Ask HN: What's the Future of Code Editors? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
I've been thinking/making lots of different creative tools over the past many years, but the code editor is one that I keep coming back to. I figure this is one of the best groups to poll since there's a mix of tech, design, development, and start-up readers who all likely interact with code at some point.
Q. What do you think the most important next step will be for code editors?
Over the past few years we've started to see lots of cool things (like alternate layouts, realtime syntax highlighting, auto-folding code, collaboration, etc.). But what do you think is next?
From my perspective, the biggest change I'd love to see is the code editor moving beyond plain text. While the code itself must be machine translatable, the meta-level content (comments, links, diagrams, etc.) could be much more informative and useful; even interacting with and highlighting the code/text itself.
I've also been working on a notebook webapp called Sketchwrite and think that could be a way to kickstart the conversation about getting plain text and embedded content to play well together.
Sketchwrite is pretty basic; it just combines sketches and writing. However, the way it keeps images and text in sync is different than what you typically find in text/image hybrid environments (like text editors which use relative anchors or explicit object boxes, and image editors which use absolute positioning for each element or layer); instead Sketchwrite anchors are implicit to what/where you draw on the page and flow with the text.
Clearly Sketkchwrite isn't the answer here (without a whole lot of re-work), but I think something like it that's tuned for code could be pretty cool. For example, here's a quick proof-of-concept of a javascript file with embedded drawings/callouts.
https://sketchwrite.com/n/VNpCzRv5r38 (see comment below for clickable link) <comment><AUTHOR> Forgot that links don't show up in the original HN question.

Here's the quick proof-of-concept of a javascript file with embedded drawings/callouts in Sketchwrite.

[https://sketchwrite.com/n/VNpCzRv5r38](https://sketchwrite.com/n/VNpCzRv5r38)</comment>


10,000 Bitcoin Mining ASIC Chips Arrive in Switzerland – 3 TH/s - <AUTHOR> http://thegenesisblock.com/10000-bitcoin-asic-chips-arrive-in-switzerland-3-ths/

<comment><USER2> I'm fairly new to the Bitcoin world, but it seems to me that ultimately (in 10 years or so) one of two things will happen:

1) Bitcoin will gain large-scale adoption. As a result, the value of Bitcoins will greatly increase from what it is today.

2) Bitcoin will fail due to government regulations, better alternatives, or other unforeseen reasons. As a result, Bitcoins will become effectively worthless.

Am I oversimplifying so far? If I'm not, then it seems like investing substantially in Bitcoins (purchasing coins) now will either make me very rich in 10 years, or I'll lose my initial investment.

By the same logic, if I earn coins by mining now and hold them, I will either be rich in 10 years, or I'll lose my mining investments.

I'm not interested in diving into mining to earn a quick 10-20k while the market fluctuates, so as a long term strategy it sounds like investing is the more sensible and less time consuming option. Thoughts?

<comment><USER3> A lot of people agree with this thinking.

It's not the only possibility— e.g. Bitcoin could putter around for a long time basically where it is now, maybe acting as a very mild threat the keep the alternatives on their toes enough that Bitcoin never gets widespread adoption.

Right now it's possible to make a decent amount _today_ with mining as a small / hobby business, supplying coins to people who don't want to get into the mining stuff, without engaging in major speculation yourself.

<comment><USER4> I see this "puttering" as the most likely possibility, since if they do hit some level of adoption that starts to threaten sovereign currencies, the GP's option (2) will come into effect.

<comment><USER5> Maybe some non-democratic governments will become hostile to Bitcoin, but democratic ones will most likely not try to stop it because they eventually do what the people want.

Case in point: even the US Treasury Department's FinCEN bureau recognized enthusiastically that Bitcoin offers "potential" and "holds great promise" to US economy: [http://www.fincen.gov/news_room/speech/pdf//20130613.pdf](http://www.fincen.gov/news_room/speech/pdf//20130613.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Such a waste of electronic computing power.

EDIT: what I meant by a waste of electronic computing power is that it does nothing for the world beyond pumping out more bitcoins. I guess it's more of my opinion on bitcoins in general than this particular artile. All the computational energy is not used to search for a cure for cancer, or aliens, or crack a code, or used to compute a deep neural net. I guess I would compare it to high-frequency trading---it makes people (a lot) of money, but doesn't deliver any net gain for society.

<comment><USER7> It's not a zero sum game.

It's not a "waste" of computing power at all, in my opinion.

\- If BTC did not exist, this computing power would not exist. The demand for this power is in addition to other forms of demand. This isn't taking away power from any other field, it's simply new power being added for a new cause. \- The technology derived from this "arms race" can benefit far more than this field.

Why wasn't the moonlanding a "waste" of money, talent and science? Because of the training it provided people and the tools and technologies they developed, etc.

<comment><USER6> > The technology derived from this "arms race" can benefit far more than this > field.

Sure, I guess...

> Why wasn't the moonlanding a "waste" of money, talent and science?

The moonlanding was a major advance for mankind, independent of all the long- term benefits that have since arisen. You're comparing that to bitcoins?

<comment><USER5> You seem to not understand the potential benefits of widely adopted censorship-resistant (decentralized) currency. Try living in Argentina where the government is inflating your currency, while prohibiting you from moving your assets to USD. Try living in China where the government will seize your bank account if you are a business deemed too successful and if they deem they need a share of your profits. Etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> so, just like in the gold rush of 1849, those getting rich are those selling equipment to the miners.

<comment><USER9> It's more like "there ARE people getting rich selling equipment". There are plenty of miners getting rich.

<comment><USER10> This isn't manufacturing money out of nothing. This isn't generating physical materials with tangible value.

The only money being generated here is simply being vacuumed out of the pockets of investors losing money on trades or exchanges.

In that sense it's not unlike online poker.

<comment><USER11> If "generating physical materials with tangible value" is your benchmark, what are your feelings about Internet companies like Google and Facebook? They make very little in terms of physical goods.

Recall that Bitcoin allows people to send money around the world in an extremely simple fashion, and at almost zero cost. Banks typically charge $15-$20 for international wire transfers _on both ends of the transaction_. I grant you that there a huge amount of speculation, but surely the ability to transmit value around the world, securely and very cheaply, is worth something?

<comment><USER10> The thing is, Google and Facebook both produce something with actual value, be it content, or databases, or user data, or people's photos with their intrinsic value. Bitcoin is literally just numbers. It's not even pieces of paper. That's why it's better compared to virtual poker chips.

Also, the transaction fees for Bitcoin are surprisingly steep, especially if you want to convert it back to cash. You'll easily pay $30 per transaction for $1000 worth of BTC just to cash out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I missing jargon or are they saying terahertz per second?

<comment><USER13> It's terahash where hash means double sha256 that is used in the bitcoin proof-of-work protocol

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So... I agree that Bitcoin has some advantages, but it's disadvantages are quite high as well.

It seems to me that all the money going into Bitcoin mining equipment, and all the power being used to run it is essentially an indirect tax on Bitcoin usage... I wonder what the total value of Bitcoin transactions in USD compared to the cost of electricity to keep the block chain up is.

The true value that Bitcoin mining provides must be some low percentage of the total Bitcoin transaction volume... or am I missing something?

<comment><USER15> It is _impossible_ for Bitcoin transactions to take place without miners. BTC miners provide cryptographic integrity, proving that transactions took place at a certain time between certain people.

Bitcoin is purely held up by the community of miners. The integrity of BTC becomes greater and greater the more trusted miners enter the system.

<comment><USER14> Couldn't this be achieved in some sort of other way? One that does not require hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and electricity? Couldn't a regular PKI message digest on the transaction list work?

I suppose there's something I'm not getting about this.

<comment><USER15> Bitcoin is a voting-based protocol. The "vote" with 51% of the computational power of the system wins.

By performing very very hard math problems with every PKI digest (ie, the "proof of work"), with a "difficulty level" such that it'd take the _entire_ BTC network approximately 10 minutes to find a solution... then it becomes extremely extremely difficult for someone to enter the BTC system and screw up the public ledger.

You see, BTC is a distributed database, cryptographically signed by the BTC miners every 10 minutes. The difficulty of _performing_ the signature is automatically adjusted to take a ridiculous amount of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What happens when all 21 million bitcoins are mined? How will transactions be archived if no one is putting in the effort to mine bitcoins?

<comment><USER17> Transaction fees are expected to replace the block reward by the time that happens.

<comment><USER13> Which is year 2140 or so

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This basically will signal an end to the typical BTC pools. At .1 BTC (~$10) per chip, it is now possible to beat a $400 AMD 7970 with just $20 worth of chips.

<comment><USER9> This doesn't change the pools at all (pools don't change if everyone uses ASIC). This does probably signal the end of GPU mining though.

<comment><USER18> Fuck bitcoin, if custom chips are that much cheaper the GPU power in cracking hashes then most key streching algorithms are worthless.

<comment><USER18> Apparently people downvote me. I don't hate bitcoin, but if the relative power is true then this is so much bigger than bitcoin.

