Richard Stallman is weird. Seriously. - <AUTHOR> http://www.fireandknowledge.org/archives/2012/02/11/richard-stallman-is-weird-seriously/

<comment><USER3> Over a year ago, I actually read the entire document, and he explains why all of that material is there. I will just say that he travels a great deal speaking about Open Source, for little, and often no, money. All of these details are there because they have come up in his travels, some of them frequently. You'll find that people who travel a lot for business, and even for personal reasons, all have lists like this, written or just mental. When you're on the road, little things matter a lot because your comfort and schedule is so dependent on them. I don't think he's weird at all, but the guy that calls him a weirdo on fireandknowledge.org comes off as a judgmental jerk.

</comment><comment><USER4> If this were about Steve Jobs, these guidelines would be respected - <USER2> would show his attention to detail, the importance he placed on clarity, etc, etc. As soon as they're about Stallman - it's because he's weird, a social outcast or whatever other insult people choose to throw at him.

People like Stallman are a good representation of the "misfits" spoken about in Apple's iconic advert, though try telling that to the RoR 'hacker' who has declared themself a misfit/troublemaker/round peg in a square hole because he decided to use Coffeescript rather than Javascript in his latest GTD app.

</comment><comment><USER5> mrs is weird, water is wet, politicians lie. News at 11!

Guess what: hackers _are_ weird, and they _like_ to tweak their environment to perfection.</comment>


Google Site Search Discontinued - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/02/21/google-site-search-discontinued/ <comment><USER2> I can't believe why Google continues to sunset their products, without giving them a viable option first. It makes it a bit harder to trust them in the future with their new product.

"Luckily" for their customers there is a bit of competitors out there (ours, www.cludo.com among them).</comment>


The inside story of a libertarian scam - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/09/16/ayn_rands_capitalist_paradise_lost_the_inside_story_of_a_libertarian_scam_partner/

<comment><USER2> IMO, this should be more correctly called "The scamming of a group of Libertarians".</comment>


Chargify down, working to restore database - <AUTHOR> http://status.chargify.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounds like they're working hard to restore it, so I'm not posting this as a rant about downtime. Instead, I think reading the status log sounds like a lot of my own "oh shit" late nights.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hey, thanks! NOT what one wants to wake up to, esp just 2 days before we planned to move to our new DB system. Amazing timing by the chaos gods!</comment>


Show HN: A command line Slack chat client - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bkanber/Slackadaisical/tree/master <comment><USER2> If you're able to get your admin to enable the IRC gateway, you can use _many_ terminal-based clients like irssi, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is the usual use case?

<comment><AUTHOR> I keep slack open in the terminal in a tmux pane next to my email (mutt), for instance. I spend most of my time in tmux and the Electron Slack client is so heavy that I just prefer this CLI.</comment></comment>


CSS Guidelines for Offshore Outsources - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikebz.com/2011/11/css-design-guidelines-for-offshore.html

<comment><USER2> I am just starting to learn Web Design and these are good for me too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Amazon Says It Puts Customers First. But Its Pricing Algorithm Doesn't - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/amazon-says-it-puts-customers-first-but-its-pricing-algorithm-doesnt <comment><USER2> Frankly, I don't see that much of a problem here. First of all, Amazon views Prime as the default experience and naturally shows that pricing more prominently. Furthermore I think it's naive to assume that pricing should be the key factor for their ranking. As mentioned, there are probably lots of details that influence the ranking, however as an anecdote I can say that shipping by Amazon and Prime-enabled is one my personal key requirements. I'll only use third party sellers if there are significant pricing differences or no other options. I wouldn't be surprised if other customers behave the same way, regardless of preferred ranking.

</comment><comment><USER3> I massively prefer FBA products, cause I do have Prime and FBA means I have it in 2 days. I hate dealing with non-FBA because experience has taught me that non-FBA stuff has no real shipping promises, and I've had times where it took 4 weeks or more to get stuff. So yeah, this seems like it's putting my wants first.

<comment><USER4> A couple of caveats on FBA: I've noticed in the last few years that they didn't pack FBA books hardly as well as they did their own, and I got quite a few that had suffered from sliding around in the box. I don't know if they're still as willfully careless, since I pretty much stopped buying books delivered that way.

And I've had great overall experiences with Amazon Merchant booksellers shipping themselves, by following a couple of rules: really, _really_ avoid anyone with a score lower than 96% and/or too few shipments to be statistically significant, and use that to bias choice.

And try to get books scored better than Good, among other things, that means minor damage in shipping like bent corners is, to me, inconsequential. Also in theory avoids underlining/highlighting, which I _really_ don't like (it can't be 100%, e.g. I remember both myself and the seller missing some underlining in the middle of the book until I actually read it). And I've been generally lucky when I choose to buy a "Good" quality book, ah, one other tip is to of course look for specific to the copy of the book condition description instead of boiler plate.

Pretty much the same for CDs, although for my purposes a CD's case is sturdy enough to survive Amazon or anyone else's packing (can almost always replace the case if I want to anyway), and if you're really only interested in the music, you can sometimes get great deals when collateral is missing (inserts, covers, etc.).

And in terms of shipping time, for general goods, a 96% rating and a realistic promise for delivery time is good enough. A company can't screw up too many times and maintain a good rating like that.

<comment><USER3> It's not a matter of them "not meeting the promise", it's them promising "4~6 weeks delivery". Sure, they made the promise, but I'd rather pay $2 more for FBA and get it in 2 days.

<comment><USER4> Ah, yeah, companies like that I never buy from, something that far out means either they don't have it in stock and e.g. may have trouble getting it, and you're likely to get a better deal elsewhere from a vendor that deals with the item in quantity, or they're so messed up they can't get it out any time sooner, which I take as a very bad sign.

Of course, if something is being shipped slowly and therefore cheaply from e.g. Japan, that's fine. And the U.K. book and CD vendors take a while, but they don't quote periods hardly that long, and in my experience under-promise and over-deliever. But I'll frequently pay a bit more to get something sooner than from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actually I think amazon does put customer service high on their list.... I wrote about it here:

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-31-write-every- carphone-w...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-31-write-every-carphone- warehouse-sucks-why-win-zubair-quraishi)

<comment><USER4> Good essay on the "semi-random acts of kindness can be paid back a hundredfold", but one thing I've noticed is that there are few sales channels that are worse than the ones for cellphones. Only bad experience my family has had on eBay was an iPhone who's cell radio didn't work (the rest did, including WiFi), and somehow the seller gamed eBay into screwing my father out of $300+ dollars.

And you can just tell from the reviews and seller feedback that Amazon is not immune to this, I pretty much wouldn't buy a cellphone through them, unless it was directly from them, I'd, in the US, for example, go to B&H Photo Video first (see Joel On Software's essay on them for how serious they are about customer service, although that was written years after I started patronizing them).

That said, I and my father have each bought a cell phone through Amazon without problem, back in 2012-3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish i could configure amazon to never see 3rd party products/suppliers. Yeah you can do it on each search once you get into a category, But i'm on amazon.com to buy from amazon, not shady bobs fake electronics.</comment>


Swift type checking is undecidable - <AUTHOR> https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-type-checking-is-undecidable/39024 <comment><USER2> I haven't had time to go over this as more than a cursory glance, but I'm intrigued. Swift holds a weird place in my estimation between making coding more accessible and making programming an exercise in futility; oversimplifying to the point of being incorrect, essentially. I look forward to enjoying this with my morning coffee.

<comment><USER3> I too had this opinion of it from starting to read a (now out-of-date) book on Swift and Cocoa. It seemed some of the decisions eg. no fall-through for switch statements were done to reduce the possibility of bugs but just made it more irritating. I don't know if the language has changed in this regard though.

I always thought C# was the meeting place between Visual Basic and C++, where it was familiar enough to both language users to migrate, although occasionally different enough to cause problems (eg. generics vs templates). I don't know what Swift is "related to" in this regard - any ideas?

Of course, my lack of knowledge about Swift may show me up here so I am happy to be corrected and educated. This was merely an observation.

The Swift discussion in the article is very good and logically laid out.

<comment><USER4> Swift has explicit fall through nowadays ([https://docs.swift.org/swift- book/LanguageGuide/ControlFlow....](https://docs.swift.org/swift- book/LanguageGuide/ControlFlow.html#ID140))

I think it has had it for quite a while, but I can't easily find when it was introduced.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I knew I'd be out of touch

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does this mean? It is the end of Swift?

