Amazon Snowball - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/ <comment><USER2> But can you trust it?

When I returned to JPL after working at Google for a year I was tasked with evaluating a Google Search Appliance. We ultimately decided not to keep it, and so we had to erase the disks, which now contained sensitive data. The appliance had a "self-destruct" feature that supposedly erased all the data, but there was no way to verify it. After lengthy negotiations with Google (some people just have a hard time grasping the idea that just because a file has been deleted doesn't mean the data is actually gone) we eventually got them to agree to let us open the enclosure and take out the disks. Forensic analysis revealed that they had not in fact been erased.

Caveat emptor.

<comment><USER3> From: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport- snowball-t...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball- transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/)

"...The data will be 256-bit encrypted on the host [running the Snowball client?] and stored on the appliance in encrypted form. The appliance can be hosted on a private subnet with limited network access."

So I assume the data is encrypted asymetrically.

"...ship it back to us for ingestion. We'll decrypt the data [using the private key specified in the job,] and copy it to the S3 bucket(s) that you specified when you made your request[/job]. Then we'll sanitize the appliance in accordance with NIST Special Publication 800-88 (Guidelines for Media Sanitization)."

That links to [http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP...](http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-88r1.pdf)

There are a few different types of sanitisation (clear/purge/destroy), and Amazon doesn't specify which type. I assume they would go with "clear", and maybe in a few select places (I'd hope storage media) "purge".

"Clear" is scary though, as for network devices, it is only "full manufacturer's reset to reset the router or switch back to its factory default settings", and for HDD's it is "Overwrite media by using organizationally approved and validated overwriting technologies/methods/tools. The Clear procedure should consist of at least one pass of writes with a fixed data value, such as all zeros. Multiple passes or more complex values may optionally be used".

So what vector do you want to protect? Accidental data egress shouldn't happen as the data is encrypted. However there are more interesting vectors, such as getting hold of the public key and injecting your own data into another companies buckets...

<comment><USER2> But that's the whole point: Can you trust that the box does what Amazon says it does? Because the Google box did not do what Google said it did, but if I hadn't been _very_ insistent about it (to the point of having a number of people think I was being a total dick), we would never have known.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

\- Andrew S. Tanenbaum

<comment><USER5> You can drive that station wagon right up to your chosen rsync.net location:

[http://www.rsync.net/products/oob.html](http://www.rsync.net/products/oob.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As usual, the pricing is not very friendly, and apparently designed to lock your data into AWS or exploit your weak negotiating position once you buy in.

While you can send in 50TB for $200, taking the same 50TB out costs an additional $1500 charge (50000 * 0.03).

[assuming they are not transferring the data over the Internet, the cost to AWS should be the same or cheaper for reading]

<comment><USER7> $1700 is amazingly cheap when you consider that it costs $4300 [0] to transfer that same 50TB out of EC2.

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/)

$4300 = 10000 * $0.09 + 40000 * $0.085

<comment><USER6> ... which is also wildly overpriced.

According to multiple sources, Internet transit in the US now costs less than 1$ for a 1 Mbps line for large deals, which translates to 1$ for 324GB, which translates to 0.003$ / GB.

Amazon charges 15-30 times that.

(it appears that traffic can be much more expensive in places other than the US and presumably Europe)

<comment><USER8> It may cost that much to buy that capacity, but it costs a lot more than that to run the large scale organizations (CAPEX/OPEX) that build and buy these services. You're not just paying for a pipe, you're paying for the corporation.

<comment><USER9> > You're not just paying for a pipe, you're paying for the corporation.

You are paying their profit margin, yeah.

It is wildly overpriced, no matter how you look at it. Operating costs even when done on a much smaller and more inefficient scale than for AWS do not make the total cost for incremental bandwidth usage THAT much larger.

<comment><USER10> What's the alternative?

<comment><USER11> Centurylink has a pretty formidable IaaS offering, it's very well priced and they charge very little (comparatively) for bandwidth. The only problem is their storage solution is extremely expensive but using S3 or soon Backblaze B2 as a storage layer is good enough for me.

<comment><USER12> So you're saying S3 is the alternative to S3 ... ?

<comment><USER11> I said their IaaS is a cheaper alternative to AWS IaaS with the exception of their S3 alternative. I suggested B2 is the cheapest alternative to S3 do you have a suggestion?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The e-ink display showing a shipping label is brilliant.

<comment><USER14> This article says it's not e-ink but just a Kindle strapped to the side.

>It has a Kindle on the side, which functions as an automatic shipping label.

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches- snowball-a-...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/amazon-launches-snowball-a- rugged-storage-appliance-for-importing-data-to-aws-by-fedex/)

<comment><USER15> Unless i'm mis-judging the scale of this thing, that screen looks a fair bit smaller than a kindle. I think it's just techcrunch using "kindle" as a generic word for e-ink display.

<comment><USER16> The Amazon exec who introduced the Snowball during the keynote also called it included a "Kindle".

<comment><USER17> Perhaps a mini kindle, I estimate by the image that's about 2x4" max.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> An AWS version of a sneakernet.

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

<comment><USER19> Yep, all I could think was "Wow, that's a good deal fancier than a station wagon full of tapes".

Cloud backup companies have had similar services for a while now, but it's nice to see AWS adopting it.

<comment><USER20> I have to admit, while it makes for good storage lock-in, I was impressed that they only charge 3 cents/GB to get the data back out.

Someone else in this thread thought $1500 was expensive to get 50TB back out. If you use this for disaster recovery, you could get all of your data back onsite quickly for a very low (comparative) cost, versus trying to provision high speed connectivity.

<comment><USER21> Don't forget, there's the ongoing storage cost at S3, which also adds up really quickly.

<comment><USER20> 3 cents/GB is _cheap_. Go 1 cent a GB S3's infrequent access class (since you won't be incurring the charge for retrieval through S3, you'll be pulling back out through Snowball), and its even cheaper.

$10/TB/month? Where else can I store data reliably that cheap? (Yes, Backblaze is half that price. I hope they become a worthy adversary to AWS S3 to drive prices further down).

<comment><USER21> If it cost you about $1000 to buy a diskpack (4*6TB drives) you could create backups and send them to at least a half dozen locations for less money than using S3 to store that data.

Yes, S3 is cheap(ish). But given Snowball is a snapshot backup service, it's not comparatively cheaper than it would be to distribute that same data by creating a clone and sending it to a safe place.

<comment><USER20> That's not really how business IT works (unless you're sending tape off to Iron Mountain, which has its own costs and storage fees).

S3 is the cheapest "real" business storage option besides Backblaze's new storage offering. S3 can't be compared to shipping disks someplace where they sit offline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> More details [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport- snowball-t...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball- transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm curious about how they're going to approach this from the fraud perspective. This is a $200 charge for a device that has 50TB storage, which would probably cost you around $2000 to buy.

There's people out there that will sign a contract under a fake name / address with a phone provider and sell the phones, and the way the providers fight against it usually by running credit checks and verifying address against them. Ultimately, this is very hard to detect when it involves identity theft.

<comment><USER13> Couldn't you just put a hold for $2k and release it when the device is returned?

<comment><USER23> Yes, you could, the pricing page doesn't mention anything about it though, hence why I wonder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The XKCD about FedEx's bandwidth seems particularly appropriate: [https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/)

<comment><USER25> His MicroSD card calculations are off because it would take a month to insert an airplane-load of those cards one by one into some computer to copy them into your storage.

Which also makes me wonder why this Snowball device only does Ethernet. Seems like it should have an eSATA port.

<comment><USER26> Maybe it'll be a 10GbE interface?

<comment><USER20> Ethernet is most ubiquitous. You don't need physical access to a server with data, just network access. Most environments outside of datacenters don't have 10GbE switches or NICs yet.

EDIT: It appears it supports 10GbE natively. I assume it'll also support lower Ethernet speeds.

<comment><USER26> > I assume it'll also support lower Ethernet speeds.

Yeah, ethernet has pretty much always downgraded well. That's why a 10GBASE-T interface is perfect :P

(I should have been more clear with my initialisms)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The math for the time to transfer comparison is interesting:

"Even with high-speed Internet connections, it can take months to transfer large amounts of data. For example, 100 terabytes of data will take more than 100 days to transfer over a dedicated 100 Mbps connection. That same transfer can be accomplished in less than one day, plus shipping time, using two Snowball appliances."

With a 100 Mbps connection it takes over 100 days [1] but with a 100 times faster connection (10 Gbps) it takes less than a day :)

[1] Assuming no network overhead it is 92.6 days

<comment><USER28> Good luck trying to saturate the 10Gbps port (on both the read and write sides) however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In my last role we would often need to upload large amounts of data for our clients to AWS. When this data got into the terabytes we would ship a NAS box to our customer and then send that to Amazon. On more than one occasion Amazon fubar'ed the upload on their end (why would you move drives around in a RAID 5/6 array?). Maybe since this is AWS branded solution it will be more reliable.

</comment><comment><USER30> This has interesting security implications for both sides. Is the device 100% offline or does it phone home when you connect it to your network or transmit any other data? What if someone gets the device and hacks it to scan Amazon's networks when sent back?

<comment><USER31> I'm gonna guess they have all sorts of physical tamper detection capabilities to prevent this. And perhaps a software load that gets wiped every time, so in case you find a bug in their software (iSCSI? NFS? whatever) it might be hard to escalate.

