Cash: a cross-platform implementation of Unix shell commands in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/dthree/cash/# <comment><USER2> I absolutely love msys2: [http://msys2.github.io/](http://msys2.github.io/)

It comes with an easy to use installer and `pacman` package manager. Their repositories have lots of stuff already compiled to windows usage (the silver surfer, gnu global, etc).

Also, sshd works mostly out of the box. Ability to ssh to Windows box into a functional shell (not crippled cmd.exe) is a killer feature for me.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for mentioning this. I just started using Windows at home after a long break and defaulted to setting up Cygwin with cmder. Before that I used Arch Linux for a while so seeing that msys2 uses a port of pacman is intriguing. Could you (or anyone else for that matter) share more information about what it's like using this as opposed to Cygwin? Pros, cons, etc.

<comment><USER4> MSYS2 is a fork of Cygwin. The goal is to make it easier to compile software targeting Windows.

Some notable changes are:

\- It has its own package repository, using PKGBUILDs on github. It can also be updated from within its own shell. Cygwin doesn't do this, for very important reasons, involving autorebase hell which MSYS2 is certainly still subject to.

\- In their fork of cygwin1.dll, they removed support for symlinks (i.e. `ln -s` creates a full tree copy); and the /cygdrive/ root directory was replaced with / (just like the old/deprecated MSYS1).

\- It has three startup links, in which gcc/ld/make and the like are all "symlinked" to different versions (e.g. targeting win32, targeting win64, or targeting MSYS2 itself). It makes it easier to compile software targeting windows. You should install separate -devel packages for each "environment".

\- MSYS2 focuses on packaging dependencies that would be useful for compiling software targeting the Windows platform (e.g. libXYZ). In comparison, Cygwin is more of a mini-OS, packaging applications for general use (e.g. rsync, BIND, MySQL and X11). There is a lot of overlap, but many exclusive packages.

\- MSYS2 is amenable to merging back with Cygwin, but, the patches they've made to cygwin1.dll can't be upstreamed. Cygwin proposed a new plugin system that would allow MSYS2 functionality within Cygwin, but, nobody has done the work to port MSYS2 to this new system. (maybe outdated information)

<comment><USER4> One more important note about compiling software with MSYS2 is that the msys2 version of cygwin1.dll (i forget how it's renamed) obviously inherits the same license as cygwin1.dll. Cygwin1.dll is _not_ LGPL. It is _GPL_. So any program you release compiled with MSYS2 inherits GPL virality, unless you pay Red Hat for a commercial Cygwin license.

<comment><USER5> This sounds like you're trying to scare people off using MSYS2 altogether with the GPL bogey man, and it misrepresents the point of MSYS2.

The 'msys2' software repository (as opposed to the 'mingw32' and 'mingw64' ones) contains things that link to msys-2.0.dll which is GPL, and yes it includes compilers and linkers that in turn generate new PECOFF objects that in turn link to msys-2.0.dll. This repository exists mostly as build scaffolding (Autotools, bash) to support building native Windows software (as exists in the other two repositories) and that is the real goal of MSYS2. If you want POSIX-y GPLed software on Windows, use Cygwin.

You are right to caution people on the naive usage of our msys2/gcc package, but you've made it sound like something much worse than it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cygwin is a _GNU_ port, not a small, random, and non-compliant[1] subset of POSIX shell utilities.

[1] [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696699/utilities/con...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009696699/utilities/contents.html)

<comment><USER7> Utility trumps compliance.

That's not to say that standards are bad and shouldn't be followed. Just that, sometimes, you really don't need a 250 page committee-designed specification to get some basic shit done.

<comment><USER8> > That's not to say that standards are bad and shouldn't be followed.

(Open) standards-compliance becomes essential if we want our work to outlast us. Yes, we all know design by committee is horrible and gets nothing done. The solution is get rid of specs completely though. I don't trust "javascript developers" to have any sort of discipline. I'm sorry if this sounds like stereotyping but it just seems like a trend that we can't ignore.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know what specs I used to write Cash? ^ look at the link two parents up.

Do you know how long I spent working on getting the specs right in Cash? Cash isn't perfect, but it took me months of "discipline" before I would let myself do even the initial release, which is `v0.1.0` btw.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, I didn't mean you when I said that. I meant our dependencies. We will revisit this topic when node js inevitably screws you and your project fails in mysterious ways with a new node update.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be mysterious if I didn't understand Node. Node hasn't mysteriously failed me yet. Looks like you're just sour with a little too little actual data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> But they are not written in cool languages therefore should be rewritten :(

In all seriousness, I am struggling a bit to see a point in porting everything to JS (beyond a weekend project because why not, let's learn something).

I might be a bit out of the loop since it's been a while that I worked on Windows (and have been using msys2 instead of cygwin back then), but how come DDL and native compiling are the issues in cygwin?

And the 1/15th of the size bit. It's largely simply negligible with hard drives (and even SSDs recently) nowadays.

No snark intended (well, other than the first line, sorry), just genuinely curious.

<comment><USER10> Well if Cygwin weren't a terrible mess, maybe we'd be using it more? It's universally reviled by most folks actually on the Windows platform.

The value of this is that it works easily, portably, and with minimal overhead.

By bigger question is, why does posix sh deserve to win? It's plaintext pipes approach is really frustrating in 2016.

<comment><USER11> > why does posix sh deserve to win? It's plaintext pipes approach is really > frustrating in 2016.

I think that in many aspects plaintext has won. Many historical records of the last century will be or have already been lost, because of formats that nobody can read.

OTOH, plaintext is readable and supported by almost everything under the sun.

<comment><USER10> I think it is weird that people say "plaintext has won" when basically every data format under the sun is structured, no one keeps data unencrypted, and transport protocols have basically grabbed all the mindshare as storage protocols.

But keep in mind I think it is bad for pipes only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Huh? Okay - think Cygwin, except:

No GCC or compilers, which I would think is one of the biggest reasons most people use Cygwin? Cygwin isn't just shell commands, and surprisingly PowerShell doesn't suck as much it features some unixy commands. As well as others have mentioned Clink makes cmd.exe suck even less.

<comment><USER13> I only use cygwin to SSH into my irssi-box and that only because I have more control over how to looks than normal "cmd"

If you have something customizable, but not cygwin I'm all ears

<comment><USER14> Just for SSH? I use and love Bitvise on Windows, but I have no idea how customizable it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Using a terminal in windows was a horrible experience when I had to do it for a (fortunately brief) project a couple of years ago. But I think the real problem isn't the lack of a decent shell; there are already several shells out there that, while not as nice as their modern Unix equivalents, are at least usable. The bigger problem for me was the terminal emulator. Awful fonts, worse rendering, crappy copy/paste, limited size, no split screen or tabs, etc etc. It truly felt like being back in the 90's, although I'll bet that even in the 90's the Linux terminal emulator experience was better than Windows is now.

<comment><USER16> [http://babun.github.io/](http://babun.github.io/) is wonderful.

ConEmu is a great container for a tabbed interface of Babun, PuTTY or powershell instances.

<comment><USER17> Babun seems to solve none of the issues that the original commenter mentioned.

      Awful fonts, worse rendering, crappy copy/paste, limited
      size, no split screen or tabs

The screenshots on the Babun site show the same 90s-era looking shell container. ConEmu looks to have more features, but is similarly stuck in the Win-98 design aesthetic.

<comment><USER16> I have none of these issues. Fonts are nice and smooth (I'm using Consolas 10pt). Copy-paste works seamlessly. Limited size? In what regard? I can expand the window as I want vertically and horizontally and I have as much scrollback as I want (you configure it). ConEmu handles the splitting and/or tabs which works wonderfully.