<comment><USER6> The important context in the intro is, _" The type checker needs to be able to determine that x and y have the same type, and reject the code if not. This is what we mean by computing canonical types."_

There's a summary at the end titled, "what does this mean?" which says that undecidability doesn't bite in practice with real-world code, but the type system features discussed in the post have been the cause of bugs: _" We are also aware of examples where we don't manage to canonicalize types properly, causing miscompiles and crashes. We've been fixing these gradually over time, but we continue to discover more problems as we fix them. This was a strong hint that the underlying approach was not correct, which is why I spent some time thinking about the fundamentals of this problem. Indeed, we can now see that the reason we have struggled with correctness in this area of the language is that a solution is impossible in the general case."_

So the question arising from this undecidability is how to fix it: _" What we need to do is come up with an appropriate restriction to the combination of SE-0142 and SE-0157. [...] I'm optimistic that introducing this restriction should have very little impact on real-world code."_</comment></comment>


D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400 <comment><USER2> I like that he addresses that his main fear that, if D-Wave does _not_ succeed after riding the marketing hype-machine, a "QC Winter" would likely happen, not unlike the "AI Winter" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter>) that occurred in the late 80's. The AI Winter was caused by a huge amount of over hyped claims and promises by the companies taking part which were never (and could never be) met, leading to the eventual collapse of the whole industry which is now only starting to see a practical recovery with the resurgence of Machine Learning.

D-Wave might be the belle of the ball today, but once the crowd turns, it could ruin an entire industry for a very long time. That's why skepticism is important when it comes to their claims.

<comment><USER3> AI had huge successes though the 80's an early 90's despite the two "AI Winters". However, people generally stop calling something AI once it starts to work. Consider path-finding sometimes it's AI and sometimes not. It's true there was a shifts in research funding (1974–80 and 1987–93) but plenty of things that where under the AI umbrella had moved on to their own separate and a lot of crap that was never going to work was cut.

<comment><USER4> There's also the fact that some "AI" consisted of redoing - poorly, out of ignorance - what had been done previously in fields such as operations research, optimal control, computer aided design, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For the ones that don't want to read the whole post, the _Truth_ is that the 3600 speedup claimed in this article: _Commercial quantum computer leaves PC in the dust_ [1](HN discussion: [2]) isn't worth much.

Quoting Scott Aaronson's post: _As I said above, at the time McGeoch and Wang's paper was released to the media [...] the "highly tuned implementation" of simulated annealing that they ask for had already been written and tested, and the result was that it outperformed the D-Wave machine on all instance sizes tested. In other words, their comparison to CPLEX had already been superseded by a much more informative comparison—one that gave the "opposite" result—before it ever became public. For obvious reasons, most press reports have simply ignored this fact._

[1] [http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23519-commercial- quant...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23519-commercial-quantum- computer-leaves-pc-in-the-dust.html)

[2] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5697619>

<comment><USER6> Geordie's (Dwave's CTO) rebuttal: [1]

"The majority of that post is simply factually incorrect.

I used to find this stuff vaguely amusing in an irritating kind of way. Now I just find it boring and I wonder why anyone listens to a guy who's been wrong exactly 100% of the time about everything. Update your priors, people!!

If you want to know what's really going on, listen to the real experts. Like Hartmut. [2]"

[1] [http://dwave.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/first-ever-head-to- hea...](http://dwave.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/first-ever-head-to-head-win-in- speed-for-a-quantum-computer/#comments)

[2] [http://googleresearch.blogspot.ca/2013/05/launching- quantum-...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.ca/2013/05/launching-quantum- artificial.html)

<comment><USER7> [1] Contains no explanation about how Aaronson is 100% wrong. It is pure FUD. He won't actually argue points because that would allow Aaronson to rebut his rebuttal.

[2] has little information, and no numbers, or comparisons to other techniques. All it says is "Quantum Computing is Cool! And we're working on NP hard problems." It does say that they have a quantum computer from Dwave, but they make no claims as to it's actual power.

Adding emphasis to the main objectives from [2] "to study how quantum computing _might_ advance machine learning." They're still researching things. [1] is a clear attempt to leverage the respectability of Google without actually addressing Aaronson's points.

<comment><USER8> How was Aaronson was 100% wrong before -

[http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/05/aaronson-intuition-about- wh...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/05/aaronson-intuition-about-what- dwave.html)

<http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=306>

"Even if D-Wave managed to build (say) a coherent 1,024-qubit machine satisfying all of its design specs, it's not obvious it would outperform a classical computer on any problem of practical interest. This is true both because of the inherent limitations of the adiabatic algorithm, and because of specific concerns about the Ising spin graph problem. On the other hand, it's also not obvious that such a machine wouldn't outperform a classical computer on some practical problems. The experiment would be an interesting one! Of course, this uncertainty — combined with the more immediate uncertainties about whether D-Wave can build such a machine at all, and indeed, about whether they can even produce two-qubit entanglement — also means that any talk of "lining up customers" is comically premature."

* Dwave built the machines * Aaronson concedes that Dwave has achieved entanglement with a quantum annealing system for its full 512 qubits. * there were two big sales (Lockheed, Google)

My own prediction from 2006 <http://longbets.org/266/>

There will be a quantum computer with over 100 qubits of processing capability sold either as a hardware system or whose use is made available as a commercial service by Dec 31, 2010.

128 qubit system was sold in 2010. Quantum entangled annealing is proven in the USC paper of the 128 qubit system that was sold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Probably the biggest point to take away from the article is this:

> For years, I tirelessly repeated that D-Wave hadn't even provided evidence > that its qubits were entangled—and that, while you can have entanglement > with no quantum speedup, you can't possibly have a quantum speedup without > at least the capacity to generate entanglement. Now, I'd say, D-Wave finally > has cleared the evidence-for-entanglement bar—and, while they're not the > first to do so with superconducting qubits, they're certainly the first to > do so with so many superconducting qubits.

In other words, this is the first actual evidence that D-Wave even has the _potential_ for quantum speedup.

<comment><USER10> I love this idea of having a computing system that might not work as advertised but still produce the right results in a repeatable manner. When the ESA had a computing system that did not work as advertised, they blew up the GNP of an african country and went straight to the textbooks.

<comment><USER11> That really confuses me. I haven't been following the story, but _how_ can there possibly be questions over whether the thing is doing what they say it is? Are the results that ill-defined?

<comment><USER10> They are playing with statistics and montecarlo stuff. Somehow it would work too in rocket science, you just have to try a lot of designs and after a while a significant portion of them will reach the moon, but they deemed the convergence speed to low, or the cost to high, I don't remember wich.

edit: a more serious answer is in the article, entanglement or not the algorithm naturally converge towards the solution. And they did not even check with convergence speed (I think the quantic version is meant to be faster) but they checked on some statistical criterion that is different in the quantic version and the plain version.

<comment><USER12> "you just have to try a lot of designs"

That's exactly what Wernher von Braun did with his early rocket designs. He (intelligently and quickly) iterated, keeping the parts that worked and getting rid of the parts that didn't.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, actually trying to be a smart rocket scientist can be seen as an euristic to make the stochastic process of finding a working rocket design converge faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems to me that all the hyperbole is about raised expectations. Hell, the fact they can even get something like this to work, and are able to determine (somewhat) that it is working the way they intended is enough to get me excited. I don't care if the QC they built performs faster or slower than a classical algorithm, because that stuff will simply come with time as we understand more about how QC works. With classical computers, we had several decades of knowledge about how electromagnetism worked - it was easily observable, and applying those principles to a complex switching system (already implemented by some mechanical computers at the time) was relatively straightforward, at least from a physical standpoint. With QC, it seems to me (I don't really know more about than anyone else here) that we are making all sorts of theoretical discoveries as well as attempting to build a computer with those discoveries at the same time. So D-wave is basically the modern equivalent of Tesla and Turing, etc. all wrapped up into one big package. So the fact that this stuff is turning out not to be a complete fairytale is more than enough to get me excited.

<comment><USER14> Yes, the problem is about expectations. D-Wave told everybody that they made a quantum computer, when in fact they've redefined the term to mean something else.

Well, that something else is working, and altough a nice physics experiment, it still lacks any real world utility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A really long time ago when I was in grad school playing with genetic algorithms and simulated annealing, I implemented something that seems awfully similar to quantum adiabatic annealing. It worked as follows:

1\. Assign all states of each variable equal probability.

2\. Sample the living crap out of the search space with some sort of energy function for every possible configuration, scoring the discrete values of the variables of each individual sample by Boltzmann weighting of the energy function.

3\. Every so often update the weights for selecting each variables potential values using the accumulated scores for each variable generated during step 2.

4\. Repeat steps 2 through 3 until each variable converges to a single state.

I never published anything but I learned three things from this process.

1\. It worked like gangbusters to find the space surrounding global optima of reasonably complex functions

2\. It worked like crap to refine really good solutions into really great solutions.

3\. It was horribly dependent on the underlying representation of the variables (i.e. if you mapped the input variables to a spin glass, it was just _awful_ )

That and I suspect somebody already has a fancy name for exactly what I did back then...

<comment><USER16> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Monte_Carlo> ?

<comment><USER17> Sounds an awful lot like Monte Carlo to me as well.

