhack-js-L36)

By using this extension you are compromising your friends' privacy!

<comment><USER2> This brings up an interesting point of social engineering compromising LinkedIn.

LinkedIn should immediately put a Captcha on their contact info display to stop this JS attack!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like all this is doing is trying every combo of first name, last name, initials, etc @ company's website the person was employed by.

Nothing new here that's actually hacking in though, just checking the combos for a positive return form rapportive (or really could just be pinging the email servers).

With that said it is in a nice and "consumer" friendly system, but even if this gets shut down you can do it manually very easily and always have been able to.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it is that simple. I just tried with a colleague I met but whose email I did not know. It returned his gmail account.

<comment><USER4> They could easily be testing many of the gmail + yahoo + other popular accounts as well, doing google searches in the background for "firstname.lastname@example.com AND company" to see if the person appears or maybe it really is more than what I thought.

I just thought this way originally because it showed "26 results" for a friend I looked up that I'm not connected to before it gave me the 1 final result that was his email. The 26 results as it was loading showed everything from email@example.com (not active), email@example.com (not active), email@example.com (not active), etc.

EDIT: So based on it showing so many false positives it looks like it's just queuing up all possibilities than returning whatever it finds works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What an incredibly irresponsible post by Yahoo Tech. No disclaimer, and it is written as a how-to!

Am I the only one that thinks that the people at Yahoo Tech should know better than to make de-facto recommendations to their users to install such kind of hacks that are as dangerous to users as they are in violating the TOS of the website target?

<comment><USER7> It's a cluster-fudge alright. The reporter should have, er, _reported_ on what they did and what results they saw.

And it left the really big question open: how does this "app" pull the email address? If it's sitting there in the source of the page somehow, this is just a pretty wrapper around a critical LinkedIn bug. If it's doing something else . . . well, I would be _really_ interested in knowing what else it was doing.

<comment><USER3> No, not on the page. The extension appears to be making a request to "app.sellhack.com" to look up the LinkedIn member.

EDIT: And it's stealing your friends' contact details! Don't install it! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7505728](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7505728)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It would be trivial for this app to steal your LinkedIn credentials or send LinkedIn spam or do other nasty stuff. It's loading this script live off their server: [https://sellhack- static.s3.amazonaws.com/extensions/linkedin...](https://sellhack- static.s3.amazonaws.com/extensions/linkedin/sellhack.min.js)

<comment><USER8> Surprisingly, most "hacking" tools actually hack their users, instead of hacking on their behalf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So in other words, LinkedIn's "premium account" service suffers from an info disclosure vulnerability that they seem to be either too lazy or inept to fix, and are instead just using their legal team as a meatspace firewall.

<comment><USER10> No evidence of a LinkedIn vulnerability yet.

<comment><USER9> Features that are supposed to be behind a paywall but aren't? That's a vulnerability if you are LinkedIn and want to encourage more users to upgrade to premium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For many years the only spam and phishing emails I got were those sent to the unique address I used to register on LinkedIn.

<comment><USER12> The same, and my custom email even included 'linkedin' as a substring, so no doubt about it. Also I was seeing web crawler bots hitting URLs that were hidden behind a "contacts only" privacy limit.

<comment><USER13> "LinkedIn: the website for self-promoters too shameless and impatient for Facebook." I'm not sure what else I would expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have just tried this with new email and linkedin account with the intention to see my own linkedin mail. At least it does not work with the last firefox and linux mint here

</comment><comment><USER15> looks like she has been made aware:

[https://twitter.com/alyssabereznak/status/450831920168181760](https://twitter.com/alyssabereznak/status/450831920168181760)

<comment><USER16> hi, i'm the author of the post. it's updated. thanks again for pinging me on twitter.

i'm planning to talk to linkedin more about it. let me know if there's anything you'd like to know.

[https://www.yahoo.com/tech/this-sneaky-tool-will-let-you- see...](https://www.yahoo.com/tech/this-sneaky-tool-will-let-you-see-anyones- email-on-81301057402.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of weev's "hack" against AT&T. Will people demand that the creator of this cool be thrown into jail for 3 years?

<comment><USER10> Is the creator a world-famous a*hole? No? Then probably not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's not really a big deal. I mean, if you have a LinkedIn account, you likely get a bit of spam already.

And, if someone really wanted to get in contact with you, they can. (Phone directories still exist.) And, of course, just send them an invite. Most accept.

I wouldn't trust a browser plugin like this though.

</comment><comment><USER19> Any piece of data that's out there, currently private or not, will ultimately become available to anyone as long as they can find it. This is a tool which speeds up that process.

Can't wait for the Facebook version of this plugin.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone use the tool and search a few email address to attest the claim.

<comment><USER21> Works perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was rather surprised when LinkedIn synced all of my LinkedIn contacts' email addresses into my address book via the Android app. Not as bad as this, but strange default behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER23> This tool sucks, I tried it when it was posted on a previous YC thread. I tried it on a few accounts where I'm directly connected with someone & it gave me bogus addresses.

</comment><comment><USER24> Tested it and it didn't seem to work. No button on the profile

<comment><USER25> I got the button, but tried it on 10 different users and it got none of their email addresses.

<comment><USER21> Right-click and Inspect Element. You will see the e-mail address inside of the Hack In "results" DIV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Advertisers and headhunters like to use it.

</comment><comment><USER27> This doesn't work....also I now feel violated...it seems like it is harvesting your contacts email and uploading it without your permission.

Sigh. These guys are about to feel the wrath of Linkedin's legal team.

I deleted it, it's useless.

<comment><USER28> it works great, has constantly worked every time I tried it

<comment><USER27> do you have to be connected to the person? I tried it and the spinner just loads forever.

<comment><USER28> nah I wasn't connected to the people, the server is probably getting bombarded now since a whole bunch of news outlets are starting to cover it and that is causing a lot of errors but this was actually released like a week or two ago and works great

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> But aren't 100% of linkedin code thoroughly tested ([http://engineering.linkedin.com/tags/testing](http://engineering.linkedin.com/tags/testing))? Much code coverage. Much fun! Wow!

</comment><comment><USER20> Now wonder How Recruiters were able to get my personal email.</comment>


Heroku sending out e-mails to all app owners regarding rails vulnerability - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/1/11/rails_security_vulnerability/?

<comment><AUTHOR> So heroku runs multiple apps on one box. I assume they are using linux and each app is under a different user account.

However if any of those apps are vulnerable doesn't it mean the attacker has access to the box as a user? From there it is just a local privilege escalation (which are pretty common) and you have access to everyone else's apps right?</comment>


What is a Source Map - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneems.com/2017/11/14/wtf-is-a-source-map/ <comment><USER3> Some interesting history of source maps: They actually are older than the article suggests, having been original developed and used internally at Google starting in early 2009. At the time, Google had some of the largest applications written in JavaScript running inside of the browser, optimized and minified using Closure Compiler [1]. One focus of Closure Compiler was/is minimizing bytes sent over wire, which resulted in trying to debug issues that occurred on Line 1, Character XXXXX of the minified file. As an engineer working 20% on a Gmail feature, I grew incredibly frustrated with having to add `console.log` or `alert` calls everywhere, and so threw together extensions to both Closure Compiler and Firebug to produce the very first iteration of source maps. While only used by a few members of the Gmail and apps teams at first, the source maps and "LavaBug" (our extension to Firebug to consume source maps) spread internally, so much so that we decided to release them as part of Closure Compiler's first release ("LavaBug" being released as "Closure Inspector") [2].

The reason the spec lives in a Google Doc is that it is not a standard; it is a specification that we wrote at Google and saw teams both internally and externally pick up as it gained steam, eventually being supported in all major browsers and most compile-to-JavaScript tools; shows how having a solution to a problem can cause it to grow into a "standard".

Source: I invented Source Maps

[1] [https://github.com/google/closure- compiler](https://github.com/google/closure-compiler) [2] [https://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing- closure-...](https://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-closure- tools.html)

<comment><USER4> I choose to believe the article writer.

<comment><USER5> If you click the fist link in the article, going to the google doc, you'll find this:

 _The original source map format (v1) was created by Joseph Schorr for use by Closure Inspector_

Username checks out. Snark or not, please avoid posting this type of comment here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who has worked in real web development knows that source maps are barely functional. When they do work, they are slow and there's a non-trivial delay, during which time the minified source or transpiled source or whatever is shown.

