Sl: a mirror version of ls - <AUTHOR> https://gir.st/blog/sl-alt.htm <comment><USER2> Probably an unpopular opinion, but I find aliases and extensive dotfiles counterproductive.

It's better to learn and remember the exact commands. If you find yourself typing the same long command over and over again, the task should probably be automated or scripted as part of a separate pipeline.

Assuming you are successful with aliasing and don't accidentally do something unexpected and catastrophic to your system, the moment you login to another system you will be lost and unable to remember any of the original and core commands.

<comment><USER3> There are plenty of cases where it can be unproductive, but I find it very helpful in some cases.

I find `alias gcr="git clone --recursive"` to be very productive for me. I never forget what it stands for, it saves me time, and I never have to go fetch all submodules if the repo uses them. `alias lt=ls -tor` is helpful, as it shows me extra information about files in reverse sorted order, so that the most recently modified files are at the bottom.

I don't run any risk of forgetting either of these because of their mnemonic nature, and they're not something I can script.

<comment><USER4> I was of the same opinion as the GP until I started using Terraform. Coming from a sysadmin background, I was always told to use default tools 'because one day you'll ssh into a random server and it won't have any of your fancy tools and config'.

So I started using Terraform. A lot. Day in, day out, I would type terrafrom, teraform, terrafomr. And I'm a good typist! But something about that word just makes it hard to get out right. (I have a similar issue with 'infrastructure'.)

Finally replacing it with a 'tf' alias saved me a lot of frustration.

<comment><USER5> This is actually supporting GP's argument.

Why do you have to "type" terraform? Are you running terraform from your own machine? Don't. Setup a Jenkins pipeline or what have you. Unless you happen to work alone – and I'd argue even then.

Moving Terraform to Jenkins was the second best thing we have ever done – first thing was moving tfstate to remote storage.

You can provide any required parameters (or jenkins can fetch for you), run terraform init, plan, ask for confirmation, apply (and even perform retries). And then run any post steps. Even managers can use terraform now (and we have a pretty complicated setup).

I guess only Terraform Enterprise might beat this, but I have little experience with that.

<comment><USER4> We ran Terraform in Bitbucket Pipelines builds - full testing with awspec, remote state in S3, statefile locking in DynamoDB.

It might surprise you, but there are cases where you might not want to run Terraform in a pipeline.

<comment><USER6> What is this awspec? I would like to subscribe to your blog or mailing list!

:+100:

<comment><USER4> Haha I don't have either, I'm afraid. Here's a link to the common architectures I helped out on when I was at Geoscience Australia: [https://bitbucket.org/account/user/geoscienceaustralia/proje...](https://bitbucket.org/account/user/geoscienceaustralia/projects/TF)

Here's a direct link to the awspec tests for one of the repositories: [https://bitbucket.org/geoscienceaustralia/webserver/src/ab6f...](https://bitbucket.org/geoscienceaustralia/webserver/src/ab6fcfaa5926e6a2c9a15240ebefc082c47cefcf/tests/spec/?at=master)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always liked the story about the guy who aliased emacs to be 'em'. Until one day he accidentally typed an 'r' instead of an 'e'. It turns out aliases can cost a lot more time than they can save!

<comment><USER8> If he would just had an alias of rm to `rm -i`...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like to add "install [https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl"](https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl") to my companies "Getting started" documentation to prank new hires. Great fun!

<comment><USER10> I was hoping someone posted this, if not I was going to. I installed it on one of my home servers YEARS ago, and forgot about it until a couple years later I typoed "sl" and it chooched across my screen. I howled with laughter at it, and at setting myself up years in advance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Or you just

        alias sl=ls

and have productivity reach unseen levels!

<comment><USER12> I've had "l" aliased to "ls -lhp" for so long that I can't work properly without it. I think many distros also alias "ll" to "ls -l" by default (I think CentOS/RHEL does it at least).

<comment><USER13> I have h=ls and hh=ls -l, which are much more comfortable with the Dvorak keyboard layout. (The equivalent would be j and jj on Qwerty.)

<comment><USER14> Good idea. Dvorak users unite!

Do you use regular dvorak or programmer dvorak?

<comment><USER13> British Dvorak, since it keeps ", £, # etc where I expect them, but is still a standard layout available on Linux and Mac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I once installed sl on a server. Completely forgot I put it there. It laid there dormant for MONTHS without anyone tripping over it. Then....it happened.

"What the...why is my screen blac--is that a train-AW DAMMIT".

That person was me. The guy who installed the damn thing.

The progression from confusion, to curiosity, to realization that I had in fact...just played myself was kind of amusing in the moment.

</comment><comment><USER16> See also, gti: [http://r-wos.org/hacks/gti](http://r-wos.org/hacks/gti)

<comment><USER17> As a golf owner, lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> No no no. There is only one 'sl'.

[https://asciinema.org/a/172723](https://asciinema.org/a/172723)

<comment><USER19> Thank you. You made my day! :D I'm confident that there are other such commands that I'm unaware of and don't know how to find them. May be you could help out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting.

Faced with the choice of _punishing_ myself for making a mistake vs. _adapting my environment_ to accommodate me, I'll always choose the latter.

(Plus, since you use `ls` so frequently, just make `l` an alias of it, especially if you have difficulty typing "ls"! Using a computer doesn't have to be some weird, punishing, bondage and discipline experience.)

<comment><USER21> Agree. It's why I alias . to pwd and .. to go up a directory.

<comment><USER22> Here are some of what I use:

        alias   -- -='cd -'
        alias     ..='cd ..'
        alias    ...='cd ../..'
        alias   ....='cd ../../..'
        alias  .....='cd ../../../..'
        alias ......='cd ../../../../..'

        alias l=ls
        alias la='ls -a'
        alias ll='ls -l'
        alias lla='ls -la'

<comment><USER23> I personally have a single function that takes care of all of those dotted aliases:

        function up {
            local ups="."
            for((i=0;i<${1:-1};i++)); do
        		ups="${ups}/.."
        	done
        	cd "$ups"
        }

<comment><USER22> I appreciate the DRY-ness of it, but that requires you to type 'up ...' which is longer :(

A while ago when I was bored I was thinking of golfing those aliases to say (pseudocode):

        for i in 2..6:
          alias '.'*i=cd '../'*i

but I didn't know all the shell needed and just wound up leaving it as is.

Edit: turns out Zsh has a 'repeat' built-in:

        alias $(repeat 7 echo -n '.')="cd $(repeat 7 echo -n '../')"

Still, non-portable, less clear, not worth changing the aliases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not to be confounded with the other project of the same name (and with the same purpose) [https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl](https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl)

<comment><USER25> It's mentioned right in the very first paragraph of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> a beautiful web page, and its only CSS is this:

        body {
            max-width: 50em;
            margin: auto;
            padding: 1em;
            line-height: 1.5em;
        }

        pre {
            overflow-x: auto;
        }

<comment><USER25> Yeah, but that's some horrible use of the fieldset element ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe i'm just weird but I can't recall ever making this typo, I find myself making letter-swap typos of words/commands with letters on the same hand often enough but that's not quite so easy with ls.

<comment> jake-low Maybe it's your keyboard layout? I used to make this typo (ls -> sl) on QWERTY, but I later switched to Dvorak where both L and S are typed with the right pinky. I think it slowed me down enough on that keypair that it never happens anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This code is incorrect: it has a a race condition that can cause it to use the wrong maximum width in its listing.

<comment><USER29> I'm not seeing it. Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER30> It invokes "ls" twice. There's no guarantee the maximum width obtained from the first invocation is still correct for formatting the result of the second.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't want to sound high and mighty or anything, but I've never mistyped 'ls'. I occasionally mistype other short binaries/commands, but typically anything more than ~4 characters has me hitting tab, and that usually completes uniquely and (obviously) correctly.

<comment><USER32> Then you're typing slower than you could.

By all means, type however you want to type, but if you _never_ __ever __make a mistake, then you could push yourself harder.

<comment><USER31> Dunno about that. I type pretty fast (don't have exact numbers to back that up, just other people's comments) But regardless of that, typing two characters that are on opposite sides of the keyboard and each use a separate hand is, for me, pretty much error free. I make mistakes when letters are closer and using the same hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This should go the whole hog: [https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-2078323.html](https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-2078323.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> For some reason I don't get ls wrong (right handed so maybe I reliably hit the l first) but I've had the following in my .alias for years

        # some common typos
        alias grpe grep
        alias gpre grep
        alias mroe more
        alias mreo more
        alias rmeo more

</comment><comment><USER35> This didn't work on Mac OS due to "wc -L" so I whipped up a python version.

[https://gist.github.com/richardkiss/4fba0c6bd27eb39a9eb56074...](https://gist.github.com/richardkiss/4fba0c6bd27eb39a9eb56074dd0f2ba4)

</comment><comment><USER36> Long ago there was a ms dos. program called "rude dos" that if installed would replace the all commands with versions that randomly and rarely would refuse to work with various rude messages. I always ran it before letting my little brother use my computer :).

</comment><comment><USER37> > Consider this code GPLv3 licensed.

is this actually valid? Does it mean the code _is_ GPLv3 licensed or not?

<comment><USER12> Create a closed source product based on the code and find out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The `wc -L` call fails on my Mac, but if I substitute gwc (as I have GNU coreutils available with a "g" prefix), it works.

</comment><comment><USER35> This didn't work on Mac OS due to "wc -L" so I whipped up a python version.