<comment><USER15> It's not _quite_ like it from what I just read, it almost seems like it's halfway between Quantum Monte Carlo and a multi-armed bandit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While most of the recent popular coverage has been full of hype, Aaronson provides a concise summary of what's been going on before taking on the hype which appears to have left the poor man at his wit's end. Honestly I was rather confused also as the skepticism D-wave was met with at the beginning appears to have been replaced with a lot of hype without any mention of the actual physics of what's happening.

The position of most of the scientific community at the outset regarding D-Wave quantum computers was that it was uncertain what was going on at all. Nobody knew for sure if the D-Wave computers were really using quantum entanglement when they ran or not. Obviously a computer that does computations without doing at least some of the weird things allowed by quantum mechanics wouldn't be much of a quantum computer.

It appears that the D-Wave computers could indeed be taking advantage of entanglement. However since the D-Wave computers are not very isolated from their environment, the delicate effects they attempt to harness are sometimes disrupted when the computer interacts with its environment (aka decoherence to use the Quantum Mechanics term).

Overall it looks like D-Wave is making some progress on demonstrating their computer does really harness what's allowed by quantum mechanics. This is exciting, though ironically they have not caught up to their own overstated claims of what their machine does. Perhaps with more work they can better isolate their computer from it's environment and graduate from quantum annealing to reversible adiabatic quantum computing. Or maybe someone else working with some other physical system which has an intrinsically lower coupling to it's environment might beat them to it. An exciting time for the field nonetheless.

Getting a speed up on a particular class of problem could have a great deal of practical importance, but building a scalable computer that fully takes advantage of everything allowed by the laws of physics is the holy grail of quantum computing, and it doesn't look like D-Wave is there quite yet. Still an exciting time for the field nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER19> Aaronson is fabulous. In my opinion, possibly the best technical author around these days. If you haven't already, his new book[1] is absolutely worth checking out, especially if you're unfamiliar with quantum.

\---

[1] : [http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus- Aar...](http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computing-since-Democritus- Aaronson/dp/0521199565/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368734378&sr=8-1&keywords=scott+aaronson)

<comment><USER20> His book is seriously awesome. It's in a weird space technically -- not sure I'd recommend it to someone who didn't take a least a few math or cs courses as an undergrad. But if you have, wow, it really shines some new light on things you thought you probably understood well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm glad there are people who understand these things. I hope some day when the field of quantum computing congeals a bit more us mere mortals can begin to understand it as well.

<comment><USER22> Quantum computing is actually surprisingly approachable. Unfourtuantly, the written material on it is still mostly in the research paper format, which is very rarely usefull for mortals. However, many lectures on the subject are pretty approachable. I used to have a collection of links to Perimeter Institute videos, but they seem to have 404`ed, and I don't have the time to dig up the new urls.

If you are just looking for the theoretical basics , this youtube series [1] is a good place to start.

While I do find these videos approachable, they are fairly math heavy. Most of the lectures I've seen explain things at a level that almost anyone can get something out of, and you don't miss out if you skip over the stuff that is beyond you.

For most of the talks, the math involved is only algebra and vectors. Although, the vectors are represented using bra-ket notation which may throw you off.

[1]<http://www.youtube.com/user/mnielsencourses?feature=watch>

<comment><USER23> Glad you enjoyed the videos (I created them)! Unfortunately, that link has the videos in reverse order. Here they are in the intended order:

[http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the- det...](http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the-determined/)

The main thing that's needed to follow along is familiarity and comfort with basic linear algebra.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Holy Quantum Annealing Qubits Batman!

That article was not for the faint of geek.

<comment><USER25> I understand some of the words, but the article itself seems to me as ancient Greek.

Can someone explain to me what the hell the whole story is about?

<comment><USER26> BACKGROUND: Quantum computing

If you are able to get substantial numbers of "quantum bits" to stay entangled with one another, and hence behave in all those counterintuitive ways quantum things do, then you can (in principle) use the resulting machinery to perform some kinds of computations faster than any "conventional" computer can do them.

Making that actually happen is an enormous engineering challenge. No one's been able to do it with more than a very few bits, yet.

If they did, it would be a big deal: in particular, something called Shor's algorithm allows you (in principle) to factorize numbers efficiently on a quantum computer, and a big enough quantum computer would effectively break RSA encryption. As an indication of the progress that's been made in practical quantum computation: the first ever demonstration of Shor's algorithm in practice was in 2001 when some researchers at IBM managed to use it to find that 15 = 3x5; there was a major breakthrough in 2011, when the algorithm was used to find that 21 = 3x7.

Some other varieties of public-key encryption are not, so far as anyone currently knows, broken once we have quantum computers. But exactly what quantum computers are capable of is a very open question.

BACKGROUND: D-Wave

There's a company called D-Wave that, for years now, has been touting what they claim is a quantum computer of an unconventional design, very different from what most quantum computing researchers have been trying to do (or trying to analyse the capabilities of). They have claimed that their machine works with hundreds of (qu)bits, whereas no one else is using more than, say, ten. They have attracted a lot of media attention and a lot of money.

(Their machine allegedly does something called "adiabatic quantum computing", which somewhat resembles the non-quantum optimization process called simulated annealing. It may or may not actually be more powerful than simulated annealing.)

Until very recently, D-Wave (despite their great _media_ success) had provided no evidence at all that their machine actually does anything "genuinely quantum", or that it is able to do anything that can't be done just as well with conventional classical computers costing much, much less than their machine.

Scott Aaronson (a young but already eminent researcher in the theory of quantum computation) has long been a leading critic of D-Wave, countering their hype (and that of those in the media who like their story) with patient skepticism and careful analysis.

A couple of years ago, D-Wave (for the first time) offered some actual evidence for actual quantum effects having some actual contribution to the behaviour of their machine. Aaronson's post about this -- <http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=639> \-- said (among other things) "I hereby announce my retirement as Chief D-Wave Skeptic".

WHAT'S GOING ON NOW

In the last few days there have been breathless reports in the media about how D-Wave's machine has been found to be _thousands of times faster_ (at solving a single particular problem, the one it was designed to solve) than conventional computers. These reports have been discussed here on HN, too.

So Aaronson is back to debunking D-Wave hype. First, though, the good news: it does appear that this latest work gives some evidence that D-Wave's machine is genuinely doing something quantum. Specifically, some researchers have taken the same kind of problems that D-Wave's machine solves, and compared the performance of D-Wave's machine with (1) an algorithm called "quantum Monte Carlo", which is approximately a simulation (on conventional classical computers) of the particular quantum thing it's alleged to be doing and (2) a conventional computer doing ordinary simulated annealing. They found that the performance characteristics -- which problems are easier to solve and which harder, and by how much -- match up well between D-Wave's machine and the simulation of the quantum process it's meant to be an implementation of, whereas classical simulated annealing doesn't match at all well. So it does seem pretty likely that D-Wave's machine is doing roughly what D-Wave say it is, and that this truly is a quantum effect. Yay!

The bad news, part 1: This particular quantum phenomenon turns out to be one that can be efficiently and accurately simulated using ordinary classical computers. In other words, in so far as D-Wave's machine is really doing that, it offers no prospect of a more-than-constant-factor speedup relative to conventional, "non-quantum" digital computers. (The quotation marks are because actually semiconductors, as used in all integrated circuits, are fundamentally quantum devices. But they don't exploit quantum coherence in the sort of way quantum computers do.)

The bad news, part 2: At the same time as one researcher was comparing D-Wave's machine against a bunch of classical optimization algorithms and finding that D-Wave's machine performs much better, another researcher was comparing it against a _different_ classical optimization algorithm, namely (you guessed it) simulated annealing -- and finding that simulated annealing actually solves the problems just as well as D-Wave's machine, but much faster and on cheaper hardware.

CONCLUSION

(For the avoidance of doubt, this is my summary of what Aaronson says; I think he is almost certainly right because he demonstrably knows his stuff, but I'm in no position to give any endorsement beyond that.)

D-Wave do seem to have a genuine quantum device. However, it doesn't seem to be a _quantum computer_ in the sense of something that exploits quantum effects to do computation faster than a classical device can do by more than a constant factor, and the recent hype about their machine is very misleading.

[EDITED to fix a goof where I missed out half a sentence.]

<comment><USER27> [http://dwave.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/first-ever-head-to- hea...](http://dwave.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/first-ever-head-to-head-win-in- speed-for-a-quantum-computer/#comments)

Geordie's reply to Scott's blog: "The majority of that post is simply factually incorrect.

As one example, Troyer hasn't even had access yet to the system Cathy benchmarked (the Vesuvius – based system). (!) Yes Rainier could be beat by dedicated solvers — it was really slow! Vesuvius can't (at least for certain types of problems). Another is he thinks we only benchmarked against cplex (not true) and he thinks cplex is just an exact solver (not true). These types of gross misunderstanding permeate the whole thing.