There's a 50/50 shot they won't even work at all, and of that 50% of the time they do work, they often don't have the correct line and column.

Again, things like the interactive debugger and "pause on caught exceptions" often casually break with source maps.

In short, it's a mess.

<comment><USER7> Maybe it wasn't "real web development" but I've worked in projects with O(thousands of lines) of transpiled and minimized typescript where they worked fine.

<comment><USER8> Thousands of lines is barely enough to get the full pain, given that webapps can get to multiple tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of lines.

Not to mention several Chrome bugs about sourcemaps over the years.

<comment><USER9> I've had no complaints about source maps in Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A source map is the ability to say, for every character in a minified JS file, "Which source file did this character from? Which line and column?"

Note that there are a few types of source maps that vary in quality, so sometimes you don't get accurate column info. [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qYxqOqD...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qYxqOqD-x3oJ:cheng.logdown.com/posts/2016/03/25/679045+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

The cool thing is, it's really easy to throw together a toy language with first-class debugging and tooling, thanks to sourcemaps. See coffeescript and lightscript for two ecosystems to emulate.

[https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/blob/master/src/so...](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/blob/master/src/sourcemap.litcoffee)

[http://www.lightscript.org/](http://www.lightscript.org/)

<comment><USER11> A source map is the reason your browser is so slow after you succeeded to debug your 4Mo webpack generated dev bunddle you spent 3 hours to configure right. And "your browser" is not plural because one config won't work with another browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The source map format is tricky. One flaw is that the VLQ encoding is strange and hard to get right. 0 may be encoded as either A or B (?). Even the author missed an edge case: -2^31 is wrongly encoded as B (i.e. 0) while the correct encoding 'jgggggE' is wrongly decoded as -1. Try entering them in [http://www.murzwin.com/base64vlq.html](http://www.murzwin.com/base64vlq.html) .

More seriously, the format is unsuitable for random access. It must be fully parsed and held in memory to be used.

</comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of what I think is the curious omission of source maps inside editors or IDEs.

The opportunity is most easily explained by pointing at the issue of significant whitespace: it should not be a language feature, but an editor option. Those that want it should get it, no need to fuss at the language level. It is not semantics. Source maps could do the trick. One could edit a source mapped version, and have the edits piped back to the source.

I'm sure there are lots more applications that make sense for an editor. Imagine having to edit a big table with lots of columns. If one could supply the editor with a filter that pairs the text down to the interesting tidbits, with a source map, edits could be mapped back to the source. That would be a big win.

Another trivial example are coding styles. Everybody has their own, the editor should interface that style to the code-base. I believe source map support in editors could enable this.

The biggest win would be an ecosystem of plugins for such services.

</comment><comment><USER14> For security and possibly performance purposes, I would like to forego sending source maps to the client in Production and instead store the source maps, using versioning on the server and just send serialized client side stack traces to the server for error reporting. Has anyone done this before? I tried digging into this several times in the past but came up empty.

<comment><USER15> I often hear people point to security as a reason to avoid shipping sourcemaps in Production, but it seems like such a non-issue given that anyone can unminify the code shipped out to their browsers. What kinds of secrets are able to be hidden via obfuscation? The answer traditionally is "none" so I'm pretty consistently baffled. We do strip comments explicitly so that devs don't need to be as concerned with exposing anything that way, but aside from that I don't really understand this angle.

<comment><USER16> > What kinds of secrets are able to be hidden via obfuscation?

Source code is very effectively hidden by obfuscation.

If that were not true, GNU and open-source and GPL would not exist.

\---

Regardless, another important thing is not to download source maps onto client's machines, as that defeats the whole point of minification.

Decoding stack traces server-side dedups work and doesn't impose an unnecessary performance burden on users.

<comment><USER17> > Regardless, another important thing is not to download source maps onto > client's machines, as that defeats the whole point of minification.

Browsers don't download source map files unless the developer tools are opened. If your client is using your app with the dev tools open you may have other problems that have nothing to do with performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very naive question as someone who last wrote production JavaScript in 2008: so basically web developers are reinventing debug symbols?

<comment><USER19> And badly. I rrally wish JavaScript would just use DWARF. Sourcemaps are quite broken, do not contain scope infos and cannot be used to map function names wirhout doing stupid things.

<comment><USER20> JavaScript doesn't use DWARF. DevTools and production server systems do. If you think DWARF is better, write up a patch to Babel or Closure Compiler, and a devtools extension. I think you'll problem find that DWARF doesn't really match the source-to-source profile case well, and in the end, you'll add so many extensions that what you end up with isn't DWARF at all.

SourceMaps can be used to global names, but not locals. However, Closure Compiler has the ability to generate more elaborate maps that do allow reverse mapping. This is how Google services deobfuscate logs and stack traces sent back by heavily optimized clients.

<comment><USER19> > However, Closure Compiler has the ability to generate more elaborate maps > that do allow reverse mapping

Is that an extension to source maps that Google came up with? Because from the current specification I do not see how this can be done without hacks. The way we're doing it is inverse token search from a starting position over the minified tokens until we find our minified function name followed by the keyword 'function'.

And that approach is slow and not entirely correct.

<comment><USER20> SourceMaps as specified are an interop format for devtools on the client side.

On the server side, you can store a lot more information since it doesn't need to be transmitted to the client. Closure Compiler stores maps for all variables, all properties, all functions, all renamed strings, all idGenerators, etc. You can store these if you want.

Google's servers store these maps and when user feedback or exceptions are logged, they are used to deobfuscate them. SourceMaps + functionMaps + propertyMaps + the others I mentioned as used to deobfuscate.

This doesn't solve the problem of deobfuscating locals or heap objects. That needs an extension.

<comment><USER19> Sure. But what you describe is not possible with the documented sourcemap format. You can't even map function names at the moment. It's purely a token and token location mapping format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Something I've been wondering lately and have seen a few different — and rather surprising — takes: do you include source maps in production?

I've seen a somewhat surprising amount of people say that they absolutely wouldn't these days, which seems fairly security-through-obscurity. Would love to hear some different opinions on this, though.

<comment><USER22> I wouldn't, or to be more precise - I wouldn't by default. I prefer to enable things like source maps via an environment variable or a special build - <USER2> I know that I need to debug something. By always including source maps, I just increase the asset size for the site's visitors, with "no benefit" (most end users won't have a clue about how to debug something).

Regarding the security aspect - don't put anything you know to be sensitive/insecure on the Internet in the first place.

<comment><USER21> Source maps aren't actually loaded by the browser unless specifically requested by opening web inspector, fwiw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How is this different from debugging info? They should just use DWARF instead of reinventing the wheel.

<comment><USER24> It's very similar, but they wouldn't be able to "just use DWARF". Half the DWARF tables are devoted to byte sizes and where variables are stored in stack frame offsets or registers. It's not like you could fork libdwarf or whatever and magically get JS debugging, the effort required to change to the different scenario is enough that it's not worth the effort.

<comment><USER25> Honest question, will any of this matter once we've gone full WASM? Will DWARF be a good option then?

As I understand in the not too distant future, everyone that absolutely despises Javascript and the whole ecosystem it re-invented will be able to merrily go about their way using the old familiar tools and languages from yore when they can compile to wasm.

<comment><USER26> There's some significant complications, like the fact that most languages that compile to WebAssembly will need to use two stacks at certain times (including C/C++). In this respect WASM is in a similar situation to .NET and the JVM, which use their own debugging information formats for good reason.

Considering this wouldn't make much of a dent in the work needed to get tools like gdb/lldb to work with WebAssembly engines I don't think it's likely to be the best path forward for WASM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Unfortunately, at least in my experience, JS source maps are pretty useless for any real life debugging because browser almost never manages to set a breakpoint on the line that you've marked, so it gives you some value only if you don't already have access to the original unminified sources.

However CSS source maps are of a great help for less/sass.

</comment><comment><USER28> check out the Rust implementation that Armin made for Sentry: [https://blog.sentry.io/2016/10/19/fixing-python- performance-...](https://blog.sentry.io/2016/10/19/fixing-python-performance- with-rust.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> He says in his article that minification is best practice. And I imagine I'm a dinosaur and (or) completely out of touch, because I disagree.

