Hacking the Brain with Adversarial Images - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/artificial-intelligence/hacking-the-brain-with-adversarial-images <comment><USER2> Seems like an odd approach. The interesting thing about robust adversarial examples is that they fool computers but not humans. Something that fooled humans but not computers would seem to be the right next step. If you fool both it seems more likely that you just made an image that looks like what it classifies as.

<comment><USER3> Yeah my first thought was - well dogs and cats look kind of similar under fairly simple transformations.

What would be interesting is if you could establish a correspondence between visual and genetic similarity... neural networks provide a distance metric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me strongly of the BLIT series of short stories, in which a category of images is discovered that cause processing problems 'glitches' in the human brain with fatal results.

[http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm](http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm)

That's the first one, others are available online too.

<comment><USER5> The other work of popular fiction that gets referenced in these cases is, of course, Snow Crash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> TLDR: If you modify pixels enough, you confuse humans, especially when you only let the humans look at the tiny blurry image for 70 ms.

 _rolls eyes_ I feel like this article totally misses the point about why adversarial ML tactics are interesting. The fundamental reason they work is that _computers don 't have any abstract notion of a cat, a toaster, a banana, or even gravity or matter._ THAT is why they're easily fooled.

To stack up two adversarial images and say, "Look we fooled humans too, OMG humans are just like computers _! " is like saying, "We erased the lines on the road and both self-driving cars AND humans got confused, OMG humans == computers!"

_I know the article isn't saying humans == computers, but .. come on .. I'm not seeing any merit to this investigation

</comment><comment><USER7> Woooah. Huuge assumptions here.

First of all, when we say that a classifier "misclassifies" an image, we have an agreed-upon definition of what that means: it means we have an image, we have a target label for it and the classifier assigns it a different label.

What exactly does it mean that a human misclassifies an image? More specifically, when the article says that "humans think that they're looking at something they aren't", what in the world does that mean? I mean, I have to assume a confusion between "looking", and "seeing". I can't really believe the article is saying that when I'm looking at the top right image I'm not actually, you know _looking_ at it; but instead ...looking outside the window? Or what?

On the other hand- seeing? Really? Who knows what it is that anyone else is seeing? Who knows what _is there to see_? Especially when it comes to an image specifically manipulated to be confusing, as opposed to a real-world image? What is the ground truth here, for the image on the top-right? Is it a cat, just because Google reserachers say it's a cat and it's fooling my senses into thinking it's a dog ish? Is it fooling my senses just because the Google researchers say it is? Google researchers are the final arbiters of objective visible reality, now?

To be more precise, who is to say that that image can just be a "cat" or a "dog" and nothineg else? Because, you know, the first thing I thought when I saw that image on the top right was "that looks like a jumbled mess made with bits of an image of a cat and an image of a dog", or something along those lines.

Of course, if you sit me in front of a computer with two buttons, one for "dog" and one for "cat" like in the researchers' setup... well, then you can force me to misclassify the image all you like. But what does that _prove_? Besides the fact that if you force me to choose one of two things, without knowing what you think is the "right" thing to choose, I'll choose the "wrong" thing a lot of the time?

</comment><comment><USER8> The subsequent images and conclusion that adverserial attacks against multiple models would be effective against humans seems tautological. Individual models may be unique, but multiple models are related in that -human- classifiers are the final source of truth. Anything that works against all of them is indirectly targeting the human classifiers that unite them.

</comment><comment><USER9> How far fetched would it be to assume that in the future, facebook would start building a neural network for each of its users, training it to like the same content as you ? With the amount of data generated by the endless scrolling, you could build a fairly accurate neural network of which content produce which emotion, and then generate adversarial images for targeted advertising.

<comment><USER10> At some point that neural network could just take over your social media presence and no one would ever know, because it's essentially your clone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So if I make a cat look like a dog, people think it's a dog. That's amazing and totally unexpected.

<comment><USER12> The point is that the human brain is just as vulnerable to the adversarial attacks that people are claiming will be the downfall of ML. It's like the people that scream about people shining lasers into the cameras of autonomous vehicles - yeah, sure, if you did the same thing to a human driver you'd get exactly the same crash, why are you suddenly worried about this?

And it's more than just "making it look like a dog". If you look at it for any length of time it's obvious that it's a picture of a cat with some noise on it. But if you only have 100ms to respond to it you are _guaranteed_ (>95% misidentification) to say that it's a cat. Now what happens if you take this and make your car look like a tree? Someone could crash and that would be terrible! Cancel driving, tear up the roads, ban wheels, cars were a mistake! /s

<comment><USER13> It's not the same. Shining lasers into eyes is not scalable. However, placing a little sign at the side of a road that causes self driving vehicles to swerve out and crash violently, killing the occupants, can be done in mass.

<comment><USER12> If you make the sign red and octagonal you could even kill human drivers too! Or maybe if you slapped an illusory-motion pattern over something that looked like a dog, then people might swerve into the opposite lane to avoid it, double kill! Shock, horror!

Human vision is slightly more robust solely because it's had more time to go back and forth with adversaries. Nothing prevents ML from reaching the same levels of safety. Nothing prevents you from deploying attacks against humans that're identical to to the attacks against artificial systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How is this news? It's wraping AI terminology over what we would call over since dawn of human, a disguise.

</comment><comment><USER15> Article subheading:

> _Researchers from Google Brain show that adversarial images can trick both > humans and computers, and the implications are scary_

So the IEEE is telling me how to feel about this article in addition to presenting the facts. One might even consider that "hacking the brain with adversarial text". :-)

> _A worrying possibility is that supernormal stimuli designed to influence > human behavior or emotions..._

Sooooo, like clickbait headlines? :-)

<comment><USER16> Exactly like clickbait headlines, political posturing, advertising, and propaganda - all of which are misleading stimuli designed to elicit a specific behavioural and cognitive response.

Brains are very easy to hack. The idea that we're reliable exemplars of rational objectivity and rigorous self-awareness is nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is interesting. Could this be a way to watermark images automatically before uploading to the "cloud" to prevent AI processing by large corporations (e.g. Facebook)? Main problem seems that the AI can be adjusted down the road to eventually fix it.

</comment><comment><USER18> there's a lot of bullshit in this article.

To start, it should be clear to everyone that it is possible to actually transform a picture of a cat into a picture of a dog. The argument that the author is trying to make is not, in fact, that the human brain is hackable with adversarial images, but that the kinds of strategies which allow you to hack a wide range of deep learning models (to turn cats into dogs) require the introduction of "features" that a human would recognize as being doglike.

The leading image is not evidence of this, however. We have to keep track of the what figures correspond to which claims, because the article jumps around.

The first figure shows us a mask which people agree turns a cat into a dog. This is not evidence of any claim because such masks are guaranteed to exist.

The second figure shows a mask which people don't even detect which causes a computer to claim that a panda is a gibbon. This is basically the null hypothesis of the paper, it demonstrates that you can attack a _single_ computer with a subtle mask.

The third figure shows us an example of an attack that is robust across deep learning models and also to perspective shifts. The argument being defended by this figure is that humans recognize the mistakes that the machine is making as being non-superficial features of laptops and toasters. The author undermines his own argument here, by requiring that the attack be robust to perspective shifts. The point he/she is trying to make is that in order to be robust to many neural nets you have to include non-superficial features, but then convolutes that claim by also requiring the features to be robust to other types of transformation as well. Does the "featuriness" of the attack come from the multiple neural network requirement or for the transformational robustness requirement? The answer is unknown.

Furthermore, I think this argument falls short pretty quickly if you simply hide the computer's answer. Would you guess that the computer guessed laptop for the first image, even if you knew it got it wrong? How far down your list would that have been? Or toaster for the second? The features offered in the second image definitely look like they have some features that are similar to the corner of a rounded metal cube, but this _is exactly_ a superficial image statistic which is robust to change of perspective transformations. My classifier might as well be looking for that exactly. This is not evidence for the authors case.

The fourth and fifth figures are more interesting, but still do not provide any evidence in defense of machine learning.

It's important, for some reason, to point out that the accuracy on image tasks is NOT measured linearly with error rate. 99.9% accuracy is 10 times better than 99% accuracy. The difference between 65 and 75% is about 1000 times less than the difference between 75% and 99% Allow me to submit, without evidence, that humans can differentiate between a cat and a dog with >99% accuracy when given as much time as they need to make a decision about whether or not they are looking at a cat or a dog (with no adversarial mask applied). This means that the difference between human performance on the task without the time constraint, versus human performance on the task with the time constraint, is about 1000 times larger than the difference between human performance on the task with the time constraint and the task with the time constraint and the filter.

This means that if you really want people to fail on the cats versus dogs task, spending time coming up with the filter to apply after you've somehow managed to present the image that you're trying to get the person to misclassify for 1/20 of a second, followed by a noise mask, is >100 times less valuable at getting them to misclassify the picture than figuring out how to add the time constraint. Not to mention the fact that transformations that _actually_ take cats to dogs and vice versa are necessarily possible, and that differentiation between cats and dogs is an image recognition task with a much clearer limit on human performance than differentiation between cats and laptops, which we are nevertheless _amazingly_ good at.

