'Hey I'm Dead' The Story Of The Very Lively Ant - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102601823 <comment><USER2> I want an ant farm that comes with bottles of ant pheremones. Then I'd use them to build a Rube Goldberg machine out of ants and make them calculate pi or something.

Edit: somebody should totally apply to YC with this idea. You could even get free publicity by getting PETA on your case.

Edit 2: Name the company "Insect Overlords".

<comment><USER3> I don't know that you can calculate pi directly. However, an easier problem to map to with ants is the Traveling Salesman. Then you can map it to all the other NP-complete problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've listened to the podcast and it was a treat. Ed was also able to isolate the chemical that ants lead behind when they're tracing back home from a food source. When he dabbed it at the entrance of an ant colony, they exploded out of the burrow.

For fun, he likes to write his name with the chemical, and the ants will follow it, tracing out his name.

<comment><USER4> _When he dabbed it at the entrance of an ant colony, they exploded out of the burrow._

Somebody tell exterminators that trick!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was covered a while back as part of a RadioLab (<http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/>) episode. Not sure if this is exactly the same audio or not (didn't have time to listen), but if you haven't already listened to every single RaidoLab show, do so...now...

What? What are you still doing reading this?!? Go listen already...they're mind blowing!

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what would happen if an entire colony suddenly "turned dead".

<comment><USER7> You don't want to know maan. Chaos.

In all seriousness I would imagine every ant carrying each other to the 'dead' pile over and over and over until the smell wore off all the ants and life returned to normal.

Could we combine the 'follow' scent with this and create some sort of elaborate Rube Goldberg ant machine?

<comment><USER2> Did we both think of this idea simultaneously? (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=544035>).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if the ants can talk and have sophisticated societies with large building underground, by they standards anyway and perhaps have universities and stuff, I mean perhaps they like us just different.</comment>


Ubuntu's Server Installer Leaked Encrypted Storage Passphrase to Its Log - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Subiquity-LVM-Pass-Bug <comment><USER2> I believe this commit is the fix:

[https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/subiquity/commit/7db70650fea...](https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/subiquity/commit/7db70650feaf513d7fb6f1ca07f2d670a0890613)

I was a little surprised by how it did so just by adding a function, so I looked briefly into how the serialization seems to work.

The FileSystemModel holds a numbers of actions, which it renders[0] into a config for the Curtin program. Part of this process consists of converting instances of various classes into dicts[1] (which presumably become JSON later on). This config is written to various files in /var/log/installer/ during setup.

The conversion into dicts is highly dynamic: it looks up all the fields of the object to be converted, and for each field looks for a "serialize_<field_name>" function on the object. If such a function is present, it is used to serialize the field. If not, the field is typically serialized using its literal value.

One such action class is DM_Crypt[2], which has a "key" field containing the secret. With this commit, the serialize_key() function will be used to write the key itself into a temporary file, and only store the location of the file into the config.

0: [https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/subiquity/blob/7db70650feaf5...](https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/subiquity/blob/7db70650feaf513d7fb6f1ca07f2d670a0890613/subiquity/models/filesystem.py#L1563)

1: [https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/subiquity/blob/7db70650feaf5...](https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/subiquity/blob/7db70650feaf513d7fb6f1ca07f2d670a0890613/subiquity/models/filesystem.py#L376)

2: [https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/subiquity/blob/7db70650feaf5...](https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/subiquity/blob/7db70650feaf513d7fb6f1ca07f2d670a0890613/subiquity/models/filesystem.py#L1179)

<comment><USER3> I'm not a crypto nerd or an os dev.

Is it _ever_ ok to let the key leave ram unencrypted? serialize_key() seems like a recipe for doom.</comment></comment>


How to get anyone's email address - <AUTHOR> http://www.growhack.com/2013/02/12/how-to-get-anyones-email-address/

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to the Google Doc he talks about: <http://bit.ly/name2email></comment>


Last Call Bus Club - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/last-call-bus-club/x/4009806

<comment><USER2> This project reminds me of the Public Light Bus in Hong Kong. It is a van with 16 seats, and they operate point to point on popular routes like Mong Kok to Sai Kung. They usually only leave when they are full or close to full. So you could have three mini buses to three areas in the Bay Area from a point in SF like SOMA.

I think if you modeled your service after the public light bus. It would be easier to start because of the lower cost to rent a van.

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

Good luck!</comment>


The Windows console is getting a new, easier to read color scheme - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/the-windows-console-is-getting-a-new-easier-to-read-color-scheme/ <comment><USER2> The original article that this is reporting is discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14918567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14918567) .</comment>


1999.io: Blogging like it's 1999 - <AUTHOR> http://1999.io/ <comment><USER2> For anyone who might not have been following Dave Winer's work, or thought streams in the recent past, the reference to blogging like it's 1999 isn't about the tech. It's primary concept is about it going back to the roots of being about openness. Instead of blogging on all the closed platforms, Dave has always advocated for blogging on your own terms. Whether from wordpress, ghost, or his new tool, it's all the same level of importance in keeping the open web alive.

A lot of his focus in this product is likely to be around the ease of editing and ease of getting your content out there. For example, it comes with support for instant articles built in. I imagine things like Amp page support will also get built in.

Re the twitter login. It's not something I personally believe in, but I know that Dave has a strong belief in Twitter having potential to be much better as a dev platform of sorts. From identity management, to message delivery. Debatable, but for another time. Just thought I could help provide some context here.

Whether this platform is better than WP, Drupal, or Ghost is all a matter of personal preference honestly. I'm not sure Dave really cares about it that way either. He just wants to keep making the open web more appealing than the closed.

Of everything in this announcement so far, the most intriguing part is his idea of interop with WP and Drupal and other platforms. One thing I can connect it with, is how his posts cross post to FB, and Medium. And he's talked about live editing a bit over there. If I recall right, Dave kind of imagines a future where the editor and the server are different. So I might edit things on my 1999.io server while the updates are all served on a WP or Drupal site. A bit more context to this. In the past Dave also wrote about wishing the Medium.com experience was more like that. Where I could use their incredible editor and publish to anywhere I wanted instead of just medium.com.

The one thing and "maybe" criticism I have of Dave's stuff, is that it is very high level/abstract at times. I've followed his work for years, and it's always taken me a while to digest any of his ideas because there's a lot of imagination that goes unsaid there. In many ways this is like the wonderful work he's done in creating RSS too. RSS alone is simply a germ of an idea which can then be used in so many creative ways. Dave's ideas are very similar. A germ of an idea that he hopes others will pick up on and push forward. New frontiers!

<comment><USER3> Thank you. That's pretty much exactly right.

<comment><USER2> Forever a fan dave! Thank you so much for teaching me about the open web from all your blog posts :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I was blogging in 1999 it involved appending each new blog entry to the top of the html page which went in the content frame.

And I don't think I'd heard of "blogging" yet.

<comment><USER5> Oh my god. Frames. The horror...

We used to append content into a single page because the alternatives were A) independent post files and a cgi script to concatenate them dynamically on each view, or B) re-create the static page from individual post files.

Since using a database was totally overkill, and static + individual posts wasted precious megabytes, and a new dynamic process per page load was way too CPU-intense, we just curated a single static page. Saves disk and CPU. When posts got past a certain number, the process'd do some juggling of content into a new archive file.

<comment><USER6> Methinks you are selling older computers short. I ran my blog (up through 2005, maybe to 2006) on a 50MHz 486 with 32?MB RAM (maybe 64MB? It's been a decade) and a gig hard drive.

That same server was also my email server.

Then again, I wrote my own blogging engine in C [1] (and still use it).

[1] [https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog](https://github.com/spc476/mod_blog)

<comment><USER5> Sure, you could do plenty with old 486's. But not hosting thousands of weblogs generating dynamic content. Not without load shooting up to 100, anyway. For a paltry few visitors, not so bad, but the more users and higher the traffic the worse it'd get.

I should add that I completely forgot (has it been that long?) about the hacks we'd use to speed up dynamic content. Since there were no competent threading models for PHP and Perl at the time, we would use either FastCGI, or mod_php or mod_perl. The former would allow you to build app servers to handle multiple requests without terminating, to speed up initialization and share/cache memory. The latter would embed a PHP or Perl interpreter in the Apache process, eliminating lots of overhead, enabling better communication, and of course allowing you to prefork multiple Apache processes and execute scripts as soon as a request came in, and optionally stay resident in memory. But that's just execution speed; if you're reading from flat-files and spitting them out one by one, that's still a very i/o-bound operation and eats up more CPU than necessary.

And ultimately, very few web hosts allowed using mod_perl or mod_php, and no weblog maintainer ever wrote FastCGI (nor were the servers configured for it). So everything was forked at run-time, leading to very slow page loads for any CGI script - unless you ran your own server, of course. It wasn't until later that LAMP development became more common and people started putting the kitchen sink into MySQL and PHP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The front page tells me nothing. Go and read this blogpost about it instead. [http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html](http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, what is it with people using front page designs like that these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well this site does not look very '99, nor does "Sign up with Twitter". Never mind.

<comment><USER3> This post, written with 1999.io, might help explain the context.

[http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html](http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html)

Dave

<comment><USER10> I read that and I _sort_ of get it but still feel that I do not _quite_ get it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://tilde.club/](http://tilde.club/) is what feels like 1999 to me, because it's just a plain old multi-user Linux box. That's it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand what is this about. Is it just a poorly implemented super- common blog engine?

<comment><USER13> It's very poorly done welcome page that's for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know if this is some type of cynical irony, but calling your software "blogging like it's 1999" whilst using a .io domain creates many feelings for me.