Minifcation becomes a thing when the page is too big. And many pages* contain bloat that do nothing to improve my lot. I write my CSS by hand, and keep it as sparse as I can. When I do use JavaScript it does a specific thing, like filter a dataset or move a slider. And it's easy to debug because it's pithy, and uses sensible naming.

* Some pages - specifically real-time apps - need lots of JS bloat. I get and accept that. Happily I don't need to make any of those beasts.

<comment><USER30> In pretty much every case minification is going to reduce the payload, which is going to reduce the amount of data a client has to download. Whether you're minifying 1KB down to 100 bytes, or 50 MB down to 3 MB -- you're still benefiting.

I can't really see a case where that is a bad thing, particularly when you have source maps to get you back to the original source code, anyway. Your stance just seems very naive.

<comment><USER29> Source maps have never worked out for me, and my pages are tiny (I see no benefit in sacrificing readability for a reduction from 1K to 100 bytes).

<comment><USER31> That's an interesting claim about readability. You may as well argue that compilation of C program reduces its readability. Minification should be a step of making a production build. It does not affect source code and thus it does not affect readability.

<comment><USER32> > You may as well argue that compilation of C program reduces its readability. > Minification should be a step of making a production build.

You can't run C without building it, so you have to do some kind of compilation. I've certainly known people to argue for e.g. including debug symbols even in the build you ship to customers - the savings from stripping them aren't worth the added complexity and difficulty of debugging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sokra (of webpack) and I have hacked on a sourcemap visualizer which really illuminates exactly how the mappings work: [https://paulirish.github.io/source-map- visualization/#raven](https://paulirish.github.io/source-map- visualization/#raven)

A few examples are available, but you can also drag in your own files to view those.

</comment><comment><USER34> When I look at downloaded minified JS files in my browser's dev tools, there's a button to de-minify/pretty-print the JS.

What is the advantage of the source map?

</comment><comment><USER35> Thanks sir.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is why Javascript is 20 years behind...

<comment><USER37> Could you tell me the language which is 20 years ahead of JavaScript?

<comment><USER38> Pretty much all the native ones. When you're debugging c/c++/etc, you're relying on source maps (via dwarf/elf/etc)

<comment><USER39> I guess for certain definitions of 'behind'.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ISS crew sheltering in Soyuz capsule due to space debris - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/16/iss-space-debris

<comment><AUTHOR> According to the twitter account of the german space agency (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt), this is the 4th time since the ISS mission began and it's just a precautionary measure.</comment>


NASA`s Viking robots found life on Mars 36 years ago - <AUTHOR> http://zeenews.india.com/news/space/nasa-s-viking-robots-found-life-on-mars-36-years-ago_769875.html <comment><USER2> There was a warning box/advertisement at the bottom of the page that my download manager is out of date, with an X to close the box. But it's not an X, it's just pixels, and clicking it pops up a window to download a download manager.

Which makes everything at this site suspect and not worth reading.</comment>


New iOS designs - <AUTHOR> http://josh.io/blog/2013/4/26/8-new-ios-designs <comment><USER2> You can tell that was done by designers going for "ooh pretty" with usability somewhere down the priority list.

"Fold to unlock"? What does that mean? Apple has spent years teaching users about the "Slide to unlock" metaphor and now you want to change the wording? I need to fold my phone? wha?

The contacts list with only pictures of contact's faces, because in the real world I have pictures of EVERYONE on my contact list, my lawyer, the plumber, that guy I met at the conference who quickly swapped numbers with...

The app icons with no names was already dealt with in the post.

I do like the keyboard though.

<comment><USER3> You're going to find this crazy (and honestly, after having tried it I agree with you: it didn't quite make sense), but the "Fold to Unlock" is not just concept art from a designer: that's a popular modification you can download for free and install on a jailbroken iPhone, and tons of people really like the concrete implementation.

[http://www.iphonehacks.com/2012/05/unfold-brings-fold-to- unl...](http://www.iphonehacks.com/2012/05/unfold-brings-fold-to-unlock- concept-to-life.html)

<comment><USER4> There's a big difference between intentionally installing a modification on your device and having it installed by default, though. iOS's popularity is largely due to its intuitive UI.

<comment><USER3> I can only imagine you missed my parenthetical? Like, reading your comment, one would presume that rather than saying "that's not just the design of some crazy designer, that's actually a concrete implementation that people like, but yeah: it doesn't make sense" I had said "no, you are wrong: Apple should do this, because you are totally wrong and a vast majority of people actually like it"... it isn't even "the most popular thing in the world of jailbreaking" or anything (although it is somewhat unreasonably popular for what it is ;P).

<comment><USER4> Rereading your comment, I did kind of skim past that bit, sorry. I was mostly referring to the little bit at the end in regards to 'lots of people really liking' it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are all pretty and nice, but the majority of them are UX regressions.

1\. App icons without app names.

2\. A keyboard where the button edges are less clearly identifiable.

3\. An app switcher that takes you completely out of your current app (this one is a little more debatable because there are advantages to showing views of other apps)

4\. A fold to unlock that ignores the reason that slide to unlock exists, preventing unintentional unlock (fold to unlock would be sensitive to touch across the entire screen)

The messages and contacts designs look slightly more promising. I think it would be interesting and possibly more usable to have a contacts list with faces in it, but in a list view, not necessarily in a 2d grid.

I like the slide-out menu visual metaphor; it seems to give the side-out pattern some of the affordance that is lacking in the current way that slide- outs are animated.

<comment><USER6> 3\. An app switcher that takes you completely out of your current app (this one is a little more debatable because there are advantages to showing views of other apps)

What _are_ the advantages to showing view of other apps ? Other than it looking attractive in mockups.

When I'm switching to an app, I almost always know what app I'm trying to get to, it's contents is rarely useful to know when switching to it.

So personally I've never found the stack switching thing useful in say Windows 7, it actually makes it more confusing because there's more data to take in.

OSX still just keeps it simple with the icons and that seems to work great.

Technically it's a very easy thing for Apple to implement (previews that is) but I suspect they have it like they do because it's actually the better solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would argue that Mission Control—not the Dock—is the equivalent of the iOS multitasking tray. The Dock can show applications that are not running, while the multitasking tray cannot (at least, from the user's POV).

When using Mission Control, I personally do find value in seeing what my open applications are doing. Often that's a factor in whether I keep them running.

EDIT: I was assuming when you said "...keeps it simple with the icons..." that you were referring to the Dock.

<comment><USER6> Yeah was just referring to the ⌘ + Tab app switching which in my mind was the equivalent of the iOS multitasing tray.

Sure, there is mission control, which I originally was really excited by but in the end dont use cause it's all overload.

But yeah, if your someone that values mission control then the app previews would be a good addition, guess was just asking if anyone actually did find it useful to switch apps that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, I didn't even consider ⌘ + Tab. That's very much like the iOS multitasking tray.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These are taken out of context. They're just mock-ups posted to Dribbble to play with new ideas, the designers who came up with them are not seriously suggesting they should be implemented as is.

Saying that these concepts show bad UX is like saying that a paper sketch lacks polish. It's completely missing the point.

</comment><comment><USER8> They are all interesting, but a design isn't better just because it's prettier.

I wouldn't even say they are prettier, but that's a matter of personal preference.

Linkbait anyone?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, not linkbait. :)

Sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but Apple's design choices also create trends that are echoed both on and offline by designers everywhere.

Edit: I think what makes iOS 7 particularly interesting is that, IMHO, many of us have seen Apple falling behind in the area of software design. I personally would love to see Apple regain its reputation here.

<comment><USER6> Who have they fallen behind ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would argue that in the past couple years, both Microsoft and Google—and not Apple—have been setting the trend in software design, notably in the growing rejection of skeuomorphism and the embrace of flat design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Personally and as a user of nothing but iPhones since 1st gen I am less concerned about aesthetics and considerably more concerned about functionality.

iOS handling of the hand off between apps is nothing short of an embarrassment. The constant ->into this app->out to homescreen->into that app->out to homescreen is a joke at this stage of the game and something needs to be done about it - desperately. there are other issues here and there too but this is a daily embuggerance.

Squawking about stitching and torn pages, etc. frankly makes little sense when the actual affordances of the UI are shamefully out of date.