</comment><comment><USER38> not quite there but

alias sl='/bin/ls -l | tac | rev | column -t'

<comment><USER39> I was thinking this could be a simple alias with an AWK script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> In similar vein: express your inner rage while terminating offending processes.

[https://github.com/robotlolita/fuck-you](https://github.com/robotlolita/fuck- you)

<comment><USER41> Killing one memory hogging processor with another!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I always alias "ls" to "l"

</comment><comment><USER43> Hi, author here. Feel free to ask questions!</comment>


Please Vote for this Chromium Feature to Solve a Problem that everyone Knows - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=5338 <comment><USER2> Inaccurate headline. Links to Chromium project tracker ticket with title "No option to deal with background images in the context menu of a webpage"</comment>


What is Hadoop? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Hadoop is not a database, it is an open source framework. It is having its own Storage system which is called as HDFS and for processing huge files it is having a framework which is called as MapReduce . Source: [http://data- flair.training](http://data-flair.training)</comment>


Medical benefits of dental floss unproven - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/medical-benefits-of-dental-floss-unproven/2016/08/02/ea2e991a-5866-11e6-8b48-0cb344221131_story.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussion of a similar article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216127)</comment>


Index Ventures Leads $4 billion Valuation Round In Dropbox - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/30/index-leads-4-billion-valuation-round-in-dropbox/

<comment><USER3> Perhaps " _But the valuation ended up lower. Why?_ "

is answered by this: " _Speculation was that they'd hit $100 million in revenue this year. Our best guess based on discussions with sources is that revenue will be more like $30 million in 2011. But this is still largely a guess._ "

A valuation at 133x _revenues_ is, well wow.

I say this as big fan of dropbox as a service and a business but I'm not a fan of these monster valuations on the come.

Also should point out there's a lot of speculation in that article and those which preceded it.

<comment><USER4> One of the simplest ways to do valuation is to look at Free Cash Flow (FCF) or Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) and then divide it by (discount rate - <USER2> rate). Now, if the growth rate is fairly large, the denominator becomes very small and can drive even a moderate FCF to cause a very high valuation, which is what seems to be happening here.

If interested search for FCF valuation, etc. there's a lot of info out there.

<comment><USER5> You have to believe that the (huge) growth rate is perpetual. Most firms do not grow faster than US GDP growth in the long-run.

<comment><USER6> On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everybody drops to zero, and yet people buy stock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Holy fucking shit.

Back of the envelope maths:

6% investment, diluted three (two rounds after seed according to <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/dropbox> , plus the current one), that goes down to about 2% (diluted by 30% each time).

2% of $4b is $80m. That's a 4000x return over what, 4 years?

<comment><USER8> There is nothing being 'returned' to YC. The value of the investment has gone up but that has little to do with an exit.

<comment><USER9> You don't know that - they could very well have sold some of their shares in this round. (at this valuation why not take a point off the table)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Darn it. I was just writing an article saying that the combined value of YC- funded startups is $4.7 billion (the number @pg gave a few weeks back). Guess I have to update the text. I wonder what it will be next week.

</comment><comment><USER11> Since Dropbox was valued at $4b, I'd love to see what Amazon Web Services is valued at

<comment><USER12> Amazon is a public company. You can figure out what AWS is valued at by the market, by doing some math, and reading some annual reports. Admittedly, the web store portion of Amazon clouds that value, no pun intended...but you could probably take a look at Amazon a few years ago, before AWS became a major contributor to their bottom line, to make sense of the numbers.

AMZN currently has a market cap of $95 billion. It's safe to say AWS is worth significantly more to the market than Dropbox; as it should be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think this can be based on their current business, but they must have a related idea ( _something_ cloud) with greater market potential + their _proven_ ability to execute in the space.

There's been allusions to developments at dropbox that are not yet public.

 _BTW_ : dropbox's initial application was single founder.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder what are they going to do with the money. Build datacenters of their own? I hope they don't bloat their service with some expensively developed value-add stuff that nobody wants, but are force-fed nevertheless. One would think they're would be too smart for that kind of failure, but you can never know what big money does.

<comment><USER12> Given the math of owning vs. renting, I strongly suspect they will want to begin building their own. If I were they, I'd be hiring ops developers from Google or Facebook or someone who has dealt with really big data centers and start dipping my toes into ownership immediately. They'll need to figure out how to cheaply and reliably manage petabytes of storage.

<comment><USER15> Not convinced. They are being valued at $4b not for some extra profitability by cutting costs, but because of a huge opportunity to grow. They need to do what they need for growth not hire expensive people to get into the server farm and storage business. Maybe later.

<comment><USER12> I won't argue that growth is not why they have that valuation. But, Google and Facebook, when faced with growth problems did not say, "How can we outsource our data growth problems?" They used it as a competitive advantage and a way to raise the barrier to entry for competitors. If Dropbox is paying 25%-50% more for storage than a competitor, they're going to lose as soon as a competitor comes along that gets all the other bits right.

All other things being equal, the company with lower costs wins. I'm not suggesting any other company is currently equal to Dropbox (it's what I use, and I'm constantly surprised by the number of my non-nerd friends who have the Dropbox icon on their desktop)...but, there are an awful lot of smart people out there who would love to eat their lunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats to Dropbox. I have to admit that I still don't see their sustainable advantage but the folks with the money clearly do!

<comment><USER7> Their defensible advantage is two-fold:

1) they developed a technology that in theory should be easy to duplicate, but in practice is extremely hard. Large teams always mess this up (even world- class teams, e.g. at Microsoft, which has had several stabs at this), and small teams often don't have the skills to work with so many orthogonal elements at the high competence level required.

2) They have supportive users signed up on yearly contracts. That makes them very resistant to competition.

A Dropbox competitor would ahve to be 10x better for people to switch. That's hard to achieve.

<comment><USER17> I've been thinking about this lately as I use Dropbox more and transition from working at home to an office and find myself using 2 computers more.

A Dropbox competitor just needs to sync my app settings and stuff on top of what Dropbox does. I am _gone_ the instant someone offers me a way to turn on my laptop and have an almost-replica of my workstation. Or upgrade phones, tablets or anything else.

Sync my <breed of device> is a _lot_ better than just syncing some files across them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been thinking the same thing recently. If the OS itself just lived on the cloud and had local copies it just updated, then your stuff would always be in 'sync' (including settings/apps).

Moreover, you could access the same OS using different platforms (mobile vs laptop) and it could behave appropriately. We're already moving towards this to some extent with more and more sync and push services.

NB Just to be clear, I'm not talking about a pure web-based OS and thin client (e.g all of google's products are like this). I mean being able connect to something in the sky that keeps it all in sync whenever you have a data connection.

<comment><USER18> Looks like you might be interested in VDI(Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).

Disclaimer: I'm ex-VMware employee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone explain to me why dropbox has been so successful? I get that its a good idea but what makes it so valuable?

<comment><USER20> Taking a shot at this -

a good idea - 1 point. executed really, really well - 100 points.

<comment><USER21> They are FolderShare for Macs, a little bit nicer and at a time where more people "get" the need.

Fun Historical note: FolderShare was founded 10 years before DropBox. MSFT paid to acquire FolderShare and then squashed all of the good things about it out of the project.

[http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-03Fol...](http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-03FolderSharePR.mspx)

Second-mover (or N-mover) advantage and clean execution is undervalued, IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"...and at a time where more people 'get' the need."_

I think this is a really good point. The market-timing was right for dropbox. More people with multiple machines (mostly laptops) so the desire to backup/sync across devices became more important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How come we do not hear much about Box.net?

<comment><USER23> Procter and Gamble was a HUGE DEAL for box.net. Did box go through yc?

<comment><USER24> nope, they didn't go through YC - [http://www.quora.com/Box-net/Whats-the- story-behind-Box-nets...](http://www.quora.com/Box-net/Whats-the-story-behind- Box-nets-founding)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is Dropbox using S3 as their storage platform?

<comment><USER26> Yes: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_%28service%29#Technolog...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_%28service%29#Technology)

"Dropbox uses Amazon's S3 storage system to store the files"

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Cue another 10,000 or so dropbox imitations.

</comment><comment><USER28> Does this number tell us how much the bubble burst will hurt? A whole lot!!

<comment><USER29> Who, exactly, will it hurt?

<comment><USER21> VC as an asset class, and programmers indirectly because of that.</comment></comment></comment>


Tech's younger generation leans on Web 2.0 for love - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/14/MNGEVO4DOV1.DTL&hw=jessica+guynn&sn=001&sc=1000 <comment><USER2> Launch party circuit, eh?

<comment><USER3> yet another advantage of being in the Bay Area</comment></comment>


Walmart is asking employees to deliver packages on their way home from work - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/06/01/walmart-is-asking-employees-to-deliver-packages-on-their-way-home-from-work/ <comment><AUTHOR> The headline makes it sound hilarious, but it's an opt-in program:

"Employees will be paid extra, and offered overtime pay as necessary to make the deliveries, Walmart spokesman Ravi Jariwala said Thursday."

The interesting question that jumps to my mind is liability. For any of you who shared the pain of law school with me, it sounds like Walmart is trying to write us a new chapter in agency law on the topic of frolic and detour. Walmart's reputation in employment matters notwithstanding, I wonder how they handle it the first time a "delivery" driver takes out a mailbox or rear ends a car. I have an idea of how it should go, but that's not the interesting part of all of this.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is why amazon is not worried about Walmart.</comment>


Setting the Record Straight on Bloomberg BusinessWeek's Erroneous Article - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/setting-the-record-straight-on-bloomberg-businessweeks-erroneous-article/ <comment><USER2> This looks like a somewhat hasty response:

-"and we fixed all critical issues before the acquisition closed" \- How can you fix issues when the acquiring party is not yet under your control?