Guess we're in opinion-mode at this point.

Can you provide an example of what you feel is a beautifully designed.. terminal container? We're still talking about the border of a shell are we not?

I must be missing something here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> well you are just replacing your dependency from cygwin to node.js

think of it, what is the utility to implement shell commands in a cross- platform way ?

only for Windows

You don't need an ES6 implementation of `ls` on Linux and Mac OS X, the tools are already there and yeah they are "ugly" compiled to native executable, but it is exactly what you want for shell commands

so you are basically trying to solve a Windows problem, but sorry you're doing it wrong

Windows problem is not about lacking shell commands, it's about lacking a POSIX environment

sure you want command line utilities like `ls`, but those are mainly useful when run inside a POSIX environment, and that is exactly the problem that cygwin have solved.

Now about some statements

"No ugly DLLs":

try to do a `ldd /bin/ls` on a Linux system you will see dependencies on `libc.so`, `libselinux.so`, etc. having tool like `ls` being dependent on `cygwin.dll` etc. is perfectly normal, nothing ugly about it

"Works in any terminal":

all the cygwin binaries can work inside a `CMD.exe` prompt, just add the "C:\cygwin\bin" path to your environment variables.

when you run Bash shell like Mintty, you also have access to the `CMD.exe` environment on top of the POSIX environment, for ex: you can call powershell scripts.

"Let's mix some Windows & Unix commands together"

`$ ipconfig | grep IPv4 | sort` works perfectly fine under Cygwin with bash

"but I only want certain commands"

maybe use package management, for ex you could use apt-cyg with cygwin, and do things like `$ apt-cyg install ncurses` or `$ apt-cyg remove ncurses`

<comment><USER19> V8 is a runtime.

Cygwin is an entire OS ecosystem of dependencies, tools, libraries. POSIX utilities are so tightly coupled to the OS, it's virtually impossible to use them with any degree of confidence without importing the entire universe. There's nothing 'perfectly normal' about such a poorly structured architecture.

JS dependencies are explicitly defined in a package's package.json so it's trivial to track a package's dependencies.

Likewise, one could create a powershell implementation in JS and -- barring windows-specific features -- Powershell scripts would 'just work' in a _nix environment as well.

This package makes it trivial to port POSIX tools to Windows. What about greenfield development of utilities that need to work in both _nix and Windows? Instead of building for one platform first then porting it to another (incl all the maintenance issues involved in maintaining separate forks in sync) why not use a truly cross-platform language from the start?

The Javascript ecosystem comes with it's own package management system.

Apt-get attempts to be 'everything to everybody'. It requires a monumental effort from the OSS community to maintain the different sources. Outdated packages are the norm making it harder for software maintainers to resolve bugs. Submitting new packages or publishing new versions of existing packages is a PITA. Etc...

NPM's source is centralized and provides a very useful online portal for: searching for packages by keyword and/or tags; publishing the Readme ad human- readable HTML (ie via Markdown); finding related links to the source control, issues, project pages; tracking downloads and development progress stats.

If you prefer not to publish to NPM the NPM directory, packages can be installed directly from GitHub, Bitbucket, etc.

Tapping the broader exosystem is easy for both users _and_ developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've used shelljs [0] a couple times now and it works great.

The big benefit is that you get cross platform support and anyone can contribute!

Overall, it just plays well with JS applications. If I have a bunch of domain- specific utils used in my application and I want to use em as I move some files around, using something like shelljs makes it very to mix and match.

I'm interested in giving cash a try, though. It's not immediately clear how it differentiates itself.

EDIT: I just scrolled to the bottom of the README and it has a section on the difference with shelljs. It appears that they have different goals.

[0] [http://documentup.com/shelljs/shelljs](http://documentup.com/shelljs/shelljs)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm quite fond of babun[0] when I have to do windows work. It packages up cygwin, zsh, oh my zsh and some other useful goodies into an easy to use package.

0: [http://babun.github.io/](http://babun.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I've found ConEmu a reasonable substitute for xterm+tmux/dwm.

Cmd.exe isn't so bad after installing clink for readline behavior and learning a few idioms.

The only thing really bothersome is the lack of job control (partially obviated by ConEmu), which I didn't see in Cash.

<comment><USER23> ConEmu is good - Cmder makes it a lot easier to set up as it has clink already configured. Still a few inconsistencies, but I've got a nice setup with Cmder, gow, and a few other shell tweaks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is neat!

For Javascript we have the engine as V8 VM already, is it possible we can use javascript the way as python/bash(i.e. #!/bin/js) someday? that means ignoring the DOM/web related portion and make javascript a true client/server side script language, then it's really close to 'one language rules all'.

<comment><USER25> This works:

      #!/usr/bin/node

      console.log("hello");

mark it executable and enjoy.

Unless that's not really what you were getting at with your comment. If I misunderstood, sorry!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nice! I've been using ShellJS ([https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs](https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs)) for this purpose (replacing a bash script with a cross-platform version). Any compelling reasons to use Cash over ShellJS, besides slightly better coverage of UNIX commands?

<comment><AUTHOR> The readme covers this (check near the bottom).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder about the "cross-platform" part. Does it work with Rhino, for example, or maybe even with the Windows Scripting Host JScript support? /s

</comment><comment><USER28> I just started this in Nim in order to learn the language.

</comment><comment><USER29> I general install git for windows and use the tools it comes with. Small simple and easy.

</comment><comment><USER30> How about git bash from [https://git-scm.com/downloads](https://git- scm.com/downloads)?

</comment><comment><USER31> This is much better than I expected. Nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Would be a good idea to write those in Go and just ship the runtime together with the binary IMO.

</comment><comment><USER33> I would like to recommend GOW. It works pretty well for my needs.

</comment><comment><USER34> Linux is enough to have Linux feel without the Windows' suck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some aren't that fortunate and have to work on Windows environments at work.

<comment><USER35> Oh no, how can you live like this ?

<comment><AUTHOR> With Cash :)

<comment><USER36> And just plain cash. We get paid a lot of money to develop software on Windows.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New development could lead to more effective incandescent lightbulbs - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35284112 <comment><USER2> As a side not, something that never happened to me with incandescents happened with halogens. I refuse to buy anything with the mercury warning and noticed the halogen the was shaped like an incandescent in the 60 W replacement size. I bought it and had it in for about a week. One night I hear a "boom" that wakes me up. It sounded like a muffled shotgun. I walked into the living room to discover[1] the halogen had blown up scattering little glass shards all over the living room. I was not happy.

I went out and bought a cheap LED from Walmart[2] which seems pretty good and turns on right away. I do wonder who is the actual supplier. No heat, bright, and hasn't blown up.

We still have a couple of packs of incandescents at work because we use the chicken coop method of heating a box outside during the winter.

1) well my foot discovered this which required first aid

2) [http://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-GVRLA6027ND-Great- Valu...](http://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-GVRLA6027ND-Great-Value-LED- Light-Bulb-8.5W-60W-Equivalent-A19-E26-Soft-White/40507614)

<comment><USER3> I've had two Cree brand LED bulbs melt apart and blow fire. I was glad to be around so I could get them shut down. And a little terrier afterwords of what could have happened. I've had at least three Walmart brand LED bulbs that have lasted less than a couple months. (No fires though!)

Surely I'm not the only one seeing this kind of failure rate?

I'm making a personal collection of the failed LED bulbs for future purchasing decision....

<comment><USER4> It sounds like you have more serious problems here, better check your electric installation. I have cheap Chinese LED bulbs from eBay and even they shine happily after >2 years now.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I have probably have 25 LED bulbs in the house. I've so far only had troubles with two brands

Out of curiosity though, what kind of electrical problem would disproportionately affect LEDs?

