The Management Fix That Made Firefox Faster - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/heres-how-firefox-workers-were-motivated-to-squash-bugs-1503399604 <comment><USER2> I'd be surprised if this is true.

I suspect the truth is programmers were not allowed to focus on speed by _management_ and now those same people are claiming their "fix" is what changed the programmer focus, rather than admitting their own short- sightedness and poor product management.

I love fixing performance issues, finding the refactoring and satisfaction from doing it very rewarding. I assume there are plenty of other programmers that do too.

But it's expensive work which doesn't deliver any functionality and can break things.

I'd be interested to know if you (as a programmer) think I'm wrong. Do other programmers actually hate fixing performance problems?

<comment><USER3> There are two types of performance problems.

The first type is where performance drops 40% from one commit/merge/feature/bug fix.

The second type is where performance drops 0.1% a time over 400 commits/merges/features/bug fix.

For the first type, the person who caused the performance drop can just be told to fix it; the solution will almost certainly be a change to code they own. The incentives basically line up. No complex management required!

But for the second type? Nobody would reject a fix for a buffer overflow because bounds checking slowed the code down a little. Fixing such problems might need hundreds of optimisations in different places - or offsetting slowdowns in some areas with speedups in others. Coordinating this sort of thing is what management is supposed to be there for.

<comment><USER2> There are a lot more types than that in my experience (I've added examples at the end), but perhaps we work in different fields. I don't work on windows apps like FF, I work on web apps.

Also, it can happen over a bunch of commits and not be one person's fault. An example might be a terribly performing DB query written by Barry but it's only used in an admin interface used once a year, then Sarah checks in a change 2 years later than happens to use the functionality regularly, but it's used every day, by every user.

Additionally, Web apps are very different in a lot of ways as you have one app serving 10, then 100, then 1,000, then 10,000, etc. etc. The performance problems appear from nowhere.

Another example of people deferring performance problems was a system I worked with that processed data, it was non-time critical and poorly written, but was fine when the company had 20 clients as they'd just set it and forget it, that was perfectly acceptable, it wasn't worth fixing. When they got to 100 clients 3 years later, they literally ran out of time in the day.

This is a regular cause of performance problems, terribly written SQL for reports that 5 years ago ran in 10 seconds, annoying but acceptable, but are now taking 2 hours to run.

Here are some examples of other types performance problems:

Problems of scale. The problem only appears when you have X number of orders or on-screen widgets, or when there are more than 200,000 users or whatever. Big O problems. This can be missed because your local db has 1,000 orders and your live one has 1,000,000 (which is a problem in itself, but one I have seen almost everywhere I've worked).

Race conditions. Everything's fine in a test environment, processing 20 orders a minute. When minutes turn into seconds, race conditions occur.

Strange configuration interactions. Problem only appears when you have feature X turned on, with feature Y disabled and feature Z set to option A.

Latency. When the DB/App latency is 0.1ms, the app is good, when it's 3ms, certain pages take >500ms because of hundreds of DB calls.

Bad Indexes/Query Plans/etc/. Problem only appears after your indexes gradually fragment or because the query plan was built when there were 20 things in the DB, and now there are 20 million.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So the management "fix" is, "hey everybody, let's focus on bugs, that make us slower compared to chrome!"

... I expected a bit more, to be honest

</comment><comment><USER5> Non-paywall link: [http://www.cetusnews.com/life/The-Management-Fix-That- Made-F...](http://www.cetusnews.com/life/The-Management-Fix-That-Made-Firefox- Faster.BJ31CCJvoFOW.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Speed is the feature that makes me go back to chrome every single time I give Firefox another chance.

I hope they one day fix the issues with performance degradation related to profiles. I should not have to reset everything twice a month to keep the same responsiveness.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yet another pay-walled posting on HN...

<comment><USER8> The article lacks any content, so in this case that's feature.</comment></comment>


Google's 'Advanced Protection' Locks Down Accounts Like Never Before - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/google-advanced-protection-locks-down-accounts <comment><USER2> "Most public of those was the Kremlin-backed intrusion that hit the Gmail account of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta"

friendly reminder there is no proof for this claim, Podesta either fell for a generic phishing page(Reset your gmail password here!), or from his known passwords (password and runner<some number>) someone could have easily just guessed his password.

<comment><USER3> There's actually quite a lot of evidence that it was a politically motivated spear phishing campaign from FancyBears, which is most likely from Russia. So technically yes there's no definitive, smoking gun proof but "no proof for this claim" seems to be a bit dismissive of some glaring hints. It certainly wasn't just a "generic phishing page" or guessing of a weak password.

They went after quite a few politicians on both sides of the aisle and journalist's, the Podesta camp just happened to be the ones who fell for it.

[https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat- group-4127-targe...](https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat- group-4127-targets-hillary-clinton-presidential-campaign)

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/10/russi...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/10/russia-linked-phishing-campaign-behind-the-dnc-breach-also- hit-podesta-powell/)

<comment><USER4> Just to add to this, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear) has links to multiple security companies which have publicly drawn the link to the Russian government.

The list of targets is also convincing: various NATO organizations but also things like the World Anti Doping Agency at the time the Russian Olympic team was being disqualified from everything. You could argue that, say, China might be interested in hacking the US or France but Eastern Europe and WADA really aren't of interest to most other major powers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad they're doing this--but I'd also like to see a little granularity.

If I'm a big-wig politician, I'd want it as-is, but as a normal techie, I'd like support in the native iOS apps and the ability to connect apps. However, I'd still like the strict (days-long) account recovery / verification process.

<comment><USER6> I agree with the utility of the granularity. On the implementation side, it adds a lot of complexity.

1) Every granularity feature adds a set of possible state interactions and widens the attack surface.

2) Every granularity feature is an opportunity for a user to accidentally misconfigure their settings and expose themselves to more risk than they believe they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My suggestion for "normal" users.

Create a new "Advanced Protection"account.

Use this new account only for: * password recovery * backup account * banking credentials (maybe?)

This backup account can then be used to protect against any password recovery attack against any other site that you rely on.

Your normal day to day email can stay with the regular security.

<comment><USER8> The less often you use this account, the more likely you are to lose the keys.

<comment><USER7> I write them down. A note with a mysterious sequence of letters is not generally a theft target.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Caveat. If you post anything subversive or controversial, they will just punt your account. All a hacker has to do is present some evidence to any of this, and your account is gone...

<comment><USER10> That may be the case with their free accounts or money earning YouTube accounts, but that is not the case for subscription based GSuite business accounts. The GSuite accounts are set up so that an offending user is a sub- account of the parent GSuite account. They will ask the parent account owner to suspend the user's account and take measures to fix the violations, but they wont unilaterally suspend the parent account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What does this mean for IMAPS w/application specific passwords?

It's a really sad statement to say outloud, but if turning this on means my emacs mail client I've been using for ... years doesn't work anymore, I just can't do it.

<comment><USER12> You're correct:

> For secure access, you will need to use the Gmail app or Inbox by Gmail.

<comment><USER11> The end is nigh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It may be harder to "recover your password", if you lost your second factor key, but the fact that it still is possible means Google employees (or a fraction of them) have a way into your account. I prefer services where this isn't possible, even though that means the account is lost if I forget my password.

<comment><USER14> That doesn't mean an employee has access to your account. If you lose your USB dongle, you'll need to prove your ownership of your account, but that doesn't mean G employees will go in and look at your emails.

<comment><USER15> > that doesn't mean G employees will go in and look at your emails

There are two forms of this assurance.

The first is running into some guy at a party, or on an internet message board, who either works at Google or "knows a guy" who does, who then spends thirty or forty minutes semi-drunkenly rambling at you about how the security at Google is "military grade" and everything is "locked down" and they have some guy who used to run the Mossad in charge of internal security and he's the best guy ever and nothing or no one ever breaks in and that shit's a fortress. Trust the semi drunken ramblings of this guy you just met, your secrets are safe with the big G.

The second form of this assurance is only giving the third party indistinguishable encrypted blobs of data. They can look at them all they want, it doesn't mean anything to them. You don't need to trust anyone, let alone some guy you found on the Internet and transitively a few hundred anonymous computer programmer and IT janitors spread across the world.

Go figure, some people are more persuaded by the second argument. Even if you're reading this and you work at G and you know that the ex-Mossad security guys are digitally looking over your shoulder and you shake your fist at this screen muttering "you don't know how much we have it locked down here, clueless Hacker News commentator" you have to realize, somewhere in your heart of hearts, that a zero trust solution is preferable when you are trying to maximize for security.

<comment><USER16> > _you have to realize, somewhere in your heart of hearts, that a zero trust > solution is preferable when you are trying to maximize for security._

There's no such thing as zero trust for email unless you're going to run your own server (even then it's iffy because of communication with other untrusted servers).

By using a mail service, you have to trust the people running the service. Even if they pinky promise to immediately encrypt every message with your public key a never never never look at it, you cannot know that they aren't secretly redirecting a copy to the NSA and publishing another copy on the novelty Twitter account @muninmails.

<comment><USER15> This is also true. I think the particular threat I was replying to was "can employees, on a whim, go into stored e-mail and view it?" You're right that there's another possibility, which is that on a whim the employees will engineer a system such that they can view all the plaintext that flows into and out of your inbox.