<comment><USER15> Should have been a .nu domain!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> sounded interesting, until I selected 'view page source' on one of the pages and saw a screen full of .js

not really very 1999ish.

<comment><USER17> 90s were all about JS, how could we forget Doc Ozone? ([http://www.ozones.com/](http://www.ozones.com/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought this was going to be bringing back the .plan file :(

</comment><comment><USER19> Disappointed. Where are the spinning 3D button gifs?

</comment><comment><USER20> Ironically, it loads as fast as a 1999 web page on dialup.

</comment><comment><USER21> What does this have to do with 1999 exactly? RSS 2.0?

</comment><comment><USER22> This confuses me. Several months ago Dave Winer wrote a post titled 'Anywhere but Medium' where he railed against closed platforms such as Medium that could disappear at a moment's notice and where the editorial voice was controlled by a company (as an individual gets to decide who gets noticed).

Now Dave Winer is launching a platform that could also disappear at a moments' notice, where the best chance of being 'noticed' is likely to be getting reposted by Dave Winer.

What's more, it seems to go against some of the Open Web principles that Winer espouses (seems to require JavaScript to view any content, doesn't seem to render anything if you have Safari Content Blockers running, requires a Twitter account even to get up and running with the thing). All in all it seems to have very little to do with 1999 or any kind of 'golden age' for the Web.

Developers already have tons of options for getting a blog up and running, from GitHub Pages to Posthaven and Ghost - what gives with this?

<comment><USER23> > Now Dave Winer is launching a platform that could also disappear at a > moments' notice,

Looks like you can set up your own server, so assuming you point your own domain at this, if 1999 goes belly-up, you can just switch to another host seamlessly:

[https://github.com/scripting/1999-project/blob/master/docs/s...](https://github.com/scripting/1999-project/blob/master/docs/setup.md)

> (seems to require JavaScript to view any content

This is true of the "About" page, but it looks like that is not true of actual blog entries. If you enable JS on the about page, they explicitly state that one of their goals is a graceful fallback when JS is not present.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> the deps for 1999 consist of request and a date/time lib ... cool.

someone else mentioned ghost, and i'm posting mainly to link that project

[https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost](https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost)

and thank the author b/c i learned a lot a/b node development from it.

</comment><comment><USER25> What? No visit counter?

</comment><comment><USER26> Just a blank gray page for me?

<comment><USER27> That's brutalist

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> @davewiner, you mention interop with other CMS software. What kinds of interop are you looking for?

</comment><comment><USER29> In 1999, I could view a simple page containing nothing but text without requiring me to download, compile and execute a massive wad of code in a huge bloated VM with a JIT. There's no need for any javascript there, try having a web page.

<comment><USER30> I don't know where you were in 1999, but where I was in 1999 IE4's DHTML was all the rage among the elite wannabe high school web developers. Early explorations into XMLHttpRequest (via this awesome ActiveX technology, wow) and DHTML Components (which perhaps unsurprisingly don't seem all that different from today's Web Components under the surface).

(I'm only remembering some of this because I recently dug up some of my actual circa 1999 website work.)

<comment><USER29> I was on the same web you were. The one where doc ozone was a bizarre novelty and well over 99.999% of text based sites had no javascript at all, much less being entirely created from javascript.

<comment><USER30> It may have been more of a novelty back then, but I remember a lot more than 0.001% of websites having some JS or some Flash (or both), and maybe not many were entirely JS (though there were some I'm trying to recall), there were plenty of websites at the time that were 100% Flash, including the websites of some major corporations.

Again, certainly from the perspective of a high school web developer at the time, my "budget" consisted of just about as much JS as a I wanted and could get my hands on, whereas I was on mostly static web hosts which constrained me from doing as much as I would have liked at the time in server side code... I know I wrote some very heavy JS sites at the time, and I know I was not alone in that constraint.

Again, sure, it was mostly for novelty, but the web where websites had basically no JS at all was several years before 1999.

<comment><USER29> _text based sites_

Just because "web designers" had shitty flash pages, doesn't mean "personal home pages" that were just test and images did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> When I go to their "about" page, this is the entirety of the content that I see:

> How is 1999.io different from other blogging platforms?

Looking at the source, I see a little more content.

"Create a test site" is almost completely blank (no text, just a drop shadow and some pull-down arrows near the top of the page). Their other links seem to work as designed.

My work blocks some domains, and is stricter about ones that it doesn't know about (like 1999.io), but I didn't have trouble with accessing any of the fargo.io css or js files.

</comment><comment><USER30> This amuses me, partly because I recently uploaded some backup archives of my actual 1999 websites and blogs to GitHub.

[http://blog.worldmaker.net/2016/06/07/portrait-web- developer...](http://blog.worldmaker.net/2016/06/07/portrait-web-developer/)

The web in 1999 was a very different place, and not a lot of it survives in even the Internet Wayback Machine (web.archive.org).

</comment><comment><USER32> Let me cross-post my comment from [http://my.1999.io/users/NKCSS/2016/06/09/0001.html](http://my.1999.io/users/NKCSS/2016/06/09/0001.html)

Nick Kusters@NKCSS1 min 0 likes Checking the editor to see how this works...

It seems to bare-bones to me.

Nick Kusters@NKCSSJust now 0 likes I expected a lot more to be honest; and no edit button seems like an omission.

</comment><comment><USER33> why do you need to be able to post to my twitter timeline?

<comment><USER3> We don't. And it doesn't.

<comment><USER34> Twitter's permissions stink. I've refused to connect with a few interesting services because there's insufficient granularity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Was the `nano` command a joke? I know it's a fine editor, but it seemed like sarcasm.

</comment><comment><USER36> How can I delete my "test" account? Since the test content stays there, even after I signed-off from the "test" this should be a mandatory feature.

</comment><comment><USER37> > You can link an MP3 or video file to a post, and 1999.io will generate > standard RSS 2.0 enclosure code in your site's RSS feed.

What? No Atom? No NewsML? That is so 1999.

</comment><comment><USER5> For this to be 1999-era _journaling_ , it would need:

      - To be written in Perl
      - To support .php, .pl, & .cgi in the user's /cgi-bin/
      - To host about 10000 accounts per physical machine
      - To use FTP, or a CGI form, for remote file management
      - To use HTML 4.01/XHTML
      - What's CSS?
      - What's Twitter?
      - Features: A user profile/bio! User comments! Subscriptions! Communities!
      - Up to 10 megabytes of FREE storage
      - Free add-ons like a hit counter and a feedback submission e-mail form
      - One free e-mail address and five free e-mail aliases
      - EXTRAS: Virtual host name and domain name support, up to 5 e-mail addresses &
        20 e-mail aliases, up to 1000* megabytes of storage, and No Advertising Banners!!!

      * actual space may vary based on how badly we over-committed storage

<comment><USER38> Don't forget Webrings!

<comment><USER39> I'm hoping to make them fashionable again! [http://webring.club/](http://webring.club/) :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > We use Twitter for identity, so creating a connection to Twitter is part of > the setup process.

That must be as far from "blogging like it's 1999" one will ever get. :-/

<comment><USER41> Beats asking for a password over HTTP and storing it as plaintext, at least.

<comment><USER42> Implying Twitter won't just hand it over to governments.

<comment><USER43> "Governments" aren't anywhere near the complete scope of risk you bring on yourself by storing passwords badly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> 1999? XML is our savior! The future of the web will be interconnected SOAP services! It's the year of the Linux desktop! Itanium will revolutionize software if someone would just make a sufficiently smart compiler!

<comment><USER45> To be fair, the neat parts of SOAP, WSDL, still is pretty neat. XML is mostly hated because named closing tags make it stupidly verbose -- a big mistake. After that it was extra complicated which made platforms like PHP have crappy implementations, I guess.

But having to rewrite lots of boilerplate code for everyone's JSON or "REST" API is annoying. There's even projects to describe JSON schemas and APIs because that's actually useful. Maybe _this_ time it'll be simple.

Transactions over SOAP (WS-AtomicTransaction I think) is also sort of neat I guess, but too complicated to be useful on the Internet?

<comment><USER46> > After that it was extra complicated which made platforms like PHP have > crappy implementations, I guess.

If the implementations are bad, the specification may be not simple enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Blogging like it's 1999

> 3\. It's written in JavaScript and runs under Node.js.

</comment><comment><USER47> If I have to enable javascript to view parts of your website at all, then it isn't anything like 1999.

<comment><USER3> To edit a blog you have to enable JavaScript because the blogging software is written in JS.

It would be possible to create a client that didn't, but that doesn't exist today.

<comment><USER48> You have to enable JavaScript (from fargo.io) to view posts (or at least to view the About page.)

<comment><USER3> The About page should NOT have required JS. That was a mistake. I'm going to fix it, but not tonight.

Here's an example of a blog post written in 1999.io.

[http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html](http://scripting.com/2016/06/08/1311.html)

You do NOT need JS on to read it, by design.

<comment><USER23> I feel like a lot of people are harshing on the fact that this is not like, I dunno, geocities or something, but I just want to express some appreciation that an effort is made for those of us who do not want to execute arbitrary code just to read a blog entry.

One note - on that page, it seems that while the content is there independent of Javascript, the navigation is loaded (from three different domains) with Javascript. I suspect there's a more graceful way to fallback there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Websites in 1999 didn't use 2MB PNG files as background images..

<comment><USER13> Do people nowadays really don't care? Or are completely oblivious to the fact that images can be huge? 2MB is still a lot of data even today. I could see it loading (on 100Mbit no less).