<comment><USER3> Tamper detection won't prevent anything. It would just be an indicator that _something_ appears to have happened.

The software load that is wiped every time is a first, and extremely basic, line of defence.

Realistically I'd hope the OS is on a SD card that they can literally take out and throw away after they have the data off (you can pwn the micro-controller on an SD card) - and replace with a freshly baked card.

<comment><USER31> Presumably if their sensors say the system has been cracked open, they don't just ship it out to another user. (And they could have many layers of sensors, telling them if it was just via damage (hitting it with a forklift) or someone really getting in.) Considering the potential downside, I'm sure they've done some work here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> All the innovation at AWS is amazing. If they every stop charging by the Gigabyte for bandwidth and move to a flat model then I would be tempted to switch to them for all my sites.

<comment><USER33> Why would they do that? It makes sense to charge per gb. It gets people using them when they are small and its cheap to use S3/EC2 and then as they scale up its easier to just stick with AWS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > __Snowball currently supports importing data to AWS. Exporting data out of > AWS will be supported in a future release.

I'm interested in hearing about how they are going to do this.

</comment><comment><USER35> Forgive me, but what exactly is 'petabyte-scale' about a 50TB NAS with a dog- slow link?

</comment><comment><USER21> Say I wanted to do something similar, but move data around locally between two NAS appliances, but not incur a double disk charge - (i've got a pack of ~ 20 disks in NAS brand a, but i want to move to NAS brand b. The disks work in both, but need reformatting).

Does anyone know of a service where I could rent a 20TB device like snowball but not push it to S3?

<comment><USER36> I know Dell has glorified portable harddrive arrays in pelican styles cases for moving data between their SAN systems. Unfortunately I don't recall the name and I don't know if they are available for rental. If you have a Dell VAR, have them ask the Dell storage group.

Edit: Correction, it doesn't appear to be an array, just single device so 1.5-2TB max. Also basically targeted at this SAN solution only.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, I need to move 20TB in one go - so i can repurpose the disks.

<comment><USER37> [https://www.synology.com/en- us/products/DS1515+#spec](https://www.synology.com/en- us/products/DS1515+#spec)

5 * 6TB drives, RAID5 would put you at nearly 24TB of storage, if my brain is in gear.

<comment><USER38> He wants to rent something temporarily, so that he can copy stuff off the drives, take them out of the nas, format them in the new nas so it's compatible, copy stuff off the rented appliance to the new nas, ship the rented thing back off.

He wants to avoid having to have to buy enough drives, etc, to hold all of the data at once

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Getting terabytes of data into AWS/Hotel California is great, but wish there was a way to get the data out just as quickly!

<comment><USER40> > AWS Import/Export Snowball is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that > uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into _and out of_ > AWS.

<comment><USER41> Yes, but "Currently, Snowball doesn't support exporting data."

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/introdu...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/introduction.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The picture on the page doesn't give me an accurate estimate of the size. They are actually 50 pounds (says on the blog)!

<comment><USER42> They demoed one on stage at re:invent just a bit ago, it is about the size of a desktop PC with hard plastic case all around it. I think he said it is ~47 lbs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's amazing that Amazon has been vertically integrated so many of both its own and external product/services into this appliances:

\- Kindle's E-Ink

\- AWS IAM / KMS/ SNS

\- Amazon Carrier? (perhaps in the future?)

\- GPS-powered chain-of-custody tracking (AWS working on it, perhaps Amazon Drone delivery in the future?)

</comment><comment><USER44> When I export data from S3, what do I get for a given bucket? Just basically a file system? How is the metadata stored? What about object versions?

I'm curious what the end result looks like in doing this.

<comment><USER41> "Currently, Snowball doesn't support exporting data."

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/limits....](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/limits.html)

<comment><USER44> Wow. Amazon is really embracing the ship fast, break things, roll with the MVP even when it lacks 50% of the features.

<comment><USER45> Amazon wants to get companies' data into AWS so they're locked in. They don't want that data flowing the other way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I thought they already allowed you to mail in hard drives?

<comment><AUTHOR> They did but you had to buy them yourself and most of the times you didn't have a use for them after. With snowball they manage the process end to end.

<comment><USER47> What's interesting is that they don't mention this on the marketing page for snowball. As in "also if you want you can mail your own harddrive, see this page for details". While most would think "why rain on the parade of this new service by mentioning the old service" with Amazon it's more than that. It's this entire idea of weaning people off of legacy ways of doing things (with new names and new processes) so it's harder for any competitor to offer the same type of service, unique way of doing things or handholding. After all anyone can accept (in theory) a mailed in hard drive. Much harder to offer a solution like this with hardware and so on. So to me this is obviously deliberate and consistent with Amazon wanting to raise an entire generation on a new paradigm of getting things done.

Edit: And yes this way it's easier for them as well and removes "missing power supplies" (big deal actually by I get the point..)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> _the E Ink shipping label will automatically update_

Are you kidding me? Instead of a 25 cent shipping label they use a $100 e-ink display?

The display alone might get the device stolen.

<comment><USER49> They mentioned in the keynote they are using a kindle as the display; given that Amazon sells refurbished kindles for $65, I imagine the actual cost is a good bit lower. They also mentioned that the kindle also functions as the user-interface, so it's more than a glorified shipping label.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I am sure most companies which are the target of this will welcome plugging in an outside device into their internal networks with open arms.

<comment><USER51> Relying on securing the perimeter is gonna blow up in their face sooner or later.

But in any case, you can just connect it to a sacrificial server on its own network that has nothing else on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Oh amazon please get your naming right. Why does every service have to be named so utterly confusing? I was expected some kind of cloud NLP library. Would have been cool.

Out of curiosity, does anyone have a real life example where they send petabytes over the wire? You know, outside the adult industry.

<comment><USER53> Lots of scientific experiments can easily generate huge data sets of raw measurements that need to be moved from the locations of measuring instruments back to the lab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Named after the horse in Animal Farm?

<comment><USER3> I assume named after the fact that a snowball is a lump of cloud matter, in a flight ready state?

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Isn't this a bit risky? What happens if someone keeps it? 50TB is a lot more than $200.

<comment><USER22> "The data will be 256-bit encrypted on the host and stored on the appliance in encrypted form", key is stored in KMS, according to [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport- snowball-t...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball- transfer-1-petabyte-per-week-using-amazon-owned-storage-appliances/)

<comment><USER56> I think the poster was talking about someone simply gutting the appliance for the 50TB drives. With a bit of fraud here and there on top.

<comment><USER57> From the looks of it the delivery provider is UPS, if they lose it or a rogue employee guts it during transit, I think AWS will probably have clauses in their contracts to go at them full pelt with a lawsuit

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> safer than google option of asking you to ship the un-encrypted drive.

<comment><USER59> encrypt it before shipping

<comment><USER58> then they can't import it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Sneakernet as a Service!

</comment><comment><USER61> They should have called it 'speedball'

</comment><comment><USER62> the biggest message this sends is something nobody is talking about: amazon is not afraid of sending hardware on-premises.

</comment><comment><USER63> Can this work with Arq?

</comment><comment><USER64> interesting how much we need to pay for the GB

</comment><comment><USER65> Another easy method to move your customers data to AWS - where I'm sure some three letter agenices feast over each newly arrived platter of data.

I'm still waiting for the big leak on how AWS cooperates with NSA at large.

</comment><comment><USER66> Well, that's an unfortunate name.

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snowball](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snowball)

Reminiscent of when Microsoft called an overlay dialog a "floater" and all the South Africans and Brits in the room started laughing.

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=floater](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=floater) (the 2nd definition)

<comment><USER67> I really don't think there's a word that doesn't mean /something/ dirty in some part of the world.

<comment><USER68> Yeah, but this is a bit like calling it Amazon Cumswapper. There's no other valid technical use of the word.

<comment><USER12> Well, apart from meaning a ball of snow, such as might be thrown by children at each other for fun. Really, that's where my mind went with the word 'snowball', much like the rest of the anglophone world. Yes, there may be slang and other juvenile repurposings of the word, but in normal, everyday (well, wintertime everyday) usage snowball means exactly what the OED says it means. Not sure why anyone would imagine otherwise?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


By 2029 no computer will have passed the Turing Test. - <AUTHOR> http://www.longbets.org/1

<comment><USER2> bull, the turing test has been passed a long time ago. in order to beat the average human, all you need is (i) active listening, and (ii) the ability to change the subject.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure that they would be really interested to know that, then. Can you provide citations for your claim?</comment></comment>


Spanning Adds Gmail Backup To Its Google Apps Backup Service - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/06/spanning-adds-gmail-to-google-apps-backup-service/

<comment><USER2> I'd like to hear more about how secure their service is. I don't want a dropbox-oops to mean that someone can read all my e-mail archives with no password.

<comment> cwood-spanning We use OpenID and OAuth to authenticate users against Google before granting them access to anything. We encrypt everything and go so far as to use an EV- SSL cert. We use only SAS-70/SSAE-16 certified data centers, wrap our own servers in a VPN, and lock down all incoming connections. But probably most importantly, we assume a security break would be a company-ending event, and implement our controls accordingly.

Please contact me directly (firstname.lastname@example.com) if you have any questions or run into any problems.