-"We further strengthen our security posture by implementing our own hardware designs for critical components such as processors [...]" \- Own processor design by Amazon? They have the Alpine ARM-processor, but that type of processor is not the type of processor that runs on the allegedly compromised motherboards.

-What is Amazon exactly responding to? Amazon denies knowing of the hack ("was aware of") when acquiring the company. That's the same denial as in the BB article. But the main point in the BB-article is that is was Amazon that found out about the hack and notified US government. That doesn't mention any knowledge before the deal was struck? Only Apple clearly denies ever having found a malicious chip.

The Bloomberg-article just seems to well-sourced to be that easily denied. Not sure what kind of communication would be acceptable for Amazon and their law enforcement partners they are (still, according to BB) working with.

<comment><USER3> On your first point, I think that's pretty common in M&A. For example, let's say the audit revealed that the target did not enforce minimum password lengths for employee accounts. Amazon could simply say that needs to be re- mediated before Amazon is willing to close -- so the target can just implement that change, and certify it was done and/or have the audit firm confirm it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are supermicro servers _everywhere_.

Surely, organizations that don't have anything to hide are talking a peek by now.

If there aren't a lot of reports of these hacks in the wild in the next couple of days... then we'll know who's not telling the truth, right?

</comment><comment><USER5> Bloomberg has turned into tabloid-level shock journalism when it comes to tech. All about the scares, not much substance. It doesn't surprise me at all that they might've screwed up their article this bad, but I hope it's a wake up call to the staff at Bloomberg (though I know it won't be).

</comment><comment><USER6> According to BBG report, "the ensuing top-secret probe" "remains open more than three years later".

I find it extremely hard to believe that uncle Sam would let a state sponsored espionage of this scale silently continue for 3 years without warning the public and cut off the pipe.

If the alleged hacking were true, wouldn't it be 100x more important to stop the spyware immediately than collecting comprehensive evidence on who's behind it? At the end of the day, it's not like U.S. would start a nuclear war against China if the allegation is proven true.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hopefully this will encourage someone find an affected device in the wild. Wonder if any of Supermicros non-blade mobos would be affected? The graphic on Bloomberg indicated blade servers but journalists seem to take quite a bit of liberty with tech graphics. It's got me curious as I've purchased a few supermicro servers off Ebay, and have no clue about where they were used prior.

</comment><comment><USER8> Amazon really feels the need to get in front of this story before their stock falls any further, down almost 3% as of writing this comment.

<comment><USER9> The entire market is selling off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _[...] investigating all hardware and software prior to going into production and performing regular security audits internally and with our supply chain partners._

Does this imply that they are checking every piece of hardware that goes into a data center including looking at it for any additional or replaced malicious components?

</comment><comment><USER11> Just because you went looking for something and didn't find it does not mean it is not there. I couldn't find my car key this morning and had to use the spare, does that mean my normal key doesn't exist and never existed? No, it just means I didn't dedicate enough time to finding my normal key.</comment>


The story of how WoSign gave me an SSL certificate for GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://www.schrauger.com/the-story-of-how-wosign-gave-me-an-ssl-certificate-for-github-com <comment><USER2> Their policy page at [http://www.wosign.com/policy/](http://www.wosign.com/policy/) currently renders backend source code in plain text...

<comment><USER3> And it's VBScript!

      <% Dim strAcceptLanguage strAcceptLanguage=Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE")
      'response.write strAcceptLanguage if instr(strAcceptLanguage,"zh")>0 then
      Response.Redirect "cps.htm" else Response.Redirect "cps_e.htm" end if %>

<comment><USER4> So much of China runs on Windows scripting it's horrific. That is changing, but slowly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So OP mentioned a question posted to stackexchange, clicked link, expected closed.

[https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/91292/](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/91292/)

LOL good ol' stackexchange, closed as duplicate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I still think it shouldn't be considered a duplicate. Especially since going directly to WoSign didn't end up solving the overall problem, which is what the linked duplicate question says to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great additional detail on the WoSign fiasco. Also discussed yesterday here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12389573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12389573)

</comment><comment><USER7> Stuff like this is depressing. Are we ever going to have any semblance of privacy and security on the Internet?

Everyone has been hacked, political figures, governments, businesses. In 100 years I think people are going to look back on this time and think we were all crazy like how we see safety in the early auto industry.

<comment><USER8> The early auto industry? They'll likely think we're crazy looking at our current auto industry. Who doesn't know anyone who was killed or seriously injured in a car crash?

<comment><USER9> How much of that is avoidable though? You still have people zooming around in big metal/composite boxes. There's only so much that can be done, especially given the culture around cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> from the article:

>Domain validation is hard. It isn't as simple as one may think, and WoSign isn't the first to have a problem. They are still a trusted CA for now, and hopefully they will get their act together quickly.

The vulnerability exposed seems like a basic unit test to me (only assume ownership of validated domains or sub-domains - NOT all domains with a common root (or perhaps substring? the article is sparse on details)).

I had already lost faith in the 'everyone can be a root if they describe their process' model of trust before reading this post, but if software vendors that rely on trust anchors on their users behalf can't be bothered to do even basic due dilligence beyond vendor-sponsered audits, I'm left speachless.

Perhaps my experience with FIPS-140 has jaded me, but after seeing so much more money spent on paper-pushing than actual vulnerability assesment (and remediation), I can't help but feel lost after reading this.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is nuts.

The only long term solution here is a distributed decentralized DNS service. When there's "default-trust" at some locations (browser CAs), There's weak- points in the security chain.

What are the best available dDNS solutions. Ideally these are initially backward compatible with redular DNS to help adoption, and then just disregard CAs.

<comment><USER11> Oh and browser vendors, distrust WoSign now!

Imagine your regular developer performing a npm install which pulls in code from a compromised MITMed github URL. That's straightforward rootkit compile and install access!

<comment><USER12> >Oh and browser vendors, distrust WoSign now!

It's not like a lot happened to other authorities (a few pinky-promises)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The root cert for www.schrauger.com is StartCom Certificate Authority. Isn't it their (StartCom's) responsibility to make sure the owner of Certification Authority of WoSign (the next cert in the chain) is acting in accord with some terms and conditions? Secondly, should the browser vendors remove StartCom CA as a trusted root? Do they not do that because all the StsrtSSL sites would break? Fine with me, personally.

[Edited to clarify who "their" meant]

<comment><AUTHOR> WoSign is included as a root certificate. When they first started, they weren't in all browser stores, so StartCom cross-signed their root certificate.

That way, WoSign could create certificates while they waited for browsers to update with their root certificate. It also helps for legacy/embedded systems that don't get updates, since StartCom has existed far longer. Due to the cross-sign, all WoSign certificates are still compatible.

<comment><USER13> OK thanks. Doesn't StartCom bear responsibility for the behavior of the entity they cross-signed for?

<comment><USER14> Supposedly they were bought by WoSign

[http://letsphish.clonezone.link/part1](http://letsphish.clonezone.link/part1)

I say supposedly because this is an archive of the original domain

[https://www.letsphish.org/](https://www.letsphish.org/)

which now says

      > September 1, 2016:
      > I'm currently going under legal review of the site.
      > Content will not be available during this period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's that best way to disable the WoSign cert on Arch Linux?

<comment><USER16> The GUI way: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:UserCertDB#Deleting_a_Root_Certi...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:UserCertDB#Deleting_a_Root_Certificate)

The CLI way: [http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/285831](http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/285831)

<comment><USER15> Thanks! I hoped it wasn't a per-browser procedure, doesn't seem to work for chrome :/

Edit: chrome(ium) has a cert manager under "settings" that allows editing certificate trust levels</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Subscription management as service with cryptocurrency acceptance - <AUTHOR> Any subscription as management service with ability for manual transfer ( wire transfers ) and cryptocurrency.
Somtimes, customers do not trust us with their card in which case, we want to offer wire and crypto but stripe etc...seem to have no support for this.
Any opensource project or paid service? <comment><USER2> Coinbase</comment>


Scraping Web Pages With jQuery, Node.js and Jsdom - <AUTHOR> http://liamkaufman.com/blog/2012/03/08/scraping-web-pages-with-jquery-nodejs-and-jsdom/

<comment><USER2> Somewhat tangential, here is something I have long thought would be a very useful project, but unfortunately haven't had the time to build:

It is a scraping/crawling tool suite. Base it on webkit, with good scriptable plugin support (not just js, but expose the DOM to other languages too). It would consist of a few main parts.

1) what I call the Scrape-builder. This is essentially a fancy web browser, but, it has a rich UI that can be used to select portions of a web page, and expose the appropriate DOM elements, and how to find those elements in the page. By expose, I mean put into some sort of editor/ide - It could be raw html, or some sort of description language. in the editor, the elements one would want to scrap can then be selected, and put into some sort of object for later processing. This can include some form of scripting to mangle the data as needed. It can also include interactions with the javascript on the page, recording click macros (well event firing, and such). The point of this component is to allow content experts/non- or novice-programmers to easily arrange for the "interesting" data to be selected for scraping.