I used to find this stuff vaguely amusing in an irritating kind of way. Now I just find it boring and I wonder why anyone listens to a guy who's been wrong exactly 100% of the time about everything. Update your priors, people!!

If you want to know what's really going on, listen to the real experts. Like Hartmut.

[http://googleresearch.blogspot.ca/2013/05/launching- quantum-...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.ca/2013/05/launching-quantum- artificial.html)

<comment><USER28> As far as I can tell, nothing in your second link is inconsistent with anything Scott has written.

<comment><USER27> Not mine, Geordie's!

<comment><USER28> I see now. I guess since there wasn't a closing quotation mark my brain just decided to invent one at a random point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a SDK? I'd like to port a NES simulator.

(there is a conjecture that anything remotely able to do an addition will be used for emulating a Nintendo console)

<comment><USER29> Someone will ask how many Bitcoins this computer can mine any minute now!

<comment><USER30> We've had that already!

Some of the comments in this thread talked about it. (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5697619>)

I learned a bit, so it's not too bad. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> PR departments have to release good publicity. Going too far is sleazy.

So is the recent D-Wave stuff just a combination of good PR and lazy journos, or are D-Wave being sleazy?

I guess it doesn't help that most people have no idea about quantum anything (let alone computing); or about massively parallel or P=NP etc.

<comment><USER31> There's an old joke a computer salesmen once told me:

Q: What's the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman?

A: The used car salesman knows when he's lying.

<comment><USER31> Q: What's the difference between a classical computer salesman and a quantum computer salesman?

<comment><USER32> Is the quantum computer salesman in a superimposition of truth-states?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Quantum computing reminds me of power from nuclear fusion: it's always 15 years away. I was awfully surprised when I read that D-Wave was already selling quantum computers. I'm glad that someone is willing to counter the hype. I find truth more interesting than fiction.

<comment><USER34> Coincidentally, D-wave's offices are located in Burnaby, BC, about a 10 minute drive from the offices of General Fusion, another company trying to crack the power-from-nuclear-fusion nut. They too have gotten a lot of flak for their claims about their technology, although I haven't heard much from that end of town lately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Important comment from Geordie on the dwave blog:

"It's absolutely possible that adding active error correction might help at some point, maybe even in the next generation. If that is the case, we'll certainly try anything anyone can think of to make the processors work better! In the specific case of exhibiting scaling differences over conventional algorithms, I'd bet we don't need error correction (at least at the current snapshot) but at the next level (say 2000+ qubits) maybe we might. If we do, no problem — we'll find a way!"

[http://dwave.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/first-ever-head-to- hea...](http://dwave.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/first-ever-head-to-head-win-in- speed-for-a-quantum-computer/#comment-23435)

</comment><comment><USER35> This thing wasn't delivered by aliens. For $10m isn't there an instruction book that describes what it's supposed to do? Can't they take it apart and look inside it?

<comment><USER36> We know what it's _supposed_ to do. We don't know what it's actually _doing_ \- and neither do the people who built it, not with any certainty.

This is a relatively ill-understood discipline and a very fragile machine. 'Take it apart and look inside' won't tell you much about what happens when you turn it on. In that regard it might as well have been built by aliens. (Okay, it's probably not quite that bad.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> OK, so the problem D-Wave has itself defined can be run faster on classical machinery. Does this also hold true for other problems run on the D-Wave?

<comment><USER38> The way one solves other problems on the D-Wave is by reducing them to the D-Wave problem, so save in extraordinary circumstances the answer will be "Yes."

<comment><USER39> The "D-Wave problem" (as Aaronson calls it) is kind of peculiar.

It's a certain kind of binary optimization problem that comes up in models of magnetic media ("Ising model"). In the original magnetic context, the two states are N and S. Each magnetic element within a 2D array of states jiggles around locally trying to align with its neighbors, and by doing so, each state-flip influences a global energy function.

The same problem comes up in image processing. The probabilistic equations describing segmentation of on-object versus off-object regions are the same mathematically as the magnetic energy function of the Ising model.

This particular problem is important in its niche, but it's really not that general. It's possible that even something as trivial (analytically) as going from 2 to 3 states will not generalize well to the D-wave hardware.

And it's possible that, by the time you transform a given problem (say, graph matching) to encode it in this model, you end up with either (a) something with more variables than the original problem, (b) something with exotic parameter settings that the D-wave hardware cannot handle, or (c) a model having an energy surface that is not well-suited to the particular D-Wave computational mechanism (annealing).

In some applications, the use of linear programming relaxations (I have not read the detailed paper, but I assume this is the CPLEX result discussed in the post) is much slower than annealing, and in others, LP relaxations are more competitive. Sometimes the LP relaxations give much better results, but they tend to be much, much, slower, for the Ising problem.

<comment><USER40> Also note that the topology of dwave's architecture strongly limits the instance of the Ising model you can implement and so the blowup in the instance size is twice: from your problem to the ising model and to map this Ising problem to the dwave's architecture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Can anyone attempt to explain this in layman terms? I can't even figure out if this is a real paper or not!

<comment><USER38> I'm not an expert on quantum computing, but it looks like two points to me:

1) D-Wave devices have finally been proven to meet a fundamental requirement to do quantum computing. This is a significant scientific advancement.

2) Despite this, they don't seem to answer any computational questions more quickly than commodity electronic computers.

Again, I'm not an expert. The author's reasoning does seem sound. Still, I'm not qualified to assess either of those claims directly.

<comment><USER14> > a fundamental requirement to do quantum computing

Yes, and it's a necessary, but not sufficient requirement. They don't have a quantum computer by the usual meanning of that term, but they have a different kind of computer, that may or may not do something better than a normal computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> TLDR: <http://mlkshk.com/p/MQLE></comment>


This is why (college) old media is failing - <AUTHOR> http://www.collegian.psu.edu/blogs/eic/2010/02/wanted_web_developer.aspx <comment><AUTHOR> If the post confuses you, I'll try and clear a few things up. This paper is still giving stipends to editors and senior reporters. They can't take even a small cut in their stipends to provide a modest stipend for someone whose skills are exceedingly more marketable than the ability to write in AP-style.

<comment><USER2> jesh. I went there. That is my college paper. And this disappoints me.

It is a good reflection on the newspaper industry

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm still a student at Penn State and I used to work at that paper. The demanded skillset has increased while the stipend has cratered to zero.

ps: I'm aware of your accomplishments. You make the Penn State startup community proud! Best of luck with Xobni!

<comment><USER3> Part of the trouble is also that the decision makers in charge of adding staff and directing the digital version(s) of the Daily Collegian are not well versed in the technology themselves. They probably just copied and pasted the job post from last time and added in whatever new they needed, without knowing that these can be extremely diverse skillsets. "Let's make an iPhone app! Add it to the job description!" A lot of people think if you're "good with computers," you can do it all.

<comment><USER4> This is true of many non-college newspapers even. It's changing, slowly, but many of the people in charge today started when linotype machines were the norm, and had been for the last 6 decades.

Newspapers are (still) not used to the modern pace of technology. My last job, the editorial system was more than 12 years old, and was still running on the original boxes 12-year-old dell boxes. Some had no USB ports, most had no sound cards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Applicants need a working knowledge of ASP/ASP.net, MySQL, Movable Type, HTML/CSS and general web server experience. Knowledge of JavaScript, LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) servers, iPhone development knowledge, Adobe Flash/Flex is a plus._

I guess this is what PG meant when he said:

 _The pointy-haired boss has no idea how this software has to work, and can't tell one programming language from another, and yet he knows what language you should write it in._

<comment><USER6> Sure - the editor in chief, or whoever on staff wrote that description, doesn't really know ASP from LAMP. But they do know the current programmers use ASP.net and MT, and will need to continue using ASP.net and MT for the time being.

In the past three years, the collegian website has added a lot of great features, and the design has improved considerably. It looks like they're still stuck on an old ASP backend, but the students responsible for the front page have been moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, its a pretty huge undertaking for unpaid (or close) full time students to replace a decent working site with a decade of archives with with a Rails app.

In many ways, the Collegian is a representative good college daily - there are many in much deeper trouble for failing to grasp the basics of good journalism, not the basics of web 2.0. (Disclosure: Former Collegian photo staff)

<comment><AUTHOR> The Collegian web site was cutting edge a few years ago. My predecessors really did a hell of a job cooking up a brand new system (built on MT). The previous system, from what I read, was archaic.

Sadly not much has changed over the last couple years and without proper staff, nothing really will change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most college newspapers actually outsource the content management and hosting for their websites to a company called College Publisher (owned by Viacom).

College Publisher takes 100% of the advertising revenue in exchange for hosting the site and providing a CMS for "free". It's a small but lucrative niche for Viacom.

By not giving up 100% of its online advertising revenue, this paper is actually well ahead of its peers.

