Microsoft to force Chrome default search to Bing using Office 365 installer - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/22/21077280/microsoft-chrome-bing-extension-office-365-proplus-installer-default-search-engine <comment><USER2> Seriously? Is this even legal?

Antitrust has already ruled that companies aren't allowed to forcibly change search settings, haven't they?</comment>


Building a 'People Who Like This Also Like' Feature - <AUTHOR> http://www.benfrederickson.com/distance-metrics/?hn=1 <comment><USER2> The book 'Progranming Collective Intelligence' covers this topic and related ones really well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like articles that use real data and let me play with it too. Nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

If you really want to play around with it, all the code is on my github [https://github.com/benfred/bens-blog- code/tree/master/distan...](https://github.com/benfred/bens-blog- code/tree/master/distance-metrics) =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My bias is towards matrix completion by rank minimization, but that's just, like, my opinion: [http://coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~katyas/wp- content/OPTML/Lecture1...](http://coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~katyas/wp- content/OPTML/Lecture19.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> I like matrix factorization models too !

Most of the netflix prize style models will have problems with this sort of data though. The problem here is that you only have positive data, and no negative data: you can assume that artists the user listened are positive, but there is no explicit negative votes for artists the user didn't like. This means that there is no gradient for Funk style ([http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html](http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html)) SGD solvers to descend.

Better matrix factorization models would be something like the weighted ALS ([http://labs.yahoo.com/files/HuKorenVolinsky- ICDM08.pdf](http://labs.yahoo.com/files/HuKorenVolinsky-ICDM08.pdf)) or BPR ([http://www.ismll.uni- hildesheim.de/pub/pdfs/Rendle_et_al2009...](http://www.ismll.uni- hildesheim.de/pub/pdfs/Rendle_et_al2009-Bayesian_Personalized_Ranking.pdf)) approaches which can handle this sort of thing directly.

Having said all that - this post isn't about CF. Its just trying to explain some basic concepts in information retrieval using finding similar artists as a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if the premices are correct here. For me at least, if I am listening to, say, Kraftwerk, a good suggestion for next artist to listen to is not necessarily the artists most people who like Kraftwerk like. Kraftwerk is very old techno music. It is very influencial. It taste strongly like Electro music. It is also arranged like classical music (the guys were musically educated).

I could like it because I like to listen to precusors, and then a precursor for Metal like Napalm Death could be a good suggestion.

I could like it because I like Electro, and then a modern but less known Electro track could be fit.

I may like classic music done with electronic instruments, and then next track could be contemporary classic music.

I have no idea how to solve this. But I have always been disappointed by most suggestions I got from mixcloud or last.fm, because I either already know the proposed track or it do not fit my taste. The only good suggestions I ever got from outside are from friends that share my taste and explored different areas (e.g. I got into Raggamuffin from a Techno-friend)

So maybe another suggestion engine could work like this:

Find a couple of other users who have similar tastes. Propose artists they like but I may not know of yet.

Also, I am baffled that there is usually no "Hate it" button. No recommendation will ever work if the engine do not know that I hate Brit pop, guitar rifs in rock, female shouting (I can't even tolerate Bjork, sadly). In music, movies, art, food, we are much better defined by what we dislike (which is usually well-defined and stable) than what we like (which is open and changing), aren't we?

[edit: clarified]

<comment><USER6> > For me at least, if I am listening to, say, Kraftwerk, a good suggestion for > next artist to listen to is not necessarily the artists most people who like > Kraftwerk like.

There are several separate things here:

The article, as far as I can tell looks at "if you like X, you're more likely to like Y".

You're describing "if you enjoyed listening to X _right now_ , you're likely to enjoy listening to Y _right now_ " and "if you like X and Y, you're like user B, who also likes Z".

These are all wildly different, and are useful for different purposes. The first is great if you don't have more data on the user than what they picked right now. The other two are better for different applications if you have the data.

One pet peeve of mine is that most music players seems to only take into account user similarity, rather than what you're likely to like _right now_. E.g. I rarely want to suddenly transition e.g. from a slow classical track to a super-noisy 8-bit war game chip tune even if I like both. And some transitions are great at some times of day, but not so great e.g. when I want a specific type of music because it works best for me when I'm working.

It greatly annoys me when I use of these services and they make transitions that are "obviously" wrong. If I've skipped the last 5 noisy tracks and listened to every slow track, clearly I want slow music _right now_ even though I've previously loved all those noisy tracks...

It must be possible to do so much better... Even just mixing in the other recommendation data with some simple markov chains you'd think would help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this not called collaborative filtering any more?

<comment><AUTHOR> Item-Item collaborative filtering could use these distance metrics when doing a nearest neighbours recommendation - but on its own not really CF. CF would provide results that are personalized to each user, while this just brings up a static list of results for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a good breakdown of the algo used at Amazon here. Useful for anyone looking at decent sized data sets:

[http://www.cs.umd.edu/~samir/498/Amazon- Recommendations.pdf](http://www.cs.umd.edu/~samir/498/Amazon- Recommendations.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> Related: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi- armed_bandit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit)

</comment><comment><USER10> +1 for the Bieber reference, and chapeau for the "this only scratches the surface" when it's actually quite fleshed out.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's an interesting technical challenge, but as a user I find this "People Who Like This Also Like" feature totally useless, especially when items of interest are generally less popular.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well written. The topics are explained carefully and the interactive examples are very nice. Thank you Ben!

How did you embed the examples into the post?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

The examples were done with d3.js, the code for all the graphs is here [https://github.com/benfred/bens-blog- code/tree/master/distan...](https://github.com/benfred/bens-blog- code/tree/master/distance-metrics/js/src)

I'm using the python code to generate a series of json files, one for each artist. I stored them all in S3, and then load them via ajax calls. Its not an elegant solution, but it lets me keep my website statically generated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> this seems like it would be a simple graph query..

<comment><USER14> Yup. There is a very approachable blog post on this subject by Nicole White => [http://gist.neo4j.org/?8173017](http://gist.neo4j.org/?8173017)</comment></comment>


Idaho prisoners hack iPads and transfer $225,000 worth of credits to themselves - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/26/idaho-prison-hacking-ipad-transfer-credit <comment><USER2> I spent 2 years of my life getting price gouged while incarcerated by a split between a company called "Bob Barker Ent." and the local county. Prices were 2 to 4 times "street price". My take; Too bad the inmates got caught.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a shame JPay charges just for sending electronic messages to inmates. I wonder why someone would choose to use JPay instead of sending a letter? I can't imagine inmates would significantly benefit from the reduced delivery time...

<comment><USER4> I wonder what the charge rate is. On one hand is sounds like extortion and a breach of at least human decency if not human rights, but it's possible it's used to reduce congestion to a limited number of terminals and censors and so prevent individuals from monopolizing the termials. Although I would prefer they gave at least X free messages per week.

The extortion of prisoners makes me sick.

<comment><USER5> Here's the rate list...

[https://www.jpay.com/PAvail.aspx](https://www.jpay.com/PAvail.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My bet is the "hacking" and "exploit" was ?add_credit=999</comment>


IPhone =/= Debian app - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/392628/

<comment><USER2> Yes, just like the dot com boom, this growth is unsustainable.

But again, just like the dot com boom, once the market has matured to blow away the chaff, what remains will have proven pretty game-changing.

<comment><USER3> The step in that process you left out was "years-long massive earthquake-level crash leading to complete economic collapse of the micro-economy under discussion", the kind where most of the casualties are _all_ the smart non- founders in the industry.

Been there, done that.

The primary reason I'm involved in this community is that I was in London before the first crash. Us internet people had been there for a decade or more, but all the investment money was going to some twat in a suit who had no cocking idea what was going on, or why.

Outside the little Nirvana that pg and company (among others) have created, the same rules apply.

[All of the following may be completely Euro-specific.]

Talentless schmucks get all the money available because they're the {sons|nephews|mistresses|cabana boys} of other people with money, and then try to hire us to fill in the yawning chasms (they call them 'gaps') in their plans.

The only winning move is not to play. Do your own thing, but ferchrissakes don't start working for some family-moneyed fool because "appz R h0tt and we're all gonna get rich". If you're gonna take a risk, at least ensure that the risk beneficiary is you. The one major thing I've noticed in this little playground of ours is this: it's not that you are going to have trouble raising money - it's that you're going to have trouble raising money because you're going to get lost in the deafening noise of trustafarian morons with connections, and they're going to win that funding battle.

 _That_ is why we need to play out of revenues and/or do our thing on ramen money: it's because the other method is massively stacked against us, and massively stacked in favour of idiots.

<comment><USER4> Very well put.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These worthless apps are also a cost to Apple. It is getting harder and harder to find quality apps on the App Store. The Store itself is now (a) the 'Featured' page, (b) the 'Top Ten' lists, and (c) Apple's 'Collections'. The more difficult it is to find quality apps the more difficult it will be for the ecosystem as a whole to improve.

Are there other examples of online stores with vast selections which genuinely help users find quality products? Netflix is the only one I can think of. (And don't get me started on Apple's 'Genius Recommendations'.)

<comment><USER6> Why does everyone discount the idea of people finding apps through the search box? Are the users assumed to be unimaginative and unresourceful? Is the long tail too flat for anyone to make a living off of?

