Tell HN: My first protest - <AUTHOR>

I'm 27 years old and I've never really been bothered to protest before. Sure, I've volunteered. I've participated in political campaigns. I've signed petitions and written my Congressmen. I've voted. But nothing had ever felt quite so bad to me that I needed to march. Other people would take care of that, as they always have, and the system would fix itself.
Something's changed. A little over a year ago today I enlisted in the Army National Guard. In a week I head to SD for "Phase 1" of Officer Candidate School. (I don't purport to represent the military).
Perhaps the reality of putting my life on the line for our country has made me take political change more personally. Of course, the past decades' worth of restrictions on our freedoms hasn't helped. I've seen many comparisons here between warrantless spying and past oppressions, or with other states' far more terrible security apparatuses. "It's really not that bad." "It could be worse." These all feel like false equivalencies.
We, of all people, should recognize the staggering, unpredictable impact that technology will have on our lives in just the coming decade alone. Given what we know about the accelerating pace of technology, are you really comfortable giving the government – any government – free reign over all your data? Do you want to set that precedent?
I'm no longer convinced that the system will self-correct. I see things coming to pass that make me worry for our collective future. I worry that if I don't step up and say something, these worries will be completely brushed aside.
Today I march. And I feel like it's the best thing I've done since I took my oath of enlistment.
Join me: http://www.restorethefourth.net/protests/ <comment><USER2> I was going to open a thread this evening to ask HN who went to the Restore the Fourth protests today, but instead I will ask for your observations of the protests here. I'd love to hear from anyone who attended a protest.

Between 6:00pm and 7:00pm, my family was in Minneapolis for the Minneapolis Restore the Fourth protest. The total attendance during that hour was greater than 100, but definitely less than 200. I was expecting many more people, and was surprised at how unoccupied the Government Center plaza was when I arrived. One TV news crew was there, from the local ABC affiliate station, and the reporter interviewed several different protest participants, and the camera operator filmed a lot of the scene. Our hand-printed "We support the Bill of Rights" poster was surely picked up by the TV camera, but may not have been on air. It was a long time before I noticed any police presence at all. The plaza is overlooked by an upper balcony, reachable from outside open-air stairways, and I noticed (eventually) two police officers there. Everyone seemed very calm, and my ten-year-old daughter, who had done the most work in making the sign, was rather bored by the whole thing.

The weather was gorgeous all over Minnesota today. Outdoor activities were very popular, and later in the evening my daughter and I saw celebratory fireworks for Independence Day in one town, while my sixteen-year-old son saw them in another. Where I saw the fireworks, there was a jazz band playing in an outdoor bandshell as the sun went down, and then just before the fireworks, the lead singer of the band sang the national anthem, and just about all of the thousands of people there stood, cheering at the end of the anthem, "the land of the free, and the home of the brave." Americans here are still in a very celebratory mood about freedom, and happy to enjoy public celebrations with thousands of their fellow Americans in public places.</comment>


Show HN: Markovbooth - <AUTHOR> https://booth.zappa.io/ <comment><USER2> I would add something on the page to explain why the app needs camera access.</comment>


Pinerly.com takes pitch decks to the next level in 3d - <AUTHOR> http://www.pinerly.com/deck

<comment><USER2> It's nice to experiment with these techniques, but in my opinion it fails as a practical way to quickly provide the visitor with the information they need. From a visual point of view, something like <http://pitch.csspiffle.com/> provides a more pleasant viewing experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> That definitely gets the information across, the point of this deck however was to get more attention and standout rather than push information across. This approach seems standard and something we were going to do, but decided to go with a different experience.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would love to hear your comments / feedback

<comment><USER3> I was disoriented a little at first. I think side strut is a little useless and confusing to the average user. I would replace the controls with: front/back => walk forwards/backwards, and left/right => turn left/right. Pretty cool concept though -- I like it. Keep mouse clicks for interacting with stuff (scrolling through the pages on the ad at the end of the hallway was pretty cool)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome really appreciate the feedback, it's helpful, want to make sure the experience is great all across! will possibly change it shortly, were you able to convey the information out of the deck?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you implement a threaded forum? - <AUTHOR>

How would you go about making a threaded forum, like on HN assuming that you want it to be efficient and deal well with edge cases? And also assuming that you want to load entries from a database, as opposed to having the information in a flat file (As I believe HN does)
The obvious and easy way would be to write a small recursive function that loads posts from the database where the parent is the current post. There are two disadvantages to this approach as I see it:
1) It doesn't deal well with posts that have children being deleted.
2) You would need to make a DB call every time you call the recursive function, resulting in a large number of DB calls to show a thread.
The first problem could be solved by not actually deleting the DB entry when an entry is deleted, but merely deleting the text. When you display the post you can check whether the textfield is empty and display [deleted] or something similar.
The second problem is a bit more hairy, I think. You could load all the entries of a thread into an array in one DB call and have your recursive function look through the array every time it runs. The problem is that this would be using a Shlemiel the painter's algorithm[1]. So maybe the solution is to delete entries from the array as the recursive function uses them.
How would you do it?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlemiel_the_painter%27s_Algorithm and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/fog0000000319.html <comment><USER2> You don't have to reflect the threaded nature of the discussion in your database. Just give every comment a foreign key to the original post or forum topic, and whenever you're displaying anything about that original post, fetch all comments about it from the database, and then after the DB part is done, then worry about which comments you actually want to display. A single DB call to fetch at most a few thousand comments should be faster than a DB call for each comment.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you need to deal with hierarchies in SQL, look into nested sets. It allows you to make a single db call to retrieve a full set of parent/child related items.

It's basically an augmented data structure (adding a left/right value pair to the data) to allow you to query somewhat like ErrantX mentions (ie, to find the child tree of a thread with left=x and right=y, select all data where left > x and right < y). Re: deleted children, I'd just add a column to the table to store a deleted flag. You can pretty easily move comments to new parents, but have to recompute your left/right value pairs - I've done this in SQL before, it's no biggie, but I wouldn't want to be doing it in an app where I was aiming for high transaction rates (ie, human edits to threads would probably be ok, driving millions of bank transactions would not).

Joe Celko has a whole book out on hierarchies in SQL and I like it. You can find decent examples out on the web as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://threebit.net/tutorials/nestedset/tutorial1.html>

Using this method on a table with 1.2 million rows, I can get a thread with a single db call. It hasn't given me a single problem yet, though obviously it is slower then standard flat list.

</comment><comment><USER5> Someone posted a thread the other day about good ways to store threaded discussions.

Store it like:

1

1.1

1.1.1

1.2

2

2.1

2.2

etc.

And load it in one database query ( id > x AND id < y or w/e) then traverse through it. easy.

EDIT: I would handle deleted like you suggest.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few problems with this approach IMHO:

\- If the discussion is sorted by something else than the counter, karma for instance, it isn't quite as easy.

\- When you're moving posts you need to look at all the children and make changes ccordingly. This might not be a huge problem in itself, but there are problematic edge cases. What if someone makes a rely to a thread that has just been moved for instance? It would get archived wrong.

\- If you want to encapsulate a post and it's children (if for instance you want to be able to hide children w. javascript) you need to write out the HTML using a recursive algorithm.

Besides, it doesn't seem like a very elegant solution ;-)

<comment><USER6> "- If the discussion is sorted by something else than the counter, karma for instance, it isn't quite as easy." ORDER BY karma?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the first problem could be better solved with a column that says "Include this row when displaying". You could simply have a DisplayOnsite column that's a bool. If true, display. In your view/proc/method/whatever (in SQL), just eliminate any rows WHERE DisplayOnsite=0.

One thing pops to mind: Do you ever want to change the order of the threaded comments? For example, if you are having a Q&A forum, do you want people to be able to "Mark as Correct Answer" and then you sort by the most votes for correct answer first? That would affect the hierarchy.</comment>


Iran Unfetters Cellphones, and the Pictures Start Flowing - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/world/asia/iran-speeds-up-cellphone-connections.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

<comment><USER2> I remember many years ago someone comparing a photo spread in TIME on Iran, which was all moody black and white shots of murals of martyrs, and Flickr photos from Iran, which was people having fun at the beach etc.</comment>


My open source brain data - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mattangriffel/afa45dd83246

<comment><USER2> I'd suggest to record all of the foods you eat each day. Just a quick list. Also total calories would be interesting, and exercise.

I tracked diet, and my estimates of mental functions for a while and surprisingly found that strawberries increased my mood considerably. Of course I could just be bad at statistics :-(

<comment><USER3> Did you harbor affection for strawberries beforehand?

<comment><USER2> I guess I've always liked them. Do you think that would make a difference?

I noticed they're high in vitamin C so I was thinking maybe it was related to that.

<comment><USER3> Vitamin C is in so many things now that it seems unlikely that the additional vitamin c in strawberries would have much of an effect. There's a lot of positive benefit of long-term consistent consumption of various fruits (such as the study that showed an association between blueberries and brain health) but for such an effect on mood in the short term it could be that you just like them :). But hey, if it works, it works!

<comment><USER2> Well at the time I was dieting pretty hard, so it might be possible to have had a short term deficiency of vitamin C. But good.