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Just for the record, I want to point out that it does not render well on Netscape Communicator 4.75.

[http://grab.by/QH2u](http://grab.by/QH2u)

<comment><USER51> In a way, I feel amazed that it even recognized that TLD.

<comment><USER50> A big problem for machines of this vintage is HTTPS everywhere. Google still works pretty well and will let you access it over HTTP, but the rendering of the search results is a bit janky.</comment></comment></comment>


WHY IS IT SO HARD TO FIND SOPHISTICATED INVESTORS/INVENTORS - <AUTHOR> Sup Hackers,
I own a robotics company that has build platform grade technology for scalable robotics applications, our target market is the drone industry and we're working on something really great.
We recently moved out to the LA area to get some better opportunity and as our current investor says "be in a better zip code". Currently, I am working with some of the staff of the facility we are in and all they keep trying to do is water down the business plan/model to something that reminds me of a presentation I gave when I was in high school. I keep getting told that it's too complicated and I keep trying to explain that Complexity and Complication are not the same thing. At all. The business is complex, not complicated. Just because the number of steps required to complete an action is greater than like, 3, doesn't mean there is a fucking tree in the middle of the road. Complexity is nuanced and sequenced... Complication is simple and binary there is either a disrupt or there is not a disrupt.
Gaahhhhhhhhhhh!
We are slow cooking something that has serious potential to not just create and fuel an industry but will enable developers and small business alike to form and thrive. Yet i'm told that I need to use 5 words to 'sum up' the business opportunity and that all that the investors are really investing in is our IP. Hahah what the fuck is that? Yeah we have a shit load of IP but it doesn't mean jack shit if I keep diluting my business model to what everyone else in the market is doing. I'm sure you guys all know this but doing what everyone else is doing is EASY, doing something that actually matters is HARD and NOT SIMPLE.
REAL TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES ARE SO FUCKING HARD TO BUILD GOD DAMNIT.
Okay, my rants over, I feel better.
Thanks for listening Hackers.
-CA <comment><USER2> [http://static.lulu.com/browse/product_thumbnail.php?productI...](http://static.lulu.com/browse/product_thumbnail.php?productId=5492042&resolution=320)</comment>


The Radical Humaneness of Norway's Halden Prison - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/the-radical-humaneness-of-norways-halden-prison.html

<comment><USER4> > "You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners". - <USER2> > Dostoevsky

He wasn't wrong.

I'm in the UK and we seem to straddle the fence between a European "rehabilitation first" and US "punishment first" approach which is irritating as what we get is broken.

Study after study have shown that treating prisoners humanely while genuinely trying to rehabilitate them has the best outcome on recidivism and yet because politician's fear the media spinning the "soft on crime" line we end up with ever more draconian mandatory sentences, over crowded prisons and a system on the edge of systemic collapse.

We should be better than this.

<comment><USER5> It's interesting that in the UK we abolished capital punishment even though at the time there was actually pretty strong public support for keeping it - <USER3> politicians _can_ do the "right" thing occasionally.

Indeed, UK support for capital punishment has only very recently gone under 50%:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32061822](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32061822)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yle - Finland's national broadcasting company - broadcast a TV-series named The Pohjoismaat (The Nordic Countries), where people from around the world are taken around in Nordic Countries and shown things they might consider weird. The first episode[1] was about a prison warden from the U.S. and the humane way how e.g. Finland and Norway treat their prisoners. The warden gets to visit Halden in Norway.

[1] [http://areena.yle.fi/tv/2199727](http://areena.yle.fi/tv/2199727) (the audio is partly in Finnish and Swedish, but the parts where they take the warden around also contain English; the subtitles are only available in Finnish and Swedish)

<comment><USER7> We (Finland) also do have some ideas about "let's put old people in prisons and criminals in old people's institutions!"

This way the old people could get five healthy meals served to them daily, a possibility to shower every day, have some activity arranged to them regularly, and they would get paid instead of having to pay for their care.

Criminals would get only cold food, spend almost all their time alone, have their lights switched off at 8PM, and get to shower once a week, if the warden happens to be on a good mood.

That said, I don't object to prisons being the way they are. I object to the extremely lenient sentences for violent crimes. The only crimes where punishment is harsh seem to be tax and drug offences.

Just look at the recent case where a woman was held captive for four years, was forced to give birth to three babies while being held. The sentence for perpetrators? 3 years 10 months for the main responsible, of which he will do less than two years in prison. And he's appealing for too harsh sentence. This system is slightly too humane for my taste.

<comment><USER8> Well, it's important to remember the tabloids are always seeking to evoke feelings of outrage.

Anecdotes about too-lenient senteces always make it to the headlines, but errors in the other direction don't. Without credible studies we can't know which kind of errors cause more harm.

Prison population and budget is orders of magnitude smaller than elder care so the swap is just a values-related thought experiment about elder care. (Hopefully its inventor didn't mean to invoke "pampering criminals"). Of course it's an outrage that voters and politicians underbudget it so badly, but that's what you get with this austerity and anti-welfare mindset that's gripping Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What surprises me the most about the headline is that humane treatment of prisoners is considered radical to the American public. I find this especially disconcerting given the large numbers of conservative Christians in the U.S. and their apparent desire for vengeance. It's almost as if Hebrews 13:3 and Mathew 25:35-46 are unknown to them. Someday the U.S. may see the light but I'm doubtful it will happen in my lifetime.

<comment><USER10> There are lots of people Christian in name only, not just in the US.

<comment><USER11> That's a bit of a No true Scotsman.

<comment><USER10> In a manner of speech, yes.

This all started when the person of Christ was co-opted to become the (conveniently deceased) figurehead to a bunch of institutions, his name on the one hand and his followers adopting his name but not really paying overly much attention to the principles (assuming history as recounted is accurate, likely it is not) is the root cause of that.

Imagine that your 'personal brand' of good intentions is stolen from you and re-purposed as a fig-leaf to cover anything from warrior popes to insane riches and abortion clinic attackers. In light of your comment of course 'no true Christian' would ever do anything like that.

I suspect Christ would not be pleased about a large chunk of those that lay claim to being Christian.

<comment><USER12> If you are having difficulty imagining that, just read _Small Gods_, by Terry Pratchett. Maybe also read it if you are not having difficulty.

The premise of that story, exploring the difference between _followers_ and _believers_ can be mapped directly to... well, quite a lot of religions, I'd think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some more pictures: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1277158/Halden- Priso...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1277158/Halden-Prison- Inside-Norways-posh-new-jail.html) and [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1277158/Halden- Priso...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1277158/Halden-Prison- Inside-Norways-posh-new-jail.html)

If you find this interesting, take a look on this short Michael Moore video about another prison in Norway, Bastøy: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01mTKDaKa6Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01mTKDaKa6Q)</comment>


How U.S. Carriers Fool You Into Thinking Your iPhone 4S Is Unlocked - Forbes - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/marcwebertobias/2011/12/22/how-u-s-carriers-fool-you-into-thinking-your-iphone-4s-is-unlocked/ <comment><USER2> Except, as noted in the comments, there is actually no way to get a truly unlocked iPhone in the USA (one that will work with any US provider). Even Apple's "Unlocked" full price phone will only work on GSM networks (so AT&T or T-Mobile). They will not work on Verizon or Sprint.</comment>


Paul Graham Facts - <AUTHOR> henning:
- Paul Graham is so good, Arc is Blub for him.
- Paul Graham is so good, he does just simply walk into Mordor. And then he checks into a hotel.

 Xichekolas:
 - Paul Graham is so good, the parenthesis match themselves.
- Paul Graham is so good, it's hard to defun him.
ptn:
- Paul Graham is so good, his keyboard only has three keys: 0, 1 and Return. No Backspace, because he doesn't make mistakes.
iamwil :
- Paul Graham's so smart that inside his brain is another brain.
-Paul Graham once matched /(x+x+)+y/ in logarithmic time.
rms:
- Paul Graham is a general algorithm to solve the halting program.
dfranke:
- All lambda expressions terminate in logarithmic time when evaluated in Paul Graham order.
breck:
- Paul Graham is so good, he yelled at the hackernews server and it fixed itself.

<comment><USER2> unsubscribe

</comment><comment><USER3> _Yawn._

</comment><comment><USER4> Paul Graham eats breakfast!!!

</comment><comment><USER5> Paul Graham is not Jack Bauer . . . is he?

</comment><comment><USER6> Paul Graham is a homo sapien

<comment><USER6> thanks for modding me down fanboys

<comment><USER6> you all just proved my point</comment></comment></comment>


Matrix Multiplication in Clojure vs Numpy - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8899773/matrix-multiplication-in-clojure-vs-numpy

<comment><USER2> Even if we don't consider the difference in data structures here, they use wildly different algorithms. Numpy does all the matrix calculations by outsourcing it to BLAS[1] routines that are a mix of C/Assembly, just like the answers detail.

BLAS is not only written in more efficient code, it's different algorithms altogether. BLAS can do a lot of optimizations that brings the total FLOP count to below what's usually considered required for matrix multiplication. (2m*n^2)

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprogram...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Linear_Algebra_Subprograms)

<comment><USER3> NumPy dev here.

Note that numpy may not use BLAS (this was done though as to avoid any hard dependencies on 3rd party libraries). I am not sure what you mean by putting the FLOP count below what's required. BLAS will still need O(N^3) operations for a NxN matrix multiplications, whether they are optimized or not. The biggest difference between libraries is usually in clever data organization/passing to use the cpu cache as efficiently as possible (memory throughput is usually the bottleneck until your data don't fit in RAM). You can easily gain one order of magnitude using MKL compared to a naive implementation in C (that you should never, ever do, BTW).

