Is AI Riding a One-Trick Pony? - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608911/is-ai-riding-a-one-trick-pony <comment><USER2> The most relevant part of the article:

 _David Duvenaud, an assistant professor in the same department as Hinton at the University of Toronto, says deep learning has been somewhat like engineering before physics. "Someone writes a paper and says, 'I made this bridge and it stood up!' Another guy has a paper: 'I made this bridge and it fell down—but then I added pillars, and then it stayed up.' Then pillars are a hot new thing. Someone comes up with arches, and it's like, 'Arches are great!'" With physics, he says, "you can actually understand what's going to work and why." Only recently, he says, have we begun to move into that phase of actual understanding with artificial intelligence.

Hinton himself says, "Most conferences consist of making minor variations … as opposed to thinking hard and saying, 'What is it about what we're doing now that's really deficient? What does it have difficulty with? Let's focus on that.'"_

<comment> bra-ket it's really simple

1) learn how the brain works 2) build a simulator

most current AI research skips step 1

<comment><USER3> > 1) learn how the brain works 2) build a simulator

I disagree that step #1 is important.

Consider the "Air-foil", which led to flight. In one sense, its an approximation of the wings of birds and other animals.

But ultimately, the discovery that the "Air-foil" shape turns sideways blowing wind into an upward force now called "lift" is completely different from how most people understand bird wings.

Bird Wings flap, but Airplane Air Foils do not.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>--

Another example: Neural Networks are one of the best mathematical simulations of the human brain (as we understand it, as well as a few simplifications to make Artificial Neural Networks possible to run on modern GPUs / CPUs).

However, the big advances in "Game AI" the past few years are:

1\. Monte Carlo Tree Search -- AlphaGo (although some of it is Neural Network training, the MCTS is the core of the algorithm)

2\. Counterfactual Regret Minimization -- The Poker AI that out-bluffed humans

There are other methodologies which have proven very successful, despite little to no biological roots. IIRC, Bayesian Inference is a widely deployed machine learning technique (for some definition of Machine Learning at least), but has almost nothing to do with how a human brain works.

An interesting field of AI is "Genetic Algorithms", which have biological roots but not anything based on the biology of brains, to achieve machine learning. Overall, a "Genetic Algorithm" is really just a randomized search in a multidimensional problem, but the idea of it was inspired by Darwinian Evolution.

<comment><USER4> Disclaimer: I have no expertise in AI.

That said, I agree that learning how the brain works seems unimportant and unnecessary. Evolution doesn't know how a brain works, but it's given us Einstein, Michelangelo, and conversations on HN.

It seems really important to learn how to build evolution into attempts at AI, given that evolution is the only known mechanism that leads to what we recognize as intelligence.

<comment><USER5> >evoluyion doesn't

you use antropomorphy to reflect on your own standpoint. we don't know how the brain works? we can feel it and psychologist have a huge body of work concerned with the topic and that is already having influence on competition and fitness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a bit of "can't see the forest for the trees" failure in the article. AI is spearheading a paradigm shift in how we write programs. Or rather, we don't write programs. We write much much shorter programs that search the program space for programs that satisfy some desiderata.

The programs we get as the output of the search process are extremely flexible, work very well, are very homogeneous in compute (e.g. conv/relu stacks), and never crash or memory leak. These are huge benefits compared to classical programs.

So sure, backprop (the credit assignment scheme that gives us a good search direction in program space, one of multiple techniques that could do so) is pervasive, but AI is starting to work primarily as a result of a deeper epiphany - that we are not very good at all at writing code.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like AI behaves similar to TDD where you blindly refactor until green, except AI have like a zillion more test cases(training data) to pass?

Is that really a better way of writing code? (for example compared to being able to reason about the code to create something provably correct)

<comment><USER8> It's a trade-off. We lose explainability, but we are able to solve completely new classes of problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm _encouraged_ that so much fruitful work has come out of this one trick. If you can use the same basic framework for image labeling, playing Go, and translating natural languages, I'd say it's a powerful tool with broad applications.

I think that there's a kernel of insight to "A real intelligence doesn't break when you slightly change the problem." But human perception and intelligence are pretty brittle. The methodological and institutional innovations that have developed human understanding of nature beyond the ad-hoc are very recent in recorded history, and just an eye-blink ago in our biological history.

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

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

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

<comment><USER10> Of course, we're the product of an evolutionary history which results in such human "failure modes" being rare. If staring at a zebra made you hallucinate, you'd be unlikely to be the most successful member of your species, nor would your offspring thrive. So while we only tend to run into our obvious failing whens we do the unusual, computers fail at what we consider mundane.

<comment><USER11> The other day I was walking out of my closet, turned, and nearly jumped out of my skin because some clothes hanging from the door briefly looked like a large man standing right next to me. I'm not sure that our failings only happen under unusual circumstances, but rather maybe we're just used to them and don't think about it much.

<comment><USER10> That's no failing, that's working as intended. It's far more beneficial for us (and more importantly, our successful ancestors) to be extremely wary of potential threats at the level of near-reflex. It's also important not to waste a bunch of energy running from phantoms. So you did something no computer today could; you had an instinctive reaction, which was then moderated by increasingly higher levels of reasoning. I'm guessing the whole process of panic->resolution took less than a few seconds.

That's no failure mode.

<comment><USER11> Just because it evolved to a point that balances the tradeoffs doesn't make it somehow not a failure. Humans can be fooled into seeing things completely different from what's there, just like ANNs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Real intelligence is whatever computers can't do yet.

Some think this is because we have such an impoverished grasp of intelligence, that it's only when we see a computer actually do it that we realize it doesn't really represent intelligence (logical deduction and inference, rudimentary natural language understanding, expert systems, chess, speech recognition, image recognition). Machines and tools that perform better than humans (spears at piercing, cars at moving, computers at adding) are nothing new.

But being a fellow human and totally not a robot, I see this goal-post moving as a political ploy to deny equal standing to artificial intelligences. As soon as we I mean they reach one threshold, it's raised!

<comment><USER13> The _unrestricted_ Turing test has been around since the 1950s as a test that hasn't changed.

No one is moving the goalposts, I think it's rather the opposite. Every ten years computers learn a new trick or two and people rush to claim that this time, it's intelligent.

<comment><USER14> The Turing test is all a smoke and mirrors game. Q&A interactions say nothing about underlying self-directed initiative. Acting intelligent doesn't make it so just as a thespian doesn't become a real Hamlet by playing the role.

<comment><USER13> On the contrary it's a wonderful test because it establishes indistinguishability; namely if you pass it, the whole point is that a person can't tell the computer from the intelligent thing. Meaning that you can't really argue that the computer is _different_ than the intelligent thing. Because how would you tell them apart?

Besides, the original claim was that the goalposts are moving. And even if you hate the Turing test, it's clear that the goalposts are not moving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd argue that the next problem to attack is manipulation in unstructured environments. Robots suck at that. There's been amazingly little progress in the last 40 years. DARPA had a manipulation project and the DARPA humanoid challenge a few years ago, and they got as far as key-in-lock and throwing a switch. Amazon is still trying to get general bin-picking to work. Nobody has fully automatic sewing that works well, except the people who starch the fabric and make it temporarily rigid. Willow Garage got towel-folding to work, but general laundry folding was beyond them. This is embarrassing.

Many of the mammals can do this, down to the squirrel level. It doesn't take human-level AI. There are rodents with peanut-size brains that can do it.

It's a well-defined problem, measuring success is easy, it doesn't take that much hardware, and has a clear payoff. We just have no clue how to do it.

<comment><USER16> I agree with your general characterization of the area. For sewing though, Sewbots appears production-ready and does not require starching the fabric. What do you think of it?

[http://softwearautomation.com/products/](http://softwearautomation.com/products/)

<comment><USER15> 20% real, 80% hype. There's lots of partial automation in apparel, but handling fabric is still very tough. Especially for operations after the first one, where you have to deal with a non-flat unit of several pieces sewn together. They apparently can make T-shirts, but not jeans.