Thanks, Charlie Founder, Spanning</comment></comment>


Star Trek: Picard – Free Series Premiere Episode – CBS All Access - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PPm5l3o2zw <comment><USER2> I watched it this morning. It's pretty good. I might have to subscribe to CBS for a couple months.

</comment><comment><USER3> Deleted now. I guess it was a flash peak.</comment>


Show HN: Audino – Open-Source Audio and Speech Annotation Tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/midas-research/audino <comment><USER2> You're likely to find people using this to build solutions for remote depositions (in the US). Seems to be something fairly ripe for disruption, the pandemic is exacerbating the demand.

Is there a recorded demo of it somewhere? Would be nice to see it in action as I'm having a little trouble understanding the workflow.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on a recorded demo. For now, the tutorial section explains the workflow well (with screenshots).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice choice of Pokémon. [https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Audino_(Pok%C3%A9mon...](https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Audino_\(Pok%C3%A9mon\))

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, it's a happy coincidence. The name is an amalgamation of audio and annotation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is incredible!

While we were trying to build up a corpus of transcription data for our company, I often thought we should build something like this an open-source it. We ended up building a one-off hacked-up thing to do it instead, but I'm really glad this exists for any future people in our shoes.

Annotating speech data is super tedious and anything that improves the process even 10% is a huge, huge win.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even we used to do the same. Hence, we developed this tool to mitigate a lot of the pain points that previous tools brought. Thanks for sharing your experience and would love to hear your experience with this tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The name is _incredibly_ easy to confuse with Arduino.

Maybe even 'audinote' would not only be less confusing; but also more clear on what the app does?

</comment><comment><USER6> How does this compare to ELAN ([https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan](https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan)) in regards to doing the actual annotations/transcriptions? Or could ELAN/EAF- files perhaps be considered for input formats in future releases?

</comment><comment><USER7> What are some example usages of this?

I could not really tell right away looking at the docs. Why would I want to use this?

<comment><AUTHOR> At our lab, we extensively work on problems that involve speech data. This includes tasks like speech recognition, speech scoring, emotion recognition, topic detection and speaker diarisation. Some of these tasks have public data available, while tasks like speech scoring and low-resource speech recognition, the data is fairly limited for supervised learning. Hence, we developed this annotation tool to generate corpus for our need.

<comment><USER8> In case still not clear, it does not do the transcription, it does not. Oh Hi Mark. It asks you to manually annotate it (in case you want to prepare a training data set for your algorithm), its not an AI algorithm.

<comment><USER9> This is the most helpful comment here. I still don't understand what the tool is for though. Up until now I assumed it would allow me to get automatic transcriptions, including breaking them down by speaker.

<comment><USER10> I was looking into that space recently and I have used otter.ai for transcriptions which gives you 6000 minutes/month for 8 USD, which is insanely cheap in that space. Their British language model is quite good as well.

I've bulk exported generated srt/vtt files from my fav podcasts and using tinysearch that was posted here recently with ableplayer to provide audio full text search of my Jekyll published podcasts posts and with clickable timestamps to audio play of search phrases.

Whenever I want to know what podcaster has to say on specific subject a quick search makes such a difference!

<comment><USER9> Awesome. Thanks for the info. I look forward to trying out your suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there an API for getting the data to annotate into that app, and for getting the annotations out?

Most of the time I need the labels in my own system, and don't want to manually move data back and forth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! To add data to your project, we provide an API-Key and an endpoint to upload the data.

To export the data, there's an option on admin panel from where you can download it in JSON format.

Please check the tutorials section for more details: [https://github.com/midas- research/audino/blob/master/docs/tu...](https://github.com/midas- research/audino/blob/master/docs/tutorial.md)

<comment><USER11> Great. Will you consider adding an API for the JSON export as well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I had a subtitle file to use as best guesses for sentence segmentation, could this help extract clips and clean up start and end alignment?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting usecase! Currently, the tool allows creation of datapoint along with reference transcripts. From what I understand, you wish to fix the subtitle start and end time while keeping the transcription for that segment same. If yes, we plan to add an enhancement where you can pass annotations aka segments with transcripts. This should solve your usecase.

<comment><USER12> That would be awesome. My hacky solution was a waveform and start and end sliders. It would just iterate through and you could accept, reject, or modify the times and text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> FWIW changing version to "3" in the compose file was necessary to get it to build with the latest release of docker-ce.

<comment><AUTHOR> Strange. Can you open an issue with logs and docker version?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> README.md file could use an image. I recommend the one from this page: [https://github.com/midas- research/audino/blob/master/docs/tu...](https://github.com/midas- research/audino/blob/master/docs/tutorials/annotation-dashboard.md)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your suggestion! We're working hard to get a demo video out and intentionally left space for it. But sure, we can add a placeholder image till then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This could be cool for analyzing lectures

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe it's me, but I was expecting this to be something to do with Arduino, given the name and the colour they've chosen for the logo.

<comment><USER16> Branding is hard

<comment><AUTHOR> True, it took days to decide on the name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> OMG, that list of frontend dependencies is just soul-crushing. How does anyone stay sane using NodeJS?

<comment><USER18> Actually, wasn't bad when I looked at it. I've seen much much x5 worse.

A few font-awesome, testing-library, ES-Lint & react imports. Some of those broader libraries have been broken up so you don't have to import the whole enchilada.

But ya in a larger project, mixing and matching the versions of some of those components can get tricky. This repo seems reasonable in dependencies, the dependencies of dependencies on the other hand can be crazy in any project these days.

<comment><USER19> yarn.lock is just under half a megabyte, and lists 1461 packages that it installs. (232 of them are second or subsequent versions of the same package, which typically indicates unmaintained software. It has five versions of kind- of, and four versions of ten other packages.)

<comment><USER18> Ya, that's not great - don't think the parent project of this post has gone off the rails though. More of an ecosystem problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you should refer to package.json for actual dependencies. But yes, I agree that tool dependencies are dependent on a lot of dependencies. I'll evaluate and reduce tool dependencies, if possible.

That being said, the gzipped js bundle size is fairly small (under 200kb).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We want to hear more about the tool for speech annotation. Please try and let us know

<comment><USER9> We, as in the developer? Or we as in a potential user?

I'm a potential user, and I'd certainly like to hear more from somebody who has tried it.</comment></comment>


A couple of my rules for startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/8301-13643_1-9889660-45.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I found this very interesting as it seems true for many business in general, especially in my humble experience.</comment>


Novelist condemns female culture that revels in humiliating other sex (2001) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/aug/14/edinburghfestival2001.edinburghbookfestival2001?CMP <comment><USER2> Doris Lessing's age is interesting in this case. She is the same generation as my mother. The difference in views and attitudes toward men between that generation, my wife's generation, and my daughter's generation is concerning enough that I go out of my way to teach my grandson that it's great to be a man. Hopefully it will be enough to counterbalance the unthinking, automatic, and pervasive attacks on his masculinity that I have seen him experience at school and sometimes at home.

<comment><USER3> Thoughts on [https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/)?

<comment><USER2> I haven't visited reddit for years and don't plan to now, so no thoughts, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men."

To which I might retort, "Historicaly, what is it about women which makes the men in their lives want to potentially travel great distances, and then maim, mutilate, and murder each other rather than, you know, spend more time with their women back home?"

</comment><comment><USER5> it's a pendulum. It needed to swing. It will swing back, and eventually come to rest in the middle.

</comment><comment><USER6> FYI mods/editors: this article is from 2001. Sad she passed away recently.

</comment><comment><USER6> Feminism, safe-spaces and microaggressions will be moot when there's no food, no jobs in ~30 years and billions of people migrate to near the heavily- fortified scraps of arable land. Instead, most people will have more pressing worries: not being gang-raped, mugged and extortion rates.

<comment><USER7> Basically, only aggressive consumption of limited resources allows society to be worried about something higher in Maslow's pyramid.

Extinction of those resources will set us back to fight for scraps.</comment></comment>


List of emerging technologies - <AUTHOR>

List: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_technologies
Previous HN thread (421 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367258
Wikipedia page for 31/03/2014 (399 days ago): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emerging_technologies&oldid=602086487
Diff: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emerging_technologies&diff=655315757&oldid=602086487
This is a text post because it seems that HN doesn't like this repost. It was a very interesting read for me and I like sharing interesting things. <comment><AUTHOR> This is clickable link for the lazy, since I can't create links in text field: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_technologies)</comment>


Star hurtling toward massive black hole may support Einstein General Relativity - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/star-hurtling-towards-massive-black-hole-may-seal-deal-einstein-s-theory-general <comment><USER2> So some supermassive unseen object just has to be a black hole? Particularly when the theoretical entity called a "black hole" cannot form in a finite time universe.</comment>


You Won't Be Able to Sue the Next Gawker - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CodyBrown/you-wont-be-able-to-sue-the-next-gawker-e6c8a3900969#.7c34274m8 <comment><USER2> >Why can't Silicon Valley counter speech with speech? That's basically what happened. Thiel empowered other speakers: the sort of thing that, if it had happened on social media, would have been called signal-boosting. He did it by funding someone's legal case, rather than through likes and retweets, but I'm not sure I can really see any particular problem with that: this is how it works offline.

</comment><comment><USER3> People in Silicon Valley have been giving a list of reasons miles in length, but you don't want to hear them.

Internet points won't nullify the fact judges repeatedly ruled against the company.

If you 'pivot' in the manner you describe you're really going from the shallow end of a swimming pool to Shark Cove during Shark Week.