<comment><USER4> > BLAS will still need O(N^3) operations for a NxN matrix multiplications, > whether they are optimized or not.

Why wouldn't they use an algorithm that is better than O(N^3)?

<comment><USER5> Two reasons: first, the matrix multiply algorithms with exponents less than three do not have the same numerical stability properties, which can introduce subtle bugs into software that was developed with the expectation of a "usual" O(n^3) multiplication being used. This makes it unsuitable for use in a general-purpose library.

Second, although algorithms with smaller exponents exist, there is more to high-performance than asymptotic complexity. In particular, the constant factors associated with these "fast" algorithms are typically large enough that there is no benefit to using them for "reasonable" matrix sizes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> love NumPy, that's the whole reason why I started using python.</comment>


Linktuned collects your links and provides search by keywords - <AUTHOR> http://www.linktuned.com/

<comment><USER2> a little like Pocket with social support

<comment><AUTHOR> Pocket is one source we are supporting. Actually, we do different things, especially we support full text search.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you pay the Bitcoin Ransom in less than 5 hours? - <AUTHOR> Ransomware - If you had no choice but paying the Ransom and you don't have a bitcoin wallet yet, how would you pay it in less than 5 hours? <comment><USER2> I haven't heard of one single confirmed case where paying the Wannacrypt ransom actually resulted in the files being released. Other ransomeware, yes. Not this one.

There is no way to associate a payment in bitcoin with a particular infected computer. To do that, attackers would need to have provided unique payment addresses for each computer or unique payment amounts. The only other way would be for the crooks to use the honors system. Don't count on that.

Clone the drive in case a master key gets leaked in the future. In the mean time, start fresh and dont pay the ransom.

<comment><USER3> Mikko Hypponnen of F-Secure says they have confirmation of _some_ (1st wave) Wannacry victims getting their files back after paying ransoms (but still doesn't recommend it).

[https://twitter.com/mikko/status/864107673146490880](https://twitter.com/mikko/status/864107673146490880)

Edit: Updated to clarify some victims, and for the first variant. But he goes on to recommend against paying, especially for new variants:

[https://twitter.com/mikko/status/865122274164318208](https://twitter.com/mikko/status/865122274164318208)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The big question is how much you need to pay in ransom. Most random ransomware is in the $300 - $1000 range with certain more targeted installs getting hit for lots more [1].

Someone else already suggested Coinbase, but as you're asking here, that might not be an option for you for some reason.

Alternatively you could try and see if a Bitcoin ATM is near you:

[https://coinatmradar.com/](https://coinatmradar.com/)

or meeting someone in person to swap cash for Bitcoin

[https://localbitcoins.com/](https://localbitcoins.com/)

Lastly, double check the Ransomware ID sites:

[https://id-ransomware.malwarehunterteam.com/](https://id- ransomware.malwarehunterteam.com/)

[https://www.varonis.com/ransomware- identifier](https://www.varonis.com/ransomware-identifier)

Maybe there is a decryptor.

1 - [http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-me-ln- hollywoo...](http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-me-ln-hollywood- hospital-bitcoin-20160217-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Have you considered trying to recover files that were deleted? Here's someone's free software being promoted for that with handy instructions [http://www.easeus.com/data-recovery/recover-decrypt- wannacry...](http://www.easeus.com/data-recovery/recover-decrypt-wannacrypt- encrypted-files.html), or you can try Recuva, which is supposed to be particularly good, with a fairly fast deep scan. PhotoRec is where I would probably go for a windows machine myself, it scans slower, but is command line and understands file formats so even if data is partially corrupted it can rebuild and fix.

Obviously, run these from a usb drive so you don't overwrite more.

</comment><comment><USER6> Local bitcoins [https://localbitcoins.com/](https://localbitcoins.com/)

No documentation needed, just meet someone in the street. Use a public place for your own safety, you'll need cash.

<comment><USER7> A good place for the transaction is inside a bank... they have quite good cameras and security guards

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Depends on the size of the ransom. For relatively small amounts Coinbase would be a quick option, however there are deposit limits for a period of time.

</comment><comment><USER9> It seems like there's a market for an insurance product where the provider holds bitcoins and the payout is in bitcoins for just this use case.

<comment><USER10> Ethereum allows just that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do every other thing you can but never ever pay.

<comment><USER12> I've heard the argument that paying gives them an incentive to develop stronger ransomware, harming the entire industry. Since this most recent ransomware depends on leaked NSA tools, no amount of incentives will get the script kiddies writing similarly sophisticated exploits. Then, are there really any long-term drawbacks if people pay the ransom?

<comment><USER13> This exploit depended on the tools but unless the NSA keeps leaking tools it's not like there are going to keep being more so at a certain point the randomware people need their own exploits. That's not even counting it probably takes at least some amount of work to turn an exploit into a working ransomware and also set up the payments in a way that governments can't go after you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> if you're referring to wannacrypt, don't.

hypothetically, though, use localbitcoins.com if you can find someone in your area, otherwise coinbase. the problem with coinbase isn't just the purchase limit -- banks frequently flag coinbase purchases (and other exchanges) which can result in a drawn-out process that lasts more than five hours.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd post on Facebook and see if there's anybody I know and trust who has bitcoin they could sell me in return for a promise of cash payment. Or I'd use a service that lets me purchase using credit cards, such as Coinbase, although the issue there is that they limit _how much_ you can purchase by credit card at a time. So maybe i'd have several people sign up for coinbase accounts and then aggregate the bitcoin together into one account.

</comment><comment><USER16> "asking for a friend..."

</comment><comment><USER17> There are bitcoin ATMs in my city, so I would use that.

</comment><comment><USER18> Restore from backup.

</comment><comment><USER10> Assuming the ransom is $300:

\- Open 4 Coinbase accounts.

\- Add and verify 4 different credit cards.

\- Buy ~$100 worth of Bitcoin on each account (weekly limit without verification).

\- Pay the ransom.</comment>


KFC Has a Problem in Britain: Not Enough Chicken - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/world/europe/kfc-chicken-uk-shortage.html <comment><USER2> Watching this unfold as a Brit is hilarious. As I've told colleagues, this is the perfect example of a production switchover done completely wrong.

They wouldn't last 5 seconds in the tech industry.

</comment><comment><USER3> Had to read half the article to learn that the shortage is a result of switching to DHL for logistics.</comment>


Coming This Summer: U.S. Will Run Out of Internet Addresses - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/coming-this-summer-u-s-will-run-out-of-internet-addresses-1431479401?mod=LS1 <comment><USER2> Always interesting to check Google's report on IPv6 use by their users.

[https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

tldr: Consistently above 5%, almost reaching 7% on weekends. The gap between weekday and weekend IPv6 usage is widening, indicating that home ISPs are moving faster than businesses.

<comment><USER3> I love playing with this graph. Anyone have any idea why there was an unusually high (for the time) spike on Oct 4th, 2014?

<comment><USER4> Mobile operators in USA started to roll ipv6? ([http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/10/t-mobi...](http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/10/t-mobile- usa-hits-43-ipv6-verizon-wireless-at-59-att-at-25-in-oct-2014-measurements/))

<comment><USER5> Probably. I recently discovered that my Verizon iPhone is now connecting to my home NAS via IPv6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised to learn that cloud computing solutions (EC2, Azure) don't already support IPv6. Can anyone share why this is? I would think the switch is inevitable. What roadblocks are in the way for enabling this?

<comment><USER7> > I'm surprised to learn that cloud computing solutions (EC2, Azure) don't > already support IPv6.

Lots and lots of parts of the networking stack (esp. when talking about both virtual _and_ hardware interfaces) either don't support IPv6, or didn't until very recently. For example: OpenVPN didn't support IPv6 until last year, and even today, you're hard-pressed to find a commercial VPN provider that provides IPv6 support, despite the fact that IPv4-only means that there's a massive privacy hole when using it unless IPv6 is explicitly disabled[0].

Also, it's very expensive to move existing systems over without risking any potential downtime or performance impact for existing customers. This is one of the reasons that new and smaller providers (like Digital Ocean) are more likely to support it than the bigger names (and even Digital Ocean didn't support IPv6 until very recently).

I don't have direct experience with this myself, but this is what my contacts at AWS and other companies told me.

[0] [https://blog.dave.io/2011/06/vpn- ipv6-privacy/](https://blog.dave.io/2011/06/vpn-ipv6-privacy/)

<comment><USER8> I still don't get it. Cloud services are a recent thing, and they are bringing hundreds of servers online every day. This is _prime territory_ for ipv6.

<comment><USER9> I took my first look at Google's offering last week.

You can set up a MySQL database, which has an IPv6 address by default. The documentation[1] says

> Each instance has an IPv6 address that is free to use. To connect over IPv4, > > you must explicitly assign an IPv4 addresss to your instance, which incurs > a > charge per hour idle.

IPv4 sounded like a hassle, so I tried to use the IPv6 address from my Google Compute Engine instance. But that doesn't support IPv6. It's the oldest outstanding feature request [2].

(Perhaps other parts of Google's cloud offering support IPv6, I haven't used much else so far.)