I pray that Ive is focusing on UX and not just on flat vs skeumorphic design.

iOS is in poor shape at the moment, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER10> "8 new iOS designs that are better than Apple's"

Sorry, but I really have to disagree. Didn't see anything better than the current design.. And if you mean in regards to new design, you don't know hoe that's going to be. A complete rehaul from what I hear, there's nothing innovating in those mockups. Not saying that they look ugly.

</comment><comment><USER11> All very interesting concepts, very nicely implemented. But, I guarantee you Apple has built dozens of designs like this internally, tested them and rejected them because they didn't work as well as what they actually went with.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's not April 1st but I laughed out loud anyway when I read about "fold to unlock".

<comment><USER13> Especially since 'fold' isn't an action you can do with your finger against glass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some of these look nice, and I really liked the keyboard. However I definitely don't agree with the author that somehow fold to unlock was "more intuitive". Also a few of them looked too similar to windows phone and Facebook Home. It should also be noted that a few of those have already been implemented on jailbroken devices in Cydia so I'm not sure how many are actually original ideas.

I am very excited to see what iOS 7 will bring us and it's good to see people creating their own mockups. Might give Apple even better ideas :)

</comment><comment><USER13> I hope Ive does more than just redesign the lock screen and home screen icons.

<comment><USER14> Same here. Supposedly there is a big overhaul on apps like Mail. I'm definitely hoping for some sort of live widget functionality and a new home screen

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ya, they are just different. But Cannot conclude that they are all better. Now that people got bored with old apple designs, these might look better. But I liked - "Fold to unlock and Contacts with Photos".

</comment><comment><USER16> Fold to unlock sounds like a laundry room term

</comment><comment><USER17> last picture looks like Android.

<comment><USER18> And WM8

<comment><USER19> Sorry to nitpick, but it's WP8 as in Windows Phone 8.</comment></comment></comment>


The Internet of Tweets - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/message/the-internet-of-tweets-581cb63ece80

<comment><USER2> I think I'm like most of us in that I had completely forgotten about annotations. They sound cool.

But I suspect that many of us also don't much _want_ Twitter to get better anymore. We'd rather see an alternative get good enough to switch to.

<comment><USER3> That's why I switched to app.net

It is very clear that app.net was a response to Twitter being so closed off

<comment><USER4> And it is very clear that app.net did not succeed in attracting a large audience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
        > We were at Twitter's first developer conference,
        > an event called Chirp. And indeed, Will.I.Am's
        > armchair interview was just one of a few clear
        > indications that Twitter really wasn't just for
        > geeks anymore. Instead, Twitter had suddenly
        > blossomed into a company that aspired to be a
        > player in media and entertainment and
        > advertising, with its eye focused on becoming
        > the giant, publicly-traded company it is today.
        > Twitter began to take its first tentative steps
        > away from its geeky roots, which set the stage
        > for a nerd backlash that still hasn't fully abated.

Wait, what? Am I the only one who remembers that Twitter launched at _SXSW_? They have _never_ had geeky roots. They were always a technology product targeting media and entertainment folks.

A big part of Twitter's initial appeal was that it was the only social network that had honest-to-God celebrities on it. I remember when being able "follow" some famous actor still carried a frisson of excitement, like you just ran into them in a restaurant.

<comment><USER6> SXSW is not geeky? I don't see what world you live in that you can so self- assuredly attempt to split this particular hair with double emphasis. Are you trying to draw a line between hipsters and geeks? Or tech before tech was cool? Native vs web? I'm not following.

Anyway, Twitter didn't launch at SXSW, they already had significant traction almost purely among a certain subset of web developers. Remember, they were spun out of Odeo (the market leader in podcast aggregation before iTunes silently added podcasts to iTunes and killed them overnight). This was one of the first Ruby on Rails companies way back in 2006 (maybe they even started in 2005). The entire thing that made people excited about Twitter was the fact that they were API first, and you could build any kind of client on it. It was really the first company that set the standard for web APIs, and the hype and anticipation around the possibilities were palpable at that time. In fact this early developer traction is what put Twitter on the map and got them the traction that they became interested enough that celebrities started joining. The celebrity thing was the second wave, which never would have been possible without the developers and early-adopter geeks to prove the platform. Remember, they "launched" at SXSW in 2007, but I challenge you to find a single celebrity with a join date before 2009.

<comment><USER7> It's also probably relevant that Twitter didn't launch at SXSW. This was me writing about the company and service a month before that SXSW, and I was hardly first: [https://blog.twitter.com/2007/anil-dash- twitter](https://blog.twitter.com/2007/anil-dash-twitter)

<comment><USER6> That's my opening sentence :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oren Michels (co-founder of Mashery) blogged about Twitter as a platform ripe for IoT last October (after Twitter developer/platform conference).

[http://www.mashery.com/blog/twitter-redefined- communications...](http://www.mashery.com/blog/twitter-redefined- communications-backend-apps-and-iot)

</comment><comment><USER3> Slightly disagreeing with Anil here. Yes, Twitter is popular with developers, so then why is it not fostering them and making developers their star players?

Twitter Should Be A Public Utility [http://blog.higg.so/2015/06/12/on- twitter/?rev=1](http://blog.higg.so/2015/06/12/on-twitter/?rev=1)

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't be the only one who sees william as a total fraud. Seeing him at a tech conference (or really endorsing anything tech related) is the best way to tell if it's been organized by out of touch execs or people that actually care.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gFA7DUM008](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gFA7DUM008)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl2h-Ol0pSI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl2h-Ol0pSI)

</comment><comment><USER10> twitter as a messaging platform. it's an interesting take, and there's certainly a gap in the market for it.

<comment><USER11> Agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The internet has been not for us since AOL broke through...

</comment><comment><USER13> Hey ya'll Twitter is a government project...look at it's first members, a bunch of GI's and Navymen...since when were they trendsetters? Oh I guess since Twitter...and of course #arabspring...also remember how overnight there were front facing cameras on every phone... Twitter + Selfies.. then Snowden, oh NSA / surveillance you so trendy

PS I love you for reading this

May all beings propser</comment>


Best iPad accessory ever? - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/12333858

<comment><USER2> We still haven't seen delivery of the gaming case that's been promised for what seems like years now. The demand is certainly there for DPads, so I wonder why the huge holdup. Apple certainly makes it difficult for third-party hardware vendors to release legitimately supported attachments that make use of the connector (otherwise you often need to jailbreak).

Some games, like Tetris, racing games, and retro games, would function so much better with a physical DPad than a virtual screen based one.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. And here I thought velcro was the best iPad accessory ever: <http://vimeo.com/11886557>

<comment><AUTHOR> That is so awesome - thanks for that!</comment></comment>


Inside the short, troubled life of a music start-up - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10303994-93.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 <comment><USER2> i think this kind of model is doomed. trying to get the old-skule record labels involved is a recipe for failure.

i'd prefer to see a whole bunch of boutique web 2.0 record labels, making new stars out of heretofore unknown acts, using entirely new revenue models.

</comment><comment><USER3> _In one case, the start-up spent $300,000 to host a video from pop singer Alicia Keys that managers claimed would draw 1 million new users. But without any of her hit songs in the clip, only 5,000 visitors showed up._

Ouch.</comment>


Robots in Finance Could Wipe Out Some of Its Highest-Paying Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/robots-in-finance-could-wipe-out-some-of-its-highest-paying-jobs <comment><USER4> The value of high paying jobs in finance doesn't come from activities that can be automated, but from stuff that can't like connections(which university you attended, who your parents are, who you play golf with and also insider trading) and soft skills(charisma, drive, looks, personality, ability to influence people, lying to them or throwing them under the bus).

For example, people like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs could pick up the phone and convince some very wealthy people to part with their cash on some investments that ML algos would consider stupidly risky.

<comment><USER5> i read somewhere when comparing a financial advisor, managing one's portfolio vs an index fund - There was no discernible higher return with the advisor managed portfolio vs the index fund.

<comment><USER6> While this has been true in the past, because of this advice, huge amounts of wealth are now in index tracking etfs or similar passive index tracking funds. This essentially means that a larger and larger amount of the market is just "betting in the market". If you want to spot where the next financial crisis will come from a generally good idea is not to ask "what looks crazy right now" (ie VC funding) but "what does essentially nobody question that is also a major change in mainstream investing".