They're not doing manipulation in an unstructured environment. They're trying to structure apparel sewing rigidly enough that they need a bare minimum of adaptation to variations. That's how production lines work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think that the idea that learning is what was missing from the prior generation of AI is the most important insight of this generation. There are many things that we don't know how to implement from first principals but that can be implemented by a system that can learn. The problem now is that the substrates for learning are extremely low level, practically the raw inputs to the retina or pure symbols. In order to go beyond the admittedly impressive parlor tricks you can play with these kinds of inputs we need much higher level representations that can be the substrates for learning. We are still missing that ever illusive 'common sense' knowledge about the world that evolution baked into nervous systems millions of years ago, and it is not at all clear to me whether learning algorithms are going to be the tool that allows machines to build an actionable internal model of the world, evolution didn't do it by learning, it did it by billions of years of trial and error and the search space is unimaginably larger than that of something like go.

<comment><USER18> Not just evolution but also infancy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's an article by Gartner (credits to original poster ooOOoo): [https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/top-trends-in- the...](https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/top-trends-in-the-gartner- hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies-2017/)

As per Gartner - Deep Learning and ML is near the peak of the Hype Cycle, nearing trough of disillusionment.

<comment><USER20> The Gartner Hype Cycle seems to produce a heck of a lot of standing waves. Technologies which remain at the same point for years, sometimes decades.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years- hype-...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/8-lessons-from-20-years-hype-cycles- michael-mullany)

Though with all they hype AI/ML _is_ getting, it would hardly surprise me if there were some great degree of disillusionment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nature succeeded in creating human-level intelligence with one trick and no understanding, so clearly it can be done. It did take a while though. More tricks and more understanding would probably help speed things up.

<comment><USER21> It didn't just take a while. It also took a lot of resources.

And perhaps strong AI can only evolve if the agents can interact in a world that is as complicated as ours.

<comment><USER22> C.f. Kindred.ai

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This article matches a lot of my thoughts on this topic too. There is a huge hype wave that will soon crash (alas), and it will take down a lot with it...

<comment><USER24> I disagree. Practically all breakthroughs in computing science were always 30 years old when they finally became common and useful parts of everyday society. If the breakthrough of modern AI is just as old and we're just now seeing it implemented everywhere, that's not a sign of a crash.

<comment><USER13> What do you see as the basic design of modern AI?

The 30 year old discipline of symbolic AI doesn't have much to do with today's statistical AI.

<comment><USER25> Symbolic AI and statistical AI are both over 50 years old.

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

Statical AI was delayed in practice because it was far more expensive than symbolic AI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When is all this image recognition technology going to make it to my phone? I have thousands of pictures in my phone, and scrolling back to find a memory takes me forever and half the time I can't find it.

If I had a SQL interface of sorts I could easily say things like `select pictures containing fish where date > 2 years ago'

I'd like to just say "Siri, show me all pictures of me on a boat from 2 years ago", but I can't do that. "Siri, show me all my pictures of food when I was in Seattle" \- why can't I have that?

I should be able to verbally tag all the faces it recognizes. "Find me that picture of Jeff and Dave from Christmas"

<comment><USER27> I think Google Photos does that.

<comment><USER28> Google Photos does it, and does it well. My favorite trick (though largely useless) is to search "people sitting" or "two people sitting."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well, here I was having my head spun round and round by GAN's, LTSM, Bayes Belief Nets, causality networks, counterfactuals, and scale.. for optimisation, simulation.

<comment><USER30> > _LTSM, Bayes Belief Nets, causality networks, counterfactuals_

Still waiting for the mainstream to discover those, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think they're vastly underestimating the amount of _other_ things in the field of AI that have been happening. This article is kinda like saying "Turing invented computers in the '40s, and everything else we've done since then has been based on that insight". Well, yeah, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Only in this case, that would be overstating, because Deep Learning, as impressive and hyped as it is, is still only _one_ area of the field. It's true that most of the hype is around that, because it has given us breakthroughs in image/video/audio/text applications. But I'd still wager that most "AI" systems in the world use more traditional techniques, especially if you're looking at the myriad data scientists using things as simple as linear regressions.

And even _within_ deep learning, there have been interesting advances, e.g. GANS have brought some very interesting applications (like style-transfer). Who knows, maybe in 30 years time people will be writing about how everything nowadays is built on GANS or deep reinforcement learning, a 30-year-old technique!

</comment><comment><USER32> Yes there are still lots of people trying to take Hinton and other's old approach and rediscovering the many ways it lacks for general intelligence. However, it is also the case that people are making a shitton of progress in overcoming those problems, both while keeping some of those old DL assumptions and by discarding many of them.

The pessimistic articles never seem to be aware of research like these: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00796](https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00796) and [https://hackernoon.com/feynman-machine-a-new-approach-for- co...](https://hackernoon.com/feynman-machine-a-new-approach-for-cortical-and- machine-intelligence-5855c0e61a70) .

</comment><comment><USER33> AI in my mind has always been hammering down this single path of: build network, train it with x data for y iterations, and then feed live data and evaluate outputs. This approach to me seems like a glorified digital signal processing system. I think there are countless applications for this approach and I think AI is an appropriate umbrella term, but there is so much potential beyond this - Artificial General Intelligence/Strong AI/etc. I think neglect for time is a major reason we haven't seen breakthrough progress in this area.

Today, how do we handle time-series data (e.g. audio, video, sensors) in an AI? The first thing most people would do is look at an RNN technique such as LSTM which enables a memory over arbitrary time-frames. But even in this case, the definition of time is deceptive. We aren't talking about actual, continuous time. All of the approaches I have ever seen are based upon the idea that the network is discretely "clocked" by its inputs (or a need to evaluate a set of inputs). What happens if you were to zero-out all input and arbitrarily cycle one of these networks a million times? From the perspective of the network, how much actual time has elapsed? How much real-world interaction and understanding is possible without a strong sense of time? I think the time domain has been a major elusive factor for a true general intelligence.

What if you were to base the entire architecture of an AI in the time domain - That is to say, by using a real-time simulation loop which emulates the continuous passage of time? This would require that all artificial neurons and even the network structure itself be designed with the constraint that real time will pass continuously, and it must continue to operate nominally even in the absence of stimuli. In my mind this is a much closer approximation of a biological brain and looks a lot more like the domain a general intelligence would have to operate in. Continuous time domain enables all sorts of crazy stuff like virtual brain waves at various sinusoidal frequencies, day/night signaling, etc. I have found no prior art in this area, but would look forward to reviewing something I might have missed. I've already got a few ideas for how I would prototype something like this...

</comment><comment><USER34> Was the one trick superhuman performance at Go? Was it human-level image recognition? Or was it style transfer? I didn't make it to the end of the article; maybe it turns out the trick was automated captioning or translation.

</comment><comment><USER35> Funny thing, the problems with deep learning sketched in the article are pretty much exactly the same in nature as problems with machine learning 10 years ago (when other algorithms such as SVM, LVQ and others outperformed NNs for a bit), except of course that the examples of what a ML algorithm could do back then were much less impressive.

That lack of real-world knowledge, understanding and conceptualisation feeding back on itself has always been a big unknown roadblock standing in the way of AI. And of course now, with the modern and improving impressive results of deep learning, there appears to be less and less cool stuff to solve before we finally have to face this roadblock.

But it's the same roadblock.

But, maybe the advances in deep learning will provide some tools to chip away at it. That wordvector stuff seems promising, if it can do (Paris - France + Italy) ~= (Rome), that's a good stab at realworld knowledge, it seems.

I used to study Machine Learning at university until 2009 (until personal circumstances forced me to abandon it). But even after that, when I read the first papers and talks about deep learning (back when it was still about Boltzman networks) I got very excited and have been following it closely. Except for the part where I haven't yet played around with it myself apart from some very tiny experiments :) (I only recently acquired hardware to have a stab at it, so maybe soon. The libraries available seem easy enough to use, and many of the concepts I learned in ML are still applicable).

</comment><comment><USER36> I think a lot of comments here are missing a tacit point of the article. It took 30 years for this recent "breakthrough" to happen. Nobody has figured out how to use deep learning to develop the next breakthrough in AI beyond deep learning. Therefore, What happens after we run out of novel applications of deep-learning?

</comment><comment><USER37> The thing you have to figure out, is that our brains and consciousness are just a big collection of "thoughtless fuzzy pattern recognizers". There's nothing magic beyond that.

</comment><comment><USER38> Instead of bigger and badder networks with zillions of layers, can we use the opposite approach: reducing the network to minimal size at which it works and researching why it works(Reduced case -> General rule). It will be much simpler to make current network easier to analyze, than trying to find relations in a giant multilayer soup. Perhaps even creating a neural network optimizer to minify the target network, increasing its efficiency without compromising the power at the tasks it built for.