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql-client#connect- ipv6](https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/mysql-client#connect-ipv6)

[2] [https://code.google.com/p/google-compute- engine/issues/detai...](https://code.google.com/p/google-compute- engine/issues/detail?id=8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> no paywall [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newss...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=newssearch&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB0QqQIoADAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fcoming- this-summer-u-s-will-run-out-of-internet- addresses-1431479401&ei=5INTVZmAGKu0sATh0IDwDQ&usg=AFQjCNEQXpxadyHY90CuQ-9XFP3U02cVhA&sig2=UlasGvEmr41zzV1pxZGSyQ)

<comment><USER11> Still paywalled, actually. They're smarter than that. ;) You have to actually search from Google.

Also, they're discriminatory, it does not work from Bing, only from Google.

<comment><USER12> The link worked for me.

<comment><USER11> Interesting. Did you click their link before clicking on the original WSJ link? I'm wondering if they try to detect people using this workaround when they hit the paywall or something.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I clicked their link and got the paywall and then I used the google link above and got through.

It's only working for me in Chrome though- not in Firefox or IE.

<comment><USER11> Ah, yeah, I'm on Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know that ipV6 is theoretically better for me, but I am not looking forward to the day that instead of 192.168.1.1, I have to type in fd42:caae:ee42:0001:0001 with my phone keyboard.

Is there any reason to think I won't need to occasionally type in full ip addresses after this switch?

<comment><USER14> Um, DNS? Bookmarks? Why do you have to type IP addresses into your phone?

<comment><USER15> Two things I can see popping up:

Router management pages

internal network stuff in places small enough not to have internal dns (Where I work we have like five NASs all accessed by IP, at home I have a plex server in the same boat)

<comment><USER16> > Router management pages

For home use, many current generation router/AP boxes are powerful enough to run a local DNS server (in addition to DHCP) and often hardcode a DNS entry for configuration, eg [http://router](http://router)

> internal network stuff in places small enough

The .local domain (ie [http://hostname.local](http://hostname.local)) has been a functional out of the box for many years now on osx/linux and NetBIOS have worked on Windows since forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In Europe, RIPE has market place for that. You can even see transfers there [https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource- transfers-...](https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-transfers- and-mergers/ipv4-transfers/table-of-transfers)

</comment><comment><USER18> As the mobile providers convert over, this will be less of a problem. T-Mobile just did. China did years ago.

</comment><comment><USER19> There are lots of underutilized IPv4 addresses out there. I'm sure there are lots of companies and institutions squatting on /8s that would sell some of their block for the right price.

<comment><USER5> The problem is that uptake is growing exponentially. I've seen the math where if _all_ /8s were returned for immediate reallocation, that would delay the IPocalypse by like 3 months. It's just not worth the extraordinary legal hassle required to pry those netblocks away from their owners (many of whom are probably actually using them in some capacity and have zero interest in willfully migrating out of them).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Unless I'm way off, it definitely seems possible that this could translate to higher prices for consumers. Does anyone have any idea what those changes might look like?

</comment><comment><USER21> How can I determine my site or my host is using IPv6?

<comment><USER22> If you Google for "what is my ip?" then Google will tell you. If it looks like "184.108.40.206" (known as "dotted quad") then your computer is using IPv4. If it looks like "FE80:0000:0000:0000:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329" or "FE80::0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329" then you are using IPv6.

<comment><USER23> It's ironic that 220.127.116.11 is known as dotted quad, but www.acme.com 86400 IN AAAA fd::1 is known as a Quad-A.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Also this summer Voyager 1 will leave the solar system!

</comment><comment><USER25> isnt this what ipv6 is for?</comment>


Geohot Chimes In - <AUTHOR> http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/04/recent-news.html <comment><AUTHOR> You know; this guy makes some good points:

"This arrogance undermines a basic security principle, never trust the client. [...] Notice it's only PSN that gave away all your personal data, not Xbox Live when the 360 was hacked, not iTunes when the iPhone was jailbroken, and not GMail when Android was rooted. Because other companies aren't crazy."

"[...] To me, a hacker is just somebody with a set of skills; hacker is to computer as plumber is to pipes. And the same ethics should apply, if you want to mess with the pipes in your own house, go for it. But don't go breaking into people's houses and messing with their pipes."

<comment><USER2> The pipe analogy is interesting, because I've heard a related analogy in the other direction. I can't recall where I read it, but I think it was some textfile from the 80s, justifying breaking into large corporate computer systems to explore them as similar to breaking into and exploring steam tunnels, and guided by a similar ethos (e.g. don't vandalize them while exploring).

<comment><USER3> Exploring steam tunnels isn't "messing with pipes." To be "messing with pipes" you would have to be doing things to the pipes in those steam tunnels.

<comment><USER4> How about breaking into a bank to learn more about their security systems?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good Christ, what comments!

"You're the perfect example of someone who can't even grasp the simple concept of how YOUR actions have consequences for OTHER people. If Sony wanted to remove Other OS that's up to them, people like you and George should have just dealt with that. Instead like children you have this sense of entitlement and so the PS3 was hacked and root keys published. No thought was given to how this would be used by other people, all that crossed your tiny little minds was how this affected YOU."

[http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/04/recent- news.html?s...](http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/04/recent- news.html?showComment=1303986868731#c8287228180500063419)

You see people become inoculated by all sorts of kooky ideas (usually offering salvation or universal insight), but to see people get their mind twisted around some faceless video game company... the mind boggles...

<comment><USER6> There is a good chance that this particular comment came directly from Sony as a part of some sort of misdirection and damage control campaign. It does not read like something a teenager would write, it sounds more like a mom lecturing her adolescent, but I can't see parents taking time to comment in GeoHot's blog. So given the context it looks artificial.

<comment><USER7> A lot of PS3 users are NOT teenagers... I'm guessing PS3's user base will tend be slightly higher in age than Xbox owners, given that people who buy PS3s might buy them for the Blu-ray player as well to complement some home theater setup. Teenagers will most likely only have appeal for the gaming aspects of a console.

<comment><USER8> This comment was being moderated down. Can someone shed light as to why they disagree?

<comment><USER8> Which means I get moderated down too? I thought he had an interesting and valid point, saw his statement when it was grey and made my comment. If I am incorrect, or have made a HN etiquette faux pas, I would appreciate knowing about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is interesting: _"Traditionally the trust boundary for a web service exists between the server and the client. But Sony believes they own the client too, so if they just put a trust boundary between the consumer and the client(can't trust those pesky consumers), everything is good. Since everyone knows the PS3 is unhackable, why waste money adding pointless security between the client and the server?"_

I wonder if he's _purely_ speculating or maybe knows something more. It's also good to see he can at least still talk about Sony security in general (or can he?)

<comment><USER10> its not speculation, they passed CC numbers in the clear over SSL instead of hashing them..

<comment><USER11> And how would you use that hashed CC number on the server? Unhashing (impossible)? Send the hash to the CC company (good luck)?

Do you mean they should have pre-encrypted the CC number before encrypting it again in the standard SSL transaction?

Would that have helped? Because if the PS3 knows how to encrypt and you own the server, decrypting is as trivial as just looking at the plain text

For people who don't own the server and are listening in SSL is enough and for people with access to the server neither SSL nor any other encryption is enough.

They have done a lot of things wrongly, but this IMHO is not one of them.

<comment><USER12> You can store 'authorizations' as a gateway instead and not store the actual number on your server.

<comment><USER11> I (and shareme I was responding to) wasn't talking about _storing_ the numbers. I was talking about _transmitting_ them. You can't transmit hashes of credit card numbers and then expect to do anything useful with them.

This is, for example, the md5-hash of my credit card number with "salt" prepended: 8cc8f5b89ae1ce45a8efce26c88b69e7.

Now good luck doing anything useful with this.

My point was just that it's totally fine to rely on SSL for securely transmitting the credit card number. There's no need to encrypt twice and salting isn't possible.

Storing the numbers (or, as you say, authorizations) is something else I a) know nothing about, b) wouldn't want to have to do (see a) and c) didn't comment about.

<comment><USER13> I hope you're kidding about the MD5 thing.

It should be feasible to hash a whole bunch of credit card numbers looking for a hash collision, especially when the first four digits depend only on the card type and the last one is a check digit or something. I'd have to look up the details, but that leaves me with just over a billion things to hash?

This is roughly the way password crackers work, incidentally. And why they keep telling people to use slow hashes, like bcrypt.

<comment><USER11> No worries. That's what I was thinking too. The hash isn't my credit card number. Still. This is a very impractical way to "encrypt" a credit card number for transmission

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "And let's talk about Sony's use of the word illegal. It is illegal, criminally so, to break into someone else's servers. But when the same word is used to refer to streaming a song from a non RIAA approved website, or to _gasp_ playing a homebrew game on your PS3, respect for the word and those who say it is lost."

Who is this kid? He's like 20 years old and he talks like this? Geohot, you have my respect thats for sure.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is an excellent piece, my esteem for geohot got even higher. It vilifies Sony (rightly so) but also is balanced. The plumber analogy is spot on and funny:

"To me, a hacker is just somebody with a set of skills; hacker is to computer as plumber is to pipes. And the same ethics should apply, if you want to mess with the pipes in your own house, go for it. But don't go breaking into people's houses and messing with their pipes. (Note that I do not endorse water piracy)"

</comment><comment><USER16> On a pedantic note, is there a reason why large corporations 'regret' mistakes rather than apologize for them? Is it just so they don't want to go on the record as being wrong?

Sony's statement for reference: [http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/26/update-on- playstat...](http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/04/26/update-on-playstation- network-and-qriocity/)

<comment><USER17> Their lawyers tell them that an apology is an admission of fault.