<comment><USER4> LED bulbs have drivers (usually AC to constant current converter) integrated so they should stabilize power themselves. My guess would be that there might be high voltage spikes that managed to burn a driver. Another possibility, that just came to my mind -- LED's, especially high power ones like Creed, become _very_ hot, maybe your bulb slot is very tight and isolated and there's not enough room to dissipate the excess heat?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More details here:

[http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q1/innovation-c...](http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q1/innovation- could-revive-incandescent-lighting,-bring-more-efficient-solar-cells.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is very good; many people will like the angle that they are even using recycled _light_ now, never mind paper, metal, textile or plastic. :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think we're a little too late -- like that guy who invented a better dodo trap or the lady who came up with a more effective polio vaccine.

<comment><USER8> There's another aspect to this development. One benefit of incandescent lamps vs. CFL or LED is superior CRI (color rendering index).

CFL/LED lamps produce output having a discontinuous spectrum, fluorescents with prominent green and LEDs blue emission. Consequently these light sources can be much less desirable where accurate color rendering is important, for example critical color matching, art galleries/museums, etc.

I've found it difficult to replace continuous spectrum sources with LED lights in particular. The latter are much more energy efficient and have greater useful life span, but unsuited to photography, etc., where quality of color rendering is crucial.

Quite likely there's a large enough market for improved incandescent lamps to warrant further development.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, and thanks for bringing this up. This is why Tungsten and HMI lighting is still a thing. Remote phosphor lights from Cineo are supposed to address this, however. But this would not be used in a residential setting, more for commercial lighting situations.

<comment><USER8> Indeed, the Cineo lights claim high CRI values. Per their website, the lights are intended for cinematography and similar applications. I surmise they wouldn't be used in homes or commercial spaces, at least that would be rare. The lighting systems are quite expensive, especially the bigger units.

Not yet seen CRI info for more ordinary incandescent replacement lamps, but potentially they could begin to approximate the traditional light emitters especially at lower color temps, <3000K.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The importance of true friends - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/opinion/14brooks.html?ex=1363233600&en=2f7f80ec4225c6e8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Also reminds me of this could-happen and chilling story. Recommended: <http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm>

"Live Your Life means that you are able get the most out of your life, as opposed to the least. Instead of dying in Terrafoam, or dying in some job that you hate, you live your life in the Australia Project in freedom and prosperity. Live Your Life means that you are in control -- again, the emphasis on freedom of choice. You decide what you want to do, and then you are able to do it. You reach your full potential. Live Your Life is the idea of thinking about your life as a whole, as something that you get to design and control. Does that make sense?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Really good article. The title way undersells it.

</comment><comment><USER2> This has been posted here before but.. <http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/mil/206782771.html></comment>


Show HN: A web-based dashboard for your graphs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/AmadeusITGroup/GraphDash <comment><USER2> Looks like a nice tool. But I didn't understand the requirement.

The README says that if I have a graph.svg and graph.txt in my directory, I can put as many graphs and start the web server. Still not getting the use of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried to clear up things in the README. The tool is inspired by Jekyll, it will build a static website for your graphs (that you already have), and some metadata you write to configure how the graphs will be displayed in the website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand. "Graph" is a word with many meanings.

<comment><AUTHOR> In this case, your svg/png/jpg files.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Emulsion, the simple way to create a photography website - <AUTHOR> https://emulsion.me

<comment><USER2> Very, very nice. Your main differentiation, as I understand it, is that it works on iPad, correct? Don't be afraid to mention that clearer. Right now it's a little hidden.

In fact, show more clearly what it looks like on an iPad, and on an iPhone. And say something like "your website works on the web, on the iPhone and on the iPad".

I really like the simple pricing too.

Awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Peter.

Good point re: the iPad stuff. I would say the other main feature is that everything is edit in place (live-updating), which is also not clearly explained on the homepage at the moment and definitely an advantage over our competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> very cool. very nice looking, too.

biggest question in my mind: how does it integrate with my iphone? i don't mean for consuming, i mean for creating sites. i primarily take photos on my phone and they usually just live there because i never take the time to download them somewhere. it'd be cool if this had an app that made creating galleries and adding to galleries from my iphone super easy.

i do realize that the demographic you're trying to serve is not really the people who take photos with iphones, but overall point stands: it is an unnecessary step to take photos from cameras and put them in a computer before uploading them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree it is an unnecessary step to take photos from cameras and put them on the computer before uploading. In the future I think we will explore ways to cut that step out, but for now, to your other point most of our audience is using digital SLRs that have no way to connect with a computer besides a clunky cable.

We did take some extra care to make sure the sites work out of the box for consuming on iPhones and other touch devices in the meantime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Beautiful stuff. Good product for an underserved demographic – professional photographers who need portfolios and not only don't want to deal with code, but also need stylish templates.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is so cool! There's a ton of photographers out there who think the web is made of Flash and nothing else. At least their websites look that way. Small business Photography sites are notorious for overly long Flash intros, gratuitous effects, and generally just bad accessibility and SEO due to the overuse of Flash.

I love this idea. It's modern, looks great, it's easy, and the sites aren't a mess of Flash. I mean, don't get me wrong, Flash has its place and I can understand why so many photographers gravitate toward it but a lot of times I see user experience go by the wayside as they focus on making everything flash, fade, pop, fly, etc.

I do web development for a living and I always cringe when I see services like this because I feel like they're the competition. People see cheap beautiful and easy templates for $12/month and then a custom website for a minimum of $1300 and they're very likely to choose the former. But I like this anyway and actually thought of creating a similar system as an extra service to capture the segment of my market that wants it. Awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words Bill!

I am not sure if we will ever be competition for custom sites. If people have the requirements or the money to make their own site, I think they will always go that route.</comment></comment>


Re-imagined docs (interactive mockups and diagrams) to supercharge product teams - <AUTHOR> https://docgrok.docgrok.com/?oid=10&aid=228&avid=501#/public <comment><AUTHOR> DocGrok is a re-imagined documentation platform that supercharges product teams.

What if product visualizations could spark creativity and make product teams more effective?

Current tools are siloed and inadequate to handle the complex requirements of modern products. DocGrok helps agile teams avoid costly, late-sprint mistakes with visualization tools like diagrams, charts and UX mock-ups.

To see the difference, check out this application mockup created with DocGrok, in a matter of minutes. [https://docgrok.docgrok.com/?oid=10&aid=227&avid=455#/public...](https://docgrok.docgrok.com/?oid=10&aid=227&avid=455#/public/)

This diagram explaining various scenarios of a 3-tier architecture is another example. [https://docgrok.docgrok.com/?oid=10&aid=224&avid=452#/public...](https://docgrok.docgrok.com/?oid=10&aid=224&avid=452#/public/)

</comment><comment><USER2> DocGrok has a leg up on mockup tools like Figma/UXPin because it is designed so that it's easy enough for the entire product team to create and edit user experiences. This is cool because brainstorming on something more tangible than a whiteboard sketch early in the process is pretty useful in coming up with the right APIs and system architecture.</comment>


Over 400 vulnerabilities on Qualcomm's Snapdragon chip - <AUTHOR> https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/08/06/achilles-small-chip-big-peril/ <comment><USER2> Do any of these vulnerabilities let us unlock the bootloader?

<comment><USER3> Way would you want that?

<comment><USER4> Because (a) it would let you root your device, allowing you to do what you want with it (b) it would make these 400 vulnerabilities especially dangerous

<comment><USER5> (c) it would prevent most banking and finance apps from working.

<comment><USER6> Just use the website.

<comment><USER7> Website for NFC payments? How?

<comment><USER6> Use the card.