2) The second component for the suite is a scraping engine. It uses the description + macros + scripts from the Scrape-builder to actually pull data from the pages, and turn them into data objects. These objects can then be put on a queue for later processing with backend systems/code. The scraping engine is basically a stripped down webkit without the rendering/layout/display bits compiled in. It just builds the dom and executes the page's javascript to ultimately scrape the bits selected. This is driven by the spidering engine.

3) The spidering engine is what determines which pages to point the scraping engine at. It can be fed by external code, or it can be fed by scripts from the scraping engine, a feedback mechanism (some links on a page may be part of a single scraping, some may just be fodder for a later scraping). It can be thought of as a work queue for the scraping engines.

The main use-cases I see for this are specialized search and aggregation engines, which want to get at the interesting bits of sites which don't expose a good api, or where the data may be formatted, but hard to semantically infer without human intervention. Sure, it wouldn't be as efficient from a code execution point of view as say, custom scraping scripts, but it would allow for much faster response times to page changes, and allow better use of programmer time, by taking care of a lot of boilerplate or almost-boiler plate parts of scraping scenarios.

<comment><USER3> You just described Kapow. Or Selenium if you want a cheaper alternative.

<comment><USER2> I didn't know about Kapow, thanks for the pointer! I think selenium could be worked into this, but it is not all the way there just yet...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem I've had with using jsdom in scraping web pages is that it is not very forgiving about bad HTML. There are so many pages in the wild that have malformed HTML, and jsdom just pukes on it. I started using Apricot [1] which uses HtmlParser [2] which has been better. I'd like to hear what others are using to scrape bad webpages.

[1] <https://github.com/silentrob/Apricot>

[2] <https://github.com/tautologistics/node-htmlparser>

<comment><USER5> A couple of months ago I posted a very similar article that uses node.js, request and jQuery to achieve the same goal. In this case, as long as jQuery can handle the response you shouldn't have any problem with malformed HTML...

<comment><USER5> I forgot the link [http://blog.devartis.com/2012/01/05/scraping-websites- having...](http://blog.devartis.com/2012/01/05/scraping-websites-having-fun- with-node-js-and-jquery/) :S

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good overview. I've been a fan of node.io for node scraping for a while. Lot's of stuff built in and you don't lose your jQuery selectors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Node.io looks excellent! As a commenter on the parent article pointed out it handles errors, is multi-threaded and allows you to use jQuery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://nokogiri.org/>

Perfectly fine use of css selectors and more

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for sharing. This is a bit off-topic, but if you are interested in Scraping Web Pages, you might find that <http://cQuery.com> is an interesting solution which uses CSS Selectors (much like jQuery) as its mechanism to extract content from live web pages.

</comment><comment><USER9> I created a dumb little script using this technique that lets you read hacker news in the terminal then opens up the story in your browser.

<https://github.com/prestonparris/node-hackernews>

<comment><AUTHOR> It's worth noting that Hacker News seems to temporarily block IP addresses if too many requests are made. I'm not sure if it's requests per minute, or within an hour. But my IP was blocked 3 times when playing around with a similar script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm confused, is the window object from Jsdom a live object? Can I scrape interactive sites?

Isn't Phantomjs already perfect for scrapping, what is the advantage of this exactly?

<comment><USER3> Phantomjs has a lot larger overhead (it runs a full browser). Plus it doesn't give you access to the full Node.js ecosystem (e.g. access to databases, etc). You can use Node's Phantomjs driver, but it spawns a child process to do the work, and seems a little complicated in how all the interactions work.

And of course you can scrape interactive sites - interactive sites still basically just use HTTP to request data. Just watch the network window in Chrome's developer tools, and figure out what HTTP requests the site is making that you are interested in. Then code them into request() calls.

<comment><USER10> Phantom doesn't need access to node apis. Separation of concerns. Run your phantom script to scrape and then pipe the results to your node script for processing. I've worked on 2 scraping projects using this method and it works great.

<comment><USER3> Sure, it can work great if your needs are simple. But if you're posting data to forms which you need from a database, and you don't know what you might need from the DB until runtime, it can get a bit more complex.

Also worth noting that jsdom is quite slow, and has a strict HTML parser. If you want something faster that will cope with more web pages, look up cheerio.

<comment><USER10> Remember that Phantom just runs a web browser. So writing a Phantom script is like writing an app on top of another app. This means you can use XMLHttpRequest or WebSockets to communicate with a back-end if that's necessary.

<comment><USER3> Yes that's what we ended up doing with Kapow. Just felt... dirty :)

<comment><USER11> Kapow? You mean this company: ([http://kapowsoftware.com/solutions/content- migration/index.p...](http://kapowsoftware.com/solutions/content- migration/index.php))?, mind to share about your experience?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just did this recently. It works great except when the pages you're scraping have JS errors on them.

</comment><comment><USER13> OK, one thing I'm confused about...what's the advantage scraping with node/jquery over a traditional scripting language like Ruby + Nokogiri or Mechanize?

It's true that this process won't render the page-w-ajax as your browser will, but I've found that if you do some web inspection of the page to determine the address and parameters for the backend scripts, then you don't even have to pull HTML at all. You just hit up the scripts and feed them parameters (or use Mechanize, if cookie/state-tracking is involved).

<comment><USER3> Partly the advantage is that you have CSS selectors to examine your document (I don't know if Ruby/Mechanize does that - I'm just saying what is good about node+jquery), and you have a language that all web developers know about. So it's about minimising friction from doing front end web work to doing scraping work. At my company this gives us a financial advantage - we can hire basic jQuery web developers to work on our scrapers.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Dodepict – illustrate soc media updates, make freeform memes and more - <AUTHOR> https://dodepict.com/create/#1 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi. Anybody? I could really do with some feedback. Thanks.</comment>


Laser Razor suspended by Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34516907#?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed <comment><USER3> To those looking for more concrete info on how this razor is supposed to work, here's the patent for it:

[http://www.google.com/patents/US9017322](http://www.google.com/patents/US9017322)

As far as I can tell, the idea is to use evanescent coupling to transfer light into hair follicles. There's no free space laser beam, just an optical fiber that you drag across your face. They also claim that chromophores (color bearing molecules) in hair can be severed at relatively low powers with a mixture of several specific frequencies of light.

So, what this product needs in order to work is a fiber that's durable enough to survive being dragged across skin while having very little cladding so as to allow evanescent coupling. That could be very hard to do, so the heads on these laser razors may wear out after a few shaves just like a metal razor. Second, they need to pack a high power multi-wavelength laser source and the power reserve to run it into a very tiny handle. Again, this is probably going to be pretty tricky.

There's nothing here that looks outright impossible to me. Just very, very tricky.

<comment><USER4> > _chromophores (color bearing molecules) in hair can be severed at relatively > low powers_

What if you're blond?

<comment><USER5> Laser hair removal doesn't work well with light hair from what I recall, they usually require you to use electrolysis instead.

I imagine that we're not doing something radically different here, so the answer to this would probably be 'it won't work'.

<comment><USER6> wait a sec, I have blond hairs in my beard. In fact, a lot of guys i know do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The thing that is weird about this case is that one of the principals, Morgan Gustavsson, is actually the dude who invented the real laser hair removal that is used in clinics and has been involved in dermatology since.

I don't know if he was actually involved in this project or not, but that was the one thing that made me think that this maybe wasn't 100% a scam?

Anyway, the implication they make in their pitch isn't that it's an open laser, but that it is a laser confined to a fiberoptic wire which leaks into the hair when pressed against it. Gustavsson has published some papers on this a few years ago in which he refers to the concept as a TRASER.

Of course, if this really is such a revolutionary advance, why go to Kickstarter to bring it to market? Why not traditional investors. Gotta be easier to get funding for a significant manufacturing outlay, right? Just to not have to sell a piece of the company? To justify that there is a market?

I personally don't have the background to make any judgments about this and I definitely don't understand the article he published, but I just thought it didn't _completely_ fail the smell test.

<comment><USER8> > Of course, if this really is such a revolutionary advance, why go to > Kickstarter to bring it to market? Why not traditional investors.

The obvious benefit being that you don't actually have to give Kickstarter "investors" any money back.

<comment><USER9> >The obvious benefit being that you don't actually have to give Kickstarter "investors" any money back.

Shouldn't that make them have strong check and balances in place to help people funding these projects?

<comment><USER10> You would think...

<comment><USER9> In an article in the Huffington post a while back, it said the Feds are now going after people who don't follow through. I also hope while they are at it, they can do something to help protect these vulnerable people giving money to support projects without proper education about what they are supporting.

Here is the article -[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/11/feds-regulate- crowd...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/11/feds-regulate- crowdfundin_n_7565952.html)

<comment><USER11> The Feds go after people who just walk away with the money. They do not, and should not, go after people who fail to achieve the objective -- that would defeat the point of crowdfunding.

<comment><USER9> > They do not, and should not, go after people who fail to achieve the > objective -- that would defeat the point of crowdfunding.

I agree. But they can somehow force the hands of Kickstarter and its competitors to have some mechanism in place to protect consumers from contributing to such bogus projects. I looked at the Kickstarter page and it seems any creature can post and request their projects be funded. Some of the scam are poorly disguised while others are masterfully disguised such as the one for which the is thread is created.

<comment><USER11> Sure, some validation is important, and Kickstarter has their own incentive to ensure some baseline quality independent of regulation. Fraudsters should be prosecuted, but I hope that people aren't discouraged from launching Kickstarter initiatives because they're afraid of genuine product execution risk turning into personal criminal or civil liability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's sad that people thought it was real, forget about lasers and stuff it's basic common sense.