If I recall I did a correlation analysis, between foods and mood and strawberries related jumped out strongly.

<comment><USER4> Strawberries contain serotonin! This is pretty well-studied; it's hypothesized they do it because serotonin in the gut acts as a laxative, causing you to expel the strawberry seeds without digesting them.

If the serotonin manages to make it into your bloodstream (e.g. if your gut bacteria don't want it, and your stomach pH isn't low enough to destroy it, and your gut permeability is high) then you'll certainly get a mood boost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's an interesting test for sure. I do similar with brain training on the 3DS, and though I've always been mindful of the various factors affecting my performance, I've never gone the effort of mapping them vs. my results.

As noted, as long as you don't start drawing any conclusions before you've played consistently to eliminate practice effects (getting better at the games) as best you can, it's fairly interesting and valuable stuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool project. I think it would be really cool if you try to interpolate some EEG data (collected through MyndPlay, Emotiv or sth else).

<comment><USER7> This would definitely elevate this project to something really noteworthy, I've a friend who works with EEG data who would absolutely love this. Chances are the data would be too noisy to be useful (from experience this is one of the biggest problems with collecting data from the human brain, there's a lot going on) but you never know til you experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, author here. What I'd really like is feedback from statisticians / cognitive scientists about better / less biased ways to perform these tests and the analysis.</comment>


All-You-Can-Fly Airline Plies the California Coast - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/business/airline-banks-on-a-buffet-style-business-model.html <comment><USER2> It's funny that a huge part of the reason that a business like this exists is the TSA. If flying commercial airlines didn't require an hour and a half of waiting in line for security and a fair dose of humiliation, I think people would be much more willing to fly from SFO to LAX.

Instead, we're running inefficient propeller planes for short distances and really high prices, and people are treating it like it's some amazing new innovation.

<comment><USER3> I was in California in 2009 and found it weird that there was no daily train between LA and SF - it only runs (ran?) every second day. The day I left, I had to get a bus to Bakersfield to connect to the train.

The other striking thing was train travel in the South being heavily subsidised - huge distances travelled for not much money, with power for your laptop and lots of space to move around. If the train schedule was appropriate for you, you'd be crazy to fly instead.

<comment><USER4> The Coast Starlight ([http://www.amtrak.com/coast-starlight- train](http://www.amtrak.com/coast-starlight-train)) has been running once a day between LA and Oakland for years, with a connecting bus to SF - here's its schedule: [http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/935/314/Coast-Starlight- Schedule...](http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/935/314/Coast-Starlight- Schedule-071513,0.pdf) It takes about 12 hours if there are no delays. It's a lovely and relaxing trip, but that's a long time compared to flying or driving.

If you want to leave SF/Oakland later than 9 am or LA later than 10 am, you have to take some long bus connections (which aren't very fun) and the San Joaquin or Pacific Surfliner.

<comment><USER5> Would that trip be interesting for a high-speed train connection? It's approximately 600 km (380 miles), that should be possible in about 3 hours. The terrain doesn't look too bad either at first glance.

<comment><USER6> As was stated, it's being worked on. It also runs into one of those things that a lot of people from outside of California don't realize about the state. There are a /lot/ of mountain ranges. The Starlight itself meanders along and through various bits of the coastal ranges of California, which, while absolutely gorgeous, leads to a path that's not particularly amenable to high speed travel.

So, the state needs to build new trackage through a 3000 ft (~1km) pass getting out of LA, and more trackage through a 1500 ft pass getting out of the SF area in order to use the much more straight and speedy right-of-way going through the middle of the state. Once that's done, and the rights of way along the corridor are upgraded, high speed rail will run between the points. Just gonna take another 15-20 years to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've never quite mentally reconciled the idea that people whose industry is built on telecommunication should have to spend hours and days traveling to talk about it.

<comment><USER8> I suspect that might change in the near future if telepresence with large, 4K screens showing life-sized, full body representations of people became commonplace. It seems like a lot of the necessity of in-person conferences and meetings is still things like realistic eye contact and subtle body language cues.

<comment><USER9> No, lower profit margins will kill it. With current enterprise software pricing you can afford lots of flights as part of the sales process. With SAAS type models you can't.

<comment><USER10> There will always be software that is worth the equivalent of millions of dollars (at least for the foreseeable future).

Maybe you can build a SAAS equivalent to SAP that puts it out of business... but companies will want a HumanBrainSimulatron (R) or a perfect weather forecaster or whatever the next complex software is, which will still be multimillion dollars' worth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fascinating! Although, as a cautionary data point, selling "all you can fly" didn't work too well for American Airlines:

[http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/05/business/la- fi-0506-...](http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/05/business/la- fi-0506-golden-ticket-20120506)

<comment><USER12> That was because the people were allowed to fly with a "guest", and started selling their seats to strangers in violation of the rules.

With this airline, everyone will be required to buy a membership -- no "guests".

<comment><USER13> Also, this seems to be month-to-month as opposed to a lifetime deal. "Unlimited" for a month could be true. "Unlimited" for life isn't.

<comment><USER14> I wonder how the duration-limited "all you can fly" JetBlue deals worked out for them.

"Unlimited airpasses" for international visitors to places like Southeast Asia are pretty common, combined with long-haul international flights, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's interesting that he ran the numbers and picked single engine aircraft for safety (but with two pilots); this seems correct from what I've seen of small aircraft stats. If you look at successful dispatch rate, it's even more clear that single engine is the way to go.

I'd do something like this if they covered Seattle, SF, Reno, Portland, and central-WA (datacenters) and central-OR (datacenters). Throw in SB/LA/SD/LV for extra fun, but the northern areas are what I care about much much more.

<comment><USER15> Light twin piston engine aircraft have can be difficult to control on one engine, and may not even maintain altitude in some conditions. A PC-12 uses a PT6 turboprop engine, which is one of the most reliable turboprop engines available.

Light twin piston aircraft are not exactly cheap either.

<comment><USER14> Indeed; I've had this conversation (in favor of a Grand Caravan) with lots of crappy C-23 (Shorts 330) military pilots. And the "oh, let's put fuel above the passenger compartment in a plane we're flying in a warzone" question, too. The C-12 King Airs were somewhat better, but tiny. I'd take a PC-12 > King Air anyday, and a Caravan or Grand Caravan in general (due to superior cargo capability, even at the cost of range), but that's my preference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very cool. Virgin started with one only plane. SA's present niche is quite different. The bottom line is that it's doable considering others still exist.

Tip: Virgin LHR counter is well run and I look forward to stopping by for that reason. It's not about promoting a particular brand as a good way of doing life... leave the world a better place.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm a PC-12 pilot in the Northeast and have been watching this company since it was little more than an idea and a Twitter account (original name Plane Red). Their marketing and execution is so much better than other small airlines. I'd love to see a service like this come to the NYC area. So many people spend far more than this per month on tickets to go to Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, the Hamptons and coastal Maine.

</comment><comment><USER18> If they could find a way to drop the monthly cost of this to around $500, this could potentially make working in the Bay Area more viable for a lot of people.

If you could shave $500 off your monthly rent or mortgage by living in a coastal CA city and just flying in to work in Silicon Valley or SF, I think a lot more people would be willing to sign up. The service would essentially pay for itself.

<comment><USER19> I am on the waiting list, depending on limits and schedule of the service I will be using this about three or four times a week to do a daily commute between my condo in Los Angeles and eBay in San Jose. It works out to about what I would pay for a Bay area shared room but I get to come home each evening and see my cats and dog. And my wife.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If they can make this work in Tahoe that would be great. A few commercial airlines have tried service to South Lake Tahoe, but the weather has made service too unpredictable. It might make sense to use Reno or Minden NV airports to access Tahoe.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's like web hosting. You have to be careful not to overload the servers, or in this case planes, so that paying the monthly is not worth it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I know a lot of consultants who fly every weekend. If this had better city coverage it would actually be cost effective.

</comment><comment><USER23> great place for the dhs to blow shit up and give the tsa reason to fuck around. i hear they're policing highways already. about time for these assholes to expand to europe. it's more likely i get struck by lightning but i'm so afraid of terrorists! come grope me!</comment>


Fred Hampton - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton <comment><USER2> I've been seeing Fred pop up a lot more here and there recently. Makes me happy.

We need a new Rainbow Coalition. A Fred Hampton-style one, not the 80s version.

"We're not going to fight fire with fire. We're going to fight fire with water. We're not going to fight racism with racism, but with solidarity. We're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but with socialism."

For those who don't know, he was murdered by Chicago police in coordination with the FBI, as part of a scandalous program called COINTELPRO.

He preached working-class solidarity between blacks, whites and Latinos, and that's why they wanted him dead.

<comment><USER3> The people! United! Can never be defeated!</comment></comment>


Steve Ballmer Buys into Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/steve-ballmer-buys-into-twitter/ <comment><USER2> It's a great time to tap into such a massive user base at a huge discount... should Google come knocking, Steve will be dancing.</comment>


Opera Automatically Uploads Compatible Free Android Apps to Nokia X Store - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+AnderWebbs/posts/DuNoYThQhmm

<comment><USER2> VERY mis-leading title. This isn't from Nokia, it's from Opera.com, which operates a number of mobile app stores, including Nokia.