<comment><USER18> Maybe true, but I don't think that's the real reason. I think it has a lot more to do with ego and cowardice. (It perhaps also belies a shoot-the- messenger mentality that exists within many major corporations.)

On The Media did a piece a few months ago about how the 1982 Tylenol recall is pretty much the gold standard for corporate disaster PR: identify the problem, apologize, and explain what you're doing to prevent it in the future. It's not hard, but it takes guts. Even J&J itself didn't meet that standard in later recalls. <http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/02/12/01>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Strange how many of the commenters on the article think the Sony was hacked from a rooted PS3. There's no evidence but I'll assume this was done from a PC until I see some reason why doing it from a PS3 would make it easier (in any way).

<comment><USER20> Apart from the fact that it's already got all the hardware and software to communicate with the servers, and is thus a much better conduit for an exploit, you mean?

<comment><USER21> Well the protocol turns out to look a lot like HTTP talking to Apache over SSL. This is no surprise, it's easy to develop with and is the most likely to make through proxies and firewalls outbound.

Nevertheless, Sony seemed to assume that it guaranteed they would only receive valid messages from actual hardware they controlled. This is not a security feature of SSL/TLS which depends on the client doing its part to prevent the absence of a man-in-the-middle.

When the client was hacked, many of their assumptions were violated. We hear rumors of hackers "mapping" their systems onto some internal development networks. What this means exactly I don't know.

But if Sony's primary network defenses were the Maginot line, their dev network probably looked a lot like Belgium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Gotta love the subtle xkcd reference at the end.

<comment><USER23> It wasn't just a xkcd reference I think, I think it really was a reference from the fail0verflow presentation where the security of the PS3 was totally dismantled (the device itself, not PSN).

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btDiX319P4w> @ around 8 minutes in

<comment><USER24> FWIW, one can link directly to a time in a YouTube video using #t=8m tacked on the URL.

More information: [http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en...](http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=116618)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I thought part of geohot's settlement with Sony was that he wasn't allowed to discuss what happened? Maybe that was just with his case and not with the latest incident. Regardless, I like his attitude, and hope he continues honing his hacking skills. As he points out, at least they used a very strong XKCD style randomization algorithm.

It's a real shame that Sony alienates their customers with these kinds of acts while building a flimsy infrastructure for gaming. I'm one of those people who bought the PS3 just for OtherOS(and thankfully never got the removal patch) and honestly, given the lackluster performance it has and this move, I'm highly tempted to just sell it. The rootkit debacle of several years ago still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Today's Penny Arcade covers it quite nicely: <http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2011/4/29/>

<comment><USER26> the scope of the gag order was limited to info relevant to the original case, not this new incident.

<comment><USER25> Thought so - thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What about the money from the legal defense fund? What happened there?

<comment><USER28> He gave like $10k to the EFF, no?

<comment><USER29> Yes he did: <http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/04/10000-to-eff.html> (Screenshot of the receipt: [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qsLYAGnuRfM/Takp2Re- dgI/AAAAAAAAAe...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qsLYAGnuRfM/Takp2Re- dgI/AAAAAAAAAew/z5aysW0mRXY/s1600/eff_receipt.png))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't understand those comments. Are those frustrated kids who can't play online anymore?

<comment><USER21> My understanding is that the "battlefield graphic murder" online simulator games are quite popular and they've had a problem with cheaters. Players have built up quite a rage against these cheaters and they look to Sony to fix it.

When hackers come along having the goal of running their own OS on the PS3 or even restoring the ability to run as a guest of the hypervisor (OtherOS), many players don't see the difference. Probably any research into the inner workings of a PS3 has the potential to benefit cheat development as well, but I for one do not accept the idea that we would turn off our inquisitive nature and forgo our home supercomputers so that others might gain a more fair killing field.

<comment><USER18> I think you're exactly right.

But I think you need to respect the opposing viewpoint: that supporting OtherOS actually isn't worth the risk of new cheats for a lot of people. It is a game console after all.

<comment><USER21> No, I think there's some fallacies there:

* It's not a "game console" by definition. It's a box with semiconductors inside it which _I_ can _purchase_ for a few hundred bucks at any of many local stores. These semiconductors are equally well-suited for doing vector calculations in support of many applications, frivolous and serious alike.

* It's simply a mistake to think by not "supporting OtherOS" it will significantly reduce the "risk of new cheats" in anything but the very short term. OtherOS is happening whether it's supported or not. That's probably true of cheating too.

* But that's not even what Sony did though, Sony actively removed OtherOS from units people had previously purchased, and only then _after_ it had already provided its (relatively small) boost to hackers.

The idea of keeping secrets locked in a box that millions of people purchase and physically control is simply ludicrous and has failed every time it's been tried.

<comment><USER31> Apple does a pretty good job of this, no?

And to be fair, the Dreamcast was about as open as a 7/11, but that didn't fair too well for Sega.

<comment><USER32> Are there any postmortems on the Dreamcast and why it failed? I'm genuinely curious. I don't know if the openness of the Dreamcast led to its downfall, but it has a fairly strong community of hackers using it currently.

<comment><USER33> [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4128/the_rise_and_fall...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4128/the_rise_and_fall_of_the_dreamcast.php)

The best I can muster. Being a fan at the time, I tend to follow the "it needed more third party support" and "Sony lied/"used false PR" (which seems oddly more acceptable) to hype the PS2 into unrealistic levels" lines of thought. Particularly the latter, claiming video as "gameplay."

<comment><USER21> Nice article, thanks for the link.

You really get the sense that success in that business (at least at that time, in the minds of the executives they interviewed) is about everything _except_ delivering the best possible value to the customer.

<comment><USER33> As a gamer, it annoys me to no end how people are quick to defend and identify with companies that have even a hand in their favorite game. Many will even defend publishers of games they enjoy in unrelated matters, as if the publisher had anything to do with it.

It truly makes me wonder sometimes about the person on the other end of the keyboard when this kind of personal data breach is written off completely, laughed at as no big thing. I mean, I don't even have a PS3 or PSN account (waiting for Team Ico's next game,) but I can tell it isn't "nothing."

Really want to be disappointed in gamers? Google Image search "Modern Warfare 2 boycott".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The word "hacker" has been corrupted by the media to the point it's nearly derogatory. We need a new term for what we do. Something like "techsmith." Any other ideas?

<comment><USER35> I think the proper word already exists since ages and it's "polymath" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath>

<comment><USER36> | _In less formal terms, a polymath (or polymathic person) may simply be someone who is very knowledgeable._

It's not specific to the coding field.

<comment><USER37> Nor is the term hacker(in the positive sense). In the negative sense it seems to be reserved for coding.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you organize your Bookmarks? - <AUTHOR> I use to use del.icio.us back in the day before they were shutdown, I guess they reopened.  I moved over to Google bookmarks, but the interface is aweful.
I am curious what other free solutions are out there to organize bookmarks in the cloud.
What are you using? <comment><USER2> I used to use del.icio.us too, but after their first (?) shutdown I created a few open source projects for my bookmarking needs. Please, take a look: [https://github.com/usametov/gitmarks](https://github.com/usametov/gitmarks) \-- github-search-friendly format you can export your bookmarks to. [https://github.com/usametov/Bookmarks- ETL](https://github.com/usametov/Bookmarks-ETL) \-- import/export bookmarks from variety of social bookmarking web sites like del.icio.us, bibsonomy, pinterest. You can export bookmarks to gitmarks as well merge them. I want to add elastic search support in the near future. [https://github.com/usametov/TagSortService](https://github.com/usametov/TagSortService) \-- this is actually bookmark organizer. You can group tags in tag bundles, I personally see a lot reasons for doing that. All these projects are very young. I am planning to document them properly, dockerize some of them. Please, bear with me. There is also machine-learning/text-mining work in the pipeline.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for sharing, the gitmarks looks very interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have a Pinboard account that I keep adding things to and NEVER go back to see 1) what's there or 2) search for anything. I always end up googling whatever I need.

I keep adding things there "for the day that I will sit down, organize everything and read what's pending", but for some reason this day never comes and nowadays I believe it will never will.

Not managing my bookmarks correctly and leaving stuff unread use to bother me a lot. It stopped the moment I realized it was okay and that I wouldn't miss anything important.

</comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, it is just an awful mess. I use Google Chrome to add to my bookmarks. I have folders clearly named. Things like "Useful Tools", "My Company", "My Web Host", "Random", "Funny", "Relationships", "Philosophy", "Internet", etc. But I really hardly ever return back to it. The only folder that seems truly worthy is "Useful Tools". Definitely wish there was a better way... and I'm usually good at coming up with ideas to make life easier, but bookmarks remain as organized as my house. Lets not even go there.

</comment><comment><USER5> I keep most of my bookmarks as a mind map.

[https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge- map](https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-map)

</comment><comment><USER6> I use Bookmark OS and really enjoy it. It's super clean and intuitive. [https://bookmarkos.com](https://bookmarkos.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> I also used del.icio.us and after doing a couple of custom solutions I ended with simple browser's folders... you might want to look into pinboard though

</comment><comment><USER8> i use opera's system to sync as it lets me browse all of my machine's individual bookmark folders. Keeps things clean at work, but everything quick to access.

if i had to switch (and could install the plugin on the work pc) i'd use xmarks

</comment><comment><USER9> Willy. Nilly.</comment>


The Brain in the Machine: IBM's Compass - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/11/ibm-brain-simulation-compass.html

<comment><USER4> We're just starting to unlock the secrets of the brain, but for all those hoping that this is the one that does it, I will take the risk of saying "It won't happen this time".