Gawker suffers from hubris and threatening Silicon Valley is more of this.</comment>


Web 2.0 Snuffs Business 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/09/05/web-2-0-snuffs-business-2-0 <comment><USER2> i liked business 2.0 and will be sad to see it go. could present a good opportunity for fast company or inc., to get a bit better in tech and web reporting.</comment>


Writing a Self-Mutating x86_64 C Program (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://shanetully.com/2013/12/writing-a-self-mutating-x86_64-c-program/ <comment><USER2> I've written "self-modifying" (really JITed) code for several architectures, mainly ARM, and I when I had to do it for amd64 I was very much surprised by how straightforward it was.

On ARM you have to be very careful to handle the cache correctly when you write self-modifying code, because when you access memory using a regular load or store it's obviously treated like data and goes through the data cache while the instructions are fetched through the instruction cache. So when you write an opcode you have to be careful to flux it out of the data cache (at least up to the point where the caches unify, typically L2 on ARM) and then invalidate the icache to make sure that you get the opcode back.

On modern x86-64 architectures, which typically have a very advanced cache system, I expected to have to deal with that as well. As this article shows, you don't. You just write whatever and you can execute it straight after. When you think about it it's a rather complicated thing for the hardware to implement. I wonder why they do it that way instead of relying on the software to issue flushes in the (relatively rare) situations where a hazard is possible.

<comment><USER3> Modern x86s may be Harvard architecture internally (with separate code and data L1 caches), but they still present themselves to the developer as classic Von Neuman, which is easier to program.

<comment><USER2> So did they keep it that way purely for historical reason and back-compat? Few people write self-modifying code (or even code loaders) these days, it seems like a tricky feature to implement in hardware for relatively little gain.

<comment><USER4> Depends if the self-modifying code in question is stuff like kernel drivers for popular hardware on widely used operating systems. The x86 manufacturers do bend over backwards for compatibility. You can run 16 bit code on the latest i9 processor if you like, including MSDOS if your motherboard still supports legacy boot modes. That is a remarkable level of backwards compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are there any languages that could actually make use of self modifying code?

Machines wouldn't have the same problems reasoning about it as humans would.

Or is it a question of compilers not being good enough until processor tech made the optimisation not worth it?

<comment><USER6> The real issue with self-modifying code is that it's basically a security bug waiting to happen, plus you have other complications like having to flush the instruction cache on architectures like ARM. Generally, the benefits are not worth it unless except for very specific cases.

<comment><USER7> I've seen points like these made before, but never really understood how. Can you give an example of self-modifying code becoming a security issue?

<comment><USER8> There's a security feature called W^X [0] (also called DEP in Windows). Basically you can use special mode which prevents memory pages to be writeable and executable at the same time, so self-modifying code is not allowed, but it prevents exploits from modifying memory containing executable code. OpenBSD uses it as well.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%5EX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%5EX)

<comment><USER9> That's not what DEP is, but it is dependent on DEP. DEP is just another word for the NX bit, that allows a page to be marked as non-executable. With DEP you can still have a page that is RWX if you set its permissions that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I once read about a clever use of self-modifying x86 code. The 8086 and 8088 are nearly identical chips, with the difference being that the 8086 has 16-bit I/O and the 8088 has 8-bit. The only way for a program to know which chip it's running on is to write a bit of self modifying code that takes advantage of this difference in I/O size. Both chips use prefetch, but they prefetch words, not bytes, and 8086 words are 16-bit, so it fetches twice as many bytes as the 8088. Thus, one can modify a location in RAM just after the current instruction and that change will be seen on the 8088, but not the 8086, which has already prefetched the previous value.

This is all from memory of something I read, probably on Usenet, ages ago. My apologies in advance if I messed up the details.

I wonder if any of the various x86 emulators out there get this difference right.

<comment><USER11> I think you probably read it in Dr Dobbs: [http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded- systems/processor-detection-...](http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded- systems/processor-detection-schemes/184409011)

Not exactly what you described, but very similar:

 _" Differentiating between 8088s and 8086s is trickier. The easiest way I've found to do it is to modify code that's five bytes ahead of IP. Since the prefetch queue of an 8088 is four bytes and the prefetch queue of an 8086 is six bytes, an instruction five bytes ahead of IP won't have any effect on an 8086 the first time around"_

<comment><USER8> Interesting! Does this effect work on modern CPU? I'd imagine that if CPU modifies memory which was consumed by prefetcher, it should reset and reread everything or something like this.

<comment><USER11> I don't think modern prefetch is linear/fifo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is super cool. Though makes me want to go back and write some lisp.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this technique used for viruses to escape detection?

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand why people still use AT&T syntax asm. It's so much harder to read than Intel

</comment><comment><USER14> I was on board until `PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE | PROT_EXEC`

<comment><USER15> I mean, how else are you going to write self-modifying code? It's kind of implicit in the name of the thing that it's going to need to at a minimum have write and exec permission, and read is kind of important to make sure you're actually modifying the right stuff. Yes it's a terrible idea to have write and execute permissions on the same piece of memory, but that's part of why literally the very first line of the article says it's a terrible idea to write self-mutating code.</comment></comment>


My new game - Pathillogical - <AUTHOR> http://www.kongregate.com/games/5minutesoff/pathillogical

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't spend quite so long as windsurfer on his great new game: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1159068>

But here it is anyway. I use my revenue from games to fund my little startup which not so ironically is an analytics service for exactly the kind of games I make. I tend to alternate between bigger games and little ones that are fast to make, this is a little one with about 5 days of dev and with levels designed by some fellow developers.

</comment><comment><USER2> I like it!</comment>


Scrollbars: Evolution Gone Wrong? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asadmemon.com/post/59656255680/scrollbars-evolution-gone-wrong

<comment><USER2> I'd argue that the main navigation should be a static navbar that floats over the content. Rather than a scrollbar, a set of options (back, top, next page, etc) should always be accessible. With that, the scrollbar as it is should be fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. But that has to be a browser feature than something to be expected from page itself. It would be nice if I could swipe from right end of screen and that scrollbar then allows me to fast scroll to some position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On iOS, tapping the status bar will scroll the page to the top.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to host a static website (with SSL) - <AUTHOR> I'm currently hosting my static website on a VM. I'd like to avoid being personally responsible for keeping the system secure, so I'm looking for a service that will host my static website; ideally on a CDN. Here are my requirements:
1) Content must be transmitted via https end-to-end.
2) Content must be served from custom domain
3) Support for directory indexes (show contents of index.html when an URL with trailing slash is accessed)
I thought this would be easy, but all services I've found seem to have some kind of drawback.
Amazon S3 + Cloudfront: If I use Cloudfront with S3 buckets directly, there is no support for directory indexes. If I use Cloudfront with S3 website endpoints, the content is transferred only via http between S3 and cloudfront edge servers.
Rackspace cloudfiles:
If I understand their docs correctly, they don't support custom domains with SSL
DreamObjects + DreamSpeed:
Apparently doesn't support apex domains, and also doesn't support custom domains with SSL
Anybody know any other options?
Does this mean I need to continue to run my own VM just to serve a static website over SSL? <comment><USER2> GitHub pages + CloudFront (with SNI) does all three. It costs ~$2 a month and you can deploy via Git. It's lovely.

Example links:

CloudFront: [https://rockymadden.com](https://rockymadden.com)

GitHub pages: [https://rockymadden.github.io](https://rockymadden.github.io)

Compilation repo: [https://github.com/rockymadden/rockymadden.github.io](https://github.com/rockymadden/rockymadden.github.io)

Source repo: [https://github.com/rockymadden/rockymadden- web](https://github.com/rockymadden/rockymadden-web)

<comment><USER3> Hmm, does it cost you $2 a month for bandwidth? I had the impression that CloudFront with SNI costs money but after looking it up it's free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you can specify index documents in your S3 bucket config and Cloudfront will use them. A good write up: [http://www.michaelgallego.fr/blog/2013/08/27/static- website-...](http://www.michaelgallego.fr/blog/2013/08/27/static-website- on-s3-cloudfront-and-route-53-the-right-way/)

I am unsure about end-to-end encryption for transfer to the edge nodes or encryption at rest. Maybe someone with a better understanding of Cloudfront and IAM can help out.

</comment><comment><USER5> Two options I'd go with:

1\. Use a static site generator to build the site, ensuring I have indexes available, piggyback s3's SSL as a custom endpoint through to cloudfront and use SNI for my custom domain.

2\. Use Heroku (or similar provider to remove most of the maintenance burden), piggyback their SSL to cloudfront+SNI+csutom domain.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would set up a free Heroku application and provide SSL and caching by redirecting it through CloudFlare.

I host a lot of static websites like this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why not just serve from S3 over HTTPS?</comment>


Coding Raps - <AUTHOR> http://mauryacouvares.blogspot.com/2015/06/coding-raps.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Earl demonstrating a pretty interesting way of learning code.</comment>


A bird's eye view on API development - <AUTHOR> http://blog.madewithlove.be/post/birdseye-view-on-api/ <comment><USER2> Why is it considered best practice to use the content type header for API versioning? It always seemed like a hack to me. Url versioning makes much more sense if you consider that your API is a resource and the content of your API is a subresource. E.G. GET /v1/post/1/comment/456 would be semantically equivalent to "give me comment with id 456, which belongs to post with id 1, which belongs to api of version 1".