<comment><USER15> Lol. You made a good comment, I dunno why you got downvoted.

One thing to note: key stretching is a good idea nonetheless. hashing ASICs will be millions of times slower _regardless_. They may be hundreds of times faster than a computer, and hundreds of times cheaper... but the effect doesn't get you what a good Bcrypt-difficulty 12 gets you (ie: key-stretching with ~4million hashes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What is this in current $/hr?

<comment><USER11> If my off-the-cuff calculations are right, then a little under $10/hr for the whole batch of 10,000 chips that just arrived(i.e., each chip will generate about $0.01/hr), which seems pretty low until you realize that each chip costs only about $10. Break even point is about 40 days, right? Not bad at all. Unfortunately, difficulty will probably spike, so these rates are not sustainable. And who knows what the price will do.

Unless you're a very shrewd businessman and want to do this full-time, you're far better off just buying Bitcoins if you're interested in speculating on them. Just remember that Bitcoin prices will inevitably plummet, go sky high a few months, and then re-plummet. It's just what Bitcoins do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> [http://i.imgur.com/zAMkNCV.gif](http://i.imgur.com/zAMkNCV.gif)</comment>


Optimizations in Syntax Highlighting - <AUTHOR> https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/02/08/syntax-highlighting-optimizations <comment><USER2> Shameless plug: my implementation of Sublime's syntax highlighting engine in Rust has similar optimizations and more. I'm not at my computer to benchmark on the same files but it should be >2x as fast as their "after" numbers just based on lines/second for JS-like files.

This evening I'm even trying to port it to a pure Rust regex engine that should eliminate non-Rust code and make it substantially faster.

It also implements the sublime-syntax format which is a superset of tmlanguage that allows even nicer highlighting.

[https://github.com/trishume/syntect](https://github.com/trishume/syntect)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this. Clearly the original post describes good work, but I can't help feeling the JS community is slacking off when it comes to performance.

Just eyeballing the cited numbers, they take 3939ms to handle a 1.18MB input on "a somewhat powerful desktop machine". Assuming that that means a chip running at 2GHz, we're talking about over 6300 cycles per byte!

That's quite frankly ridiculous. An improvement by at least one order of magnitude should be possible. Where's the ambition?

(Yes, there's always a trade-off with these things. But I feel _someone_ has to point this out when the OP is explicitly about getting kudos for performance work.)

<comment><USER4> I hate slowness and inefficiency too, that's why I try to make the editor as fast as possible :), but at least in this case, it is not the dynamic nature of JS to blame, but rather the nature of TM grammars. TM grammars consist of rules that have regular expressions, which need to be constantly evaluated; and in order to implement a correct TM grammar interpreter, you must evaluate them.

I've looked in the past for optimization opportunities in the C land (mostly through better caching), which yielded quite nice results [1][2]. I would love if you'd want to take a look too.

At this point, in tokenization, 90% of the time is spent in C, matching regular expressions in oniguruma. More precisely, regular expressions are executed 3,933,859 times to tokenize checker.ts -- the 1.18MB file. That is with some very good caching in node-oniguruma and it just speaks to the inefficiency of the TM grammars regex based design, more than anything else.

It is definitely possible to write faster tokenizers, especially when writing them by hand (even in JS), see for example the Monaco Editor[3] where we use the TypeScript compiler's lexer as a tokenizer.

At least in this case, inefficiencies are not caused by our runtime.

[1] [https://github.com/atom/node- oniguruma/pull/40](https://github.com/atom/node-oniguruma/pull/40)

[2] [https://github.com/atom/node- oniguruma/pull/46](https://github.com/atom/node-oniguruma/pull/46)

[3] [https://microsoft.github.io/monaco- editor/](https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/)

<comment><USER3> Do you pre-process the regular expressions into a common DFA, or does oniguruma do that for you? That would seem like the natural design for this.

It's non-trivial because TextMate grammar seem like they're just a little bit too general to be convenient. So there's definitely a trade-off. But if I wanted to really get as fast as possible, I would try to see if I can get there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I once dabbled inside vscode tokenizer code. There is a lot going but putting tokens in a buffer took me by a surprise. It was a very smart implementation.

I think it's their focus on performance and good architecture that makes vscode stand out.

Sure sublime also has great engineering behind it, but being able to contribute and look under the hood of tools, we developers use is very exciting. It feels like a very democratic process.

I remember filing the mini-map bug in Monaco, I'm so glad to see they are working on implementing it in a performant way even though it will require large rewrites of their editor rendering code.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does VS Code support highlighting for "non-regexp" cases. For example: in code i can reference a Class by it's name, but in the same time if could be a function - how you can distinct one from another by just regexp when you don't use capitalization marker for class names? Some times Class is an Object in some languages (Scala, Kotlin...), how this case is handled?

</comment><comment><USER7> > there is no feasible way to interpret TextMate grammars in the browser even > today

That doesn't sound right... but then again I don't know enough about TextMate grammars to argue.

<comment><USER4> \- all the regular expressions in TM grammars are based on oniguruma, a regular expression library written in C.

\- the only way to interpret the grammars and get anywhere near original fidelity is to use the exact same regular expression library (with its custom syntax constructs) in VSCode, our runtime is node.js and we can use a node native module that exposes the library to JavaScript

\- in the Monaco Editor, we are constrained to a browser environment where we cannot do anything similar

\- we have experimented with Emscripten to compile the C library to asm.js, but performance was very poor even in Firefox (10x slower) and extremely poor in Chrome (100x slower).

\- we can revisit this once WebAssembly gets traction in the major browsers, but we will still need to consider the browser matrix we support. i.e. if we support IE11 and only Edge will add WebAssembly support, what will the experience be in IE11, etc.

<comment><USER8> Sorry if I'm missing something, but why do you care about supporting other browsers? Isn't VSCode built on Electron which is a self contained server/browser environment?

<comment><USER9> Monaco is a standalone component which also works in the browser: [https://microsoft.github.io/monaco- editor/](https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/)

The article says "It was shipped in the form of the Monaco Editor in various Microsoft projects, including Internet Explorer's F12 tools"; presumably some of those projects also embed it into webpages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So VSCode is great in many ways, and the article might be interesting. But I would never call it fast. It's still really really slow. Just see this comparision: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDRBxtEUOFE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDRBxtEUOFE)

<comment><USER4> When we started the project, we did write tokenizers by hand. I mention that in the blog post. You can write some very fast tokenizers by hand, even in JavaScript. Of course they won't be as fast as hand written tokenizers in C, but you'd be surprised how well the code of a hand written tokenizer in JavaScript can be optimized by a JS engine, at least I was :). IR Hydra 2 is a great tool to visualise v8's IR representation of JS code [1]. It is a shame it is not built into the Chrome Dev Tools.

In the end, we simply could not write tokenizers for all languages by hand. And our users wanted to take their themes with them when switching to VS Code. That's why we added support for TM grammars and TM themes, and in hindsight I still consider it to be a very smart decision.

[1] [http://mrale.ph/irhydra/2/](http://mrale.ph/irhydra/2/)

<comment><USER11> What about a parser generator that takes something like a BNF-type language and generates optimal JS/TS code on the fly, similar to Lex/Yacc? (The BNF would be portable, the generated code would be a cache.)

I can see that reusing .tmLanguage files saves a lot of work, but that format is atrocious -- hard to both read and write. (I once wrote a parser/highlighter for it in ObjC, it was not a lot of fun.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So with the comparisons at the end of the article, does this mean that there were a lot of edge cases where the theming wasn't being correctly applied prior to 1.9? Were there themes that incorporated less stylistic choices because of the limitations?

<comment><USER4> Yes, those comparisons at the end show differences in rendering caused by the "approximations" used prior to VS Code 1.9. They were all caused by the difference between the ranking rules of CSS selectors and the ranking rules of TM scope selectors

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Those who switched from ST to VS Code, did you stick with VS Code? Do you have any advice for making the transition easier - key bindings, packages etc.?

<comment><USER14> I stuck with VS Code. To be honest, I don't think it's even in the same league as ST or Atom due to the amount of integrated tooling. The integrated debugger, git, and task runner management is a god send. VS Code is also the only editor I've used where javascript type lookups and auto completion/code doc parsing Just Works out of the box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great article, specially regarding the type of optimisations that were applied.

</comment><comment><USER16> _(Syntax highlighting) is the one feature that turns a text editor into a code editor._

Syntax highlighting is eye candy. Automatic indentation is what turns a text editor into a code editor.

<comment><USER17> Automatic indentation saves a few keystrokes. A languages service (go to definition, etc) is what turns a text editor into a code editor!

<comment><USER18> A language service is for people with poor memory. A terminal window is what turns a text editor into a code editor.

<comment><USER19> I need OOP navigator to use C++/Java/C#

<comment><USER20> I think support for butterflies is what turns a text editor into a code editor (xkcd#378) XD</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


F.D.A. Agrees to New Trials for Ecstasy as Relief for PTSD Patients (Nov 2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/us/ptsd-mdma-ecstasy.html <comment><AUTHOR> This happened yesterday (Tuesday 29th November 2016) afternoon. There was a meeting with the FDA where they would give a verdict, and they gave approval during that meeting.

