Avast Anti-Virus for Mac Uses "Man in the Middle" Scheme to "Protect" You - <AUTHOR> https://itnerd.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/avast-anti-virus-for-mac-uses-man-in-the-middle-scheme-to-protect-you-yikes/

<comment> noir-york Er... yes. That's how nearly all web security products work. The only way for them to monitor (and filter) HTTPs content is the MITM + fake cert. This is done everywhere: from that websense or bluecoat proxy appliance at the office, to the boxes by someone like a Sandvine doing DPI on telco core networks.

Of course, this is unacceptable - but there are very few alternatives. For the record, we - rawstream - don't do this as its crazy to compromise security like this. So we had to find other means.

<comment><USER2> > Of course, this is unacceptable - but there are very few alternatives. For > the record, we - rawstream - don't do this as its crazy to compromise > security like this. So we had to find other means.

So, then you're using extensions, BHOs, API hooking, or some combination thereof depending on platform?

<comment> noir-york Yes - any method that allows us access to HTTPs page content without compromising security.

Setting up MITM + certs is a PITA for most admins so we've tried (and I believe succeeded) in making deployment faster/simpler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Found this from this[0] post, which contains the second part[1]

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643857)

[1][https://itnerd.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/avast-responds-to- my...](https://itnerd.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/avast-responds-to-my-post- about-their-anti-virus-product/)</comment>


Advice for Ph.D. students from Tony Hoare [video] - <AUTHOR> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3777256219801905839&hl=en#

<comment><USER2> Could someone who's watched it summarize what he discusses.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank you for that. Very good advice actually, especially the first part of mentioning the merit of other works.

On a side note, does anyone have good advice of how to motivate yourself while in PhD studies? I am now in year three and have lost all my drive due to the "broken academic" environment.

<comment><USER4> Every environment is broken in some way or other. Try to make it work for you to do what you want as well as you can. I personally am inspired by all the work that Charles Babbage tried to do and managed to do more than a century ago without having his dream (a computer) at his disposal. Remember, a modern desktop or laptop computer would be a super-computer worth millions of dollars just say 25 years ago. Just imagine what Babbage would give to be in your shoes. So if you own a computer, your environment isn't completely broken. Do the best with the tools you have.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for that.</comment></comment></comment>


New documentary #killswitch exposes media consolidation and government collusion - <AUTHOR>