There are maybe a few things that could be done to reduce your trust in "Honest Munin's Very Secure E-Mail Hosting and Used Cars", like, I could publish the code to the server and run it in SGX, allowing anyone in the world to use SGX attestation to verify* that the code running in SGX is the code that I publish, and that code could only initiate encrypted network connections with other mail servers. So even if I ran that in good faith and sat outside the SGX container listening to the network traffic, I'd still be getting a face-full of encrypted data.

This is still a "verify*" because maybe something is funky with SGX. You're not really trusting me now though, you're trusting Intel and the SGX TCB. Maybe that's worse? I don't know. I still think that's an improved proposition over trusting the honesty of system administrators to not grep your INBOX on a whim, though.

edit: I guess this also kind of breaks down because the story for TLS in SMTP land is kind of dire, so you could probably actively MITM the communication between the SGX blob and the outside and there's no practical way for anyone to know that this is going on. Maybe someone will fix that someday! Probably not though!

<comment><USER16> Employees looking on a whim is generally solved by encryption at rest with shared keys. You don't need a unique key per user. You just need to make it really hard for the employee to get the key. Key per user doesn't gain much except difficulty indexing for search. (I have no idea if Google encrypts email at rest, by the way.)

As for SGX, it doesn't really solve for this problem. It would allow _Google_ to verify what software is running, but with a Google-controlled network in between the server in question and the user, I'm fairly certain any assurances SGX could yield are gone. Google could publish their code publicly, allow users to request attestation, but send attestation requests to server A running the public code while serving the user's email on server B running NSA-modified snooping code. And of course your email isn't actually sitting on a single machine anyway. It's probably stored redundantly on 3+ backend machines and served by any of thousands of front end machines. Verifying each of these would be infeasible even if technically possible. (I'm not very familiar with SGX, though, so maybe there's some magic I'm missing here.)

Also attestation is for binaries. I doubt you could actually verify a source match.

<comment><USER15> > I'm not very familiar with SGX, though, so maybe there's some magic I'm > missing here.

There is magic you are missing. I don't want to be the person that glibly says "you should read more about this" and then vanishes, but because I don't have time to write out what the magic is, that's exactly what I'm going to do :(

The magic does allow users to verify that the software they're talking to is what it says. Specifically, it also allows users to set up an encrypted channel with the processor that is running the software that is attested, so you exactly can't do the attack you propose of shuttling attestation to one system and actual data to another.

The technology is pretty cool, you should check it out!

<comment><USER16> I don't want to glibly dismiss your comment either, but I fail to see how this helps users at all. From what I can tell, you're correct that the SGX connection can be structured such that attestation cannot be spoofed by sending the data request to a different service (assuming you trust Intel), but that doesn't really help end users.

1\. Intel does not bill the technology for this purpose, which makes me doubt its fitness. SGX is very specifically billed as being for developers who want to run secure software in an untrusted environment, not for end users who don't trust the developers. These are wildly different scenarios.

2\. The "encrypted channel with the processor" implies direct access to individual machines, which is impractical at Google scale.

3\. The attestation is for binaries and not source, so attesting that the binaries are unchanged doesn't help users verify that the binaries match the trusted source. (Of course Google also doesn't publish the GMail source anyway.)

<comment><USER17> Signal actually just wrote up a very detailed post about how they're using SGX to provide verification that the computer you're sending your data to is running a specific algorithm: [https://signal.org/blog/private-contact- discovery/](https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/)

<comment><USER16> That's pretty cool, and a good write-up, too. Thanks for the link.

Obviously still doesn't help for the GMail case unless Google starts publishing their code, and they pretty much give up on email search, and somehow the whole chain of email cross-provider lands in these enclaves, but it's very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _All non-Google services and apps will be exiled from reaching into your > Gmail or Google Drive._

Does this mean I can no longer use Google's OAuth service for logging in to, say, Bitbucket? Or just that they are locking down the information such apps can access?

<comment><USER19> I just enabled it on my account, and I can still log into GitLab and other OAuth accounts. I presume it just means they can't access Gmail, Drive, or the other listed products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> One question I have that the article didn't answer, can you set up multiple physical keys? Can I create a backup and store it in a bank safety deposit box? I believe the current Fido process let's you do so, but does the new advanced version?

<comment><USER21> From earlier discussion, if I recall correctly, you'd have the option of creating a set of one-time passwords as well.

Details remain somewhat vague as to having multiple credentials, or managed accounts (though the corporate service -- Google Domains or whatever it's called, should allow an administrator some options).

<comment><USER20> I know the current 2-factor auth allows backup one time passwords, but it specifically says in the article that the advanced protection does not allow the one time passwords. I was just curious if the advanced protection also limited the number of hardware tokens you could have.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for that, and good question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How do the Google iOS apps handle authentication, since NFC security keys aren't supported by Apple?

<comment><USER23> NFC keys are now a possible reality since iOS 11 API opened up the hardware to developers.

Here's an example: [https://github.com/hansemannn/iOS11-NFC- Example](https://github.com/hansemannn/iOS11-NFC-Example)

<comment><USER24> For the record, it's only possible to READ tags using iOS 11.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-dub i suppose the missing piece would be to tie it to a specific chromebook to avoid issues with pwnage of the endpoint. they say they require chrome, i wonder if it would be possible to steal the session cookies and run a second session on the same host? (maybe they fingerprint the browser or use some other scheme to ensure that they only talk to the authenticated browser process?) i suppose even if that was the case, if the endpoint was pwned the browser could be modified to make requests in the background on behalf of the pwners.

almost kinda surprising they didn't tie it to special chromebooks that they could sell. not only would it actually mitigate a big problem, i could totally see it also being some kind of a "i'm an important person" status symbol that people would brandish in public. if they gave it a distinct look it would be like a newfangled blackberry or zero halliburton for whatever you call this weird decade.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm going to take the plunge into using security keys.

What are the recommended bluetooth and USB-based keys I should be buying?

<comment><USER12> Why to use security keys: [http://fc16.ifca.ai/preproceedings/25_Lang.pdf](http://fc16.ifca.ai/preproceedings/25_Lang.pdf) (updated from my earlier link to the yubico article _about_ that paper: [https://www.yubico.com/2016/02/use-of-fido-u2f-security- keys...](https://www.yubico.com/2016/02/use-of-fido-u2f-security-keys-focus- of-2-year-google-study/) )

Review of security keys by Adam Langley:

[https://www.imperialviolet.org/2017/08/13/securitykeys.html](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2017/08/13/securitykeys.html)

and testing security keys:

[https://www.imperialviolet.org/2017/10/08/securitykeytest.ht...](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2017/10/08/securitykeytest.html)

tl;dr: Yubikeys are $$ but really solid for USB and NFC; the Feitian is probably the best option for Bluetooth but YMMV there. Those are what I personally use.

(Note that Yubico recently announced a problem with their RSA key generation, which they're fixing, but that bug does not affect the security of the device when used as a FIDO authenticator as it is for Google/Github/Dropbox/Vanguard/etc.)

<comment><USER26> According to Yubico, the RSA vulnerability only affects the YubiKey 4 and "all YubiKey 4 products shipped by Yubico after June 6, 2017 (version 4.3.5 or higher) use" a new implementation that is secure from this.

[https://www.yubico.com/support/security- advisories/ysa-2017-...](https://www.yubico.com/support/security- advisories/ysa-2017-01/)

<comment><USER27> FIDO U2F does not use RSA anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> (OT but related to security and Google) I used the existing link at the bottom of my gmail page to sign out all other sessions. The next day I went to another device and saw that it was still signed in.

</comment><comment><USER29> So how would someone back up their email using this system?

</comment><comment><USER30> Anyone else read the title as "Google Locks Down Accounts", as in: Google closes accounts without any chance of remedy?

<comment><USER31> That would be 'Locks out' instead of 'locks down'

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wouldn't users who sign up for this also de facto flag their accounts for NSA operatives embedded within Google?

</comment><comment><USER33> Does this mean they've eliminated that vulnerability where no matter what 2FA option you chose, someone could always get into your account by tricking Verizon or some other carrier that they are the owner of the phone number?

I never understood the _point_ of offering additional so-called "stronger" 2FA options when the mandatory fallback was always the SMS code. Why even bother? Services should at least give users the _option_ to disable SMS fallback. But really they need to start thinking about a SMS-less 2FA future. Even NIST has deprecated SMS 2FA.

<comment><USER34> is that even an issue to begin with? afaik you need a phone to enable 2fa, but you can remove it after adding another token.

<comment><USER26> Exactly. Google has always (at least since 2012) provided the option to remove any and all phone numbers from your account after enabling 2FA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > And if you forget your password, or lose your hardware login keys, you'll > have to jump through more hoops than ever to regain access ...

'Advanced Protection'?

In any case, if passwords can be reset and if USB keys can be changed, there is always a flaw... No matter what Google say.

<comment><USER26> Don't know why this is being downvoted. If humans at Google can help recover the account, then it is potentially susceptible to social engineering. There's no way around that.