<comment><USER7> Maybe it's just me, but the process I use to determine what software I choose is not done in the store. Research via reading reviews and recommendations from others is usually the way I go about it.

The problem I have in the App Store (wrt. finding apps that are "free floating") is that I don't know what's out there, and it's difficult to predict what will show up when I type in a specific query.

I'm a gamer, so let's look at games. Typically, for my 360 and PC, I'm well aware of new games that are on the horizon. Big name publishers and even the smaller ones typically receive publicity well in advance of release, and on release day/week there is usually something I can find on metacritic that someone else has written about that game.

OTOH, in the App Store, I have very little idea on the quality of gameplay for new games released that day. Finding reviews outside of the App Store for games developed by one-man-shops is incredibly difficult.

Take the game "Red Conquest" as an example. I heard about it in an online web forum. I never saw it in any App Store category list, and a search for the term "RTS" is bound to contain so much fluff that I still wouldn't have found it. It's a game that I think exemplifies the lost-in-the-shuffle problem in the App Store. (FWIW, I love this game. It's brutally hard, but you can tone down the difficulty to make it manageable. Small things, like the fact that it boots in less than 5 seconds, or that it has bluetooth/wifi multiplayer, make a big difference).

To summarize, it's difficult to search using the search box because you don't know what you're looking for.

<comment><USER8> Metacritic also publishes iPhone game ratings, like they do for consoles: <http://features.metacritic.com/features/topics/iphone/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What about the barrier to entry: $100 + a Mac + an iPhone.

As compared to a computer, which pretty much everyone had by 1998. Also iPhone programming is way harder than HTML. I had a mandatory high school class that taught HTML.

Maybe I'm underestimating how many people are jumping on this, but my intuition is it can't be as many as were jumping on web. Twitter/social media marketing however... :P

<comment><USER10> For many novice developers, web development imposes its own barriers to entry. First of all, you need some server somewhere, which means you need to know something about servers, maybe have some sysadmin skills, and likely that you'll have to make some sort of ongoing cash outlay for it. Secondly, if you want to get paid you need to figure out how to process payments, or at the very least what ad network you want to attempt to embed.

On the dead simple end where you just want essentially a blog with ads, it's easy. On the not-so-simple end, where you want to build an application you can charge money for, the app store model is very straightforward. You don't have to make any decisions about servers or hosts, do any sysadmin work, worry about traffic spikes and scalability, and your cash outlays (aside from development time) are all upfront and totally predictable. Similarly, payment processing is already there and handled for you. And lastly, you don't have to worry about SEO or distribution channels because you don't have a choice in the matter.

It's easier to put up a web page somewhere than to build an app for the app store . . . but for a large number of people building an app for the app store is much simpler than putting up a web _application_. And that, I think, is a big reason why the app store exploded.

<comment><USER9> oh for sure. I differ though in that that's not the comparison being drawn in the article. TFA compares iPhone apps to pimply kids making web pages for local businesses in < 2001, and not, as you suggest, to developing web apps.

I had a few friends in high school that made decent money making websites for eg a local car dealership. It was easy because it's just HTML.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would point out that there is as much difference between your basic piece of ShovelWare and a real iPhone app as there is between a "Home Page" and a Web app.

In both cases having a deep understanding of the platform and the skills to build non-trivial stuff on top if it will be valuable after gold rush phase has passed.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think that the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad platform has taken off because the mobile Web is just painful to use right now in those tiny browsers.

Apple's fulfilling a niche that AOL did in the '90s. Where AOL provided training wheels for the Internet, Apple does the same thing for mobile computing. Unfortunately, AOL didn't figure out that users would eventually outgrow the training wheels and discover the open Internet.

I guess the same thing will happen with the mobile Web once browsers improve and people start to learn to design mobile Web sites for mobile devices. I think Apple realizes this, since they're putting effort into HTML 5.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't totally disagree. But I don't agree either. Maybe that's because I'm making enough off my ad supported app to pay my monthly iPhone bill. Not much more than that, but enough.

<http://brianlane.com/software/nascar-iphone/>

and it isn't even pretty.

</comment><comment><USER6> What's more volatile than a discussion with a group of enthusiasts with chips on their shoulders made of pure sodium? A discussion that pits two such groups against each other.

When it comes to binary compatibility, Debian's answer is basically the same as the App Store's: Use only our official packages and you won't have to worry about compatibility.

With all the flamey comparisons about the contents of the iPhone App Store and Official Debian Repositories, who develops for each, and what their motivations are, what's getting lost is that in each case what connects the developers with officialdom is some kind of approval process. By investigating the App Store's approval process, the Debian project can get a lot of ideas about what they might want to add to their own approval process (and what they might want to remove from it).

</comment><comment><USER14> Whether you agree with a market or a business, it's your money and your choice and your investments.

Whether you believe the market is the next great thing or unsustainable, if it's trending up, that's money to be made.

Whether you think a widget is pretty or pretty ugly, it's money.

Whether you think the CEO is a genius or an idiot, if a company is going up, it's money. (And if you're positioned for and inclined for a put or with a CDS, a market or a business that's headed down can be money, too.)

Sure, the folks might eventually realize they're getting minimum wage, and that those fancy tulip bulks are all worthless. The key is stepping off before the bubble bursts.

Or you might wake up one morning, and realize that the business cycle has shifted, and iOS is everywhere.

Welcome to capitalism. Place your investments.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ehum.. What? Yeah there were a lot of shit webpages back in the day, but there was also what became came ebay, facebook, google, etc, etc.

I don't see a lot of debian apps doing better than facebook..

<comment><AUTHOR> >> _I don't see a lot of debian apps doing better than facebook.._

There's no possible scale of values that you could use to evaluate this comparison. It's not even apples to oranges. It's like saying Facebook is doing better than beagles. The things don't fit into the same category at all.

Here's a random example: one of the Debian apps is aptitude. It manages packages on the command-line. If you are a Debian sys-admin, it very likely enormously important to you. Nevertheless, it makes zero sense to say it's "doing better than Facebook." That sentence is just meaningless.

<comment><USER16> Facebook is doing way better than beagles! Beagles are predisposed to epilepsy; Facebook is not. Beagles did not generate $800MM in revenue last year; Facebook did!

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know about the epilepsy. How sad.

Comparing Debian to Facebook in terms of revenue is literally senseless. Debian is a free - free as in beer, free as in freedom - operating system. It does not exist to make money. That was my real point since I suspected the OP meant "doing better" in terms of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As Apple's products get more and more popular with developers and users, the anti-Apple criticism get more and more bizarre and inane.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what you think is inane - I wouldn't mind hearing. And I read the post as anti-Appstore more than anti-Apple. (I think it's an important distinction in context.)

The poster is responding to this in the thread above him:

 _How many useful applications are in Debian's repositories?

<snip>

10 thousand? 20 thousand?

How long has Debian been around? 17 years?

Now compare this to iPhone: 3 years and ~140,000 applications._

The post isn't criticizing Apple so much as saying to _that_ argument, "You're not counting parallel things here. The Appstore is filled with trivially small apps - apps that amount to no more than a simple webpage. That inflates those numbers."

What is it you find inane there?

<comment><USER17> Funny you should mention the original post, because he makes a very good yet obvious point:

> If 'Free Software' is to succeed as 'Free software' it needs to produce > superior product and out compete

It was wrong of him to trot out total app count, because it's a meaningless number, but there's no question that the iPhone has attracted a _huge_ amount of developer interest. This has resulted in a large library of very well- designed and compelling software across all categories, and has allowed independent developers to reach more users than they ever could have dreamed.

Much of this developer traction can be attributed to Apple's management of the App Store, but this kind of exciting software development was happening _before_ the App Store, when developers did it just for fun and had to reverse-engineer the APIs. If you weren't there in 2007, you have no idea how exciting it was.

It says a lot about what can happen when you deliver a compelling piece of hardware running a sophisticated platform. Of course, the reply addressed none of it, and succeeds only in demonstrating a complete lack of understanding about consumer software development in 2010.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the extended response. I don't believe that Debian (as the Free Software under discussion here) is in any relevant sense competing with iOS (or OSX, for that matter).

Debian's mission is to provide a universal (as much hardware as possible) operating system freely (free as in beer, free as in freedom). This simply doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that's competing with iOS in any relevant sense.

So, I don't think the author fails to address that point. I think it's irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I agree with this point completely, I also think bitching about Apple's iPhone and Ipad "apps" is a moot point. 5 years from now it's all going to be html5, and all of these apps will run on any mobile device web browser.

Apple now has such a head start on their app platform that pretty much the only reasonable strategy their competitors can do is collude and standardize on html5 for all apps.

Then Apple has a very big problem—they will be in direct opposition to Google and the rest of the organic, growing web. Never, ever bet against the web, nor face the web upstream.

If you discount 3d games, image manipulation programs, and some other specialized software that really can't "just be a web page", then what is even left for "apps" to do that the web can't?

Apps should have been the web the entire time.

<comment><USER19> Ah, 3d games and image manipulation. The last resort of all native arguments. This is going to change pretty rapidly with native client I think.

<comment><USER20> That went over my head. By 'native client,' are you making a reference to the fact that the push to make all of our apps run on a server is a swing of the pendulum back to the 'mainframe' days and that some day people will be expounding the virtues of writing software to run on the client as the 'new thing?' Or is 'native client' a reference to some new browser technology that I'm unaware of (which is possible)?