Because everyone is doubling down on investing on the status quo, don't be surprised if a disruption to the status quo has far more dramatic impact than it would have 20 years ago.

<comment><USER7> the wrong assumption is that the large bets on ETFs are "wrong" for extended periods.

If the ETFs are incorrectly pricing assets because of blind buying, then an enterprising managed index fund could bet against it. Or, find some other arbitration mechanism. But of course, this doesn't actually happen, because price discovery _still happens_ even if ETFs account for a large percentage of trades (since price discovery can happen even with small number of trades).

And if ETFs is just betting on the market average, then the worst that can happen is they get average results. ETFs don't use leverage or debt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It makes sense... I mean just look at stock trading. Manual stock traders used to be a high paying profession and now it's a job that's almost entirely been replaced by automation.

It's not a 'could' in the future but something that's already happening in significant amounts. The trading room floors of most the big banks are a tiny fraction of what they once were despite trading volumes skyrocking.

<comment><USER9> There are still millions of stock traders, if you're meaning brokers, then yes, automated routing and matching has dropped the number of brokers dramatically. It's estimated around 10% of the volume of trades are still the result of people making decisions, which is actually an incredibly large amount because electronic trades create such an enormous volume that to even make up 10% means a lot of traders are still out there picking stocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm always skeptical of these articles, but this is accurate:

 _> many of whom will lose their jobs -- not necessarily because they are replaced by machines, but because they are not trained to work alongside algorithms,"_

The story with technology is about adaptation, not replacement. Teams, departments, technologies have come and gone out from under me in about 15 years in the software field.

One could say I was replaced by software (or cheaper devs elsewhere) when I was laid off or when teams I was on were eliminated. But if I wanted to keep getting a paycheck, I had to adapt to something else in demand.

That's life and these sensational articles generate clicks but it happens in almost every private industry.

You have to adapt and grow or else you'll wither.

<comment><USER11> _You have to adapt and grow or else you'll wither._

Agreed, but we now know that as people age it becomes increasingly difficult for them to learn new things. This is a basic function of biology and how the brain ages.

Due to automation, change is happening increasingly quickly, more rapidly than many people can adapt to. People are being left behind, which has pretty serious social and political implications.

<comment><USER12> That's why it's quite important when you do get that high paying job to bank a large percentage of your salary into income generating assets. It's basic diversification of income streams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Robots in Government could wipe out just as many high paying jobs including large swaths of redundant personnel.

<comment><USER14> Robots in Military could wipe out huge swathes of the population

<comment><USER15> You don't need robots for that. Nukes are sufficient.

<comment><USER16> But nukes have been delivered by robots (ballistic missiles) since the 50s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think one thing needs to be stated; I do not have concrete numbers, but it seems as if algorithmic trading technology has actually levelled the playing field and created more jobs.

I am a series 3 (commodities) and quant. Take this example, at one point in time people were literally trading seats on the exchange, and a seat on the NYSE was as high as 3 million !!! While there may have been more people with those jobs than today, you had virtually no choice to be in a large institution.

Today, almost anyone can raise some money, use the simple Interactive Brokers API which sits on top of FIX protocol, and build a trading strategy. The main reason I think you don't see more competition from small new firms - <USER2> though there is a lot - is that the regulation is fierce and most funds already offer nice compensation.

Within those firms, yes there may be some decline in those jobs like a floor trader, but someone has to program and manage those algorithms.

It's also important to keep in mind that many firms are only replacing execution traders while directing traders through fundamental analysis, and if all firms ever go completely algorithmic you'll find firms trying to exploit these algos in ways unique to humans.

</comment><comment><USER18> How many 100's of thousands of IT folks make their mortgages in New York, London, Singapore, etc etc?

35 years ago, the number would have been 10's?

</comment><comment><USER19> >Nasdaq runs more than 40 different algorithms, using about 35,000 parameters, to look for market abuse and manipulation in real time.

I laughed when I read this. 40 whole algorithms!

<comment><USER20> Isn't the more intense number the _35,000 parameters_?

Why pick on the _40 algorithms_?

<comment><USER19> I think the reason why I laughed is that I can't understand what 40 algorithms actually means. It probably takes more than 40 algorithms to accept a request at this url [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730608) and return the response that you are seeing on your screen. That bullet in the article added no value to me as the reader.

<comment><USER21> As far as imprecise journalism (let alone blatant inaccuracy goes) this is pretty inoffensive IMHO. It's not even that far off. Algorithms can be composed. When we publish a paper on a complete ML application, the whole thing is generally referred to as "the algorithm" because it can be documented as precise set of steps from initial raw inputs to some kind of output. Just because there are literally thousands of applications of sorting and searching, matrix multiplies and what have you buried under the process doesn't make it unclear what is being referred to.

<comment><USER22> Almost all algorithms are composition of algorithms. Probably a good way to define a singular algorithm is the point a human has to be the source of its input. A self driving car is a composition of thousands of algorithms by definition -- a process that step by step calculates with an input and output which is every single method in all its code. However, for sake of conversation in the number of complete autonomous systems consider the car to be a single algorithm defined by the point a human has to be the originating input at the interface where the key gets turned to turn it on.

I think this definition will be important in law because it is where we will define responsibility for actions of autonomous things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know why de Prado left AQR so quickly? It seems kind of funny: AQR hates on ML, AQR reconsiders and hires this guy, and pretty much instantly ditches him...bad look for ML.

Btw, I think some of this is correct. It still amazes me that anyone thinks the CFA is relevant (it is largely done by Chinese/Indian students who will never work in finance). But there will always be a place for fundamental investing (i.e. you should be aware that not everything in life can be measured quantitatively).

<comment><USER24> Even granting that not everything can be measured quantitatively, how would I identify these talented non-quantitative investors?

<comment><USER23> One important thing to understand about fundamental investing: most fund managers can't outperform the index the way they manage money, and so the business model is lever up on beta, hope to catch heat (close fund down and reopen until you do), take the fees, and then repeat in the next cycle after it blows up...and that is if the manager is actually trying. Skilled management doesn't really work as a business (without luck).

So it is actually very rare. I have probably come across less than 10 managers who are +EV, and the majority don't manage any public money (again, economics of the business).

But it is straightforward: are they doing actual research (the majority of fund managers don't)? Are they turning over their portfolio frequently? Do they say dumb shit (i.e. constantly use buzzwords)? It isn't magic.

<comment><USER24> My point was that a quant manager can at least point to a strategy that's been backtested. The non-quant manager, who doesn't have a method, can't point to any test of his method. I agree with you that there are talented non-quant managers, I just think it would be hard to measure and identify who they are other than by the eyeball test.

<comment><USER23> All backtesting proves is that you have discovered a technique that worked in the past. Unless you have a time machine, that isn't very useful. The competitive advantage in quant and non-quant is identical, it is only the tools that are different.

It isn't hard. As I said, the first thing you have to understand is that 99% of managers cannot outperform and are not trying to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Robots in finance ARE wiping out some of its highest paying jobs.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have some doubts about Lopez de Prado. He gives a lot of interviews, but he washed out of AQR after less than a year.

<comment><USER27> You are correct to have doubts. Applications of ML in finance particularly trading has been very unsuccessful so far.

<comment><USER28> ML in HFT has been super effective, if you don't take ML to just mean deep learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Every year around this time Bloomberg, Economist and the like publishes PR stunt articles to lure highly skilled developers to Wall Street. I can tell you from my experience that ML is not replacing high paying jobs in trading AT ALL!!! Not even close.

<comment><USER29> He is saying something less controversial that was put through the PR media machine: those without the skills or willingness to work alongside the machines will lose their jobs.

If you look at who is saying this, and follow the money (not disclosed here, but a short search away), you'll notice that this is a butcher grading his own meat. Without blinking he further suggests that the U.S. government hold tournaments on anonymized data to crowdsource market manipulation detection.

The bias in ML sections are all mealy-mouthed and elitist. Just because you hold a PhD in a technical field does not mean you understand economics, AI futurology, public policy, or ethics. It would be career suicide to stray from the path of the popular safe opinion. So you get language-imperialist terms like "Latinx" instead of "South Americans" to describe Brazilians, claims that automation will favor taking jobs from minorities, that the government should promote women in leadership positions at _private_ companies, and that especially women of color have no access to study computer engineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Yeah, no. A pressure washer can easily shoot a stream of water fifty feet, but the upright monkey that can stand back the furthest and still hit the urinal gets the corner office.