Cats are very close to dogs, and it seems like this paper has completely forgotten this fact, and is deeply surprised to learn it.

Overall this is a very poor defense of deep learning.

</comment><comment><USER13> With attacks like this it would never be safe to use image recognition in any applications where human life depends on accurate results.

<comment><USER19> Because my favorite hobby is modifying my liver so that the biopsy picture confuses the cancer detection algorithm. :)

<comment><USER13> I'm thinking more along the lines of cars, surveillance, heavy construction equipment etc.

<comment><USER20> [https://xkcd.com/1958/](https://xkcd.com/1958/)

<comment><USER13> If this is the defense, it's paper thin. Human drivers can easily reason about fake lanes, or fake pedestrian cut outs, or a sign somewhere that it shouldn't be.

You also don't need an abundance of murderers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Passion vs. Professionalism - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6523/the_designers_notebook_passion_.php?print=1

<comment><USER2>
        Feisal: Our own prisoners, Mr. Bentley, are taken care of, 'til the British can
        relieve us of them, according to the Code. I should like you to notice that.

        Bentley: Yes, sir. Is that the influence of Major Lawrence?

        Feisal: Why should you suppose so?

        Bentley: Well, it's just that I heard in Cairo that Major Lawrence has a horror
        of bloodshed.

        Feisal: That is exactly so. With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it
        is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.

             - Lawrence of Arabia

Good business is built on mutual trust, consistency, and reliability; art on exceptionalness and originality. It should be no surprise that designers and businessmen so often clash, one is playing for the middle of the normal distribution, the other longs for the fringes.

<comment><USER3> Your indentation is breaking the line wrapping. Please edit this if you see it in time; it's a nice comment that deserves proper typesetting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A nitpick:

      Games aren't movies; we don't hand total creative authority to a single director
      and let his passion rule the project. Games are collaborative efforts, and that
      requires compromise and diplomacy.

Auteur filmmaking in commercial cinema is very much more the exception than the rule. Even where the director has free reign, it is seldom at the expense of a collaborative process except at a very high level. On the surface at least the two industries seem to have many more parallels than contrasts. Each, I'm sure, require both passion and professionalism in droves (though like the author, I think I'd make the second my preference).

<comment><USER5> This is very true.

The production of big-budget, AAA games and the production of most Hollywood movies share more in common than not. Especially these days, with AAA studios spending more money on writers, directors, and in-game voice talent.

There are maybe 3 directors in Hollywood who can command anything remotely approaching total creative control over a big studio picture. And even they don't exercise the sort of control people think they do.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. After all, a "big studio picture" is a fairly well-defined genre. That is to say, a tremendous number of choices have been made before any given project even begins. Even a director given "full control" can be relied on not to paint too far outside the lines. After all, how do you think he got full control in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Finally! This needed to be said a long time ago, especially in the game development industry. I only wonder why Ernest waited so long to say it. He's one of my favorite gamedev bloggers precisely because of his criticisms. They should make his Twinkie Denial Condition list a game industry certification ;)

<comment><USER8> Yes! I've always found it to be the case that employers that ask for 'passion' are merely interested in turning enthusiasm into dollars. Run, run, run like the plague.

<comment><USER9> This may often be the case, but it's not necessarily true. I've hired software developers for many years. I believe that passion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a highly effective developer.

<comment><USER10> Passion is certainly necessary, but when it's used as a smokescreen for how poorly you're treating the developers, calling it a requirement is flat-out wrong. I certainly see no problem with using it in recruitment spiels; it's using it during the job offer that's a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My take away since "art" does not scale: Work in smaller teams in order to produce passionate art.

</comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me a lot of Erin Hoffman's infamous rant (<http://ea- spouse.livejournal.com/274.html>) about EA's abusive working conditions which resulted in three class-action lawsuits.

</comment><comment><USER13> Lord Acton said to judge talent at its best and character at its worst. Large human organizations tend to judge both at their worst, and to be negative on unknown people for a longer time than any single rational actor would be, which is why "dues paying" periods are so ridiculously long. What this means is that the people who get ahead are people who can sustain a middling performance over a long time without even a whiff of failure, and not the creative, passionate people who take a lot of risks and can hit the high notes but occasionally screw up.

There are high-variance (passionate) and low-variance (professional) people, and various gradations in between. HV tend to swing (in work performance) between 2 and 10, while LV tend to swing between 5 and 7. If you're HV, it means you learn quickly and can do great things but it's also a statistical near-guarantee that you'll be fired at least once in your career (don't worry; in the long term, it's not as big a deal as you think it is).

Game development on AAA titles is no different. Don't go into it thinking a high level of creative talent will launch you into a position of major influence. You may or may not have creative talent, but not only do you have to prove it first, but you have to get into a position where you _can_ prove it-- and the latter is much harder, because the only people who can get on projects where creativity is visible are those who've already put a lot into the political bank.

Passionate people look at the garbage games typical of the industry and think, "I could do so much better!" And they're 100% correct. That also doesn't matter.

My advice (which is so cliche): forget about games, except as a hobby and possibly something to study. Play them and build independent games if you wish, but consider "game design" a non-option without one hell of a lift. Learn how to program. Programming opens up a lot of problems that are fun in their own right even if you're _not_ working on games. A lot of programming problems are _far_ more interesting than running 8-figure video games; trust me on this. Become a really great programmer. That will pay off regardless of whether one ever goes into the video game industry. And becoming a top-1% programmer (takes 10+ years, start now) will make entry into the game industry at a decent level (for a passionate person unwilling to pay dues for decades) possible.

<comment><USER14> _There are high-variance (passionate) and low-variance (professional) people, and various gradations in between. HV tend to swing (in work performance) between 2 and 10, while LV tend to swing between 5 and 7._

I'm not sure that I'm convinced by this model. Truly great work is often a result of consistent professionalism combined with ridiculous productivity.

Consider jashkenas, for example: Over the last few years, he's written an impressive number of solid, professional libraries and released them as open source. So he was working from a high baseline, and he gave himself lots of chances at success. Sooner or later, he was bound to write something 1 or 2 standard deviations better than his personal average.

I'd say that CoffeeScript is at least a 9, but it's an outlier from a pretty large group of 7s.

<comment><USER15> I do think that's somewhat true in software, but I think games are more of a mix of art and software, and in art it's much less common to find consistent winners outside of the mediocre category--- Thomas Kinkade makes consistent nice-looking paintings, but Picasso produced a lot of crap amidst his masterpieces. I'm not sure it's possible to take risks on game _design_ and not end up with a reasonable number of duds, even if you're solid and professional on implementation.

It is true that most game-industry positions aren't really for designers, but these days a large number do involve _some_ amount of design, especially if you want the game to be unique in some way. For example, AI programmers are in an odd position of doing "just implementation", but implementing a system that deeply impacts what kind of gameplay and design is possible (in some cases they quite literally write the tools that the designers will use to do things like write NPC behavior).

<comment><USER16> Is disproof by counter example allowed? Blizzard is one case of a company that has consistently produced masterpiece games in all of their major ip's at least since Diablo, Starcraft I, and Warcraft 3.

<comment><USER17> Only because they scrap ones that don't work. There's a difference between consistently producing incredible work and consistently releasing incredible work. Curation is a big part of industry success.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_Adventures:_Lord_of_th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_Adventures:_Lord_of_the_Clans)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft:_Ghost>

<comment><USER16> OK, great point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Given two candidates with similar skills, but one with obvious passion and the other not, I'd pick the passionate one every time.

</comment><comment><USER19> You need both to truly succeed.

</comment><comment><USER20> The difference between passion and professionalism is doing those parts of a project which nobody wants to but which must be done. There are some necessary tasks which just plain nobody is passionate about.

</comment><comment><USER21> Did anyone else find this rather rambling? I lost interest after a few paragraphs because it basically read like a recapitulation of easpouse. I'm not saying it was a bad article or anything; to be honest, I'm surprised that it didn't hold my attention given the subject matter.

<comment><USER22> He lost me shortly after the sweeping statement that "'Passion' is an excuse used by employers to mistreat their employees." This simply isn't true in all cases. If I'm hiring someone, I want them to be passionate about what they're working on. Even if they work exactly 40 hours a week, it means they'll do better work than someone who just wants a job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was in general agreeance with this article until the end:

>But Van Gogh was no naïve artist operating on raw talent and passion alone. If you read his letters, you discover that he was a well-educated scholar of art, much influenced by the ideas of others.

His passion kept him going when nobody would buy his works, but it was his professionalism -- his endless desire to learn more and do better, that exploited his talent to its fullest. Van Gogh's early works didn't amount to much. It was his growth as a serious, thoughtful, professional artist that turned him into what he became. _____

Hold on, how can the author draw a line between passion and being learned? Isn't it possible to be learned because you are passionate, and yet still be unprofessional? I define unprofessionalism as acting like Steve of Apple...and by that I mean either of the Steves.

I think it's obvipus to a cliche how Jobs fits in to this debate. IMO, Woz falls into the "passion" category. If, in a company, he was hired to build boards so that the company could profit and grow, and instead, he gave away his intellectual property and energy towards furthering what he saw as the home brew culture, that is an act of passion over professionalism. But it has little to do with whether he was learned in his area of expertise.