<comment><USER16> Because most people don't consider ability to recover to be a "flaw". The idea that Google is fucking up by not permanently locking someone out is absurd. There is no technical way for Google to even implement this. Someone at Google with sufficient access could always go poke the DB directly to change a locked-out user's password hash and replace whatever hypothetical keys are in play. The most Google could do would be to force a purge/loss of any current user data encrypted at rest. This would of course not prevent a successful attacker from sending or receiving new emails.

<comment><USER36> I think that is the point, a Googler who is moonlighting for spooks in any country can spy on their behalf. In other words, people are cautiously pointing out it is not "only someone with the key" who can gain access to your emails.

<comment><USER16> I get that, but an account "reset" is always possible. Even if Google encrypted all of your mail and other content with a key you exclusively control, it would always be possible to simply drop the encrypted data, update all keys/passwords, and regain access to any incoming email. This is a smaller attack surface but still significant.

It's also not actually possible to be an email provider and have no access to read plaintext and the point of send and receive. It can be encrypted at rest but you have to allow read for transmit which means a Googler working for the "spooks" could simply intercept there instead of at rest.

<comment><USER20> Well, you should be able to encrypt the subject/body of the email without encrypting the headers, so the mail vendor never sees the content of the email, only the to/from addresses and such. But that encryption has to happen in the browser/application. ie Mailvelope plugin for Chrome and others like it. and I think there is an android mail client that will also do pgp/gpg encryption/decryption.

<comment><USER16> Sure. You could absolutely have an entirely different protocol that doesn't work with all the existing email clients/services out there. It's certainly been done multiple times. Obviously it's not caught on, though, because compatibility is sort of a big deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Locks down your Gmail from everyone except the companies that pay Google for the information gleaned from AI reading your emails.

<comment><USER38> Which is the well-understood cost of getting an otherwise free, highly performant, unusually secure service for free.

<comment><USER26> I've always wondered why they don't offer the option for personal (gmail.com) users to pay for the service and opt out of monetization. I'd pay $5-10 per month for Google's services without me being the product.

<comment><USER39> > I'd pay $5-10 per month for Google's services without me being the product.

That's actually not much different than paying for a domain and G Suite Basic.

Which is probably what they expect people that concerned will do.

<comment><USER26> That's a good point. But currently there is no option to use my gmail.com address with G Suite, which I'd like to keep because of old accounts. I host my domain name email addresses with ProtonMail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Kremlin-backed intrusion that hit the Gmail account of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta"

It's quite obvious to many that it was the Russians, even in the absence of formal proof. Why do we have to keep seeing this assertion, especially when the CIA had a team making malware that emulated or included ostensibly Russian code. No one was trying to frame the Russians; it was just to save time.

[https://theintercept.com/2017/03/08/wikileaks-files-show- the...](https://theintercept.com/2017/03/08/wikileaks-files-show-the-cia- repurposing-foreign-hacking-code-to-save-time-not-to-frame-russia/)

<comment><USER41> Ah yes, a hacker organization which does things like create Android malware to disable Ukrainian artillery and attempts to interfere with American elections is probably not a Russian front. Come on.

Dell SecureWorks and the CIA have presented plenty of evidence that this was a Russian-backed group, probably GRU.

EDIT: Also, even if there aren't lines in their malware which say "(c) GRU 2017", Fancy Bear is a group which consistently targets enemies of the Russian government. They don't steal credit card numbers, they commit digital terrorism that furthers Russia's interests. It doesn't really matter if they're 100% state-backed or not, because they _clearly and consistently_ act in the Russian government's interests. An organization which hacks targets that benefit Russia and a Russian gov't hacking organization are the same thing from the perspective of the United States.

<comment><USER42> It'd be kind of weird if they were state backed given that they run websites with their own name and use cheap Anonymous slogans:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37374053/what-we- know-...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37374053/what-we-know-about- fancy-bears-hack-team)

Russian - would make a lot of sense. Run by the government? Seems more like the sort of approach I'd expect from a bunch of kids who got bored of spamming/malware and got political. Phishing isn't really an advanced technique by intelligence agency standards.</comment></comment></comment>


How a preventable disaster killed six marines - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/marines-hornet-squadron-242-crash-pacific-resilard <comment><USER2> Military family here. My step-brother flies F/A-18's in the Navy (not exactly the same spec as Marine Hornets but shares many parts), so that's extra concerning. This is sad and understandable based on how the MIC works. Tens of trillions spent on crap; and chickenshit CO's blame the victims (soldiers) and coverup incompetence and gross negligence rather than exhibiting leadership, taking responsibility and learning lessons. Don't join up because your life isn't worth a damn to pig generals, politicians and corporate schmucks.

PS: A roommate of mine in college was a Marine Herc Navigator MOS, for KC-130 and C-130. They would frequently get on the plane drunk from the night before but be expected to function. Squad meetings? At the bar, with mandatory alcohol. He bemoaned the V-22 Osprey as an overpriced death-trap, which it definitely was, in the beginning. I think many military cultures needs to strongly encourage less binge alcoholic consumption for operational effectiveness and because more personnel end up alcoholic, like my grandfather, for one (who was a paratrooper and later an AP (MP)).

<comment><USER3> Yeah my experience in the Marines resonates with this a lot. So many training meetings about how drinking and driving was bad, followed by a meetup at the bar. Even during the presentations the officers in charge would joke about it. None of it was ever taken seriously. The best example of double-talk I have in real life. Way they would talk about "partying in Okinawa" was always creepy when you consider the Marines' history there.

Not blaming anyone specifically of course. I feel for anyone who feels like they need to drink to get through their days. Just think it's also a good example of CO's talking big but meaning nothing, and that attitude trickles all the way down the chain.

<comment><USER4> And your problem is here ?

If the meeting attendees where not driving after the meeting, I don't see the problem with social drinking and bonding.

<comment><USER5> Well, the original post said they were _flying aircraft_ while still impaired afterwards ...

<comment><USER4> Well it was more the mandated PowerPoint presentation they had to sit through.

Anyone who's worked for a big corporation will know what I mean. "what the anti brbary course dint we do that 6 weeks ago "

<comment><USER6> Isn't the difference that most people are unlikely to be in any position where they can be bribed whereas in the military a lot more people use heavy equipment (for want of a better word)?

<comment><USER4> Its the same sort of repeat the same tick the box training - and woe betide you if you don't do it properly.

[https://www.duffelblog.com/2017/12/soldiers-accidentally- sum...](https://www.duffelblog.com/2017/12/soldiers-accidentally-summon- cthulhu-after-commander-forgets-to-give-safety-brief/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Devastating story, thank goodness for ProPublica bringing this to light.

I served on the ground side and never experienced this level of incompetence. (There was plenty of other fun stuff...) But maybe the shear fact that Marine Officers are on the front line with the enlisted, curbs dangerous behavior. The Air Wing in the Marine Corps is it's own branch. Marine Air Wing commanders are constantly being relieved, and usually make the cover of the Marine Corp times.

My thoughts and payers go out to the families.

Semper Fi

Retired CWO2

</comment><comment><USER8> I was air-crew on a C-130 platform, I got to take part in a night aerail refueling once.

It's truly an awesome sight. The aircraft are so big, and so close together. The tanker has colored lights all over it, I expect to help guide the following plane.

Through the windshield, it looks larger than life and a little surreal.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not really into military doctrine, but why not just leave all the flying stuff to the Air Force or maybe specialized parts of the Navy? When you look up US air units/forces, there is a bunch of stuff left to the national guards, marines etc. and flying is obviously something to be taken seriously. And it looks like they are more likely to screw it up or take it less seriously.

<comment><USER3> The various forces do different things in the air. I'm not super knowledgeable about this, so someone might have more details.

Air Force is general flight missions. They tend towards support and recon.

Navy is focused on carrier support and sea missions.

Marines are focused on CAS and both land and sea missions. Lot of helicopters as well.

So each branch takes different responsibilities. I don't think this is an issue of Marines not being good enough to fly, as there are very talented Marine pilots around the world. Instead, these Marines weren't being given the resources and training they needed, and were being ignored by the higher chain. The argument that Marines don't take things as seriously is a little ridiculous.

<comment><USER10> You should look up the MAGTF concept. Pilots are pilots and they are all very well trained. The Marines generally deploy in a fully functional unit that has a ground element, support element, and air element. There are different sizes of MAGTFs that can support various levels of operations anywhere in the world. One of the many advantages of the MAGTF is that everyone is speaking the same "language" and using the same playbook making communication a lot easier.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for reminding me of this weird word hah. Been a while since I've heard about MAGTF

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Donate to ProPublica!

</comment><comment><USER12> No one has yet mentioned "Lying to Ourselves," so I will. It's a great essay on this topic.

<comment><USER13> > Lying to Ourselves[: Dishonesty in the Army Profession]

A post[1] and working link[2]. The two HN submissions got no traction.

[1] [https://warontherocks.com/2015/03/lying-to-ourselves-the- dem...](https://warontherocks.com/2015/03/lying-to-ourselves-the-demise-of- military-integrity/) [2] [https://apps.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA615274](https://apps.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA615274)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hierarchical organizations have many flaws, yet humans continue to largely support them. Why?

I think the question "why there are social hierarchies" is the biggest open problem in social sciences. There are many plausible explanations, but no clear winner.