<comment><USER8> I doubt a college newspaper would rake in the moolah with online advertisement. I remember my college paper getting most of their paid ads from local restaurants and businesses

They don't look very smart by not taking Viacom on their offer and then asking for a volunteer web developer to work on the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My University paper did something like this. They were looking for someone to do some website design and maintenance for them at $300 a semester, and I offered to help. Not because eleven dollars a week rewards the effort I would put in, but because I felt like helping my University fix their embarrassing web presence.

In the end, despite the fact that I had worked with them before, and came recommended by the CS department, they demanded a full resume and a burned CD with examples of previous work before they would even talk to me! They ended up with an English major who "had experience with Dreamweaver", and clearly didn't mind jumping through hoops for negligible reward :P

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems most senior staff for college papers (the journalism majors) think that they can very easily apply their expertise and authority of print journalism (most of what's being taught in journo programs) to the web. It doesn't work and creates insulting instances like your story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to be the online manager at my college newspaper (<http://mndaily.com>).

Working in the newspaper publishing environment is challenging for programmers. For instance, while online advertising made up a sizeable portion of the paper's revenue many of the salepeople at the paper had no idea where the ad spots were on the site or even what a CPM is.

Also challenging was working with different departments that had different workflows. We had to support the editorial process, the sales process, the hiring process, etc.

But wanting to get programmers for nothing is crazy. The programmers at the Daily were among the highest paid employees (only editor-in-chief, controller, and president were paid more than the online staff I believe) there and it would still takes months to fill a position with someone who had any competence (knew HTML and could write something more than Hello World in PHP).

While I know times are tough this is pretty disgraceful. College newspapers offer a good opportunity to get training in programming and allow prospective coders to start working with teams and real projects. But doing it for no pay really makes it a non-option.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just bought a Powerball ticket. $114M woohoo!

My odds of winning and her odds of finding someone are about the same.

<comment><USER12> You know what's gonna happen? Whichever boyfriend (or guy with a crush)[1] of a reporter there has the most tech knowledge is gonna get dragged into taking it over. I've been in that situation enough times (though usually with event stuff, not programming). That's basically the only shot they have at getting free skilled labor.

[1] - Not that girlfriends can't be programmers, but college girls seem to be better at roping guys into doing work for them than the other way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This ad is frighteningly similar to the ones out there in the real world at all but the most progressive papers, only difference is they pay a _little_ bit better.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is that tech people can go _anywhere_ with their skills. They're not limited to journalism. This means that newsrooms should make it a priority to at least be somewhat competitive when it comes to hiring technical talent.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. For the aspiring journalists, working at the college paper is a sweet way to get an edge in the journalism world, something very few other jobs at that level can provide. For the web developer, this is merely one of thousands of opportunities, and holds no special lure for being the school paper. Clearly, the journalists/editors here are looking at it from their limited point of view. Given that, the tone of the ad is somewhat disrespectful ("you have to know everything, but we'll pay you nothing")

<comment><USER15> I like to think of an internship as a kind of apprenticeship. In some cases, the apprenticeship is worth it. For example, a tech internship at Google or Microsoft lets you work on some of the most widely used software in the world with some extremely competent people. In this instance perhaps being unpaid wouldn't really be a big deal -- the real value would be in the experience you get and the things you learn. Working for a college newspaper, however, is unlikely to provide a good CS student with anything more than they'd learn on their own with a rather useless name to drop at the end. While working for a college newspaper may be a high accomplishment in the journalism world, it doesn't really mean all that much in the tech world.

Also, Microsoft and Google pay. They pay _a lot_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The collegian's web site runs on a windows server. lol'in at LAMP.

<comment><USER17> Well, theoretically, maybe they would like to switch platforms if the "intern" could do it?

<comment><USER18> Just means they don't know enough about the acronym to say 'WAMP' instead.

Theoretically, it could mean they want to switch. Theoretically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At my student paper in the UK we are all unpaid volunteers. Is it any different in the States?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Daily Collegian gives "scholarships" (stipends) to all editors and some senior reporters. These stipends don't come close to a wage, but it's _something_. Giving _something_ to all editors and some reporters and then giving nothing to a web developer is insulting.

<comment><USER20> I don't understand why it's insulting. I assume that the editors and senior reporters have been on the paper for at least an academic year - otherwise, I don't see how they could become editors or senior reporters. So the little money they have goes to the people who've put significant amounts of time into the paper.

The advertisement is for a new staff member. I assume new reporters don't get stipends either. So I don't see why it's insulting to treat this staff member the same as other staff members.

<comment><USER12> Simultaneously, the advertisement is for the position in charge of their website and online presence (which is to say a decent portion of their operations), and is thus a fairly senior position.

Stuff just gets more complicated when money's involved. It's one thing to ask for a hand with something you're not making money off of, and another thing to ask for free help on a project that's paying you.

<comment><USER20> I think you and others are looking at it from a normal business transactions perspective. College papers aren't a business. I would be surprised if their advertisement revenue even covered operation costs. Students work on college papers for the same reason they attend class: to learn.

Also, I think you're using "senior" in a different manner than I. I'm using it to mean seniority, or length of time spent working on the paper. You're using it to denote importance.

<comment><USER12> As a learning experience, this sounds fairly sub-par. Having just finished college, I'll say that the thing that made extra-curriculars a great learning experience was the ability to work with people who knew as much as or more than you. As a reporter at that paper, you'd get a lot of low-risk practice writing articles, and get advice and critiques from people with a few year's experience. By contrast, this job for the college paper would be throwing yourself into a position where others depend on you, and you have no one to learn from. It's all the difficulty of self-teaching and working with the safety net of a mentor, combined with all the responsibility of having dozens of other people depend on your work.

<comment><USER21> I was shocked years later when I worked with some MSM how amateur they were compared with the fairly "best practice" stuff we invented ourselves for our university paper.

Personally, the best learning environments I've ever been in were when I was at the sharp end of the problem, and had to work it out with other people from first principles. I'll never forget what I learned with sweat running down my forehead.

More traditional teaching like tutorials or apprenticeship-like things aren't so memorable for me, and the apprenticeship model (apart from the positive side of implicit learning of many intangible processes) tends to lead to repetition of ages-old worst practices by the learners in later life.

<comment><USER12> The reason college organizations develop these best practices is because they're ideally structured for an apprectice-ship/mentor-ship situation. Even the highest ranking and most experienced student has only been there for 3-4 years, so they're experienced enough to know what worked in the past, but the turn-over's high enough to avoid getting bogged down in "this is how we've always done it" or "that didn't work last time". Because the old guard is out in the Real World in a few years, there's less of a delay for a genuine innovator to move from rookie to chief. In the corporate world, those innovative youngsters get frustrated with the idea of spending 10+ years climbing the corporate ladder to be able to put their good ideas and/or unique perspective to use, so some of them quit and become entrepreneurs.

It's a very fine line that 3-5 year programs seem to walk rather well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are more than 600 college newspapers in the US. This means that an opportunity exists in these hyper-local markets to also report community news and, perhaps, create something that may "save" (I know that's the wrong word) the newspaper publishing industry.

<comment><USER23> We're working on that. e-mail me if you'd like to talk =).

-Marcio

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm surprised they didn't want a minimum 10 years experience in iphone app dev experience.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't see how this is different from the real world. I see lots of ads for "Unpaid Internships" that want extensive knowledge of the field and expect you to already have the skills and experience the internship is supposed to teach you.

<comment><USER25> My other favorite is looking for a technical person for whom they will "split the profits". Your local CraigsList "computer gigs" section will be filled with these.

My favorite recent: "We are a couple of mompreneurs who are launching a business geared to moms. We are looking for someone, preferably a mom so you will already have knowledge of the target market, to help us with website design, online promotion etc. etc." <http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/rds/cpg/1621222670.html>

<comment><USER26> That's hilarious. Doubtless they'll be offering a smaller share of the profits as they're bringing their all important idea to the table.

I think I'm going to try this stunt with every service I consume. "Yes, you see, you give me a haircut for free and then we split any resultant profits. 70-30, because the haircut was my idea".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why the heck is it still so hard to make iPhone applications? You'd think some smart HNer would realize that every publication on the planet wants to have its own iPhone app. But few of them can afford to pay someone $10k to build one. I bet a lot of them could afford to pay $500 bucks though...

<comment><USER28> There are a bunch of companies (check out Scoble's YouTube feed for a few) that do this for a few hundred dollars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not enough vision here... its a potentially great way to get free press and ad space for your project while learning a bit about all the newspapers that will be desparate for any programmer with knowledge of a dying industry can be saved.

</comment><comment><USER30> And they allowed commenting... big mistake.

<comment><USER23> what's wrong with commenting on news stories? Isn't that what we do here?</comment></comment>


3-D Printed Skeleton Keys Can Pick High-Security Locks in Seconds - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/08/3d-printed-bump-keys/?mbid=social_fb

<comment><USER2> Some user re-keyable locks are supposedly resistant to bump attacks, like Schage's SecureKey. (What I use.)