<comment><USER21> new tech: <http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's true, iPhone apps aren't like Debian packages at all. iPhone apps are self-contained, sandboxed, can only access data that I allow them to, and if I delete them, every trace of them is gone. A Debian package on the other hand first of all has to pull 57 other packages in order to even work, each of which splatters hundreds of files of all kinds all over my filesystem, and if I uninstall a package, I can rest assured that at least two dozen configuration files remain abandoned somewhere in /etc. I'm not sure how someone could confuse the two.

<comment><AUTHOR> FUD:

        # remove package, its dependents _and_ purge config files

        aptitude purge <package-name>

        # purge config files from items that were removed but not purged

        aptitude purge ~c

And, to play Devil's advocate the other way around, because Debian's tools are _not_ sandboxed, they can inter-operate sanely. You can, you know, share things, print them, move them around. It's as if - shocking - you own your own data. Imagine that.

I work pretty regularly with both Debian and OSX. They both have areas where they excel. I think you're being pretty simplistic.

<comment><USER22> Well, I want to make a few things clear here. First of all, I was being a bit snarky obviously. I didn't know about "aptitude purge", but it's a bit ironic that when googling for that, the first result is a forum post about someone with orphaned config files that aptitude purge wouldn't remove... sounds reliable.

I think it's time for desktop OS makers (and that includes Apple, because OS X isn't any different from Linux or Windows in this regard at all) rethink the way software is installed and organized. In my opinion, the way you can install and try applications without consequences on iOS devices has a lot going for it. Users _actually install stuff_ on their iPads, which they don't on their Windows computers because they're scared of unintended consequences.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Edited to remove unhelpful rage_

It sounds like you don't know Debian very well. That's fine. No reason you should. I know Debian reasonably well. I can tell you that in four years of using aptitude, I have found a very small number of edge cases where it does not work sanely, efficiently and helpfully. (To clarify it's really APT + aptitude. aptitude is one possible tool to use APT.) It's not perfect; no software is. But it's quite remarkable. I believe it to be a far better packaging system than anything available for OSX, including Homebrew - which I like a lot and which gets better all the time.

To respond to your follow-up, I deeply disagree about iOS representing a good future for software. The kernel already implements one filesystem - and that's a big job. Why would we want every application to have to reinvent that wheel? Worse yet, how we will we allow and help users to share data between all our little sandboxes if we go that route? I think the iOS sandboxing is a disaster and huge step backwards for software.

A final question: in your original post you say if you remove an iPhone app, no trace of it is left. How would you know? My point being that the system is so locked down, there's really no basis for us to know that. For all we know, iApps leave the drive cluttered with _their_ configuration files and preferences. Maybe you develop for Apple and can show me I'm wrong (or someone else can), but _as a user_ there's no real way for me to know this, is there?

<comment><USER22> (Edit: This response was written at a point when the parent post was quite a bit more unfriendly than it is now. I'll leave this here regardless, even though it's out of context now.)

Was I in any way rude to you?

1\. That's not what I said.

2\. I admit that I don't use Debian, but internally, package managers don't differ _that_ much. I was criticizing the model where software has to install files all over the place. I think the proper response should be "make a simpler model", not "write a complex tool that can keep track of this mess".

3\. So I was wrong and Debian packages come with cleanup scripts. That's good. Am I right in assuming that those cleanup scripts are only as good as the maintainer of the package, i.e. there's nothing inherent in the design of Debian that makes this cleanup function work reliably. (Note that some config files might have been created after installation, i.e. are not part of the original package.)

4\. What?

5\. Have you talked to a casual computer user recently? They are afraid of installing unknown software, yes. Almost everyone I know has had malware on their PC at one point or another.

<comment><AUTHOR> You were not rude. My initial response was unhelpful and aggressive, and I quickly edited it to respond to your arguments. I apologize for the initial response.

For the record, regarding 3, there _is_ something in the design of Debian that makes the cleanup function work very reliably. (Again, not perfectly, but very reliably.) There are strict, strict rules for Debian maintainers in terms of the pre-install and post-removal scripts that go with packages. These rules help to maintain a very uniform system - even though its actively developed by thousands of people all over the world who are often only loosely connected to each other.

<comment><USER22> Apology accepted. Much of my dislike for package managers is on theoretical grounds (I use Macports, but only casually), so it's great to argue with someone who actually knows something about them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reputation Is Dead: It's Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/reputation-is-dead-its-time-to-overlook-our-indiscretions/ <comment><USER2> This has tones of Zuckerberg's "privacy is passe" and Schmidt's "if you don't want anyone to know about something, don't do it". I pretty much despise this view.

I also think it is somewhat naive about how this is going to play out. People are not going to accept with good humour that their reputation is being trashed on line. And they are also not going to magically ignore other's indescretions. We're pretty much biologically incapable of that - when we see someone portrayed in a highly compromising light it makes psychological impressions that we can't just dismiss. The reason this hasn't really been a problem yet is just that it's still so new.

What is going to happen as time goes on is that the lawyers are going to start getting involved. People are going to start suing left right and center. It's already happening - there was a case just today where a school is suing a parent for making disparaging comments on a web site:

[http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-sues-parent-for- bit...](http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-sues-parent-for-bitter- website-20100327-r4dg.html)

Things are going to deteriorate into a very messy and ugly fight until we sort out new norms and social conventions on line, and possibly, if things get bad enough, new regulation by the government (which I really hope we avoid, but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the fun of it don't give me much hope).

<comment><USER3> > but the morons who routinely give up all their privacy on facebook for the > fun of it don't give me much hope

Facebook has over 400 million users. That's more than there are people in the USA and Canada combined. When you reach those kind of numbers you can't credibly dismiss people who throw away their privacy as being morons.

I bet that people will just grow numb of scandals in the way that people have grown numb about inefficiency in the government, misconduct by the police, or gross negligence in finance or about wars in foreign countries. People just shrug and go on with their lives.

<comment><USER4> There's something about scandals that seem to keep people interested. That's all most reality TV is, really, scandals about people that you don't even know. Tiger Woods (and Jesse James) certainly weren't the first famous men to cheat on their wives... but people still eat it up like a greasy bucket of KFC

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Absolutely agree.

Once it becomes obvious that _everybody_ does certain things, they will necessarily become better accepted - unless they are really bad things (e.g. if what because obvious was that, say, a large percentage of the population engaged in pedophily or murder something equally unacceptable), in which case making them visible might help stamp them out.

For those trivial things that everyone does and a few people get up in arms about, morality will have to change. Hopefully, out of date laws will change along with it.

I think this is an unavoidable trend of the internet. And it's a good thing. Privacy is dead. Long live tolerance.

<comment><USER6> And then there are things that only a significant minority does, but nobody talks about. I don't think bringing that out into the open will benefit anyone, since the majority could more easily bully people into submission.

<comment><USER7> Do you have any examples? I'm not able to follow...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I take the opposite view; this is the return of reputation. The internet ends the anonymity of urban living. Are you a chronic liar, a drunken slut, a responsible employee or a good parent? Soon the world will know so act accordingly.

<comment><USER9> "good parent" is an excellent example of how this is a terrible idea.

A story from the spooky future...

Father: "I told you to do your homework before flying on your jetpack with your space friends! You're grounded! Go to your room."

 _Child stomps up stairs. Soon, the soft sound of typing_ "...and he routinely abuses his children, both sexually and psychologically. And he's a drunk."

<comment><USER3> Correction, spooky _present_.

Right now children can effortlessly destroy the lives of parents, family members or teachers... by spreading exactly those kinds of lies.

<comment><USER10> exactly.. check out this "instructional" video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiwreHjQiqs>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If the only way to protect yourself from negative information is to make the information absolutely untrustworthy, everyone will quickly be accused of everything.

This new startup's only real use will be as a honeypot for 4chan trolls.

</comment><comment><USER12> The PeopleRank (or Whuffie or Karma or Facebook Points or eBay rating or whatever) is coming, no doubt.

This is one of those major shifts to society that one day will just be there and change everything.

Are you ready for it?

Are we?

<comment><USER13> I don't even think it is that huge a shift from what we already accept, although it will be a quantum leap in effectiveness.

I think a small team of folks with CS backgrounds plus an insurance company's claim data (or a bank's loss data) for a year plus a Hadoop cluster would make FICO obsolete, at least until they were regulated out of existence for being too darned efficient at what they do. (The basic theory is "Birds of a feather flock together": if most of your friends are losers, it is probably net- beneficial to the business to assume you are a loser, if most of our friends are solid debt-paying responsible citizens, it is probably net-beneficial to the business to assume you are a solid debt-paying responsible citizen.)

I think this would be so effective (prices risk appropriately, far cheaper to maintain than the current reporting infrastructure since folks helpfully update the social graph for you) you'd almost _have_ to illegalize it. (Let me hum a few bars: "disparate impact".)

<comment><USER14> Well, what you describe is all but the very definition of prejudice. It would discriminate directly against whole social classes of people irrespective of their individual behaviour, on the basis of group behaviour. From what you describe, in a private education system built around loans it would have kicked me out at 15 or so.

On the other hand, such an inefficient classification mechanism ought to create sufficient surplus for profit for those specialized enough to look for it. But there are other systemic inefficiencies that might prevent those niches from being profitable enough.