<comment><USER15> Because with a lack of explicitly hierarchy, an implicit hierarchy is created. I'm not sure of any social system that doesn't include some form of hierarchy, but am very inclined to read an opinion.

<comment><USER14> You can have democratic decision-making, which isn't hierarchical and yet is explicit about the distribution of power.

So while it's true that holacracies can quickly turn into hierarchies rather than democracies, it's still doesn't explain why hierarchies are preferred by humans over democracies, while the latter is obviously more acceptable on the state level.

<comment><USER16> > So while it's true that holacracies can quickly turn into hierarchies rather > than democracies, it's still doesn't explain why hierarchies are preferred > by humans over democracies, while the latter is obviously more acceptable on > the state level.

Democracy on the state level mostly refers to bureaucratic heirarchy where the leaders are (sometimes indirectly) accountable to the electorate; heirarchy and democracy coexist rather than being mutually exclusive. Heirarchy dominates state-level organization with or without democracy, just like it does virtually all other human enterprises.

Democracy, on the state level, seems to be more reliant on formal reservation and delineation of powers and well-institutionalized means of enforcing those formalities than non-democratic heirarchy, which is perhaps why holacracy becomes informal non-democratic heirarchy rather than something democratic.

<comment><USER14> > heirarchy and democracy coexist rather than being mutually exclusive

Exactly, that is my point, in the army they are exclusive though. The people lower in the hierarchy have little say in whether they trust the people upper in the hierarchy.

> Heirarchy dominates state-level organization with or without democracy, just > like it does virtually all other human enterprises.

That is true, but that's my point also. Why does it dominate, if we know from our (rather limited) experience with democracy that at least on the state level, it leads to better outcomes?

<comment><USER17> The US experimented with democratic military structures during the early days of the Civil War (and perhaps before) at the regiment and company levels. Some volunteer regiments elected their officers. This did not turn out well and the practice was abandoned.

<comment><USER14> That's certainly a worthy endeavor but I don't believe you can build democracy from the bottom (by embedding it in the larger hierarchical structure), it has to start from the top. At the bottom, it will not be taken seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The preventable disaster—and one that's cost taxpayers maybe a trillion dollars with the F-35–is that the Marines have fighter jets. The argument we should be having is whether the Navy should have its own fighter jet capabilities in addition to the Air Force... but the argument we're having is that the Marines also have fight jets and impose silly requirements on their jets.

<comment><USER19> In that case, the question might as well be whether USA needs a navy at all, considering that the aircraft carrier and its planes have been the deadliest naval weapon system since WWII.

<comment><USER18> No doubt air craft carriers were very effective in WWII, when neither side had high precision radar let alone real-time satellite imagery. They won't be effective in future wars. Air craft carriers are sitting ducks and will also prove to be a terrible waste of blood and treasure.

The Navy is hugely important, and I think there's even a good argument to be made in favor of the USMC continuing to exist in a quasi-spec-ops/rapid deployment infantry role. I think there's no good argument to be made in favor of the USMC having fighter jets.

<comment><USER20> The Air Force doesn't do close air support. (They barely want to do air superiority. No, really, check out the history of the AAF going into WWII and B-36 in Korea.)

The Navy can do close air support, but likes to keep its planes on its ships rather than forward deployed where the Marines need them.

The Army uses helicopters for close air support to get around the Air Force, but those have the problem of loiter time.

If you did manage to bludgeon the Air Force into handling air support, those units would have to be so tightly tied to the Marines and Army that their careers would be compromised in the Air Force.

<comment><USER18> Our services could use some bludgeoning to work better together. There's no question that CAS is an important mission. Providing it with F-18s and F-35s through an underresourced mini-air force within the USMC seems kind of dumb. Give the USMC drones to handle some basic missions, make USAF provide CAS, and use a more diverse, cheaper, and specialized set of platforms.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Scripting Language for HTTP - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Max00355/HTTPLang

<comment><USER2> KATT does a few more things (since it's goal is testing HTTP), but I've used it also for scripting purposes. The syntax is 99% plain HTTP syntax.

[https://github.com/for-GET/katt](https://github.com/for-GET/katt)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yet another Github project that could be useful, except that there is no explicit license. Which means it's under traditional copyright.

<comment><USER4> Not quite. Since it's on GitHub, the terms and conditions for uploading, means that github users have the permission to view and fork the repository. [https://help.github.com/articles/open-source- licensing/](https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-licensing/)

<comment><USER3> Which really means nothing. It certainly is not an Open Source or Free Software license. View and fork does not mean _use_. Or _distribute_ , etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie](https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie)

</comment><comment><USER6> Creating this Language in Racket would be the best option IMHO. Racket was made for specifically this reason.

[http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/languages.html](http://docs.racket- lang.org/guide/languages.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Author here, I am currently looking for someone who would be interested in improving and maintaining this project. I have been trying but I don't really have time due to work and other things happening in my life. I would like to see HTTPLang grow,and it seems like there is some interest in the community. If anyone is interested send me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER8> This is reinventing [https://metacpan.org/release/webchat](https://metacpan.org/release/webchat)

You should just give up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious why this was made into a scripting language instead of into a regular Python library. It it were regular Python you would get tons of features for free like loops, functions, if statements, etc.

<comment><USER10> Because then you'd just have Requests and normal Python which it sounds like the author wanted to avoid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Previous discussion on Hacker News:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9598443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9598443)

</comment><comment><USER12> One problem i've had using python to script loading pages, is sometimes other pages you need things from load in frames based on a javascript load functions. PhantomJS solves this by emulating the browser... of course then you have to do everything in javascript.

<comment><USER13> Sure, but the JS you need is incredibly minimal and you can easily transport Phantom's output to whatever other application you can dream of.

I've seen a lot of headless apps outside of Phantom, but none of them work well enough for me to ditch the system above (Phantom :: Message Queue :: Other App).</comment></comment>


Kleiner Perkins says Pao is asking for $2.7M not to appeal - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/kleiner-perkins-says-pao-is-asking-for-2-7-million-not-to-appeal/ <comment><USER3> >Before the trial started in February, Pao's husband, Alphonse "Buddy" Fletcher Jr., was ordered by a New York state judge to pay $2.7 million to a law firm that represented him in his racial discrimination complaint against the famed Dakota apartments in Manhattan's Upper West Side. [1]

What an astonishingly coincidental sum

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/pao- said-t...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/pao-said-to- seek-2-7-million-to-walk-away-from-gender-lawsuit)

 _Warning, autoplay video_

<comment><USER4> I keep seeing this argument made and I don't buy it.

Certainly the sums of both cases are not exactly $2.7M. Those are just rounded numbers. And certainly there is some very specific list of expenses somewhere justifying that request.

Plus, if her husband owes that debt isn't it reasonable to surmise he owes others?

Do you really think she would take the specific amount her husband owes in an unrelated case and the demand that exact amount from an unaffiliated party in an unrelated case? This is nonsense. Coincidental indeed and not even a very strong coincidence. It's rounding.

<comment><USER5> I agree the number is probably a coincidence and it looks bad to focus on it. But the lawsuits in her husband's past are important to keep in mind due to the similarities with her current case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I disagree with a lot of the decisions, both personal and business, that this person has made over the course of the last several years, including the decisions not to take the 1M settlement, and then to ask for 2.7M. It makes me wonder what sort of CEO she is at reddit, which I love immensely. Her decision to implement a no-negotiations salary is interesting though, I wonder if they pay higher or lower than what candidates are wanting.

<comment><USER7> No-negotiations salary? You can bet she negotiated her own salary.

Then again, she seems to be digging herself a pit hard to get out of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> what a weird number. sounds like its connected with buddy fletcher, her husband. he owes 2.7 million. [http://nypost.com/2015/02/18/case-builds- against-former-ny-h...](http://nypost.com/2015/02/18/case-builds-against- former-ny-hedgie-buddy-fletcher/)

<comment><USER9> This seems like a popular conspiracy theory. But in what way does it make sense? Yes, the numbers are close, but

1) Why not pick a larger number, if there is legal basis to ask for it? Is there a benefit to winning the exact amount they owe somewhere else, aside from trolling? More money would be better, wouldn't it?

2) Why not pick a smaller number, if just a little, to avoid the similarity in the number (such similarities are noticed, as you are doing)?

It seems more likely that 2.7M is a number that they can justify legally. It may also have been justifiable legally in another lawsuit. Yes, it seems like an interesting coincidence. So what?

The same thing happened with the 16M figure from earlier in her trial - <USER2> appears both as a possible maximum willful damages number from her lawsuit, assuming she won, and somewhere in the legal proceedings of her husband's hedge fund. Again, an interesting coincidence, but the same objections arise.

Overall, the fact that people pored through all the numbers in her lawsuit, and all the numbers in her husbands affairs (one lawsuit, one hedge fund fiasco), and found some dots to connect, seems to say more about people looking for patterns than about Pao and her husband.

<comment><USER10> The article says that number is her legal expenses, right? So it seems pretty straightforward where that number came from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure this is serving any purpose to any side - the only people who are going to come out happy are the lawyers, probably :(

</comment><comment><USER12> _" Kleiner's lawyers say that Pao can't use the recent California Supreme Court ruling to invalidate Kleiner's request for more than $800,000 in expert witness fees because Pao "failed to accept a reasonable settlement offer" before the lawsuit went to trial."_

So... Are they claiming that not accepting a settlement is the same as malicious intent?