<comment><USER8> Use an implant.

<comment><USER6> Not a fair comparison. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While they are still withholding info about how to exploit the bugs, there is more technical detail in their Defcon talk, "Pwn2Own Qualcomm Compute DSP for Fun and Profit" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrLJ29quZY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrLJ29quZY8)

</comment><comment><USER10> Also discussed here

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24081581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24081581) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24092545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24092545)

</comment><comment><USER11> Seriously I'm beyond pissed at the state of Android, patches and open-source compliance. If we are _lucky_ 10% of current phone models will get any form of update. The rest will be vulnerable for _years_ until the devices finally break.

And that's only the Qualcomm stuff. There is another CPU vendor beginning with M who is big in el-cheapo hardware - look at their Android kernel leaks, wherever you dig you find horrid, HORRID code.

Google should mandate full open source disclosure of all GPL'd components as part of the Play Store certification and unlockable bootloaders, otherwise this shit is never going to change.

<comment><USER12> Still getting updates for my one plus 6. YMMV.

<comment><USER13> Still getting updates for my 7 year old ipad air 2. About to get ios 14 as well. Android has warped peoples perspectives on how long a device would get updated. On PC you can just keep installing updates until the device can't keep up anymore.

<comment><USER14> The iPad Air 2 was introduced just under six years ago. But even the original iPad Air, which was introduced nearly seven years ago, still gets security updates. The last update was released less than a month ago. It's stuck on iOS 12, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "A single SoC (Software on Chip) may include features to enable daily mobile usage such as image processing, computer vision, neural network-related calculations, camera streaming, audio and voice data."

Should be SoC (System on Chip)

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's a link to the DEF CON talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrLJ29quZY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrLJ29quZY8)

</comment><comment><USER17> There seems to be some confusion on the authors' behalf about what a DSP is, and what an SoC is ("software" on chip, as they call it...) I'm just nitpicking, of course.

<comment><USER18> I think you have a point here. When they say "DSP chip" instead of "DSP core inside the Snapdragon chip" it makes me wonder what else they got wrong. I don't think the oversimplified language is any more approachable here.

(As it happens I read the slides and this is a legit vulnerability but you'd never know it from the press release.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if Apple/others knew about such vulnerabilities, and passed up on using the chip as a risk? Or, was it just dumb luck that they avoided this?

<comment><USER20> From Apple's perspective Qualcomm has been insufficient for a long time for many reasons, the security issues here would only be one of the many factors involved in the decision to do their own development.

For what it is worth, a modern chip as complex as the A* series is essentially guaranteed to have vulnerabilities. Maybe not 400, but definitely not 0.

<comment><USER21> This is a thing I think people constantly underestimate... Intel's cores are not necessarily dramatically more broken than everyone else's chips, they just pay for more auditing and public research.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > they just pay for more auditing and public research.

Did Intel finance the research that turned up any of the major headline vulnerabilities over the last few years (meltdown, spectre)?

<comment><USER22> They did not.

<comment><USER13> It was a Google researcher mostly.

<comment><USER23> > Meltdown was independently discovered and reported by three teams:

Jann Horn (Google Project Zero), Werner Haas, Thomas Prescher (Cyberus Technology), Daniel Gruss, Moritz Lipp, Stefan Mangard, Michael Schwarz (Graz University of Technology)

Spectre was independently discovered and reported by two people:

Jann Horn (Google Project Zero) and Paul Kocher in collaboration with, in alphabetical order, Daniel Genkin (University of Pennsylvania and University of Maryland), Mike Hamburg (Rambus), Moritz Lipp (Graz University of Technology), and Yuval Yarom (University of Adelaide and Data61)

[https://meltdownattack.com/#faq-systems- meltdown](https://meltdownattack.com/#faq-systems-meltdown)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Time to switch to open source:

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5)

<comment><USER25> An Open Source OS can help, sure, and is a start. A DSP is a programmable hardware device. Both phones to which you linked use variants of ARM processors and then use third-party baseband systems. You're not getting rid of closed-source hardware vulnerabilities by replacing Android or iOS.

<comment><USER26> Agree, we need open source hardware (like RISC-V) to mature in order to eliminate this class of vulnerabilities. I haven't heard much on mobile class RISC-V SOCs though.

<comment><USER27> RISC-V is an open source ISA, which means anyone is free to implement it, interface with it, customise it etc.

But most RISC-V devices are not open source as far as I know, as least currently. And a mobile class SoC would still be a very complex device, therefore with vulnerabilities (and also therefore with much less motivation for a company to open source the whole design). You'd have a similar problem as now.

That said, if someone wants to work with me on a RISC-V mobile class SoC (or server/supercomputer class) do get in touch, I'd love to do it :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I guess this makes "national security" as an argument a bad joke.

<comment><USER29> unless they force everyone to buy Apple phones ;)

<comment><USER30> CheckM8? [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/09/devel...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/09/developer-of-checkm8-explains-why-idevice-jailbreak- exploit-is-a-game-changer/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hardware vulnerability and issues are hard to address at times as it can be connected to other vendor hardware or softwares. I always wonder if these flaws are left in the design intentionally or its just a sneaky bad bugs.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is there any related data for Apple?

<comment><USER33> They have a lot too, a new one just popped up a few days ago [https://www.bgr.in/news/apple-products-have-a-new- unpatchabl...](https://www.bgr.in/news/apple-products-have-a-new-unpatchable- security-flaw-in-the-secure-enclave-chip-details-specifications-vulnerability- jailbreak-906524/)

I'm not sure if anyone has compiled a list of how many

<comment><USER34> > The report notes that this security flaw is present in all the devices > running chips between A7 and A11 Bionic. Apple has already fixed the exploit > in A12 and A13 Bionic chips so newer devices are safe.

That's four generations of Apple hardware, the latest being iPhone X and iPhone 8/8 Plus (Sept 2017). The patch being fixed in A12 means the iPhone XR and iPhone XS (and later) are unaffected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder how would it be like to fill application forms for over 400 CVE numbers, or reading a security advisory with the first page exclusively occupied by CVE numbers. Well, seriously speaking, they'll probably group these vulnerabilities and apply a big one.

<comment><USER18> Keep reading; there are 6 CVEs assigned. The 400 is different binaries that have the same vulnerability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> [https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/i58ex8/new_qualcomm...](https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/i58ex8/new_qualcomm_chip_vulnerability/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Would having an open source chip with a rolling release be more secure? Like as soon as the vulnerability is discovered you would push the fix and the next generations would already be fixed. Or would such frequent changes to the chip design be to difficult to mass produce, due to having to modify the production process?

This is coming from a point of view that Linux is quite a success and thus maybe the same philosophy could be used for hardware?

<comment><USER38> Hardware is different in that it can't be updated once it's leaves the factory and has to be "right first time".

<comment><USER39> Not quite true: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Microcode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Microcode)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Shouldn't proper IOMMU usage prevent this?

In theory when properly configured the DSP or GPU should be unable to touch system RAM outside of buffers that are specifically assigned to them.

I'm not very familiar with the status of IOMMU on Android devices.

<comment><USER22> It's dependent on the SoC whether there's IOMMUs at all and whether they're rigged up to all the bus masters in the system. A lot don't have them as it was seen as a virtualization feature rather than a security feature for the longest time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Google has pushed the patch for this back to October. I wonder what will happen to downstream vendors (Samsung, CopperheadOS)?

<comment><USER42> You mean GrapheneOS.

<comment><USER41> I'm referring to businesses because they have SLAs or other customer obligations. AFAICT Graphene isn't a business but is a FOSS project without customer support requirements or obligations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> You say vulnerability, we say feature.