<comment><USER15> Someone that has relatively many friends that play football is probably someone that likes, and plays, football. Categorizing him as such is neither prejudiced nor discriminatory: it's a reasonable extrapolation. The same holds for more sensitive facts about someone: someone with many gay friends is more likely than average to be gay.

There already are insurance companies that only insure people with a university degree. Their rates are lower than those of other companies. They aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate: they estimate risk based on solid information about a person and the mere fact that they can stay in business suggests there is indeed a good correlation between their estimates risk and the actual risk.

If they could determine who has many university educated friends, then they would perhaps want to extend their service to those people, because they have determined that those people share the characteristics of university educated people that cause the insured risks to be smaller. (Assuming these reasons that are independent of the reasons for not doing/finishing a university education, etc.)

<comment><USER16> _They aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate_

I am pretty sure that picking only people with a university degree is called discrimination.

Now, is it a good discrimination is a whole another matter.

<comment><USER15> True. It would be nice if we would have different words for 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' discrimination, because I'm not the only one that keeps falling in the trap of using the word to mean a specific kind of discrimination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think it might even become creepy to not have any indiscretions. Might look robotic.

</comment><comment><USER18> When i filter this through my michael arrington lens, i find this article hilarious. It almost seems like he's priming his audience for some big letdown a couple months out, rather than hypothesizing about the future.

 _"the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor."_

umm... right.

</comment><comment><USER19> Isn't the trend going away from anonymous interaction on the web? Facebook Connect is an example. Just like anonymous comments on our blogs, we see them with very little value and often just trolls causing trouble. I would never believe anything about anyone that was submitted anonymously.

<comment><USER20> The important thing is this, though: it doesn't matter if you'll believe it, it matters if everyone else will.

<comment><USER19> I don't see it that way. I care what my friends might think, but they wouldn't be the ones that would be anonymous (nor would they believe a faceless site over their real world experiences). Everyone else? Who cares. Some of the treads on here mention getting a job or your boss seeing something. Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be swayed by something like this? In reality the same thing can happen now at work, but it isn't a problem so I don't see this changing that.

<comment><USER20> > Do you really want to work with someone that would let their decisions be > swayed by something like this?

Absolutely not. This is why I have forearm tattoos and stretched ears.

But many other people absolutely do care. My mom was incredibly upset when I got my first visible tattoo. "You're never going to find a job."

Those of us here are of a different breed than out in the greater world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's funny how much effort goes into image and reputation management, as if we're putting more effort into maintaining this false appearance of who we are instead of simply being ourselves.

For me all throughout college I put up this fake front of who I _wanted_ to be because I wanted to be popular and accepted by the world. It wasn't until after college that I came to realize (and still am) that internal acceptance and living truthfully with others removes such a huge mental burden. I have my utter failings, and I have my great successes, and both of them I am more than willing to share with others because that's _who I am_.

Reminds me of the Billy Joel lyrics...

 _Well we all have a face

That we hide away forever

And we take them out and

Show ourselves

When everyone has gone_

</comment><comment><USER22> A good article with a terrible and non-sequitor headline.

Perhaps we are moving toward a society that overlooks minor indiscretions. That doesn't mean we overlook everything. With the increase in data, we can start paying more attention to substantive things (that indiscretions were only a proxy for anyway).

There's no reason not to jump ahead here. This is a good time to take a look at your own habits in judging people and make sure you're doing it fairly.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't really think reputation is dead. Sure if you publish all your live to the internet it can be found sooner or later. But if they don't have enough info about you how are they going to know which is your real self. You can web search my name and I bet you won't easily find(if you find it that is) where I live or how I look.

</comment><comment><USER24> A reputation site for journalism could work well because it could be structured to be immune to the big problem of such sites: there would be no hearsay. One couldn't just make up a factual error written by the some author. That author actually has to go and publish the erroneous text.

</comment><comment><USER25> Clearly the death of reputation will be a good thing for tech crunch.</comment>


EU Plans Ban on US Travel to Europe - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/23/21300747/european-union-eu-ban-us-travel-coronavirus-reopening-borders-draft-list <comment><USER2> "The EU" can't enforce this list to member states - it's up to each government to act. it also can't "reinstate stricter borders" \- EU is not a government.

It's not surprising that countries want to avoid travelers from infected countries though. There are already tourists with infection that tried to "sneak in" to the south by traveling through germany for example.

Going forward, containment a-la new zealand seems to be the most viable economically solution for reopening, even if tourism is gone for a year or two.

<comment><USER3> Amateur journalists use the term "EU" to refer to anything and everything related to Europe: the Commission, the Council, the Parliament, the National Governments, the ECB, etc. Sometimes even the continent of Europe is referred to as "the EU".

I guess in this case EU would mean the EU Commission. But yeah it's just a recommendation to the governments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I presume Sweden is on the list too, since their numbers are worse per million inhabitants than the US.

<comment><USER5> The risk are the absolute numbers, not the relative. If it were the relative numbers most Western European countries are on the very top. Esp. the EU country itself, Belgium, which is still leading the Top rankings of poor COVID-19 response due to their habit of mask sharing in infected nursing homes. No budget for masks, become world leader in COVID-19 deaths.

Also Swedish tourists are allowed to travel to Germany for over a month now, due to a famous high court decision.</comment></comment>


Netflix Shows Different Skin Colors on Movie Title Cards Depending on Your Race - <AUTHOR> https://exstreamist.com/netflix-shows-different-skin-colors-on-movie-title-cards-depending-on-your-assumed-race/ <comment><USER2> I didn't see different poster for same movie although I'm not a caucasian. Maybe it's just not your ethnicity but also your previous viewing habits. For example, if you watched lot of movies with hispanic or Indian or african- american actors then you might get those posters to incentivize you to watch more.

I'm pretty sure they have exhaustive feature set (not just demographic information) in their model to select the cover poster for user.

<comment><USER3> It's all about engaging. It's actual leveraging the biases of the individual rather than Netflix. _You 're_ being racist, not netflix which is kinda funny.

There's data points to indicate you're more likely to watch X if they show A,B,C title cards. When you do, that reinforces that link. In aggregate it feeds data points to Netflix that lets them A/B test the needed graphics.

Customer biases driving biases/business decisions.

</comment></comment><comment> King-Aaron This just in, based on the data they collect on a users habits, companies adjust their marketing to suit demographics.

So... is the data racist? Is the user _more inclined to click on things with people from their demographic?_ Is it really Netflix at fault for aligning their content to a users browsing habits?

It appears to me that Netflix didn't "assume" her demographic. They very accurately identified her based on data _she unwittingly provided them_ and they adjusted the content according to what she would statistically most likely view. In the same way almost all modern companies do.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/artwork- personalization-...](https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/artwork- personalization-c589f074ad76)

<comment><USER5> There you have it. They don't even see it as something they should be embarrassed about. It's something to be written up for their engineering blog. They're _proud_ of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess the question is whether Netflix is generating the graphics or the movie producers supply varying content targeting different demographics.

</comment><comment><USER7> It seems interesting that with all its investment in original content, Netflix would rather re-skin "white" movies than invest in "black" movies.

I wonder if this is a sign of institutional racism at work and lack of diversity.

<comment><USER8> >, Netflix would rather re-skin "white" movies than invest in "black" movies.

Citation needed, here. Netflix could be doing both.

<comment><USER7> I know, right? I just may not be seeing the black movies because I'm a white customer.

<comment><USER8> Or you may not be seeing black movies because you don't watch black movies. I think the only solution here is the "Android" route: allow people to log in to their account and turn the knobs on the recommendation algorithms, or turn them off entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmmm I wondered why netflix seemed to use actors that weren't actually very prominent in the show or movie being watched for their title cards. Makes sense now i suppose.

</comment><comment><USER10> Mine shows Kristen Bell in a river in her bathing suit. I'm a guy and have action movies and comedies mostly on the netflix home page. So..yeah.</comment>


Virgin Orbit designs mass-producible ventilator for Covid-19 patients - <AUTHOR> https://virginorbit.com/virgin-orbit-uci-and-ut-austin-design-new-mass-producible-ventilator-for-covid-19-patients/ <comment><USER2> A demo of a cam mashing an ambu bag isn't terribly reassuring. Better than nothing, of course.

The somewhat similar MIT design seemed to have more electronics, and thus probably safeguards and measurements (tidal volume, pressure, etc). [https://e-vent.mit.edu/](https://e-vent.mit.edu/) Maybe this just isn't shown in the Virgin video?</comment>


The Struggle for Series A - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cwylonis/the-struggle-for-series-a-4d8395dc803a <comment><USER2> Speaking on the VC side, some the crunch premise is flawed. The crunch is due to a huge explosion of early stage companies (easier than ever to get seeded, less capital than ever needed to get started) w/o a corresponding explosion of A-level capital.

There is no formula for unicorns, I'd dismiss that outright, and even if we found one, every founder would bend their story to adapt superficially, and the forumla would prove useless.

My #1 theory on why people w/ a somewhat logical strategy/thesis fail to raise? Failure to tell a compelling, coherent story about their opportunity, and failure to come across as a compelling "force of nature" founding team.