A AAA battery doesn't store enough power to drive a laser capable of burning hair for any reasonable amount of time.

When the laser isn't interrupted by the hair it has to go some where which means that heat is produced, if it can get something hot enough to burn the hair off it would get hot enough that you won't be able to hold it yet alone put it to your face.

There's no way you would ever could get the laser beam close enough to the skin for a smooth shave without burning your skin off.

And most importantly burnt hair smells like shit....

P.S. I assume that most people know at least 1 person that did laser hair removal, they should know it's a very painful and long process and it works only on dark hairs so again using this to shave anything but a fairly dark beard would never work.

<comment><USER13> I've done laser hair removal, and while it does hurt like a bitch, and does only work on dark hairs, the claims were that the razor would use a wavelength that targeted all hair (I don't know enough to say that's not plausible), and presumably they'd use a short enough focal length to only hit exposed hair, rather than the normal method of focusing on the hair below the surface.

Doesn't get around the smell, power requirement, or heat output though.

<comment><USER14> If there already was a wavelength that targets all hair colour, they would use it already with other hair removal treatments, you'd think.

<comment><USER13> True, that is indeed another hole in their story.

<comment><USER15> The other is that there's a critical difference between hair cutting - <USER2> is what this claimed to do - and hair follicle killing, which is what laser and IPL treatments do.

Existing treatments are supposed to kill follicles permanently.

This suggest it trims hair but doesn't leave you permanently beardless.

They can't possibly work the same way.

So I think KS did the right thing. Too many people have been using it in scammy ways, and that makes it less effective for anyone with a genuine product, talent, or idea to sell.

Having said that - the scams only work when you have a market full of people who don't know enough about basic science or simple online research to check unlikely claims. And that's been the real problem with KS, IGG, and the rest - it's just too damn easy to make money from a few hours of 3D rendering to create a shiny sketch of a product that can't possibly work, or (at best) can't possibly be developed without far more investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Since we all check the comments first, here are some links:

KickStarter project page (suspended):

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skarp/the-skarp- laser-r...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skarp/the-skarp-laser- razor-21st-century-shaving)

IndieGoGo project page (they re-posted the project there after being suspended):

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-skarp-laser- razor-21s...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-skarp-laser-razor-21st- century-shaving#/)

Demonstration video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOLwNJ7TXWA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOLwNJ7TXWA)

<comment><USER16> There's no laser there. If there was a laser there it would be a significant hazard to everybody in the room, so it's good it's completely fake. With the sort of power you would need to be cutting hairs in any capacity simply looking at diffuse reflections (think a laser dot at a wall) would have the ability to permanently damage your vision. The video is someone fooling around with a piece of aluminum and a hot wire[0]. It's a testament to human stupidity that something this blatant managed to get $4M.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot- wire_foam_cutter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-wire_foam_cutter)

<comment><USER17> > It's a testament to human stupidity that something this blatant managed to > get $4M.

That's a bit harsh. Most people don't understand technology on a functional level. Ask a "regular" person how programming, the internet or their mobile phone works and they won't be able to give you a technical explanation. In fact, most modern technology tries to hide the internal workings.. "it just works".

<comment><USER18> Heck, ask a programmer what a MOSFET is.

<comment><USER19> Or ask and EE what a closure is.

But seriously, some programmers will actually know what a MOSFET is.

<comment><USER20> I am a programmer that knows what a MOSFET is. I had to know in order to pass intro to digital logic.

They are 4-connection devices, but _usually_ source is connected to body. They come in n-type and p-type, and _usually_ operate in enhancement mode, where the channel between source and drain opens when the signals to gate and body are different. With those, you can either pass a weak digital 0 or a strong 1, or a weak 1 and a strong 0, so in order to produce a digital output that has strong 0 or strong 1 for every possible input and doesn't "leak" power, you can combine the result of the 0 logic with the result of the 1 logic. Hence the term _complimentary_ MOS (CMOS).

So a CMOS NOT gate has 2 MOSFETs: one n-type, and one p-type. A NAND gate has 4 MOSFETs, 2 of each type: the zero logic connected in series, and the one logic in parallel.

This knowledge--that I never really needed to write software for a living--was all building up to constructing a basic ALU using digital logic gate chips on breadboards with DIP input switches, LED outputs, and a manually-switched clock signal. I'm glad that I know it, but I'm mostly willing to trust the folks at Intel and AMD to do 64-bit ADD, SUB, MUL, DIV, and MOD correctly on integers.

Should I ever really need to, I could _probably_ pick apart a very high- resolution image of a CMOS chip. I wouldn't necessarily be able to design such a chip, but I could _eventually_ tell you what it does. And knowing what I know, I also have some idea that manipulating 32-bit floats on an 8-bit integer ALU is going to require _much_ more complexity in the microcode or software.

That level of detail is not necessary for me to know that shaving with a laser is practically untenable in 2015. It's the sort of thing that I might expect in sci-fi as a hand-wavey sort of marker of a futuristic setting, but it will probably never happen. It's more likely that we'll have an epigenetic treatment that simply instructs follicle cells to either stop growing hair entirely, or to make the hairs they grow be pigmentless and reduced in diameter. Until then, steel blades will continue to work just fine.

Even there, I am still skeptical that five parallel blades are really better than one. So to me, when you propose that I shave with a laser, I will roll my eyes at you just as hard as if you suggested that I pay 40% more per shave to add a _sixth_ blade _and a magnet_ to my razor. Human hair is not evolving defenses against older shaving technology. You can still scrape your face with knapped flint if you needed to.

If people are stupid about laser shaves, it may be because they have been well primed for this nonsense by the advertisements of Schick and Gillette and their flexy, bendy, swivelling, lubricating, blinking, bleeping, 20-bladed shaving heads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Backers received an email from Kickstarter saying the Laser Razor was "in > violation of our rule requiring working prototypes of physical products that > are offered as rewards".

Interesting. Was this a recent policy change? Control VR never showed any working prototypes either, and their campaign was allowed (this was in 2014). Their demonstration video was later revealed to be using another company's significantly more expensive product ($10k+ vs the $600 pledge price), with zero modifications. They never demonstrated any prototypes of the product they were claiming to develop themselves, yet the campaign went through and now they have everyone's money (>$400k) without delivering.

<comment><USER22> that policy is probably about a couple years old.

<comment><USER23> Is there a site that tracks these sorts of policy changes (like [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/) does for UK laws)?

<comment><USER24> "TOSBack is a collaboration between the EFF, the Internet Society, and ToS;DR. Every day, we check the Terms and Policies of many online services to see if any of them have changed"

[https://tosback.org/](https://tosback.org/)

But it is currently in beta and doesn't include Kickstarter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> hackaday.com had a good writeup that was skeptical of this.

[http://hackaday.com/2015/10/01/ask-hackaday-i-love-the- smell...](http://hackaday.com/2015/10/01/ask-hackaday-i-love-the-smell-of- burnt-hair-in-the-morning/)

They have generally been good at writing up some of the more sketchy kickstarts.

<comment><USER26> like Soap router, hackaday approved!!1

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Their prototype reminds me of concept car designs that look great but don't have enough internal space for an engine. You'd maybe fit a AAA battery in the handle but I haven't even seen a torch that works without more juice.

Also, I was kind of suspicious when I noticed that more than half of the team have beards.

<comment><USER16> I doubt you could get more than a watt out of a AAA anyway.

<comment><USER28> A one-watt laser is pretty powerful (Class 4). Most laser pointers in the US can't exceed 5 milliwatts. One watt is several times what's needed to light various common materials on fire.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woiTedSKPrk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woiTedSKPrk)

<comment><USER16> They do additionally claim a 10 year battery life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In light of the recent actions of the Washington State Attorney General, it takes balls to try and pull a scam like this. The AG ruled against the people behind a kickstarter campaign for a card game when they did not ship rewards for two years. The original campaign raised 25k and the judgement was for 56k. The ruling was on behalf of 31 residents out of 810 backers. The company is slowly shipping units and it looks like the AG is backing off.

But this whole thing brings up many interesting questions. The fine was 1k per WA resident + reimbursement + legal fees. Knowing that the AG has your back if things go south should undoubtedly embolden WA residents, which may lead to a higher percentage of backers coming from that state, which in turn would mean a higher fine if things fall through. I honestly was going to have my sister, a WA state resident, back this for me for my birthday, if it survived to the last day of funding.

Links:

[http://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-makes- crowdfunde...](http://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-makes-crowdfunded- company-pay-shady-deal)

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/213177064/asylum- playin...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/213177064/asylum-playing- cards/comments)

<comment><USER26> Yes, that punishment was pretty severe, offender had to ... promise to never do it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If Indiegogo doesn't suspend them too, it could be a real watershed moment for them. It'll brand them as the place to go for scam products.

<comment><USER31> They already are.

<comment><USER32> [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tellspec-what-s-in- your-f...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tellspec-what-s-in-your-food#/)

<comment><USER23> I'm assuming from the context you're touting that as an example of a "scam product" \- first time I've heard of them but [http://tellspec.com/order/](http://tellspec.com/order/) has beta device for purchase at present and they appear to be getting plaudits eg "Selected to be part of the HIVE at TED Med 2015" is on their website (and confirmed at TED MED).

Surely ordering the beta would show straight away that the product was entirely non-functional (ie fake)?

Did I miss something that you're relying on to form this opinion?