</comment><comment><USER24> Passion means wanting to do something. Professionalism means doing stuff you don't like because it's necessary. The acid test is often how the person responds to their work being flamed.

* -passionate -professional: ignore it

* -passionate +professional: respond neutrally, "agree to disagree" if the flames continue

* +passionate -professional: flame back, send ASCII dongs

* +passionate +professional: stick with it, prove beyond reasonable doubt (often by demonstration) that the flamer is wrong

All my opinion, of course, but I find the distinction useful. A good organization needs both passionate and professional people, though they need not be the same people. The trick is to put people who have only one attribute into roles where their strengths are maximized and their weaknesses minimized. Don't put the passionate amateur in front of enterprise customers, and don't put the boring pro in front of idealistic programmers.</comment>


The Mathematician and the Mystic: André and Simone Weil - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-mathematician-and-the-mystic <comment><USER2> A friend of mine is reading a a lot of Simone Weil, and quoting her ofen to me. She really seems like a kind of figure we don't have nearly enough of in our contemporary intellectual life.

<comment><USER3> This quote of hers flashed in my mind, perhaps in response to your observation:

"To make room in the budget for the eternal is not in the spirit of the age."</comment></comment>


Apple offers gift cards for old iPhones, iPads, and computers (even PCs) - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/08/apple-expands-recyclinggift-card-program-to-iphones-ipads-more.ars <comment><USER2> I don't have the stomach to hand in my perfectly functional (albeit extremely slow by today's standards) G3 iMac for recycling.</comment>


Peek Inside Tesla's Robotic Factory [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/07/tesla-plant-video/

<comment><USER2> This video is more comprehensive. Was published last year.

Mega Factories - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0GtKfOPZRg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0GtKfOPZRg)

<comment><USER3> I stumbled across this the other night, it's very much worth the watch, especially when they talk about how big the factory they bought is, and their future expansion plans

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From this Wired post: [http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/07/tesla-plant- video/](http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/07/tesla-plant-video/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised at how the robots can work so closely to the employees without protection cages. They must have strong fail-safe systems in place. Most impressive!

</comment><comment><USER6> Except that they seem to be making and assembling larger/fewer parts, this doesn't look substantially different from the Toyota plant I worked at 10 years ago.

<comment><USER7> It kind of was a Toyota plant in an earlier incarnation, the old GM-Toyota NUMMI plant: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI).

</comment></comment><comment> jb- Does anybody have an idea of how much Tesla employs automation compared to other automobile manufacturers?

<comment><USER8> I've heard from the CTO that they have a fraction of the amount of workers than most other car plants, and they've intentionally developed it this way so that their factory is programmable to make it more flexible for other cars.

What's also REALLY cool is that their whole car is programmable, in other words, they can push software updates to it and have that affect your driving experience. So, if there are defects, you don't have to be stuck with a crappy car -- you just get a software update.

<comment><USER9> Saab utilizes this through Tech2. Just to turn the Aux Out component on my stereo would cost $150-300. Disable the Alarm system beep? $150-300. Disable the airbag warning? $150-300. Replace the stereo? $150-300. Disable daytime running headlights? $150-300. List goes on.

Had Saab made these options available through menus, I would bless their innovation. Instead, the menus are 'hidden' and only accessible with a DRM yearly license and a device.

I know these aren't driving experience based updates, but it is a testament of how a car's configuration can lead to thousands of dollars of waste and customer dissatisfaction.

<comment><USER8> The difference is that Tesla doesn't charge for any of these features, and all of this is configurable via their onboard system (of course, only when your car isn't driving ;) ).

You can even configure your car to "creep" forward or to stay put when your foot is off the break but the car is on. This is also done via the menu.

I think what you mentioned is more of a testament to how Saab overcharges for small features on their product. Just because Saab does this, it doesn't mean Tesla does. I'd love to have more configuration options come with my car.

<comment> apa-sl I wasn't aware of that. Sounds cool - I always like to play with the available options in the software ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most amazing robot is actually the one that takes a picture and computer vision techniques to identify where to bond the glass.

See it in action here: [http://youtu.be/fA4K4AAucVA?t=37m48s](http://youtu.be/fA4K4AAucVA?t=37m48s)

</comment><comment><USER11> this is the old toyota/gm plant which toyota still have a major stake in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Factory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Factory)

</comment><comment><USER12> Aw, I was kind of hoping it would be about this kind of Tesla: [http://warehouse13.wikia.com/wiki/Tesla](http://warehouse13.wikia.com/wiki/Tesla)

</comment><comment><USER13> Where is the Tesla Coil?...

</comment><comment><USER14> Part of me was hoping this was about how people like Nikola Tesla are born.

Edit: Like everyone else I suppose.</comment>


Redesign Hacker News - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/designed-thought/redesign-hacker-news-f3af65d70668 <comment><USER2> Use the HN api and publish it somewhere..

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you please make it look like Reddit?</comment>


How to cut megabanks down to size - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/business/a-fed-voice-asking-to-cut-megabanks-down-to-size.html <comment><USER3> The criminal actions[1] of Wachovia, Lloyds, Credit Suisse, Barclays, HSBC, _et al_ have shown that the megabanks cannot be trusted to follow existing laws.

The robo-signing debacle[2] has demonstrated amply that the financial sector can't be bothered to verify their data before destroying the lives of thousands of people.

The LIBOR manipulation scandal[3] proves that even the industry's own measuring rods are bent and unreliable.

The last 5 years have revealed an industry rife with crime, deceit, and unabashed greed which has severely damaged the global economy and the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people. And the penalties for these actions pale in proportionate comparison to those imposed on a street-level drug dealer.

When a private enterprise becomes too essential to regulate effectively, it endangers the society in which it operates. Breaking it up into manageable chunks is the only viable option.

[1]: [https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/opinion/how-bankers- help-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/opinion/how-bankers-help-drug- traffickers-and-terrorists.html)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_foreclosure...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_foreclosure_crisis)

[3]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal>

<comment><USER4> I always remember what Milton Friedman used to say, he was amazed be people who see failure of regulation and propose a fix by seeking to introduce even more regulation.

"well this time it will surely work!" "if only we had the right kind of regulation/people in charge!" they say.

That's never gonna happen. Breaking the system in chunks artificially will not work, because it will consolidate again and buy up the regulators. The true solution here is Bitcoin, precisely because it is not controlled by anyone.

<comment><USER5> I used to be an Austrian but it's been almost a century now and it's become clear to me that the Keynesians are actually correct. Even after the GFC things bounced back very quickly. The power to inflate away old debt is too useful to sacrifice.

<comment><USER4> Hm, it's interesting, would you care to elaborate: what do you mean by "too useful"? Too useful for whom?

<comment><USER5> Well let me put it this way:

If the USA kept the gold standard, I seriously doubt they'd be the number 1 economy in 2013.

<comment><USER4> But you're not explaining your claim. How can possibly printing money can make society as a whole richer? It can make certain individuals better off, for sure (the ones who receive the newly created money first while the prices are low). But how does it make the economy as a whole better off? No additional value gets created.

<comment><USER6> I think the point is inflation increases the money supply, while debt remains the same. Individuals make more money with less buying power, but can pay off debt easier.

<comment><USER4> Well that's good for people with debts. It's bad for people without debts and those who loaned them money. Debtors are basically paying off their debts more easily at the expense of all the others (even those who are not involved in the deal of loaning).

<comment><USER7> as long as the inflation rate is expected, the inflation rate is always adjusted up/down to compensate for the inflation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >small institutions must submit to the rigors of the free market.

>market discipline has worked to keep smaller institutions on the straight and narrow, it has been ineffective with megabanks

>market participants have proved [in]effective in monitoring risks at these [huge banks].

>They know they will be protected by a taxpayer rescue should a large institution teeter.

How is this not obvious to everyone involved?

<comment><USER9> They _are_ obvious and breaking up the banks is a popular topic of speculation in the finance industry. What's a mystery is why it is taking so long for mainstream econ and op-ed writers to catch on.

Paul Krugman, for example, proposed that big banks like Citibank provide value by having a huge service network, and therefore he's skeptical of breaking up banks. Which is true--Citibank's size is the primary (and probably only) reason I'm a Citibank customer. But the unstated assumption that there must necessarily a 1:1 ratio of Too-Big-To-Fail bunches of assets to bank service networks is baffling to me.

There seems to be a TBTF blind spot in the sphere of wide-area economic and financial knowledge; that is just one example. The solution is always "more regulation", or occasionally, "better regulation" with the implication that everything is the government's fault.

<comment><USER10> _What's a mystery is why it is taking so long for mainstream econ and op-ed writers to catch on._

I think they're quite familiar with the idea and have caught onto it long ago; they just don't want to be misrepresented as advocating a government takeover of the finance industry or as communists or whatever. It's not so much that they favor large institutions, as they're trying be moderate and consider both sides of the argument.