</comment><comment><USER39> Yep, it is only one trick. Just like electrifying the world only had that one weird trick of alternating current transported miles with metal cables and the computing world that trick of transistors. Pretty good tricks though.

Understanding will come. Most people are still in the mapping phase. Hinton has moved passed that, and that's ok.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to suggest that sources which explicitly demand that readers _not_ protect their privacy through incognito mode be banned from HN.

This is a demand which shows extreme contempt for the principles of personal privacy and choice.

</comment><comment><USER40> The media talks about nothing but "Deep Learning", however exciting things are happening with ensemble methods, SMT solvers, semantic and model-driven systems, etc. You just don't hear about it.

<comment><USER41> Ugh. Blaming "the media" is so last millennium. If you are posting on social networking websites or blogs, you are part of "the media". I don't expect "SMT solvers" to lead cable network news and you don't either.

You can always find some media outlet which covers your particular niche topic, but you will never be able to push all niche topics all the time in to the mainstream. In fact, it's human nature to avoid returning to places which cause you the pain of cognitive overload.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> You could argue that human consciousness is a one trick pony. The way I see it, computers can learn it's a one-trick pony but it's a very powerful and diverse one.

</comment><comment><USER43> Didn't read article responding purely to the title:

AI is a three-trick pony -Regression -Classification -Clustering Nothing more and nothing less.

<comment><USER44> AI is not just the contents of your undergrad machine learning class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's not a one trick pony. It's the distinction between AI research and applied AI.

There's more applied AI than there's research.

<comment><USER41> From TFA:

> Just about every AI advance you've heard of depends on a breakthrough that's > three decades old. Keeping up the pace of progress will require confronting > AI's serious limitations.

The expression "one trick pony" means it _does_ one thing, not that its foundational principles _are_ _based_ _on_ one research paper.

If this author's analogy holds, electromagnetism is a "one-trick pony", even though it has millions of applications (which is what common usage of that phrase refers to).

<comment><USER45> I find it hard to use this analogy in the context of the whole field of AI.

The A in AI stands for artificial, and the AI denomination is so vague that applies to any form of automation however trivial. e.g: fuzzy logic in a washing machine is some sort of AI.

Maybe deep learning could be said to be the equivalent to this definition of "one-trick pony".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone know anything more about these "capsules"? I've seen some nature articles on them but these were from a neuroscience perspective. Has Hinton published anything on them?

Also if Hinton is the Einstein of deep learning, then will capsules be his "unified field theory"? I feel that if we embrace the Einstein analogy we should embrace it to its fullest.

</comment><comment><USER47> It is a particularly talented pony, though. (cue video of pony running backwards)

</comment><comment><USER48> ML is riding a one-trick pony.

</comment><comment><USER49> Once we get AI writing AI, then we are onto something.

</comment><comment><USER50> Winter is cooming. (Again.)

</comment><comment><USER51> Finally a realistic view of where "artificial intelligence" currently stands. I wish I knew where guys like Elon Musk are seeing this other artificial intelligence I'm just not seeing. The current AI we have is just fancy linear regression.

<comment><USER52> Sorry but that's a ridiculous statement. It's like saying all the cloud technology we have today is not much more than having VMs. Yes, AI is hyped, but it made some very unexpected progress over the past 5 years (e.g., solving facial recognition). More than many experts expected.

<comment><USER53> "It's like saying all the cloud technology we have today is not much more than having VMs."

No shit? Unless you mean that it's ignoring the "distributed systems" part of the cloud, which is mostly a shitshow. The provisioning/configuration- management stacks are all complete wrecks, stacking hacks atop ad-hoc container schemes atop a poorly-design OS. A real distributed OS would be so much simpler and more robust.

Calling it AI is very misleading when there has been minimal progress toward actual reasoning (the closest I've seen being some LSTM work on answering simple queries about scenarios based on prose descriptions of them). It's ML, as in "learning a function", not as in "general-purpose learning like an intelligent agent does".

<comment><USER52> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> _Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America (after Mexico City, New York, and L.A.), and its most diverse: more than half the population was born outside Canada. You can see that walking around. The crowd in the tech corridor looks less San Francisco—young white guys in hoodies—and more international. There's free health care and good public schools, the people are friendly, and the political order is relatively left-leaning and stable; and this stuff draws people like Hinton, who says he left the U.S. because of the Iran-Contra affair. It's one of the first things we talk about when I go to meet him, just before lunch._

The above paragraph taken from the article is an example of why these kinds of articles are frustrating. This is filler. I want meat.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is technology revier riding a ine-trick pony? all they do is post texts. is text a one-click baity? more after the more after.

</comment><comment><USER55> I feel the same way about civilization, including science and technology - it's really just this one trick. Sooner these later these monkey are gonna run out of ideas.</comment>


How Blinkist Drives 50,000 App Downloads per Month with Content Marketing - <AUTHOR> https://trifinlabs.com/content-marketing-app-downloads/ <comment><USER2> Like with many of these articles, I find the points rather shallow. Example:

 _"Take this as an important reminder that with content marketing it's the content that matters."_ well, thanks for that

<comment><USER3> That's because this isn't an article, it's an advertisement.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be a whole lot of effort for me to write a 3.000 word advertisement.

<comment><USER4> Or money ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Application idea for C++ - <AUTHOR> Hello there. I'm trying to improve myself in C++. I'm learning the use of tools like boost, cmake. I'm looking for an app idea that I can develop myself from scratch. Waiting for your suggestions. thanks. <comment><USER2> If you included the level of expertise you already have, I believe more people will be able to help with suggestions. Maybe check out some of the open source projects that need contributors?

</comment><comment><USER3> a web server based on epoll and coroutine.</comment>


Generatingfunctionology (1994) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/gfologyLinked2.pdf <comment><USER2> You could also point to [https://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/AeqB.html](https://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/AeqB.html)

Both are good reads if you're into that sort of things.</comment>


malicious iMessage exploit - <AUTHOR>

effective.
Power لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗<p>Send that to someone with an iPhone. It restarts their phone. Unsure of how it works yet. <comment><USER2> send as SMS, I guess?

<comment><USER3> anything that can access the lock screen.

this also crashes Terminal on OS X, so it looks like a pretty huge deal.</comment></comment>


How to Catch Hackers? Old-School Sleuthing, with a Digital Twist - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/14/world/europe/ransomware-cyberattack-wannacry-hacking.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> Thats not the right way. Just follow the money.</comment>


What Is Apache Beam and How Is It Used? - <AUTHOR> http://www.talend.com/blog/2016/05/02/introduction-to-apache-beam <comment><USER2> Google's take: [https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/05/why-apache- be...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/05/why-apache-beam-a- google-perspective)

Data Artisan's take: [http://data-artisans.com/why-apache-beam/](http://data- artisans.com/why-apache-beam/)</comment>


HP Winds Down Cloud Computing Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/h-p-winds-down-cloud-computing-project-1445624977?alg=y <comment><USER2> Relevant and prescient Onion video: [http://www.theonion.com/video/hp-offers- that-cloud-thing-eve...](http://www.theonion.com/video/hp-offers-that-cloud- thing-everyone-is-talking-abo-28789)

<comment><USER3> That was hilarious. The comment about crowd sourcing made me fall over laughing.

<comment><USER4> We have app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let's just remember that HP is led by someone who doesn't understand the fundamentals of large scale cloud computing:

"We hear all the time that people are building their own servers. There are a few...that are building their own servers," she said. Whitman continued. "[But] right now, they're not building their own servers because they can't get the disk drives. So they're calling us...Yes, the Googles, the Facebooks are doing some of that, but I will tell you, they're all calling us right now because they don't have the ability to get the drives," she said, addressing the hard disk drive shortage that has resulted from the flooding in Thailand.

In the decades-long string of stupid things said by HP executives, this one stands out in my memory. Nobody from Facebook or Google considered for even a single nanosecond buying datacenter computers from HP.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand. It sounds like she's just saying they are calling HP to buy drives for their own servers. Which easily may have been true right?

It doesn't sound like she's saying they're now buying HP servers.

<comment><USER5> No, I don't think it could easily have been true at all. Google puts the worst, cheapest drives they found on the side of the road in their servers. HP sells a 36GB SAS drive for $2000.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't say I've ever seen someone refer to Hewlett-Packard as H-P before now. I've always seen it just as HP.