</comment><comment><USER31> Isn't that weird that it's easier to replace high paid jobs in finance with ai before jobs related to flipping burgers?

<comment><USER32> There are several demos on the internet of robotic arms flipping burgers, many even include machine vision, for roughly $70k per device. I'm ignorant of the limitations, but it may be relatively soon that they become economically viable.

Then again, there are few kitchen jobs that solely consist of flipping burger patties.

<comment><USER33> >$70k per device

That's pretty steep compared to the price of the labour.

<comment><USER34> It's cheap, especially for 24/7 joints such as many McDonalds or Burger King. Assuming a well built product, the burger flip robot will produce consistent quality at a workload a human cannot physically cope with, with none of the downsides that employees have (wages, vacations, sick days, inability to do the same task repetitive over 8h with no break)... that robot will pay itself off in two or three years, after then it is pure profit (maintenance aside).

The thing is, I (and many other lefties) would _welcome_ a world in which robots do all the work while humans are free to do whatever they want - <USER3> problem is that in current capitalism, the burger will cost the same for the customer while the costs implode (most cost in restaurants is staff!)... meaning the extra profit goes to the owner class, not the worker class which has to fight for the few jobs that remain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Not really robots, more like scripts really.

Simple scripts are already wiping out many high paying developer jobs.

<comment><USER36> A counterexample as a web developer:

My girlfriend can't get her Squarespace website to work.

<comment><USER37> I am a developer and I could not get the Squarespace website to work!

I could not understand the conceptual underpinning of it all. What goes where and why do some things appear on the page...

<comment><USER38> I think with basic systems you have to give up the notion of controlling what goes where, give it data and "trust" it to put everything in a reasonable place. That's not a [frontend] dev approach; but it's a "i want information showing in a webpage" approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Good.

<comment><USER40> Couldn't have happened to a nicer group of people

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> 48 trackers and one paywall be gone [https://archive.is/TtIwT](https://archive.is/TtIwT)

</comment><comment><USER42> Still not actually robots.

<comment><USER43> Yes, I dislike the use of the term for non-physical entities.

<comment><USER44> The HR "industry" uses the term "robotics" to mean _any_ sort of automation. Screen-scraping is robotics. Excel macros are robotics.

<comment><USER28> Once nice thing about calling scripts robots is it makes swearing at a computer feel slightly more reasonable/statisfying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Lol at "robots" and "AI". The jobs of most old school traders are being replaced by regular nerds with fairly simple code.

<comment><USER46> As soon as AI works we call it an algorithm. AI gets used as a hype word for something that doesn't work yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The more human jobs get replaced by robots the closer we get to money-less world. Sad thing is that lower classes will suffer most. But faster we get there shorter the suffer.

</comment><comment><USER47> My prediction is that the blockchains are going to eat all of this stuff actually.

Smart ethereum contracts based on chainlink data are going to be the new financial instruments. You are already seeing the fertilization of this with stuff like makerdao.

I know it's annoyingly to talk about the blockchain all the time, but unfortunately I think I may have become a true believer. I don't think human "financial advisors" are going to be able to outperform these sorts of funds.

Also: deregulation (or difficult to enforce regulation) is going to allow a LOT of innovation to happen. How long until some 17 year olds create a token which represents the consumer side of a fund? And then how long until the funds strategy is codified into a smart contract and runs on its own?

It's going to be a wild time.

<comment><USER5> ahh yes.. i see blockchain is still the flavor of the month term, to throw out there, for pretty much any domain.

<comment><USER47> Coinbase is currently valued at almost $10 billion. One of the most successful startups the site you are posting on has EVER funded.

I don't think it's a flavor of the month. Maybe I'm wrong, but neither I nor apparently the market thinks I am.

<comment><USER48> > _Coinbase is currently valued at almost $10 billion_

Coinbase's last round's investors valued the top-of-the-stack preference they were given at a price per share that, if multiplied across the cap table, comes to $10bn.

That valuation printed when crypto hype was near its peak. It's reasonable to conclude it may be stale. Given the preference, enterprise value would fall faster than the value of those most-recent shares.

Valuation is a poor sole measure of success. It's easily manipulated, determined by a few people and often stale.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TwitterSense. It's Coming. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/27/twittersense-its-coming/

<comment><USER2> Auto-filtering of tweets for relevance is going to be nearly impossible. 'Relevant' changes for me on an hourly basis, based on workload, project, location, working / not working, and a slew of other factors.

And there's no way I'm telling tweetsense that much so it can filter tweets.</comment>


Native America: A New Narrative? - <AUTHOR> https://www.historytoday.com/reviews/native-america-new-narrative <comment><USER2> >That's the equivalent of shedding 16 pounds of weight while walking, or 12 pounds while running.

Article doesn't really make it clear whether the weight of the device itself is included in the savings calculation. If it isn't, it doesn't seem very significant at all, only shaving a single pound off the burden of a running person and only five pounds off a walking person. That while adding a significant maintenance and preparation task.</comment>


New evidence of Japan's effort to build atom bomb at the end of WWII - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-japan-bomb-20150805-story.html#page=1 <comment><USER2> I wouldn't use the phase "attempt to build the bomb". I wouldn't even call this an effort.

I would label this as discussion or thought experiments. Drawing up a few blueprints for a centrifuge is no more an attempt to build a bomb than Project Daeidalus was an "attempt" to travel to another star. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus). The amount of effort necessary to build bombs during the 40s was ridiculous. Japan didn't have the industrial power. And I mean literal power as the manhatten project's Oak Ridge facility used something like 1/8th of US electricity at the time.

"Electric energy consumption, courtesy of the TVA, was 20 percent higher than that of New York City. Oak Ridge used one-seventh of all the electricity produced in the United States" [http://www.u-s- history.com/pages/h1652.html](http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1652.html) (not the best source, but reasonable given the context.)

I'm all for discussion of ALL history but to bring forward claims that Japan was trying to build a bomb so close to the anniversary of its use against Japan smacks of guilt-motivated justification. Japan's "bomb" program was of absolutely no threat to allied forces and therefore should not be part of any debate over the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. If anything, a Japanese bomb program would have sucked up resources from other war efforts.

<comment><USER3> Eh, the reason we spent so much effort at Oak Ridge is that we tried _all_ vaguely practical methods of getting weapons grade fissionables, and that was the location for uranium enrichment, thermal, caltron, and gaseous diffusion.

But the most practical method turned out to be breeding plutonium and separating it, and that was done at Hanford on a vast scale, the largest single WWII construction project. But not inherently super electricity intensive, the piles had to be kept cool, and ... I'm not sure anything was all that power expensive.

Ignoring the minor detail that they had 1/166th of the uranium needed for a Hanford style pile, assuming that 1,200 pounds was the first large quantity the might have gotten their hands on ... well, industrially there was no way they could have pulled this method off, we could just barely do it. They couldn't build reliable airplane engines with > ~1,000 hp of output.

Niels Bohr dismissed the concept of A-bombs for WWII early on, he thought "you would have to turn the county into a factory". When "Nicholas Baker" showed up in the US, he observed we'd indeed done just that.

<comment><USER2> I would argue that plutonium breeding is only obvious after you have performed some criticality experiments with an appreciable-sized block of enriched uranium. This was new physics at the time, without computer simulations. Bomb theory, critical mass, could only be understood after you get your hands on some enriched uranium.

<comment><USER4> This is very much not the case. Bomb theory and critical mass come from a fundamental understanding of neutron chain reactions. You need to have good data on fission properties and neutron mean-free-path distances, but that requires only extremely tiny amounts of Plutonium or natural Uranium, it does not require enriched Uranium.

Other than that the other critical factor is coming up with the correct model/theory for nuclear weapons. Something that the Japanese got right, the Americans and British got right, and the Germans (specifically Heisenberg) ended up getting extremely wrong.

Fine tuning critical mass calculations was important in optimizing the bomb later on but it wasn't necessary to developing the basic underlying theory of how bombs work or of pointing the way toward implosion assembly and Plutonium breeding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am a bit skeptical of this. Not even the Germans were close to building an atom bomb and it was their scientists that figured out the physics. If Japan did have any real plans on the board it probably had more to do with stolen intelligence garnered from the States.