By contrast, read the editorial pages or the comment sections of the Wall Street Journal, in which Obama is regularly characterized as a Marxist ideologue and worse, and any sort of regulation or disciplinary action against the financial services sector is characterized a shakedown, at best. If the government actually proposed carving up the banks there would be (even more) howls for his impeachment. Much as only Nixon could go to China, a reset of the financial sector could only come from some prominent Republican, and a fiscally hawkish one at that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm confused by this. The large banks are (arguably) more efficient because of economies of scale, eg. less duplicated management, purchasing power. So it's probably not a good idea to limit the size of banks which is what this article seems to propose, because that'll make banking more expensive.

But the flip side is: why don't we just let megabanks go bust? If they go bust, the government steps in, briefly nationalizes them, sells off the parts (the shareholders get nothing, of course), and life continues. As long as this period is kept as short as possible why is there any danger of "meltdown"?

<comment><USER8> Per the article, size is correlated with problems but not the cause of them. It happens that large banks are the ones who are more likely to get bailed out, thus they are incentivized to take more risk, so they do. It is the potential for government bailouts/protections that is the root of the issue, thus the proposal is basically to stop doing that.

<comment><USER12> The problem is not the bailout, per se, the problem is that the bailout didn't wipe-out shareholder value (and executive compensation) in the process.

<comment><USER13> the problem is the bailout, just don't bail them out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The proposal should be extended to all "too big" companies.

Big companies combine the worst characteristics of state-owned and privately- owned enterprises.

On one hand, large amount of small shareholders makes them similar to state owned companies (in which everyone is a shareholder) with all the associated bureaucracy, parasitic management class, pathological incentives etc.

On the other hand, being private they lack even the weak control mechanisms that democratic societies impose on state-owned companies.

</comment><comment><USER15> An analogy:

Bank runs are like forest fires. If you prevent all the small ones, eventually you get a giant one that's too big to stop.

</comment><comment><USER16> Next time they blow up just let them all burn to the ground.

<comment><USER17> The people in charge are too afraid we'll go all "Lord of the Flies" on them without the banking system to motivate us into productivity.

<comment><USER18> Suppose JPM/Chase had failed. The day after, there would be no cash in the ATMs (unless the government stepped in). The USA would be in a Lord of the Flies situation very rapidly. And we wouldn't be interested in the bank bosses, we'd be interested in food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Another interesting way to think about "too big to fail" is as a considerable government subsidy. Banks operate in a risky environment. When there's a meltdown, the government steps in to bail the largest banks out. These banks are getting a free insurance policy from the government, a subsidy that's not going to the smaller banks.

<comment><USER20> The word 'meltdown' is apt.

[Price–Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We already _know_ how. The political will just isn't there.

<comment><USER22> Bullshit. If you're talking about the American people, the political will is there in spades. But thanks to gerrymandering and the filibuster, their voices been successfully nullified. The GOP holds the House by a wide majority, even though their members in it received fewer votes than the "minority" in opposition. And while the GOP has a numerical minority in the Senate, they still control the chamber since it (alone in the developed world) runs on a self-imposed Supermajority rule, not a simple majority.

These two departures from basic democratic control have freed the legislative body from proper accountability to the people, rendering the will of the people increasingly irrelevant to the operations of the government. Saying political will "is just not there" like this is some sad but immutable fact of life ignores the reality of the situation: America has suffered an unofficial coup. We are now suffering under an intrinsically illegitimate government that preserves its power thanks to very clear, very precise structural problems that have been magnified enough to effectively hinder the legitimate will of the people.

These are facts, and they are neither debatable nor acceptable. The situation must resolve itself and it must do so in favor of the people.

<comment><USER23> Vote totals for the bailout:

Aye: 171 D, 91 R. Nay: 63 D, 108 R.

<http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h1424/show>

Why are you complaining about the GOP holding the house? Based on their votes, they seem to be the party of letting banks pay for their mistakes.

<comment><USER22> Why are you citing a vote from 2008 in reference to the Congress that was just elected in 2012?

<comment><USER23> I cited it because I don't believe the Republican position has changed.

Do you disagree? Perhaps Republicans hate the Tea Party so much that they decided to support bailouts just to spite them?

<comment><USER22> Um, the Bailout Bill was signed by George W. Bush - a Republican approving the work of his own cabinet.

The bailout wasn't the issue, by the way. Faced with a catastrophic crisis, propping up a criminal enterprise that we are utterly dependent upon is very much a lesser of two evils choice. The real problem is with sparing these bastards from even a hint of prosecution after the fact.

If you want a more accurate view of where the GOP stands today, consider Eric Cantor (i.e. their leadership) who actively courted Wall Street during the election, promising that the Republicans would provide "better service" and getting a highly disproportionate of the bribes (ahem) contributions in return.

And don't get me started on Elizabeth Warren. She was actively and articulately opposed to the criminal class that's developed in banking. And the agency she designed (the CPFB) was the target for the most vitriolic rage that the House Republicans have managed to date, and that's saying something, given who we're dealing with.

<comment><USER23> I didn't say opposition to bailouts was unanimous among Republicans, merely that the majority opposed them.

As for "criminal enterprise" and "prosecution", could you remind me what crime was committed, and by whom? Last I checked, taking a long position on housing (the cause of the crisis) wasn't a crime. If it was, we need to jail every homeowner.

Keeping Elizabeth Warren out of the public policy arena is a fantastic move. She is driven primarily by ideology, and displays a remarkable ability to state correct facts in a manner that misleads reporters and the public. See, for example, her nonsensical claims that medical costs _cause_ millions of bankruptcies, or her confusing presentation of data in the "Two Income Trap" which obscures the fact that the primary cause of the two income trap is taxes.

<comment><USER22> Oh for god's sake. Are you really that uninformed about the crash? Do you honestly think it was simply banks "going long"? Tell you what, if it's an education you're after, see "Inside Job". It's right here, free and legal, for your convenience: <http://vimeo.com/54817244>.

For someone who knows as little about what actually happened as you appear to, it's probably the best crash course available.

<comment><USER23> As I expected, you can't even articulate what crime you think was committed.

<comment><USER22> You are correct. The scale of your ignorance combined with the depth of your obliviousness to it rendered me speechless. Should you actually have any curiosity here (which I suspect you don't), you'll find that the resource I provided offers a view vastly more comprehensive than any one person could include in a single HN post.

And not being one to suffer fools gladly, referring you to a comprehensive account of multiple, interlocking frauds spanning a variety of institutions spares me the effort of engaging with someone displaying a Creationist's level of epistemic closure. This particular discussion of rampant corruption and outright criminal conduct (fraud, mostly) has the added benefit of being a very high profile account. It has been widely circulated, closely examined, and generally accepted as a fair and accurate assessment. This level of exposure means you'll have an easy time verifying the claims, should you choose to do so (which, ha).

In the meantime, I'm going to go back to being amazed that someone discussing this in 2013 can do so without appearing to know what a derivative is, let alone how one works.

<comment> barry-cotter The guy you just said didn't know what a derivative is used to workas a quant.

<comment><USER22> Knowing the limits of my own knowledge, I was careful to say "appears".

But honestly, that only makes him even more dishonest. After all, he was saying that there was no real difference between banks involved in the subprime crisis and any homeowner "going long" with a bet on rising home prices. Except that there's a world of difference between placing a bet on a specific piece of tangible property in an open, regulated market, and placing bets of derivations from that market so far removed that they have no clear connection to reality. And he, of all people, should know it.

This refusal to see how cynically the inputs for financial models were being manipulated supports my view that many of the quants who played a key role in this mess had no idea who or what they were working with, that they were oblivious to the fraud and corruption engulfing the firms that employed them, and that they failed to register what would happen when things like fraudulent AAA ratings on securities found their way into a system. Among a broader class of market observers this blindness was attributed to a quasi-religious belief in efficient market theory, rejected the possibility of fraud out of hand.

The basic problem can be summarized as mistaking the map for the territory. In this case, the map was the Black-Scholes Equation. Or rather, the source of the maps was this formula. People who learned to model various risks to determine prices without properly understanding the equation's limits (there were many of both) ended up with catastrophically misguided decisions to their credit.

For a bit more background on all this, see here: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/12/black- scholes-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/12/black-scholes- equation-credit-crunch)

If there's one thing that 'Inside Job' makes clear, it's that the policy framework that governs markets is absolutely critical to their stability and value. In America, this framework was subverted by the rise of an ideological (again, quasi-religious) form of market theory that say deregulation as both a practical and moral virtue. This was deep tissue corruption, and as it found its way into the laws that governed market players (or failed to govern, as the case may be), it opened the door to a cascade of fraud - <USER2> deliberately describing X as Y.

Like a ever-growing fog (toxic cloud, really) this continued until none of the major players had any idea what positions their counterparties were in. Knowing how fraudulent their own positions were, they had every reason to fear the worst from others in the same game. And then, on one horrible day in September, the music finally stopped.

To put it in very crude terms, a system built around bullshit eventually choked on the stuff. I'm not surprised that a person who shared more responsibility than most for the resulting catastrophe would respond by entering a state of deep denial. But it's sad, nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> My first reaction to hearing the term "too big to fail" was "then make them smaller." I'm surprised that it's taken this long for such an idea to be seriously considered.

</comment><comment><USER24> Give me a break. The whole point of the banking system _is_ to concentrate capital into a handful megacorps. When you have thousands of little competitors, profit plummets and risk increases enough to make banking not a viable business anymore.