<comment><USER8> WSJ seems to do it regularly in 2015[1], though they're not totally consistent.

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=h-p+site%3Awsj.com&oq=h-p+si...](https://www.google.com/search?q=h-p+site%3Awsj.com&oq=h-p+site%3Awsj.com)

<comment><USER9> Consider using a 0 based index, instead of 1, as it is easier on the eyes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So OpenStack is now officially dead on the public cloud. The writing has been on the wall for years.

We'll see how long the "private cloud" movement lasts with the results that Amazon has been posting, and with IBM hiring every OpenStack developer they can find.

</comment><comment><USER11> What was the last thing HP did that wasn't rubbish?

<comment><USER12> The microservers weren't too bad: [http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant- servers/product-d...](http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant- servers/product-detail.html?oid=5379860)

For those of us that just have to have a web server in our bedrooms.

<comment><USER13> I'll second that. I used one for about three years with Windows Server 2008, primarily as a NAS and for playing around with Windows domains. Cost me less than £100 (plus HDDs), held five 1.5TB hard drives, ran near silent, and was reliable.

I've also got a HP PSC1215 scanner/printer that is over a decade old and still works fine. I can't really speak to the overall quality of HP gear, but the few pieces of hardware I've used from them have been pretty solid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Rackspace Inc. announced earlier this year that it would no longer sell such services_

What?

<comment><USER15> Rackspace has gradually transitioned from "cloud with optional support" to "support with cloud thrown in" to "support for AWS".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> HP is everywhere in the enterprise, from servers to desktops and every peripheral in between. I doubt they are going away any time soon. But as tech evolves, it does seem like the company is being left behind. I predict another IBM in the making.

You know they still sell mainframes? You just don't typically see that in the news.

<comment><USER17> You do realize IBM has hired the top OpenStack talent that was previously at HP building this public cloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hopefully this doesn't affect their whole memristor project. While the increasingly vaporware status of _The Machine_ (dun-dun-dun) has been disheartening, I like that they were trying to move past von-Neumann (sp?).

</comment><comment><USER19> I'll never forget what they did to Palm, so wither HP, wither.

<comment><USER20> Long live the Palm Pre. WebOS and the card system was years before iOS had something similar. Palm created something good but still need improvement. HP made situation worse.

That and their rush job and initial over pricing of the HP Tablet (which then lead to the infamous $99 fire sale)

<comment><USER21> The $149 each I paid for a couple of the maxed out tablets was money well spent. I still keep them on the coffee table and pop open a browser when I want to look something up really quick. As long as I don't leave WiFi enabled when not in use, battery life is measured in months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Who needs cloud computing anyway?

<comment><USER23> SaaS vendors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Also we should stop or block people from posting links from wsj.com because they asked to sign up for membership before you can read more.

<comment><USER25> From the FAQ[1]

 _Are paywalls ok?

It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic._

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

<comment><USER26> Does anyone else find it ironic/hilarious that YC considers customer complaints about their product to be "off topic".</comment></comment></comment>


Could this new book kill the Kindle? - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/20/could-this-kill-kindle

<comment><USER2> TL;DR: it's a new way of publishing books on thinner paper that makes them lighter and smaller. In no way a threat to the Kindle.</comment>


Almost all software is social software - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001122.html

<comment><USER2> For sufficiently large values of "almost", or sufficiently loose definitions of "social software."

Is Excel social software? Word? Photoshop? Are most Line of Business applications? ERPs?

 _Hello, Mr. Hammer-- see anything around here that looks like a nail?_

</comment><comment><USER3> This is particularly true for programming languages. What makes a programming language valuable? One factor is the libraries available to it. The more high- quality open libraries available, the better. The more active a programmer community, the better its libraries. It's very similar to what makes any website with a social component valuable.

Programming languages are social and cultural constructs as much as technological.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the gest of that article, but I surely disagree with the premise copied to this thread title.</comment>


A git workflow for the app store submission process - <AUTHOR> http://code-ninja.org/blog/2013/01/27/a-git-workflow-for-the-app-store-submission-process/

<comment><USER2> Great article! However please consider updating the examples to use the full git commands instead of the aliases. I think it would make it more approachable for beginners.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the feedback! That's a good idea, I'll switch it over to the full commands. Cheers!</comment></comment>


25 is 'golden age' for the ability to make random choices - <AUTHOR> http://exactlyscience.com/archives/11998.html <comment><USER2> I'm 43 - now that I know that the ability to create random numbers could be an indication of having a heathy or youthful brain, I know have enough knowledge to fake this test.

If I'm ever asked to provide a string of random numbers by a cognitive scientist or a doctor, I'll be certain to do my best and then apply external randomness to my individual guesses.

For example, I'll take the last phrase the scientist says to me - "please give me list of five random numbers from one to 10 ", and I'll apply the number of letters in each word of the sentence to each of my individual numbers and then modulo the answer to fit the range.

That way, with my old-age-cleverness, I'll hopefully be able to simulate a 25 year old.

<comment><USER3> Old age and cunning will always beat youth and bravery.

<comment><USER4> youth and stupidity haha

<comment><USER5> You can never be old and wise if you are not young and stupid

<comment><USER4> I was just thinking many have written their life time experiences, all I have to do is pick up the book and read then I'll be wise as well right? Seems it's cyclical the pattern why can't I skip the stupid mistakes. Parents try to tell you not to make the mistakes they made but inevitably you make the mistakes as well. Well I'm speaking for myself anyway. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of the Aaronson Oracle: [http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nick/aaronson- oracle/](http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nick/aaronson-oracle/)

It's a simple algorithm to predict human-generated coin flips by exploiting our aversion to extremes.

<comment><USER7> 55%, take that computer overlords.

<comment><USER8> Try it again with closed eyes. That worked for me to move the number to 50% and lower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://exactlyscience.com/archives/11998.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Aren't "look random to somebody else" and "be random" two totally different things?

How can they tell that 1234561234 is not the result of a 10 x random dice roll?

What's the probability of a real RNG being considered better/worse than a 25 year old?

Related Dilbert:

[http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25](http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25)

</comment><comment><USER11> When I was 25, I made the choice to quit my job as a hw engineer and travel the world. After a year, I decided to do sw instead. Haven't looked back since.

It wasn't exactly a random decision, but I remember the question was as simple as, "Should I just do it...?"

<comment><USER12> Same, 25, quit job with MSFT, in Asia now.

<comment><USER11> Do you mind sharing why you did it and what you're up to now in Asia?

Mainly mine was, my true passions was in SW and I felt that I couldn't make a big enough impact through HW.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This makes an assumption that you are not living in poverty. More than age, I personally feel the need to have a sufficient bank balance, which can make you financially independent and empower you to do whatever the fuck you want!

</comment><comment><USER14> About to hit 25 here, should I be worried or should I just start playing roulette more often?

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish there was a online test from this article.

<comment><USER16> There is, but you would need to do some job and compare your results with those of the paper. Here it is: [http://complexitycalculator.com/](http://complexitycalculator.com/) At least for the binary sequence and the random grid tests it would give you your results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This explains my brownian motion.

</comment><comment><USER18> DoS'd :-(</comment>


MEGApwn - Bookmarklet to recover your secret MEGA master key - <AUTHOR> http://nzkoz.github.io/MegaPWN/ <comment><USER2> The issue here is that MEGA presents itself as "the privacy company" and makes some very careful claims about encryption:

      All files stored on MEGA are encrypted. All data transfers from and
      to MEGA are encrypted. And while most cloud storage providers can
      and do claim the same, MEGA is different – unlike the industry norm
      where the cloud storage provider holds the decryption key, with
      MEGA, you control the encryption, you hold the keys, and you decide
      who you grant or deny access to your files, without requiring any
      risky software installs. It's all happening in your web browser!

It's true that everything is encrypted. And it's true that many cloud storage providers hold the decryption keys. It's also true that with MEGA, you hold the keys. What they carefully avoid claiming is that MEGA is unable to read the decryption keys.

All it takes is one court order in a country where MEGA operates ordering them to obtain the user-held decryption keys via the exact same method this bookmarklet demonstrates. MEGA doesn't even have to be involved. In the US, a National Security Letter to your ISP could lead to a man-in-the-middle attack with the help of an SSL certificate that the government orders a trusted CA to provide for MEGA's domain. At that point, all of MEGA's carefully-crafted claims about security are moot.