<comment><USER3> The URL is meant to represent a specific resource. You're requesting a comment resource, not a version of a comment resource. It's semantically inappropriate and may lead to unnecessary complexity.

There is an HTTP concept created specifically for this idea. Why not use it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone explain why using different verbs (PUT, PATCH, ...) is preferable to using just POST with an additional parameter (e.g. POST action="add")? It seems like the author's distinction between POST, PUT and PATCH seems rather arbitrary...

<comment><USER5> POST action="add" is not RESTful. It's procedural. It doesn't take advantage of all the http caching mechanisms that come into play with the web that you get for free with a resource based design. You should PUT the resource.

<comment><USER4> > POST action="add" is not RESTful. It's procedural.

Can you expand on what you mean by this? In particular, how could HTTP catching mechanism work with POST requests, if the purpose of POST is to _change_ something on the server (so the request should always reach the server)? And in what way is PUT handled differently (by browsers, by proxies, by servers)?

<comment><USER6> It's just conventional. If a PUT fails, you (and others) know you can safely retry it multiple times without having to worry about it having any other effects, like duplicate rows. The concept is called idempotence.

<comment><USER4> Oh, so basically `PUT` is just like a `POST action="add" id="XYZ"`? In any case, that only works if the ID can be known in advance (which e.g. isn't possible if you want sequential IDs).

<comment> keithb- No, POST is create and PUT is update[1]. In the RESTful world, PUT uses a specific URL for that entity, e.g. PUT /contacts/rich-hickey: there is only one Rich Hickey and I'm going to update his contact info with the body of the request. Check out the Decision Flow Diagram, it is really awesome[2].

There is probably no single reason why you should _never_ use POST when you need PUT or DELETE. This is mostly an implementation choice, but if you are using a Repository or DAO pattern on the server side, it might be easier to understand if all of the semantics align nicely, e.g. HTTP<POST> -> OOP<Add> -> SQL<CREATE>, HTTP<PUT> -> OOP<Update> -> SQL<UPDATE>.

IMHO using a parameter for method name is a call-by-name strategy that, in this case, is a level of abstraction that just isn't necessary. In other words, there is really nothing dynamic about the behavior. When the application state hits the client side, the flow of control is dictated by earlier events or actions. Your application isn't likely to make decisions on the fly about whether the current flow is concerned with creating an entity versus deleting an entity. For example, the user and the application state "know" already what is valid for an entity and it is likely that your application is reflecting that in a hard-coded "action=[add|update|delete]" parameter. Why funnel this state through a single method with a switch- statement on the server side?

Incidentally, there are some references to caching the results of a POST request[3] but I can't think of an production example that I've run across. It might be cacheable if the response is a redirect to the same "list of entities" URL rather than a direct URL to the newly created entity which is arguably more RESTful but not cacheable.

[1] [http://restcookbook.com/HTTP%20Methods/put-vs- post/](http://restcookbook.com/HTTP%20Methods/put-vs-post/) [2] [https://webmachine.github.io/images/http-headers- status-v3.p...](https://webmachine.github.io/images/http-headers- status-v3.png) [3] [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114156/why- ar...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114156/why-are-there- are-no-put-and-delete-methods-on-html-forms)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good article, summarise what I like and don't like.

I wish it would delve deeper into versioning with some code samples. The way I've done it in the past is just inherit from a controller and just override an action as well as the json-builder. But that because unmaintainable after version 3 or so.

I like how Relay/GraphQL sorta abstracts that away, but Ive had a hard time figuring out how to make that work with the ORM (Active Record) so abandoned for now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, this is just an introductory article. You can always take a look at this great book for more info: [https://leanpub.com/build-apis-you-wont- hate](https://leanpub.com/build-apis-you-wont-hate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice read.

Sidenote: Should credit not be given for the use of the xkcd comic?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are totally right. Fixed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The elephant in the room for me is that while HATEOAS is mentioned, the impression I get from posts from developers online is that people program against a pre-agreed API format.

That's different to REST's automated discoverability for REST API clients.

<comment><USER10> In my experience for most REST APIs use cases HATEOAS is not needed or not that useful. Writing a REST API for your mobile application? What do you need HATEOAS for? Do you really think it can replace documentation?

On the other hand all the rest of nice bonuses of REST APIs are very useful in such a use case.

<comment><USER9> Exactly, that's where most implementations seem to decide against REST.

I agree with you. The other parts of REST (if you agree that REST can be picked apart and still referred to as RESTful), as surely valuable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a great guide. Side note: Is there an example of implementing OAuth2 from API developers perspective and from API Consumers perspective? language agnostic but Go or Java preferred.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't seen it myself, but I hear: Google I/O 2012 - OAuth 2.0 for Identity and Data Access ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLHyeSuBspI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLHyeSuBspI)) is a great talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> No mention of swagger?

<comment><USER13> Can't mention everything, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great into on API development. Thanks for sharing :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading ;)

<comment><USER15> I really enjoyed the article as well. I wasn't even aware of some of the structure standards you listed (specifically JSend and HAL).

Side note: I think there is a typo near the bottom trough should be through in the header based versioning section.</comment></comment></comment>


Revoking Trust in One CNNIC Intermediate Certificate - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/03/23/revoking-trust-in-one-cnnic-intermediate-certificate/

<comment><USER2> What we had feared for years happens.

In China (mainland), the genuine certificate of google.com/gmail could not be verified from time to time (possibly due to inaccessibility to intermediate CA that signed these certs), adding up to the speculation that a mass surveillance using Man in The Middle attack is drawing near.</comment>


What Does the Word "Liberal" Mean? - <AUTHOR> https://www.lawliberty.org/book-review/what-does-the-word-the-word-liberal-mean/ <comment><USER2> It gets even better in Canada: "neoliberal" and "neoconservative" are used more or less interchangeably, and mean roughly the same thing as "classical liberal", which is of course the exact opposite of the current Liberal party.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that the nation states.net 3-axis model is sufficient for plotting and exploring political ideas for now [0]. It's still better than the one- dimensional left-right spectrum or the two-dimensional Nolan chart [1]. However, given the rate at which language changes, it seems completely feasible that people might on day need a more granular political coordinate system.

[0] [https://www.nationstates.net/page=create_nation](https://www.nationstates.net/page=create_nation)

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart)

<comment><USER4> D&D alignment works too - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_(Dungeons_%26_Dragon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_\(Dungeons_%26_Dragons\))

<comment><USER3> How so? I don't see how it compares political freedoms, personal freedoms, or economic freedoms. Maybe there is a specific one for politics you know of?

<comment><USER4> I'd say it is complementary to the nation states three axis model. It doesn't define someone's politics, it defines how they go about their politics and what they proritise about their value system, which is generally just as important to consider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "When most Europeans hear the word "liberal" they think of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan."

No. NO WE DO NOT. Irrespective of your views on Maggie - nobody considers her a liberal..

<comment><USER6> Holy hell, I had to double check that quote. How can the authors get something like that so absolutely wrong?

<comment><USER4> Is the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect - [https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2011/08/the- murray-g...](https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2011/08/the-murray-gell- mann-amnesia-effect/)

<comment><USER7> No, it's the exact opposite. The original poster now has little confidence in the authors and will in the future view their work with suspicion.

For all the times the MGMA is trotted out I don't think there is evidence that it is actually common. It was just a theory proposed by an author with no research or evidence. He discussed it with a colleague and then printed it as 'fact'. Perhaps it's actually a self-referential hoax...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think a lot of it is the extremes and secondary views adopted at either end. I also think part of the problem is not recognizing the Statist/Individualist part of the political spectrum. It isn't a slide rule, it's a map.

In the end, you have some very statist identitarian communists on the far "left" and you have some statis nationalist racists on the far "right" ... Most of the republicans are just right of center, 92% of democrats the same (excluding the fringe 8%). The fringe right is a fraction of a percent. Anyone who is outside of the left-most 20-30% is often called alt-right adjacent... it's no wonder Trump is in office, and even more left leaning people think they're right wing now.

<comment><USER9> 92% is an awful lot of precision.

<comment><USER8> 8% is considered the "Progressive Activists" or SJWs, they are definitely over represented in media and the likes of twitter, but are definitely that. 92% is the rest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Liberal means the near opposite of leftism. In the US, and abroad, I think that we are seeing a clear shift of the right wing factions towards liberalism, away from conservatism and religion. Likewise, there is a corresponding left wing shift towards Marxism. I personally think that is how the political factions will be characterized over the next century.

I would characterize liberalism's tenets as:

1.) Universality under the law (not contextualized by identity)

2.) Focus on maximizing individual liberty and minimizing centralized authority

3.) Laissez-faire focus on accountability. You reap what you sow

I would only differentiate a liberal from a libertarian in that a liberal is just more likely to accept certain market failures as being better served by the state. A liberal is more likely than a libertarian, for example, to support anti-monopoly clauses, or heavy taxation or regulation of negative third-party-externalities. But a liberal and libertarian are of the same ilk; and value liberty as the primary virtue.

</comment><comment><USER11> Anything to the left of me is liberal, anything to the right of me is conservative.

<comment><USER12> What does the word "left wing" mean?

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left- wing_politics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics)

<comment><USER12> A lack of Wikipedia articles isn't the problem:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've always been curious if the internationalization of political discussion was behind the changing definitions of the word "liberal" in US politics.