Information explaining the significance from fruitsforhire

> Okay so here's a little background information on what this specifically > means. It has taken 30 years to get to this point. MAPS has been around > since 1986 with the main purpose of getting MDMA through the legal > prescription system in the United States. Some extremely talented and > dedicated individuals have made it their life goals to study MDMA (and other > drugs as well) and to get them through the absurd regulatory hurdles Western > nations have enacted since the War on Drugs.

> Phase 1 trials FDA trials for MDMA were greenlit in 1992, and Phase 1 trials > are simply trials to assess safety in a small handful of individuals. It's > just the step after animal safety trails. Preparation for Phase 2 and then > subsequently Phase 2 is what has been going on for a decade or so which is > small-scale human trials meant to start studying the actual effectiveness of > the drug. It's all extremely expensive and complicated work building the > foundation for Phase 3 trials which are absolutely massive in scale compared > to anything else before at roughly 10 times as many people involved as Phase > 2. It is one of the toughest and most rigorous prescription drug regulatory > systems in the world. Phase 3 is going to take many years, and it'll cost > tens of millions of dollars.

> Most drugs never even make it to Phase 2, but on top of that most never make > it through Phase 3 either. This will be the last crucial many years and many > millions of dollars that stand in the way of MDMA becoming a legal > prescription medication.

> If you believe in this cause and have money to spare then I highly recommend > donating. Phase 3 trials cost an immense amount of money to fund. MAPS is a > non-profit organization, and the only one of its kind in the world.

> More information can be found at maps.org and mdmaptsd.org</comment>


Show HN: Video Face Recognition Software - <AUTHOR> http://roundbit.tech/vfr <comment><AUTHOR> A software I developed to recognize faces on video files.

You feed it face images and it will scan through videos searching for them. When it recognizes a face, the information can be appended to the filename or exported to an external report file.

</comment><comment><USER2> Can this be done near real time? or is it always going to be a few minutes / hours behind because it takes time to process from a video file?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean processing from a live camera ? It is possible, but it does not have that feature at the moment. I chose to focus on files because for live video there seems to be other apps already (although they are not free).... Perhaps will be implemented in a future update though</comment></comment>


Is NordVPN Safe to Use? - <AUTHOR> If no, what commercial VPN could you recommend for usage? ExpressVPN kinda looked promising i guess. <comment><USER2> I've heard most (if not all) VPNs log information in order to maintain a profit, even when they say otherwise, and for this reason it's safer to not use a VPN. Not sure if that's true or not but it's definitely something to keep in mind.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you ask this, you have to first model your risk tolerance, on some levels no electronic chip is safe to use!</comment>


Dissident.ai - <AUTHOR> https://www.dissident.ai <comment><USER2> Yet another landing page that doesn't actually tell me what the company does!

I get a "home for my digital belongings" \- so this is a DropBox clone?

"A new way to explore, filter and research content inside Social Media." \- oh, sorry, it's TweetDeck?

"Discover hidden gems, explore music films, books and art" \- nope, my bad, it's a curated archive.org?

There's some vague screenshots. But nothing meaningful. I suppose I should be grateful that there's not a full screen video with a ukulele playing...

More of my ranting at [https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/11/yes-but-what-does- your-star...](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/11/yes-but-what-does-your-startup- do/)

(I especially like the irony of saying they don't like tracking, but the only sign-up options are Google or Facebook.)

<comment><USER3> Yep, no email signup and Google Analytics. Funky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It took quite a bit of digging but I think I've finally figured out what the heck this thing actually _is_.

* Desktop is a web-based file manager that ties into a bunch of proprietary cloud storage systems

* Dashboard is some sort of cross-network social media reader

* Library is a catalog of public-domain content, for some reason

What any of this has to do with the high-minded visioneering slogans and impenetrable marketing text I have no idea.

Of the three, only Dashboard sounds like it might have any value at all; unfortunately the very first thing it does on signup is:

(if you sign in via facebook) demand access to "your public profile, photos, videos, likes and email address".

(if you sign in via google) demand total access to Google Drive and to "View and manage your YouTube activity, including posting public comments".

(if you try to sign in via email) this appears to be impossible; there's a "forgotten password" link but no apparent way to actually create a new account.

This doesn't sit very well with the whole "respectful of your time, attention and personal data" thing.

<comment><USER4> I should follow up to say: I do recognize that if the service wants to be able to display content from your facebook feed or youtube channel, certainly it needs to ask for access to that content. I don't object to that; I object to it asking for far more access than it needs, before you're even able to see the product you're granting access to, after making such a big deal about "putting the user back in control" of their data.

I went ahead and sucked it up and signed up via facebook. (There's a "free invitation code" on Dissident's facebook page, if you're curious.) It's... eh. For facebook content it only has the ability to show "Pages", not people -- I believe this is a facebook-imposed limitation, but it makes Dashboard fairly useless for that site at least. You can import RSS feeds and read them inside this app, which works reasonably well. There are dozen or so other services that can be imported as sources (mostly the usual suspects: youtube, vimeo, medium, flickr, etc). In all cases that I tried, the app asks to be granted maximal permission, whether that's reasonable or not. That's about it. The UI feels a little old-school -- it's all nested folders and tiny type -- but isn't terrible.

I dunno. Maybe if I hadn't been so turned off by the awful marketing copy I'd be feeling more charitable about the app itself -- it looks like a not- terrible feed reader, I suppose -- but as it stands I don't see anything here that seems worth paying money for, and I don't see anything that has _anything_ to do with the manifestos and sloganeering.

<comment><USER5> > I object to it asking for far more access than it needs, before you're even > able to see the product you're granting access to.

If after trying it, you don't like it and revoke its access, it's fine. The most meaningful data was probably siphoned already.

<comment><USER4> > The most meaningful data was probably siphoned already

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly the part I object to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like they're bundling MAME[[1] that's under GPL, but I can't find the sources anywhere. Seems to include the games too, which defiantly isn't legal.

[1][https://blog.dissident.ai/weve-just-added-tons-of- emulated-a...](https://blog.dissident.ai/weve-just-added-tons-of-emulated- arcade-games-in-library/)

<comment><USER7> This games are via archive.org, it's not unlicensed in that regard I should think?

[https://archive.org/details/internetarcade](https://archive.org/details/internetarcade)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hello, Thanks for all the feedback. I am one of the founders of Dissident and happy to answer any questions.

We became frustrated that many storage don't allow us to fully enjoy our content (I can't listen to my FLAC music on my Google Drive, even if I have 1To of storage there, I can't read my epubs on dropbox,...) so we decided to create our own desktop and use the most popular web viewers. We added the ability to do cross search and also move files from one service to another. For some services that allow it like Put.io we even convert torrents into files.

The idea is to have the same interface and features, no matter if you are on Box, Hubic or your Owncloud server. You can pin important folders and we let you know when they have been updated. We allow cross service search and cloud to cloud between storage, one of our most popular feature. We also added the ability to browse Slack, Facebook, Instagram, Smugmug or Pocket as a "file system".

We decided to create Dashboard to browse social media (without the noise) and every Friday we work on Library to offer a free access to public domain content.

We want to create a nice environment to access our content. We don't want to do advertising so we decided to provide the product for a subscription.

Few remarks: We have changed our website copy to be less "marketing" We are bringing back our email login (we agree with everything that was said here, it will be available shortly)

Regarding oAuth permission, we have always focus on effortless sign up (you login and boom you have everything setup) and, of course, we don't store/sell any user data. But we understand what was said here.

We are looking to ask for less permission for login even if means ask more permission later for specific services (youtube, google drive)

We are still a work in progress and would love to have more feedback on the product. Here is an invite code: DISSIDENT_HNEWS

</comment><comment><USER9> "Take back control of your content and unlock your sources of inspiration for just 5€/ Month."

Sounds like a tagline for a "Silicon Valley" episode.

</comment><comment><USER10> I hope this project crashes and burns, honestly. "Regain your life" by giving literally all your data to us, for 5€/month.

</comment><comment><USER11> Confused about this. How are you making money? Why do I need a central server? Is part of your unique (presumably commercial) offering that we can't run servers ourselves? It appears quite closed with regards to tech details (e.g. how you are fetching things for people). I am probably not going to sign up with this limited information, sorry.

</comment><comment><USER12> So... it gives UI access to a bunch services all in one place? Quite underwhelning given the name.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Reclaim access to your own content..." by putting it on this closed centralized proprietary server?

No.

<comment><USER14> ... that requires a sign up with either Google or Facebook. PERFECT!

<comment><USER8> [https://twitter.com/wearedissident/status/982257661935693824](https://twitter.com/wearedissident/status/982257661935693824)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A more product appropriate name might have been AggregatingTheStatusQuo.ai.

I see no pathway to becoming a dissident here.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a very ambitious project.

Aggregators like this can't control their own destiny until they become their own content platform. While navigating the long road to become a platform, they're at the mercy of changing API policies and rate limits of the different content platforms.