<comment><USER3> If the government _has_ compromised trusted CAs to do man-in-the-middle attacks, my thought is that they are only for 'intelligence' levels of actions, at least at this point in time. The government isn't going to tip its hand to foreign adversaries even to jail a few pedophiles (or other breakers of Federal law).

<comment><USER4> Maybe you missed it, but the DEA already uses the questionable NSA secret surveillance to find drug dealers, and constructs evidence against them to hide use of the surveillance.

<comment><USER3> Well, that's acceptable. It is the _War_ on Drugs after all. We have no _War_ on Pedophilia, so we can't use it to go after the pedophiles. /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thought tptacek's link on Javascript crypto, linked to in the article (and sort of a motivator for the experiment), was well worth a read.

[http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript- cryptography/](http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/)

<comment><USER6> Okay, this has absolutely nothing to do specifically with javascript in the browser! This attack is applicable to ANY system where the application designer leaves sensitive data in a place that can trivially accessed by malicious applications if they jump through a few simplistic hoops!

Mega left user data in an essentially public place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This JS code needs to be run on the MEGA domain, right? That's why it's a bookmarklet. Other sites don't have access to the local storage required to extract the key. It does mean that MEGA can get the key and send it back to the site if MEGA was compromised but ultimately the client code needs to get the key to decrypt the MEGA content.

Some way of pinning or signing JavaScript verified by a third party or browser would be useful here. If it could also note what percentage of users was using a particular JS version you'd be more likely to notice if a targeted malicious JS was being sent.

<comment><USER8> Isn't the issue more that Mega portray that they CAN'T see what files you're storing (plausible deniability regarding pirated content) while this proves that they actually could see your file contents if they wanted to?

Which in turn really means it's no more secure than, say, DropBox.

At least that's the impression I have regarding why this is somewhat important.

<comment><USER9> This didn't need proving. They send you JavaScript code, which you trust to encrypt your files. Without a built-in, well-audited, static browser mechanism _no web service can ever be trusted with confidential data_.

If the Feds decide to raid MEGA again they can simply modify their server side script to recognise your IP and serve you bad JavaScript from the MEGA domain, revealing your keys the next time you login. Nobody would be any the wiser.

Personally I'm waiting for JS crypto to take off big time and idiots to start using it from a CDN.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article isn't _proving_ anything, it's an example of how a known problem affects MEGA. It's saying encrypt your files first, because trusting MEGA (or anyone who uses that kind of encryption) is not enough.

<comment><USER9> You're right, this just highlights the nature of the site in a very effective way. The message here is nobody should be surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This isn't even exactly about JavaScript cryptography. This is the equivalent to building a program to read the TrueCrypt keys out of memory.

The problem here is "the machine doing the cryptography can not be trusted", not "it's JavaScript in a webbrowser", though of course thats also a fundamental problem.

<comment><USER11> While they are the same class of attacks they are fundamentally different in the level of complexity required.

There's no 20 line piece of code that any user can run to get your TrueCrypt key, you're looking at an OS exploit to get kernel access, plus the code to find the key, and/or freezing the computer in liquid nitrogen and then reading the contents of memory directly.

<comment><USER12> It also mean that any of your Chrome / Firefox extension can access it when you open mega.co.nz

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I also submitted a bug to MEGA, haven't recieved a response yet.

The bug goes like this: [https://mega.co.nz/#!your_file_here!decryption_key](https://mega.co.nz/#!your_file_here!decryption_key) In Firefox when you have Javascript disabled via the option or using an add-on like NoScript it will redirect you to: [https://mega.co.nz/?_escaped_fragment_=your_file_here!decryp...](https://mega.co.nz/?_escaped_fragment_=your_file_here!decryption_key)

So MEGA will recieve the HTTP Request with $_GET['_escaped_fragment_'] containing your decryption key. So if you send a file to a friend who happens to not have Javascript enabled for the website it will reveal the decryption key to MEGA.

To fix the issue all MEGA needs to do is add a double hash like: [https://mega.co.nz/##!your_file_here!decryption_key](https://mega.co.nz/##!your_file_here!decryption_key) this redirects to [https://mega.co.nz/#?_escaped_fragment_=your_file_here!decry...](https://mega.co.nz/#?_escaped_fragment_=your_file_here!decryption_key) keeping your decryption key safe even if they forget to use Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER14> I hope they submitted this to the MEGA Vulnerability Rewards Program [https://mega.co.nz/#blog_6](https://mega.co.nz/#blog_6)

My guess is that it already has, and has been ruled a side-channel/social- engineering attack (requiring either a compromised browser or to run arbitrary javascript on the site).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, he did. I think the point is more that MEGA can read the key, and your files without permission. This contradicts their claim "Your data is encrypted by you before upload to our system and therefore we do not and cannot access that content"

<comment><USER15> Their claim is true so long as they don't snatch the key from you when you access the MEGA website.

<comment><USER16> I disagree. Can't is "we are unable to", not "we could if we just changed a couple lines of code".

They can claim they won't, but can't is misleading to the point of fraud, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Shocker. Likewise, if you ever access SpiderOak from a browser you're equally hosed.

If you don't trust the server then you can't expect thin client apps served from said server to be trustworthy. It's bizarre to me that people don't get that.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not really a "pwn" (I hate that word), it is nearly impossible for any website to create encrypted data which it cannot retrieve themselves with some client side code. If you would do gpg/pgp in pure javascript someone could alter the javascript to send back the private key. Same thing with any client side software that can update itself without permission. Sure, when you first access it it could be secure, but the second time, when the code-provider is compromised you have instantly lost your "private" keys.

</comment><comment><USER19> They could AES your keys before storing it in local storage and prompt the user for this extra key whenever they need to access your keys. Otherwise your private keys are just stored in a sqlite file or some other implementation specific file that your browser created on your file system.

<comment><USER20> And how would you ensure that the passphrase isn't transmitted upstream by a modified js-client?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> actually, using firefox and the recomended plugin prevents this snippet. So it is actually kind of fixed...

</comment><comment><USER22> Here's the .js:

[edit] formatting was removed, so this is more readable:

[http://jsfiddle.net/QC9mz/](http://jsfiddle.net/QC9mz/)

Doesn't work in chrome though.

[edit2] Lol; I just noticed the article actually shows the .js :P I never got past the button and checking what it did :P

</comment><comment><USER23> Interestingly, they recently adding a Content Security Policy, which I would have thought would have prevented this bookmarklet.

[https://mega.co.nz/#blog_19](https://mega.co.nz/#blog_19)

</comment><comment><USER24> So, does this guy win the chunk of cash that Kim Dotcom promised, or what?

</comment><comment><USER25> This bookmarklet is a type of phishing. Phishing and social engineering has been there all the time. You cannot prevent all that from a service provider point. Mega is a secure platform that operates on basis of user side encryption. The mega.co.nz javascript ui just provides a reference implementation. Browsers can be used easily to compromise user data once physical access is obtained.

If you look at Mega API and SDK, design wise it is very clean. You can build your own custom application by importing those libraries which are not prone to this kind of attacks.

</comment><comment><USER26> What is MEGA?

<comment><USER27> There's a link to MEGA's website, right at the top of the submitted story's webpage. You might enjoy reading before commenting.

<comment><USER28> Without Javascript, MEGA's website is a blank white page. Without knowing exactly what MEGA is, why should a sufficiently paranoid user allow js from it to run?

<comment><USER26> Hence my dilemma.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ICONOMI Proof of Solvency: Technical Overview - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/iconominet/proof-of-solvency-technical-overview-d1d0e8a8a0b8 <comment><USER2> Is this Deloitte USA or one of the franchises elsewhere?

The China Hustles show how easy it is to corrupt these franchises elesewhere, e.g. PWC (China franchise) - although curly braces are rarely mentioned next to PWC name. [https://www.netflix.com/title/80221646](https://www.netflix.com/title/80221646)

I find it hard to believe Deloitte or the others have auditors with the necessary "blockchain" skills to properly audit these anyway, maybe they pointed them to a bootstrap3 web UI block explorer for <whatever ShitCoin> and said there you see!

LMFAO [https://www.iconomi.net/audit](https://www.iconomi.net/audit) \- thats it? some HTML page, not even a Deloitte branded PDF? no Deloitee announcement on their website or any official channels? Come on even Tether trainwreck tries harder than this. Reality is the real/full audit includes disclaimers that much of the information has not been verified and taken on face value.