We don't know what the information transfer mechanisms are in the brain, nor do we know how information is stored. We do know that action potentials are the observable and recordable signs of potential brain activity, but that's all we can see. If you have something as complicated [1] as the brain, assuming that one of the first things we found about the brain is the way it lets me think of art, reason about the past, and adapt to my surroundings is plain stupid.

Since we discovered neurons [2], there have been monumental changes in how we understand the world. But this still isn't enough. We cannot explain the things that happen in brains with our current understanding of physics. Minds are more connected than one may initially assume.

I'll tell you a story about why I know this to be true, and what it means for our attempts to recreate a brain.

For as long as I can remember, I have been falling asleep with some sort of music or movie playing.

Whenever I would drift off to sleep, I would hear this noise in the background. It let me sleep easily, giving me something to focus on. When I went to Norway this past summer, I didn't have anything to listen to, only my mind.

I noticed when I was about to fall asleep, something weird would happen. I would hear things that weren't thoughts I had, they were thoughts in other languages. They sounded like what I was hearing in Norway, but they could have been Chinese for all I know, but what I do know is that they were sounds I never recognized, and they were in languages that weren't my own.

Whose thoughts were these, and why were they in my brain when I was falling asleep? Weird things happen when we sleep, but before all contact from the real world shuts off, the transition into sleep may be one of the most important for figuring out what is really happening in our brains.

How would this information transfer boundaries between my brain and another person's brain, or another region in space time? This would be easy to pass off as misinterpreted noise, but this happened for many times while in Norway, but when I got back home, it tapered off (I lost my peace of mind when I returned home).

Our current understanding of physics is not advanced enough to allow us to understand the brain. We have done cool things with technology, but I think we are farther from understanding what is a person is in the true sense of the question. It's interesting to think about the 'hard problems' that persist over life times. Almost all the problems that we are solving today are not 'hard problems'. They are challenging, fulfilling, rewarding, and helpful in the short term.

I once went for a long bike ride, and it had been a while so I was pretty excited. I told my dad about my achievement. I said "Dad, I went for a 50 mile bike ride today!". He said "Yeah, but did you get anywhere?".

We are solving problems, but the solutions are not advancing the human race. We are riding around in a circle.

I'll stop now, and hopefully start a blog so I can put out my long winded rants there.

[1] <http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n17/history/neurons2_i.htm>

<comment><USER5> >Whose thoughts were these, and why were they in my brain when I was falling asleep? Weird things happen when we sleep, but before all contact from the real world shuts off, the transition into sleep may be one of the most important for figuring out what is really happening in our brains.

Why do you immediately assume they aren't your own thoughts? Surely you have no problem simulating garbled language or your own garbled interpretation of other languages in your mind right now, why couldn't this have been the case when you were falling asleep? It seems strange to me to think that because of some bizarre or out of character thoughts that the only answer would be someone else's thoughts invading your mind.

<comment><USER4> The thing that made these 'thoughts' different is that they felt real. I experienced hearing something in another language, I wasn't just thinking about it. This happens with music, and every once in a while I'll hear my name. They aren't just thoughts, they are experiences.

I don't think someone was invading my mind, I think I was detuning my brain and tuning into something else, a 'sea' of thought. I think they aren't my own because I can't consciously think those thoughts, I cannot simulate what happened just by thinking about it.

I think we have more control over the world than we give ourselves credit for. It's easy to cast off stories that are not backed by fact, but what if this was the divide? What if we just needed a little bit of faith to see something that most people can't see? What does a kid see when they play in a box? They see whatever they want to see, they are not tied down by what society deems as real, they create reality for themselves.

For a while, I had a spurt of thinking about some new tech idea and seeing it within a week of thinking about it. It was almost like I was forging the path through the sea of unknown information around me. I don't have enough experience in the world to determine whether or not my thinking had influence on what happened, but it provides an interesting framework for some thought. What if you could control the world, and you were the center of the 'relative universe'? Quantum mechanics predicts that prior to the first consciousness observed a wave function collapse, the world could have not existed, it was merely a fuzzy combination of wave functions that never had definition. What if this was happening every time I did something, interacted with something, noticed something. What if, when I thought about something, it collapsed the wave functions necessary to bring me that information? What if I controlled the world, and whenever I reached in to grab information, the necessary wave functions collapsed (regardless of where they had to). What if we could have multiple layers of collapsing wave functions, so you can live your life, I can live my life, and until we communicate, we lose the necessity of having the same time or space clocks? What if the world reconciles the differences when necessary, rather than all the time?

It's easy to get sidetracked when I'm thinking.

At what point do I call a thought my own? I'm not sure, I'm not even sure if ideas are my own thoughts. My thoughts are the ones where I can follow the train of logic that got me to where I am now. An idea is a lightning bolt. To backtrack where an idea came from, generally all I get is a couple inputs, a big jump in logic, and a conclusion. you can say what inputs were necessary, but that doesn't always get you to the output. I call these 'prime ideas', these are the good ones that cannot be assembled from combining (in some way, shape, or form) previous ideas. Prime ideas are ones that don't feel like they come from me, I wasn't thinking about anything, I was cleaning the kitchen when a lightning bolt in idea space struck my brain. Those don't feel like something I made, they feel like something that was given to me, like someone saying "Here, look at this picture" and I see something cool in my brain.

<comment><USER6> I get where you're coming from, but I firmly, although respectively, disagree.

 _> The thing that made these 'thoughts' different is that they felt real. I experienced hearing something in another language,_

\- So do schizophrenics. That doesn't make their experiences any more concrete.

 _> What if we just needed a little bit of faith to see something that most people can't see? What does a kid see when they play in a box?_

\- Faith in things is important - probably intrinsic to our existence. It gives us things to aim for, to believe in. Systems of rationalisation. But believing something that is not possible will not make it so.

Kids are playing. Daydreaming. creating possibilities. You can do that when you're grown up too. I daydream all the time. But that reality doesn't exist outside of the story, the fantasy in the head of the creator. It could be argued that the greatest inventors and innovators (not to mention story tellers and artists) are able to mobilise their vision and dream into reality through faith. But there are still lots of things that can't, won't, exist.

 _> For a while, I had a spurt of thinking about some new tech idea and seeing it within a week of thinking about it_

\- This is a relatively well known phenomenon. - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery> \- It has happened throughout history. I have personally felt this a number of times - that I have come up with an idea independently - and then you see the idea out in the wild. On closer reflection I realise that I was more likely influenced by my extensive readings and my day-dreaming to make links between existing technologies, discoveries and inventions; formulate and write up an idea - <USER2> these ideas are in the 'potential space' of possible ideas and concepts; and someone was more on the cutting edge than me; and did it better and faster.

 _> What if you could control the world, and you were the center of the 'relative universe'?_

\- interesting, and i've had similar thoughts. Forever unprovable however; and the idea of us each controlling a 'relative universe' I think on some level is true - i.e. we can do amazing things if we just set our minds to them and rise above apathy and entropy; but on another; we still exist as part of the universe, which has universal rules.

we are the universe experiencing itself; there is so much we don't know; keeping an open mind is important; so is dismissing things that are not the truth; the hard part is filtering the wheat from the chaff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article, and the author's critique of Ray Kurzweil's latest book, which was also on HN last week, makes me think about a powerful point made by David Deutsch in his book "The Beginning of Infinity". He says (excuse the paraphrasing) that explanation-less theories are useless and bad science. Devoid of an explanation, data are meaningless and can be interpreted in countless nonsensical ways.

When it comes to consciousness the problem is not that we haven't built a big enough simulation with enough neurons, but rather that we lack an explanation for consciousness and its associated complex phenomena, like qualia. When we can explain consciousness, he suspects it will be easy to program. Conversely, if you can't program it, you don't understand it.

<comment><USER8> The notion of "qualia" confuses me.

Tracking down such a thing sounds like trying to find the essential "Tuxness" of a given Linux installation.

If I install one kernel patch, does that make the system "less Linux-y"? What if that patch was a bug fix by Torvalds himself? Would that have the opposite effect?

I know the answer to the questions above: they're nonsense questions, so answers don't even enter the equation.

We have identified specific modules of the brain that, among other things, let us distinguish faces from mere shapes, friends from strangers (even when it comes to the same individual), and language processing itself. Our own _sense of self_ seems to reduce to a distinct, _toggle-able_ neurological phenomenon.

In short, the very idea of qualia reduces to just various artifacts of our brain's multiple systems of abstraction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      Simulating a brain using the same number of neurons is like simulating a body using
      the same number of atoms.

Also relevant, Chomsky vs Norvig, on AI [http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and- the-f...](http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight- for-the-future-of-ai)

Which boils down to "make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler". Chomsky wants to understand what's happening. Norvig says it's too complicated.

I think we can _usually_ carve off an aspect or layer of phenomena that - <USER3> isolation - is simple enough to understand. But I don't see any guarantee that this will necessarily be the case; models are possible that aren't decomposable into simpler parts (because they must interact with everything else, informationally). However (1) understanding is what we _seek_ in Science; and (2) it's always been possible before - for whatever reason, the universe _does_ seem to be decomposable hierarchically... at least, the bits that we've understood, so far...

</comment><comment><USER10> How will the world change when you have hundreds of virtual human brains, overclocked to think hundreds of times faster than a normal human?

Create the biggest MMO ever made, in a week?

<comment><USER11> Brain uploads living in simulated universes are I think are our surest bet at immortality. @cstross has a highly entertaining book called Accelerando which deals with this. Check it out if you haven't yet already.