Edit: perhaps [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small- busi...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb- growth/day-to-day/backers-often-face-long-delays-for-crowdfunded- products/article23057331/) ?

<comment><USER32> Yes, almost certainly a scam, for a few reasons. The first being that hand- held Raman spectroscopy devices are currently the realm of _extremely_ pricey systems that are targeted at industry primarily (we're talking $10k at the very, very low end). Building a hand-held device that could do even a tiny fraction of what those units are capable of would be hugely disruptive for that market. So why not approach that market at all? Probably because it's vastly more savvy than consumers. Additionally, there is absolutely zero hard info anywhere about their device, it's design, it's specs, anything like that. Not only isn't there a specrum, there isn't even a "this is what a spectrum from our final equipment might look like" representation. It's all smoke and mirrors.

The biggest giveaway in that particular campaign though is something that most ordinary people won't pick up on: gluten. You tell someone that a spectrometer can detect sugar, they'll nod, you tell someone that it can detect gluten and they'll still nod, but people who know better will have their ears perk up. Because gluten is just a protein, and proteins are a nightmare when it comes to spectroscopy. Spectroscopy picks up the different bonds that are in a molecule. A simple molecule with only a few, very different bonds is easy to distinguish. But proteins are polymers made up of tens of thousands to millions of amino-acids, which blur together in spectroscopy. To distinguish different proteins from one another with _any_ kind of spectroscopy (whether Raman, IR, or even NMR) requires high end equipment which can give you very high resolution spectra. A low cost, consumer grade spectrometer is going to have very low resolution and be even more difficult to do. If they could pull it off it would be a tremendous breakthrough. The idea that they've made such a huge leap without seeking traditional investors to go after the industrial market, without any substantive research backing is, frankly, not robust against the much more realistic probability that they are pulling some sort of scam that involves a device that maybe has some capability or other but is nothing like what they say it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As soon as I saw that Kickstarter kicked them off I was wondering how long it would take for them to get onto Indiegogo. Then, of course I see it only took 4 hours.

If you're unaware, Indiegogo has shown that they're more than willing to be the platform of choice for scammers and nonsense products.

</comment><comment><USER34> I really want a Kickstarter review site, where people can post projects. Since non-backers cannot post comments there is no way to let people know that 'this project is probably not going to work'. Snopes for Kickstarter?

<comment><USER35> [http://drop-kicker.com](http://drop-kicker.com) was excellent from an engineering viewpoint but it's gone dormant. [http://eevblog.com/forum/crowd- funded-projects/](http://eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/) is not bad if you want to hear a bunch of skeptical engineers tear things to shreds.

A site that focuses on the shipping milestones, the true measure of success rather than meeting an arbitrary goal, would be valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Do not look into razor with remaining eye?

</comment><comment><USER37> This current phenomenon about crowdsourcing products is similar to the GroupOn/flash sale phenomenon, and as the products get shittier and shittier, and as more and more get disillusioned by it, the entire space will die.

Kickstarter and IndieGoGo need to do a much, much better job policing this, otherwise they will be out of business in 2 years. There are too many shitty products with great marketing videos that are taking a lot of money, and they will likely all be disappointing as hell.

<comment><USER38> I like your highlighting of quality. Do you think it is a real or just perceived notion that the quality of items on Kickstarter/Groupon decreases as their popularity increases? At first glance it feels to me that it casts too broad of a net. Maybe if a user saw it as patronage when Kickstarting artistic endeavors, she might bristle at seeing baubles like laser razors being funded?

Anecdotally I see this with video games on Steam Greenlight, but that service always seemed liked the Wild West to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't like what has become of kickstarter, but I think it's more of it's users fault than the company. They are really trying to stick to their values and principals, and mission despite having the possibilty to go the usual 'lets raise bazillions and get some flippin growth and extinguish the competition' way

<comment><USER35> There's more than one Kickstarter. Lots of us live below the million-dollar campaigns that are more the product than whatever's being sold. With less hype and more right-minded Kickstarter patrons, everything's a little more straightforward. It's the middle-class campaigns that remain the heart of Kickstarter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Don't worry, it'll be ready by spring." lol

</comment><comment><USER41>
        "They have been incredibly helpful and they believe in the
        Skarp Razor as much as we do," the firm said of Indiegogo.

is a very polite way of saying "Yeah, we don't believe in our own product either"

</comment><comment><USER42> How can you prove to potential buyers that you're able to produce the product you're selling them if you can't create a prototype demonstrating that it works?

Let's say we take everything at face value and believe 100% they can do this and that it is not a scam. If there is no prototype it's still possible that it could not work as it's unproven.

</comment><comment><USER43> Reminds me of that hologram device scam - bleen. It was so funny I couldn't tell if it was a scam or a parody trying to make fun of crowdfunding. Unfortunately it was flexible funding so people lost their money and whatever you think no one deserves to be scammed.

</comment><comment><USER44> I couldn't help but wonder if this would ultimately produce the same result as the "No No" shaver which, from what I read, is just a hot wire that burns the hair at the root.

The reviews make it sound like its a rather slow and smelly affair shaving this way.

</comment><comment><USER45> A fool and his money, be soone at debate: which after with sorow, repents him to late.

</comment><comment><USER46> What made me skeptical of this is that it looked like too much of a polished system, you'd expect it to look more like a braun shaver than a gillette fusion, with more battery space. The AA battery was also a dead giveaway.

</comment><comment><USER47> The name "Skarp" \-- possibly in conjunction with "Kickstarter" \-- immediately made me think of "scarper", i.e. the process of fleeing, ideally with the big bag of crowdfunding money.

</comment><comment><USER48> Anything that heats a hair to the point it burns off, no matter what the heat source is, will give out a bad smell. Good luck if one has thick beard, and no, I am not convinced this will work cleanly.

</comment><comment><USER49> Unpopular opinion, but I think parents should be assigned based on actual working models of something. Not just an idea, but something that is actually been tangibly created.

</comment><comment><USER50> Laser Razor will clearly have to show actual hair removal to prove itself; fleecing countless sheep of millions is a mere metaphor.

</comment><comment><USER51> lol... what I found funny and somewhat ironic is that most of the people in the video seem to wear a beard? (or lack of shaving) Maybe they're waiting until they can get their hands in an actual working prototype :P

</comment><comment><USER52> Um, folks, you're missing the obvious.

Optic fiber glass is _SHARP AS HELL_.

So, make the thing light up with pretty lights and colors and expose a sharp glass edge for cutting.

Works like a razor, cuts incredibly closely, and has _ooh shiny_ for marketing.

I'm not seeing a problem with this.</comment>


Bill Joy: Why the future doesn't need us (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html

<comment><USER2> Here's the problem with the "Let's just agree not to do this research!" plan that everyone seems to suggest when they start thinking about existential risks: when we're sitting around in 2030 with a million times more computing power at our fingertips than we have today, constructing a workable AI just isn't going to be that difficult of an engineering problem. We already know the equations that we'd need to use do general intelligence, it's just that they're not computable with finite computer power, so we'd have to do some approximations, and at present it's not realistic because the approximation schemes we know of would work too slowly. Pump up our computer power a million times and these schemes start to become a lot more realistic, especially with some halfway decent pruning heuristics.

It's bad enough that (IMO) by 2040 or so, any reasonably smart asshole in his basement could probably do it on his laptop with access to only the reference materials available _today_ ; I have no idea how you avoid that risk by making some political agreement. Hell, ban the research altogether on pain of death, and there's still going to be some terrorist team working on it somewhere (and that's even if all the governments actually stop work on it, which they won't).

The only positive way out of this is to go to great pains to figure out how to design safe (friendly) AI, and to do so while it's still too difficult for random-dude-with-a-botnet to achieve (and preferably we should do it before the governments of the world see it as feasible enough to throw military research dollars at). We need to tackle the problem while it's still a difficult software problem, not a brute-force one that can be cracked by better hardware.

<comment><USER3> "We already know the equations that we'd need to use do general intelligence"

Not only am I pretty sure we don't know how to build a general intelligence I'm pretty sure that nobody really knows what kind of approach would be most likely to succeed.

Having said that, I would love to be proved wrong on this one - so as you specifically say that the necessary techniques have already been published perhaps you could give the relevant references?

<comment><USER4> There's an algorithm developed by Marcus Hutter called AIXI, which makes provably optimal decisions. Unfortunately(?) it's also uncomputable, but computable approximations exist including a Monte Carlo variant: <http://www.vetta.org/2009/09/monte-carlo-aixi/>. As the paper notes it scales extremely well; to get better results you just throw more computing power at it.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, AIXI is the algorithm I was referring to, and Monte Carlo AIXI is the approximation.

As hugh3 mentioned in a sibling comment (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2479211>), 'making "optimal decisions" in some defined state space where the quality of various options is evaluable is a really different problem to general intelligence'. While I definitely agree with this statement to some extent (namely, a powerful MCAIXI setup is not necessarily going to display any intelligence that's remotely human, at least without a lot of other stuff going on in the system), the concerning thing is that it should almost certainly be enough to get a system reasoning about its own design, since its code _is_ a well defined state space where quality is evaluable (depending how the programmer decides to have it evaluate quality).

To end up with a dangerous runaway "AI" on our hands, we don't _need_ AI that we'd consider intelligent or useful. All it takes for a runaway is an AI that is good at improving itself, working effectively at optimizing a metric that approximates "get better at improving yourself". AIXI approximations should be plenty powerful to do this with the amount of computing power we'll have in ~20 or 30 years (at the very least, there's a big enough chance that we _really_ have to take it seriously).