</comment><comment><USER44> insecure by design

</comment><comment><USER45> If the US government hadn't sanctioned Huawei, we could have an alternative to these chips.

<comment><USER46> There are other alternatives, e.g. Samsung.

<comment><USER47> Yeah because Samsung has _so_ much better history of fixing security issues...

<comment><USER48> That's why we need all of them, instead of sanctions on either one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> SpaceX designed custom SoCs for their isolated offshore/offworld network of Starlink satellites, [https://spacenews.com/spacex-accused-of-poaching- chipmakers-...](https://spacenews.com/spacex-accused-of-poaching-chipmakers- employees/)

 _> Broadcom filed suit ... claiming SpaceX hired a number of Broadcom's top engineers to develop "a family of sophisticated, customized computer chips." The two companies had been working together on the development of advanced computer chips for an undisclosed project, but SpaceX ultimately ended the collaboration._

<comment><USER50> What's your implication here? SpaceX perhaps saw a bunch of security vulns and decided to DIY?</comment></comment>


Taiwan vendors to offer dual-platform tablet PCs due to Wintel market status - <AUTHOR> http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20101014PD213.html

<comment><USER2> I have been hearing about these arm netbooks... but they have been 'coming soon' for several years now. I think I've seen one or two things that could maybe be called arm netbooks that I could actually buy during that time (none of which had usable keyboards.)

edit:

Example: [http://news.softpedia.com/news/Lenovo-s-ARM-Based-Linux- Skyl...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/Lenovo-s-ARM-Based-Linux-Skylight- Smartbook-Delayed-139425.shtml)

Did the Ipad kill it? damn you, jobs, and your devices that lack keyboards!

Really, I want something in the sony viao P series form factor (e.g something small and built around a keyboard with a trackpoint rather than a touchpad) Hell, if you gave me arm-level battery life and good Linux support, I'd even pay sony prices for the thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are quite a few ARM/Windows CE netbooks designed in China. Ubuntu clones are available for most of them.

<http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.42015>

<http://www.dealextreme.com/search.dx/search.netbook>

<comment><USER2> yeah, but from what I read, it's quite difficult to jack the bootloader to load Linux, and the hardware looks like it's at the level of the OLPC, which is pretty much unusable. (keyboard-wise, not cpu-wise)

I don't know of anyone who uses these seriously and really, before I buy something where touch is as important as a laptop, I'd like to either try the keyboard in person or at least hear someone on the 'net describe it. (I mean, for that kind of money, I'll take some risk... but I'd like at least some evidence that they might not be complete crap.)</comment></comment></comment>


Powerful static blog generator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/laoqiren/yohe <comment><USER2> It's the 10th time you submitted this in one week. You can try the [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show) category (just prefix the title with 'Show HN') which gives a little more expose and maybe at a comment "hey, it's the author here, I created this because ... feel free to ask questions".</comment>


"In The Zone" - <AUTHOR> http://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/16/zone/ <comment><USER2> By the way, speaking of quote investigations, I want to figure out how this fake Cervantes quote came about:

        Time ripens all things. No man is born wise. Bishops
        are made of men and not of stones.

The fake part is "time ripens all things." Cervantes didn't write that part in Chapter 33 of Don Quixote II. The rest is indeed said by the Duchess to Sancho. The cheesy empty word play of "time" and "ripens" struck me as odd for Cervantes and more like something that Heidegger would write in Being and Time such as "time is the ripening of temporality". As an amateur Cervantes scholar I looked it up, but I could not find any Don Quixote translation that has the phrase, yet it always appears this way in English quote collections, which all seem to quote each other. It's even in Wikiquote. I first encountered it in xkcd:

[http://xkcd.com/1704/](http://xkcd.com/1704/)

So, who added that "time ripens all things" crap?

</comment><comment><USER3> If you find this interesting, you may find _The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary_ [1] interesting as well. The Oxford English Dictionary was made in the mid-late 1800s and laboriously tracked down the etymology of most english words by asking for submissions and tracking them on paper. The largest contributor, Dr. W. C. Minor [2], was a rich doctor who murdered a man and, because of his class and genuine insanity, was confined to an insane asylum and left alone with his books.

I never thought the origin of a dictionary could be fascinating but I spent an entire Sunday reading this book.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English- Dic...](https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dictionary- ebook/dp/B000FCKM7E/)

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

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to see a serious study of rapping, especially free styling and rappers who don't write their lyrics in advance (celebrity examples include Jay Z, Lil Wayne, Kanye). For everyone who hasn't tried to rap: it's nearly impossible to create or perform a good verse if you're not in the zone. Improvisational poetry to the beat is too demanding of your mental bandwidth if there's anything else going on in your head.

And I'd love to see this study done with both high and sober participants. Cannabis makes it significantly easier to enter flow state, and it's no coincidence that it's popular among rappers and other improvisational musicians.

</comment><comment><USER5> In her book "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas" [1] Natasha Dow Schüll also calls "the zone" the trance-like state of mind addicted players strive to prolong.

Like in programming, it is a state of mind driven by machine interaction.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by- de...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-design)

</comment><comment><USER6> See also, "hack mode"

[http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack- mode.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack-mode.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Now known as a state of flow: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_\(psychology\))

<comment><USER8> I suspect "in the zone" is the better-recognized phrase, despite the book.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough! Perhaps "also known as..." would have been better.</comment></comment></comment>


Sabre (Rocket Engine) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine) <comment><AUTHOR> This thing, when it works, will make Musk's reusable sticks look ancient tech. And looks like they have no blockers, just slow but steady progress.</comment>


Show HN: I built a service to uncover hidden Facebook advertising interests - <AUTHOR> https://targetbear.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hacker News,

I just built this tool around uncovering Facebook advertising interests.

For each keyword you put in, the Facebook™ Ads Manager shows the only 25 interest suggestions, the same that it shows to everybody.

Turns out more interests are just an API call away. If you are a dev, it's pretty simple but I thought to put a UI and some more features into it.

This was a small feature of a product I built almost three years ago and decided to give it new life.

Hope you like it!

</comment><comment><USER2> This looks cool, though as a non-Facebook user, I'm not sure of the details here. What does the "We don't." header mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there, thanks for commenting!

If you don't use Facebook, probably you are not familiar with the Facebook ad manager.

It's a tool for advertisers on Facebook.

For each keyword you want to target, the Facebook™ Ads Manager shows the only 25 interest suggestions, the same that it shows to everybody.

We don't. We show you a lot more so that you can target interests that your competition is not.

Hope this clarifies it!</comment></comment>


Integer Factorization: Part I - <AUTHOR> https://www.slideshare.net/SubhendraBasu3/a-method-for-factorizing-arbitrary-length-integers-in-real-time <comment><USER2> You submit this repeatedly. I've replied in depth in the past, and you've been given the same advice over and over again - factorise a large number that's known to be hard, and people will pay attention.

But currently this appears to be manifest nonsense.

Previous comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990371)

I have _no_ idea who has upvoted this and your other submissions. I suspect sock-puppets.</comment>


Linus Torvalds Compares Hard Disks to Satan - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/linus-torvalds-hard-disks/

<comment><USER2> What a thoroughly uninteresting read. Linus doesn't like the noise and latency, developers prefer SSDs.

Stay tuned as this breaking news unfolds!

</comment><comment><USER3> Way to take a handful of offhand comments from someone else's interview and try to spin it into an entire article for your own publication.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. For reference, here's Linus' actual quote from the linked Slashdot article[1]:

 _I'm not actually all that much of a storage guy, and while I'm the top-level kernel maintainer, this is likely a question that would be better asked of a number of other people.