And it's very likely not pirating - it's uploading an app the developer already had in an Opera store to Nokia's store.

How Opera's system works is that it will automatically upload apps (the latest version it has that works against the runtime or whatever) to the new stores that appear. It used to automatically list them for download, but they got blowback from users and now you have to validate the account. Then whatever version you have in Opera's database will become available for Nokia X.

It's not a bad way to get compatible apps in a store. I understand users might be freaked out, but you can either not confirm the email or contact Opera/Nokia and decline having your app in their store. By signing Opera's ToS, they have extended distribution rights for your free apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> The English seems a bit funny e.g. "You have app and possibly more", you sure this is Nokia?

edit: Author's comment: "It's not from Nokia, it comes from Opera.com (non- fake address according to gmail filters)." I think the title of the post is a bit misleading.

</comment><comment><USER4> This title appears to be false. We're burying this story until someone suggests an accurate, neutral title.

Also, what's the news here? Is this something more than a random scammer?

<comment><USER2> Read my comment. Not even a scammer as far as I can tell, since they got the email (and it didn't go to someone who uploaded a pirated APK to Opera with a different account name/contact info.

<comment><USER4> If someone would please come up with an accurate, neutral title, we'll change it.

<comment><USER2> So I think the problem is, the guy freaked out for no reason?

Maybe, Opera Automatically Uploads Compatible Free Android Apps to Nokia X Store?

<comment><USER4> Ok, we changed it. If that turns out to be inaccurate, we can change it again, although so many users have now flagged this story that it won't get very high in rank.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Larry has approved renaming Perl 6 to raku - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/10/larry-has-approved-renaming-perl-6-to-raku.html <comment><USER2> Interesting. I've never considered Perl's name to be its biggest problem. The readability is and renaming the language does not address that.</comment>


Show HN: Antdsite – A document generator based on Ant Design and GatsbyJsg - <AUTHOR> https://antdsite.yvescoding.org <comment><AUTHOR> Antdsite is a document generator based on Ant Design and GatsbyJs. You can write document via Antdsite and generate static html files.

It is originly modified from Ant Design Pro Site: [https://pro.ant.design/](https://pro.ant.design/) and I make it configuarable.

The features:

You can use Ant Design out of box.

You can use JSX in markdown.

You can custom themes. See: [https://antdsite.yvescoding.org/guide/theme](https://antdsite.yvescoding.org/guide/theme)

You can also custom theme color. See: [https://antdsite.yvescoding.org/default-theme- config/#cutom-...](https://antdsite.yvescoding.org/default-theme- config/#cutom-theme-color)</comment>


Metcalf Sniper Attack - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack <comment><USER2> I was on duty as security for a.. semi secret substation designated as critical infrastructure that night. In the Bay Area, we just had to divert power a little bit. It basically didn't affect the grid at all.

Everyone was all a little more worried as to if this was isolated, if we were next, etc etc.

Transformers that are small are often on hand and easy to swap out. But some of the bigger ones have months long lead times. The facility we were at had transformers that had a 6 month lead time from Germany to replace them and they had to be sent via boat as they wouldn't fit in planes.

The average person isn't going to know that about transformers. Which leads more credence to the fact it's an inside job.

<comment><USER3> To me this whole thread reads like an ad for solar + local storage. There should be tremendous resilience advantages compared to grid power. I'm surprised security/defence authorities aren't pushing for that?

<comment><USER4> I don't understand your point.

If it's the "instant delivery" you propose to replace by local storage, what is the link with solar? You could as well store energy received from the grid.

Solar is particularly inefficient, both because of the volume it requires per unit of energy produced, and because storing energy incurs a huge loss (also, since this post discusses security risks, I guess storing large amounts of energy at home is definitely not the safest of options)

<comment><USER5> "Solar is particularly inefficient, both because of the volume it requires per unit of energy produced, and because storing energy incurs a huge loss "

When your goal is to be at least temporarily energy autark (in case of a power loss for some days) it does not really matter, how much energy was needed to produce the panels. What matters is, that you have that powersource in that moment.

And it surely works very efficient, especially in california.

Even in rainy middle europe, I am able to go to a remote place with my tent, laptop, power bank and small solar panels - and can enjoy distraction free working time - without access to the grid.

<comment><USER6> > What matters is, that you have that powersource in that moment.

And if that moment is during the night, you don't have it. If power outage is a part of your threat model, you want something that you can reliably switch to in a very short time and that will reliably provide the power you need for as long as you need to get the primary power supply back up.

<comment><USER7> I could entirely scrape by without power at night for some time. Would it be inconvenient? Absolutely. Threatening? No. The little infrastructure I'd really need to run over night includes probably my fridge and my freezer and those could be powered by a battery backup for that time. There's ready made modules for available for that (camping equipment level ready).

Stove, oven, kettle not being available would be seriously annoying, but not threatening either. Intermittent power would be a massive improvement over no power at all.

<comment><USER6> Right, but you're not running a data center or factory.

Individually, unless you're in very harsh climates, the safety margin for normal operations is huge. But that's not the case for complex systems. You can't simply shut down a data center for a week without turning it from a data center into some expensive building that currently provides zero value.

Society relies on reliability. By extension, so do you, because without reliability in factories, there won't be solar modules, batteries and all the fancy gadgets being produced. Individually, you can easily survive a few days without power, or without food for that matter. But on a society level, that's a very different story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand why this is called a terror attack. From the article it seems managers got spooked, sure. But it doesn't read as if the general population was.

Granted, it's possible the attack failed to achieve its goal and that's why the population is not terrorised. But even then: an actual terrorist could've easily kept track of news on damages caused and how close to great effect they had come. That would surely incentive them to try again. But I'm not aware of that happening.

So what is the terror angle here?

<comment><USER9> The terror angle is that someone tried to disrupt a major component of the electrical grid. It's hard to imagine a motive for such an attack that doesn't involve trying to cause major panic to a community. That's definitely qualifiable as terrorism.

Just because they didn't attempt again (that we know of) doesn't mean that they weren't terrorists to begin with. Also noted in the article, investigators later believed it to be an inside job. This goes into wild speculation, but if the attackers worked at DHS, they may have known how close an investigation came to revealing them and opted not to try again. We'll probably never know why though.

<comment><USER10> Terrorism is any use of violence or intimidation for the purpose of furthering a political goal. The political motive is a necessary element of terrorism. While you could presume terrorism as being the most likely explanation, it's not the only one, as state sponsored acts tend not to be classified as terrorism (depending on the perceived legitimacy of the state in question).

Of course is a politically loaded word, so people will redefine it to suit whatever their political agenda is. But that's it's original definition at least.

<comment><USER11> This is such a unnecessary nitpick since yourself seem to understand by calling it terrorism, people are explicitly declaring their belief that it was to political ends.

It's like people calling a bush fire arson, then you giving the definition of arson and saying "arson refers to the deliberate act of setting a fire"...

That's kind of the whole point of implicating it was arson, to further narrow the cause/motivation of an incident.

Also the nitpick isn't internally consistent, if you want to be literal and say terrorism _any_ use of violence for the purpose of furthering a political goal, how is a _state sponsored attack_ not a terrorist attack? Are geopolitics excluded from your definition then?

>State sponsered acts tend to not be classified as terrorism

Says who???

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_state- sponsored_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_state- sponsored_terrorism)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_state- sponsored_ter...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_and_state- sponsored_terrorism)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state- sponso...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state- sponsored_terrorism)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_state- sponsored_terro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_state- sponsored_terrorism)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_and_state- sponsored_te...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_and_state- sponsored_terrorism)

[https://www.state.gov/state-sponsors-of- terrorism/](https://www.state.gov/state-sponsors-of-terrorism/)

<comment><USER10> It's not an unnecessary nitpick at all. The way the word is used today, it actually doesn't have a meaning that you could write down. State sponsored acts of violence against another state has traditionally been described as war. The thing that blurs that particular line today is the blurriness between between agents of the state and private agents resourced by the state (as well as controversy around which states are legitimate states, and which governments are legitimate governments).

The reality of the situation today is that 'terrorism' doesn't actually describe a definable act. Whether something is terrorism or not depends entirely on the political perspective of the person describing it. Destroying property, committing arson and tearing down statues as part of a political protest would be quintessential terrorism according to the actual definition of the word. But to describe it that way in our current political climate would be remarkably controversial. Whenever somebody calls something terrorism, all they're doing is offering a political opinion. Which seems like a particularly relevant point to acknowledge in a discussion about what terrorism actually is.

<comment><USER11> One person's freedom fighter is another person's rebel; One person's soldier is another person's foreign invader... that's not a new concept? Didn't stop us from calling things wars, groups rebels or soldiers, and a whole host of other words for hostilities that all depend on your point of view.

-

If you put something like a firecracker in a random mailbox and watch it blow up, it will scare people, but a limited number of people would consider that terrorism

If you go and put firecrackers in random mailboxes all around a city for a week, it will be called terrorism because there's an expectation there's some political or ideological objective someone is trying to meet with that fear.