Heck, that's how banking _started_. A handful Venetian traders got _so_ rich they started lending money.

</comment><comment><USER25> The banks will never let this happen. The banks have become too powerful.

</comment><comment><USER26> Start the Bank of the United States, cancel FDIC insurance.

There problem solve.

<comment><USER26> FDIC is a form of privatizing the profit, while socializing the risks for the banks.

<comment><USER27> Yes

BUT it's also a form of "insurance". If there's a suspect a bank won't be able to honor deposits, bank run ensues, THEN the given bank can't honor deposits obviously, because no bank works like that today, that is: self fulfilling prophecy

It's a necessary evil (for the customer's sake)

<comment><USER28> Credit unions don't participate in FDIC insurance, they have arranged their own private insurance. So it is not a necessary evil.

<comment><USER29> Credit unions participate in the NCUA, which is decidedly not private.

<http://www.ncua.gov/Pages/default.aspx>

<comment><USER28> Sorry, you are right, I didn't realize it was a federal agency, I thought it was something they had arranged amongst themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If we call for BitCoin as the solution, The Federal Reserve will fight us, using our money, to make it the villan in the narrative. If we call the division of banks as the solution, the federal reserve will support it, because gigantic entities have clout in resisting the parasitic nature of the Federal Reserve, where minor banks would have to suffer what they must.

Whatever we do, the parasites who can print and dilute our currency through systematic inflation must be appeased and satisfied, or else they will inject poison into the entire system as a retaliation for trying to remove the blood sucking parasite. The bitcoin angle won't work.</comment>


BitFinex down due to Bitcoin security breach - 120k BTC stolen - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/4vtv1m/bitfinex_down_due_to_bitcoin_security_breach/d61ofzt <comment><USER3> Commentary from my part:

Bitfinex uses BitGo for multi-signature (MultiSig) transactions. 2-of-3 signatures must be present for user funds to be released.

Keys present:

\- Offline key held by Bitfinex

\- Online key held by Bitfinex to initiate user withdrawals

\- Online key held by BitGo to confirm user withdrawals are within constrained limits in a set timeframe

zanetackett, Product Development of Bitfinex, confirmed that Bitfinex's offline key was not compromised. The attack was also not internal [1]. Another set of comments also suggested that BitGo limits were set in place by Bitfinex [2-3].

The automatic limits are designed to constrain BitGo from signing any transaction from Bitfinex that are irregular in volume or exceed a set amount in any rolling timeframe. Somehow they were bypassed. What we have currently suggests that the limits were too large or that BitGo was not enforcing the limits. BitGo and Bitfinex are also separate established entities, so that both of them being compromised for this attack is unlikely. An improper setup between Bitfinex and BitGo is more likely.

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4vtuxo/bitfinex_se...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4vtuxo/bitfinex_security_breach_trading_will_be_halted/d61pc44)

[2]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4vupa6/p2shinfo_sh...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4vupa6/p2shinfo_shows_movement_out_of_multisig_wallets/d61paqy)

[3]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4vtuxo/bitfinex_se...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4vtuxo/bitfinex_security_breach_trading_will_be_halted/d61qkll)

<comment><USER4> Somebody, one of these days, should design a cryptocurrency whose point is just to NOT get stolen.

<comment><USER5> I can't believe I'm saying this but: this is not a Bitcoin problem, per se. This is a Bitcoin _exchange_ problem. (Bitcoin has many security problems, in the same way that an overweight smoker has many health problems, but that doesn't mean that smoking caused the gunshot wound.)

It's possible to have customer balances of $60 million and not lose them. Thousands of businesses manage this. They suffer $5+ million dollars of damages in less than 0.1% of business-years. (SWAG on a reasonable upper bound-- ask an actuary. This is an insurable risk.) Bitcoin exchanges with this level of deposits sustain $5+ million dollars of damages 20%+ of exchange-years.

Running Bitcoin exchange probably requires $10 million a year in engineering and compliance costs, and consequential changes to the business model with an eye towards a) paying for the actual costs of running the business and b) compromising on other things that users/investors care about, like speed of withdraw, degree of engagement with the regulatory state, and growth rate. Instead of making that tradeoff, Bitcoin businesses continue trying to grow at 100%+ YOY on four, five, or six digit risk budgets. And this works... until it doesn't.

"How do we not transfer substantially all of our assets to fraudsters?" would be an acceptable job interview question _at the Medici bank in the early 15th century_. It was a solved problem _then._

<comment><USER6> It's as much of a Bitcoin problem as the ethereum DAO hack is a ethereum problem. In a normal banking system you just roll back the transaction, which often is possible. In Bitcoin, what's gone is gone.

<comment><USER7> Bitcoin has problems, but let's not pretend the normal banking system is unhackable, or even possible to roll back. One group did at least four thefts via SWIFT this year using RAT tools in banks, the largest of which netted $80M. Nothing rolled back, no one caught.

<comment><USER8> The important part is that the money lost was the Banks (or the insurance companies - it's unclear). $80m is not chump change, but it also isn't a catastrophic loss which gets passed on to savers.

Of course, understanding the difference between an exchange and a bank is worthwhile - but these guys getting rinsed repeatedly and taking out user wallets is a problem that can't be waved away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Whoa. A core BitCoin dev (maaku7) just suggested blacklisting those transactions in miners[0]. More to come, I'm sure.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4vupa6/p2shinfo_sh...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4vupa6/p2shinfo_shows_movement_out_of_multisig_wallets/d61oe33)

Yes, that's a scary precedent.

<comment><USER5> Oh that is _beautiful_.

So if you're playing along at home: the consensus Bitcoin chain is the longest one consistent with the rules of Bitcoin Core, the lineal descendant of the Satoshi client.

This consensus chain currently includes 1+ transactions T, which effected this theft.

The proposal is for a large number of miners to abandon the consensus chain and start mining a new chain at one transaction prior to T, replaying all real transactions minus T plus a new transaction which would moot T.

With enough hashpower, this chain eventually surpasses the current longest chain and at that point all points on network, not just mining cartel, will agree that T never happened.

This is supposed to be impossible because it is incentivize-incompatible, as the mining cartel would lose an incredible amount of segniorage to make it happen and it wouldn't be a sure thing. Point #2 is mooted by mining centralization, a ship which has sailed. Point #1 could get mooted by a payment outside the standard understanding of the Bitcoin protocol.

Comedy gold!

<comment><USER10> Someone further down the thread also mentioned a very good point in that the attackers could potentially start a bidding war against such a fork. They would have nothing to lose compared to a situation where the heist is reversed.

<comment><USER5> They have a fairly elegant mechanism to do so, too: just chain transactions from T to the addresses the miners send their coinbase transactions to. If miners go forward with the re-write history plan, the bribe gets undelivered, Back to the Future style.

It might be one of the first cases of bribery where the briber doesn't have to talk to the bribee to discuss the object of the conspiracy, the price, or how the bribe would be delivered.

<comment><USER10> Amazing.

<comment><USER5> Oh it gets better! The attackers can do things like entangle their stolen Bitcoin in systemically important institutions. Say, send 0.01 BTC to Coinbase. Coinbase is probably not operationally capable of separation that Bad Bitcoin from their Good Bitcoin before it's been comingled with customer funds. At that point, reversing T would _also_ invalidate consequential transactions by Coinbase, which is probably something they can't allow to happen, so _they_ would pay miners to not reverse.

Comedy. Gold!

<comment><USER10> It sounds like miners could find a replacement revenue stream even if block rewards go to zero and transaction fees are low: Hold the blockchain hostage for reversal and sell out to the highest bidder!

(Of course, this would likely drive the value of 1 BTC to exactly $0)

(Edit: This is all a demonstration of how the security of the blockchain absolutely depends on mining hashpower being widely decentralized and distributed)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As much as the joke about bitcoins "take the money and run" exchange business model is bandied about, how do people actually suggest securing exchange wallets?

I'm sure it's talked about, but I've never really found a straightforward explanation of how it should be done - is there even an agreed upon set of best practices? If so, why are these supposedly sophisticated exchanges not able to successfully apply them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, Sam here, CTO of BitMEX - we're a crypto derivatives exchange that's been open since 2014. When we founded BitMEX, we went through a long period of discussion among the partners on this topic. We were just coming off the low of watching the MTGox heist and it it was obvious that wallets were becoming the #1 point of failure on any exchange.

Ikeboy(sibling comment)'s explanation is as good as you'll get, in my opinion. And you can even skip steps 2 and 3, as we have done for two years on BitMEX.

It's our opinion that customer funds are simply too important to expose to this kind of risk, so we process withdrawals only once a day from airgapped multisig wallets. It's a bear, and it's slow - we developed a few internal tools to make the review process easier and separate signal from noise - <USER2> aside from some manual work we've never had a problem.

The #1 surprise, to me, was that customers don't mind the inconvenience. Sure, a few wonder why they can't simply get their funds immediately. But it's explained to them, they seem to appreciate the sensibility of managing this risk seriously. Compared to alternatives like ACH, at least it only takes one day and runs on weekends.