If you push is a bit, you can also branch the human brain at a certain point in your life and merge back to master whenever you see fit, and you can experience more than you ever could in a single life.

EDIT: I realize space is a big deal, but I only wish some organization working with the funds that NASA has that can explore the human brain and consciousness. This could initially lead to a variety of psychological hacks coming out which could be used by marketers and ultimately a deeper understanding of intelligence. Like OP said, if we could simulate a brain in a computer, there's no reason we couldn't make it better. If we could make it better, and this is pushing it even further, provide it with the right "memories" as a starting point, you could have the equivalent of the greatest minds of humanity living simultaneously. Think about what we could achieve then ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So many questions about the future.

Will there be movements to give legal rights to our virtual creations based on the notion that they are conscious? Will this cause humans to lose control of things as the computer minds grow more powerful?

Will we have laws that force us to imbue emotions in them? So that they can only be created with empathy for human beings?

Will everyone obey these laws when creating computer minds? Will there be black markets of unempathic, cold-hearted superminds that blindly obey their self-serving owners?

Will we all be out of jobs? Will we even need or want money?

<comment><USER13> Because human moral is based on emotions, answer to first question will depend on applications of such virtual creations. We have movements to give legal rights to dolphins because they are cute, but we don't have such movements for chimpanzees or parrots because their human-like behavior is inside our uncanny valley. So probably we will have movements to give legal rights for toys and chatbots with AI and no such movements for medical or scientific AI's.

<comment><USER14> Morality is properly based on reason. Many people do use a primitive kind of morality that is based on emotion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If the goal is to learn about how thinking works, and maybe find ways to adapt specific methods to software problems, simulating brains makes a lot of sense, of course.

But it bewilders me how so many people see the "holy grail" in simulating whole human brains. Two things:

1\. Human brains are extraordinarily power efficient - I don't think we can beat them anytime soon, as long as we are power constrained. I believe the difference in efficiency for tasks the human brain is good at (such as visual pattern recognition) is a significant number of orders of magnitude.

2\. Computers are at their best when they complement us, when they solve tasks the human brain is NOT good at.

</comment><comment><USER16> Some theorists say this is the first step to achieving technological singularity. Once it becomes possible to replicate human mind/consciousness in computer memory (by running a brain simulation), the line between man and machine will become very thin. What happens once you upload your consciousness into a computer? Are you creating a new instance of yourself? What happens once such creations are able to harness the power of underlying infrastructure and use high powered processors to perform calculations and do reasoning?

I remember reading somewhere that humans might well become a completely digital species if this ever occurs. Interesting stuff to say the least...

</comment><comment><USER17> This kind of work has applications in neuroscience to model specific parts of the brain. Blue Brain is just such an effort. I'd also be confident in saying this thing isn't going to become intelligent any time soon.

We also don't have any idea how the physical structure of the brain maps to its functional characteristics (pattern recognition, consciousness.) This work may help us explore that. It's a brain simulation, maybe, but it's definitely not a 'mind' simulation at all.

</comment><comment><USER18> Before you get too excited, (from the IBM article):

      It is important to clarify that we have not built a biologically
      realistic simulation of the complete human brain. Rather, we
      have simulated a novel modular, scalable, non-von Neumann,
      ultra-low power, cognitive computing architecture at the DARPA
      SyNAPSE metric of 10^14 synapses that itself is inspired by the
      number of synapses in the human brain.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's important to note that while this simulates approximately the number of synapses in a human brain, it does so 1542 times slower than realtime.

</comment><comment><USER20> There are many thing that science doesn't yet know conclusively about neural architectures. Arguing that a machine such as described in the article will get us nowhere massively misses the point.

We live in the age of simulation in science. Computation has reached the point where, in many disparate systems such as weather models, particle physics, protein folding, and neural architecture, building complex simulations lets investigators freely play with hypothesis and compare the results to real- world data. Hypothesis are proved or disproved, science advances, and we know that much more about how such complex systems indeed work.

The author of this article derides this approach, saying that we just don't have enough information to do anything useful with the machine. I call bullshit.

One of the entire points of the machine is to allow experimenters perform experiments that are either impossible or morally unethical on biological creatures.

In a few years, suppose a research decides to change the algorithm about how simulated neurons exchange a neurotransmitter or an electrical pulse. The simulation then produces patterns very similar or identical to an FMRI or electrocardiogram of a living brain. Biologists can then use that as an unexpected avenue to exist living neurons to see if they react in the same way. Its an instance of simulation allowing experimentation that illuminates the real deal.

<comment><USER21> > ...the machine is to allow experimenters to perform experiments that are > either impossible or morally unethical on biological creatures

Ignoring the fact that whether this ever happens is up for debate, why would it be moral to torture a simulated animal as long as you're not torturing a "real" one?

> In a few years, suppose a research decides...

You vastly overestimate what research will produce in a few years.

<comment><USER14> _why would it be moral to torture a simulated animal as long as you're not torturing a "real" one?_

Morality is a human concept that should serve human ends--individually and socially. As such, performing experiments on a dog to gain more knowledge _is_ moral.

<comment><USER22> _Morality is a human concept that should serve human ends--individually and socially. As such, performing experiments on a dog to gain more knowledge is moral._

If life arrives on Earth from elsewhere, and is much more intelligent than us, let us hope they don't consider us to be dogs.

<comment><USER14> Agreed.

I think the same arguments that establish that humans have rights would still hold, even for the aliens. I also think that they would apply to the aliens, so that we should recognize that they have rights. But all that is just "possibly," because it's hard to speculate about a case like that.

<comment><USER23> Or it may be that when they hear us debating with each other about their ability to have 'rights', they think it's as comical as we would listening to dogs debate among themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mck- Once technology advances to a level at which we succesfully replicate the human brain and its interactions all the way down to the nano/quantum level, would that artificial neural network then gain consciousness?

<comment><USER24> Nobody really knows, but I think the informed consensus is that consciousness would probably happen long before we "replicate the human brain and its interactions all the way down to the nano/quantum level".

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4KrhDZQ088>

A popular debate about what knowing the brain's wiring diagram will bring us

</comment><comment><USER26> I found a comment on the article to be more concise and interesting than the article itself.

</comment><comment><USER14> The author has committed a serious epistemological error by repeatedly conflating neruons with simulated neurons. For example:

"In sheer scale, it's far more ambitious than anything previously attempted, and it actually has almost ten times as many neurons as a human brain."

No, it has ten times as many _simulated_ neurons. It does not have _any_ neurons. Unless it's a big wet biological computer.

This kind of sloppy thinking is not too surprising to me, given that this is The New Yorker, which I consider to be exemplary of sloppy thinking almost as a rule.

</comment><comment><USER27> Google has Big Brains. It's expecting open source either the end of this year or early next year.

<comment><USER28> Link?

<comment><USER27> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb3Wed9M25A> click to 08:50</comment></comment></comment>


Poolside.fm is the chillest place you should be hanging out - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270794/poolside-fm-summer-feeling-1997 <comment><USER2> Another endless chill playlist is [https://www.nts.live/infinite- mixtapes/poolside](https://www.nts.live/infinite-mixtapes/poolside).</comment>


Goodbye Nim, and Good Luck - <AUTHOR> https://gradha.github.io/articles/2015/02/goodbye-nim-and-good-luck.html <comment><USER2> So it doesn't fit his use case. There is no silver bullet. Everything is a moneky's paw in software engineering. I look forward to the day when someone discovers a language trade-off and doesn't dramatize the entire experience.

<comment><USER3> I like reading a bit of prose about when a tool doesn't fit someone's use case. Nim has a pretty interesting approach to data sharing in concurrency, and it's more interesting to read a story of someone who got bit by it than to read a table of language features and wonder when it might prove to be a problem.

<comment><USER2> But that's not how it was phrased at all. It was more like "I liked this thing, then I didn't like it because it didn't scale in a certain aspect as I wanted to so peace". I think studies of use cases are valuable but this was not one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shame to see gradha go - I read and enjoyed his ranty posts on macros, and he's contributed to a lot of repos.

He is right that there was some breakage in libraries with 0.96 to 0.10.2 - I'm hoping that things will start to settle once v1.0 is released and Nim will gain more traction.

</comment><comment><USER5> Might I suggest looking at Rust? It started out with the policy that

" _This means that a thread cannot touch the memory of another thread._ "

but has grown a host of smart pointer-based thingys that do exactly that.

<comment><USER6> As far as I'm aware, Rust is the _only_ recent systems programming language that is memory-safe in parallel mode (i.e. number of kernel threads > 1). Java and C# were, by virtue of spending a lot of impressive work on their garbage collectors, but the recent languages have unfortunately tended to throw memory safety away in various cases.

(Edit: I realized I forgot Swift -- mea culpa.)

<comment><USER7> Not that I don't believe, but can you provide a citation for that fact about Rust in parallel mode? I don't follow Rust too closely, but I hadn't heard of that. That is really interesting.

<comment><USER8> Interesting read would be here: [http://doc.rust- lang.org/std/thread/](http://doc.rust-lang.org/std/thread/)

It is also guaranteed by ownership system: in the safe mode (which is default) rust will statically (at compile time) ensures that a value can only be mutated at a single execution point. It is done by moving, instead of copying any value _by default_, unless it is wrapped in some kind of synchronization primitive or implements a _Copy_ trait.

Synchronization primitives themselves are implemented in unsafe mode, thus limiting the unsafe code scope and allowing custom unsafe code which can also be wrapped in safe interface.</comment></comment></comment></comment>