<comment><USER13> IANAL, but essentially in a civil case if the plaintiff is offered a settlement by the defendant and the plaintiff turns down said settlement and later on the plaintiff either loses the case or ends up winning or settling for less than the first offer the plaintiff gives up the ability to have the defendant pay legal fees in the case. Essentially it works like this. If I sue you for $100000, and you offer a settlement for $50,000 but I refuse, we go to court and I am only awarded $40,000 I would owe you all your legal fees from the time you offered me the initial settlement. There is a legal term for it, but there again, IANAL so I can't remember it.

<comment><USER14> As I understand it, it's not about legal costs in the sense of the fees that Kleiner's lawyers were paid, but rather costs for expert witnesses and other non-lawyer costs. Specifically, $864,680 in expert witness fees, $59,000 in deposition costs, and $40,000 in other costs.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/kleiner- perkins-a...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/kleiner-perkins-asks- ellen-pao-for-nearly-1-million-in-costs-after-trial/)

It's not impossible to recover your lawyers' fees too, but it is quite hard in the American system and you would have to show malicious intent, and there's no similar mechanism where you make a settlement offer and can then recover based on that.

<comment><USER13> You are right, it is not the lawyers fees, but the costs associated with the case, like you said the expert witnesses, copying documents, court fees, etc... that are owed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a little surprised they offered her the original $1M. Which I guess means a counter is legitimate, who knows what the legal costs are for Kleiner.

But this is starting to feel a bit dirty. "You may have won the case, but I can make it expensive for you still." Then again, you could say that about anybody who sues anybody.

The real problem here is that legal cases are so expensive many startups live in dread of them. In bigger businesses they save a great deal of time and money by using arbitrattion- both parties agree on an arbiter and pay the arbiters fee. I read some American Arbitration Association (I think it was) claims several years ago that they were much larger and more effective than the current legal system- hearing more cases and with better customer satisfaction. Apparently even losers like it, if they lost but felt the hearing was fair.

Probably Pao and Kleiner would have both saved a lot of money if they'd been able to resolve the dispute this way-- IIRC the court ruled Pao owed kleiner money already for recovered legal fees.

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately, the limiting force on all that is that you can't opt out of the legal system itself, which retains veto power over any such moves.

Even if you found an arbitration procedure that reached the same rulings at a fraction of the cost and 100x faster, you have to get the other party's consent to do it, and as long as they have to consent, they can use that leverage to impose disproportionate costs, regardless of the merit of their side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ugh. Super rich people fighting.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've not seen this story on Reddit... Weird.

<comment><USER19> Open your eyes. It was on the front page and the comments were terrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't this just blackmail? "Pay me $2.7M or I'll continue my case against you"

<comment><USER9> No more than "drop the appeal or we'll demand 1M in lawyer's fees in the case you lost."

You can see both as blackmail, or both as legal positioning looking for a settlement in the middle.

I will say though, that after losing, to ask for such a high number is very brazen on her part.

<comment><USER20> The difference I see there (IANAL) is that they are asking for that 1M to recoup their legal fees as the winners of the case, and offering to waive them if the case is closed. Not sure if they're definitively entitled to that money, but at least it's the other way round.

Asking for millions of $ as the losing plaintiff to not continue the case and cause more expenses for the defendant seems like a pretty clear case of blackmail to me however. Is it still settlement when you've already lost?

<comment><USER21> If you have a valid appeal, you haven't "already lost" \-- you have a case that's working its way through the courts.

The legal system isn't sportsball, and you aren't being a sore loser if you appeal your case to a higher court. If someone _gives up_ their right to appeal, that obviously has a financial benefit for the other party. It's not underhanded to admit it, and use it as a negotiation tactic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The extreme attention applied to all these stories arises out of the need of men in tech and finance to document the _proof_ that women are liars and tricksters -- that these legal cases are all individual anecdotes doesn't matter.

You can always tell when a headline on HN is about a woman in a gender discrimination situation, usually on the "losing" end, i.e. "look at what the Women's Libbers have created, these demon women who will use PC feminism to sue and get as much money out of some poor company as they can, even when it's been proven they are wrong". It's always a very vague headline, because all of the men whose eyes are on the story already know all the details, as it is with all of these "high-profile court cases". The implicit draw of these stories, at the heart, is "she thought she was a victim and she was wrong".

If you want a more honest illustration of the reason why this story is being so focused on, look at the Ars Technica comment section.

<comment><USER23> The extreme attention applied to discrimination, harassment, and civil rights issues in the US is a cultural phenomenon that goes far beyond women in tech.

<comment><USER22> You deliberately simplify my assertions into other ones to make them seem irrelevant or obvious. This is intellectual dishonesty in service of mitigating the perceived threat of another's point, rather than engaging with it.

<comment><USER5> Since you open with an inflammatory ad hominem attack and never really move beyond it I'm not sure how much you get to talk about civil discourse.

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

<comment><USER22> "Ad hominem" has a specific definition -- in what way does it apply to any of what I have written? Do you use a non-standard definition?

<comment><USER5> I provided a link to the definition I'm using.

<comment><USER22> Graham describes the situation of an argument being disagreed with. Whose argument am I disagreeing with?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacking my arm prosthesis to output CV so that it plugs into my synth [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=qSKBtEBRWi4 <comment><USER2> Previously on HN (46 comments, 2 months ago):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22342314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22342314)

<comment><USER3> The below comment there from horentis got me thinking.

> This is incredible. I think the next step from here - technology wise I mean > - is figuring out how devices can tap into this without needing to lose a > limb.

Accessibility mode, but not as I have seen it before.

<comment><USER4> From what I got out of his explanation, is that his prosthesis listens to the nerve signals that would control the muscles of a left hand (which he doesn't have). So, I think you could hook up a similar detector to your own arm for similar effects, its just that your arm would twitch along with your commands.

I suspect the reason we don't see these built for able-bodied people is that its easy to contact the fingers to buttons and knobs and read the muscle activations through these cheap, well-understood pieces of hardware. Might be slower than his input method though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good lord.

I guess I knew this was possible, but seeing it in practice is something else entirely.

I wonder if it's output unipolar 0-10v or bipolar -5/+5 and how that "feels" to the user.

<comment><USER6> Most CV signals can be positive or negative. For instance, there's a standard for pitch CV that's 1 volt per octave. 0 volts might be middle C (whether it is would vary depending on the synth and/or position of tuning knobs), and -1 volt would be an octave below middle C. (There's another hz/volt standard used most notably by the Korg MS-20 where 0 volts == 0 hertz, but it hasn't caught on as widely.)

If the prosthetic adapter only outputs positive voltage, you could just turn the knob corresponding to the CV being controlled to its lowest setting (assuming there is a knob and it is summed with rather than bypassed by the jack).

<comment><USER5> Right. I guess my question is more around the actual sensation and expressiveness when using it.

Is it simply "the more I tense up the muscle the higher the voltage"?

Is it able to be more or less expressive than say a Cv joystick or a high quality ribbon controller.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is so fucking amazing. The "mind control" DJ is definitely a concert I would attend. I wonder how much extendable is the prototype.

<comment><USER8> I know I'm not fun, but everything is "mind control". When you turn the knobs on a synthesizer you control the music with your mind (not your hands). You can also mind control the music with other devices such as an xy-pad [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaoss_Pad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaoss_Pad), if you've ever tried it, the result is about the same as what you can ear in the video.

So this is "mind control" in the same way that a trackpad can be used to mind control the pointer on the screen. It's a device that allows you to control two continuous variables with (almost) no physical effort. And yes it's connected to the nerves, but what can you do with this that you can't do with a joystick or a pad?

<comment><USER9> Oh. Thanks for, "explaining it". And also way to miss the point completely.

<comment><USER8> Oh come on it is not _that_ obvious. At least it took _me_ a while to realize that this was not a superpower.

But you're right, I know I'm missing the point. I don't care, I can't help, I need to know: can this guy do something that I cannot do with a trackpad?

<comment><USER7> It's obvious we didn't truly believe about "magic" mind control. He's a handicapped person that can do something truly amazing thanks to tech skills.

Even though we all possess the same electric signals let me tell you. Unless you can chop your arm off you will never be able to do the same thing with your bloody trackpad.

<comment><USER8> When I saw the video, I thought "wow there are so many crazy things that I could do with this". Now I realize: probably not so much that I cannot already do with a bloody trackpad. This is just something I wanted to share.

Of course this guy's story is inspiring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, that's a really cool project! I love the modular design of the prosthesis that allowed the hand to be quickly exchanged with the CV output module. I wonder how many independent signals you could learn to control using this type of interface? I suspect at _least_ ~5 per arm (>=1 per finger), similar to the fingering used for piano/guitar/etc?

While it isn't remotely as cool as controlling CV with you mind... someday I should convert my Nintendo Power Glove into denkitribe's SynthGlove[1] MIDI controller.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpLkX7X37D4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpLkX7X37D4)

</comment><comment><USER11> I was thinking, I'd consider hacking off an arm if I could control a machine with the stub, and then I realized, one likely does not need to remove any appendages to interact with such a mind body interface. The future is coming.