No one knows for sure why you're doing it, maybe it's not terrorism, but it will be called terrorism because that's a logical conclusion. _At some point in level of violence, or complexity, or damaged caused, people start to seek meaning past fear for fear 's sake. This is why you see them use the word terrorism _

If anything your hangup seems to be exactly that, people seeking meaning by calling it terrorism without some concrete objective being known to them, but it's common sense.

This was a sophisticated attack, a team of gunmen with scouted positions, communications lines cut, only very specific components being hit. What non- political motive can you come up with that out ranks some kind of geopolitical motive, or anti-government tilt? Even reasoning like "to wake up the government to the possibility" is political

<comment><USER10> This pretty much reads as a rephrasing of your previous comment.

<comment><USER11> Well, I extended upon my point in a consistent manner instead of weeble wobbling from one thing to the next while not really saying much, but that's an intended differentiation.

If you read it as a rephrasing that's ok too. Sometimes it's not a bad idea to rephrase a concept when someone has trouble understanding it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Multiple gunmen shot at the transformers for _19 minutes_...what about that sounds professional to anyone?

That's not a quick attack, accurate shooting, nor the proper ammo to do real damage. Terrorists can't get a .50? The only impressive part is cutting the phone lines.

Anyone with basic knowledge of a substation could inflict more damage faster than that.

If I were to take a random guess, at best it was a cartel prepping to rob someone, and Telco operations aren't exactly new for them

</comment><comment><USER13> Why is it called an act of domestic terrorism? Was it ideologically motivated?

<comment><USER14> Good question since they didn't catch anyone. It looks pretty remote, so perhaps not surprising the culprit wasn't seen.

<comment><USER15> It's in a suburb of San Jose. I don't think it can be classified as "remote."

<comment><USER14> Well, it doesn't look urban or suburban to me. But, hey, you're the expert.

[https://www.google.com/local/place/fid/0x808e2f6cead39bb3:0x...](https://www.google.com/local/place/fid/0x808e2f6cead39bb3:0x6340de8983062e5f/photosphere?iu=//geo1.ggpht.com/cbk?panoid%3DG1s611AqxP3l3vWKst0ldA%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dlu.gallery.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D160%26h%3D106%26yaw%3D61.646606%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100&ik=CAISFkcxczYxMUFxeFAzbDN2V0tzdDBsZEE%3D)

<comment><USER16> It's right along the freeway. A couple hundred thousand commuters from south SJ suburbs pass it every day. It's in a little band of open space between South San Jose and those suburbs.

[https://goo.gl/maps/2TfHJKYXBExg4SqH7](https://goo.gl/maps/2TfHJKYXBExg4SqH7)

<comment><USER17> Yep - might look a little remote from the streetview, but it's the parcel just North of Coyote Ranch in the bottom right of this map:

[https://i.imgur.com/8eU58wG.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/8eU58wG.jpg)

There are tens of thousands of people living within 5 miles of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The reason why the Intelligence Community freaked out is because this is exactly the kind of small-scale test they'd do to test a possible attack pattern. [https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/12/27/military-style-raid- on-...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/12/27/military-style-raid-on- california-power-station-spooks-u-s/)

The people spooked here _are_ spooks. And that should be telling for those of us on the outside. It's an attack scenario no one had planned for.

I would highly recommend this article by Michael Lewis (and his book) that explores related systemic risk, [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of- energy...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy-risks- michael-lewis)

> The safety of the electrical grid sat at or near the top of the list of > concerns of everyone I spoke with inside the D.O.E. Life in America has > become, increasingly, reliant on it. "Food and water has become food and > water and electricity," as one D.O.E. career staffer put it. Back in 2013 > there had been an incident in California that got everyone's attention. Late > one night, just southeast of San Jose, at Pacific Gas and Electric's Metcalf > substation, a well-informed sniper, using a .30-caliber rifle, had taken out > 17 transformers. Someone had also cut the cables that enabled communication > to and from the substation. _"They knew exactly what lines to cut," said > Tarak Shah, who studied the incident for the D.O.E. "They knew exactly where > to shoot. They knew exactly which manhole covers were relevant—where the > communication lines were. These were feeder stations to Apple and Google."_ > There had been enough backup power in the area that no one noticed the > outage, and the incident came and went quickly from the news. But, Shah > said, "for us it was a wake-up call." In 2016 the D.O.E. counted half a > million cyber-intrusions into various parts of the U.S. electrical grid. > "It's one thing to put your head in the sand for climate change—it's like > mañana," says Ali Zaidi, who served in the White House as Obama's senior > adviser on energy policy. _"This is here and now. We actually don't have a > transformer reserve. They're like these million-dollar things. Seventeen > transformers getting shot up in California is not like, Oh, we'll just fix > the problem. Our electric-grid assets are growingly vulnerable."_

> In his briefings on the electrical grid MacWilliams made a specific point > and a more general one. The specific point was that we don't actually have a > national grid. Our electricity is supplied by a patchwork of not terribly > innovative or imaginatively managed regional utilities. The federal > government offers the only hope of a coordinated, intelligent response to > threats to the system: there is no private-sector mechanism. To that end the > D.O.E. had begun to gather the executives of the utility companies, to > educate them about the threats they face. "They all sort of said, 'But is > this really real?' " said MacWilliams. "You get them security clearance for > a day and tell them about the attacks and all of a sudden you see their eyes > go really wide."

 _Edit_

 _Personal Interpretation:_ Someone hired highly trained mercenaries (?) to operate on US soil to test destroying critical infrastructure that led directly to Apple + Google. Large, stationary, expensive infrastructure that is lacking in redundancy.

They knew exactly what targets to hit. It follows that they knew that there was backup capacity in the system. This was a test run. And bullets are cheap.

What if instead of one team for one location, it had been three teams for three locations? Or, four? Five? Six? Could they have successfully crippled the nation? And plunged the stock market?

<comment><USER19> I'm neither a national security expert nor a terrorist, but if I wanted to pull off an attack like this, I'd be concerned that a test run—especially of this sophistication, which would likely get a lot of attention in certain quarters—would result in measures that'll make future attacks more difficult.

Nobody's going to make the grid impregnable overnight, and—depressingly—it may well be that security is so pervasively bad that the attackers don't believe any immediate attempts to fix the situation can stop them. I'd think, though, that additional security at even a few more sensitive spots could change the situation enough to make whatever was learned by the test run less useful. An attack like this would only serve to tip one's hand and underscore the threat (my personal suspicion of why this was done).

It seems a little like testing a valuable 0-day by defacing one government website; okay, that worked, but now everybody's going to start thinking about fixing that vulnerability.

<comment><USER18> The time span for a deployed "patch" IRL is between years and never. What matters to these unnamed, unknown operators is practise and training. It is a pattern repeated for most covert ops.

Semi-software example, Stuxnet (and I'm sure different deployment methods) were tested in Israel pre-deployment - [https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxne...](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html)

For Neptune Spear, the Bin Laden raid, they created different layouts and practiced every part of it, [https://special-ops.org/operation-neptune-spear- killing-osam...](https://special-ops.org/operation-neptune-spear-killing- osama-bin-laden/)

Adm. McRaven's interview is highly recommended to understand their psychology [https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/05/02/bergen- mcrave...](https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2016/05/02/bergen-mcraven-bin- laden-training-helicopter-origwx-js.cnn)

The value gained by practicing on US soil to execute such a mission likely outweighs tipping their hand.

<comment><USER20> _> The value gained by practicing on US soil to execute such a mission likely outweighs tipping their hand._

There is tremendous operational value in carrying out the logistics and process of such a test. The lessons learned can be applied not just to the electrical grid, but many other reserves-sensitive infrastructure.

Long rant ahead that comes as no surprise to Taleb and principal-agent problem space cognoscenti which most HN readers are, so freely ignore.

The US lacks reserves of nearly every kind except in the crudest forms like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. As already noted elsewhere, the leadership- think that in the US permeates both private and public sector leadership to treat redundancy as deadweight losses still outweighs _any and all_ national security considerations. This is absolutely rampant everywhere, and not a national secret.

It is so severe that even companies like 3M who actually plan ahead and do what they're supposed to do (set up emergency production lines, materiel, procedures, and staffing that are mothballed until needed, urge customers to keep a working reserve on hand suitable for continuity planning) get unjustifiably crucified [1]. Because...tada!...leadership in hospitals ditch working reserves who then turn around and blame 3M when the shit hits the fan for their lack of continuity planning. Then these same leaders who utterly failed their continuity planning lean in on government. And...tada!...leadership in government let working reserves exhaust from SARS who then turn around and blame 3M for their lack of continuity planning.

Of course this happens because the incentives are misaligned; leadership are not an evil cat cabal, they're just min-maxing to incentives they've been handed like everyone else. There is no tail risk governance of life- and national-security-critical infrastructure to maintain continuity.