The one (personal) thing storage-related that I'd like to re-iterate is that I think that rotating storage is going the way of the dodo (or the tape). "How do I hate thee, let me count the ways". The latencies of rotational storage are horrendous, and I personally refuse to use a machine that has those nasty platters of spinning rust in them.

Sure, maybe those rotating platters are ok in some NAS box that you keep your big media files on (or in that cloud storage cluster you use, and where the network latencies make the disk latencies be secondary), but in an actual computer? Ugh. "Get thee behind me, Satan"._

[1] [http://meta.slashdot.org/story/12/10/11/0030249/linus- torval...](http://meta.slashdot.org/story/12/10/11/0030249/linus-torvalds- answers-your-questions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Linus used to say controversial things.

<comment><USER6> That's actually one way to get famous. And it works very well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having just spent the majority of yesterday recovering a backup thanks to my laptop disk going pop, I agree.

Can anyone recommend a decent SSD (SATA2)? I am considering crucial m4.

<comment><USER8> The OCZ drives are fantastic. I'm running a Vertex 3 right now, which rates at about 60,000 IOPS. It was a replacement for a short lived Crucial.

 _This is entirely anecdotal, and by no means a smear against Crucial_ I put a Crucial into my laptop the day before departing on a 3 month business trip to Europe last year.

By the time I got to London, the drive had failed utterly and completely. Thankfully, I had stuffed my previous drive into my bag with me and was able to recover.

I replaced it with the OCZ ( It amuses me that my time in London has made me hear that in my head as "Oh Cee Zed" ... I believe they have an even better Vertex 4 now ) and it has been a rock solid workhorse.

I've since hauled that laptop + drive over about 120k miles and 15 countries without so much as a blip.

Again, anecdotal but I adore this drive.

<comment><USER9> My experience with OCZ is not as nice; their Vertex 2 has a bug where if you sleep the machine too many times, you may get data loss. Total data loss. Heaps of people on the OCZ forums having the same issue.

Luckily had weekly backups, so only lost one week's worth of data, but still.

This kinda soured me against trying any new OCZ...

Now I have an Intel SSD; pricier, but well worth it.

<comment><USER10> Same experience, with two separate OCZ drives. Total irrecoverable data loss. Yay backups. I switched to Intel too in the end.

<comment><USER11> And, having had a similar problem with Intel, I switched to Samsung. So it goes.

<comment><USER7> I grabbed one OCZ and one Samsung. Fingers crossed.

Managed to persuade company to pay for it as well as I'm being a guinea pig user :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What are some good prosumer SSDs for people putting together new desktop boxen?

<comment><USER13> My experience is a bit outdated, but I've had good luck with both Intel drives and the OCZ Vertex series. If I were going to buy an SSD today, it would probably be the 240GB Intel 520.</comment></comment>


Academic acceleration in gifted youth: a 35-year longitudinal study - barry-cotter https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-47023-001 <comment> barry-cotter There is no argument against academic acceleration beyond that it increases inequality of achievement. If the school system was about education more than childcare acceleration would be the norm for bright children and we'd have 14 year olds starting their Bachelor's level studies in every school and 20 year olds who already had doctorates in every city of any size. Instead we waste their time, to their detriment and ours. Theirs, because if you're going to be in school you should be challenged, and ours because they'd be able to start their professional lives earlier or with substantially more education, and hopefully skills.

<comment><USER2> I experienced long term psychological effects from lack of proper education pacing.

From the very beginning, I entered kindergarten as the only one in my class able to read. The teacher, doing her best, sent me off to read by myself in the corner as she taught the rest of the class. In the years where your brain is programmed to adapt itself to the environment it expects for the rest of life, I only ever had to do things which were to me trivially easy. There was this constant social distance and having to put on a sort of mask in order to interact with my "peers". At the same time everyone around me was always telling me how smart I was.

Everything was easy until it wasn't and my subconscious was simply unprepared to cope with not everything being trivial and socially making it very hard to actually be myself around people because of this very strongly built in assumption that nobody cares about what I think in conversation (amongst other things) so that I simply couldn't think of anything to say.

The struggle is real and never really has gone away.

<comment><USER3> Yes. Exactly. Precisely the same thing for me. I was reading at an absurdly young age.

School for me was a special sort of hell where I was able to read at a 12th grade level in 3rd grade, and yet a decade later was in class with people who could not yet read. I would stare at the clock and switch between sleeping and being insanely bored.

I'm 31 years old now and I feel I have enough life experience to call it what it was: Neglect. I was left in a corner to rot in child jail for a over a decade, during some of the most important years of my life, and constantly punished for the crime of being a bored young person whose time is being wasted.

<comment><USER4> What helped me get through the boredom of school was to learn to daydream. Any time there's something boring going on I can tune out from that and daydream. Walking around while doing it is great. The downside of it is that it's not productive and once you're out of school you don't need it to occupy your time, but you still want to.

<comment><USER5> I struggle with this. Daydreaming is my instant Dopamin release system, always available, especially when I have to deal with something boring. But I'm getting better by improving work package size, removing barriers beforehand. That increases flow and flow is pleasant even while doing mundane tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Meh. I skipped 7th grade, after being in the youngest cohort in my class already (birthday in July). I've done fine I guess - went to MIT, did some startups, got paid plenty of money, and I'm pretty happy today (COVID transient aside).

I thought it was cool at the time, and I was in a hurry to get out of high school, get to college, and get on with my life, so I certainly didn't object when my parents and teachers suggested it.

But looking back, it was weird. I couldn't drive until almost the end of high school. Couldn't legally drink until I had already graduated college. And while the adults at the time thought I was emotionally mature for my age - <AUTHOR> teacher memorably called me an "old soul" \- the truth is I was just a smart kid who didn't cause trouble. In retrospect, I still had a lot of growing up to do, and I wish I had the time to do a little bit more of it before entering college and having to make decisions that really mattered.

<comment><USER7> That extra year you gained actually saved you from something though. You didn't have to sit in a classroom being void of stimulation for that year or later years. You were given the chance to grow intellectually instead of sit around doing not much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if there are any studies about the effects of removing highly gifted students from a class of otherwise average students. I'm aware of a few about the lack socioeconomic mixing: rich kids in classes with just rich kids seem to see almost no positive effect, but poor kids who experience a good social mix in their class fare far better than their peers who are in schools where everybody comes from a poor background.

I would expect a similar effect here: gifted kids who are accelerated might show no long term negative psychological effects, and might do a little better academically, but what about the overall effect on everybody else? Is it really better to have classes with the 1% smartest removed?

At least from a political and ethical perspective I would advocate for greater mixing, teaching more fortunate kids that they should put their advantages to fruit by pulling the rest of the class. In other words focus on collaboration rather than competition. However, I have no data to back this up.

<comment><USER9> > ... what about the overall effect on everybody else? Is it really better to > have classes with the 1% smartest removed?

This is a function of the method of instruction. "Pulling up the rest of the class" ought to be the teacher's job in the first place but these sorts of "direct instruction" (DI) based workflows, which do help less fortunate kids a lot, have become extremely unpopular. Every teacher wants to be teaching the 1% of gifted kids and have them "learn everything on their own"; no one wants to actually do the hard work of teaching.

<comment><USER10> The overall effect on everybody else is that they graduate higher ranked in their class, benefit from grading curves, there may be others. But regardless, saying that we have to sacrifice the smart kid so he/she can benefit the other students....its not the kid's job to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's my data point to the contrary: I entered college a few weeks short of my 17th birthday in the early 1980's. I was about 1.5 years younger than others in my class, on average. I made many good friends, but my relative lack of maturity still had a huge impact on my emotional well-being (especially when it came to dating). I'm now in my 50's and still dealing with the psychological repercussions of my parents' decision to accelerate me.