Instagram can decide at anytime to shut off access or remove an endpoint which will greatly reduce the user's experience.

It's also tough to build a unified AI to engage with so many different types of content. Most people will be familiar with the the UIs of the respective platforms which are already tuned toward content consumption. I do grant those UIs may not have the user's best interests in mind as they focus on hitting engagement and retention KPIs.

It is an interesting one though, almost an "adblock for over-optimized UIs".

They may be able to find something that works for a niche group of creatives if they can manage the challenges above.

<comment><USER17> > This is a very ambitious project.

I'm quite certain the word you're looking for "Ambiguous". The entire landing page was confusion personified, with loads of promises and assembly-language- like marketing that only a few exceptional people with limitless amount of time will dedicate themselves to be trapped by

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are probably good ideas but I really do not like the the name. To me this is neither dissident nor AI related.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have a feeling that if this product is going to become successful, it will find some as-yet-unthought-of use case which will take off with some subset.

If that is right (and who knows), then you would be better off giving it a generic name "Allinonespot.ai" or "Aggregate.ai".

Calling it dissident is okay, except that now I think the use case is somehow making some kind of statement against something. And that is confusing. Why am I dissenting? Am I dissenting against HBO? I like HBO. I have nothing against Game of Thrones or Silicon Valley. What am I taking control of?

</comment><comment><USER20> "Tech is the center of our modern lives. But it's broken."

on a page that doesn't properly render without running Javascript from 2 third-party services. There are also multiple third party javascript includes explicitly for surveillance/metrics. I agree that the system is broken but I don't trust these clowns to help

</comment><comment><USER21> This is beautiful and I love the nostalgic UI design, but I really don't see any reason to use it.

</comment><comment><USER22> "it's time to take back control" they say. by asking users to give dissident.ai access to Facebook for "your public profile, photos, videos, likes and email address" and to Google for "View and manage your YouTube activity, including posting public comments" it seems the only ones taking back control are dissident.ai. another company helping Facebook and Google to rule the world and control us.

</comment><comment><USER23> What pissed me off is when you try to login using your google account, it asks permissions to access and manage files in your Google Drive.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I forgot to add that I received am email with this info from the creators of Jolicloud. Seemed like more of the same thing but I wanted to see HN's take on it (the lack of email signup was a red flag for me).</comment>


Thoughts on what the X-37B was doing in space? - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/air-force-x-37b-space-plane-landing-soon-101130.html

<comment><USER2> While the overarching mission/concept has disturbing aspects, in all honestly it probably wasn't doing much of anything during its maiden voyage.

The biggest events were the changes in orbit, and that was probably mission control testing positioning thrusters and associated systems to prove the craft is capable of dropping in and out of a geostationary orbit and repositioning itself into different orbit patterns with ease + accuracy (and probably with little human involvement).

Given the craft hasn't passed a test of re-entry nor an automated landing from space, it seems unlikely the US Air force would have loaded sensitive + expensive monitoring equipment onboard, nuclear weapons or any of the other conspiracies - on this initial trip anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Air Force doesn't suffer from the same kind of planning paralysis as NASA, so I'm assuming they actually carried out some kind of mission. It's not clear to me what this thing is really good for, though. The payload bay is about the same size and shape as a coffin - far too small for the kind of sensors you find on spy satellites.

They might have some scheme cooked up for refueling spy sats, which would extend the service life and give them the ability to shift orbits more freely. Still... even then, would it really be cheaper than lofting a new one?

In theory they could fit a guy in there, barely. That might make some sense for repairs. Assuming you could find a good mechanic without a trace of claustrophobia. And assuming the flight profile didn't flatten him. Maybe some kind of teleoperated repair bot?

<comment><USER4> You could fold quite a large collapsing antenna into that sort of space, and reconfigurable orbits would make very high resolution SAR scans available virtually on demand. I can see that being _extremely_ useful.

<comment><USER5> SAR is indeed a great use for this kind of platform, but the equipment needed to do really high-quality work might be too bulky for this platform. The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission equipment (<http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/images/photos/srtm_22_lo.jpg>) certainly wouldn't have fitted, given the description of the available space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since it's maiden voyage I would guess not much other than a prolonged check- out, maybe some surveillance and/or mapping.

As for the overall mission mandate may directly or indirectly be related to prompt global strike, a kinetic kill system (either for satellites or for ground targets), or electronic warfare.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike>

<http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-06/rods-god>

<comment><USER3> Neither of those strike applications make much sense for this platform. If you were going to put bombs in space you're only wasting payload capacity by including a ship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A friend of a friend who works for the government apparently was recently doing some work on high-speed interactions between orbiting bodies. Orbiting bodies like satellites and space planes? Time will tell...</comment>


Ask HN: What would you do if you own a large ISP - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys,
I'm new around here.
I always read HN but never actually posted anything.
Today I got the news that my dad's company just bought my country's largest ISP. Obviously, I'm not from the US and my country considered "third-world country".
He said something like "Hey, we just bought redacted ISP, what can we do now?"
They have plans like creating a exclusive TV channel but I believe the possibilities are endless.
What would you do if your dad owns the largest ISP in your country. (Doesn't matter where are you from but what would you do) Please, don't think I'm here to show off but to listen from very smart and bright entrepreneurs like all of you.
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> It's a hard question to ask without an understanding of the economics of the country you live in.

Believe it or not I developed a new product strategy for an Australian telco and ISP that ended up getting shelved after a change of management.

If you want to have a chat about this kind of stuff feel free to drop me a line.

</comment><comment><USER3> For now focus on expanding the customer base, first with new customers and later with customers from the competence, investing on hard assets and infraestructure, and limit the number of products and services that are being offered.

Later, when the growth rates start to drop and the average customer internet speed is high enough, look to create competitive advantages thru differentiation in order to increase the perceived value of the service for the customer, so the competence won't steal them from you. For example, offering new services and products related to internet access, like a nation- wide movies and tv streaming service for an additional rate.

Don't forget that the greatest part of the potential value of the business won't come out from the internet access per-se, but rather out of what you can deliver and sell with it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Move into mobile telephony. Customers get cheaper calls if they go over wifi, use a standard mobile connection if not. If you control the access points in homes and businesses, you can allow handsets of unrelated customers to access them.

Whether this makes sense obviously depends on whether you do control your customers' wifi routers and whether you can get the handsets cheap enough for your market.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ι just add my comment here with the hope that your question gets with some luck to the front page.

It is a very interesting question but it is really so uncommon that somebody (even)here owns an ISP company that people may think that you could be just asking that for fun.

Good luck

<comment><USER6> +1! I also believe the potential is huge but I'm having a hard time on actually thinking _WHAT_ would I do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My question is why would your dad's company purchase an ISP without any specific strategic plan in place!?</comment>


EPO and UKIPO Refuse AI-Invented Patent Applications - <AUTHOR> https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2020/01/07/epo-ukipo-refuse-ai-invented-patent-applications/id=117648/ <comment><USER3> "DABUS was developed by Dr. Stephen Thaler, who is named as the applicant on the patent documents."

Problem is AI cannot be the inventor, as inventor has to be natural person. This is no different than corporation cannot be the inventor. [1]

[1] [https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/18455/can-a- corp...](https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/18455/can-a-corporation- be-listed-as-an-inventor)

<comment><USER4> This is going to be a huge problem for AI-generated art, music, and other media, because currently these are all public domain by default, for the same reason.

<comment><USER5> I think this would be an excellent outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most software patents written by _people_ should be refused -- I'd say 95% of them are "obvious to someone skilled in the art". Given a particular problem/use-case, a panel of software engineers would easily come with the equivalent design. (As far as I'm concerned, I shouldn't have been granted the patents in my name though companies I've worked for.) There is probably more of a chance of out-of-box thinking w/AI design in many domains - the AI is simply used as a tool by the a person. Anyway, seems like the patent system is like many other things now, just an engine for the big players.

</comment><comment><USER7> Presumably the Artificial Inventor Project is applying for patents under the name of the AI in part to try to provoke the system into responding?

I don't really see how an invention created by an AI that you developed is any different from an invention that you developed. There's no-one else with any claim to it. Inventions are achieved with the assistance of all sorts of tools - simulations, topographical optimisation, CAD software - but this doesn't mean they're suddenly not created by the person running the tool.

<comment><USER8> This is a good point, and there's an analogy in drug discovery. Lead compounds are generated using high-throughput screening of vast libraries of molecules. The basic skeleton of the drug is picked by a heavily-automated, expensive process, and then tweaked by humans or more HTPS before being patented.

There's tons of human labor to validate the drugs, and it's extremely expensive - hence the patent guards the _time and money involved,_ not the "idea."

Drug companies are also starting to use AI systems for retrosynthesis - <USER2> sequence of reactions to take you from common precursors to the desired compound. My understanding is that these systems have gotten _very good,_ to the point where clicking "Run" is most of the effort.