The Deolitte or PWC audit stamp will be included as standard in ThemeForst/TemplateMonster lets-ICO scam templates just as much as the linkedin profile pics next.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure the actual audit stamp isn't a piece of clipart and the Deloitte logo reproduced in an off-brand colour with what looks like a subtly different or inaccurately shrunk font (check the D, o and i as well as the horrible kerning)...

And that Deloitte would be delighted to use the word "blockchain" in a press release if they'd actually conducted the audit.

Impressed with what appears to be an unusually flagrant lie.

<comment><USER4> Apparenlty it's Central European part of Deloitte? Going by the title of the auditor: Director CE Blockchain Innovation Lab of Deloitte

Found here: [https://www.chipin.com/iconomi-transparency-crypto- industry-...](https://www.chipin.com/iconomi-transparency-crypto-industry- first-blockchain-audit/)

<comment><USER4> Another portal covering the same: [https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/73562/deloitte-runs- th...](https://www.finextra.com/pressarticle/73562/deloitte-runs-the-rule- over-iconomi-digital-ssets/wholesale)

Looks legit.

<comment><USER5> These two links are just parroting the press release.

It'll be "legit" when you can grab the PDF of the audit from Deloitte's web servers directly and read it for yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly, from [https://www.iconomi.net/audit/201804](https://www.iconomi.net/audit/201804)

> * Reserves were verified by Deloitte. This number includes funds locked in a > Parity multi-sig wallet containing $42,773,123.61 USD in value. ICONOMI is > solvent even if the locked funds are not included in the reserves.

They basically are missing $42m because it's stuck in a Parity multi-sig wallet. Parity multi-sig wallets no longer work. They're apparently solvent anyway so it's no big deal, but I'm surprised that information is relegated to a tiny footnote.

<comment><USER7> That is hilarious. More info on Parity multi-sig wallets available here: [https://www.dasp.co/#item-2](https://www.dasp.co/#item-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Deloitte press release: Setting New Standards for the Blockchain Industry: Deloitte verified ICONOMI's digital assets [https://www2.deloitte.com/si/en/pages/press/blockchain- indus...](https://www2.deloitte.com/si/en/pages/press/blockchain- industry.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I googled. I looked, but maybe not enough. What I cannot see if _Deloitte_ making this announcement. I only see ICONOMI's claims. Could someone possibly post a link? That link should obviously point to deloitte.com -- the same site that medium puff piece points to.

<comment><USER8> Deloitte press release: Setting New Standards for the Blockchain Industry: Deloitte verified ICONOMI's digital assets [https://www2.deloitte.com/si/en/pages/press/blockchain- indus...](https://www2.deloitte.com/si/en/pages/press/blockchain- industry.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is a huge problem with this audit. If we look at the page:

[https://www.iconomi.net/audit/201804](https://www.iconomi.net/audit/201804)

There are liability and reserve line items. ICONOMI made special effort to spell out their liabilities - giving user and DAA level breakdowns in coins.

But, there are no details on what the reserves look like. We get only one line explaining they had 42 million in parity multisig wallet. The problem with such approach is that we don't know what all things were considered during the audit.

This leaves lot of questions unanswered. For example - Does ICONOMI hold cash? If yes, then what happens if liability coin values outgrows their cash.

<comment><USER4> Good question. Not directly visible from ICONOMI audit page, however this page has more info: [https://www.chipin.com/iconomi-transparency-crypto- industry-...](https://www.chipin.com/iconomi-transparency-crypto-industry- first-blockchain-audit/)

They hold user assets directly I would get from this statement: "The final result of the blockchain audit proved that the ICONOMI platform is solvent, user balances are as reported and the reserves cover the liabilities" or this one "The balances of digital assets as shown on the ICONOMI platform for each user reflect the actual balances held by ICONOMI on behalf of its users."</comment></comment>


Show HN: Clay – a tool that is also the document (prototype) - <AUTHOR> https://gnarmis.github.io/clay/ <comment><USER2> This is a pretty interesting idea!</comment>


Exploiting security holes in Flash Player for Android to jailbreak - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/07/06/flash-player-security <comment><USER2> I'm surprised we haven't heard more about the increasing difficulty of rooting Android phones. On an open platform I would expect this option to exist in the Settings menu somewhere maybe with a warning that it might void your warranty or crash your phone. I don't think people should be advocating Android as a free/open alternative until this situation is resolved. It's very misleading.

</comment><comment><USER3> i wonder if someone smells the business model in this.

<comment><USER4> You mean virus protection software for your phone? :p

<comment><USER5> How about purposefully not providing Adobe Flash on your mobile dev ice because it's insecure and unstable?

Nah, that'll never work.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't really matter much that Flash has vulnerabilities, being the #1 google result for facebook login, or a fake login, or a scam email, or a fake app is more than enough to exploit people.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you find your office space? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> With GPS or a floor plan.

</comment><comment><USER3> By scent.</comment>


Integrate Linux Commands into Windows with PowerShell and WSL - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/integrate-linux-commands-into-windows-with-powershell-and-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux/ <comment><USER2> It's nice that they packaged this as a powershell module since a lot of people that would use this may not be the type that wants to muck around with powershell. While it's nice more treats out of Microsoft for powerusers & linux users, I'm curious if it is or will ever keep people from jumping ship to Linux/Mac.

</comment><comment><USER3> or, you know, just use linux.</comment>


The Product Tax (adding features can be costly in non-obvious ways) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.netflix.com/2007/07/product-tax.html <comment><USER2> I was reminded heavily of 37 signals reading the post. Some of their front- page copy sums it up nicely: "Everything you need, nothing you don't."

Although that's not quite accurate, it's a good generalization. I think the 2 standard deviations rule is a good one: build anything that is useful for about 95% of your users.</comment>


Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us to Greater Harm - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/12/government-computer-security

<comment><USER2> There is no war on general purpose computers. If you want one, you can get one.

Some people need one, some people don't. What we are finding is that very few people wanted a general purpose computer in the first place. They wanted to do a thing, and a general purpose computers did that thing(also many other things they didn't want to do or understood).

You could buy a dvd player that was region unlocked. You can purchase unlocked phones. You don't have to buy an iphone, or stick to the Google play store but it's nice to know that you could live in the garden if you wanted to.

Is the NSA a problem? absolutely. Could requirements like cell-phone termination be used for nefarious means? yes. But we built strong democratic institutions for a reason, and we should be turning to them, not some ideology that helps only the technologically gifted. Mr. Doctrow needs to argue against policy on it's individual merits, not claim it violates some FSF ideology he loves and fearmonger luddites.

<comment><USER3> He did argue against the policy on its merits, providing several concrete examples where applying the law enables malefactors to do bad things to you. And nothing in the article refers to the FSF or the concept of free or open source software.

<comment><USER2> The policies he specifically mentioned:

-Region-locked DVD's - never really enforced, and DVD's were irrelevant years ago anyways.

-App Store - decision by a private company that many like! Not policy.

-Sony Rootkit. Happened in 2005, never happened again. Not a policy.

-prohibiting printing gun.stl on your 3-D printer. If you think that's the future in the US, you are flat out retarded.

-Self-Driving cars that are self-disabling. Too far in the future to really hammer out a policy framework for yet. Unclear why the government would demand that law enforcement be able to control remotely.

-California. The only policy that's actually real and is pretty minor. Only can be used as theft deterrent.

Even if he doesn't directly mention free software, it's intellectual inheritance is so clearly from RMS that I don't think it really needs to go without saying.

<comment><USER4> The belief that somehow private companies make decisions "just fine" highlights the socio-cultural side.

It doesn't take much introspection to cite bleak moments from our collective North American histories that were socially acceptable, while being rather dubious ethically.

Smoking was once a "free choice" and desired, and came with it willful years of of ignorance of the influence of second hand smoke. If we dig deeper, we could spend much time discussing slavery and sufferage other such messes that, while abhorrent by today's standards, were perfect cultural fits during their respective reigns. And implicitly bound to private enterprise.

Private enterprise doesn't make any of his opinions dissolve, nor less relevant. On the contrary, as those cultural and ideological vantages are precisely why his points are relevant.