Re-keyable locks are more expensive, but worth it.

If you do a patent search about rekeyable locks, you see that they are fairly recent. In 1967, a patent was granted on a lock that flips permanently from one combination to another. During construction, a builder uses the builder's key to access the property. This key stops working as soon as the owner uses the owner key to open the lock for the first time.

There is patent activity in this area as recently as 2009.

This site has some discussion of the Schlage SecureKey internals: [http://www.lockwiki.com/index.php/Schlage_SecureKey](http://www.lockwiki.com/index.php/Schlage_SecureKey)

SecureKey is programmed by inserting the original Reset Key into the lock and turning into a special position (a 45 degree angle, IIRC). You can then remove the Reset Key, and insert the new key, which can have an arbitrary code. You turn that to the original position, and the lock is programmed. Internally, it looks like the lock "quantizes" the height of each cut to one of ten positions to memorize the new pattern; but it's all mechanical. Quite neat!

<comment><USER3> Schlage secureky is far less bump resistant than some other slider designs.

I've also seen pin-locks that incorporate a single disc-detainer to make bumping harder (a single disc-detainer likely isn't enough to actually _prevent_ bumping, since you could probably just get N bump keys where N is the number of set positions for the disc detainer).</comment></comment>


America's Peculiar Bail System - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/americas-peculiar-bail-system/ <comment><USER2> America's entire justice system seems unfair to the poor. Or to phase it another way, I literally don't believe the poor get a fair or speedy trial, but do believe the rich can. Bail is a big problem. Plea agreements and their relationship to public defender's workload are another massive problem.

A lot of people without much familiarity of the legal system think things like "no innocent person would ever plead guilty!" but the way the US legal/justice system is set up right now, it is often the least-bad alternative to plead guilty to a crime you didn't commit than to fight it.

And I'd love to point my finger at one individual or set of individuals, but the reality is that the entire system is broken, and it isn't broken because of bad actors, it is broken because it is just poorly designed and implemented at its core (although moral prosecutors can help mitigate some of the problems).

The UK justice system is imperfect, but things like no plea deals, no monetary bail, and better pay for public defenders (although still too low, and they're still overworked) improve things a lot. Plus prosecutors aren't politically motivated and are interested in justice (elected prosecutors is another massive problem in the US).

The US criminal justice system is "scary." I feel bad for anyone who it victimises, in particular the poor.

<comment><USER3> Americans also have a uniquely individualistic philosophy of life. They are big on "personal responsibility" and free will. I see lots of people with no sympathy for people who are caught up in the justice system, based on a belief that they "chose" to do whatever they did, and are inherently evil and deserve whatever they get. We love retributive justice here in the USA. That will be very hard to dislodge. It seems abundantly clear that there is no such thing as truly (i.e. supernatural) free will, and severe punishments do little to deter crime.

The phrase "they are just _x_ " gets thrown around a lot. They are just animals. They are just monsters. They are just evil. As if these qualities are discrete things that exist by themselves...

What can we do to convince people that criminals are not, in fact, "just" bad people?

<comment><USER4> I don't know that this is uniquely American, but I agree that this happens and I think it's pretty scary.

For example, in the discussions about recent high-profile police shootings, a lot of people just dismissed the whole thing once they found out about that the victims were themselves criminals. A disturbing number of people immediately stopped having any sympathy the moment they found out that e.g. Michael Brown had just robbed a convenience store or that Eric Garner was selling cigarettes illegally. They would generally not come out and say that people deserve summary execution for these crimes, but that is essentially the argument that they end up making.

If you can't even convince people that small-time criminals deserve to survive an encounter with the police, then good luck convincing them that they deserve fair treatment in court....

<comment><USER5> _A disturbing number of people immediately stopped having any sympathy the moment they found out that e.g. Michael Brown had just robbed a convenience store or that Eric Garner was selling cigarettes illegally. They would generally not come out and say that people deserve summary execution for these crimes, but that is essentially the argument that they end up making._

It's less that these men "deserved" death for what they did or didn't do, and more that they made decisions that spiraled out of control and led to unfortunate consequences - in Brown's case, physically attacking an armed police officer; in Garner's case, refusing to go along with police when asked ("resisting arrest"). Neither crime is punishable by death, but when you take actions that lead to police escalating use of force [1], the consequences are unpredictable and generally not going to be good.

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

<comment><USER4> That's a different thing altogether. I have problems with that approach as well, but it's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about people who literally cease to care about Brown's and Garner's deaths the moment they found out that they were criminals. Not even getting into the specific police interactions, just straight to "well, he had just robbed a convenience store, so who cares?" I understand that you presumably don't believe that, but I saw a lot of people who did.

<comment><USER6> Have you considered the possibility that these people don't exist (or exist in very small numbers), and you've decided there are a lot of them due to some kind of confirmation bias?

<comment><USER4> Yes, but I (obviously) don't think that's actually what's happening. Why do you bring it up?

<comment><USER6> Because I think that is what's happening.

You have acknowledged that there are some nuanced reasons that knowledge of crimes committed by these men might change one's perception of the incidents.

You then refer to a non-specific, large group of people who's reaction to that knowledge completely lacks nuance. From this, you conclude these people are simple-minded hate-machines and lament their existence.

It seems to me much more likely that you failed to understand the nuance in their opinions, because you lacked either the willingness or the ability to relate to them and the way they think.

<comment><USER4> I've seen many people state this opinion, sometimes in nearly the exact words I "quoted" above. It's possible that they're very small in number and I just happened to encounter a large proportion of them, but I think it's unlikely.

That's my basis for saying that. What's your basis for saying your alternative is more likely? It looks to me like you have substantially less to go on for your statement than I do for mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Suppose someone is arrested for a crime they didn't commit, bail is set, they get a bail bond, they show up to court and are acquitted. The fees they pay on that bond are a de facto fine. This weakens juries' power to acquit and gives false arrests teeth.

One way to improve things would be to allow juries to rule, not just that a criminal case wasn't proven beyond reasonable doubt, but that it was weak enough that no arrest should have been made; and in that case, make the government liable for bail bond fees, rather than the defendant.

<comment><USER8> Many states do just that. This is called the "Grand Jury" system. Every case is brought before a Grand Jury to determine if enough evidence exists for the case to go to trial.

<comment><USER9> And, as the saying goes, whomever the prosecutor wants indicted by the grand jury, up to and including a ham sandwich, will get indicted. Exceptions to this rule fall into the man bites dog category.

<comment><USER10> True of Federal grand juries. Less so of state grand juries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excellent overview of problems in the bail system. Here's a nice supplement to it from the other side by a judge. The two together show why the situation is _extremely_ one-sided if the accused is poor.

[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why- inn...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/nov/20/why-innocent- people-plead-guilty/)

</comment><comment><USER12> And if anyone is curious this is the bail schedule for san francisco:

[http://www.sfsuperiorcourt.org/sites/default/files/images/13...](http://www.sfsuperiorcourt.org/sites/default/files/images/131224.Bail%20Schedule.Final_.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> <quote> 77% of people charged with a misdemeanor in New York City were released on their own recognizance, and the other 23% were offered bail. Within that 23%, bail amounts widely varied: Of the 26,459 cases in which bail was set, 19,137 -- or 72.3% -- the bail amount was $1,000 or less. "Despite [this] relatively low bail amount," writes the report, "the overwhelming preponderance of defendants required to post that bail amount were jailed because they could not do so." </quote>

How much cheaper can bail get? You can hardly get an apartment anywhere in NYC for less than $1000/month. These people must make and spend more than that in a month - it's just the strangely Average American Lifestyle to spend money as soon as you get it.

Any amount that these poor people could afford isn't going to be an effective bail. These kind of people can only afford something that fits in a week's paycheck, and losing a week's paycheck isn't _that_ big a deal, they've done without before.

<comment><USER14> The minimum wage in New York is $8.75. Someone working 40 hours/week for 52 weeks/year, which is a generous estimate due to how many minimum wage employers hire and schedule employees, would earn $18,200 every year. After 15% in federal income taxes, that leaves us with $15,470. Let's assume they pay nothing in state/local income taxes. Let's also assume they live alone and have no children or family to care for-- all their expenses are their own.

Assuming that they pay $1000/mo for their apartment (let's be generous -- this includes rent and utilities), that leaves them with $3,470 every year to cover all other living expenses.

If I spend $50/week on food (which is conservative for NYC), that adds up to $2400, which leaves us at $1070. At that salary, if you spend more than $70 in a YEAR on clothing, healthcare, toothpaste, public transit), then you won't be able to afford $1000 in bail. I spend more than that every year on public transit alone (MTA 30-day pass costs $116.50 -> $1398.00/year).

It's really not hard to see how a $1000 bail can be out of reach for the poor in New York.