Pharma companies use synthesis patents to further hamstring competitors by cutting off viable routes to potential competitor drugs in the same class, or keeping their products from being manufactured once patent expires.

If they're allowed to file _synthesis_ patents based on simply running the AI retrosynthesis algorithm, it'll do really bad things to the industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> More technical (and sceptical) discussion:

[http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/12/epo-refuses-ai- inventor...](http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/12/epo-refuses-ai-inventor- applications-in.html)

[http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-first-ai- inventor-i...](http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-first-ai-inventor- ipkat-searches.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Just don't tell them an AI invented it, right?

<comment><USER11> Yes. Same as the monkey selfie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My first thought on reading this article is that it would encourage using Trade Secret law to protect these inventive creations rather than Patent law. One intended effect of patent law is that the inventions would become free to use by anyone after the patent expires. Trade secrets can go on forever, e.g. the formula for Coca Cola.

</comment><comment><USER13> Somewhat related, I formed Delaware LLC that was to be AI-managed. Delaware would not process filings e-signed by AI and required the filings be signed by a natural person. This was easily solved by AI contracting with an attorney to act as the authorized signor for Delaware filings.

<comment><USER14> Managed, like a fund? or...?

<comment><USER13> Managed as in performed/executed in accordance with the votes of the owners.

Take a future where there are self-driving cars. You and a few friends/family want to invest in one that will be dedicated to ride for hire services. The AI could manage the entire business based on the votes of the owners, from contracting with attorneys for legal documents/representation, purchasing the vehicle, acquiring the insurance, authorizing vehicle servicing, contracting with a CPA to file taxes, filing the State Annual Report (or contracting to file the State Annual Report), etc...

Why pay wages/salary to an actual full-time manager when the typical management duties could be entirely performed by AI in many types automated/passive businesses?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> An unexpected resolution to the problem of software patents. ..

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's also a conversation going on here: [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6620646...](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6620646387489083393/) whether this is the good reason for it.

One opinion is that if a new discovery is made via automation (e.g. cognitive automation) it lack an inventive step.

And if generating new patents is the current state of art, things that were patentable before should no longer be patentable.

</comment><comment><USER16> Has anyone got an example of an AI invention?

<comment><USER17> There is none as the "I" in "AI" is a fallacy.

"AI" is like blockchain, mostly useless technology that wastes huge amount of resources where there's almost always better and way simpler solutions except in very marginal use cases.

<comment><USER18> That is entirely a matter of definitions of intelligence. If it's as in Strong AI, then we're nowhere near yet. But if it's as in limited scope better than humans, then we're very good.

Let's put the definition aside for a moment. Lets say we have a black box that doctors can put images into, and it will tell if there are areas that look like it might be cancer. Is that AI? Is it an AI if you can teach it what cancer look like?

<comment><USER19> It's not AI, it's a dynamic programming algorithm.

<comment><USER18> Dynamic programming algorithm is a well defined and very specific term. This is not dynamic programming in any form.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some companies are filing AI generated patents just to function as smoke and mirrors for the Chinese competition.

Good luck with deciphering the baffling gibberish in these patents when your trying to implement it as a recipe.

Obviously this only works by not immediately start dumping a tenfold of your normal number of filings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are there any examples you are aware of and are able to share?

<comment><USER20> No If I mention a name or supply a link the whole strategy is obviously wrecked.

I do advice every company with a significant patent portfolio to start training a GPT-2 on text and pictures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wtf? Are you saying that I can't use tools to make inventions?

</comment><comment><USER22> This all becoming a bit too complicated... why not to just cancel the patent system and that's it?

:-)

(humor people, humor)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, maybe not humour in the end.

If we can't distinguish between machine and human-generated ideas how does it affect the patent system?

<comment><USER22> Yeah, the joke did have some insight to it. I'm a mathematician, where theorems cannot be patented. It makes things so much easier in case we'll start proving (some simple) theorems using computers in the near future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't mathematicians earn million-dollar rewards for their theorem - proving? :-)

<comment><USER22> Though I'm a mathematician I still think my odds are bigger winning the lottery than proving one of those million-dollar millennium problems :p</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Data storage question - <AUTHOR>

How would you store user-submitted tabular data if you didn't know the column data types of the submitted data prior to it being uploaded?
Note: The data must be able to be queried.
One idea is to convert each cell in the table of data into a row in a database that holds the value, data type, and position of the cell in the uploaded table.
Any other thoughts? <comment><USER2> I used to work at blist (now called Socrata) where we had to solve this exact problem.

You could use a schema-less database - either a document store like CouchDB, or a schema-less table/column store like Cassandra or Tokyo Tyrant.

Or you could use a standard RDBMS and generate new tables on the fly. (This is what blist did when I worked there; I think they may have a different storage model now.) Or implement a column store or tuple store as a layer on top of the RDBMS, like Infobase:

<http://openlibrary.org/about/tech>

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard that the "create tables on the fly" route is bad practice for reasons of _optimization_ , though, I have to admit I'm not sure what those reasons are in practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Read in the file, then issue the appropriate CREATE TABLE commands through your database connection to dynamically create the appropriate columns. Keep a table with metadata on the tables you've created (you really only need the table names, you can issue a DESCRIBE to get everything else, but there may be a bunch of other metadata you'd like to store, like the original file name & format, date uploaded, etc.) Query as normal.

I've been down the row-per-cell route before. It seems to be one of those ideas that everyone comes up with, sounds really clever at first, and is the wrong solution in 99% of cases. Problem is that it's really hard to get efficient querying - almost every query requires a full table scan.

</comment><comment><USER4> Windows Azure Table Storage supports schema-less data. You can give it any sort of entity and store them in something similar to a table but without schema restrictions. I use it for one of my projects and love it.

<http://www.microsoft.com/azure>

edit - Thought I would also point out you can whatever language you like to use it. You use a REST API to perform all your queries.

</comment><comment><USER5> This sounds perfect for a native XML "database". Check out e.g., MarkLogic Server. That's what we built <http://markmail.org/> on top of.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all of the great comments. I'll need to do a little reading to get up to speed on these ideas.

</comment><comment><USER6> You could use DB2 Express-C (which is free); you can then store the data as XML and query it at will.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the avg age of your startup's employee - <AUTHOR>

Ours 39.5... (Cognitive Networks) <comment><USER2> 25 (Reliable Reef)</comment>


Towards Ethical Hacking - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/towards-ethical.php

<comment><USER2> I think it's good, at a basic level, to refuse to do things that shock your morality, even just a little bit. I was once told our company was going to be pitching to do work for one of those companies that sneak charges onto your credit card and then claim that you asked for it. I said, "You'll be doing that project without me." It's a risk, that you might be considered to be not a team player, but I think it makes you feel better in the long run.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree, and kudos to you for saying no. When I was at Microsoft, I refused to work on things related to Digital Rights Management, which I find abhorrent. Of course everybody has to make their own decisions about just where the line is (some people would say I had already crossed over just by working for Microsoft) but in the end you have to live with yourself so don't do things that compromise your integrity, however you see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice article. Reminded me of Norbert Wieners "God & Golem", where he uses the term "gadget worshipers" for people thinking, that "everything that can be done (and makes money) should be done"

Though sometimes the decision may be difficult "One mans poison is another mans medicine" can become a problem. If I write a game many people may like it and it may help them to relax from work and just have a good time once in a while. Another person may become addicted to it.

You can't act always to Kants rule, that everything you do should be able to become a universal law, since some things may be of great help to many people and still destroy others...

<comment><AUTHOR> You bring up a great point -- acceptable losses.

This gets into utilitarianism, what makes people better overall? It's the next logical step in the discussion. I didn't have time to go there this morning. Maybe I can follow up with it in a future article.

<comment><USER5> I guess at least while people are picking Superberries, they don't kill anyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. It is much better. Better to simply disable them and leave them alive and breathing than killing them. Much cleaner -- not only does it remove them from productivity, it also forces society to drag them along. It's like those weapons that leave folks alive but just blinded or disabled -- they are much more humane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not about what I thought it would be about, but it's still good.</comment>


Moving to Python 3 - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/426906/9707a799b4d38e79/

<comment><USER2> There is _fundamental_ a difference between Unicode and UTF-8/16/32. Unicode says nothing at all about how strings should be stored in memory. It is just a set of symbols and code-points. On the other hand, UTF-8/16/32 are implementations of Unicode. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Mapping_and_encodings> for others.

Statements like "first 256 code points in Unicode map to Latin-1" make little sense. They are true if you s/Unicode/UTF-8/g. However, they are not true for other encodings such as ones that use 2 or 4 bytes per character. There 'abcd' is not 4 bytes, but 8 or 16.

<comment><USER3> > _Statements like "first 256 code points in Unicode map to Latin-1" make > little sense._

That's not true. Latin-1 is both a character set _and_ an encoding, so "the first 256 Unicode code points map to the corresponding Latin-1 characters" is a reasonable statement.

You can also say "the first 128 Unicode code points, when encoded in UTF-8, are equal to the corresponding Latin-1 encoding".