#killswitch The Battle over the Internet Educator and Writer Chris Dollar is teaming with filmmakers Ali Akbarzadeh and Jeff Horn of Akorn Entertainment to create the full-length documentary #killswitch.   They are raising funds on KickStarter.com to produce the documentary so they can educate the Western world about the fact that big corporations will continue to have more and more control over our news and Internet… unless we do something now.
 Check out the trailer and learn how to become involved in this project here: (#killswitch trailer) (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-documentary-film?ref=live) ____________________________________________
Everyone who is a regular to Hacker News knows we have a culture of corruption in Washington and are in desperate need of media reform and legislation protecting Net Neutrality.  So, why does mainstream media ignore the massive amounts of corruption and collusion between large corporations and big government, while also ignoring the issues of Net Neutrality and media reform? Simply put, the mainstream media has much to lose and nothing to gain in opening up this can of worms. In fact, the largest media conglomerates in the United States are among the most influential players in American government and benefit substantially from their political connections and an American public that's generally unaware of what's going on behind the media curtain.
One of the biggest corruptive practices in American policy over the past 30 years has been the unregulated merging of the media conglomerates. The Big Six (General Electric, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS) have become so large that the vast majority of what most Americans see, hear, or read has either been produced in their film studios, broadcast on their television stations, printed in their magazines, heard on their radio stations, transported through their broadband, or read on their websites.   This monopolization of media power has not only been unchecked by the U.S. government, it is actually promoted. It wasn't always this way.  Our founding fathers knew that an independent and diverse media was essential to a functioning democracy.  They knew that in a democracy, knowledge and information couldn't be controlled by only a handful of professional print makers.  Instead, there needed to be dozens of different venues where Americans could report and receive the news.  The U.S. government promoted this diversity and vitality by heavily subsidizing the media in the first 100 years after the birth of our country.  In fact, there was great consensus in support of these massive subsidies, regardless of political party.  Political leaders from Jefferson and Madison to Hamilton and Adams all agreed that government-funded subsidies were essential to a vibrant and diverse media.
The U.S. government did not favor one form of political content over another.  All newspapers, regardless of political content (conservative or liberal), were treated equally by the U.S. Post Office (which was essentially the Internet of the late 18th and 19th centuries), and all news was delivered throughout the nation at a special subsidized rate, costing the print makers next to nothing to send information out to the broad American electorate.  As a result of the Post Office subsidies, news papers flourished in our nation's first 100 years. It was quite common in this era to have dozens of independent newspapers delivered to every major town across the country.  American citizens were well informed and possessed many choices for news content and political perspective.
Flash forward to the year 2011.  Most cities and towns are fortunate to have two competing newspapers, much less two dozen.  Television and radio ownership is even more alarmingly concentrated in the United States.  It is simply not in the interests of the Big Six to spend any time discussing the moral hazards of this monopolization.  Instead, they continue to merge without much debate, dialogue, or criticism in congress, amongst the American people, or of course, the traditional media itself.
We do, however, have the Internet, where alternative media and consumer rights groups thrive and attempt to hold the politically and economically powerful accountable.  But alas, these same media conglomerates are now looking to dominate the Internet, and are increasingly successful in doing so.  In January of this year, the largest media company in the United States, NBC-Universal (owned by GE), merged with the largest ISP, Comcast, to become the biggest vertically-integrated media conglomerate in the history of the United States.  (Suspiciously, neither, NBC-Universal nor its news affiliates provided much coverage of the deal…)
The merger was blessed by the FCC despite warnings from numerous consumer rights groups and academics.  These groups rightly feared that if ISPs owned content, they would be tempted to give it preferential treatment over competing content.  They also argued that NBC-Comcast would be commercially incentivized to impede or block the flow of content and information from competitors.
Not surprisingly, no one in the traditional media lifted an eyebrow when FCC Commissioner Meredith Baker resigned her position to become the top lobbyist for Comcast shortly after lobbying to expedite its merger with NBC four months prior.
We have seen this collusion between big government and big industry in every regulatory agency in Washington; top government officials routinely cash out to become executives at the agencies they were "regulating" in the first place. Then, after making millions in the private sector, they go back to "regulating" their buddies again.  The documentaries Food Inc. and Inside Job have done excellent jobs of describing this phenomenon in the food and banking industries.  But after over 30 years of corruption, kickbacks, and mergers, the full-length documentary exposing this behavior in our media industry has yet to be made.
There are nearly 300 million Americans who have to learn about and get involved in these issues. The best way to do this is through education and awareness. We must speak the language of the people, which is television and film. Unfortunately, as you know, the Big Six are the gate keepers of these industries. But that doesn't have to be the case. With crowd-funding, we can turn this hierarchy upside down and give the language back to the people.
I, along with many of my friends and a film production company called Akorn Entertainment, are trying to do just that. We're creating a full length documentary film that aims to expose the widespread political corruption between the media industry and government.  It's called #killswitch (link). #killswitch is an in-depth, highly analytical and entertaining documentary that will attempt to make sense of the issues concerning the media, Internet, and democracy in the 21st century.  In the course of the film, Akorn will interview a wide array of academics, activists, and citizens as well as political and business elites in order to get an in depth and entertaining analysis of where we are, where we've been, and where we're heading. Our goal is for #killswitch to be funded entirely by individuals, since citizens have the most to gain or lose in the battle over the Internet.  To see our trailer and our current fundraising, check out our (kickstarter page - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-documentary-film?ref=live.   Read our treatment and check out more details about our project here: www.killswitchthefilm.com.  For a sampling of previous work our film company has done, click here: www.akorn.tv.
We look forward to partnering with YOU in creating a film that educates and informs the American public on these important issues.
Sources for this article include: Bagdikian, Ben.  The Media Monopoly								         Free Press. <http://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart/main> 				   Lessig, Lawrence.  Remix								     McChesney, Robert and John Nichols. The Death and Life of American Journalism.		              Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion						                                     Wu, Tim. The Master Switch <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the link where my article was originally posted:

[http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/11/06/14/killswitch- and-...](http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/11/06/14/killswitch-and-battle- over-internet)

It will probably be easier to read there, because it's long.

</comment><comment><USER2> This collusion between big government and big industry must end. The only way we can do it right now is through great art like #killswitch. Let's turn this hierarchy upside down. I really appreciate your sense of urgency in this post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks airey!!!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Post the article elsewhere and link to it. It is too long to be read in mid grey on light grey.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice mooism2!

Here's the link the article I wrote:

[http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/11/06/14/killswitch- and-...](http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/11/06/14/killswitch-and-battle- over-internet)</comment></comment>


GM says it will put fleets of self-driving cars in cities in 2019 - <AUTHOR> http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/mobility/2017/11/30/gm-will-put-self-driving-car-fleets-raod/108164014/ <comment><USER2> > The automaker is using the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt as its autonomous > mule

Wonderful.

Has anyone tried the Bolt yet? I think Bolt is turning out to be what Tesla Model 3 was intended to be... it's cheap, electric, rides excellently, and looks pretty slick. One of the best things about it is the top-view, which is a god-send when it comes to parallel parking: [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5kei2BVFGb8/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5kei2BVFGb8/maxresdefault.jpg)

It seems really innovative in lots of clever ways. For example the "one pedal driving" is neat (push the pedal to go.. and when you take your foot off the pedal, the car slows down, the point being that you basically stop using brakes and save energy that way).

<comment><USER3> While the tech and features are pretty great, I think many disagree with it looking slick. I'm in the market right now, but I could never see myself driving a Bolt. I'm stuck waiting several years for a model 3 to get an EV with actual aesthetics (that isn't 100k+).

<comment><USER2> I honestly really like Bolt's look, and not because it "stands out" as being electric. I like crossovers (Prius, Impreza, etc.) and I think this one has great aesthetics. I like model 3 less, but that's just me.