This is one of the reasons Eliezer Yudkowsky is so keen on extending decision theory, so that we can get some idea what we should be actually be trying to approximate in order to have a decent shot at doing self-improvement safely.

The best way to sum up my concern is that (unboundedly) self-improving programs make up a tiny fraction of program-space that we can't quite hit with today's technology. Of that sliver of program space, there's a _much_ smaller sliver that contains "programs that won't kill us." There's another sliver that contains "programs that have useful side effects". We need to make sure that the first "AI" that we create lies in the miniscule intersection, "self improving programs that do something useful [1] and won't kill us", and that's a terrifyingly small target to shoot at, so we had better work strenuously to make sure that when once it's feasible to create any of these programs our aim is good enough to hit the safe and useful ones.

[1] We need to find self improving programs that are useful early on because we'll need to use them as our "shield" against any malicious self-improvers that will inevitably be developed later. There's a significant first-mover advantage in AI, and even a small head start would probably make it difficult or impossible for a second AI to become a global threat if the first AI didn't want to allow it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looking for a summary? Read this wiki entry: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_future_doesn%27t_need_u...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_future_doesn%27t_need_us)

<comment><USER5> Thanks! Very interesting. From the WP article:

"Martin Ford author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future [6] makes the case that the risk posed by accelerating technology may be primarily economic in nature. Ford argues that before technology reaches the point where it represents a physical existential threat, it will become possible to automate nearly all routine and repetitive jobs in the economy."

I find this, for short or medium time scales, quite likely, too. There will always be a demand for high skilled humans. Maybe even after the machines are the new bosses. But if we don't make groundbreaking progress in human learning techniques, most people will have trouble to learn these skills fast enough.

Then he writes further:

"In the absence of a major reform to the capitalist system, this could result in massive unemployment, plunging consumer spending and confidence, and an economic crisis potentially even more severe than the Great Depression. If such a crisis were to occur, subsequent technological progress would dramatically slow because there would be insufficient incentive to invest in innovation."

This sounds somewhat plausible but I don't believe it. The trend goes towards highly profitable mega corporations. Governments, and with it most people, become less powerful in economic terms. I think we can already see this effect very well. So there won't necessary be a recession. As long as the rich find ways to spend their money - like flying to Mars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Even the most trivial computer programs have lots of bugs (with VERY few exceptions [1]), and we're worrying about creating a super-brain that is actually _smarter_ than we are ourselves ?

And let's not forget the debugging, which is TWICE as hard as the coding ;-)

We may be able to simulate the hardware of the brain (using "biologic hardware"), but programming the AI software is probably greatly under- estimated....

[1] Some of the NASA software is probably as close to bug-free as we get, and check the required amount of planning, documentation and testing compared to the amount of actual code produced \- <http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html>

<comment><USER7> The human brain has much more bugs than any current piece of software.

The actual program will be small. The brain is clearly a learning agent in a task environment. The sensors and actuators are implementable, the only real question is what algorithm should process the input stimuli.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think a relative simple solution to this is written in the first paragraphs. We will more or less 'merge' our minds with computers, just to a further extent than we already do now. Nowadays a computer is merely a tool, which helps us keeping in touch with relatives, visualizing ideas, calculating stuff. but this bond will probably become much more intense in the future, where whole subroutines of our thinking will rely on artificial machines. This might only seem like a threat considering our 21st century morality - but I think this will become widely accept in the next century.

<comment><USER9> The future must be now. At least one of my subroutines of thinking already relies on an artificial machine. I call it my Google neuron; it's wired up directly to everything I don't know off the top of my head and fires whenever I feel unsure about something. Well, the latency is still a bit high, but I'm sure someone is working on that problem. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> ATTENTION: Book spoiler below!

SF author Vernor Vinge who introduced the term "singularity" tried to come up with an idea to prevent this and other "out of the kids basements" lethal threads to humanity, in his latest book Rainbow End. The "solution" in this book though, is to put all of humanity under mind control.

</comment><comment><USER10> Humanity may be doomed if it keeps innovating, but it's most certainly doomed if it stops.

<comment><USER5> I second this!</comment></comment>


Launch HN: SharpestMinds (YC W18) – Online Community for AI Devs - edouard-harris Hi HN! We're Ed and Jeremie, the founders of SharpestMinds in YC's W18 batch. We're building a free online community for ML/AI developers through which they can access job opportunities. (You can apply to join it at https://www.sharpestminds.com/members)
We're ML developers from non traditional backgrounds. Ed did a PhD in biological physics, and Jeremie studied quantum optics before dropping out of grad school to work on SharpestMinds. We started looking for ML jobs after school, thinking it shouldn't be too hard to get one. We found to our naive surprise that we fell short on a number of skills that are needed to do good work in industry. You just don't learn much devops in grad school.
As a result we decided to build something that would make it easier for ML devs to develop (and discover!) skills they might be missing, and then get their first jobs or internships. From the outset we also wanted to build a community around the process, since looking for your first job is usually a pretty lonely experience. Because we monetize directly through hiring, we can afford to create a space for discussion without ads or algorithmic distractions :)
Our typical users so far have been grad students who know ML material well, but don't yet have much, or any, practical experience. However, you don't need a degree at all (a few of our users are self-taught high school dropouts), and anyone who knows the material is welcome. In fact, that's one of the advantages of our system: we test directly for knowledge, so it doesn't matter how you got that knowledge or how long it took you to get it. One of our goals is that by the time we present you as a candidate, things that would otherwise be holes in your resumé don't matter so much, and we can make that case to companies that are hiring.
To qualify for joining, you do an online deep learning quiz (here: https://www.sharpestminds.com/members/apply), followed by a technical interview. If you pass both, we invite you aboard. It's possible to retake the quiz a month later if you don't pass it, and we'll send you tips on what to study in the meantime.
Once you join you get access to a job board with exclusive (i.e., not scraped) internship and full-time opportunities on it. We've created an application system where your profile gets customized to the job you're applying for, to maximize the odds that you'll get an interview. We also have lists of common interview questions, mentors that you can practice interviewing with, and periodic AMAs with ML hiring managers from companies like Skydio and Airbnb.
The hardest part about building this has been figuring out the best way to present our users to employers. Early on we found that hiring managers were passing on qualified people, because their eyes would glaze over from reading too many CVs. We ended up building application profiles that let our users display their most relevant personal projects prominently in their application. The interview rate has increased significantly as a result.
If our approach works for the ML/AI field, we'd like to build communities like this for other fields too.
We're looking forward to getting feedback and hearing ideas from HN! We know there are lots of ML devs / enthusiasts on here, and we'd also be very interested in hearing about your own experiences making the transition, or similar programs you might know about. We'd also be interested in hearing about what, in your experience, are the most important programming skills needed by someone with a good knowledge base but little practical experience to be a strong contributor at their first job or internship. <comment><AUTHOR> I recruit in this area and wish you all the best. One piece of advice: change your name. In my experience the sharpest minds are intellectually honest to a fault, and would rarely describe themselves that way.

<comment> edouard-harris Thanks for the feedback! We're open to a change. Let me know if you have any thoughts.

<comment><USER2> The Neural Network

<comment> edouard-harris Solid

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > However, you don't need a degree at all (a few of our users are self-taught > high school dropouts), and anyone who knows the material is welcome.

> To qualify for joining, you do an online deep learning quiz (here: > [https://www.sharpestminds.com/members/apply](https://www.sharpestminds.com/members/apply)), > followed by a technical interview.

> Once you join you get access to a job board with exclusive (i.e., not > scraped) internship and full-time opportunities on it.

These three constraints don't reconcile with each other.

Yes, new ML/AI resources like TensorFlow and MOOCs have made AI more accessible, and that having a degree is no longer required to _implement_ ML/AI. I agree it's unnecessary gatekeeping to require a degree to be able to play with ML/AI.

But what showy YouTube videos and Medium thought pieces don't teach is _implementing ML /AI in practice to solve business problems_. The stereotypical quiz + technical interview for the ability to join the service won't account for that.

When I was looking for jobs last year, 100% of the job openings for ML/AI (as opposed to Data Analyst/Data Scientist) _required_ a Masters/PhD. In that case, I can't blame them, since there is a certain amount of experience and _knowledge_ required to define problems and work up statistically sound solutions that can't be done by simply adding layers to a neural network or ensembling XGBoost models.

<comment> edouard-harris You're right, but this is the same catch-22 for getting started in any nontrivial field. How do I get experience if getting a job requires experience?

Having an MSc / PhD in the field doesn't resolve this. HR departments use grad degrees as first-pass filters, and thereby miss self-taught people who are genuinely competent.

We try to solve for this by easing people into jobs with internships and work terms first. The community is a key part of that since it supports them if they get stuck on an implementation problem. And of course we're incentivized to make sure members perform well in the internship phase, since we make money when they're hired full time.

<comment><USER4> I completely agree. Machine Learning is on the way to become a field like Web Development. There is a huge supply/demand gap that will only get wider.

<comment><USER5> With the caveat that holding a PhD is positively correlated with success in ML, and negatively correlated with success in web dev.

(I'm guessing.)

<comment> edouard-harris Having done both with varying success, I definitely agree that your brain needs to be wired differently for each.

In web dev, experimentation is cheap, so you make changes fast and see what happens. In many ML applications, trying stuff is expensive in time and/or money. So the best strategy is often to think hard about what could be going wrong, and make and test explicit hypotheses.