<comment><USER15> Not to put too fine a point on it, since overall your calculations seem fair and your conclusions reasonable: but at $18200 with $10300 in deductions and exemptions the person's AGI would be only $7900 and hence all of their taxable income falls into the 10% marginal tax bracket. Of course this neglects payroll taxes (you did as well) but also ignores the EITC so suppose these roughly cancel. This results in the tax burden being $790 rather than your calculated $2730. That $2000 is a huge deal to a minimum-wage earner. Your back of the envelope calculation in this specific area was off by 450%.

<comment><USER14> Yeah I figured I would be off by a fair bit off when it came to the income tax math. I'm not sure whether there would additionally be some tax burden due to NY state income tax and NY city income tax. You're right that $2000 is huge to a minimum-wage earner -- that's almost 11% more disposable income.

On the flip side, minimum-wage earners are more likely to be employed part- time instead of full-time, but only 10% and 2% respectively of those groups are paid minimum wage or below, so it's pretty tricky to come up with a good estimate here.[1]

My main goal was to illustrate that the poor spend disproportionately more of their income on basic needs compared to the middle class, and inspire some empathy when we discuss the economics of poverty.

[1] [http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2013.pdf](http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2013.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Antikythera Mechanism - <AUTHOR> http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/

<comment><USER2> Anyone got a mirror? The .gr site is toast.

<comment><AUTHOR> This site describes the artifact (and links to the Greek site): [http://antikythera.whoi.edu/artifacts/antikythera- mechanism/](http://antikythera.whoi.edu/artifacts/antikythera-mechanism/)

Also, the blog is tracking the current dive to claim more artifacts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Url changed from [http://antikythera.whoi.edu/artifacts/antikythera- mechanism/](http://antikythera.whoi.edu/artifacts/antikythera-mechanism/), which points to this.</comment>


Show HN: SimpleAuth.com - Free Social Sign On/Multi-point Sharing/Contacts - <AUTHOR> http://www.simpleauth.com Hey everyone... I know that there are mixed feelings about social sign on around here, but I'd like to show this off anyhow. SimpleAuth is a completely free Social Sign On / Multi-point Sharing / Contact Management (for letting users invite their others from their friend lists or address books). SimpleAuth also addresses a major issue with the largest commercial player in the market -- the fact that with other services, your provider API Keys are tied to their domain (YOURNAME.THEIRDOMAIN.COM). With SimpleAuth, you create a CNAME and all the API Keys from the providers are tied to your domain. Should the unthinkable happen, you won't be left out in the cold asking your users to re-register. We're like the SimpleGeo of SSO/sharing/contacts. We've got some pretty neat stuff in the pipeline that will be the revenue driver, but the SSO/Sharing/Contacts will always be free in their full glory. Would love to hear your thoughts. <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone... I know that there are mixed feelings about social sign on around here, but I'd like to show this off anyhow.

SimpleAuth is a completely free Social Sign On / Multi-point Sharing / Contact Management (for letting users invite their others from their friend lists or address books).

SimpleAuth also addresses a major issue with the largest commercial player in the market -- the fact that with other services, your provider API Keys are tied to their domain (YOURNAME.THEIRDOMAIN.COM). With SimpleAuth, you create a CNAME and all the API Keys from the providers are tied to your domain. Should the unthinkable happen, you won't be left out in the cold asking your users to re-register.

We're like the SimpleGeo of SSO/sharing/contacts. We've got some pretty neat stuff in the pipeline that will be the revenue driver, but the SSO/Sharing/Contacts will always be free in their full glory.

Would love to hear your thoughts.</comment>


Ask HN: What would you do if money didn't exist? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Sex, music, drugs.... oh wait

</comment><comment><USER3> Introduce money?

</comment><comment><USER4> Write a bartering app?

</comment><comment><USER5> money == value

>What would you do if [value] didn't exist?

huh?</comment>


Automated scanners looking for vulnerabilities in Huawei firmware - <AUTHOR> https://breakingdefense.com/2019/07/hunting-huaweis-hidden-back-doors/ <comment><USER2> So, I can totally believe that the Chinese government instructed their tech companies to put back doors in their equipment (not least because the U.S. government almost certainly ordered U.S. tech companies to put back doors in software sold into China). But, it is a little odd that the article headline is about Huawei, but the re-appearing backdoor that "just screams malicious"...was not in a Huawei device. Maybe both "Huawei is really bad at security" and "Security camera company you've never heard of installed backdoor in their device's software" are not very clickable headlines?

Again, I totally could believe that Huawei, or any other Chinese tech company, would do this if told to by the Chinese government (again, because U.S. companies almost certainly do it when told to by the U.S. government). But, that's not even what the article (as opposed to the headline) is alleging.

</comment><comment><USER3> Running some kind of automated analysis on the firmware and reporting vulnerabilities is a long way away from "Huawei's hidden back doors found".

<comment><USER4> While that's true, the correct way of creating deniable backdoors is to simply write insecure code. The best way to detect something like that is essentially what this article tries to do: a comparative analysis of vulnerability frequency. It doesn't do a great analysis, but it is the correct approach to thinking about the problem.

<comment><USER5> That's conspiracy theory logic. The fact that it doesn't look like a backdoor is evidence that it's a backdoor? It is impossible to disprove something like that.

<comment><USER6> What of this:

 _Dahua at first ignored ReFirm's inquiries, then claimed the vulnerability was a simple error that had been fixed in the latest update. But when ReFirm looked through the updated firmware, they still found the same backdoor — just relocated in a different place in the code. (Huawei had done the same thing)._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "found the average device had 102 vulnerabilities, at least a quarter of them severe enough to let a hacker get full access easily. That's much more than comparable Western products"

Why not compare against comparable Eastern products? Were the Western products more expensive?

The article reeks of hatchet job to me.

I did a quick search to try and find the referenced Huawei backdoor they discovered had been "moved", but I couldn't find anything... Can anyone else find something about it?

Edit: I think it is obvious the Chinese government would have backdoors, but I also think they won't be obvious (the Chinese NSA are not stupid). These security issue are just bad code, not strategic.

</comment><comment><USER8> This article quickly turned into a puff piece for ReFirm

</comment><comment><USER9> > Dahua at first ignored ReFirm's inquiries, then claimed the vulnerability > was a simple error that had been fixed in the latest update. But when ReFirm > looked through the updated firmware, they still found the same backdoor — > just relocated in a different place in the code. (Huawei had done the same > thing).

Regardless of which vendor we're talking about I fear that this simple admission of human error is going to repel any improvement justified by technological means. It is extremely easy, and entirely believable, to continuously blame human error, "junior devs", management, etc in the face of any discovered vulnerabilities.

The value of automated detection is to hopefully fuel a real boycott and/or government ban. I'm not specifically calling out Huawei here because I think it's entirely reasonable for other countries to do the same thing to U.S. companies. Hitting offenders in the only place it hurts, the bank account, is probably the only way inhibit this behavior.

</comment><comment> gjsman-1000 Well, not intentional (except for that camera company), but should we be using Huawei when that expert described it as "some of the worst [most exploitable] equipment I have ever worked with."?

We might as well make sure that it's relatively secure regardless of politics.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ah yes, a network device vendor with serious vulnerabilities, that's new...

</comment><comment><USER11> This is how they describe their security system: [https://finitestate.io/product/](https://finitestate.io/product/)

Would love more details on how it works

</comment><comment><USER12> So the theory is that chinese vendors put existing exploits into their firmware deliberately? That seems rather hard to believe. Would it not be much simpler to create a few new holes?

<comment><USER4> What do you mean by 'existing exploits'? It seems like they are accusing them of writing insecure code on purpose, which is exactly how i'd go about inserting a backdoor if I were going to do it.

<comment><USER13> That is correct because plausible deniability is very important.

However writing insecure code is also the defacto standard across industry, definitely including in the US.

If we accept this as proof, then Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc, (all the way down like the turtles, until we hit every one man company) are all government controlled corporations deliberately installing sneaky back doors through security vulnerabilities in code, which cleverly simply look like incompetent programming.

<comment><USER4> That's right, but I think the article is asserting that:

a) The vulnerability density is much higher in Huawei's code.

b) When vulns were reported to them, they simply moved them to another location, rather than actually patch them.

Those are the things that I consider to be (weak) evidence that they are backdoors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Notably _not_ in this article: any Huawei backdoors.

"Backdoor" implies malice. What this article is about is "vulnerabilities," also known as "bugs." The moral panic continues unabated.

<comment><USER7> "But when ReFirm looked through the updated firmware, they still found the same backdoor — just relocated in a different place in the code. (Huawei had done the same thing)."

I'm not sure what event they are referring to for Huawei.