<comment><AUTHOR> i partially agree with your point on an explosion in early stage companies. however, i think part of this explosion in seed stage companies is because companies are now raising 2-3 seed rounds and jumping straight to A rounds which in effect is the old "B round." i think part of this behaviour is driven by investors dis-interest in A rounds so entrepreneurs try to be "seed stage" as long as possible until then can raise 10 million dollar A rounds which is really a b round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The two sets of questions are asking fundamentally different things. The "bad" questions are all about the market your company has entered, the potential size and value of that market and who the competitors are that are in the space. This is important because your "good" questions are all about whether your team can execute and what growth/adoption rate but with an unknown market size. You can certainly grow to be a big fish but if it's a small pond you're playing in that may be less compelling to that investor. On the other hand, an investor may want to make a bet on a smaller fish in a big pond knowing that there's a lot of room to grow even if it means there's higher risk. Both sets of questions are important in my opinion. The 1st set establishes whether or not I even want to invest in this space and the 2nd is if your company is the one I want to place my bets on.

<comment><USER4> Big fish in small ponds frequently (to stretch an analogy painfully thin) start to take over nearby larger ponds once they've dominated their niche.

A few examples that come to mind include:

Amazon (books -> retail in general -> streaming media, hardware, IAAS...) Google (search -> ads -> mail, calendars, etc. -> hardware and operating systems...) Facebook (social networking at Harvard -> social networking in the Ivies -> social networking at colleges -> social networking everywhere -> messaging, ads...) Zappos (shoes -> handbags -> clothing, jewelry, sunglasses...)

And those first three grew not just by taking over existing markets, but by becoming popular enough that they enlarged their own markets. Before Facebook became big, social media just wasn't something the vast vast majority of people over fifty had any involvement in. Now everyone I know (including two over-90-year-old great-grandmothers) has an account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cringeworthy post.

A post like this feels like a good way to seal your fate as a victim of the crunch.

It's true that investors make mistakes. Don't feel sorry for yourself or complain about it, figure it out. It doesn't get any easier (or so they tell me)

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm sorry to hear that you perceive this as some sort of excuse. that wasn't my intention. we haven't started fundraising yet so i don't know which side we'll land on. this was more meant as my personal observation on the VC ecosystem and how I can see some of the dynamics leading to the crunch.

<comment><USER6> It's generally not a good idea to imply that the people you'll be asking money from don't know what they're doing or are doing it wrong.

From your lists of questions, yes, I'd say they're doing it wrong. But their questions are their questions, and you don't get to determine what they care about. It's their problem that they miss out on the next unicorn; just thank them for their time and move on to the next investor.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes it is completely their prerogative to ask whatever questions they want. luckily a lot of investors do ask the right questions. my observation is just that a lot don't and i wish they did because it would mean a lot more interest in series A companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was ready to dismiss the article because the first set of questions didn't seem that bad and Fitbay doesn't strike me as a "unicorn". Though the next set of questions does really nail it. But I think that's just a different way of saying "can this team create traction?"

<comment><AUTHOR> hey pbreit. i'm not saying that fitbay necessarily is a unicorn.. i'm saying that there are potential unicorns among series a start-ups that are not getting funded. but i agree that "can this team create traction?" should be the most important question that investors ask.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> VC money has flowed freely because interest rates have been low, so capital had nowhere to go.

Interest rates are going up in June, so there is going to be less VC money.

<comment><USER9> Really? How much interest rate does it take to change things? Someone will invest in foobar.com social toaster app over putting in a savings account based on savings rate going from 1% to 2%?

<comment><USER10> Your example would be a 100% increase in cost of capital, which would be .. significant.</comment></comment></comment>


The Rise and Fall of Cribspot - <AUTHOR> https://www.tcbusinessnews.com/2018/04/29/the-rise-and-fall-of-cribspot/ <comment><USER2> How is this different from a property management company (say, Property Force)? The fact that they have a website over just putting out on CraigsList?

</comment><comment><USER3> > The vision was to provide an end-to-end housing solution, with landlords > handing control of their properties over to Cribspot and still earning a > passive income. Tenants could use the platform to find properties, tour > properties virtually, ask questions about different houses or apartments, > schedule property maintenance, or pay rent online.

> "It ended up being a lot more people-intensive than we thought," Dancer > said.

> The new challenges ate into Cribspot's profit margins. Between furnishing > apartments, handling maintenance claims, and even offering a rent guarantee > for landlords, Cribspot was spending too much money.

... Who in the hell was advising these guys!?

They wanted to intentionally take on all all the worst parts of being landlords while the actual property owner sat around with a guarantee of being paid?

I get that the idea is that handling these issues in volume may seem like you get good at it and develop processes - but that only works if you happen to see the same exact issues over and over. That's not the rental industry. Everyone has stories of landlords and vice versa.

It was "more people-intensive" than they had expected huh? I wonder what they were expecting because it seems obvious.

<comment><USER4> Other people's mistakes always are, especially in hindsight. What's not so clear is what value there is in "what were they thinking" beration.</comment></comment>


My Life in Child Porn - <AUTHOR> http://www.wikileaks.com/wiki/My_life_in_child_porn <comment><USER2> Let me try to keep this "Hacker News":

It seems that the only way to even put a dent into child pornography is to basically outlaw any kind of network privacy hardware and software. As long as you have privacy you will have this kind of thing. If somebody starts a popular service with (close to) 100% anonymity and 100% data privacy (e.g. server provider doesn't hold encryption keys), they are virtually guaranteed that it will be used for this kind of content. In other words, any truly private service is almost certainly an unwilling accessory to this kind of abuse. Further, users of such services are going to be stigmatized for sharing a service with kiddie porn consumers/producers. That is very unfortunate.

Also, since apparently this kind of content is easily available, we are all one click away from becoming criminals. Imagine somebody posted a link to some kiddie porn on news.yc with a title like "Apple Announces iPhone 4G" on some non-alarming domain. Anybody that clicks the link to get their daily Apple rumor will instantly become a criminal.

Eventually, nearly all of us will probably have some kind of incident like this. And, as companies and governments start recording and analyzing everything we do online, this means that we will all eventually get caught. At any time, any of us could be instantly arrested and (nearly) instantly convicted. This is just like how cops claim that if they follow somebody long enough, eventually they will break a traffic law because it is nearly impossible to follow the laws.

Somebody that can solve these problems would be doing society a lot of good. I wonder if they could make any money in the process.

<comment><USER3> I recall a story about a case where a US government agency put a video file up on a server, linked to it in CP forum(s), and then traced the IPs of and got warrants for whomever downloaded the file.

The catch? The file was nothing but static. Their argument was anyone downloading the file was obviously thinking they were downloading CP, so the actual content of the file was irrelevant.

Can you imagine getting linked to that file, without context/with false context?

<comment><USER4> I think this is the perfect example of a comment that needs a citation to be taken at all seriously. I'm not saying you're lying, I'm just saying it's a pretty sensational and inflaming anecdote, and it would be nice if you could offer some proof.

<comment><USER3> Find it yourself if you care. I don't, especially. It was on Reddit within the past 6 months, but it's impossible to find things on Reddit. I'm not about to go googling about for it, personally.

Edit: Ok, ok, "fake" found it: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9899151-38.html?tag=nefd.l...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9899151-38.html?tag=nefd.lede)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, and yes, that's a really disturbing tactic, and pretty unbelievable that it's actually court-approved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I couldn't finish this article. Not because it was written by a sick person -- it was -- but because it didn't seem to have a lot of interesting things to say.

As a libertarian I'm all for wide-ranging freedoms, but I'm also a parent and not a complete moron. I retain the right to have moral opinions even if I think it is wrong to impose them on others. As a parent, I can see that kids don't have the cognitive abilities to make decisions until later in life. I don't want my 9-year-old joining the army. I also don't want my nephew with Down's Syndrome to be sold life insurance, or my senile grandmother in a nursing home to open a credit card account. We limit freedoms based on cognitive ability -- that's just common sense. We should not provide the tools for kids to do things they will regret the rest of their life. CP, from our experience in many past cases, is something that leaves lasting scars.

I was especially amused at his fierce stance against fundamentalist Christians, those bastards. Seems like he is convinced they are the only ones keeping law-abiding perverts from their child porn.

If that's the case, you can count me in as a fundamentalist Christian.

With the technical angle, I'm sure its HN, but I'll let somebody else dig out the good pieces. I feel like I have to go wash after reading the small part that I did.

<comment><USER3> Your being a parent gives you no special insights. It gives you anecdotes, nothing more.

<comment><USER6> Everything you experience in life is an anecdote. What _does_ give you special insight? Something you have _not_ experienced, but read about?

<comment><USER3> Yes. Reading a solid scientific study will give you more valid insight than experience.

<comment><USER6> Regardless of the subject matter?

<comment><USER3> Huh?

<comment><USER6> Would a reading a scientific study give me more insight into how to better painter, programmer, car driver, hockey player, or parent than actually doing these things? Reading about anything bestows more insight than collecting anecdotes (experience) in it?

<comment><USER3> Whoosh.

Doing something is completely different than knowing about something. Parenting is likely the best way for a person to learn how to parent (though supplementing reading, mentoring, and so on will likely be even better), but reading a scientific study is going to give you a more accurate concept of the mental and emotional capabilities of children in general than your experiences parenting a single child (or several).

As the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.