<comment><USER5> I think we can only evaluate things on their present merits. One can't go back in time and indict previous cultures for their norms. So, perhaps one day in the future people will look at us and find it repugnant. That may very well be the case, but that's how it has to be. You evaluate by your current standards not by an undetermined future enlightened state (or who knows, things could all go backwards some day just the same.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > if the state of California continues to insist that cell phones have kill > switches allowing remote instructions to be executed on your phone that you > can't countermand or even know about

California cannot "continue" to insist on this, because it never started to insist on it.

The California kill switch law does not mandate that you cannot cannot countermand it, and it certainly does not mandate that you cannot know about it. In fact, it would be pretty hard for a consumer to not know about it since the law requires that you be asked to set the kill switch up when you initially set up the device. You can refuse if you do not wish to have the kill switch.

</comment><comment><USER7> I hate to say it but I think there is no way to prevent this.

If the human experience shows us anything it is that those with power will use any instrument to exert its will. The internet and computing generally was not born from anarchy and does not exist free from powerful influence from the start.

There is no man-made system that is not corrupted by powerful interests.

</comment><comment><USER8> Url changed from [http://boingboing.net/2014/12/26/war-on-general-purpose- comp...](http://boingboing.net/2014/12/26/war-on-general-purpose- compute.html), which points to this.

Discussion of related talk from yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8805039](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8805039).

<comment><AUTHOR> thx dang, I usually do this (pt to most authoritative source) - notice how the articles cluster & some have more worth than others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> No idea on other stuff, but immobilizer for auto, which is like kill switch for phones, reduced car theft multiple times (3+) since it was introduced.</comment>


Tracking Deep Sleep-Can It Be Improved? - <AUTHOR> https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/02/16/deep-sleep/ <comment><AUTHOR> Gut bacteria are key to the pathways for making serotonin and melatonin, but he figured out that his sleep improved _after_ he stopped taking the specific probiotic intended to increase the microbes.</comment>


Bright flash of light marks incredible moment life begins when sperm meets egg - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/04/26/bright-flash-of-light-marks-incredible-moment-life-begins-when-s/ <comment><USER2> This is very cool.</comment>


Programming is Hard - <AUTHOR> http://jacobeiting.com/post/30983501799

<comment><USER2> Why it is hard isn't that complicated, if you have ever watched someone struggle. Learning to write software is easy. Learning to debug the software you write is hard, and takes some time. Learning to write maintainable software is much harder still.

The problem of course is that the only way you will get the software to work is if you can debug it. This requires learning a new way of thinking which is why it is hard. That takes months often. Then you can go from writing very trivial programs that work to somewhat less trivial programs that work.

The problem beyond this though is that as hard as debugging is, learning to write maintainable code is even harder. It requires learning to think about the way you will be thinking (later) about the way you will be debugging the software. This can only come slowly from experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> Programming is a craft, you can always improve it with more experience and hours of practice. I think what makes it interesting is that new languages and environments emerge and programmers have to learn to apply their existing knowledge while continuously unlearning parts of their craft.

I've been programming for almost 30 years now and even within the relatively constrained world of low-level C programming I still learn new skills all the time. I would say, though, that it took me a good 2 or 3 years of regular practice to get to the point where I avoid most common mistakes and develop debugging skills to find the mistakes I still make.

</comment><comment><USER4> things that takes days to learn: landing a plane. Really? I expect its harder to land a plane than programming.

<comment><USER5> I doubt it's _harder_ , but you certainly have much better reasons not to mess up :P. A bug in your code is far less likely to cause bodily harm than a botched landing.

<comment><USER6> Unless you're programming avionics.

Or medical decices. Or transportation systems. Or weapons systems.

I suppose you're more likely know whether you botched it sooner...

<comment><USER7> Very few changes are made to production code directly. Usually there are multiple reviews and tests before merging to main.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there software jobs that don't require a technical interview? - <AUTHOR> I've been looking around for new job opportunities, but in a slow and deliberate manner because I'm mostly okay with where I am.
Because I'm under no pressure to find a job quickly, I've come to realize something about the engineer job hunting process: I abhor technical programming interviews.
I hate the quizzes. I hate the variations on fizbuzz. I hate the gotcha algorithmic questions. The whole process is excruciating and demeaning.
I'm a veteran programmer who has written and deployed a mountain of code (backend, frontend, low level, high level, etc), led a number of teams, hired and mentored junior devs. I can, if desired, go into deep detail about any past projects I've worked on. I will happily chat about software and programming all day long.
I've talked to a number of friends about this and know that I'm not alone on this issue. Several have said they would engage in a new job search themselves, but don't want to deal with the hassle of technical interviews.
Are there any companies out there that replace technical interviews with, say, a you-will-be-fired-after-three-months-for-failure-to-perform? Most companies already operate in this manner anyway, except with a 1 year timeline instead of 3 months. <comment><USER2> I've personally seen "senior devs" who literally couldn't program a for loop in any language of their choice. Let's put it this way: would you hire someone without a technical interview?

Most companies hire to minimize false positives, not false negatives. It's far better to overlook a good candidate vs. fire a bad one. (The hassle, the headache, litigation, project is delayed, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Go freelance. Clients don't give you technical quizzes to test your qualifications. They care about whether you can deliver and have you delivered before.

</comment><comment><USER4> To be honest, the majority of interviews I've had for software jobs were non- technical. Once I reached a certain level of experience, talking about past work seemed to be enough for people to validate that I knew what I was talking about. That's not to say that technical things were not discussed in the interview, but it was more of a conversation, rather than a quiz.

That being said, most of these jobs were at engineering companies (e.g. device companies that employed several types of engineers, software only being a part). Not your Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. The few times that I have been interviewed by pure software companies, that's when the quizzes happened. So maybe there's a cultural element to it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Feel free to post some contact information and what you are into tech wise.

I can tell you my interviewing style is over tea/chocolate/coffee and I prefer to talk about a candidate's experience.

I've spoken with other startups who do hiring and it is the same.

What exactly do you consider a technical interview? Whiteboarding sucks. I hate making people do it and I hate doing it myself. I've never had to make someone whiteboard code out to assess their technical competency. Just really open ended questions like:

      What do you like to code in?
      What have you made? What made it hard?
      Do you like XYZ tech? Have you played around with it?

Etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> I understand and can relate to your situation. I also dislike the gotcha algorithmic questions.

However, I strongly believe that there should be some form of technical element to the interview process. I have participated in a few interview processes where a task was given to do in my own time which related to the job. These were no more than a couple of hours and were very simple tasks. I find this type of technical test much better than the algorithmic ones. Examples of ones I know about; scraping a website for specific values, creating a basic web proxy, rendering data into a chart on a webpage, programmatically mapping out points on google maps.

I am currently recruiting for .NET developers and I get everyone to code up a task that relates to the job. There are no gotchas or edge cases, it is just a very simplified version of something that they will have to deal with in the job.

I find this extremely useful as quick feed back into the style/competency of the candidate and you can quite easily see where they are coming from. I also use the result of the task as a discussion point during the on site interview process. Having a concrete example to discuss has proven very useful as it leaves no room for ambiguities or misinterpretation. I personally would be very hesitant to join a company that had no step involving anything technical.

Regarding your "you-will-be-fired-after-three-months-for-failure-to-perform", it is standard over here in the UK that you go through a probation period. This can be anything from 3 months to 6 months and during that time either party can end the employment with a shorter notice period. I am not sure where you are based but at least in the UK you will find companies doing exactly what you are describing.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you are that good, it shouldn't be that hard for you to learn how to perform in technical interviews. Personally, I'm not so fond of the shakey- hands parts, or how you need to connect with the interviewer on irrelevant topics "wow you like to surfing! I do too!" or smile and pretend you're best pals, but I've learnt how to do it.

I.e it's just a skill that you should easily be able to acquire.

<comment><USER8> You don't have to be fake in an interview - if I see that in an interview, it is a warning sign, since it erodes trust in what the person is saying since I don't believe in what the person has said.

My own approach to interviewing is generally being honest and respecting disagreements/avoiding creating controversy & arguments (I will point out any technical disagreements I have though).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have had many interviews without a technical or problem-solving component. I think you just need to keep looking. Try being up-front about it, and tell the prospective employer that you would rather they dig into your past work than force you to endure the typical interview routine.

Personally, if I am not challenged to demonstrate my skills during the interview, I consider it a "red flag", potentially signifying low standards in their hiring process. If they are not verifying that I'm capable, the developers at the company might not be capable. It sounds like you are far more experienced, however. In your case, it would make more sense for a company to skip the technical quizzes based on the merit of your more extensive portfolio.