Also, it is unlikely anyone would have realistically expected uranium to be delivered to Japan by U-boat in 1945.

<comment><USER3> _it was [ German ] scientists that figured out the physics._

Not exactly, although they contributed a lot to the early work. If we start from "splitting the [heavy] atom", the first practical method, a German radiochemist was the first to recognize what happened, and the German physicist he first forwarded this information and her nephew figured out how it worked. But those two were Jews in exile, and most of the following more practical stuff was figured out, correctly at least, by scientists outside of Germany. Inside, they suffered a couple of disasters, a silly failure to get an higher priority for the project, and an incorrect evaluation of using graphite as a moderator, limiting them to heavy water. Which we made sure through sabotage that they couldn't get more/enough of.

But if you put on your alternate history cap, note Heisenberg and Himmer's relationship from when they were school kids, direct all the V-2 resources into the bomb, who knows? Many on both sides were legitimately worried the Germans would get the bomb in time.

As for the Japanese, no way. Besides what you read in the article, thermal diffusion was all but a failure in the US, among other things required fantastically too much steam, and was only revived to provide somewhat enriched feed stock into the caltrons (modified cyclotrons), and later into the gaseous diffusion plant before it fed the caltrons. ADDED (forgotten while drafting): centrifuges were of course obvious, and about the first thing we tried, but were beyond the state of the art then.

1,200 pounds of uranium at the normal 0.72% U-235 would not come close to yielding one critical mass, and for gun assembly apparently you need more like 3 times the normal pressure critical mass, although it doesn't all have to be of the highest grade.

<comment><USER2> I read somewhere that after being captured by the allies some german physicists were recorded speaking in disbelief about the bomb. They were under the impression that any bomb would have needed many many times as much enriched uranium (think tons) resulting in weapons too big for aircraft. That was an indication they hadn't done much criticality research with enriched material.

<comment><USER4> Google "Farm Hall transcripts", that's what you're thinking of.

But you're quite right. Heisenberg used an incredibly faulty method of calculating critical mass. And everyone around him simply deferred to his expertise. His method involved considering a branching tree of neutron chain reactions inside a sphere of fissile material, and if this tree can grow to include about 1 mole of material then that should be about enough to release enough energy for a "bomb". The reality is that it's completely unnecessary for an entire neutron chain-reaction tree to be encompassed within fissile material. All that matters is that on average from generation to generation there is a multiplication of neutrons, which will then grow geometrically incredibly rapidly. And that can happen even with many "branches" of the tree leaving the sphere and not contributing to future reactions.

<comment><USER6> He also "proved" (incorrectly) that graphite was not an appropriate moderator. Which ruled out bombs pretty much entirely.

In hindsight, he was actually _blatantly_ incorrect. Dude knew it was possible and convinced the rest of the German scientists it wasn't, for long enough to make a difference. If you read between the lines, he's almost gloating in that transcript.

      "On the other hand the whole heavy-water business, which I did everything
      I could to further, cannot produce an explosive."

      "We wouldn't have had *the moral courage* to recommend to the government
      in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for
      building the thing up."

      "The point is that the whole structure of the relationship between
      the scientist and the state in Germany was such that although we
      were not *100% anxious* to do it, on the other hand we were so
      little trusted by the state that *even if we had wanted to do it*,
      it would not have been easy to get it through."

      "Well, that's not quite right. I would say that I was absolutely
      convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine,
      *but I never thought we would make a bomb, and at the bottom of
      my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a
      bomb. I must admit that*."

That's a Bill Gates level of finely-parsed deposition right there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> America is building new nukes.

[https://www.revealnews.org/article/new-mexico-thrives-on- nuc...](https://www.revealnews.org/article/new-mexico-thrives-on-nuclear-bomb- despite-us-pledge-to-reduce-arsenal/)

<comment><USER8> This article is about the warhead B61-12; the whole program is estimated to cost about $11 billion.

This is scary, as the higher-precision guidance and adjustable lower yields make it more likely to be used; and sad, that President Obama and the various contractors and New Mexico politicians are pushing this.

<comment><USER9> Nuclear weapons have a definite "shelf life" because of the exotic materials used. But if you think about things like the screws & bolts used on them - every time a technician applies a tool to them, there's a little bit of wear and tear. Over time, these and other parts need replacing because of ongoing handling & routine maintenance.

The socio-political aspects are a much broader topic. Personally I don't like them, but I realize that once Pandora's Box Of Technology has been opened, there's no going back.

<comment><USER10> > Nuclear weapons have a definite "shelf life" because of the exotic materials > used.

Not only that, but, because of the secrecy and security, many of the processes for building these exotic materials have been lost.

<comment><USER9> And that the people with the direct knowledge are now 60+ years old.

<comment><USER11> Some decades ago, during discussion about test bans, the people who had experience from blowing up 1,000+ nuclear bombs were asked if it was possible to design a nuclear bomb that could be used by future generations that would be sure to work without additional testing, and bearing in mind changes in technology. Their answer was "yes".

(I think my knowledge comes from one of Freeman Dyson's accounts.)

I have not heard a clear explanation of why those earlier weapons designers were wrong, only concerns about how they might have been wrong. That more nebulous caution sounds identical to the sorts of statements someone might make as a justification for designing new weapons - for some people designing nuclear weapons and watching them go BOOM is a lot of fun.

In my very limited understanding of the topic, the largest unknown is the changes to the plutonium-gallium alloy of the core. Some worry that it has degraded. Others say "most plutonium pits have a credible lifetime of at least 100 years". Even if it's a problem, one solution is to re-smelt the cores, though currently we do not have the facilities for that. However, we could make those facilities without testing new weapons.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_Replacement_Warhead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_Replacement_Warhead) and [http://depletedcranium.com/do-our-nuclear-weapons- work/](http://depletedcranium.com/do-our-nuclear-weapons-work/) for some of the discussion. Also bear in mind the annoying calculus of game theory. A higher inability to use a nuclear weapon may make it less likely to be used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The uranium seized from the German submarine ended up in the American atom bombs"

That's what I call cruel irony. I wonder how much of a role those 1200 pounds of ready-made u235 made for the timetable/viability of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima/Nagasaki? A few more days/weeks and Japan would most likely have capitalulated from the terrorcampaign of firebombings among other factors.

<comment><USER13> Countries don't capitulate in the face of strategic bombing. They certainly would have been willing to negotiate a peace (as most losing combatants are), but sans nuclear weapons there would be no unconditional surrender.

<comment><USER12> Looks like we're both right: nuclear bombs are essentially strategic bombing -- and I misremembered the reason Japan was in the process of capitulating prior to the nuclear attacks -- but there have been a lot of discussion indicating that Japan was indeed in the process of surrendering prior to the attacks, see eg:

[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/why_did_japan_surrender/)

<comment><USER13> They knew they were losing and would have been happy to conclude a peace treaty. That's not the same thing as surrender, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A lot of people are talking about Germany's and Japan's nuke programs being failed wastes of resources. In retrospect this is certainly true, but the massive benefit of a working bomb outweighed the slight chance of success. By late 1944 it was fairly clear that both countries were going to lose the war. Had they devoted the same resources to conventional weapons as they did the bomb, they would have lost anyway. But they didn't know how hard it was to build a bomb, and if it had worked, either country probably could have negotiated a ceasefire immediately. Furthermore, Japan could have theoretically held out a lot longer than August 1945 due to its extremely defensible position. The only reason the Pacific War ended when it did and not after a protracted siege or invasion of Japanese home islands was, of course, that the US built a bomb first.

<comment><USER15> "of course" is a bit too pat. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has used Japanese sources to argue that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the threat of Soviet occupation was at least as influential in the surrender decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Even if Japan had made a bomb in time, by 1945, they had barely any navy or air force left to deploy it. By then, the fantastically inept IJN leadership had squandered all their best assets in strategic blunders. The only way they could have used the thing would be to drop it on themselves.</comment>


Ask HN: For user generated content, how do you deal with questionnable material? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a web app that let's people build timelines. One thing I haven't quite figured out yet is how I'm going to deal with situations where users create timelines that contain sensitive or questionable content.
For example, my app makes it very easy to build biographical timelines. Autobiographies are fine, but what happens when a user creates a timeline for another person and posts private information such as date or birth, their location, etc? That also assumes that I can confirm that a timeline is autobiographical, which would be impossible in practice.
Other less clear examples:
- Disgruntled boyfriend creates an autobiography with details about a previous relationship. The ex-girlfriend learns about it, emails me and asks for me to remove it.
- Controversial timelines, such as history of Israel, Palestine, and absurd timelines: Jewish World Domination, etc.
This problem isn't unique to timelines. All of this could be done on a blog, for example; my app is just a different medium.
For sites like posterous and other apps that lets users generate content, how do you deal with situations like this? <comment><USER2> I was just looking up this information for a project I am working on. I think the caselaw you are interested in knowing about is Section 230.