<comment><USER6> The saying is wrong:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369394>

<comment><USER3> The saying is irrelevant, whether it's wrong or not. I shouldn't have even added it, lest I give you another way to deflect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sigh: "seriously creepy", "Evil lurks in the heart of man", "deleting browser history".

These are typical responses, which lack any perspective on life and culture. At face value, child pornography is not necessarily bad, child pornography is not necessarily damaging and child sex does not need to be a bad thing.

Damage comes from rape, violence and emotional abuse (which is the worst because it lasts).

But these things are not inherent to child pornography and very common outside child pornography. The argument is child pornography _leads_ to damaging events. But it certainly isn't the source. People who do such things are usually emotionally disturbed themselves. And making child porn illegal is not going to change that (almost hard to believe it wasn't illegal not so long ago).

You might even have the same "make it illegal, it will become worse" effect as there is with drugs.

So, I guess there is no point to this post, but I do think it's wise to keep perspective on subjects. Even though everyone is inclined to err on the safe side, continuously making the safe side more extreme.

<comment><USER8> As usual, there is a continuum there. While some young teenage girls (and all boys ;) might be interested in sex, at how young do we put the limit? 13, like in Spain? 12? 11? When does it becomes _really_ uncomfortable to talk about their "sexual drives"?

When it comes to teenage sex becoming criminalized, though, the author is right on the money: this is just crazy. When I was a teenager I knew some girls my age who were having sex with young men in their 20s. None of us thought this was creepy. They were boyfriend/girlfriend, and that was it. But it was in France in the 80s, and I'm not sure people would be so understanding today.

Ultimately, this should be a case of "has there been violence or coercion?", and "how did the minor perceive the experience?". Anti-rape laws should suffice for this, with the youth of the victim as an aggravating factor. As to when to decide that the child was unable to give consent, that, ultimately, should be in the hands of the judge, as advised by a psychologist. Not a perfect system, but far more humane than automatically putting a 18-years old behind bars for boinking his 17-years old girlfriend.

<comment><USER9> Agree with last paragraph. I had my first sex at 17 with a 15 yo girl who then became my girlfriend for seven years. Guess America would gladly brand me a pedophile.

 _I'm not sure people would be so understanding today_

The focused brainwashing by the media that led to this recent change in people's opinions should really be the focus of discussion here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who works weekly on such cases I would like to point out that the technical content of this article is largely correct, however the sections about the origins of the abuse and the accused is incorrect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate? I found those sections to be the most interesting.

<comment><USER10> // Disclaimer: I work in investigating these crimes \\\

His assertsion about the number of wrongly convicted people are very wrong.I would say that around 80% are "users" whereas the rest have usually stumbled across it (this is very obviosu btw: there is not often a fine line). A lot of the defence is "it was a virus" so it is one of the first checks and has been the case in only one example as I recall.

We deal with all sorts of computers weekly & I have never identified CP on any of the machines that cross my desk (bar the odd image or 2 come across whilst browsing legitimate pron sites)

In terms of the origins: a lot of the mild abuse is "homebrew" with a small proportion of the worst images being homemade. The majority of extreme images are, from their context, commercially produced.

I cant say much about the children being forced or not (or comment on the argument of whether they are innocent or not) because I am biased due to my job and because it is wholly subjective (actually I deliberately emotionally detach from such thoughts to allow me to do my job fairly). And finally because I am involved purely in the technical side and have not met any abused persons :)

I am a bit worried to say any more: it really is grazing close to a line here (silly laws ;)). Im well on the right side of said line (i'll add) but....

EDIT: edited slightly after chatting to a colleague :)

<comment><USER11> "I deliberately emotionally detach from such thoughts to allow me to do my job fairly"

How do you do that? (neutral question)

<comment><USER10> Great question thanks

In terms of viewing images it is quite hard. Partly I manage it due to my personality (empathy troubles etc. which is ideal for disconnecting). Mostly though it is by multi threading: I program & pen test for the company I work at so I occupy my mind with programming/hacking problems for later whilst leaving part of me on neutral to process cases. And then just through sheer will power :)

At first it was difficult to do but I find it easier and easier to function perfectly normally (i.e. thoroughly and effectively do an investigation) whilst not fully connecting with the content :)

(Also we use hash analysis to cut down the amount of actual content we view - standard practice).

If you mean in terms of not feeling angry at suspects etc. - that is difficult but I find ways to channel my dislike outside of work (kickboxing, occasionally alcohol, arguing with my GF):) and carefully control it when in the office. Again - practice makes that easier.

Not for everyone but I (and I hesitate to use this word because of the context) enjoy it.

<comment><USER12> I salute you. Most people who deal with the darker side of humanity see / learn things they wish they could unsee. But, I suspect your job is far more difficult than most.

<comment><USER13> Well I don't salute him at all.

Think about what he's doing. He is examining computers for _illegal information_. An _illegal series of bytes_. This is utterly insane.

You can make up whatever justification you want, but to me the very existence, the very possibility of existence, of _illegal information_ is absolutely, 180˚ opposed to everything I believe in. As far as I am concerned, people like ErrantX are actively working to undermine free society.

The fact that many of these illegal files are simply scans of magazines you could apparently buy, completely legally, over the counter, in the 1970s, just adds that last twist of "We have always been at war with Eurasia" doublethink _frisson_.

<comment><USER14> To me that's like arguing it's crazy to pursue anyone committing violent crimes because they're "just moving atoms around."

That said, I think it's totally ridiculous they don't devote _100%_ of the crime fighting effort to eradicating producers, slamming down on abusing parents, etc. That they're wasting time on easy targets seems sick to me. The argument is that by killing the market, the producers won't abuse kids, but I ain't buying that because I bet a dollar to a nickel that there's always been a small section of society that has sexually abused kids for their own sick pleasure from it.

<comment><USER15> The notion that child abuse would end because there would be no market for commercial child abuse is a stupid idea.

It's also the kind of idea that so frequently bubbles up in law enforcement: the eradication of visible crimes is more important than the eradication of the unseen ones. It's also because the visible ones are so easier to catch and give so much more TV coverage.

Going after the producers/abusers is the goal. Going after users do next to nothing to protect exploited children.

I have seen a similar attitude when I followed the investigations after I had a laptop robbed here in Brazil. Police officials were much more worried about catching the guy with the gun than the guy who bought the computers to resell. If you take down the guy in the spike, the buyer can quickly recruit another. If you take down the buyer, the hub, the whole "market" collapses for a while and crime drops (or migrates to other activities).

An that brings me to another story: when bank cashiers here started to use ATM-like equipment in their desks and had no meaningful amount of money easily accessible, bank robberies dropped to next to nothing. Interestingly, shortly after that, kindnapping spiked.

<comment><USER14> _The notion that child abuse would end because there would be no market for commercial child abuse is a stupid idea. [...] Going after the producers/abusers is the goal. Going after users do next to nothing to protect exploited children._

Agreed, but that's exactly what I just said, lol :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hope I'm not the only person who after reading this immediately deleted their browsing history; the thought of the title of this article appearing in my browser/address bar history in front of certain/most people, is cringe worthy.

EDIT: To the people down voting me, all I meant was I'm often showing stuff on my laptop to different people and I would be afraid of their assumption if I typed the letter "m" into my address bar and "My Life in Child Porn" popped-up because they might come to the wrong conclusions that's all. Whether their assumption is right or wrong, is irrelevant, I was just saying; it's something I'm aware of and wouldn't want to happen!

<comment><USER17> So you read somebody's writings about child porn. Does that make you a bad person? Is mentioning the phrase _child porn_ a crime? Is reading the words of a child pornographer wrong?

There's nothing wrong in reading an article. Anybody that thinks so is either deluding himself or is twisted in a really awful way.

EDIT: Okay, that makes sense. Sorry if it sounds like I was being scoldy.

<comment><USER16> No it doesn't make you a bad person, no mentioning the phrase isn't a crime and no reading the words of a child pornographer isn't wrong--in my opinion. However, not everyone shares my opinion and I can't take the attitude that my boss, client or whoever sees it pop-up in my address bar history is deluded or twisted, just because they don't share the same opinion as me.

<comment><USER18> And filtering/tracking software seems to be pretty naive. So if the network administrator uses tracking software, that article will probably raise a red flag. I would be somewhat surprised if a person thought that this article was inappropriate.

But I wouldn't be very surprised if this article got your internet history reviewed. That is at least an invasion of privacy.

And I think this would be most likely to happen on a network with a strict internet policy, like at a company. Also, if your history is checked, there is a possibility they will be reviewing how much time you spend on non-work related websites. But I'm probably being somewhat paranoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I found it seriously disturbing that there were some parents who actually thought it was ok to involve their kids in child porn.

<comment><USER19> I think the question that these parents asked themselves was do we let our (other) kids starve to death, let them live on the street and sniff glue , or etc... or get money from something that is "controlled" by them. With the collapse of Eastern bloc it was dark times for many..... and certain forces used the situation for personal gain. And it is not different from parents in Arab country or India selling their 9 years old daughter for arranged marriage.

<comment><USER20> I'm afraid that you're correct, but I think there is also a "darker" side to it. As the OP mentions, parents involving their kids in CP crosses class barriers and happens in both poor and rich families.