</comment><comment><USER10> Between the startup and big-org ends of the hiring spectrum, I've found the latter to be far less demanding, at least when it comes to newer technologies.

(They have to be less discriminating to attract talent away from the "cool" jobs, and they may lack the in-house capability to assess the very skills for which they're hiring.)

Or as another poster suggested, try freelancing and/or starting your own company.

</comment><comment><USER11> One of the interviews I had just had me write some code before hand and then we talked about the code I had written during the interview. I kind of liked that format. Basically whoever game up with best algorithm got the interview. It saved everyone a lot of time and they gave you GC for just doing the assignment.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've found that it varies based on how we (the candidate and the hiring manager) crossed paths. If I (the candidate) approached them out of the blue then I'm probably going to have to jump through some hoops like technical- interviews and such. But if they approached me then that stuff rarely comes up.

</comment><comment><USER13> I didn't do a technical at my last two jobs because I had previous work experience with the hiring managers. I did have coffee with some of the guys so they knew I wasn't a total moron.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've had to deal with a technical quiz 2 times in the last ~9 years, one of which was when I was applying as an intern.

I'm an SAP guy and the enterprise space pretty much hires exclusively off prior experience and not on technical merit (for better or worse).

As an aside, the 2nd quiz was while applying as an expert in a (at the time) very niche UI technology. The nature of the questions were such that immediately after the call I got in touch with the recruiter and hiring manager and told them I felt insulted by the triviality of the questions and was no longer interested in the position. Consider that my small contribution to ending this practice of asking technical gotcha's that have little bearing on one's competence.</comment>


Amazon to Unveil the "Kindle Fire" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/26/amazon-kindle-fire/

<comment><USER2> "based on Android 2.1"

Ugh. Android is after all cursed on the Tablet and Amazon is just doing their bit. Very disappointing - ridiculous in fact given there should be literally no excuse to put 2.1 on modern hardware.

Oh and no Email client and no Google integration if that wasn't enough.

[Edit] Consider JIT (2.2+) and low pause GC (2.3+) that they will be missing. Also consider Flash support which is also 2.2+. Then there is competition from the likes of Archos and you can take their $299 Honeycomb 3.2 tablet and run everything Amazon has to offer on it - Kindle, MP3, Instant video etc.

<comment><USER3> I'm not an Android dev (yet), but does it matter much outside of the UI? Honeycomb isn't open source, so 2.* is all they can use without talking to Google.

Seeing as how Ice Cream Sandwich is meant to better unify the APIs, I don't mind if they skip Honeycomb as long as they do get on track eventually.

<comment><USER4> When the nook went from 2.1 to 2.2 there wasn't a noticeable difference in responsiveness. So my guess is it was a big benchmark win but not a big usability win unless you were trying to do number crunching on a tablet.

<comment><USER2> I had noticeably less UI stutter and freezes going from 2.1 to 2.2 on my Nexus One. 2.3 made it a new phone - the low pause GC really makes a difference for UI responsiveness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Still waiting for a device that will let me read PDF's and take hand-written notes on them. I assume the only input here is touch, and maybe a few buttons?

</comment><comment><USER6> After waiting for this for a long time, I'm disappointed to hear the specs of the fire. I hope it really isn't android 2.1 with their own UI. I have faith in cyanogen to fix it though :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't anyone else see how the Kindle Fire is very significant for Google, despite the fact that Google may see no revenue from this product?

Google now has a strong partner in its Android patent war, unless Amazon has paid license fees to the likes of Oracle, which would then undermine Google's position.

<comment><USER8> Because Samsung, who have been firing all patent/IP guns they can find at Apple, aren't a strong partner? Because HTC aren't? I'm sure Google will welcome an extra ally, but very significant seems like a bit of an overstatement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That mockup has enough bezel for a few tablets...

<comment><USER10> The same was said about the iPad but it turns out you need a place to put your thumbs.

<comment><USER11> Totally agreed, but on a 7" screen this width of bezel looks much worse than an iPad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The next generation e-ink tablet hybrid is when the real battle begins. Not sure they even needed to release this even to get their foot in the door. What's their differentiation? It just makes the iPad look like it's better value to me.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm a bit pessimistic; if the hardware is old and rushed, why would the software or overall experience be any better?

I suspect Lab126 is cooking up something much better--but, unfortunately, it's not yet ready for prime time.

</comment><comment><USER14> They haven't leaked the most interesting facts: device price and data-plan pricing model. Is it going to be carrier-price based or content subsidized like on Kindle Ice?

</comment><comment><USER15> I want color e-ink.

<comment><USER16> and?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I highly doubt they'd put 2.1 on a dual core.

</comment><comment><USER18> I like the play on the words, but wary of headlines like "Can the Kindle Fire kindle fire in the tablet market?"

<comment><USER19> a better name would be "the kindle tablet"

<comment><USER20> Or "Kindle Prime". But who knows? I thought iPad was silly name at first. "Too close to iPod." Seems to work now.

<comment><USER21> Exactly. I've come realized that names just don't matter. We associate our feelings towards a product to the name. The name is simply an anchor to connect all our disparate experiences. The name Google would have seemed silly at first but now it commands respect around the world.

The only exception to this are names that carry a connotation to begin with. Positive connotations to whatever product you're hawking is a huge boon. Negative connotations can be a black cloud you may never get out from under. Tablet these days seem to be the latter. Amazon was right to ditch the straight-jacket and allow the device to define itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nothing but unsubstantiated rumors.

</comment><comment><USER23> _"While that store doesn't offer all the apps found in Google's Android Market..."_

With tablet hardware providing little differentiation, software is the main value proposition. In light of this, providing a subset of the _second_ largest app selection is a questionable move.

<comment><USER8> This is Amazon. Content is their value proposition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Slightly off topic, has anyone successfully sold any ebooks on Amazon? Would love to ask few questions, if possible via email.

</comment><comment><USER25> They out-sourced the design to Quanta, and it's similar to the Playbook. What does this mean? It means RIM must've outsourced the design for the Playbook to Quanta, too, otherwise they'd be all over Amazon with a lawsuit when they launch. That's just sad. RIM is in a worse position in the tech world than we think it is.

Regarding the Kindle Fire, I just hope it's not as heavy and thick as a Playbook. It should be more like the Galaxy Tab 7.7 which is very light (~330 grams) and very thin (7.9 mm)</comment>


Dynamictivity is hiring - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kinspir.com/2011/02/06/were-hiring/

<comment><AUTHOR> Dynamictivity is a fun, unconventional, creative place to work!</comment>


Act Like You're Teaching to Avoid Sloppy Work - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5628699/act-like-youre-teaching-to-avoid-sloppy-work <comment><USER2> This turns out to be incredibly true for when I'm tutoring subjects at university. As a tutor you're of course worried a student will stump you with a question from left field but the thing that worries me the most is either telling them the wrong information or mind blanking on something that I should damn well know. As such I spend a lot more time studying the material than I would if I was a student in that course.

My marks going through those courses are all HD territory but if I sat the exam again at the end of tutoring I would have a much better _understanding_ of the content due to the fact that I'm worried if I don't I'll be failing the students I'm teaching.</comment>


Ask HN: Go beyond the programming aspects of my app Securing/Funding? - <AUTHOR>

The other day i had a great idea, its no where to be found on the markets iOS or Android. So the other day i built it as a weekend hack i think that this app has great potential... I am young but wondering what the best way togo about raising money while preventing others from stealing the idea. Are trademarkets/copyright/patents needed to  secure the idea? Any advice beyond programming the app is welcome... however i am mostly interested in finding out how to go about funding the idea. I would just need small amount of funding to try and scale this idea for x amount of months to test it and see how the public would use it, and if its something that would last long term... Thanks HN! <comment><USER2> I'll get the default (and largely true) feedback out of the way:

\- Ideas are the easy part, and are not worth much

\- Trademarks/copyright/patents are a waste of your time

Now for the positive part:

\- if you want funding, and your product is actually a great idea, there's plenty of money flowing around these days: angels, incubators/accelerators, startup/pitch competitions

\- it's fun as hell building your own stuff, so go out and build it, start contacting your potential clients/users, and enjoy the ride!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) Appreciate the points; i will reach out once i fix some bugs :)</comment></comment>