<comment><USER12> It's happening! I'd say we're no more than five years away from a computer interface that integrates with your existing fingers.

<comment><USER13> > a computer interface that integrates with your existing fingers

Like ... a keyboard?

<comment><USER11> Imagine how much faster you could type if you interacted through muscle twitches or directly through brain impulses. No latency from pressing/releasing keys.

This would be a step beyond a keyboard. Imagine letting kids learn it while they're young. Your WPM is limited by the speed of your mind!

<comment><USER14> > Your WPM is limited by the speed of your mind!

I mean... it already is. This tech is highly unlikely to surpass keyboards for a few reasons:

1) It needs to be customized for each user.

2) It needs really special hardware to read an accurate signal, especially if there's no open channels to connect to via a missing limb.

3) The accuracy / speed tradeoff for muscle twitches vs. touch typing can't possible be that good. The signal to noise ratio of brain impulses is bad.

4) The limiting factor on wpm typed for any original work of non trivial length is going to be your thinking of the idea, not your typing of it.

5) Imagining the tech worked perfectly, such an interface would probably be very mentally draining to use. Typing out a passage is easy to imagine doing, but editing existing text? I feel exhausted just thinking about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Awesome. I wonder how much control he has over the output. I assume it's easy for him to hit min or max, but can he be accurate in the middle?

<comment><USER16> I imagine each of the sensors are binary - either picking up a signal or not - so it probably depends on what "speed" he has set the "knob turning" to be, and he sets it in the middle by holding on a sensor for a mid-range amount of time.

Most fine precision motor skills are made with a orchestra of opposing muscle stimuli.

It'll be interesting one day to see fully-integrated humans with these digitally controlled devices. I imagine the human brain will be easy to train to operate, say a cell phone, especially if it's integrated at a very young age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22342314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22342314)

</comment><comment><USER18> This is so rad- I love that the prosthesis designers are so excited to work with him on this. Really need to ditch those cables for bluetooth though.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how many channels he can get up to.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is exactly the type of content I come to HN for.

</comment><comment><USER9> That is fucking rad.</comment>


The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/full/nature14625.html <comment><USER2> The reporting about this over the years has been very confusing, because a lot of the reporters who were making best efforts to report on this story are confused by the methods of anthropologists who ascribe population relatedness to skulls or the methods of genetics who ascribe population relatedness to DNA samples. The key finding in the article is "We conclude that the currently available number of independent phenetic markers is too small, and within- population craniometric variation too large, to permit reliable reconstruction of the biological population affinities of Kennewick Man." In other words, we don't have a good enough data set about skull measurement variation in human populations to assign the Kennewick skull reliably to any population that has been sampled.

The genetic findings are consistent with those of other studies, for example the landmark review article "Toward a new history and geography of human genes informed by ancient DNA" Pickrell, Joseph K. et al. Trends in Genetics , Volume 30 , Issue 9 , 377 - 389 DOI: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tig.2014.07.007](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tig.2014.07.007) which found that every very ancient human DNA samples show patterns of movement of human beings across long distances and much genetic admixture between supposedly separated geographic populations.

The chapter about human biodiversity in a general handbook on biodiversity says it well: "The massive efforts to study the human genome in detail have produced extraordinary amounts of genetic data. Although we still fail to understand the molecular bases of most complex traits, including many common diseases, we now have a clearer idea of the degree of genetic resemblance between humans and other primate species. We also know that humans are genetically very close to each other, indeed more than any other primates, that most of our genetic diversity is accounted for by individual differences within populations, and that only a small fraction of the species' genetic variance falls between populations and geographic groups thereof." Barbujani, Guido, and Vincenza Colonna. "Genetic basis of human biodiversity: an update." In Biodiversity Hotspots, pp. 97-119. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011.</comment>


Ask HN: Docs for web-based job scheduler - <AUTHOR> As I am building a v2 for Crono, a web-based job scheduler, I decided to write the documentation first. I figured it would be the best way to gather  feedback from other devs. Here it is: https://crono.com/. What do you think? Is it clear enough? Is it missing some important functionalities? <comment><USER2> clickable link: [https://crono.com/](https://crono.com/)

from a very quick skim:

* make it clearer at the top this is a hosted service

* more details on how "run" tasks work

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, detaro. Good feedback. I'll make some edits.</comment></comment>


Germany's about to switch on a revolutionary nuclear fusion machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/first-of-its-kind-german-stellarator-could-revolutionise-the-way-we-use-energy <comment><USER2> Date: 2015

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10710670](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10710670)</comment>


Behind the App: The Story of Pushbullet - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/behind-the-app-the-story-of-pushbullet-1657859652

<comment><USER2> Pushbullet is a huge security risk. All SMS verifications go thru their servers. I asked them if they'd ever implement encryption (zero-knowledge), they haven't responded yet, and one could wonder why...</comment>


Ants Build Complex Structures With a Few Simple Rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140409-the-remarkable-self-organization-of-ants/ <comment><USER2> Ants also have a risk-management algorithm and can be compared to businesses. Their business model is to send ants out of the nest and bring back calories, water and protein. These resources are then turned into more ants.

In the most ideal case, this is an exponential growth curve. But "investing" in a new food source, meaning to send out a fraction of the capital to get more revenue, is also risky. There are predators, rain and heat. Would be tough luck on a colony, if they send out half the ants at the same time and then some hungry predator just feeds off the ant street.

So the ants do have some sort of risk management algorithm. I don't know how it works completely, but essentially the decision to send out workers is influenced by the amount of workers in the nest and the frequency of ants coming back with a "profit".

As with any well managed portfolio and a little bit of luck, the growth curve then is exponential, while not exactly crazy, and the end result after a few years is a prosperous colony, having accumulated so much capital, that they don't know how to spend it on growing themselves.

That's when they start to spawn a new generation of ant queens, which is a horrendously wasteful and expensive exercise, but all of these newly mated ant queens, if she survives the first few days, will go into stealth-mode and found her own startup colony.

<comment><USER3> I think there also is a limit to growth. If population density gets to high, the average ant has to walk so far for food that getting food costs more energy than the food brings in.

<comment><USER2> There seems to be a an intellectual reflex that whenever the topic of exponential growth comes up, people have to bring up growth limits and population density...

In this case though, I don't think that resource limits apply that much. Individual ants feed each other, so they can survive quite long periods without food, and they don't grow much beyond carrying capacity. If circumstances change, they can do a "soft landing" by downsizing the colony slowly or even moving the colony.

In fact, colony size seems to be most often limited by burning off excess capital in sexual broods.

Compared with most other insects, ants are actually much worse at building up biomass. But the queen ant's survival is actually safer because the colony manages risk and growth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel compelled to repost the NYT's excellent, terrifying article on "Crazy Ants", particularly the section about how the constant stream of dead ant bodies also creates functional structures:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/magazine/crazy- ants.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/magazine/crazy-ants.html)

> _Soon he and his wife were waking up to find vast, frantic networks of ants > zipping around the kitchen floor in all directions. When the picture on > their 50-inch box television started flickering, Mike took off the back > panel and found the guts throbbing with ants. He got rid of the television._

 _Outside, dead ants began pooling around the base of the house in heaps so high that they looked like discarded coffee grounds. (It's common in Texas these days for a person who is shown one of these heaps of dead ants to take several seconds to realize that the solid surface he or she is scanning for ants actually is the ants.) Mike laid out poison, generating more heaps of dead ants. But new ants merely used those dead ants as a bridge over the poison and kept streaming inside._

<comment><USER5> Wow, what an article.

Ants in Texas are terrible. Off the top of my head --

1\. I was stung by a swarm of fire ants when I was ten years old. I had been standing, and hadn't realized that I was standing right on an ant bed. I remember an adult carrying me away, and blinding pain.

2\. Ants infested the office of my last job in Texas. Every desk was equipped with an ant motel. One of the water fountains near my desk was completely unusable because of the infestation. All attempts to eradicate the ants failed.

3\. At my last apartment in Texas, the ant infestation was so bad that significant numbers of them would crawl up the tires and get in my car. I'd be driving along and realize that there were ants crawling on my hands. I was actually worried that I would take the infestation with me when I moved to the bay area -- but thankfully I haven't seen one since I moved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is another interesting structural phenomenon built by ants, mass graves.

I have first hand observed that when a ant pile/mound is damaged (pour water on the mound, spray with ant poison, or just kick the mound), the ants over the next few days will simultaneously rebuild the original structure and relocate the dead ants to a newly build structure. Though I can not recall if the new structure is composed entirely of the dead ants or if dirt is involved as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's a good explanation of Ant Pheromones and how it's used as a routing topology in the MUTE P2P software.

[http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml](http://mute- net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml)

<comment><USER8> Related: "Ant Colony Optimization" by Dorigo and Stutzle. They also provide sample code in C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone interested in this kind of emergent behavior should check out a great project I worked on years back called Starlogo at the MIT Media Lab. It was designed to help anyone understand decentralized systems and emergent behavior.

Here's a video with a demo of ants foraging for food - basically ants are red, food is blue, and pheromones are green: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9liT8epLnAQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9liT8epLnAQ)

You could "program" individual ant behavior and tweak parameters to see how that impacted the overall behavior (how far do ants go from the nest? How fast do pheromones dissipate? etc).