In the 1990s, "liberal" was used as a synonym of "leftist"; a "liberal" politician would support expanding the welfare state, for example. My understanding is that the European definition of "liberal" is different, and implied a light touch in business affairs; the Economist is a "liberal" publication.

In 2019, this definition has spread to the United States as well; members of the Democratic Socialists of America don't identify as liberal. The European definition is only used in some circles: conservatives tend to stick to the old definition, and would describe somebody like Bernie Sanders as "liberal". I was always curious if this was because US political activists were talking to European ones on sites like Twitter, or Internet forums before it.

<comment><USER15> > I've always been curious if the internationalization of political discussion > was behind the changing definitions of the word "liberal" in US politics.

No.

> In the 1990s, "liberal" was used as a synonym of "leftist"

The early 1990s was the height of what was then referred to as the "neoliberal consensus" in US politics, and the liberal in neoliberal is exactly the same sense you are trying to sell as uniquely European (but which is really just economic.)

> In 2019, this definition has spread to the United States as well; members of > the Democratic Socialists of America don't identify as liberal.

The DSA has been around for a long time, and it's members have never identified as liberal. "Liberal" was only ever equated with "Leftist" in conservative propaganda. Though for a long time in the US, both the major parties were dominated by economic liberals, so economic liberals that were socially liberal were "liberals" and economic liberals that were socially conservative were "conservatives".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This has already been flagged, but a few points for those who may stumble upon it: the author is a professor at a wingnut, for-profit Christian college that primarily grants online, non-accredited certificates. So when he writes,

> The substantive problem is the bias Rosenblatt brings to her story of > liberalism.

we need to look at the other possibility: Rosenblatt is dismantling the tradition, central to the author's personal mythology, of liberalism in the Anglo world being the primary thread of that idea. The book he quotes to claim that it is not so is another piece by a professor at Hillsdale College.

When you go look at the work they have produced, it becomes pretty clear. Rosenblatt has been working on this issue for a long time, and has a paper trail to show it. If you look at Schleuter's CV, you a minor PhD dissertation on Martin Luther King and...that's about it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Both Liberal and Conservative are really loaded words. Not necessarily loaded in the emotional sense (although they are often that), but just in terms of being used with very different definitions in very different places. I listened to an audiobook or a lecture series a few years ago that discussed the idea of Liberalism that I found very interesting. Rather than dealing with any of the modern senses of the terms Conservative or Liberal, it dealt with the sea change in types of governance that occurred at the end of the Enlightenment with the rise of the United States and the French Revolution.

It takes a bit of doing for modern people to even conceive of what the actual argument was at the time. To really understand that both the rulers and the citizenry viewed rulers as fundamentally Better People in some way (often granted by God) is a mindset that modern people just aren't accustomed to. They read 'all men are created equal' and they don't realize what it's even talking about. The idea that citizens who are being ruled should have some say in how they are ruled was the essence of Liberalism in that time. It was a revolutionary idea and seen as stupid by many. Thomas Payne's 'Common Sense' was published at a time when the phrase 'common sense' was a perjorative. It referred to the 'sense' of commoners, implying that it was worthless and senseless. Commoners simply weren't built to be able to understand notions of governance or to be able to wield power without self destruction.

Just as racism and sexism proposed that there were "different kinds" of people who inherently bore different capabilities, setting one group or another apart and making them unsuited to certain pursuits, Conservatism held that the divide between ruler and ruled was of this nature as well. A natural fact, emerging either from direct divine edict or carried in bloodlines, that made it ludicrous to even suggest that perhaps the peasant should have something like a 'vote.'

Liberalism won quite conclusively. After the American Revolution and French Revolution, revolutions flourished all over the world. While Ancient Greece debuted democracy, it had died out for a long while and at the time every single nation on the planet was ruled by a Conservative government built around the idea of inherent superiority of the rulers. I can't imagine what it must have been like to live in those time periods, growing up knowing to your bones that you're simply a follower and a subject, liable to be called upon to have your concerns or life spent by the crown for their own purposes, and knowing that you simply weren't capable of questioning their motives or techniques. And then, that some people emerged who made arguments about the philosophical basis of government which was able to persuade this population to rise up and kill their own country so that they might build one of their own based upon this utterly heretical notion that there really aren't any Special People born to rule... it's dizzying to consider.

Those that remain dedicated to an idea of a return to this sort of Conservatism, and there are some, walk in step with eugenicists and should be feared.</comment>


Facebook Opens a Door and Startups Rush In - <AUTHOR> http://ploneglenn.blogspot.com/2009/05/living-in-facebook-downline.html

<comment><USER2> If Facebook or Twitter were to shut down their public APIs it would upset a ton of people who have come to depend on applications built on them. I'm definitely not suggesting that public outcry would itself be enough to dissuade a company from making bold decisions (as Facebook has shown with the TOS and redesign debacles), but it is a little bit of insurance. Whether you choose to build an entire company (or invest in one) that depends on that little insurance holding up is a valid question. I definitely wouldn't.</comment>


Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen - <AUTHOR> http://www.genericmaker.com/2013/09/why-phonebloks-phone-will-never-happen.html <comment><USER4> So far I've not heard "this can't be done." All I've heard is "I don't know how this might be done." _Huge_ difference there. I also hear a fair bit of "this shouldn't be done", which I find incredibly disappointing.

Here's a hypothetical: we already know how to do noisy, shared-media device interconnects. It's called 802.11. Look at the size of wifi adapters: you can get a usable signal that works over _meters_ from something the size of a USB plug. Now, imagine that doesn't have to include an aerial, or much of an amplifier, because _even if you get a dodgy connection_ you're transmitting fractions of a millimetre into a chunk of metal, and you're looking at something that can be shrunk down to _well_ within the scale Phonebloks needs, for pennies a block.

With something analogous to a router running a zeroconf system on the baseboard, it's not even particularly difficult to see how you might handle service discovery from the blocks you plug in.

Again, this is just a hypothetical, but it's _just one_ way Phonebloks could _technically_ be coerced into existence. I don't claim to know about any economic reasons, but there's a saying: those saying something can't be done should stay out of the way of those doing it.

So, less knee-jerk negativity please, it's _far_ more entertaining to try to figure out how this _could_ be done than to wallow in a brief moment of superiority by writing it off.

<comment><USER5> An engineer will rarely tell you that something is impossible. Ask an engineer to build a bridge across the pacific ocean. The response you get will not be "this can't be done", but "the costs involved make it impractical".

It's similar to this phone idea. Of course a modular phone can be built, but the trade offs involved make it impracticle.

<comment><USER6> Agreed here. Making a shared protocol for the cpu, RAM, and disk? Heck, how fast is this phone expected to run exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > the stated motivation for this design is to reduce electrical waste. The > best way to do that in the short term is to ensure devices are more > repairable

Right, a replaceable screen and battery and an SD card slot would get you 99% of the features you'd actually _want_ from phonebloks, and it's actually something that would be achievable (if there were demand, which I think is the biggest problem here: there's just no demand for this from the majority of consumers)

<comment><USER8> A replaceable battery, SD card and easily replaceable screens were all features of phones available more than 5 years ago, yet these features disappeared because the iPhone showed that most consumers don't value those features over a sleek integrated lifestyle product.

Besides all points mentioned already, I just can't think of a way to protect the pin-connection from wear in daily use without adding an additional shell or individual screws, which would make it even more bulky. Simply haven't seen a single miniature socket yet that works well under constant external stress.

Regarding the proposed design, with all it's sharp edges and deep ridges I'm already looking forward to weekly lint removal sessions.

In terms of total energy waste it might be worth considering that there's not only one logistic process anymore but a mere 5 to 10(?) with each has it's own packaging, transportation and handling footprint. So it's debatable that the total environmental impact might be actually worse than that of a 2 year life cycle smartphone.

<comment><USER9> _iPhone showed that most consumers don 't value those features over a sleek integrated lifestyle product._

Consumers have no acess to bid on the incremental value of features. There is no supply side market for these. There is no market because apple is playing monopolist (legal). Lets not use sloppy language !!

<comment><USER10> > Consumers have no acess to bid on the incremental value of features.

They _could_ have kept buying Nokia 3310s instead of iPhones if they thought that a replaceable battery was more important than everything else they got with the Apple product. People made the same argument about physical keyboards, and look at what happened to RIM.

<comment><USER11> The fact that the Droid line sells despite it being basically a keyboard bolted onto a 2-3 year old phone shows that there is a market there. RIMs problem was one of software - only Android and iOS smartphones are really doing well these days, since nothing else has the app ecosystem.

Which comes back to the incremental value of features thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is one of those ideas that look good on paper (or youtube) but just isn't practical. There's absolutely no spare space in a modern phone. If you make it modular, each 'module' has to have enough space for its component, PLUS space to bring it up to the next module size. This will make the phone HUGE.

The concept of an upgradable device is, however, great. Just not in the manufacturer's interest. Apple lose out if they offer a storage upgrade. Motorola don't sell another phone if they make the screen swappable to the next technology.

<comment><USER13> You can clearly see the cost of modularity if you compare my current laptop to my previous one.

My current laptop is a 15" retina MacBook Pro. It isn't upgradable in any real sense of the word.

My previous laptop was a 15" MacBook Pro. I could upgrade the RAM and HDD, and with little difficulty replace the battery.

The upgradable one is 5mm-ish thicker and about 400 grams heavier.