<comment><USER2> My point is that in Python land it is silly to call u"" strings, "Unicode" strings. Unicode strings are strings in UTF-8/16/32 and a bunch of lesser-used encodings. For that matter "" could be used as a Unicode string as long as it's only ASCII. What the docs should be talking about is ASCII vs UTF-16, not ASCII/Latin-1 vs Unicode. This starts making a difference when questions like "How much memory is consumed by this string?" or "What characters can I not store in Python?" are asked. In this light, Python 3 makes a big improvement: it has immutable byte arrays and it has encoded strings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Python 3 is unarguably a better language than Python 2."

I would say that's unarguably marginally better. What provides Python 3 that I miss in Python 2? For me nothing at all. Ok, dealing with Unicode it's easier. So what? Optional type annotations, that's something I would miss.

<comment><USER5> Unarguably marginally better is still unarguably better.

Set and dict comprehensions are pretty rad. Ordered dicts are useful. The new unittest module is great.

Of course, all of these have been back-ported to 2.7, but even if they hadn't, Python 2 is still a very capable language. Don't have dict comprehensions? Well, you can build an equivalent loop without too much difficulty, and you're used to doing that.

So there's not a great value proposition when it comes to moving from Python 2 to Python 3. You're used to working around the warts, and the workarounds aren't that painful. But what about going from 3 to 2? Once you're used to range() being efficient, to dict comprehensions, to a cleaned up stdlib, and to sane Unicode handling? You won't be crippled, but I'm fairly certain you won't find it quite as pleasant.

I believe that's the measure that matters, in the long run. Would the old thing feel worse than the new thing, from the perspective of the new thing? If the answer is, to any degree, unambiguously "yes," then it only makes sense to plan on making that move.

<comment><USER6> > Well, you can build an equivalent loop without too much difficulty, and > you're used to doing that.

You can build an equivalent list or generator comprehension (just generate tuples and feed that to `dict`). It's just ugly.

<comment><USER7> I believe that was the OP's point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Two words: Django.

Ok, that's only one word, but that's my only hold-up for moving to Python3.</comment>


Clara Immerwahr: Science's Tragic and Surprisingly Modern Heroine - <AUTHOR> https://nursingclio.org/2020/06/16/clara-immerwahr-sciences-tragic-and-surprisingly-modern-heroine/ <comment><USER2> >Haber worked on many of the gases used in the front lines in World War I, from mustard gas to zyklon. Immerwahr, a lifelong pacifist, was horrified and disgusted by her husband's research, which would lead to the loss of countless lives.

Haber also invented the Haber process and on the whole probably saved an order of magnitude more lives than were lost to his inventions.

<comment><USER3> He's a fascinating tragic figure. Many of his own relatives were later killed by the Zyklon B pesticide derived from his work.

With that said, I think it's appropriate to focus on Clara's life in this discussion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Immerwahr" means "Always true" what a nice name.

<comment><USER5> Same thought. It sounds almost too good, like it's out of a fantasy book.

I wonder how her family got that name? Many family names seem to originate in professions. What did you need to do to get Immerwahr?

<comment><USER6> Judge maybe?

<comment><USER7> Actual Immerwahr here. It's a Jewish name. We all come from the same family. My understanding is that during the Napoleonic era when the German-speaking Jews had to take stable last names (rather than the patronymics), one of our enlightenment-inspired ancestors chose Immerwahr, "Always True." The closest English equivalent is Truman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A surprisingly common tragic story. The Curies were almost unique for their time in that Pierre actually allowed Marie proper credit for her work.

</comment><comment><USER9> Her grandson Daniel Immerwahr mentions her in his superb book on the empire building of the USA. She and her husband are mentioned in the chapter on the Guano Islands Act [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act).

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40121985-how-to-hide- an-...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40121985-how-to-hide-an-empire)</comment>


Reddit r/science is one of science's biggest outlets with the stats to prove it - <AUTHOR> https://massivesci.com/notes/social-media-reddit-science-community-journalism-front-page-science-communication/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad to see they mention one of the major reasons r/science is so successful... good moderation.

Through some combination of random chance and volunteer effort, that sub has a (relatively) consistent, fair, and active moderation team. Possibly it helps that the subject is not part of the usual "peak popularity" curve for subs there, where sub activity is more tied to groupthink and fads than substance.

Many good subs elsewhere on reddit have not survived long term, and many of those failures are due to bias, bad behavior, laziness, or outright corruption on the part of their moderation teams.

Reddit seems to leave good moderation to chance in the name of allowing subs the freedom to be their own communities.

</comment><comment><USER3> Read-and-edit? First time I have seen someone interpret it like that. Read it. As in I have already 'read it"</comment>


Silent Circle removes warrant canary - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/05/silent-circle-silently-snuffs-out-its-warrant-canary-but-claims-its-a-business-decision/ <comment><USER2> I work for silent circle, as a backend developer. I speak for myself, and not the company.

As far as I know (and, sure, I may not know, although if someone wanted something from the server I'm one of a few guys that could get it), we haven't received any letters. What makes me even more confident, though, is the fact that there really isn't much data to give. All we have is some ciphertexts for attachments, and messages aren't retained, even encrypted (why would they)?

We don't even log IPs or other personal information, so I'm not sure what usefulness an NSL would serve.

Anyway, this is not an official company stance, I just wanted to comment about my personal experience because I see some speculation here.

<comment><USER3> _I speak for myself, and not the company._

As soon as you said "I work for that company", you speak for them, whether you like it or not and no amount of disclaiming changes that in the mind of the reader. Additionally, you went on to explain things that only someone that works there would know, so you _are_ explicitly speaking for the company. I'd normally recommend that an employee delete such a post, perhaps explaining the error. Given that it involves an NSL, I recommend this action more strongly than I might normally. Ask yourself, "what do I and the company have to gain from such a post, other than getting to sound like an 'insider' on HN?", and then ask "what's my worst possible outcome of posting such a thing?" Weigh the two, choose a winner.

As a warning to others, one should always ask themselves if they are posting outside their wheelhouse for an ego boost, or if it truly helpful information to others and to the company. Useful advice in the general case, IMO, but especially if you're posting in reply to "my company's in the news". I generally just shut the hell up and let the PR people handle it. Especially when you're an IC or middle-manager, 'cuz odds are that you don't have the full story.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what the point of this comment is, but want to chime in to say I'm always happy when people directly connected to stories on HN take the time to shed what light they can on them. I'm kind of repelled by the instinct we have to tear those people down.

<comment><USER3> _I 'm kind of repelled by the instinct we have to tear those people down._

Sorry you took it that way. Myself, I'd hate to see our desire for gossip overrule wishing to avoid folks having a difficult conversation with their manager. Maybe not in this case, but if enough people from various companies start posting out of turn on public forums when they as individuals don't know the whole story, someone's going to wake up to a bad day. It's one thing to comment on "MSFT Announces new, cool widget thingy": "I worked on that, and what a long road we've travelled!" Quite another when the headline is "Google writes down $4 billion on stupid acquisition", and "I work Google, but I only speak for myself, and I think..." Any whiff of controversy and I'd say just stay out of it.

But it's just advice, do what you like with it, including ignore it.

<comment><USER5> Gossip is, by definition, unreliable secondhand (or greater) rumors. If he actually works there, it's firsthand and therefore not gossip.

Perhaps more people should have difficult conversations with their managers. Or perhaps his management supports, or at least actively doesn't care about, these sorts of posts? We have no idea.

Surely as an adult, he can decide that for himself, without being subject to sermonizy advice meant to take care of his own interests for him because he's deemed incapable of doing it himself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Current warrant canaries are useless, it's a one time fuse. We need new, better, recurring (i.e. monthly) warrant canaries of different types (common canaries, individual canaries for each user). I want something like this everywhere:

        Jan 2016 - we haven't received any NSL

        Feb 2016 - we haven't received any NSL concerning your account

        Mar 2016 - we haven't received any NSL

        Apr 2016 -

        Jun 2016 - we haven't received any NSL

<comment><USER7> I've always wondered if there is a side-channel that could be used instead of a warrant canary. More specifically, my understanding is that witnesses have Miranda Rights. Therefore, couldn't a company promulgate a process whereby they'll publicly solicit bids for legal counsel should they receive a NSL? If they start asking for bids, you can assume they've received a NSL. If not, then no NSL has been received.

Any lawyers in the house?

* Edited slightly for clarity.

<comment><USER8> What if you told everyone that you would probably retain a specific lawyer if you were served a warrant such as this. If your company retains that specific council and makes a post on your website I don't see how that can be misconstrued as a warrant canary.

<comment><USER9> The law says you can't disclose that you received a letter, and in this context making a post on your website would clearly be a disclosure. You would be required to simply hire the lawyer without making an announcement.

<comment><USER7> How about company Y declares they may hire law firm X if they receive a NSL and law firm X subsequently releases a press release stating that they've been hired by company Y?