<comment><USER12> 1.5 years isn't even that much? I mean you can probably find that variance within any cohort so I doubt it was the acceleration that caused any psychological repercussions.

<comment><USER13> When you're 15, 1.5 years is 10% of your whole life. I know I seriously struggled with being significantly younger than the others in my classes. Having gone through a PhD since then, there is no way I would have handled it well at 20.

Besides, my experience is that if you're so bright, there are plenty of opportunities everywhere to satisfy your curiosity (or at least work on it). It does not have to be at school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if they lack good ways of measuring this. I skipped a few grades and started university at 15. It took years to catch up socially and in many ways I never did. I wouldn't recommend it.

In retrospect, I'd say a better thing to do with a smart kid is to convince them that they should work on things they're not as good at. Nobody's good at everything. However, that would have required individual attention of a sort that wasn't available back then.

There's a grass-is-greener effect though. It's easy to imagine that one would have done better if one had been / had not been accelerated. As a philosophy prof told me back in those early university years, "Life does not bear counterfactuals." She also said "I bet you tell that to all the girls" when I dropped her Hegel class.

<comment><USER15> I was forced to _not_ skip grades, and it took me years to catch up socially afterwards, because everyone was so hostile and school was such an oppressive, totalitarian environment that it made me unable to trust anyone.

<comment><USER14> I hear you. That's why I added the grass-is-greener skepticism. It may just be that it sucks either way—or that we simply needed different things. It's important not to overgeneralize from personal experiences with this stuff.

When I look back on it, I think what I needed most was for some teacher, mentor, or older/wiser person to spend time with me. That's what would have made the biggest difference. But I was completely isolated.

<comment><USER16> Then maybe instead of accelerating children down the same horrible route.. we could create separate tracks?

I know that 'negative' (special needs) tracks are basically a disaster, but maybe positive (group gifted children together) one would work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I consider myself pretty fortunate to have both:

1) Been accelerated after I had formed a pretty tight friend group with my same-aged peers (jumped 2 years of math in 7th-8th grade)

2) Been born in a time where the internet was modern enough that we could all hang out and game online

I entered University at 16 (the PSEO program in MN that pays for tuition and books your junior and senior year of high school), but was able to keep in touch with my high-school friend group with multiplayer video games.

Even today, a decade later, I'm still able to keep in touch with them almost daily even though I'm living in Taiwan (started the digital nomad thing soon after graduating University at 20).

Academically I did _really_ well in a large University environment with a lot more autonomy, freedom, and responsibility (it's insane to me that we have 18 year olds still needing to ask permission to go to the bathroom during class).

Socially, I'll admit that I struggled to make any college-aged friends, but I think that was more due to still living at home than anything else. Instead of being able to take people up on offers to hang out at night, I had to make the last bus out of Minneapolis to my small town by 6:30pm.

</comment><comment><USER18> Disclaimer: it's late and I don't feel like SciHubbing it so I haven't read past the abstract.

My N=1 opinion is that being "highly gifted" may not cause social and emotional trauma, but it can certainly complicate unrelated trauma.

I skipped so many grades when I was a kid that they started holding me back so I wouldn't get too "out of sync" (I did junior high twice.) I got along socially with relatively little bullying. But I still have a lot of school- related trauma, especially concerning emotional regulation.

My working theory is that none of my teachers had any idea how to teach a 7-year-old in the midst of kids twice their age, so they treated me like I was twice my age, which was fine intellectually but messed me up emotionally. The emotional impact of this has absolutely nothing to do with my giftedness; it would mess any child up.

There are some postrationalists that tweet occasionally about how their educational experience messed them up similarly. Qiaochu/QC Yuan is my favorite.

Also, I'm trans and there are more of us with this story than you'd think.

<comment><USER19> Fulltext: [https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/smpy/2020-bernstein.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/smpy/2020-bernstein.pdf)

I keep a fulltext bibliography of SMPY-related papers at [https://www.gwern.net/SMPY](https://www.gwern.net/SMPY) \- this is just one of many papers establishing that various kinds of enrichment and acceleration are just fine, do no emotional damage, and _do_ save a lot of their life from formal schooling, which has been a major premise of SMPY since Stanley founded it in the 1960s.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I'm agreed. My point, I suppose, is that the best "acceleration" available to me involved a good deal of emotional neglect and a pinch of actual abuse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you have such a child, get them into an extracurricular where they can compete with others based on body mass.

I got my ass kicked in varsity wrestling after a grade skip. Still, I competed as I had since late elementary school. I could start varsity because our high school was smallish and I fit into an open weight class.

I had a strong peer group orthogonal to my classmates. I spent time in the weight room and otherwise working out. I learned how to handle myself for the rare occasions that conflicts became physical. These skills helped me immensely when I began university at 16.

</comment><comment><USER21> As a self-motivated accelerator (I dual enrolled on-site with the local university my senior year of high school) I can't help but feel like everyone trying to hold me back (I was strongly discouraged) was motivated not just by trying to keep dollars in the school and GPAs they could get credit for up, but that they were also motivated by jealousy and a sense that what I was doing was somehow unfairly improving my life.

The head guidance counselor mocked me. The secretary who was supposed to buy my books and oversee my registration made me go back and forth between the university and the high school way too many times, and had a bad attitude about it the whole way.

Several of my friends who I had tried to get to follow me got talked out of it by the same people.

If it's so bad for everyone else, of course they need to come up with excuses for why it's bad for the student.

Nobody cares that these gifted students are sitting there bored. That to get an A requires them to do meaningless busywork. That the entire situation teaches them that success means showing up and demonstrating they're smart, instead of the hard work that real success requires.

Staying in that high school one minute longer, with those who were vindictive, condescending idiots, would have destroyed my psychological well-being.

My professors talked to me like I was an adult. It was very easy to respect them and my time with them. I greatly appreciated spending my time in the stacks instead of being made to run between classes all day, taking a pass to go to the restroom, and getting berated by thoughtless busybodies on my way to the library.

Our schools are first and foremost a kind of daycare that allows the adults in all of the children's lives to go to work. Only after meeting this first goal are they educational. Some schools are fortunate enough to not have discipline problems. Others are not so fortunate, and the rules and instruction is targeted to the worst performers. This greatly shortchanges those students who need challenges - challenging books, instructions, math, performance, exams, etc...

If anything, it is psychologically destructive to purposefully hold them back.

</comment><comment><USER22> From the paper:

      Acceleration Composite = 1 × AP Courses +
                               1 × College Courses +
                               4 × Grades Skipped

"The average age of high school graduation was for Cohort 1: M = 17.8 years (SD = 0.62); for Cohort 2: M = 17.7 years (SD = 0.76); and for Cohort 3: M = 17.2 years (SD = 1.02)"

According to figure 2 (pg 5), only 52 of 1497 (= 3.5%) students graduated from high school at an age ≤ 16. So it seems like this study is measuring very modest levels of acceleration, most of which probably comes from AP courses. I don't think this study tells us much about 20 year-olds with PhDs, or what would happen if we put an 8-year-old in a high school literature class, or if we separated everyone into different tracks an a young age, or a lot of the other things people are discussing in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER23> > "elite science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduate students > (N = 478) identified in 1992. Their educational histories were assessed at > age 25 and they were followed up at age 50 using the same psychological > assessments."

One thing to consider is the fact that America during the period 1992 to 2020, has seen a vast societal shift from nerds being seen as social outcasts to being seen as the thing a huge portion of the people at the top of society claim to be.

As a counterpoint, I wonder if the exact same study, when conducted in an anti-intellectual society (say Nazi Germany in the late 1930's) would still return the same results, or if the people that were "held back" would end up better off psychologically.