A few weeks ago, I took a primal therapy course, aimed at improving participants self-awareness and quality of life by letting them express pain experienced during childhood trauma. Anyway, the reason I am bringing this up is that some people in this course had childhood stories of abuse that would make anyone puke. And these were all high-income people with good jobs.

I believe all parents try their best, nobody wants to be a bad person. But if your perception of good parenting includes fucking your kids, that can make you do horrible things.

<comment><USER21> "good parenting includes fucking your kids" - eh? I didn't read that in the article, i.e. that sexual molestation by parents was a significant source of revenue (that was done through one-upmanship, apparently); it was rather children who "posed naked" with the consent of parents.

I do think it's important to recognize a spectrum here; and also, rational discussion requires avoiding emotive language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> the technology part is pretty interesting, the business model too.

Which brings me to a question...if you are that tech savvy to do all the stuff they talk about under technology...why risk all that for the peanuts they talk about in the business model?

<comment><USER10> As the writer of the letter states the majority of this is conducted by the russion organised gangs. Usually as one part of their larger cyber-crime operations.

That entire "industry" is a multi-million dollar one.

<comment><USER18> I'm assuming that the parts can be used for many different things.

The botnet can be rented out. And it can be used used to distribute ads. There was recently an article on HN about a guy who got arrested for putting spam on a botnet.

And I'm sure having access to private servers can be monetized in other areas too. At the very least you could use it to sell pirated material.

And of course the money laundering method they're using can probably be used in other areas too.

<comment><USER10> yep - the botnets are usually multipurpose. You can buy botnets containing a few thousand machines all over the place fairly cheaply now.

<comment><USER18> Do you know how likely it is for the police to arrest a bot herder?

<comment><USER10> Somewhere between low and impossible.

Usually it would be the users (the ones that send out the spam etc. via the networks) who get caught - and that is a very low number as well really (compared to those uncaught).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I found the bit about the US prison population growth rate interesting. The author points to a Reuters article that pegs prison population growth rate at about 4% ([http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN07275062200710...](http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN0727506220071007)), and, according to Google, the US population growth rate is 0.883%. I wonder why the former is so much higher than the latter, and how those numbers compare to historical trends.

<comment><USER24> Most of the growth is thanks to our drug policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ugh, if you ever wanted proof that Evil lurks in the heart of man...

<comment><USER17> I'm not comfortable using the word Evil big-E. This is human existence, good and bad. This guy obviously thinks there's a reason behind child porn. He made one or two points that sounded like they'd be worthy of debate at the very least, rather than instant dismissal. And the people participating did so for reasons. It isn't all abuse, from what he's saying here.

Calling things Evil is a convenient way of dismissing them. It means you can put it aside and roundly condemn it and feel better for having done so. The truth is more complicated: nothing is roundly good or roundly evil, which is exactly why it's so difficult at times.

<comment><USER18> While I agree that child abuse laws could use some change, mainly with how it deals with sex between people where the age difference is very small. For example, I'm not comfortable with an 18 year-old being viewed as a predator for having consensual sex with a 17 year-old.

But other than the fringe cases, I really don't see how it ever can be healthy for a child to be involved with an adult, or even be in a situation where they can give consent.

There is too great a power difference. Somebody mentioned earlier that some parents were basically forced to get their kids involved with porn so they could eat. What is the child going to do in that situation, say no? Basically, in that situation, if the child has a choice it's between eating and doing porn.

Also, minors today are taught that it is the acceptable thing to defer to adults. So children already have a lot of pressure to defer to adults instead of enforcing their personal boundaries.

And I can't imagine a child being seriously attracted to an adult. They are both in different stages in life. After I started college, I really viewed high school students differently. They are just in a different place in life. I have different goals, responsibilities, and plans then I did in high school. I really doubt I would have enough in common to be attracted to a high school student, let alone be able to make a healthy relationship work.

<comment><USER17> I agree. I don't think child porn is at all a good thing. (I also agree with the current age of consent laws, which some people think are too overstrict.) But I don't condemn the people who make it in their entirety. Everybody has a story talking about where they got to be where they are, and most of them aren't stories of pure evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is seriously creepy.</comment>


Researchers have successfully teleported wave packets of light - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/15/3192505.htm <comment><USER2> One thing that isn't clear in this article is whether they really teleportated it, meaning that they were able to transfer information _instantaneously_ from point A to point B (which would go against Einstein's relativity law that states that nothing can go faster than the speed of light), or if they just transported a light beam from one point to another with regular means of communication.

It sounds more like it's the later case, and the word "teleportation" here is probably more a link bait than anything else.

And in any case, the title in the article is horrible: "Scientists teleport Schrodinger's cat"

<comment><USER3> The speed limit of the universe isn't just some hypothesis waiting to be disproven. It can't be broken. It's impossible.

<comment><USER4> Scientific theories aren't reality - they are a _model_ of reality and to be considered scientific a theory has to be refutable - if you can't conceive of experimental results that would disprove your theory then it's not really a scientific theory.

So _every_ scientific theory is in a very real sense "waiting to be disproven".

<comment><USER3> We can know things. We know that no algorithm can determine whether or not arbitrary Turing machines will halt, because assuming the contrary leads to a contradiction. Similarly, no consistent axiomatic system powerful enough to express propositions of elementary arithmetic can be complete.

Neither the undecidability of the halting problem nor Gödel's first incompleteness theorem are "waiting to be disproven." Similarly, the speed limit of the universe, if assumed to be breakable, leads to all sorts of contradictions and true paradoxes. Note that I'm _not_ saying that the entirety of some theory, be it special or general relativity, quantum theory, etc. are known truths.

<comment><USER5> Algorithms, being a sub-branch of mathematics, are logical constructs, which means they can be proved or disproved on a logical basis. Physics is a scientific model of reality which is based on experimental observations (mathematics is used as a descriptive language, but the underlying reality itself is not (as far as we know) based on logic), therefore any physical theory is not provable, only verifiable through experiment to some statistical probability of correctness. The current physics theory is backed by a huge amount of observations, so admittedly we can be pretty sure about much of the theory. But to say that we "know" is not correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A better word for non-quantum-physicists would be "transport" here. It's very difficult to move quantum bits from one place to another at all. The light beam is used to increase the reliability of that process.

This doesn't affect how -classical- information is transmitted or make it any better. It makes -quantum- information transmission reliable, which is actually pretty significant. This should allow for quantum computers of larger sizes than the super-tiny ones that have been created so far to actually work.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-teleportation_theorem> (why it is difficult to transmit quantum information)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation> (what is being done in this experiment) What the breakthrough is is a way to do quantum telportation reliably -and- quickly (which had both been done before)

</comment><comment><USER7> Why are people assuming that 'teleportation' means instantaneous travel?

To me, teleporting has always meant transferring the information that describes an object to another location, where the object is reproduced. This transfer of information occurs via light/radio waves or similar.

<comment><USER8> I hate to post what is nearly a "me too", but I'd also like to ask that question, with the clarification that I do not mean it as a rhetorical equivalent of "No, of course it's not instantaneous, duh", I am genuinely curious where the sheer confidence of the definition of "teleportation" as "instantaneous in violation of relativity" suddenly came from. Is there some scifi show on TV that I'm not watching that is promulgating this interpretation or something? I've seen the belief that entanglement can be used for FTL communication going back unto yea the very beginnings of the internet but this solid and shared definition of instantaneous is new to me vs. even the iteration of this whole argument I saw a few months ago. (Fringe maybe? Haven't started that yet.)

<comment><USER9> Not sure how anyone could of missed the whole teleport = instantaneous thing... Thankfully Wikipedia is here to save the day! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fiction_containing_tele...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fiction_containing_teleportation)

<comment><USER8> I have had this conversation twice a year for the past ten to fifteen years. Something needs to have _changed_ , because the conversation has changed in the way I cited. The vast bulk of those don't even address whether it's "instantaneous" in violation of lightspeed because they just ignore lightspeed entirely. You in fact seem to be reinforcing my point by the casual assumption that teleportation _must_ be instantaneous-as-FTL by the very definition of the word, and thus the mere fact that the word is used proves your point (circularly, I might add), so let me ask you: Where did you get that idea? It's not the way the word has been defined for the past 50 years, it's a new mutation. Why do you think that? (And why would English have such a rigid, useless definition for a word like that?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Teleportation is a misnomer here. Nothing is being teleported or transmitted rather information is being measured in two different locations simultaneously as if it were teleported. What I believe is that information is showing up in two different locations simultaneously. This term, entanglement, I think means that every quantum spin has an equal and opposite quantum spin at some other location that always exists. In other words, there's an opposite "thing" of our "thing" and when we adjust our "thing" we can now see or measure the opposite "thing" adjusting oppositely.

</comment><comment><USER11> So what's the meaning here? I've been reading similar (to a non quantum physicist) stories for years and RTFA. What will this change about my life?

<comment><USER12> Minimum round trip time between San Francisco and Tokyo is about 60ms due to the speed of light, which means in practice FPS games are unplayable across the ocean.

If they manage to implement this shit, we'll be able to have FPS games hosted anywhere in the world!

<comment><USER13> If we could actually break causality, playing games would be the last thing on our minds.