Not a true apples-to-apples comparison, but it does show the bulk added by having end user interchangeable connections on the hardware.

<comment><USER14> Definitely agree with you on the space/volume issue, but I don't think most of that weight gain comes from modularity. Because 400 grams is a lot of weight. I think it's probably mostly the hard drive weight.

<comment><USER15> Hsrd drives do not weight as much, unless you are talking about 3.5" drives, not laptop drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is so typically "I have this greatest world-changing idea ever, all I need is a programmer to implement it..."

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't buy the speed argument. In a modern PC, many things are pluggable. PCI express can transmit up to 30 GB/s, IIRC. Even CPUs and RAM are modular. If there was such a benefit from soldering them together, I'm sure we would be seeing more integrated systems.

Furthermore, the modem part of many smartphones is already a black box that is heavily isolated from every other component. It's basically just hooked into a bus, and connected to microphone, speakers, and antennas, and doesn't necessarily interface that much with the CPU.

I'm not sure the PhoneBloks concept would work. (Crazy ideas follow.) But what I can definitely see working is separating the computer from the shell (case, screen, speakers, camera, ...). We are reaching a point where the speed difference between smartphone generations becomes meaningless. In the future, you might be able to buy standardized "computing bricks". For one phone, you might need a 2017 model A brick, for a tablet at least a model C, and if you want to build a server, you just pick up a few (kilos of?) CPU bricks. These bricks would be so cheap and featureless, that they would allow really ubiquitous computing. Building a house? Build in a few, like power sockets. You'll get the equivalent of today's top PCs thrown after you as advertizement gifts.

This is not necessarily what must happen, but the reason I think it could happen is the following: Once the raw computing sector stops growing, and there is no longer much profit to make, the industry will want to move on. As we are already seeing today, specs will not be the main selling point. Instead, people will pay for features (a great camera, physical buttons :-), wireless charging, ...), a better integrated experience, a certain design, or a brand name (e.g. all Apple). Development will focus even more on that, and there will be a drive to reduce the cost of raw computing to it's minimum.

<comment><USER18> > I don't buy the speed argument. In a modern PC, many things are pluggable. > PCI express can transmit up to 30 GB/s, IIRC. Even CPUs and RAM are modular. > If there was such a benefit from soldering them together, I'm sure we would > be seeing more integrated systems.

The issue between the CPU and memory isn't throughput (the vast majority of operations are <=64 bits at a time), it's latency. Latency is directly affected by the amount of wire between the two things. In a desktop, you can offset the latency to a large, replaceable memory module by adding smaller amounts of more expensive memory (cache) directly in the CPU chip.

> Furthermore, the modem part of many smartphones is already a black box that > is heavily isolated from every other component. It's basically just hooked > into a bus, and connected to microphone, speakers, and antennas, and doesn't > necessarily interface that much with the CPU.

This is partially true. The CPU still needs to control the radio, and they're constantly feeding each other data. You might want to send the audio data through a DSP for audio processing. The microphones/speakers will be shared between the two, and probably go through a codec. Also, Qualcomm radios and CPUs are pretty tightly coupled. If you want to do CDMA for the US (they seem to have patents on all of the CDMA tech) then you need to use a QC radio, which means that you need to use a QC processor, a QC codec, ... (Source: I used to work on audio firmware at RIM.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The only thing that will make something like this plausible and sought-after is expensive e-waste disposal. We have to charge the actual costs of the waste to the waste producers.

Right now that waste cost is practically invisible to the consumer, much less the manufacturer. If the true waste costs (health impacts, polluted water supplies, diminishing limited resources) were factored into the decision to get a "new" phone, computer, etc. then there'd possibly be some desire for this type of device. But right now, I can't see this happening without that market force.

<comment><USER20> Honestly, it's probably not that bad. You could cast all the old electronics in solid, impermeable concrete blocks and only pay pennies per phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This idea seems like it would be a much better fit for tablets rather than phones.

You have much more room to play around with on a tablet and perhaps the typical usage patterns of the tablet actually encourages you to swap out your bloks for different purposes.

For example, I could switch to a better but more power consuming Wi-Fi module when I'm at school which usually has crappy coverage but could then swap that out for longer duration battery so that I can watch shows on the train ride back home without compromising on screen brightness or risk the tablet dying before I get home

</comment><comment><USER22> I would not want a Phoneblok phone. I don't want to think about my phone at all. I want to use it, and put it away when I'm done. That's it. I don't want to deal with CPU blok A has a bug in it, or doesn't quite work with wifi blok B, or app C was written with camera blok D in mind and is a bit wonky with my camera blok E.

It's a major reason I've always preferred the iPhone. It's also why I no longer use Linux, same general annoyances just mostly in software instead of hardware.

</comment><comment><USER23> People are complaining about fragmentation on Android, heck people are even complaining about it on iPhones. How would you develop a good mobile OS with apps on hardware you can't test against? Even if the hardware problems was solved now, I do not think people would be happy to dev against the "platform".

<comment><USER24> People did just fine developing applications for PC with the huge variety of possible hardware, and for web where target hardware differs in size and power by multiple orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER16> > People did just fine developing for PC

So fine that we ended up stuck with 1366x768 for the last decade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps the technical challenges for Phonebloks will be too great. However, a modular design is more than achievable if you don't mind reducing the number of blocks.

Imagine you have 4 blocks: screen, battery, file storage, logic. Each of these could easily be connected in a modular way, and in the case of batteries, already are in a good number of phones. Whilst you might lose out on some of the customisation flexibility that the Phonebloks concept showed, you do get a number of decent benefits...

1\. Replacing screen if damaged or wish to have an upgrade. 2\. Can upgrade storage space without upgrading the whole phone (SD cards are a decent way to augment storage, but the proposed method offers the chance to expand beyond the limits of SD cards). 3\. Replacing the logic block only allows you to have an upgraded phone customised quicker than buying a new phone (no need to migrate contacts, settings and media). 4\. Battery upgrades should be the norm anyway, it's wasteful to throw away a phone just because the battery no longer holds a decent level of charge, plus it allows for extended battery capacity upgrades.

</comment><comment><USER26> This reminds me very much of what [Bug Labs] ([http://buglabs.net/products/blocks](http://buglabs.net/products/blocks)) is doing. Building modular hardware components for rapid prototyping and development. Cool stuff.

<comment><USER27> That's exactly what I thought of, as well.

<comment><USER26> Yeah I interned there a couple of years ago. Honestly very surprised they're not more well known in the tech community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The reasons this will never happen has nothing to do with the technical challenges, but rather the business implications.

What business is going to invest in creating commoditized platform? Certainly not Apple or Samsung, they are busy figuring out new ways to lock consumers into their ecosystem. So it has to be a new entry into the mobile market.

Perhaps a company like IBM has the resources to build the base platform. (This is certainly beyond a kick starter). But, why would an IBM invest in creating a commodity platform? How does an open hardware platform serve their, or any other business', interests? It doesn't, and that's the real reason that we won't see a system like this.

</comment><comment><USER29> As much as it sounds fun, I very much doubt that industry will adapt it. Look at Android which is open-sourcish, updated frequently and the whole os should be easy to transfer between devices. In reality no one wants to allow people to do that. Older devices are not updated and crappy additional software is installed just for this reason - to make sure people have to buy complete new phone often and to make sure it's the right one. I don't think it's the right approach to shout into the void instead of, let's say, build a startup and go on kickstarter.

<comment><USER30> Exactly, the industry would quite likely resist building such a device - <USER2> are very little incentive to do so - they would rather sell you a brand new model.

As with most consumer products, especially electronic devices, there's quite a lot Planned Obsolescence in mobile phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> PC's are modular. You can mix and match (at least, until a new motherboard standard); you can replace parts (at least, while they're still made).

One problem with mobile phones is that they haven't been fast enough - <USER3> tightly integrating every part, you can maximize efficiency to get the best out of the hardware. Apple does this fantastically, whereas Android is more modular, and so isn't quite as efficient.

But now that the iPhone 5S is 40x-56x faster than the first iPhone, speed doesn't seem to be an issue, in practice or theory. So an even more modular phone is plausible.

</comment><comment><USER32> I love to see people using the words like " this will never happen" like they could predict the future in any way. So many have been proven wrong over the years, I wont be surprised if this author is proven wrong again. This might not be possible now, with today's technology, just like 10 years ago it wasn't possible to have a computer in your pocket with multiple GHz cores and GB of RAM.

<comment><USER33> Past progress is not a sure indication of future progress. Phones have made huge leaps in the past decade, but now the leaps they're making are smaller and more incremental. We're hitting a barrier of how much power we can pack into a device that can fit in your pocket.

This article does a fantastic job of explaining whats up: [http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are- slow...](http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> From what I've learned of hardware engineering (basically by colocation osmosis here at a large Finnish handset maker), it's that the needs of RF performance alone make this thing a near impossibility, at least unless the radio and antenna portions of the phone are considered to be "off limits" for modularizing.

Every piece of hardware added to the phone affects RF performance by virtue of its being made of matter (that isn't RF-transparent) and being in close proximity. If it starts emitting or being affected by electromagnetic waves, well that's a whole new layer of pain to deal with...

Maybe...maybe...if you wanted to consider the radio and antenna fixed, and bring back the old external antenna that would be forever unobstructed by new bloks...