I can't imagine a nightmare worse than losing millions of dollars of other people's money. I hope for Bitfinex's sake that they are able to recover a portion and continue operating. We've spoken personally with much of the team and enjoy the relationship. They - and their customers - don't deserve this loss.

<comment><USER12> I know in the US you are used to ACH which is dreadful, but in the UK everyone is used to faster payments which allows you to send £100k to anywhere in the UK, often fee free, within 2 hours. Usually it's actually within a few seconds.

Waiting a day for a transfer now seems hilariously outdated now to me.

I understand there are other benefits to bitcoin but something seems inherently wrong if transfers have to be intentionally delayed so long to make the system more secure.

<comment><USER13> _I know in the US you are used to ACH which is dreadful, but in the UK everyone is used to faster payments which allows you to send £100k to anywhere in the UK, often fee free, within 2 hours._

My understanding is that the inconvenience of ACH is by design - they are security delays. If you need to send money from one account to another instantly, you use a wire. If you have the amount of money in your account that is typical of people that need to send wires, they are often freely included with your higher-end checking account. Wires send the money instantly.

<comment><USER14> They send instantly after you sign the document and fax it back, after the bank manager approves the large amount, etc. It still takes a few hours to do the paperwork in my experience.

<comment><USER15> A good bank will allow you to do wires directly from their internet banking suite (commonly requiring 2-factor auth before using their wire-related tools).

I commonly see wires hit within ~30 seconds of hitting the "confirm" button, and almost always within <=5 minutes, and that's between separate US banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's a sizeable chunk of the 21m BTC total that can ever be in existence...!

Are the destination wallet addresses for the heist visible in any block chain explorers? Would it even be possible to mix those coins or will they be impossible to spend as tainted?

<comment><USER16> yeah sure it is possible to spend that amount of tainted coins, and yes everyone knows where they are.

you can't send the tainted coins to an exchange or a bank, because they risk getting seized and your identity compromised

you can give someone the private key on a flash drive for goods, services, or an army.

you can move varying amounts to different addresses each for a different flash drive, to exchange for goods, services, or an army.

physical transfers wouldn't show up on the blockchain.

you can also mix them over time for whatever amount you need. $50,000 a day wouldn't be impractical.

and you can also build up your own bitcoin infrastructure yourself, start another bitcoin casino and all the players get paid out in your otherwise tainted coins

do an ICO for a new project and fund it with all your tainted coins, and others. most crowdsales - like Ethereum's - have one or two large investors amongst the little amounts everyone else contributes.

honestly all the transparency perks of the blockchain is just to rosy it up to regulators. but it undermines any and every capital control in existence.

<comment><USER17> That's a very nice remark by someone who clearly have a deep understanding of the BTC ecosystem.

(no sarcasm here, I totally agree that's what the ecosystem is like.)

> you can give someone the private key on a flash drive for goods, services, > or an army.

But for this part, what if the one who gives out the private key moves the coins later? That's not a finalized transaction at all if both side have the private key.

<comment><USER16> Yes that is a problem and it does involve trust.

Conceptually It can be alleviated with having the coins in multisig address where a third party creates one of the signing keys and the original thief retained one, and ideally the second recipient also had a third signing key. Still have the problem of getting the third signing key generated in a way that required no trust, in advance

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> More details: [https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@pseudonymwriter/bitfinex- hacked...](https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@pseudonymwriter/bitfinex-hacked-here- s-what-we-know-so-far)

</comment><comment><USER19> Prophetic comments about BitFinex from 11 months ago:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3igv0r/bitfinex_pr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3igv0r/bitfinex_pretty_sure_we_are_dealing_with_amateurs/)

<comment><USER10> If the accusations about how the entire exchange was built on a stolen ruby- on-rails source code leak is true..! Let's just say this is the money quote in that thread:

> "There is a good story here, waiting to be written by some investigative > journalist. Perhaps we will have to wait for some catastrophe before that > happens."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is how modern heist look like. You do not need guns anymore. Get keyboard, access to internet, learn, learn, learn and then get ~60 mil euros in one evening without going out of home stealing somebodies bitcoins.

<comment><USER14> And it's not directly physically violent! One could also argue that the people you're stealing from are mostly financial speculators too if it made one feel better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think it's time to give BitSquare a go. Distributed exchange, FLOSS, no single point of failure. Not suitable for fast trading due to transfer of real money on every trade, but totally fine if you just want to buy or sell cryptocurrency.

</comment><comment><USER22> Woo I trust these guys so much more than the Federal Reserve.

</comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like 1870s for bitcoin.

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

</comment><comment><USER24> Part of the beauty of start-ups is that anyone can start one. You don't have to have a 20 year vetted resume, a college degree, or extreme wealth. However this is a boom-a-rang that comes around full force when people expect financial and medical services being offered by start-ups to have the same quality as those created by people with 20 year vetted resumes, college degrees, and extreme wealth.

<comment><USER25> Honestly after the 2008 crash those highly résuméd old people start to look as untrustworthy as anyone, given a bunch of Respected Financial Institutions appear to have accidentally tanked the global economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If it turns out that BitGo did not properly enforce limits (as opposed to being hacked or ???), would they be liable for the losses?

<comment><USER27> I mean, liable for that much loss is going to be pretty meaningless at the end of the day because none of the actors would be able to cover the liability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Time for a hard fork ;)

</comment><comment><USER29> Still less than was stolen from the Federal Reserve recently.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/06/ny-fed-first-rejected- cyberhe...](http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/06/ny-fed-first-rejected-cyberheist- transfers.html)

<comment><USER30> But that money wasn't really stolen from the fed. It was stolen from somebody who had a fed account. We know exactly who lost money, and the answer isn't everybody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> For me the question is very clear:

1 - A monetary system without any regulation accessible online (i.e. Bitcoin) needs perfect security.

2 - There is no such thing as "perfect security".

Therefore: A monetary system without any regulation accessible online (i.e. Bitcoin) is deemed to fail.

</comment><comment><USER32> Time to buy. :)

Seriously, there is a curious coincidence with the BTC-driven pump and dump currently going on at the Etherium's dead chain.

Another curious coincidence is that the price started falling before the closure, as if someone did some insider trading.

<comment><USER33> Your comment reminds me of this:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> According to google, that's $62,129,412.80 US Dollar

</comment><comment><USER35> Oh dear - this should be interesting.

Seems like it is good advice not to invest more in Bitcoin than you can comfortably lose...

<comment><USER36> >Seems like it is good advice not to invest more in Bitcoin than you can comfortably lose...

Not losing bitcoin isn't any harder than not losing cash.

Problem here is people storing their coins with unqualified third parties.

<comment><USER37> How does one determine a qualified third party?

Obviously you can't go with "You can trust us, we know what we're doing"

You could find a party that is endorsed by someone going "You can trust them, They know what they are doing, Trust us on this, we know what we're doing"

But that just moves the point of concern.

Is there yet any "You can trust them, if we are wrong about that we will cover your losses" insurance. (even then how can you be certain they will follow through)

<comment><USER36> >How does one determine a qualified third party?

Surely you wouldn't store your cash in a bitcoin exchange? It's not a bank.

With bitcoin you don't even necessarily need a third party, a hardware wallet could do just fine. That can be stored in a safety deposit box if you feel like it.

>Is there yet any "You can trust them, if we are wrong about that we will cover your losses" insurance. (even then how can you be certain they will follow through)

While you can certainly insure anything if you pay enough, I don't think there's anyone publicly offering that in the crypto space. But then there doesn't seem to exist a similar mechanism for USD accounts of any significant size either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Let me guess - PHP?

</comment><comment><USER39> I have no skin at all in this game, but at this point I have to wonder why anybody is still investing in this, it's been one scam after another every six months for as long as BitCoin had been around. Is it all just the greater fool theory?

<comment><USER40> Shows the importance of server security.

And a reminder that no need to store your bitcoins online.

<comment><USER41> The NSA and Department of Defence have has documents leaked.

Major retailers leak tens of thousands of credit card numbers.

Banks routinely have embarrassing security holes.

The very building blocks these systems are built on have bugs that laid dormant for years (OpenSSL, Secure Transport)

Why does anyone still believe computer security is anything but an illusion?</comment></comment></comment>


Hey Internet, it's time to show a token of gratitude. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bug.gd/2008/05/27/solution-saved-you-time-show-a-token-of-gratitude-with-tipjoy/

<comment><USER2> I'm really excited about this. I don't know how many times the intertubes have answered my coding questions. Very often the answer is worth a lot, but there hasn't been an easy way to give back.

This could be a good reason for both those looking for answers and those giving them to go to <http://bug.gd>

<comment><USER3> I'm less excited about this. Tipjoy only lets you gather your tips after you've gotten up past $5 in tips.

Now, since bug.gd mentioned $0.10 tips in their post, only the very very prolific (and very very helpful) bug solution poster will ever have a chance of cashing in (and then only for an Amazon gift card). Everyone else will just have 0 to 50 cents lying around taunting them.

I understand why tipjoy does it the way they do - intrinsic micropayment issues and such. It just doesn't seem like a good way to get money to anyone but the popular bloggers/internet personalities.