<comment><USER14> If causality is broken, how do you know it wasn't the _first_ thing on our minds? :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can anyone explain what quantum teleportation is? Wikipedia does not help, aside from assuring me that it is not what I thought it was:

 _Quantum teleportation, or entanglement-assisted teleportation, is a process by which a qubit (the basic unit of quantum information) can be transmitted exactly (in principle) from one location to another, without the qubit being transmitted through the intervening space. It is useful for quantum communication and computation. It does not transport the system itself, nor does it allow communication of information at superluminal (faster than light) speed. Neither does it concern rearranging the particles of a macroscopic object to copy the form of another object._

<comment><USER16> I found it best described as such: you put a white marble and a black marble in separate paper bags. You send one to a friend. As soon as you open the bag, you instantaneously know what color the other marble is. That doesn't mean you can instantaneously communicate with your friend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'll try to explain from what I understood in quantum physics class years ago.

When you're dealing with things on the quantum level, observing a particle affects it. Remember Schrodinger's cat? The cat is both dead and alive, until someone opens the box. The opening of the box gives the cat its new state of deadness or aliveness.

Quantum teleportation works through entangled particles. Entangled particles are, in some sense, the same particle in two places. An action on one entangled particle will instantly affect the other particle, including observation of the particle.

Suppose Alice and Bob share an entangled particle. Alice observes the particle on her end, collapsing it into one of four states. Which state it collapses into is and always will be completely random.

Bob's particle was instantaneously affected in one of four ways corresponding to those states. Trouble is, he doesn't know which way, and he can't do anything with his particle until he does.

Alice has to communicate to Bob in any regular way, through light, telephone or internet, what she observed on her end, so that Bob knows what exactly happened to his particle, and what to do with it.

So in this way, it really was instantaneous over a distance, but at the same time nothing useful happened faster than the speed of light.

</comment><comment><USER18> Can someone please explain what the term "teleport" mean here? I'm not getting why this is an amazing scientific breakthrough (but I'd love to learn why it is).

If it doesn't mean information travelling instantaneously or faster than light, then did the reporter (or the scientist) put the word "teleport" in the title just so it's attention grabbing?!

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone found the DOI link yet? The explanation in the article is, I agree, awful, and I want to read what they actually did! If it was only moving a bit of information from RAM to a register (or the quantum equivalent) which it sounds like...then yea, no biggie.

</comment><comment><USER20> And this is why science is hard to report on

</comment><comment><USER12> Does this conflict with the notion of the speed of light being a universal maximum speed? If teleporting information causes bi-directional communication to be instant, aren't signals being propagated at faster than the speed of light?

<comment><USER21> It's not instantaneous; there's no conflict, no FTL to see here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> chinese dit it even over the air last year, distance - 16 km <http://www.physorg.com/news193551675.html>

so what's new?

</comment><comment><USER23> I, uh, recognize the Hammond 1590D box. Do I get partial credit?

</comment><comment><USER24> The damn cat was not both alive and dead simultaneously...

</comment><comment><USER25> I have no idea what that experiment does but the pic is cool!

EDIT: The pic is not cool?

<comment><USER21> Downvotes probably due to people thinking that your comment adds nothing to the conversation, not necessarily disagreeing with you (I would think that the pic would be cooler if it were higher res; as it is, I can't make much sense of it).

<comment><USER26> <http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/201104/r751650_6238699.jpg>

reasonably high res

<comment><USER27> (a) So, what, those are optics they use to bounce the beam around, so they can get 10km of laser beam on a 5m bench?

(b) I can't look at that picture without thinking of Agatha's dingbots from _Girl Genius._ <http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20091005></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I didn't understand how widespread rape was. Then the penny dropped - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/05/dsk-sexual-assault-feminism-weinstein-casting-couch <comment><USER2> Now take that realization and apply it to racism, homophobia/transphobia, classism, other forms of misogyny and sexism besides outright physical sexual assault, and all sorts of other problems that plague our world. Sucks, huh.</comment>


Surge in chess popularity creates drama, friction among grandmasters - <AUTHOR> https://www.sportingnews.com/us/other-sports/news/surge-in-chess-popularity-creating-friction-among-grandmasters/zjzp5k5kog911q529rfx5wr7b <comment><AUTHOR> The current presence on Twitch of young, funny chess masters like the Chess Brahs and the Botez sisters with top level talents like Nakamura crossing over with famous xQc-types is maybe the best thing to happen to chess in recent years to showcase it as something fun loving young people can enjoy, not just the dusty old men and social incompetents of caricature.

It would be great if it encourages new people to come in from esports and elsewhere, and bust through the gatekeepers and play this brilliant game.</comment>


Transfer Files from PC to Amiga Using a Null Modem Cable - <AUTHOR> http://amigalove.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=15 <comment><USER2> I transferred files from my commodore 64 to PC by connecting the C64 modem phone line to the PC phone line and powering up by connecting both in parallel with the actual phone line to get the dial tone one modem needed and then by dialing the Telstra number check to trick the dialing modem to think it had successfully dialed a number and get the receiving modem to pick up on the telstra number call back test and to maintain the required Line voltage during the transfer..

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure why this story is so popular.

It's just an advertisement for a simple yet very expensive program which solves a well-understood problem that has been solved many times before.

<comment><USER4> Made me curious enough to find the price, perhaps I'm not looking right, are you calling the "Amiga Explorer" program of $9.95 "very expensive" (found here: [http://www.amigaforever.com/ae/](http://www.amigaforever.com/ae/) ) or is there some other program you're referring to?

<comment><USER3> Yeah.

And even a simple aminet search like this: [http://aminet.net/search?query=serial+transfer](http://aminet.net/search?query=serial+transfer)

Does show a load of free alternatives.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few free file transfer programs out there often limited in size they can send or one at a time), but I think AExplorer may be one of the only dummy-proof options out there that installs the "receiver" script for you on the Amiga side while also providing an easy to use file browser on the PC side with few file limitations. If the ones on Aminet do that, too, then that would be very cool.

<comment><USER3> FTP over SLIP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, for me at least, getting my 1200 online is my next to-do. I got a wireless card for it. So yeah - FTP is in the future (to be fair, most aren't ever put online but it is a modern option).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool! I first thought the install-over-serial meant they had found some kind of "exploit" of the AmigaOS, but it turned out you do have to run a command on the Amiga to copy incoming data into a file. Phew!

Also, this part:

 _Be sure you plug the cable into the Serial port on the Amiga, not the Parallel port! They look the same._

Was interesting, since it's clear from the picture (and "general knowledge") that a 25-pin serial port and a 25-pin parallel port _do not_ look the same; the serial port is male on the computer, while the parallel port is female.

Thus, it's not possible to plug the cable, which was very well-specified in the article to have a female plug, into the parallel port.

<comment><USER6> You can plug anything into anything, with enough force.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Surely would be better to use SLIP or PPP and set up a IP network.. Amiga could certainly do that, I did so back in the day.

Mind you, I don't know if modern Windows can do SLIP ..

</comment><comment><USER8> I used null-modem-cable, called rs-cable between my Casio FP-200 "laptop" and 286 AT PC. Later Laplink was used to transfer files much faster over parallel port.

<comment><USER9> ...and also the method to get laplink to the other PC was quite similar:

[http://imgur.com/J5lCnbz](http://imgur.com/J5lCnbz)

        MODE COM1,2400,n,8,1,p -> configure serial port
        CTTY COM1              -> let the other computer control the terminal (command.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> OMG What's next? Connecting the Amiga with a TV set?

<comment><USER11> Or connecting it with a Toaster???</comment></comment>


Scheme:  Good or Bad for Freshman CS? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9w1br/scheme_for_first_year_cs_classes_good_or_bad/ A new CS student states his opinion on why Scheme is a poor choice for intro CS.  More interesting because of the attitude that comes across clearly: that "working" code is all that matters, not testing, commenting, or other maintainability elements.  Hopefully his program will explicitly address this issue. <comment><AUTHOR> A new CS student states his opinion on why Scheme is a poor choice for intro CS. More interesting because of the attitude that comes across clearly: that "working" code is all that matters, not testing, commenting, or other maintainability elements. Hopefully his curriculum will explicitly address this issue.

<comment><USER2> The interesting thing here is that his attitude is quite representative of what I've seen in plenty of companies.

Code that 'works' is treated as though it is holy because hardly anybody is around that worked on it originally and touching it is inviting disaster, because the comments are non-existent.

In the 80s there were plenty of companies that made a substantial living out of selling system development courses, where you were taught how to do it 'properly'.

This led to 12 lines of comments for every line of code, 100's of file folders full of ascii art that never were looked at.

The pendulum for some reason never seems to stop in the middle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you want your education to be about only what you will use at a job, then go get a degree from a technical college that has a programming degree. If want to learn computer science, which truthfully is more a math degree than an engineering degree, learn to love new things.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe I'm just in a bad mood tonight, but I really envy the fact that this "student" is learning scheme. My college used Modula-2 on an IBM 370 for all the mainline classes.

<comment><USER4> Yep.. my university covered things like data structures and complexity well enough, but felt they had to dumb things down for freshmans, many of who would not be advancing.

So we had java and pascal for various first year courses... I wish they had just gone straight to Scheme - it would have been mind-altering and a lot of fun.

They did have one course which was heavily project based which is the one I remember clearly - write a toy compiler, add a feature to a minix like OS, spellchecker with compressed dictionary etc.</comment></comment>