The difference definitely came as a surprise to me when I was making the transition.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, web dev seems to favor the bold, whereas DL or other highly brainy endeavors seem to favor the thorough / careful developer.

For a long time as a non-web dev, I reckoned that I was smarter than 99% of the web devs. Then a web-dev friend of mine made his first few million $, and I reached some humbling conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some feedback on the quiz:

\- a few of the questions were very good, and either spoke to key high level concepts, or were specific while being language agnostic. (e.g which one of these layers wouldn't you need, why wouldn't this type of classifier work on this data).

\- too many of the questions were hyper-focused on the minutiae of word embeddings, tensor flow syntax, SQL queries, and recommender schemes.

\- many of the questions were constructed vaguely enough that "I don't know" would be the technically correct answer even though I don't think that was what you were going for.

metadata: recent PhD with serious grad courses in ML and working in DL/CV for the past year using a non-tensorflow framework (PyTorch).

<comment> edouard-harris This is great feedback. Thanks!

We're constantly iterating on the quiz and it would be great to get more detailed thoughts on it.

If you'd like to do that, please get in touch! (Email in my profile)

<comment><USER6> would be happy to, but I don't see your email there -- mine's in my profile (I think!) if you'd like to get in touch

<comment> edouard-harris Sorry, realized it wasn't public. Just updated, should be there now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First thing my sharp mind noticed is that the page sends data to connect.facebook.net

Why does Facebook have to know what I am doing jobwise?

<comment> edouard-harris Good catch, this is a leftover facebook pixel from back when we were experimenting with FB ads. Just created a GitHub issue to rip it out

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why not create a tiered community. Beginner. Learning. Expert.

Beginner - Anyone with an interest similar HN. Maybe resource to get into the Learning Area.

Learning - Place to find others learning the material. Maybe find other people study with. or collaborate/reproduce projects.

Experts - people actively looking for employment(what you already have planned).

<comment> edouard-harris Great idea! We're actually in the process of doing this. Pilot version is 1 week away.

We're starting with 2 tiers instead of 3, but the goal is similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not to sound rude or anything, but the name is kinda douchey and outputting.

<comment> edouard-harris Fair enough. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER9> Not a clue, I'm bad at names lol. Sharp Minds would probably be fine, just Sharpest Minds makes it sound like you're talking down to anyone who isn't involved in AI (which is like 99.99999999% of people).

Or if it was a clever reference to something in AI that made you sound smart but because it was a clever reference comes off more funny than rude.

<comment><USER10> I actually took it as people who were _building_ the sharpest minds, not necessarily those who had them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A couple bits of feedback:

1\. At least in the title of this post it is called an "Online Community" but it really feels like a job board. Is it really a community at all? I expect to feel disappointed.

2\. Wait... is it a job board, or an internship matching system?

3\. I got about 5 duplicate questions.

4\. The timed questions with a big code block and multiple choice were stressful, in that there was some dense code to read and I couldn't decide whether to understand the code first or read the questions first.

5\. It wasn't clear to me that the timer was actually a limit, and not just a suggestion (i.e., something to pace yourself to do all the questions in the time limit)

6\. The SQL questions felt like very normal SQL questions. They seemed easy enough (assuming I got them right!) simply given past experience with database driven websites.

<comment> edouard-harris Thanks for the feedback here. Much appreciated.

1 & 2\. It's.. both. From the inside it feels like Slack + job board + GitHub- like profiles

3\. Investigating this issue now, thanks for flagging

4-6. Noted, we'll keep updating the UI & question bank. Knowing this about how the timer feels is especially useful

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Advice: Hold kaggle like contests -- ML/AI developers/enthusiasts come flocking to these. When you are at it, please don't make it suck like Kaggle.

<comment><USER13> What don't you like about Kaggle?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have been out of college and working fulltime in software for two years. I have been spending a large amount of my free time learning DL through fastai. I really want to move to a job that involves deep learning, and I would like to use your system, but I don't feel like I can responsibly switch to part time or internship work given the stability and pay of my current job. Do you have any option for people who want to go direct to fulltime?

<comment> edouard-harris Yes.

You can either (1) keep going with your current job and do this on the side assuming your employment contract allows it, or (2) apply to a company that wants to do full time right away without a work term.

There may be other options depending on your situation, so email me if you want to discuss further. Email address in my profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had made a job board for machine learning jobs as well [https://mljobslist.com/](https://mljobslist.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the idea! Very much actually. It's a real problem - the discrepancy between actual skills and how your CV looks.

In that it reminded me of the way that Basecamp hires - which is that in the "final rounds" they actually hire the candidates to do some small project that is actually needed at Basecamp - just another way of getting at the bottom of what a person can actually do rather than how they look on paper.

<comment> edouard-harris You're right, this approach grew out of how we hire people ourselves. Give them a chance to prove themselves on a real project.

Wasn't aware that Basecamp did this too. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I may have misread this, but would OP agree that ML/AI is not composed of just DL. Currently, the quiz is perhaps too focused.

<comment> edouard-harris Would agree.

Yep, quiz might still be a bit too focused. Trying to strike a balance between breadth / depth / time spent answering questions, but still some fine tuning to do

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >Submit a deep learning project. If your application isn't accepted at this stage, we'll tell you why.

Why only 'Deep Learning'? When you call yourself an 'Online Community for AI Devs', you need to consider projects from any domain in AI.

Deep Learning is just a sub-part of ML, to be precise, neural nets.

Please stop throwing keywords

</comment><comment><USER18> Very interested in this, however I would prefer if it was more than just a jobs board. Something like github+reddit in addition to a jobs board would make this very cool (haven't tried it yet so this may already be the case and I am wrong!).

<comment> edouard-harris It's more like Slack + jobs board + GitHub-like profiles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> For such an exciting title, I was a bit disappointed to find another job board in here. Should I apply if I'm not looking for a job but want to participate in a professional community?

<comment> edouard-harris Yes. While we make money by placing people, most of the day-to-day activity involves sharing papers, open source collaboration, etc. (plus job-related things like sharing interview tips)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm sure I am making an incorrect inference, but I'm probably not alone. Average work term payment = $5K, average work term = 8 weeks = Below minimum wage.

<comment> edouard-harris Thanks for flagging! Embarrassingly I reread this stat and realized that (1) it's way out of date and the true number is higher, and (2) it refers to part- time work (20 hrs / week) but we don't actually say that anywhere.

We've never had a work term work out to less than $25 / hour, except possibly in geographies like India where cost of living in USD is very low. This is below market, but it's only for the work term before getting hired.

Will update this with the most recent stats and clarify part-time status. Thanks again for catching this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is great. Is it US only or available in India too?

<comment> edouard-harris Available in India. We already have several users from there.

<comment><USER21> Awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This website doesn't work on my computer.

<comment> edouard-harris Thanks for flagging. Do you mind sharing your OS / browser versions?

<comment><USER22> Ubuntu / Firefox

My Firefox doesn't run JS though, so there's that.

<comment><USER23> Mine isn't working either. I also use Ubuntu / Firefox and also the computer isn't plugged in, so there's that.

<comment><USER22> I recommend you plug it in then. Common mistake.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: NQueens problem solved using backtracking in Elixir lang - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tacticiankerala/N-Queens

<comment><USER2> It would be interesting to see timing results of this implementation. Similarly, comparisons to other implementations/algorithms. I will have to fire up erlang when I get home this evening.

I am basically a broken record on this topic, but I do like sending more people to see the Dancing Links algorithms solving this (and other related problems, such as sudoku.)[1] The techniques in DLX cut the search space for the 8-queens down to just 1,048 board states. (For 13, the number of boards is up to 1,046,318)

[1] [http://taeric.github.io/DancingLinks.html](http://taeric.github.io/DancingLinks.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> 8-queens : 0.19s user 0.09s system 127% cpu 0.222 total

12-queens : 0.21s user 0.11s system 129% cpu 0.244 total

16-queens : 0.29s user 0.10s system 119% cpu 0.325 total

20-queens : 2.79s user 0.10s system 102% cpu 2.826 total

24-queens : 7.50s user 0.10s system 100% cpu 7.533 total

Thanks a lot for sharing the Dancing links algorithm. It looks really interesting. I wanted to try sudoku with backtracking,but now I would like to give dancing link a try!

<comment><USER2> Are those times for finding a solution, or for all solutions? If all, that is truly impressive!

Dancing links is a backtracking algorithm, just a nice way to optimize the backtracking.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is for finding the first solution. Sorry that I didn't mention it.

<comment><USER2> No worries. I could have guessed, if I'd paid attention to how large of an N you looked at. :)

Also, I should explicitly say thanks for sharing! It is fun reading solutions to this puzzle. Also fun to read Erlang.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A solution for doing the same thing in Ruby: [https://gist.github.com/hugodias/cf89ba138b986ddb3e7d](https://gist.github.com/hugodias/cf89ba138b986ddb3e7d)

Time spent processing for 12 queens: 3.59 seconds

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is the benchmarking for 12-queens

12-queens : 0.21s user 0.11s system 129% cpu 0.244 total

But, I see that you are finding all the solution. My program only finds the first solution.</comment></comment>


US life expectancy continues to move in reverse - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/another-year-another-decrease-in-life-expectancy-in-the-us/ <comment><USER2> With relationships/friendships/communication getting more and more digital, people are getting lonelier. Loneliness leads to all sort of health problems.</comment>