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe people like leaving $10 tips for bug help...

<comment><USER2> The tip amount is up to the tipper. The default is $0.10, but you can set it up to $0.50. After you tip, there is a link to give more, where you can give quite a lot. You can change your tip amount here: <http://tipjoy.com/settings/>

So an active user of their site probably won't have to worry about accumulating enough to reach $5.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Devcenter Attacker video - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q000_EOWy80&feature=youtu.be

<comment><USER2> He says he did everything legally and he notified Apple of his pentesting, except he shows names and email addresses in the video itself. Pretty illegal I'd say.

<comment><USER3> Ummm... he possibly has his own definition of "legal". Apple did not gave him permission.

So the summary is: 1) He broke into Apple systems without authorization 2) He caused mayhem and chaos for Apple and its customers 3) He disclosed private information about individuals. In effect, this kid has a deathwish, because that's the only reasonable explanation - if I want to make any sense of his actions.

For a "security researcher", he didn't do much research on what's the usual outcome in these cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well thats sort of hillarious.

I'm guessing this is similar to what Weev was prosecuted for.</comment>


History of Windows Startup Sounds - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/10/24/windows-startup-sounds/

<comment><AUTHOR> Followed by Blue Screens of Death - <http://mashable.com/2012/10/25/microsoft- blue-screens/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Brings back memorable moments of waiting on my old desktop PCs to boot up.</comment>


Bachelors degree not enough? - <AUTHOR> http://edcorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=35&author=26 <comment><AUTHOR> Vinod Khosla is a very smart guy, maybe's he's not referrring to the software industry, but do you guys think there is a limit on what hackers can do with "just a bachelors."

This is sort of related to having a technical advantage on your competitors. How can startups that aren't from cutting edge PhD proposals or started by that rare star hacker (Bram Cohen, Wozniak, etc...) have real and sustainable technical advantage?

<comment><USER2> In the narrow sense you don't need ANY degree to be a brilliant entrepreneur. Having an advantage is independent of school. That's not to say that school is worthless, but "advantage" and "business degree" are not synonymous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Or is khosla saying every normal person needs to hone further to excel? I think there may be 1% born hackers. Now how will those 99% get on par and get sharper? Education may be the key. I understand it as a general statement

</comment><comment><USER4> "I actually don't think bachelor's is adequate for anything in today's world."

That guy is arrogant as hell.</comment>


Gesture Recognition with Line Integrals - <AUTHOR> https://justinmeiners.github.io/gesture-recognition <comment><USER2> Not sure what is intended, but it seems to have some bugs?

[https://assets.opentoken.com/sha256/N1ShZ7kcVmH_- auZEGaGOS_b...](https://assets.opentoken.com/sha256/N1ShZ7kcVmH_- auZEGaGOS_baJxgQTG2)

Ah nevermind, it's matching the curve against template fields so it makes sense that it would show the best match even when the match is poor.

<comment><AUTHOR> > best match even when the match is poor.

Yeah, a real application could have a score threshold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I created a method similar to this one for curve extrapolation based on sample curves. I took the second derivative of each point on the training data, added it's contributions to a vector field.

To extrapolate, you can take 'position' and 'velocity' of live data and integrate over the vector field to produce an extrapolation. I enjoyed the project and it worked fairly well. I think there's plenty of room for extension around this method.

</comment><comment><USER4> It was ridiculously hard to get 4 to work, is this a limitation of the algorithm or just something with the implementation?

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you draw your 4? The one I used is the "one stroke" 4 where you draw it from left, top, and then down.

<comment><USER4> I quickly realized variations of:

        │  │
        └--┤
           │

Weren't going to work so I switched to the style in the font:

         ╱│
        ∠--┼
           │

And it really liked to give 7, 6, or 2 if I went in the left,upRight,down pattern.

I think I found out the trick though: if you make a sharp 4 like the font you get random results but if you just make smooth loop of it (almost looks like a tilted roller coaster) it gets it every time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool but how is the math used to recognize gestures?

<comment><USER6> It appears to be a dot product of a vector field and the curve vector (i.e. a line integral).

I think this approach can't handle certain cases where a path is retraced in opposite directions, like with the handwritten letter 't' or 'i'. Perhaps curvature integrals could be added as well to improve it.

Overall seems to work quite well!

<comment><USER7> I think it works quite poorly: [https://imgur.com/a/oDpVkZ6](https://imgur.com/a/oDpVkZ6)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like you draw your digits differently. It's "trained" to my style. Try making your own glyphs and see how it does.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps, but how does that 9 I drew ever map to a 6?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think so. I draw my 9s by drawing the circle, and then the line down. Looks like you go the other way. This is all about direction and gesture as opposed to OCR.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How MooTools was built - <AUTHOR> https://betweenthewires.org/between-the-wires-mootools-7ac80d4ca28f#.tsiemucc9 <comment><USER3> Amazing that it have only been 10 years. I remember when i learned and focused on mootools because jquery seemed just so far away from actual js while eating away, then valueable, performance.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, and I still prefer Moo for my own projects because of how it extends javascript instead of replacing it (like jquery does).

Back when I was learning javascript (2006/2007) it seemed like Mootools was for people who had a good grasp on the language and wanted more from it. I appreciated this, and still think it's better at this than jquery.

I wish Moo had gotten more attention over the years. I get why jquery has done so well, but I don't like its methods.

<comment><USER5> I still maintain that MooTools was the superior system over jQuery.

jQuery won the war, in the end, because it catered to the 'get it up and running now' crowd over the 'do it right' crowd. It was always easier to understand off the bat, especially if you aren't a trained developer, while MooTools makes for a more long lasting, quality codebase.

<comment><USER6> No jQuery won the war because it fit with what JavaScript does in the browser while MooTools lost because it was part of the Java/OOP fad of "Well it has a new keyword so let's extend classes with it!" that has (thankfully) been rendered to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I still love MooTools. It should be where jQuery is with regard to mindshare. A lot of people didn't like the fact that it extended globals, but whatever it works well and you can easily build very complex systems with the class structure. I made this object pool using MooTools as an example on how to reuse instantiated objects [http://jsfiddle.net/XkTPJ/](http://jsfiddle.net/XkTPJ/)

<comment><USER8> I told myself recently that it's actually mootools who won. Most cool stuff mootools does on natives is now standard since ES5/6 - either in the exact same form or something similar. On the contrary, jQuery is consistently losing ground in favor of "vanilla js" (that is, babel, really).

Even if most frontend devs didn't use mootools, the way they code nowadays is very similar to what mootools was pushing for. This biggest difference I see being that we still don't have animations and requests as objects that can be reused (but css animations are probably more performant, and fetch + async/await is cooler).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't realize that so many of the React team had worked together, let alone on a project as well known as MooTools. Some of their answers mirror my perception of React, especially:

        We were so focused on the API design, rather than building
        something that people could actually use and adopt.

It's good that they found more people who shared their ideals and a company willing to give them the time to implement them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Gaah this brings me back! Mootools was how I initially learned Javascript. The Mootools source was so brilliantly written and well structured that it was breeze to follow. I learned a lot about advanced topics like animations, events and a lot of functional style programming. Learning jQuery afterwards was such a disappointment, and just seemed like a big hobbled mess of procedural style code.

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember the days when MooTools was hot^H^H^H^H useful enough to be bundled in Joomla.

Learning JavaScript while fiddling with it was really fun in 2009 when I was about to graduate from high school. Aaron Newton's jqueryvsmootools was an eye opener when I first read it and David Walsh's blog was really helpful in the early days.

I still like to follow some of its contributors (mainly Dimitar Christoff and Chris Pojer).

</comment><comment><USER12> Mootools have been my all time fav for really really long time and I always believed it will beat jQuery somewhere in future (which unfortunately never happened) but I am glad to see pieces coming together in React and see so many people from the team working on another project which not only picked up but swiped away most state of art projects.

</comment><comment><USER13> This brought back a lot of (good) memories for me. I was new to Javascript and picked up MooTools to help me with my first big project at work. Really glad to find out that a lot of the MooTools devs work on React now!

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, this takes me way back -- but that 'way back' was only 10 years ago. So much has changed in that span of time, it's mindboggling.

Around the time that MooTools appeared, Prototype and Dojo were the cutting- edge of DHTML, freshly made cool again by the term 'Ajax'. Prototype was very much a series of ugly hacks driven by the get-shit-done monkeypatching mentality of Rails, but it was fantastic. Meanwhile Dojo was fast-sprawling ecosystem of community and corportate contributions and plugins and whatnot, backed by a non-profit Foundation, and supported by major companies like IBM and Sun -- I can't firsthand speak to its quality (some have said it was quite good), but the contrast was night and day.

Script.aculo.us emerged built on top of Prototype to add tasteful interactivity (like DOM element dragging), and its branding targeted style- conscious developer-designers (the sort who'd read CSS Zen Garden but were tempted by JS). As the MooTools team noted, the weaknesses of Prototype started to show as its capabilities were pushed -- and it was getting kinda big. It was into this landscape that jQuery, Moo.fx, and MooTools arrived, and the rest is now ancient history.