Edit: I followed the first reference I found, and ended up at: [https://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/543641/netgear_patch_...](https://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/543641/netgear_patch_said_leave_backdoor_problem_router/) perhaps because owned by Huawei or person referenced Huawei when they meant Netgear?</comment></comment>


Tilera launches new generation of multicore embedded chips for communications - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/09/21/tilera-launches-new-generation-of-multicore-embedded-chips-for-communications/ <comment><USER2> Some more info at Ars Technica: [http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/MIT-startup- raise...](http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/MIT-startup-raises- multicore-bar-with-new-64-core-CPU.ars)

and a paper published at the ISSCC conference: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/6151332/TILE64-Processor-A-64Core-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/6151332/TILE64-Processor-A-64Core- SoC-with-Mesh-Interconnect)

</comment><comment><USER3> _Tilera is targeting the chips at high-end networking equipment that would otherwise use digital signal processing chips from Texas Instruments._

DSP is a special case, where scaling is easier. Anyone have more details on how general their approach is?

 _EDIT_ <http://www.tilera.com/technology/technology.php>

They address the multi-core hardware bus problem (iMesh/Tile packet switching), but not the multi-core _software_ problem. Previously on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295530> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=295152></comment>


Ask HN: I want to move to the Valley. How would you do it? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
I just found myself in a situation where I'm allowed to work remotely. I do UI/web work and would love to get involved in an interesting project.
This seems like a question many people are wondering where the answer changes frequently so thought I'd ask you.
If you know of a cool project or have a story from experience please share! Thank you <comment><USER2> It depends on your budget, and what kind of lifestyle you wish to lead.

Could you elaborate a bit on your expectations?</comment>


Do not track is dying - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/30/technology/do-not-track/index.html?iid=HP_LN

<comment><USER2> Of course it's dying. There is no acceptable solution that isn't on by default, and advertisers will never accept that because nobody would ever turn it off. Their business model would dry up and die. So they block it at every opportunity, because what else are they going to do? Change to a business model based on things people actually want? Ha! What an idea.

<comment><USER3> I want advertising. It tells me about things I might like.

You're perhaps one of the very very few people who dislike being told about things, but thankfully you're in the minority.

The whole "do not track us" idea is ridiculous and a 'moot' issue. Cookies aren't really necessary, you can track people server side based on their browser make up, and they won't know they're being tracked. 99.9% of browsers are completely unique and identifiable back to the computer.

If you _really_ don't want to be tracked (<0.01% of users), then use TOR, lynx, adblock, disallow cookies, etc etc etc

Look also at the recent EU cookie laws, and how ridiculous and needlessly cumbersome they have made websites that have addopted it. Endless clicking confirmation boxes / dropdowns to say it's ok for them to store a cookie. We do not need more of this madness.

<comment><USER4> >I want advertising. It tells me about things I might like.

I hate advertising. Usually the ads are irrelevant and for things I do not and would not ever want, are often scammy, sometimes they carry malware, often get in the way of me retrieving the information I went to a site to see..

I bet if I counted every time I clicked on an advertisement in the last decade, that number would be less than 20.

That said, I agree completely the "tracking" worries are absurd and more borne out of FUD than any concrete privacy issue.

>Look also at the recent EU cookie laws, and how ridiculous and needlessly cumbersome they have made websites that have addopted it.

Due to shoddy implementation of a shoddy law - that does not reflect whatsoever on the concept. And cumbersome? Really? Could you point to an example site?

<comment><USER3> The worst implementations "drop down" a message at the top of the page to tell me they're using cookies. This invariably happens just as I'm clicking on a link. The link moves, and I click on some link I didn't want to click on.

There are no words strong enough to describe how shitty that is, and it's incredibly common, on big, widely used websites.

<comment><USER5> Recently became required by the EU for all websites to notify users of cookies, so don't expect the notifications to go away. Better implementations don't move content around the page though.

<comment><USER3> I expect us (UK) to withdraw from the EU in the next few years, so hopefully it'll become irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That this is even a debate is preposterous to me. I am a buyer. I love to shop. I also love the internet. What I don't love is being FORCED to view advertising I have no desire to view. Is advertising a right? If so, I've certainly never heard of it. I personally could not care less if internet advertisers dropped dead of starvation. They have no inherent right to follow me around to check out what I am doing in my personal time just so they can MAYBE get me to buy something that will put money in their pockets and food in their mouths. I think it is time to send advertisers a message (SOPA/PIPA style). I think it is time to send congress a message that states that we DO NOT WANT forced advertising and we will not be silent until we get it. Opt-In is the only acceptable choice for a free society.

I certainly understand the ad industry wanting to make enough money to eat. I also understand the importance of advertising. It is a great way to raise capital while offering viewers a chance to see what products and services are out there. It is also a great way to financially support a site. I have made many purchases due to great advertising. But is it really their right to force ads on us while we have no right to a simple "leave me alone" button? Maybe there could be an option version of "do not track" that allows advertising based on the SITE information or adblocking that removes ALL ads. Then let the consumer choose. I would certainly accept a non-tracking option most of the time. Am I completely unique in this?

As for the argument that viewers will not opt-in to advertising, I simply laugh. I use "do not track" and ad blocking implementations extensively. However, I turn it off (my version of opting in to advertising) for family birthdays, anniversaries, and especially holidays. How else will I find the best deals? However, the rest of the time, I have absolutely no desire to see any Web page containing 50% (conservative for some sites) advertising. Unless I am completely unique in this world, I cannot imagine that I am the only individual who does this.

Again, why is a consumers right to be tracked or advertised versus a company's right to track me and advertise to me even a debate?

<comment><USER7> _Is advertising a right? If so, I've certainly never heard of it._

Advertising is speech (tracking aside). On one's own site, yes, we have a right to advertise.

 _I think it is time to send congress a message that states that we DO NOT WANT forced advertising and we will not be silent until we get it._

If you don't want advertising, you're free not to use websites with ads. Please don't fuck with free speech just because you don't like them.

Now, tracking is (IMO) a different issue and yes, it should be opt-in.

<comment><USER8> OK, advertising is speech, sure (I suppose). But, there's no right to demand that anyone listen to you; I am still free to peel the logo off my car, remove the tag from my shirt, fast-forward past commercials, tear pages out of magazines.

And that's the problem with trying to use protected speech as a defense for advertising: all that does is protect your right to use it; it does not force me to also use it. Once the content is loaded on my browser, on my computer, I have the right to do with it whatever I please -- including automatically block any of the pieces that I don't want.

You're free to have advertising on your site. I'm free to not download any of it. Freedom is great!

<comment><USER7> Sure, but that's not really a contention point. Even Google, the biggest advertiser, lets you install AdBlock from their own "Web store": [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock/gighmmpiob...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adblock/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> '"The advertisers have been extraordinarily obstructionist, raising the same issues over and over again, forcing new issues that were not on the agenda, adding new issues that have been closed, and launching personal attacks," said Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford privacy researcher and Do Not Track technology developer who is involved in the negotiations.'

So get a better Chair.

</comment><comment><USER10> DNT is pretty laughably ill conceived. Vague definitions of what is able to be tracked, what constitutes a first party and third party (Is a browser vendor first party or third party?). Some of the major proponents are companies like Google and Microsoft, both with their respective gigantic ad platforms DART and Atlas. Would they be able to collect data directly from the browser and dominate the ad world? It's certain that if this were legislated that it would destroy the business model for many large companies. (Yahoo, ValueClick, AOL).

The existing legislation requires an opt-out policy from tracking. Advertisers must respect the user's choice with regards to targeted advertising. Does Microsoft turning on DNT by default represent the users choice or does it represent Microsoft's interests? What about third party identification for things like disqus? Sure we have ways to handle CORS today but what if there was a law (that only effected the USA) saying you were not allowed to "track" if you were a third party? If it's just about advancing web technologies why isn't this just a w3c proposal or RFC? What's wrong with the existing opt-out methods?

From what I see DNT is just a political tactic to gain power in the ad-world, not a way to protect the privacy of users.

</comment><comment><USER11> Of course its dying. It's compeltely impractical and almost comical. There wa no reason to believe it would amount to anything but a publication in some journal.

</comment><comment><USER12> This might be a naive idea, but it seems like you could throw noise into their system by having a program send out random requests, making their data less valuable.

<comment><AUTHOR> How would this work in a real world scenario?

<comment><USER12> Maybe something like a browser plugin that would work like selenium ,but instead of scripting it with test cases, it could be fed by a service providing it with urls with the intention of throwing off anything data-mining your traffic across sites by giving it false data-points. Im not an expert though... for all i know, what im describing might be impossible or like fighting a rhino with a wet sponge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Instead some regions have been outright making tracking without opt in illegal, e.g. the EU.</comment>


Ask HN: How OS detect keyboard layout? - <AUTHOR> I was just build GH60 keyboard, and set the key using this dvorak layout here http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/2f5956676fb8761a4fe504d32e118470. It works perfectly on qwerty layout in windows and linux, but not detected as dvorak keyboard and doesn't work in dvorak layout.<p>It is make me wondering how the windows or linux detect keyboard layout? <comment><USER2> Not an expert on underlying tech. Yet, I use multiple keyboard layouts. Key remapping is software defined.</comment>