There is no clawback for intentionally ignoring pointed out tail risk, nor is there an emphasis upon leadership in the same organization across a long period of time to expose and correct misalignments. Tail risk decisions are not tracked and evaluated in most organizations. Raising the organizational risk profile way after the leader has left for another role, and disconnecting the organization's ability to systemically learn from those expensive and infrequent tail risk mistakes.

Even worse, the US business culture and political culture itself severely punishes those who do prudently and competently assess tail risk. How the US arranged reserves is about right for nearly a century ago, but that means a successful attack on reserves-sensitive infrastructure will take us roughly back to that tech tree until we resupply.

Precision coordinated infrastructure attacks through black-hat, memetic and specops combined force of arms can be far more effective than many stealth bomber runs, with the additional invaluable bonus of plausible deniability, and possibly economically eclipsing the US if it causes enough damage. It's a really effective asymmetric attack mode option.

The US has long had people who thought about all this already, and encoded their thought experiments into various policy guides, with some updates from lessons learned like during SARS (and now COVID-19). Our policy leadership are choosing not to follow their advice because it involves unsavory spending decisions with negative political ramifications. COVID-19 has not sufficiently raised awareness about this, so it will likely take a Carrington-scale event to have these guides dusted off to see the light of day of implementation.

Individually as a normal citizen, at least prepare for natural disasters as guided by FEMA, financially prepare as much as you feel prudent (if you see the rampant de-reserving in infrastructure going on, just what do you think is happening in the less-regulated parts of finance?), and just hope three standard deviations doesn't hit our asses in our lifetimes.

[1] [https://marker.medium.com/how-3m-gambled-its-reputation- on-t...](https://marker.medium.com/how-3m-gambled-its-reputation-on- the-n95-mask-e266a2fd8933)

<comment><USER21> I thought the strategic PPE reserves were exhausted from H1N1, not SARS. The Democratic House tried to replenish, but it was prevented by the Republican Senate, so there wasn't uniform lack of care or treating it as deadweight.

<comment><USER20> Correct, they were physically depleted to far below minimum levels after H1N1 (and other crises), but SARS was their last warning before COVID-19. General political leadership across parties and jurisdictions [1] routinely treat it as a deadweight loss by allowing severe atrophy, short-changing the requested budgets; most recently in 2011 a -$121M shortfall [2].

Read into that what you will, but my hot take on it is if there is another pandemic, or an NBC attack, unless you are part of the 0.1% of government, you're on your own preparedness supplies.

I don't see the SNS placing the long-term supplies under inert gases and in extremely dry storage conditions (though much of it is secret, so I'm hoping they're doing this and just not telling anyone), the primary cause of various rubber components expiring. They are definitely not integrated into vendor supply chains, nor practicing shipping on a regular basis to rotate stock and evaluate large-scale field trials of preserved PPE to establish long-term operational practices that no one in the world has performed, injecting into re-supply orders and tracking the results with the healthcare institutions.

Once PPE preservation is worked out reasonably well, then the costs of maintaining the stockpile switch to marginal replacement costs. Then they can switch to funding research into reusable PPE, and ultra-long storage (on the order of 100 years). The national security angle is to weaponize the increasingly-long storage durations themselves, while at the same time benefiting the environment (less disposables): the ever-increasing lifespan covering an ever-increasing percentage of the population for an ever- increasing incident timespan are wielded as a deterrence factor; if we quickly react and return to semi-normal relatively quickly based upon such a robust supply chain, the effectiveness of such attacks are neutralized to that extent.

[1] [https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/mar/30/federal- pande...](https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/mar/30/federal-pandemic- money-fell-years-trumps-budgets-d/)

[2] [https://www.businessinsider.com/strategic-national- stockpile...](https://www.businessinsider.com/strategic-national-stockpile- location-items-inside-history-size-2020-4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 2015: "While we have not yet identified the shooter, there's some indication it was an insider," said Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at the Department of Homeland Security.

<comment><USER19> I always wondered about this. First thing that crossed my mind at the time was that it was (1) idiots who thought it would be fun to cause high-profile trouble, or (2) terrorists, but it sounded a bit sophisticated for #1 and as far as I know, no one ever claimed credit for it.

After reading one of the references ([https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power- gri...](https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-grid/)), and learning that they think it might have been an insider, a third possibility occurs to me: what if it was someone—maybe a PG&E employee—who knew first-hand how unprotected this infrastructure was, and wasn't being taken seriously? Especially given the Homeland Security report a year earlier about how easy this kind of attack would be.

Conspiracy-theory stuff, maybe, but:

> _The assault...became a harsh wake-up call for energy providers, who have > since become obsessed with the physical security of their remote power > stations._

> _PG &E alone has pledged to spend $100 million to improve security at its > facilities...Transformers are often custom designed, sometimes costing $3 > million each—and replacements are slow. Plus, physical attacks on energy > distribution machines are much more effective at taking out the power grid > than a computer hack. And it's incredibly easy to pull off, several energy > utility firms told CNNMoney._

> _Experts attending GridSecCon, held by the North American Electric > Reliability Corporation this week, are now discussing the need to enclose > electronics in 1 /2-inch thick armor plating that can stop high-powered > rifle rounds. Power utilities have started loading remote substations with > infrared cameras, gunshot audio sensors and even seismic recorders that > catch vibrations._

<comment><USER23> Well, if we're doing actionable conspiracy theories then:

\- it caused $15 million in damage, and $100 million in updated security -> contractor needing work

\- it was a "domestic terrorism" event -> what legislation or policies were on the table at this time?

Those would be my starting points.

<comment><USER19> Someone else mentioned job security/contracts as a possible motivation. It makes sense.

I'm less sure about the terrorist angle. The point of a terrorist act is to advance or discourage a specific political agenda; that only works if you're clear about who you are and why you did it, though. These guys never did that (although maybe scaring PG&E into securing their facilities roughly fits the definition of goal-oriented violence, even if it wasn't motivated by politics).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nobody seems to be paying much attention to the fibre cut. What if that was the point, not the substation getting shot up? What do we know about the effects on the network around that point?

</comment><comment><USER25> What I'm surprised about is the bullet casings and markers left at the site - wouldn't professionals remove those?

<comment><USER26> From the time line, they left in a hurry, just before law enforcement arrived. It's also not easy to collect 100 scattered bullet casings in the dark.

<comment><USER25> Let me rephrase that: Wouldn't professionals plan to remove them, and thus have an attachment on the gun that collects them in a bag?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That video does not appear to show anything for four minutes. Did I miss something?

Edit: Now I have a feeling that I got trolled and that's the point of the video

<comment><USER28> The action is easy to miss after nearly two minutes of nothing happening. If you fast forward you might not see it at all.

1:54 What I believe is the signal flash near the fencing. Lower left of the video.

2:06 You will see sparks from a bullet striking the fencing. A bit higher up than the signal flash, and on the extreme left of the video.

3:01 Toward the middle right of the video, a bullet striking the fencing.

Update: NPR article with timing of events seen in video. They say first flash is also bullet related and not the signal flash I thought it might be.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2014/02/05/272015606...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2014/02/05/272015606/sniper-attack-on-calif-power-station-raises- terrorism-fears)

<comment><USER29> Thanks so much for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The only significant facility I can think of in this area is the IBM Almaden Research Lab. It and another IBM office are very specifically in that area, which is an odd connection. Can't say whether their electrical service is provided by that substation, but they are geographically very close.

[https://goo.gl/maps/i7NWjxfomyXvZCBY9](https://goo.gl/maps/i7NWjxfomyXvZCBY9)

</comment><comment><USER31> Does it count as "terrorism" if nearly no one noticed it happened, and no me claimed credit or made demands?

And why try to kill a power plant with guns instead of bombs? And why go to all the effort and only shoot 100 bullets? Seems like a bizarrely stupid plan executed by talented people, a strange combination.

Also, calling it the largest attack on the grid is strange, when it was quite trivial compared to Enron.

</comment><comment><USER32> That's not the only weird sabotage that has happened in San Jose. Back in 2009, someone intentionally cut some fiber optic cables. They've never been found.

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/04/09/san-jose-police- sabot...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/04/09/san-jose-police-sabotage- caused-phone-outage-in-santa-clara-santa-cruz-counties/)

<comment><USER14> Probably someone hoping for copper to scrap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I kind of wonder if this was an inside job since it seems like their plan may have been to shut down power but it completely failed? Maybe it was people who worked there who just wanted to destroy some transformers and knew it wouldn't disrupt power. Certainly not impossible. But if they were insiders you think they would have done something that was actually going to get more noticed.

<comment><USER34> It wouldn't assume it failed. It caused $15M worth of damage for PG&E. It could easily have been a couple of disgruntled employees who wanted to hurt their employer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> On a similar register, multiple French power plants were scouted by unidentified drones in the past 5 years. Transformers are an fragile point of failure of an entire country infrastructure. I hope security has improved since then.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm curious how well data centers are protected from such a coordinated attack that involves an insider? Can a determined, educated group of terrorists disable multiple data centers (e.g. of Amazon) at once? What data center redundancy do the cloud providers have - can they withstand losing 2 data centers at once? How about 5?