It's mostly defunct now, but it looks like there is an online version called StarLogo Nova, you see a sample and play with it at [http://www.slnova.org/djwendel/projects/2/](http://www.slnova.org/djwendel/projects/2/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Ants are really good at working as a team.

The famous short story "Leiningen versus the Ants" describes the scary power of a massive ant infestation.

[http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html](http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've just recently watched a very good documentary about ants: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-gIx7LXcQM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-gIx7LXcQM) . They are a truly amazing organism. Does anyone know of any ant games? I thought it would be cool to have a strategy game where you build an ant colony, defend it from disasters and attackers, etc.

<comment><USER12> SimAnt has a good reputation: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimAnt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimAnt)

Old, but still a novel concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm currently reading "Ant Encounters - Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior" by Deborah M.Gordon. It covers a lot of related material and is a very engaging read.

<comment><USER14> I highly recommend 'Self Organization in Biological Systems' by Camazine et. al.

Each chapter describes a single mechanism found in biology: e.g., ant foraging, termite nest building, etc. For each such mechanism they first provide an accessible, well-written description of the process from a biological perspective, and then go on to simulate it using numerical analysis and computer simulation.

[http://www.amazon.com/Self-Organization-Biological- Systems-P...](http://www.amazon.com/Self-Organization-Biological-Systems- Princeton-Complexity/dp/0691116245)

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the recommendation. It's in my to-read list ~ along with far too many other books ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you are ever interested in browsing (reading from start to finish would be a lot of ants reading) a fascinating book about ants take a look at Ants by Holldobler and Wilson:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Ants-Bert- Holldobler/dp/0674040759](http://www.amazon.com/The-Ants-Bert- Holldobler/dp/0674040759)

</comment><comment><USER16> There's quite a nice and easy to use program (a programming / modeling environment) for exploring and getting an intuition of how a system of many individuals who follow simple rules and interact with each other can give rise to interesting complex behavior. The modeling environment is called NetLogo, and it's basically a multi-turtle version of the old famous Logo programming language. It has lots of different models included in its example model library, including about ants, and the models have modifiable source code. I have quite enjoyed playing around with it, and have even used it in some presentations about how simple rules can give rise to complex behavior.

[http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/](http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/)

</comment><comment><USER17> wow! its incredible how they design a lattice that can help all occupants survive within water !

</comment><comment><USER18> The ants bridge looks very much like structures from World of Goo, I wonder if it has been an inspiration for the game mechanics.

</comment><comment><USER19> Similar idioms can be used for building products with complex requirements (with minimal incidental complexity) & resilient codebases.

</comment><comment><USER20> _Want your employees to cooperate better? Follow this ONE CRAZY RULE we learned from ants!_

</comment><comment><USER21> This is no job for traditional science; we'll need a whole new kind! Quickly, to the Wolfram-Signal!

</comment><comment><USER22> Nature's own artificial intelligence.

<comment><USER23> Wouldn't that just be intelligence?

<comment><USER24> Just like people believed the Universe revolves around Earth, they still have this naive believe that they're the center of intelligence in the Universe. Any other display of intelligence is explained as a combination of simple chemical, mechanical and electrical processes. But don't be quick to judge humans, though, after all, their brains are built on a combination of simple chemical, mechanical and electrical processes themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yes. AI/cog sci could learn a lot from this. Intelligent structures are self- organized, the order isn't imposed from above or from some "central executive."

<comment><USER26> The correct tense is " _is_ learning". They've been studying this for years. This is not news to the AI/cog sci community, to the point that it's insulting to claim that it is.

<comment><USER25> Yes and no. I am aware of the status of the field (well, AI less so). I myself am a psychologist working on the self-organization of behavior. Yes, we have been using examples like termites and ants for years. But we are far from the mainstream. For example, in Pinker's _How the Mind Works_ , he dismisses self- organization as "fairy dust".

Some aspects of our work have been trickling into the mainstream. But if you don't assume that the mechanisms of mind are computations on representations, then it is very difficult to get a job without compromising your principles.

And perhaps you could argue that the mainstream thinks this system of computations is the result of self-organization on some lower level. And I wouldn't disagree. But for the majority of the field that is just lip service. Their research goals are to uncover the algorithms that the mind is running. There's no self-organization at that level.

Of course there are always exceptions. But if anyone is still reading this and is interested I can provide literature staking out the relevant positions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Now I always wonder: if such simple creatures as ants can build such complex structures and are unbelievably successful as species, without any central body enforcing their behavior, why do we humans, need all those numerous laws and regulations that no human alone can fully comprehend? And why everyone believes we need central authority in order to achieve something? Ridiculous.

<comment><USER28> Their behavior is enforced directly by evolutionary constraints. If an ant colony's behavior fails to be adaptive, that colony dies out.

Humans have developed intelligence and culture, which allows us to consciously adapt our behavior over timespans shorter than a generation. Thus we also have developed more adaptable rules that are embedded in culture rather than genes.

That said, both ants and humans arise from the same evolutionary process. Human government is different from, but not any less natural than, ant behaviors.

<comment><USER29> _" Human government is different from, but not any less natural than, ant behaviors."_

Though genetic influence is likely more attenuated.</comment></comment></comment>


Jaron Lanier Fixes the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/23/opinion/data-privacy-jaron-lanier.html <comment><USER2> In essence, this short video series seems to recap the main ideas in Lanier's book Who Owns the Future: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F)

<comment> dawg- I expect the vast majority of people on HN to be familiar with Lanier and already have an opinion on him, but for those few who are not I will highly recommend his writing. I love this book in particular. It presents itself as more serious and scholarly than it actually is, which is where most of the criticism comes from. The most valuable part is Lanier's insight into Silicon Valley culture from the 80's and 90's. The economics behind his plan are not rigorous, nor are they meant to be. He writes from an intensely personal perspective - perhaps at times leaning a little too heavily on his beloved music industry to predict where the rest of the internet is going. But I like that he doesn't compromise on who he is, he doesn't try to be an economist or a social scientist when all he is is a highly accomplished dreamer, innovator, and creative thinker. All in all, it's a pleasure to spend a few hundred pages inside his head.</comment></comment>


They are going to print vegetables - <AUTHOR> https://getvegetable.com <comment><USER2> Misleading headline for a shop that sells veggies in a box. Nothing on the site about 'printing vegetables'.

<comment><USER3> Yep, SPAM, pig in a can.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Teddy, an educational compiler written in Swift - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jtrivedi/Teddy-Compiler <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone! Author here.

This is a small compiler I built that compiles a Swift-like language (called Teddy) to C.

It's written in Swift, and is intended to be a straightforward, accessible reference project for those interested in compiler construction. It's still a work in progress, but figured I'd ship it so others could play around with it.

Hope you like it!</comment>


Mars Express beams back images of ice-filled Korolev crater - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/21/mars-express-beams-back-images-of-ice-filled-korolev-crater <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18733433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18733433).</comment>


How we use Slack in our family - <AUTHOR> http://labs.earthpeople.se/2016/02/my-family-uses-slack/ <comment><USER2> For those who don't want to use Slack but want some sort of family automation, Huginn[1] may be useful.

[1] - [https://github.com/cantino/huginn/](https://github.com/cantino/huginn/)

<comment><USER3> a great concept, anything like this in python?

<comment><USER4> Check out [https://home-assistant.io](https://home-assistant.io) similar but with some extra home automation focus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My wife and I use slack. In the past ~6 months we: got engage, planned a wedding, a wedding reception (2 different dates), honeymoon to Australia, a baby, a new house, and renting out our townhome.

While slack is really a gussied up messaging platform, the extra polish they have on things like search, pins, and documents, made planning and executing on 3 of lifes major milestones significantly easier to manage.

So far we use only a couple of integrations: google calendar, and a custom build slash-command that pushes events to IFTTT's Google calendar event reciepe.

<comment><USER6> You got engaged over slack?

<comment><USER5> Hah. No. That I did in person (though I did flub up my rehersed speech) [https://www.instagram.com/p/3dJYnyOtVg/?taken- by=balls187](https://www.instagram.com/p/3dJYnyOtVg/?taken-by=balls187)

<comment><USER7> That's awesome. You're lucky she didn't just elbow you in the face from adrenaline.

<comment><USER5> I talked about that with the other krav instructors. The girl behind me in purple was there to make sure no one accidentally ran into me while launching into their attack. So it was up to me to protect myself if she hit me.

As you said, luckily it all worked out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice use of slack.

Side question : anybody here using some sort of hosted family social network ? I'm thinking about doing that. We have a huge family (around 200 alive members who are connected in real life) and thought about installing something, with a facebook/g+ login with oauth. I thought about maybe a wordpress + budypress thing but.. maybe I'm missing something better ? The first requirement is that anybody must select his parents, so that an ancestry tree can be created, etc...

<comment><USER9> Why not just create a Facebook group? What features are you missing?

<comment><USER10> Privacy?

<comment><USER11> Doing group chats with my family of 5 using Signal private messenger. The privacy guarantee is nice, but I'll admit there are lots of little issues in Signal group chats, often between iOS and Android.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "It turns out our school is living in the future, providing a RSS-feed per child."