</comment><comment><USER35> A thought experiment:

What if just the enclosure was replaceable?

For example, if an iPhone 5 user could purchase an iPhone 6 enclosure and transfer his iPhone 5's PCB to the new enclosure (perhaps as easily as moving a SIM card from one phone to another), then as far as the most of the non- technical, status-conscious, exterior design-focused world can tell (this probably excludes you, gentle HN reader), does the user have an iPhone 6?

What if were true that non-technical consumers buy phones in large part because of how they look? After all, the differences in functionality between, e.g., Samsung's and Apple's, phones are relatively minor. Many phones from different manufacturers are more or less the same size.

</comment><comment><USER36> This would be cool as a desktop. Yeah, desktops are already modular and upgradable. But if had this Lego-like interface, anyone could do it, and it'd be a ton of fun.

Actually, even better would be a whole computer in a single block. You could then buy an identical computer and connect it to the first one, to make a more powerful single computer. It'd add a little bit more of a boost of CPU power, GPU power, RAM, and HDD. You'd never have to upgrade; instead you just keep buying more blocks and attaching it to your old hardware. Of course it'd be less efficient than a non-Lego computer, but it'd be really fun to use.

<comment><USER37> Like this project [http://rhombus-tech.net](http://rhombus-tech.net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Phone like phone we see today uses very highly complicated chips and its connections to each functional modules. Something that can be detachable easily can be really surprising.

Mobile phone SoC chip (Application processor) is heading into very uncertainty area as fabrication process require too small transistors now. Hope that dealing super sensitive chips, can be guided by chip experts.

Putting everything physically close in one chip is also cost and integrity issues. More functions in a smaller area = less die cost. Blok based components would have to consider how to compete cost where $10 everything possible SoC is ready.

</comment><comment><USER39> I never figured it would be done in the way it's presented. I like it because there's a lot of potential. And if a lot of smart hardware engineers start working on it, we can develop something way cooler. I want to see companies recognize that people like this idea and start moving in that direction. I would love for this to spark pressure that moves us away from monolithic solutions and towards something more modular.

</comment><comment><USER32> You know... SK Telecom, in South Korea just announced speeds of over 200Mbps for mobile data. I believe that speed tends to increase over time. We will get to a point where smartphones will just become dumb terminals, using resources from a "cloud". We are talking years from now, but that could easily become the next big leap, IMHO.

<comment><USER40> Latency is going to the hurdle there. You can have the fastest connection in the world but if it takes 400ms to pull up someone's contact info, no one is going to give a fuck.

<comment><USER41> No, I look at this as I would connect my laptop to a supercomputer via ssh or PuTTY.

I still have a good amount of computing local, but for those heavy jobs, I can send it elsewhere and have it come back to me. Think voice-text transliteration, near immediate video processing, instantaneous (near real- time) voice translation, map stuffs.

And if we use a system that allows shared code to migrate from one machine to the next (think Erlang), then we don't even need that ssh tunnel... The estimated weights on a process would send it appropriately to the right cluster of CPUs.

<comment><USER34> That is already how voice recognition, translation, etc services work on smartphones today. At least in Google and Windows/Bing systems, that is done in the cloud and sent back to your phone. They have simpler, less powerful versions entirely on the phone that are used as a fallback (one explicitly warned by the vendor to be inferior, mind you) for when the device cannot connect to the big iron in the sky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> PC's were once integrated, too, and then became modular. Smartphones are integrated, but I could see a future where they become modular. It would also follow Clayton Christen's theory of "integration/disintegration" from his Innovator's Solution book.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm curious if you could implement a GSM/3G phone using software defined radio, using a device such as BladeRF/USRP.

Amittedly they're not small enough to use as a normal phone though. Maybe you'd be able to scale down that tech though one day?

</comment><comment><USER44> Yes the idea is good, but can not practical implemented. Category: Fun projects for geeks.

</comment><comment><USER45> The biggest problem is that all major hardware manufacturers must create common standard and redesign their hardware components. The combined effort would cost billions of dollars and the result will be uncertain. No one would take the risk.

</comment><comment><USER46> I disagree with the principle that we should make more things to reduce waste. I'd much rather take the 800$ I'm supposed to spend on buying this phone, and give it to someone trying to repurpose old electronics.

</comment><comment><USER47> The comments here remind me of the classic debate of monolithic kernel vs micro kernels; It ends up with the same result that the ecosystem required for the modular components causes too much operational bloat.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is a great idea. Own your phone. Right now, the phones we have feel like they are the corporation's phone and not ours.

I love this idea, and hope that they get enough interest to make a splash.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's also a bin packing problem :)

</comment><comment><USER50> i'm puzzled at why few people mention the busses needed to communicate between the blocks. sure it looks all nice and stuff. and even if you had a lot of money, what about the transfer speeds needed to communicate between one block and the other?

</comment><comment><USER51> I do not think that this would ever work. If it does, I'll take three.

</comment><comment><USER52> Your use of "never" is going to bite you in the ass, brother!

</comment><comment><USER53> It will never work because there is no apple logo on the phone.

<comment><USER54> And yet, no Apple logo on what, 75% of smartphones these days?

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> It's also an appearence issue. Most women I know tend to choose their phone by its looks. Phonebloks would not appeal to most of them ("I see the screws!") and thus it is not a very marketable phone.

<comment><USER54> Yeah, sure, it's only women who choose a phone on looks.

<comment><USER41> Heh.

My girlfriend's complaint about her android is that it's all software buttons on the screen. She wants physical buttons ala blackberry (but absolutely NO blackberry!)

And a bigger battery would be helpful.... As would a better antenna! She remembers the old 5W bag phones that could get signal from hell and back.</comment></comment></comment>


Dudley Buck's Forgotten Cryotron Computer - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/dudley-bucks-forgotten-cryotron-computer <comment><USER2> NSA put effort into cyrotrons for much of the 1960s and 1970s. NSA's history says that they got to a successful special-purpose machine (probably a key- tester), but never went all the way to a general purpose computer.

As CMOS got better and passed the limits of cyrotrons, the cyrotron effort wound down. NSA continued to try various cryogenic computing concepts, and there's a published proposal out there for a modern cryogenic computer, but mostly this seems to have been a dead end. Price/performance just isn't very good when you need liquid helium and liquid nitrogen and refrigeration gear.

</comment><comment><USER3> >In 1952, Buck's attention alighted on the chemical element bismuth, which exhibits strong magnetoresistance: Its electrical resistivity rises dramatically in response to an applied magnetic field, especially at low temperatures. At the boiling point of liquid helium (4.2 kelvins), the electrical resistance of bismuth varies by a factor of tens of millions with the application of a strong magnetic field. Buck thought this behavior could be useful for building computers. A relatively small current in a control wire, and the magnetic field it produces, could bring about an enormous change in the resistivity of a piece of bismuth, abruptly halting or allowing current to travel through it. He would have an electronic switch.

sounds like a memristor? There is also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_random- access...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_random- access_memory)</comment>


The Newton You Didn't Know - <AUTHOR> https://www.huntington.org/verso/2020/01/newton-you-didnt-know <comment><USER2> I tend to agree with Paul Graham[0] on this one, and less on the "last of the magicians" moniker. The idea is Newton tried to uncover truth through multiple methods and avenues, and we remember him for the ones the bore fruit, and not for the ones that didn't seem to pan out.

After all, in Newton's time, how would you know alchemy didn't work until you tried it rigorously? Or, more generally, how would you have even known for sure that empiricism and mathematics would be so successful?

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/disc.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/disc.html)

<comment><USER3> You raise a good point because as we've found in the 1930's and I believe finally performed in the 50's, alchemy can occur. (Seaborg with a particle accelerator). The method of discovery is performed by trial and error and building off the mistakes and successes of your predecessors and Newtown was just the first step in many of his discoveries.

<comment><USER4> Okay, alchemy doesn't refer only to transmutation. It was a legitimate practice by early chemists who were playing around with materials. The mysticism is greatly exaggerated. And the scientific method goes back tens or hundreds of thousands of years .. for example early hominids fishing for tuna in Morocco. My point is that rudimentary scientific experiments are still science and should be appreciated. There was no transition from magic to science in the 17th century.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the last paragraph of his Principia Mathematica (maybe the most important book in the history of science?), Newton claims that sensation and action comes from electrical vibrations in the nerves. It took hundreds of years before before his hypothesis could be accepted.

<comment><USER6> You should say "proven", not "accepted.

<comment><USER4> Nothing in science is ever proven. There can only be accumulating evidence and increased agreement among scientists. If something were to be considered proven, then we would not be open to re-interpretation if contradictory evidence were to appear. This would be anti-scientific.

<comment><USER6> Nah, now you are simply going down the rabbit's hole of arguing definitions.

Nothing is ever proven, yet the probability of it being true is higher than the probability of you waking up tomorrow being Frodo who just realised he needs to bring that goddamn ring to Mordor.

It's the same funny case of arguing that we live in a simulation: it's a great idea, but the fact is that if that simulation is good enough, then you will never know you live in a simulation.

<comment><USER4> Maybe your life has not provided you with enough surprising results to be weary of the word proven.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The biggest leaps are not made through rigorous process, but through unhindered imagination. Einstein was the same way.

<comment><USER8> Unhindered imagination and a excellent proclivity for advanced math.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Always look where they don't want you to look. Something Newton knew and was careful to hide in his time.</comment>