I'm sure they have good protection against technical accidents. But in the times when everybody moves their apps and systems into the cloud I'm not equally confident the cloud providers are equally well protected against a sophisticated, coordinated attack.

</comment><comment><USER37> G. Gordon Liddy wrote about this in the 80's. The story includes more than just transformers, but it identifies the impact of the issue and the means of attack.

[https://vocal.media/theSwamp/this-fictional-memo-to-the- pres...](https://vocal.media/theSwamp/this-fictional-memo-to-the-president- from-1989-predicted-terrorism-in-the-us)

</comment><comment><USER38> Wouldn't it be better to just disperse a cloud of graphite like the US did in the first gulf war? Transformers seem physically rather tough, unless you can shoot an insulator(are they still ceramic or are they silicone nowadays?).

<comment><USER39> I had no idea this "graphite bomb" was a thing. From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_bomb):

The bomb works by spreading a dense cloud of extremely fine, chemically treated carbon filaments over air-insulated high voltage installations like transformers and power lines, causing short-circuits and subsequent disruption of the electricity supply.

<comment><USER38> Yeah and any moron could build one. We really need to beef up our grid and stockpile critical components.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Additionally, following the attack, investigators found small piles of rocks near to where the shots had been fired, the type of formations that can be used to scout firing positions."

I think that sums it up.

Why do we think it's more than one person?

[edit] The FBI states this attack is not terrorism, Wiki seems to _miss_ this

<comment><USER34> Investigators will have a pretty good idea of where the shooters were based on where the spent casings piled up. Three piles of casings would mean three shooters, etc.

<comment><USER40> Can you quote that?

Was it three? Are there any location maps of the spent casings? The one map I found only had one location.

I can't find anything to back more than one.

It's a important fact because it's rare you have two insiders doing something like this.

<comment><USER34> I don't have inside details on the investigation; three is just an example. It shouldn't be difficult to id different firing positions from spent casings, so if investigators believe it was multiple shooters I assume traces on the ground reflect that.

<comment><USER40> No investigators actually say it was more than one.

Some leave it open. But that's what they do every shooting.

One drunk possible ex-employee sums up the evidence.

I like one quote of how they were a bad shot and kept missing the exact target. Some circular logic going on there. Maybe they were shooting somewhat randomly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Meta: I thought the new rule was no more Wikipedia posts without context?

<comment><USER42> From a cursory search, it looks like they aren't banned, but the algorithm makes them fall faster. It stinks, they are often good reads (although maybe the discussion isn't always that deep).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117614)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I remember this, still wild re-reading the entire record of events.

</comment><comment><USER43> >Sniper attack

>7.62x39

One of these things is not like the other.

<comment><USER44> The supposed inherent inaccuracy of AK pattern rifles is a fud meme, primarily perpetuated by the type who also think M-16s are made by Mattel and other goofy boomer legends that were popularized before the internet made it easy to fact-check. However it's also a popular misconception that sniping is necessarily a matter of long range shooting. JFK was shot from under a hundred meters and that's commonly agreed to be the work of a 'sniper'.

<comment><USER43> It's the sights on the AK platform. They're awful and they always have been. Not getting into vodka-specials or bent barrels, poorly pressed trunnions or eccentric cut chambers, none of which are uncommon. They have a reputations not because of FUDDs but because 95% of them ARE bad.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What happened with the supposed "BadBIOS" that jumps airgaps? - <AUTHOR> Did this turn out to be real? Did Dragos Ruiu say anything else about it? I never got any closure on this topic. <comment><USER2> I do not know any vulnerability researchers (Dragos, who is someone I do like, is not one of those) who give this story any credence. The closest I've seen that to happening was Robert Graham writing a blog post about how RF side channels could be used by cooperating processes to communicate --- but that's just a small detail of the whole story Dragos told.

I do know some extremely reputable researchers, people with no connection at all to the supposed events, who have very forceful arguments for how the (scant) evidence Dragos produced didn't establish anything about the existence of anything like BadBIOS.

You're probably not going to get closure on this story.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing can jump an AirGap.

Literally nothing. If something jumped an AirGap then a USBdrive, or CDrom/DVDrom, etc. was infected. In which case the system wasn't Air Gapped, it was part of a sneaker net.

Most commonly we refer to sneaker nets as Airgaps, when often their just as vulnerable as a normal network. Dirty USB sticks are an old as the hills hack at this point.

<comment><USER4> BadBIOS was supposed to communicate with C&C systems using sounds inaudible to the human ear that could be picked up by the microphone of a nearby (also infected) computer.

Hence 'airgapped" (not connected to the network) computers could still export private information to a botnet operator.

<comment><USER3> No.

'Airgapped' computers without infected BIOSes could not leak information. Sneakernet computers with bad BIOSes could.

Unless you can pull off a remote code execution via microphone input, or speaker feed back. Its unlikely an air-gapped computer will be infected.

<comment><USER5> I think you missed the "already infected" part.

If I've got drivers running on two computers that only are in the same room, and they both have speakers and microphones, then yes, I may be able to pull this off. If one of them is connected to the outside world and the other isn't, I may be able to connect from the outside world to the unconnected computer using this acoustic method.

None of this helps me get the infection on the unconnected computer, though. For that, there has to be something else - sneakernet USBs, for example, as you mentioned.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clark's Curious Corollary of Concurrency - <AUTHOR> http://clarkgaebel.com/clarks-curious-corallary-of-concurrency/

<comment><USER3> [http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html](http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html)

> Years ago David Cheriton at Stanford taught me something that seemed very > obvious at the time -- that if you have a network link with low bandwidth > then it's an easy matter of putting several in parallel to make a combined > link with higher bandwidth, but if you have a network link with bad latency > then no amount of money can turn any number of them into a link with good > latency.

You can tell it's dated from this little tidbit:

> The Cable TV industry is hyping "cable modems" right now

<comment><USER4> Theoretically, if your bandwidth is high enough, you can transfer the entire computational state of the distant resource to a local substrate, and then run the computation locally for a low-latency conversation.

So, if you are annoyed by the slow comms of our alpha centauri - <USER2> channel, just transfer _your entire brain_ to a local avatar and I'll converse with that. Then run "git merge" to bring the remote history back to the master repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> @cgaebel The code for your blog seems to have a race condition in it where the content is all there on the page, its just invisible, and only appears properly about 1 in 10 times. Either that or maybe your code is just hanging because I'm not allowing it to load Google Analytics like it wants.

[http://i.imgur.com/w1ZB7Qy.png](http://i.imgur.com/w1ZB7Qy.png)

I'm using Google Chrome 33.0.1750.149 on Mac OS X. I had to open dev tools and tweak your CSS to get the invisible text to appear so I could read it.

<comment><USER6> It's probably this (known) Chrome bug: [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=336476](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=336476)

I've been hitting it a bunch lately too... Workarounds listed there seem to improve but not totally fix the issue unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This only works for "embarrassingly parallel" tasks, where you have lots of completely independent things to do. Please remember that the whole world is not a web server.

This is not trading latency for thruput. This is spending _hardware_ for thruput, with some overhead in latency.

The relevant generic performance number is CPU-seconds (for CPU-bound work), or I/O consumption (for disk-bound work), or in general how much of your bottleneck resource is consumed. Once you know your bottleneck, you can either improve your code to use less of that resource, or buy more of that resource.

As tasks become less embarrassingly parallel, throwing (non-serial) hardware at a problem increases communication overhead, and gives lower speedups.

</comment><comment><USER8> Another factor is that technology improvements tend to favor increases in bandwidth over increases in latency (and there are hard limitations on latency, like the speed of light in distributed systems). This short paper by David Patterson is a great read on the subject:

[http://www.cis.gvsu.edu/~kurmasz/Teaching/OldCourses/CS451/G...](http://www.cis.gvsu.edu/~kurmasz/Teaching/OldCourses/CS451/General/WebPage/ReferenceDocuments/Patterson- CACM.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Well, in practice the latency that normaly matters is between "start doing activity" and "finish doing activity", and the time actualy working (that depends on bandwidth) is normaly orders of magnitude bigger than the time waiting for data (that depends on latency). There are exceptions, but not many.

And now that I really thought about it, looks like the article's law isn't that relevant in practice. Yes, you can always trade latency for bandwidth if you throw some money at it. But money is finite.

<comment><USER8> _Well, in practice the latency that normaly matters is between "start doing activity" and "finish doing activity", and the time actualy working (that depends on bandwidth) is normaly orders of magnitude bigger than the time waiting for data (that depends on latency)._

I don't think that's true; moreover, it is likely to become even less true in the future. Once the data needed for a computation has arrived at the CPU, for most applications the required computation is pretty cheap -- the time spent waiting for the data often dominates the time spent computing with the data. Much of modern CPU design has been devoted to trying to hide the high latency of memory accesses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Tell me the 99th percentile latency. Track it. Improve it. When needed, throughput comes easy."

Actually, if you're worried about tail latency, it can be improved via throughput. Expensively:

Double your entire infrastructure. Send each request twice, once to each half. Take the results of the faster one.

I assume that Google does something like this for fast search results.