I strongly suspect the huge change in how cool it is to be nerdy today is a significant factor in today's wellbeing.

<comment><USER24> > say Nazi Germany in the late 1930's

I'd say Nazi Germany in the late 1930s was more of an anti-Jewish intellectual society, more than an anti-intellectual society pure and simple, the reason being that them being mostly a technocratic State they highly needed those intellectuals, engineers and technicians. One of the many proofs is the work of von Braun, without which us as a species wouldn't have gotten to the Moon as fast as we did. The same discussion goes for Soviet Russia, with some exceptions (mostly genetics-related work, where the politruks intervened in a very harmful way for their scientists).

IMO the only true anti-intellectual regime that I know of from the 20th century is represented by Mao's relatively short-lived Cultural Revolution in China, a policy which was pretty quickly reversed.

<comment><USER25> Pol Pot.

<comment><USER24> Yeap, that too, had forgotten about his atrocities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> From my own experiences, most "gifted" students are actually from middle or upper class families, and their parents are usually well-educated and very interested in the education of their own children. This will positively affect the "psychological well-being" of those kids, and likely also negate many negative impacts of academic acceleration.

Plus, acceleration is really unnecessary these days. There's no shortage of information on the internet, so why bother rushing into universities? Just let kids find and follow their passion.

<comment><USER10> I once did a pretty broad GIS analysis looking at different kinds of data related to census block groups in conjunction with published standardized test scores and the correlation between income and education is practically a straight line.

Money and Education are a chicken and egg problem in terms of causality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have a 6 year old daughter who has been taking lessons with the 3rd graders this past year. I just had a conference with her teachers and they are ok to jump her a grade. They thought two grades would have been too much socially. But they did agree to give her advanced lessons. She is in a Montessori where grades 1-3 are together. I really believe all children have the potential for genius. Its all in how they are raised and what they are taught at a young age. The Pygmalion effect has massive power over young developing minds.

<comment><USER28> Would you care to elaborate on the Pygmalion effect? How did you raise your child?

<comment><USER27> My wife and I read to her a lot when she was young. We gave her lots of open ended play with lots of arts and crafts.

My wife taught her to read right around when she turned 4. I was also applying some of the techniques from Glen Doman in his book How to teach your Baby to Read.

I think learning to read is what really helped her excel. She was reading 2nd grade chapter books by the time she started kindergarten. Once you know how to read, you can learn about the other subjects.

There is more that we did, but I think reading to her and teaching her to read where the biggest parts of it. The idea that any child has the potential for genius came from Glen's book. I really think its true. Even if you only spent 15-30 minutes a day, that is enough to have a profound influence on the child.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I was a "mentally gifted minor" as of the 5th grade in California. This seemed mainly to be about the schools receiving additional funding for each such student.

The high school I attended let us vote on how the funds were spent, and we voted to purchase musical instruments (which anyone in the school could use). We also hired a Mandarin tutor for one quarter, which was decades ahead. I don't remember any Mandarin except for one phrase, which translated to 'I am reading a book.'

</comment><comment><USER30> This study re-enforced the result of at least three prominent longitudinal studies about gifted education and acceleration: the study of Lewis Terman, the study of Julian Stanley and the Marburger study.

</comment><comment><USER31> > The accepted manuscript version of this article will be publicly available > on 07/02/2021

Does anyone have access to the study?

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm curious about the inter-relational impacts in e.g. families or peer groups. Has this aspect been studied?

</comment><comment><USER33> Total honesty time. This topic has bothered me for years.

I went to public school and did every honors program / enrichment class / etc. that we had. Nothing that showed me how to think about learning, however. I'll get to that below. Furthermore, everything was easy enough that nobody ever found out I had severe issues focusing on the material because the pacing was so slow. I didn't think of these things as a problem at the time. I thought it was normal to daydream then learn math sort of looking in reverse, in review of what was covered "yesterday, while I was dreaming" or similar. More importantly though, given the ease of the curriculum, from an early age I thought of school as a game -- a type of intelligence test where the object was to do as well as possible with the minimum effort, using only the materials provided by the teacher, and the class lecture. This was reinforced by my peer group of course, but also parents and authority figures always telling me I was smart. With friends, the mantra, "You aren't smart if you have to work hard" was the sort of maxim we obeyed.

This all proved to be an absolutely disastrous set of notions when I finally arrived at university. I daydreamed through calculus -- I didn't have the skill of focusing. I took misinformed and patchy notes and, still playing the intelligence game, used those notes as my only source of information. I played the game until undergrad was finished. I graduated... I'd gotten by on geometric intuition and educated guesswork. I made b's and c's. Even as I failed at my own game, I wondered what was wrong with me. Why was I not smart enough?

Only at the end of my BS, after falling off the treadmill I assumed would simply spit me out in a professorship somewhere, did I realize what a mistake I'd made. The mistake, of course, in not taking every opportunity to maximize what I learned and to investigate what I was curious about -- indeed, what I loved. Only then, with no options, no academic structure before me, with every opportunity (seemingly) past, did my eyes open to see the world as it was, and not as the intelligence game. I type this now, 16 years later, in my home office; a shrine to self learning... At that time, I dug out my calculus books and started over. Soon I went to grad school for something easy -- something I could get into based on the existence of my engineering degree alone (a degree for which in and of itself, I was basically unemployable, or at least to which I did not trust myself to struggle onward and use in that way). Meanwhile I taught myself calculus over again from page 1, and began to resurrect my prospects in the most painful way possible. Piece by piece I scrapped my education together, getting my PhD in engineering (not physics like I wanted) years late.

I've a very wide education now, but I am always wondering what could have been, and now I have a toddler, almost 2 years old. One thing about the above I know: I just want to make sure he never goes through such a process with wool over his eyes. I want him to know from the start how to direct his curiosity into learning what he wants, at his own pace.

</comment><comment><USER34> I didn't know that this was in question.

Most of the questions I'm aware of are reinforcement of systemic bias (equivalently capable white and Asian kids being selected over other races), and the diversion of funds from teaching the less "advanced" to teaching those kids who aren't struggling with no evidence that the acceleration actually accomplishes anything in the long term

<comment> barry-cotter > and the diversion of funds from teaching the less "advanced" to teaching > those kids who aren't struggling

This doesn't happen. In the US gifted education gets at most 1% of all education spending, almost certainly less. Special education gets over 20% of all spending, probably closer to 25%. The average high school has no explicit accommodation for gifted students and a dedicated special ed teacher.

> with no evidence that the acceleration actually accomplishes anything in the > long term

Strong positive effects exist.

[https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf)

> Exceptionally Gifted Children: Long-Term Outcomes of Academic Acceleration > and Nonacceleration

> a 20-year longitudinal study has traced the academic, social, and emotional > devel- opment of 60 young australians with iQs of 160 and above. Significant > differences have been noted in the young people's educational status and > direction, life satisfac- tion, social relationships, and self-esteem as a > function of the degree of academic accel- eration their schools permitted > them in childhood and adolescence. the considerable majority of young people > who have been radically accelerated, or who accelerated by 2 years, report > high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading > universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and > love relation- ships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by > only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter > less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life > satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with > socialization. Several did not graduate from college or high school. Without > exception, these young people possess multiple talents; however, for some, > the extent and direction of talent development has been dictated by their > schools' academic priorities or their teachers' willingness or unwillingness > to assist in the development of particular talent areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This study is clearly wrong. When I was 16 I completed my CS degree, finished university by 22, and joined an early tech company by 25. It changed my life forever.

<comment><USER36> Are you sure you understood the abstract/title correctly? The study says there seem to be no negative social/emotional effects of academic acceleration.</comment></comment>