That's crazy (awesome).

</comment><comment><USER13> Seems like a great use of Slack. Unfortunately, my first and only experience with Slack has not been a fantasy. I joined a public slack on startups and everytime I check, I'm 100+ messages behind. Seems like a giant chat room.

I'm missing the magic.

<comment><USER14> Well, yeah. That's not the intended use case for Slack. People do use it for public groups organized around a shared interest, but it is intended for teams or companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is this curl script that calls out to Find My iPhone...

I'm surprised that the web api is trivial enough to script but would love to use it.

<comment><USER16> It's not really scriptable, but if you look at the network traffic you can "copy as curl" one of the URLs that pop up as you're playing with "Find My Friends" on icloud.com and paste it into a terminal. It will return a JSON blob with geo information of all of your friends.

I don't know how long the cookie that "copy as curl" grabs lasts, but if it's long-lived I can absolutely see dropping it into a little script and feeding the lat/long into a static Google Maps tile URL.

<comment><USER15> Right on. I would have figured that iCloud would have one of those iterating cookies (I have no idea what it's really called) where each request iterates the request-data of each subsequent http call so a copy curl wouldn't work.

Very cool automation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Our school is living in the future, providing a RSS-feed per child.

That is actually really cool. Are there any privacy concerns though?

<comment><AUTHOR> hi. article author here. the feed url is very long, and parents can disable it entirely. so i guess it's fine.

<comment><USER18> > _the feed url is very long_

What does this have to do with the security of the feed?

<comment><USER19> [http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/36870/is- includi...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/36870/is-including-a- secret-guid-in-an-url-security-through-obscurity)

<comment><USER20> Put another way: all security is security through obscurity. Whether we're guessing URLs or brute-forcing passwords, logging HTTP traffic or keylogging someone's machine. I hardly see the difference. It's not easy to tell where "obscurity" ends and "security" begins.

<comment><USER21> One-time pads as long as the message aren't security through obscurity are they? There's no way to brute force them. No future maths or quantum computer could ever crack them.

<comment><USER22> 'How the pad was generated' is the obscure part with OTPs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the MatHem hack is pretty neat, why would anyone be offended by it?

<comment><USER24> Evil coder is making it easier for his family to buy stuff from our site, better send him a cease and desist!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone have a favorite "Shared Family Calendar"? We need something to keep track of everyone's school schedule, reports/projects due, sports games/practices, etc. etc.

I've tried Google and Trello ... wondering if there's something better.

<comment><USER26> Out of interest, why didn't shared Google calendars work for you? It works quite well for us.

<comment><USER25> It didn't "not work" but neither of my kids have gmail accounts so they can't see the calendar on their devices.

I just thought there might be something a little more vertical/family-focused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I built a Slack bot to digitize movies, so everyone in the house knows when to swap discs, figure out tracks and post to the TV hub.

[https://github.com/jeremywohl/moviebot](https://github.com/jeremywohl/moviebot)

</comment><comment><USER28> As a B2B SaaS app founder I dream of the day when our app generates this type of positive, organic coverage so effortlessly. It's no wonder Slack are growing at such a rate, they've built something that provides a serious amount of value to people.

<comment><USER9> There are a few things to unpackage here!

1\. Whenever you catch yourself thinking that something uncommon is effortless, you're probably not seeing what's going on behind the scenes. Or at least– getting to the point when you've set the flywheel in motion (and people are trying to use your product or idea as a centerpiece for discussing something of their own) is non-trivial! But I'm sure you know this.

2\. There are B2B SaaS apps that provide a serious amount of value that grow nicely, but still don't grow as quickly as Slack does– Slack is kind of an outlier in this regard.

3\. There's a predictable news cycle that these things go through: [https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces- a-n...](https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-narrative- on-companies-it-covers-5f89fdb7793e) Within this model, Slack is currently between 4 and 6 o' clock. This will change, inevitably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> We plan our vacations in Trello! Personally I think that's less hardcore than using Slack for family group chat.

<comment><USER30> Trello is great for vacation planning - have used it for this purpose!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I also wanted to setup something like this but I did not see an option to switch languages in Slack and since no-one speaks any English, it's not going to work well...

<comment><USER17> If you're writing your own Slackbot it shouldn't matter, should it?

<comment><USER31> The interface of Slack is still in English which is a major blocker for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I use Hangouts for that sort of things and this dude pretty much gave Google and Facebook their roadmap for the next couple years.

</comment><comment><USER33> See, people. This is how Slack should be used. For family daily use, not as the only communication tool for opensource projects.

<comment><USER34> What's the benefit of using this for family vs hangouts?

<comment><USER35> Is it possible to get all the stuff in the article integrated with Hangouts?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Right now my wife and I just use Google calendar and iMessage, but I can see a time soon when my child can speak, read and type where it might be handy to have a group chat.

Although reading this now I wonder if it would be handy to have this for my in-laws who all live in the area, since right now we all have to coordinate via email.

<comment><USER37> But how would you deal with losing history? 10K messages is not very many.

I've been using gmail/gtalk for ~12 years -- I can quickly dig up (and regularly do) pretty much anything my parents and I ever talked about. I consider this to be the killer feature (vs, say, hotmail, where I had to keep deleting messages because of the 10MB limit, back in the day).

<comment><USER36> > But how would you deal with losing history? 10K messages is not very many.

That's a good point, although in practice I rarely have to search through our message history.

Also, since we're using iMessage, it's really hard to search anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Someone at work was recently giving me the slack pitch, and mentioned the cool bot that be configured to announce people, answer questions etc...

It made me very nostalgic for my old IRC friends, both people and eggdrop bots alike.

<comment><USER39> I have long held that IM (in particular MSN Messenger) was what killed community usage of IRC.

Before XP shipped with Messenger bundled, and aggressively pushed (i recall you would get a big window in your face on first login "demanding" you set up an account), basically everyone with a net connection in the local area was found on one or more regional channels.

After IM came however, things became very "cliche-y" as people were "approving" each other over IM and then dropping off IRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> For those using Slack, I recommend you to check out this to-do app [http://www.zlapps.com/todo](http://www.zlapps.com/todo)

Disclaimer: I built it :)

<comment><USER41> I use this for groceries and it's great! Really easy to add items as I think of them, then check the list while at the store. Thanks for the app!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Smiled as I read this, seeing as I'm on Slack largely due to my "extended family" from my previous job (everyone else left but we stayed in touch over Slack).

</comment><comment><USER43> Are there any downsides to using slack for family uses? I can only of think of my personal need to separate work/personal chat apps

<comment><AUTHOR> the apps support several teams, you're set to go

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> this is so awesome. My wife and I have been thinking and working on how can family productivity be improved. It's not an easy task as we are figuring out. There was a recent blog post that became reasonably popular. [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-slack-moms- slackformoms...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-slack-moms-slackformoms- kavalpreet-ganti)

The challenge I feel is to determine if one should take a broad-based approach to family productivity that addresses all aspects or should one take a narrow high-value problem and solve for improving the productivity of that task. We have approached it from the point of view of making kids' activity planning as a task easier. We are going into beta in a week or so. We'll know if this works.

</comment><comment><USER45> We also use slack in our family - haven't customised anything other than adding an emoji for the dog. I've found slack channels to work well with different sections of the extended family.

</comment><comment><USER46> I just moved into a house w/ a few room-mates, and we were looking to make a discord channel for the house and write some bots around home automation.

</comment><comment><USER47> It is cool to have all these conversation been backed up by the NSA ;-)

</comment><comment><USER48> Would this be doable with IRC?

<comment><USER49> Well, yes people have been doing similar stuff with IRC bots. But you would miss the possibility to show widgets inside the chat client (eg. map, calendar, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Did you look into Trello?

</comment><comment><USER51> They should have used IRC.</comment>


Uninstall QuickTime for Windows Today - <AUTHOR> http://blog.trendmicro.com/urgent-call-action-uninstall-quicktime-windows-today/ <comment><USER2> Wow. There is a ton of multimedia software from freeware up to commercial $$$ software that won't start or break without QuickTime or am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> This certainly looks like a major issue for media production. I know I have a ton of clients who are only set up to take .mov/H.264 files, and I have no idea how this will affect them yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't iTunes for Windows depend on QuickTime? Does this mean that iTunes for Windows is also deprecated?

<comment><USER3> Apparently, iTunes no longer depends on QuickTime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't want to install QuickTime in the first place, but shitty iTunes required it.

Now I have a completely separate old laptop that I only use for bloated malware like iTunes, TurboTax, Adobe Flash, and the Java browser plug-in.

That keeps my everyday machines free of this junk.</comment>


Lua scripting with Redis - <AUTHOR> http://danoyoung.blogspot.com/2015/12/lua-scripting-with-redis.html <comment><USER2> Lua is great. I've been using it a lot with nginx (OpenResty recently) to do advanced routing and header management, and half the time it makes more sense than nginx's own instructions.

I know nginx recently released nginScript (JavaScript) but I doubt you'll see Lua in nginx go anywhere anytime soon.

It's very much one of the reasons I chose Redis for our caching layer. Yeah, Redis is pretty awesome on its own, but Lua scripting really extends the possibilities by a large multiple.</comment>