<comment><USER10> Yep, and you don't even (necessarily) need to double your infrastructure to do it. Jeff Dean talks about some strategies in "The Tail at Scale"

[http://research.google.com/pubs/pub40801.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub40801.html) (paper)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PxVdQmfpk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PxVdQmfpk) (talk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Little's law certainly applies here. The article's author does have a good point though: if there is no queue and requests are processed one by one, your only option is good old serial program optimization.

Still, I think most large systems where latency is a major concern have some level of concurrency and/or queueing that can be manipulated to reduce latency.

</comment><comment><USER12> _Performance is hard, but we should all be working together towards the things that matter the most. Latency is more important to optimize than throughput. Let 's just focus on that._

I believe this is naive. First, it has no context. You optimize for what you need; there is no absolute best thing. If you have fantastic latency, but your throughput is not good enough to meet your needs, then, no, latency is not more important.

Second, while we tend to trade latency for throughput, it's not an even trade. That is, we tend to trade a _small_ increase in latency for a _large_ increase in throughput.

The insight the author had is a good one (although as others have pointed out, we've realized it before), but I think he oversold the conclusions.

<comment><USER13> > You optimize for what you need; there is no absolute best thing. If you have > fantastic latency, but your throughput is not good enough to meet your > needs, then, no, latency is not more important.

The _whole point_ of this post is that if you have low latency, there are easy ways to trade it away for better throughput. Whereas there are not easy ways to trade high throughput for better latency. And, therefore, latency is fundamentally more important.

<comment><USER12> And my point is that absent knowing what your needs are, it's silly to talk about what is "more important". Because of the lopsided nature of the tradeoff (small latency harm for big throughput gain), it's dangerous to keep around "latency is more important" as a mantra.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's hard to write latency benchmarks for desktop apps. I remember this discussion happening when the "completely fair" scheduler was introduced to the Linux kernel a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER15> Have you heard of Amdahl's Law?

You should take a look - I think it says something similar.

<comment><USER16> Amdahl's law is only related in the sense that they are both dealing with concurrency. It deals with diminishing returns due to parts of programs that can't take advantage of parallel processing.

The OP is saying that there are techniques that hurt latency and increase throughput, but not necessarily vice versa (except unwinding techniques going the other way), so it makes sense to focus on latency first.

It's an interesting theory, and I've filed it away as something to ponder, but I'm not sure in what use cases it's valid for.

If you've got a stream of independent non trivial requests, then the best throughput strategy is to process each request on one thread; almost all computing resources are focused on the problem at hand.

The best latency strategy is to devote all threads to each request in turn (assuming this gives a speedup). The communication overhead will increase the CPU cost of dealing with each request, hurting overall throughput (if you process two requests simultaneously, your latency will explode).

In this scenario, it's a simple trade off and thus doesn't seem to fit. Of course, nothing real world is this idealized, and the devil in the details is probably where the OP's law fits in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Blank page :(

<comment><USER18> using Chrome?</comment></comment>


How do you get a job without a college degree? - <AUTHOR> I understand that the experience you have is more important, but the problem is getting filtered out before you get the chance to talk to someone.<p>Some HR department filters out the resumes of degree-less candidates. How do you get pass this road block? <comment><USER2> What kind of companies are you trying to work at? I totally feel your pain. In fact many ATS's (Applicant Tracking Systems) often bounce 50% of applications without a human even looking at the app.

Hiring is hard on both sides. Many companies (understandably) need some way of filtering. That's why you shouldn't apply online or through job portals =)

The CTO of Stripe talks here about how he built a great eng team: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zoq085zVhA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zoq085zVhA)

you can see that most are referrals vs. in-bound leads, with other channels in between.

What I'm getting at is that regardless of industry, you should do some of the following:

\- contribute to the field you're applying to in other ways. Write articles, do side projects, etc. This will build up your reputation and experience in ways that a company can substitute a degree for.

\- find people in the field and talk to them about what they're doing and what they'd find most helpful to study up on.

\- take an internship or research position

\- find people at LinkedIn who work at the company and meet up for coffee. Companies are definitely more amenable these days to hiring non-degree candidates but HR might be a bit behind the times. If you can demonstrate to hiring managers directly in-person that you're qualified, you can bypass a lot of these issues

\- apply to startups / smaller companies. it's more of a meritocracy for sure and HR tends to be more hands-on.

good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I last worked for a large company, I probably slipped through the cracks. But everyone hired after me were from big name schools.

Thanks for the advice. Since I am trying to find a new field, I will look more toward internships.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Even if you get hired somewhere, most companies will stop you from rising without a degree.

Financially stability is important, but you should also look into getting some sort of degree.

</comment><comment><USER4> Build business networks and relationships that allow you to bypass the HR filter. A hiring manager or current employee who recommends HR talk to someone carries weight.</comment>


How will memristors change everything?  - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/5/5/how-will-memristors-change-everything.html <comment><USER2> My main concern with the hype around memristors is how quickly the technology will scale. Yes, they have great promise. But if technical problems make them 4 times bigger and 8 times slower than existing technology, nobody will adopt them. And without volume adoption, they won't have enough investment dollars to be able to exceed Moore's Law. Which means that we won't care about them until well after Moore's Law runs out of steam.

This is not a theoretical failure mode. It has happened before in the computer industry. Multiple times.

For example it is why Transmeta died. Their goal was to have a simple chip that was so fast that they could emulate the x86 faster than the x86 could run. They failed. However one of the design goals was less heat (because heat was a major scaling barrier), which translated into having an emulated x86 chip that with much lower power. Given that they had a simpler architecture and had already solved heat problems that were killing Intel and AMD they hoped to iterate faster, and eventually win. But the investment asymmetry was so huge that they couldn't execute on the plan. And Intel was able to reduce their power enough to undercut Transmeta on the niche they had found, and Transmeta couldn't survive. (Intel was aggressive because they understood the strategy and the potential. Transmeta was always going to be something that either wiped out the existing industry or died with a whimper, and Intel knew which outcome they'd prefer.)

<comment><USER3> HP has already fabricated chips with memristors that are smaller, faster, and lower power than Flash. The problem I see is write endurance. They match Flash in this area as well, but that's not good enough. If memristors are to be applied to anything but storage (e.g. DRAM, SRAM, logic, neural nets) they will need to be many orders of magnitude more durable.

<comment><USER4> If that were the case, then HP should already be selling memristor memories to compete with flash memories. Flash is already a huge market, HP does not have to wait until memristors can compete with RAM.

<comment><USER3> Give them a little time; the paper was just published last month! Commercial availability is expected in 2013 according to <http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/25018/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an excellent article. I agree that memristors will change everything.

I'm a bit perplexed about the timeframe, though. I'd like to think 5 years, but my gut says it's more like 12-15 years before it's all different. And it will be _very_ different.

<comment><USER6> I agree about the timeframe. I think the issue is not when the technology will be ready, but when the money will be ready to embrace the disruption. So the tech will be ready in 5 years, but the products and paradigms wont make their way into the wild (outside of academia) until 6 or 7 years after that.

<comment><USER5> Yes it's not a tech issue, the issue goes much deeper than that. It will mean a major change in architectures and languages, and that's going to require some killer applications to gain adoption. I imagine the tech will show up and languish -- while the rest of us try to figure out how to get our heads around it.

Even after adoption, there will be major friction from the corporate and governmental sectors -- lots of money has been invested in doing things the old way. Early adopter consumers in 12-15 years. Rest of the world? Perhaps a good bit longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a presentation by R. Stanley Williams linked to in the article, and it is well worth watching.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY#>

It has some tidbits I didn't expect. Teaser: "one of the guys in my group has...built a compiler to compile C code using implication logic rather than NAND logic and, interestingly enough, when we play with that the compiled code we get is always more condensed...by about a factor of 3"

<comment><USER8> I the basic circuit componants are R, L, C and now M. I wonder, how one can build a transistor out of R,L,C ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _You can't just drop a memristor chip or RAM module into an existing system and have it work. It will take a system redesign._

If these truly are a viable storage system, building an interface that's reasonably easily adaptable to the current computing paradigm shouldn't be too difficult. Traditional HDDs and SDDs both play nice with SATA, for instance, despite using wildly disparate methods of storing bits.

<comment><USER10> Better yet, configure a small portion of the memristors as IMP CPU compute clusters to handle the work needed to adapt it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _With memristors you can decide if you want some block to be memory, a switching network, or logic. Williams claims that dynamically changing memristors between memory and logic operations constitutes a new computing paradigm enabling calculations to be performed in the same chips where data is stored, rather than in a specialized central processing unit. Quite a different picture than the Tower of Babel memory hierarchy that exists today._

That part is mind-blowing.

And I'm wondering, if this all works out, will the whole multi-core thing and all the trouble that comes with it (from a software standpoint) be pushed back for another decade?

And what implications would that have for programming languages? Seems like it would mean JavaScript wouldn't be so much worse than Erlang after all (cf. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304599> ).

(Yeah, I know, it's a little bit of a stretch.)