<comment><USER9> It still clearly violates the spirit of the law. I guess in this case the government could argue that your attorney represents you; you're still effectively making a disclosure. I think it would be pretty much unheard of for a law firm to unilaterally announce a new client, so it's not like you could claim you didn't know it would happen, or it was out of your hands.

I just don't think it makes sense to look for a loophole here. That's not really how the legal system works, especially in these kinds of national security cases. If you make some conscious decision at some point that ends up informing people of a NSL, that's disclosure. There's no way around it. Setting up a system beforehand probably makes things worse, since you're proving that you fully understand the purpose of your actions and the spirit of the law.

<comment><USER7> Well, I guess at some level, I think NSLs violate the spirit of the law. Thus, it is worth examining the issue.

I particularly like the above structure because it separates the hiring of the firm from the disclosure of the NSL to the firm. In fact, you might choose to never actually disclose the NSL to the hired firm! Since the firm doesn't necessarily know the reason they're being engaged, they're not making a disclosure either.

I imagine an organization like the EFF could make it a policy to publicly disclose when they've been hired or terminated by a client.

I find it all very interesting...

<comment><USER10> > an organization like the EFF could make it a policy to publicly disclose > when they've been hired or terminated by a client

I've worked at EFF for a long time and I don't believe EFF could adopt such a policy as a matter of prudence -- or legal ethics. I can tell you that there are many reasons that lawyers will regard the existence of conversations, client intake, consultations, and representation relationships as confidential. In fact, they see that as an important principle of legal ethics.

You can see some discussions of the confidentiality of the fact of legal representation as a matter of legal ethics at

[https://www.google.com/#q=legal+ethics+"fact+of+representati...](https://www.google.com/#q=legal+ethics+"fact+of+representation")

Many times, EFF has to talk to clients and prospective clients about matters that, for a variety of reasons, it's not EFF's place to make public. Just as a start, it's important that people feel comfortable talking to our lawyers when they have questions about their rights in a particular situation, whether or not we end up going to court for that person, and knowing that the matter won't end up in the press or be revealed to other parties as a result of those conversations. Lawyers can also become subject to protective orders issued by courts specifically instructing them not to reveal information about a case.

Legal matters are sometimes embarrassing. Many people who've been sued, arrested, indicted, investigated, subpoenaed, or who anticipate a possibility that one of those things may happen, aren't necessarily keen to draw any further attention to the situation. Often, people involved in legal issues are quite anxious and distressed about what's happened to them. Sometimes people ask lawyers for help dealing with other people's improper disclosure of personal, private information, and naturally don't want their lawyers to draw more public attention to what's happened.

And people who are considering filing a lawsuit, giving information to a journalist, launching a new product, introducing or changing a corporate policy, or responding in some way to a government request, among other things, may have various acknowledged and alleged duties and responsibilities to other people. Announcing or implying that a particular legal case, issue, or situation exists or that a person is taking legal advice on a certain matter could have significant repercussions. It could lead to claims that someone has breached a duty of confidentiality, or it could damage personal or business relationships.

This isn't an exhaustive list of reasons that lawyers will keep confidential the _fact of representation_ or the fact that a prospective client has sought legal advice (whether or not the lawyer ends up representing that client on an ongoing basis), but hopefully it helps to illustrate that this is something that lawyers take seriously as an ethical matter.

<comment><USER7> I might go with something like this:

 _" We, corporation X, hereby declare as a matter of public record that our counsel of choice in any criminal proceeding pertaining to a NSL is the EFF. This notice constitutes prior informed consent to any advertisement featuring us as a client of the EFF should we chose to retain them."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have an honest, and probably dumb, question: how do warrant canaries actually avoid the prohibition against disclosing the receipt of a national security letter? Like, how is taking down a warrant canary legally dissimilar from just tweeting "we got an NSL"? If it semantically "means" the same thing, then why is one illegal and one legal?

<comment><USER12> I think the idea is that a warrant canary is regularly updated. And the fact that it is NOT updated would be an indicator that a warrant (or whatever) has been served. So it's the INACTION that triggers it, not an actual action (like tweeting).

<comment><USER13> I suppose for that you would need to say "We have not received a letter as of $date" and then stop updating that date. The current notion, adding a line you'd remove if you did receive one, may be still an action, if it's part of your default reporting.

But I don't believe warrant canaries "actually work" in practice.

<comment><USER14> Yes, the apparent standard practice of just saying "We haven't received a letter" and then removing it if one is received makes no sense to me. Much better to have something you regularly update, and then stop updating it. The government could nab you for deleting something, but they might have trouble forcing you to update your declaration with false information.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. Although I wonder if removing cron or similar to update the date would be the same as removing the message legally speaking. I doubt these companies would have someone go in every day and bump the date. Then again that might be a good thing to outsource.

<comment><USER14> I don't think automating it would be a good idea. I'd say update it monthly or quarterly (so it's not too burdensome) and do it entirely by hand. Then when you receive a letter, just cease to do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Warrant canaries have outlived their usefulness. Did anyone stop using Reddit when they removed theirs? Or Apple products, when they removed theirs?

<comment><USER17> I'm sure some people did. Probably the same number of people who _started_ using them because the canaries were there.

However, that doesn't mean users haven't changed their behaviour in response to warrant canaries.

It's just not a lot of people, and it isn't clear we want it to be that way either. We don't want there to be a disincentive for companies creating them.

<comment><USER18> To continue this line of thinking, the case can be made that warrant canaries could be used to flush out a subset of users from a service, among whom are those that would be considered "interesting" by intelligence agencies.

<comment><USER17> I mean... realistically, what is the point of using a service because of a canary if you didn't think about what your plan would be if the canary disappeared?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure warrant canaries are particularly useful anymore. Yes, it's nice to know when a company has received a secret order or request for cooperation. However, _any_ company that stores user information is going to receive such an order or request at some point, it's practically inevitable. Furthermore, one can never be assured that a canary is entirely reliable as a signal -- just look at the other comments with conjecture as to why a canary might be removed. Thus I would conclude that the use of a warrant canary should not be taken as conveying any useful information about a company, or not any more useful information that a mere marketing statement that they are sympathetic with user privacy concerns.

<comment><USER20> > _Furthermore, one can never be assured that a canary is entirely reliable as > a signal -- just look at the other comments with conjecture as to why a > canary might be removed._

I would treat the removal of a canary as I would a fire alarm. Sure, it's possible that it's a business decision, just like it's possible that the fire alarm is a false alarm. But I'd rather make the assumption that is most likely to protect me.

<comment><USER19> Fair point. I would make that assumption from the beginning though, regardless of whatever the service provider tells me. It's a shame though, as the warrant canary is such an ingenious legal device that I have to admire it even as I doubt its usefulness.

<comment><USER20> But if you make that assumption from the beginning, you can't use any of those services. It's like assuming that every building you enter is on fire.

<comment><USER19> You can and (probably) do use many such services, and they're all going to give up your info as soon as any governmental authority asks nicely. It's a trade-off that many of us who aren't Richard Stallman make everyday, for example to use gmail. Or even the postal service. I throw out all kinds of personal mail in my garbage, and if anyone has read it (aside from the occasional raccoon in search of rotting pizza) I would be surprised but not terribly alarmed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't imagine that it costs very much to host a warrant canary. They had one, and took it down. So arguably they've either been pressured, or have decided that it was sending the wrong message about them. "Meh, who cares?" doesn't seem very likely to me, given their history and image.

</comment><comment><USER22> _not related to any warrant for user data which we have not received._

Interesting choice of words.

</comment><comment><USER23> Bail.

We need to crash the company in order to give these guys plausible deniability when they do not cooperate. The company will die, but another will be created. Their freedom is on the line.

Abandon ship, citizens. Your Bill of Rights commands you.

</comment><comment><USER24> After the departure of Mr Callas this probably further proof of the decline in Silent Circle more than anything. Too bad...it showed promise. Probably too close DC to really affect change.

<comment><USER25> It had friggin Navy SEALs in it's advertisements. They know what we need because they were in the field and needed secure comms. Help run the business, too. All that told me is anyone concerned about Five Eyes surveillance better run.

<comment><USER26> The founder and original CEO was a SEAL.

<comment><USER25> Didn't know that. Icing on the cake of my claim. Not even me having anything against SEAL's: two in my family with one decorated. I just have to assume their loyalty will lead them to side with military or intelligence over Constitutional principles. It would be different if code was all open, jurisdiction + servers non-US, and review by mutually-suspicious parties. Then I could focus on product more than the subversion risk of people or country involved. Lacking any of these, there's residual risk.

<comment><USER27> Imagine a long hallway segmented with closed doors, where each door represents a decision made during a mission. As you continue walking down the hallway, opening doors, the morality of each decision becomes more difficult to square with your original frame of reference. Finally you encounter a door that you decide to leave shut.

That is roughly how it works, self selection. The SF groups that, to put it charitably, operate under legally ambiguous circumstances are people who know each other really well, and they only invite in those who are a known quantity. There isn't any kind of laboratory-prisoner-execution/choose-the- red-pill sort of test, the evaluation occurs continuously in the daily performance of one's duties.