If you passively host third-party content, you will be fully protected under Section 230.

If you exercise traditional editorial functions over user submitted content, such as deciding whether to publish, remove, or edit material, you will not lose your immunity unless your edits materially alter the meaning of the content.

If you pre-screen objectionable content or correct, edit, or remove content, you will not lose your immunity.

If you encourage or pay third-parties to create or submit content, you will not lose your immunity.

If you use drop-down forms or multiple-choice questionnaires, you should be cautious of allowing users to submit information through these forms that might be deemed illegal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting. Thanks for the tip.

Section 230 for the curious:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Don't take responsibility for content people create on your site, or you open yourself up to legal liability for it.

Most services like posterous, twitter, Wordpress.com etc. prohibit users posting defamatory or harassing material, giving you the right to enforce it but not the responsibility.

As for timelines that are simply controversial rather than harassing, you really don't want to become the speech police. As you've already said: your app is just a medium. It's not your speech, you don't have to agree with it. If it's legal, you should allow it. Users hate arbitrary restrictions (LiveJournal has spent sooooo much time trying to do this).

As always, for the actual legal implications, you should consult a lawyer. I'm not one, and my opinions aren't legal advice. =)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to launch a minimum viable product and wasn't planning on talking to a lawyer until I have better confirmation that the site is going to do well. But given that there are going to be tricky situations like this almost immediately, maybe it makes sense to talk to a lawyer first.

If I talk to a lawyer, incorporate, and get legal advice, it's going to cost me a few $K before I know whether the site has potential. But if I don't, I open myself up to liability issues. Neither one seems like a good option.

<comment><USER4> Given your site's (current) size, I doubt legal liability is an issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> In theory, anyone can sue me regardless of how big the site is, right?

I think you mean that since its a small site, no one is going to waste the time and money to do it?

<comment><USER5> Anyone can sue you at any time for any reason. Don't worry about this. If a take down request doesn't come from a lawyer ignore it, and get back to work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think if I get a take down notice I'm going to consult a lawyer :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can't police the Internet! The DMCA covers a lot of the issues that you are mentioning. Talk to an attorney.</comment>


Early Facebook and Google investor slams them for "aggressive brain hacking" - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/famous-facebook-and-google-investor-condemns-brain-hacking-2017-8 <comment><USER2> Earlier discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14959031)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's definitely true. Google and Facebook do not care about their users in any way other than a venue for making more $. Advertising is a toxic business model that is built around exploiting customers.

I think it will take time, but maybe eventually users will learn and begin voting with their $ towards non-ad funded platforms.

A big reason why these companies can take advantage of users, is because of the lack of education around technology. Very few people really know what data can be collected / inferred.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a real problem. Anecdotally, I've talked to several people struggling to stop clicking on ads so they can keep getting things done. I struggle with it sometimes as well.

<comment><USER5> I've never even _heard_ of this problem before. Please could you explain?

<comment><USER4> Targeted ads. They look like interesting articles but then when you get there it's just a few facts and then more ads. You end up making somebody money from ad clicks but never find out the information.

Ironically, the solution is to usually just google the topic, satiate your curiosity and move on. But I can get stuck in a looking at ads for an hour before I realize what is happening. It's such a waste.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was really hoping to read that he plans to dedicate all the resources he made from the success of these companies to creating the solution. Did I miss that?

Maybe he's just trying to get a bit more attention for himself? (Also, feels like there is some amount of irony in the click-baity title and that he published this in an ad supported media outlet.) "I invested early in Google and Facebook and regret it. I helped create a monster." Original story: [https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/08/08/my- google-...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/08/08/my-google-and- facebook-investments-made-fortune-but-now-they-menace/543755001/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think it is time for gov regulations on social networks and search engines. For starters, enforcing basic rights like freedom of speech. Also more scrutiny into what (ads and content) get shown to minors.

<comment><USER8> Enforce the basic right to freedom of speech? You mean the right to hate speech, incitement to violence, bullying, slander, and the freedom to to abuse protected groups like children? I don't believe in ignorantly pursuing what has become a slogan for the unthinking.

<comment><USER7> Apparently you've never lived in a state with censorship like I did (it was USSR). Never again.</comment></comment></comment>


JHipster 3.0.0 – Spring Boot and AngularJS app generator - <AUTHOR> http://jhipster.github.io/2016/03/23/jhipster-release-3.0.0.html <comment><USER2> To keep up with being a hipster, doesn't this need to be updated to use React or Angular 2? :P

<comment><USER3> It needs to be written in clojure/clojurescript to be a true JVM hipster

<comment><USER4> I think the idea is to let Java and Spring developers be hipsters, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to say I really don't like scaffolding tools other than maybe just an example generator.

Typically thats what I use them for is just to generate an "example" project. Somewhat useful if your brand new to a technology otherwise completely useless if you know what you are doing... maybe I'm missing something new though?

Also I often would just rather look at an example project in github so I can take what pieces I need instead of having to run a damn scaffolding tool.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.beyondjava.net/blog/angularbeans-a-fresh-new- take...](http://www.beyondjava.net/blog/angularbeans-a-fresh-new-take-on- angularjs-and-javaee/)

src: [https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/4betgo/angularbeans_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/4betgo/angularbeans_a_fresh_new_take_on_angularjs_and/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Last time I played with JHipster I thought it was really neat, but it couldn't readily be deployed to a free Heroku instance. The memory requirements were just too high even for a Hello, world app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we have had a lot of work with Heroku to make this work correctly. BTW, our Heroku sub-generator is made by Joe Kutner, the Heroku Java evangelist, so that's directly made by the person who knows this best!

<comment><USER4> Great news! I'll try out the new version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats Julien! I know you all worked hard on this. Can't wait to give this a spin.

</comment><comment><USER8> Any thoughts on how is Spring Boot compared to Play Framework?</comment>


Ask HN: Would it be worth it to code an SMS system to send them on your own? - <AUTHOR> I have a web app that needs to send and receive SMS.
In France, you can send unlimited SMS with a private free mobile plan for 2€/months. That's 2€ for sending 1000sms a month.
Twilio asks for 3€/months + ~10ct per sms. Thats 103€ for sending 1000sms a month. Twilio prices are just ridiculous.
So I have hacked together a system combining 2 old android phones, an sms gateway app and no-ip to do the SMS thing on my own. But it's very brittle.
I feel like I should make a proper open source system:
-A nodejs part to install on the server, as a npm package, that you can require and use to send smss
- An android client (in java, lightweight and compatible with super old versions of android). It would continuously poll the server and send whatever sms it needs to send. It would notify the server of incoming SMS.
My question is : is it worth it ? How did you solve that problem ? Is sending an SMS as a person also cheap in other countries ? <comment><USER2> I'd strongly recommend you to go with some third party providers, because

\- International coverage

\- Delivery dashboard

\- Easy to scale = 1 less headache

\- They know the regulations (DND stuff)

I will go for the 3rd party solution just for sake of _1 less headache_ for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would also recommend it as soon as the project scales up.

But you have to admin the price difference is massive for the french market. Maybe not that much in the US ?

I make an app that costs 15€ / months. It sends sms reminders and notifications to the user's clients. With twilio pricing, if their are more than 100 notifications/reminders a month I'm loosing money.

\- The dashboard would be part of the server package

\- In europe, any plan can now send sms to any European country for the same price

\- The system would allow for multiple android phones to be connected for better redundancy and scale

\- Most carriers say you should not use their personal plans for automated communication. But if you keep the number of sms low and use it for notifications only, you'll go under the radar and I think it's fair.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just realized sms are 0.0075 cents for US carriers. They are 10x more expensive for french carriers.</comment></comment></comment>