<comment><USER12> Actually, it's the other way around; it sounds like they are talking about having lots of processors literally physically spread amongst the data. That's sort of more Erlang-y, although it isn't actually Erlang-y either. Erlang pretty deeply assumes homogeneity of the computational units it is accessing. (It does allow you to start a process on a given node, and that's a start, but the VM's strategies for memory management and copying on a given node would have to change quite substantially to cope better. Or map one node to each processor-in-the-memory in which case I'd expect too much copying between nodes to occur without a _lot_ of care taken by the programmer, sort of fighting the language the whole time. Erlang lets you control where processes run, but not directly control where data lives beyond that.) Basically this future seems to be NUMA writ large, and while an "Erlang-inspired" language may be the way forward, Erlang itself would not make this transition without substantial changes. (Might be feasible, though.)

But Javascript as it stands today is even worse off, as are most languages. We don't really have much that could cope with this right now in a clean way. (Anyone know a language that really handles NUMA well? And I do mean a language, not a library for C or something. Something slick, not something that merely "permits" working with it.)

<comment><USER2> _Anyone know a language that really handles NUMA well?_

Depending on what you mean by well, any language that offers fork() as a primitive does work. The trick is that this allows you to create 2 copies of a process that share little enough that a scheduler can safely move them from one machine to another. By contrast with threading you have the problem that the scheduler cannot know when it is safe to schedule two threads on distant CPUs.

Of course this only lets you scale embarrassingly parallel problems.

For another approach that could be made to work reasonably well, try Go. Its central idea is that you pass messages to the processing job, and not vice versa. Figuring out how to schedule threads is a complex task, but run-time scheduling heuristics should do a reasonable job of that for most problems. (Writing algorithms that reliably avoid having bottlenecks will be an interesting challenge.)

And a third approach to watch is Parallel Haskell. Because of the guarantees it offers, the opportunities to rewrite the program at run-time based on what is appropriate are extremely interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Positronic? (the brains of asimov's robots).

CPU with data is a bit like objects - except asynchronous, with true message passing. Like smalltalk or Erlang (or web services for that matter).

Brain images, with parts lighting up depending on how active they are, suggests that much of our brains aren't being used most of the time, but come online as needed. It's as if one part calls another part, except the "call" doesn't block. I'm not being very coherent here.

</comment><comment><USER14> I hereby suggest that we pronounce these things as memri-stors rather than mem-ristors.

<comment><USER15> It may sound better, but you're slaughtering the root of the word, which is Resistor. Memristors are useful as a storage element but that's only one possible utility, not the fundamental of the device itself.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely. The comment was very much tongue-in-cheek. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow. When I asked this question I wish I had been as through and thinking critically as this guy.

It's so hard to guess what this means but I wonder if I should start writing a memristor VM just to see what could been done.

Even if they are here in 5 years I bet i'll bet longer than that before we really, truly know what to do with them.

<comment><USER17> Yes! A VM is exactly what we need right now for hackers to start wrapping their heads around the memristor paradigm. Even if it's only practical for very lightweight proofs-of-concept, it would be a major step for mindshare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The theoretical density they give neglects some overhead. If you divide the area of a chip by the size of a transistor, you should get 100 billion transistors on a chip, but in fact you can only get about 1 billion. The rest is overhead: wiring, power, isolation, etc. Probably a similar overhead will apply to memristors.

Also, in the 5+ years it takes to make them practical and reliable, transistors will make progress too. So it's unfair to compare the theoretical density of a new technology to the achieved density of an existing technology.

</comment><comment><USER19> For one thing, orthogonal persistence will become the norm. A computer that needs to boot up will become a quaint thing of the past. Capability systems might become widespread because of this, resulting in finer grained security throughout the entire computing world. Small, cheap, but voluminous and low power memory stores will allow for greatly increased capabilities for computerized tags of physical objects. Vernor Vinge's localizers or Bruce Schneier's Internet of Things could come about because of this technology.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've lost the link but someone here posted a PDF on propagation networks a while ago. I can see that married to this technology somehow and become the ideal computing fabric.

I'll dig around a bit to see if I can find the link.

<comment><USER5> Yeah this is true functional programming writ large.

The data, which is usually huge in comparison to the code, moves around slowly and transparently. The programming goes to the data. I'm willing to be the next step would be embedded memristor blocks in a human body, providing multiple PetaBytes of both storage and processing capability (and perhaps with some sort of primitive neural interface)

<comment><USER20> > I'm willing to be the next step would be embedded memristor blocks in a > human body,

I think that's more than just a little while off, that sort of enhancement, if it ever comes to pass.

Ok, finally found it, posted it here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1322135>

<comment><USER5> Well we're already embedding RFIDs in people, so chips with limited radio potential and some rudimentary processing power are a done deal.

The question becomes how these embedded processors will change over time. I don't think it's too unreasonable to imagine the memristor tech being used and adoption rates going up. The neural interface, of course, was extremely speculative. But the rest of it seems trivial. At least to me.

<comment><USER21> My thoughts would be that heat would become an issue. RFID chips are much lower power.

<comment><USER5> Don't know.

Should be easy enough to do the math.

I would assume some sort of bio-friendly heat sink, perhaps a silver lace spread through the abdomen or something.

Fortunately getting rid of heat is already well understood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Would it be worth buying HP stock? They could own the next generation of computers.

</comment><comment><USER23> _This allows multiple petabits of memory (1 petabit = 178TB) to be addressed in one square centimeter of space._

Given the sugar-cube reference earlier, and that nothing's 2D, much less tons of stacked circuits, I assume they mean one _cubic_ centimeter. Taking that assumption, I point out this problem with that storage claim:

Heat. Good luck dissipating that little cube. Heat's one of the biggest reasons we don't have _way_ higher power machines now, you just can't continually stack things together.

* goes back to reading __* very interesting article, though. I'll have to watch the video too. Homework first, though :|

<comment> Tuna-Fish Memristors are completely powered off when not accessed, making heat scale entirely with access speed, not chip size.

Also, memristors are not stacked, they are deposited on a surface a layer at a time. This is a meaningful difference -- stacked chips are much harder to manufacture, and have much worse thermal conductivity than what is essentially a solid chunk of TiO2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Even if things don't pan out as Stanley Williams says, there will be enough innovation atop the technology to make many things a reality.

I have known about the memristor from the beginning--before all the "hype"--as I've interned at HP Labs and I drool at the thought of their vision for intelligent systems with in-memory processing. I mentioned this in another post, but I predict the memristors will make computer vision possible. This means autonomous vehicles, better airport security, etc. Similarly, anything involving sensors and machine learning, will lead to unimaginable progress.

Nanotech is real folks. The question isn't "if?", it's "when?" It will go through many iterations, but it's now real.

</comment><comment><USER7> Could someone explain the author's conversion of petabits to terabytes?

 _(1 petabit = 178TB)_

<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=petabits+to+terabytes>

<comment><USER25> Wild guess, 1 petabit = 0.125 petabytes * 1024 = 128 TB, with a typo making the 2 a 7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Typo in title (memristors)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, thanks for the heads up, posted in a hurry this morning.

Nice recap of details I had read a bit of a few years ago... also, highscalability is a great blog that is likely of interest to many HNers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can anyone explain at a high level how these things work? Even the wikipedia article loses me fairly quickly. From what I understand, they were predicted to exist based on a theory about the relationship between capacitors, inductors, and resistors. What variables would be of interest in this relationship?

</comment><comment><USER28> Imagine the security rift this will create between old-style cpus and new. Memristers would tear through current encryption like a knife through butter.</comment>


Bill Gates Calls Microsoft's TikTok Deal a Poisoned Chalice - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/8/21359720/bill-gates-microsoft-tik-tok-deal-comments-interview <comment><USER2> Microsoft would enter a whole new market with the acquisition of TikTok and one that I think it is wholly unprepared for. Additionally, with the added complexity of working closely with the United States Government it is pretty clear the sort of gamble Microsoft would be taking with TikTok.

<comment><USER3> > Additionally, with the added complexity of working closely with the United > States Government

Microsoft works closely with the US Government [1] and has a Government Cloud [2]

[1] [https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Contracts/Contract/Article/...](https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Contracts/Contract/Article/1999639/)

[2] [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/industry/government](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/government)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It bothers me as a Windows user. Microsoft has a responsibility to support people who use Office, Skype, LinkedIn, GitHub, Azure, etc. A TikTok deal gone wrong endangers all of that.

The most dangerous form of mindlessness in the C-Suite today is the urge to merge. Why did successful telecom AT&T buy a failing satellite TV business? The TikTok merger is something a CEO would think up off the cuff while smoking dope with Elon Musk. I want to know that a CEO isn't quick on the draw for mergers.

<comment><USER5> TikTok for Business server 2021

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's crazy, Bill Gates as the Head of Microsoft was probably my hate symbol nr.1, but now he's is one of the most sane, intelligent and work for the better persons ever..really a 180 change for me personally.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have yet to see any reason as to WHY Microsoft was handed this "Deal" from the start. Any one know why them and not FB?

<comment><USER7> You're assuming there's a difference. Look at what Microsoft suggested their users do when they gave up on Mixer...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Chalice with the Palace ? Don't take it, Bill, get the flagon with the dragon!</comment>