There were many things that set jQuery and MooTools apart, but a notable one was their differring philosophies on extending native JS objects, or in contemporary parlance "extending the DOM". jQuery specifically didn't do this, while MooTools followed in the vein of Prototype and actually extended more builtins. Over time, this particular debate went from an implementation detail to a significant issue in the community -- a good example is this blog post from 2010, and its comment thread [1], to read both supporting and dissenting attitudes of the time.

I remember these early days of "mainstream Ajax" as being fairly annoying, but mostly because of browser vendors, and less so because of library authors. But today, that Ajax JS frameworks have been superseded by MV* JS frameworks, I actually find fewer substantive articles, blogs, and analyses that talk about the innards of frameworks and contrasting design decisions than I did back in those days.

Notwithstanding the issues about framework proliferation, most high-quality reviews, comparisons, and material is produced by first-parties (especially the authors of 'underdog' libraries), while very little is produced by the community. There was a LOT of cargo-culting back in 2007 too -- I know, I was one of those people -- but there's much more today. Whether this is because the most engaged people now tend to _contribute_ to projects instead of blogging about them, or because interest in deeper analysis has declined, I'm not sure. I miss it sometimes.

[1] [http://perfectionkills.com/whats-wrong-with-extending-the- do...](http://perfectionkills.com/whats-wrong-with-extending-the-dom/)

</comment><comment><USER15> What's with all the past-tense? MooTools still exists and is going strong.

...right?

</comment><comment><USER16> "Sebastian: My dad used to code C++ games for the Commodore 64,"

Huh?

<comment><USER17> (I'm "Sebastian".) It meant to read C. It definitely wasn't C++. However, now I'm curious if I'm confusing it with the later Amiga games. I'll need to look into this. I was 8 years old at the time. :) Note that this was for hobby projects many years after the original launch of those products - <USER2> mainstream dev.

<comment><USER18> C/C++ was much more common on the Amiga, although even C++ was rare until later in the Amiga's lifecycle.</comment></comment></comment>


Taking over Laravel Nova Admin Panel via an XSS Attack - <AUTHOR> https://cyberpanda.la/blog/taking-over-laravel-nova-admin-panel-via-xss-attack <comment><AUTHOR> While doing a penetration-test for a client we found a dangerous XSS in Laravel Nova version 1, sharing here the details so you can apply proper remediation if needed.</comment>


Vesting is a hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2012/04/vesting-is-a-hack/

<comment><USER2> Double acceleration is fine - don't be worried about future may-or-may-not- exist acquirers when you're getting started.

don't negotiate for them before you meet: they can negotiate some of it away if they want at the time of sale.</comment>


Intel AI open-sources library for deep learning-driven NLP - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/24/intel-ai-lab-open-sources-library-for-deep-learning-driven-nlp/ <comment><USER2> A while ago there was an article about creating a "wasteland" of unprofittability __around __your core business so to become the monopolist and extract the highest margin out of the industry.

The position of Intel/Nvidia is then quite simple, they will open source any model, dataset, toolkit, library, etc that makes use of their hardware. Training new AI will become simpler and simpler and they will extract high margin from selling the hardware.

What about Google instead? They have the data and the engineering knowledge to make complex AI works, however it seems quite unlikely that they will be able to drive the price of AI hardware down. Moreover they are charging quite a lot for the use of their custom TPU.

From this analysis it seems like Google is bound to fail in the long term in the AI race.

Am I wrong? Why?

<comment><USER3> Google can compete for the most influential/promising ML researchers with crazy salaries and be at the forefront of both best models as well as immediately putting them into their cloud offering for others to use. And their DNA revolves around ML whereas Intel's and NVidia's doesn't. Looking at past 5 years at Intel, they still don't get it; NVidia seems much more qualified and sensed the opportunity right away in a developer-friendly way, just doesn't have muscles Google does and their ML business model is right now under a threat of quick commodification - I'd be more worried about them than about Google to be honest. Google's only threat is that they will self-implode due to their inner culture and arrogance, but that's a long shot and they manage it better than SUN did.

<comment><USER4> The question is really whether those high salaries are achieving long-term payoffs. For certain things like image and audio processing, they've made some remarkable strides. However, many of those strides have to be remarkable to people outside the HN/AI community. For example, typing dog in Google photos and having it find pictures of your dog is great. However, when it misses a few and people notice that, they wonder why it's so bad. Almost as if Google should correctly identify 100% of them. Someone needs to sink the money into doing the grunt work of getting close to 100%, but the last few percent of improvement cost a lot of money. And to productize that to a user base of hundreds of millions of people is not cheap on the infrastructure, either.

<comment><USER3> I think one of the hiring strategies is not having those very talented people outside doing damage to them, rather inside even if inefficient/underutilized. They just need to be better than their competition and frankly, looking this week at what Amazon is offering they can continue being in that mode for quite some time.

General public more likely notices improvements in apps with immediate feedback like what Snapchat/Messenger is doing.

There are already models surpassing human cognition in many tasks, maybe the inferencing costs aren't economical yet?

<comment><USER5> I remember people ascribing this hiring strategy to Microsoft (back in the day): hiring up all the researchers to ensure there never was another Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looking forward to seeing the evaluation numbers!

I'm mostly curious about how their NER and parser compare against what I've implemented for [https://spaCy.io](https://spaCy.io) . I've tried the architectures they're using, and I've found they need very wide (and therefore slow) hidden layers to get competitive accuracy.

I'm sure they have _some_ evaluations, right? I mean you can't really develop these things without running experiments...

<comment><USER7> Also it seems like their reported NER is just serving up the spaCy NER.

"spacy_ner service which provides Spacy NER annotations." [0][http://nlp_architect.nervanasys.com/service.html](http://nlp_architect.nervanasys.com/service.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That title will make someone a proud winner of bingo.

</comment><comment><USER9> GitHub link - [https://github.com/NervanaSystems/nlp- architect](https://github.com/NervanaSystems/nlp-architect)

</comment><comment><USER10> The more interesting announcement is that Intel Nervana, already postponed multiple times, is again postponed to "late 2019".

One theory is that Intel Nervana outperformed Nvidia Pascal, but didn't outperform Nvidia Volta, so it couldn't be released.

</comment><comment><USER11> GitHub repos here: [https://github.com/NervanaSystems](https://github.com/NervanaSystems)

</comment><comment><USER12> so just another deep learning wrapper, or does it do anything significant not already done by 10 other more established libs?

</comment><comment><USER13> Link to repo?

<comment><USER14> [https://github.com/NervanaSystems/nlp- architect](https://github.com/NervanaSystems/nlp-architect)

It's not linked directly in the article but the article does mention the name of the software is "nlp-architect"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> An AI decided to open source something? Hmm... Perhaps it's trying to use humans to further advance itself...</comment>


A curated list of awesome lists of interview questions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MaximAbramchuck/awesome-interviews <comment><USER2> Leaving aside the question of whether such questions have a value for interviews in the first place, I want to talk about how awesome they are.

I scrolled down to a language I know and picked a random link: [http://www.careerride.com/C++-Interview-questions- Answer.asp...](http://www.careerride.com/C++-Interview-questions-Answer.aspx)

Those are inane multiple-choice questions written in broken English, the included answers explain neither why a choice is correct nor why the others are incorrect. The difficulty level is very low. There are few interesting open-ended questions, like "How should errors be handled in C++ ?" but the suggested answers are below anything a competent interviewee would say. I can see no reason why this specific link should be included in a "curated list of awesome".

MaximAbramchuck slapped the "Awesome" badge on that list. He even linked to the Awesome manifesto. Does MaximAbramchuck personally recommend the above link as an awesome list of C++ questions? Really?

And why? The Awesome manifesto requires curators to provide an explanation, to argue in favor of each item's inclusion. MaximAbramchuck, if you're reading this, why do you think this link is awesome?

<comment><USER3> Did the same with PHP: [http://phpinterviewquestions.co.in](http://phpinterviewquestions.co.in)

Also contains incomplete & incorrect information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't this sort of list of trivia the sort of thing the "interviewing is broken" meme refers to?</comment>


North Korea earns millions from army of online gaming hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/world/asia/05korea.html?_r=3

<comment><USER2> So they used bots?</comment>


Ask HN:  Market an iOS game using a free Android version? - <AUTHOR>

Is this a reasonable thing to do?<p>Would people still be willing to pay for an iOS version given that it is free on Android? <comment><USER2> Would they actually know it's free on android?</comment>


Microsoft Keeps Beating a Dead Browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/167862/microsoft_keeps_beating_a_dead_browser.html

<comment><USER2> That ie8-vomit-ad is funny AND sad.</comment>


Obama's Web Transparency: not for everybody - <AUTHOR> http://www.joedolson.com/articles/2009/05/obamas-web-transparency-not-for-everybody/ <comment><USER2> Actually, the whole premise that these guidelines would be binding on the White House isn't entirely clear; the White House and Congress are specifically exempted from many federal laws, including those that apply to other parts of the government.</comment>


Show HN: AI Powered Spaced Repetition Tool (Quiz Me AI) - <AUTHOR> https://quizme.ai <comment><AUTHOR> Hello!

I'm one of the creators of Quiz Me Ai.

Would love your feedback on what we're building!</comment>