SEAL teams are, relatively speaking, high profile SF - and therefor much less likely to be tasked with strictly illegal and morally objectionable missions. I have a lot more trust in someone who has SEAL team affiliation towards the end of their military service. They've walked the hall and stopped opening doors pretty early on, so they're a well measured quantity.

Also, it is my experience that veterans with combat action ribbons are far less likely to mindlessly appeal to state authority or be swayed by utilitarian justifications. Of the dozen guys I've kept in touch with, most are libertarians and a few are anarchists. I guess seeing the ugliest side of the state will flip a switch :)

<comment><USER25> Interesting points. Your view on the evaluation process matches my observations of them and their organizations. The only problem is, with that background, what happens to average one when Uncle Sam needs them to kick open another door to protect America or other SEALs? And promises that backdoor will only be used by our spooks with no damage to American or other users?

I know that some would say no. I don't know how to tell ahead of time. It's a hard, general problem that's all probabilities and personality. Yet, with them, it's even harder.

<comment><USER27> The system is designed in such a way that such a scenario doesn't happen, because once you indicate an unwillingness to open that door - you aren't expected to ever open that door (and you're unlikely to be offered the opportunity). You will just continue to operate at the level of your last door opening. This isn't unique to SF, you see this sort of continuous evaluation occur in the corporate world as well.

That is how you end up with a spectrum of SF groups, where some are tasked with difficult but clearly whitehat missions (the bulk of well known SF), illegal but debatably moral grayhat (some known SF but mostly units operating under cover designations), and finally the blackhats that rise to Hollywood level evil (basically Apocalypse Now with no paperwork). So for a late career SEAL the probabilities are pretty good for someone to land between lawful-good and neutral-good. Those are infinitely better odds than what you'd get with some random businessman.

I'd probably share your concern if the military was full of utilitarian statists, but strangely enough it is the direct opposite... well, except for flag officers - they can get a little kooky.

<comment><USER25> "This isn't unique to SF, you see this sort of continuous evaluation occur in the corporate world as well."

You're implying the Old Boy network effect doesn't exist. Whereas you discuss it in other posts. This is a concern to me even if I accept the arguments about what their views are likely to be on average walking out of the SF community. When the effect applies, they're often working for each other or previous groups as much as the current one.

<comment><USER27> > You're implying the Old Boy network effect doesn't exist.

Kind of, but not really. One is monolithic and the other is stratified in such a way that loyalty does not transfer to the superstructure. Consider the relationship between the US Navy and Red Cell - a perfect, and largely public, example of the compartmentalization and transferability of loyalty.

> ...or previous groups as much as the current one.

And since the order of potential group membership and level of potential shadiness is so well defined - that is a pro rather than con when the last group to which one was a member can be determined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I love how when a canary goes down, everyone's arguing about what it means. Of course if the company received an NSL they won't confirm it and will lie about the canary to protect their business. Why should we take their statements at face value?

The canary is gone. They have received an NSL. If we don't assume this, then what the fuck was the point of the canary in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER29> After the last missed warrant canary update, some internal decision was probably made to scrap the warrant canary altogether. Big mistake.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is kind of off topic, but afaik, warrant canaries have never been tested in court.

It seems very unlikely, given the pervasiveness of NSLs that all orgs still using canaries have never received an NSL. Has anyone collected a list of all the companies with canaries?

</comment><comment><USER31> National security letters can't compel Silent Circle to actually lie. That's key. So we are faced with two possible scenarios.

1) They're telling the truth, didn't get any warrants, and (nearly beyond belief!) decided to retire their warrant canary with a completely silly and unfounded justification, leading clueful observers to believe they're incompetent fools.

 _or_

2) They're lying on their own recognizance and are deliberately collaborating with some three-letter agency to compromise their users' privacy, contrary to the very justification for their company's existence and betraying their customers' trust.

So. Fools or traitors. Shall we flip a coin?

Either way, if you care enough about your privacy to buy a Blackphone in the first place, time to remove the battery and toss it in the bin.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've been using Silent Circle's black phone 2 for almost a year now, and it is a rather terrible experience.

They are ahead on app-specific permission denials, but they have hardly any sense of decent QA for their SilentOS.

Previous updates had power regressions where the phone would be dead from a full charge within 8 hours. Took 3 months for them to fix that. Most recent update no longer has a functioning headphone jack, and will forget all bluetooth paired devices on reboot. It also is crashing after 15 minutes of map usage as it seems to overheat.

Perhaps they may do better in the future, but I won't be staying with their product and services for much longer.

That said, it seems like the explicit update-system they run for their own software and the operating system would lessen the likelihood of an on-demand compromise from a state agent to an individual's device. Though it's not like the individual can do anything besides trust that the signed packages are authentic.

<comment><USER33> >will forget all bluetooth paired devices on reboot

OT but asking because I'm genuinely curious, if your goal is to have a "secure phone," why would you be pairing it to peripherals via Bluetooth? Or maybe am I misunderstanding "secure" in this case? The marketing speak on the the Blackphone 2 site seems more about "privacy" than security.

<comment><USER32> A smart watch for notifications. Having voice reply is useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can someone explain how a canary is implemented in software exactly?

<comment><USER35> Did you receive a National Security Letter?

No? Okay, I'll update the date. Canary date is updated.

Yes? Okay, see you in the after-life I guess. Canary update process dies.

<comment><USER34> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> >I think American authorities can tell the difference between what they do and the Stasi.

Of course they can, they're protecting their nations chosen way of life, while the Stasi were oppressing citizens who dared resist the status quo. The difference is clear.

<comment><USER37> > The difference is clear.

That's either some fine quality sarcasm, or I'm going to need some help understanding the difference between the two.

Didn't you just describe the same job from two different points of view (opressor vs opressed)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The naivety of warrant canaries shows a kind of desperate denial, especially in the wake of Snowden. Warrant canaries are more about preserving the myth of a principled legal system than a real rebellion against deep state surveillance.

I think people cling to the fiction because the alternative is too awful for them to bear. We've gone from denial to a bargaining phase, where we come up with little technicalities that might preserve our beliefs. Next will be anger, and then a polarization of how people act on their eventual acceptance.

As someone who has seriously evaluated buying a blackphone and support SC in principle, I couldn't bring myself to do it. It's not just them, they're just the most viable and so they catch all the criticism from nerds like me. I wanted a physical lens cap, hardware switches for all microphones and all radios, a removable microSD key module, an option to use the 2nd sim slot as a custom javacard crypto module, a hypervisor for android versions (which I think they have something like) a key management spec published in BAN logic, and the moon. The moon would do.

Basically, I wanted the AR-15 platform of smart phones, where the baseband processor is just the lower receiver. Said nobody who wanted to make money ever.

i am not against them, but I do think SC, wickr, whatsapp, firechat, and privacy companies like them need a narrative pivot. The tech will be valuable, but real market fit depends on popular acceptance of a state level threat model - or at least a desire to be seen as against it.

Today, it's the electronic equivalent to wearing a motorcycle club patch. Yeah, lots of military and law enforcement and regular folks are in motorcycle clubs, but it's a statement. Privacy apps today are a shibboleth with negative skewed optionality.

One of these companies could become the harley davidson of privacy platforms, (whatsapp is close) but that's the upside. An aging rebel brand torn between loyalty and relevance.

The user base for these niche, qualitative difference apps is not unlike the story of indie record labels back in the 80s. Outsider identities, alternative social networks with their own shibboleths. If anyone can figure out who ever got rich off goth, the business model for privacy tech might be within reach. For now, privacy is just an effects pedal and some shitty makeup for bland suburban consumer apps.

The warrant canary issue is a romantic misunderstanding of law, markets, and politics, and the issue is the least important thing about a company like Silent Circle.

<comment><USER39> > The warrant canary issue is a romantic misunderstanding of law, markets, and > politics, and the issue is the least important thing about a company like > Silent Circle.

Misunderstanding of...? If it disappears it's either 'a business decision and/or NSL or just a NSL. What's the misunderstanding? There are some people who are more relaxed about Trump proclaiming that he "hates protestors'. I am not. When someone says they hate protestors, I set warrant canaries on all my websites. This is a scary time and warrant canaries are literally the least we can do. Furthermore when someone removes a warrant canary then explains it as "a business decision" whatever the actual reason, they have told you the type of company they are; a company that removes warrant canaries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> "not related to any warrant for user data which we have not received"

vs

"not related to any warrant for user data, which we have not received"

<comment><USER40> Not calling it, just pointing that out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Members of the US military swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, including domestic ones. Just because your family members might be oathbreakers doesn't mean everyone in the military is.

<comment><USER42> > _Just because your family members might be oathbreakers_

Personal attacks (which attacking someone's family is) are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't do this again.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038978) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER41> Are personal defenses, like mentioning your own family similarly not allowed? Or do the rules just make that an irrefutable argument?

<comment><USER42> Not sure I understand your question, but sharing personal experience (including family experience) in good faith is more than fine.

<comment><USER41> That's okay. It was primarily a rhetorical question anyway.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>