Different strokes for different folks hey.

(but I will concede on one thing if we're talking about pure aesthetics: Tesla's "T" logo is really cool, Chevrolet's "+" is anything but. I honestly think they should change the logo. As established as that brand and logo may be, they should be targeting the newer generation... "Chevrolet" definitely does not scream cool to anyone born in the last 40 years)

<comment><USER4> Cross-overs are pretty popular. There was an article not too long ago about how they pretty much all blend in together.

The Bolt looks more like European cars than what we imagine 'American' cars looking like (though that has changed over the decades). We'll see many more like it as more people move to cities but still need cars.

Yeah, Chevy doesn't scream cool. I've had an Acura since 2003 and _knock on wood_ will drive it until it's dead. I wouldn't put as much stock in an American-made car to last as long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cruise Automation's software is a sloppy collection of special cases, coded by hand. We write ad-hoc rules to handle each situation we observe.

We don't really develop any neural networks ourselves. We use what we can get off GitHub: freely available research and school projects that we paste together, often without understanding them.

We use ROS ([http://www.ros.org](http://www.ros.org)). ROS is not reliable for a timing-critical automotive system. That's why our cars drive so slowly/cautiously and stop so abruptly/frequently. It's because we're always on the verge of reacting late and hitting something.

Our technology is not "real" in the way that Waymo's technology is real. We build demos and promote them in the media. That's the truth.

Am I proud of this? No. But GM is paying for my house in San Francisco, so...

<comment><USER6> What's the status of this ROS 2 real-time proposal [http://design.ros2.org/articles/realtime_proposal.html](http://design.ros2.org/articles/realtime_proposal.html)

What sort of structure would make more sense than the ad-hoc rules?

Do you have comprehensive profiling for the latency or logging so you can detect when there is a lag and then patch ROS or the TCP stack or whatever is causing it?

I can see how reliability is critical, but whether it is so important to be actually real-time is less obvious. If you can get latency variability down to within about 1 ms, is that not adequate to greatly exceed human capability?

I guess when it comes down to it there needs to be some certainty that there cant be a big hiccup that creates a big latency spike. So whatever underlying Linux or whatever needs to be real-time in that sense. And there needs to be a real-time backup system that cuts in if the other system takes too long to react (hits a hiccup which it is not supposed to be able to).

I mean, if your idea is to throw everything out and start over with a real- time OS and some bespoke NNs, is it quite certain that any team would actually be able to replicate the task integration and actual functionality of the system you have with that approach?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's the slideshow that accompanied GM's presentation to investors yesterday. It's a breezy read:

[https://www.gm.com/content/dam/gm/events/docs/5265893-685163...](https://www.gm.com/content/dam/gm/events/docs/5265893-685163-Chartset-11-30-2017)

Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, in his part of the talk repeatedly emphasized the efficiency of their validation process that contributes to their high rate of improvement. Every outside indicator suggests Cruise really is moving faster toward their goal than anyone else.

Vogt also repeatedly emphasized that they have a mountain of engineering challenges still ahead of them before they're ready for an initial commercial deployment. They're rapidly scaling up testing, and hope to drive 1 million miles/month by the end of 2018. For Comparison, Waymo just announced they've done 4 million miles testing on public roads total, since 2009.

<comment><USER8> oh, they're lidar based. those sensors are super costly.

<comment><USER9> FTA: "GM says the cost of the next-generation lidar will be cut by about half to $10,000."

<comment><USER7> That's a misquote. Lidar is down to $10k from $90k. With the acquisition of Solid state lidar startup Strobe, they hope to get the costs down to ~$300. It's not clear if that's a per-unit cost, or a per-vehicle cost.

For sensors Cruise's Bolts currently use 14 cameras, 3 articulating radars, 8 regular radars, 5 Velodyne32 ultrapuck Lidar units, and 10 ultrasonic proximity sensors.

<comment><USER8> 5 lidars! wow

<comment><USER10> That's what Waymo's little bug-like car had. One in front, one in back, one on top, and one below each side-view mirror. Full coverage.

LIDARs are getting cheaper. Continental, the big auto parts maker, bought Advanced Scientific Concepts and is preparing to bang out low-cost LIDAR units in quantity.

Color TV cameras were once insanely expensive. This is the RCA TK-41, the first good color TV camera.[1] Each image orthicon alone (it used three) was about $10,000 in the 1950s. The camera in your phone costs about $10 and far outperforms a TK-41.

[1] [http://www.earlytelevision.org/rca_tk-41.html](http://www.earlytelevision.org/rca_tk-41.html)

<comment><USER11> Flash LIDARs have some serious problems:

They require extremely high power outputs since the beam spreads out. This limits the range significantly but also makes it so that you need very powerful lasers, and the only way to make that eye safe is to use 1550nm light, which requires InGaAs photodetectors, which are much more expensive. In addition, you usually need SPADs which have very high noise levels. You can reduce this noise somewhat by cooling them, but that's very expensive and infeasible for automotive applications m

<comment><USER10> That's what I thought when I visited Advanced Scientific Concepts in 2003 and saw the prototype optics working on an optical bench. They pointed the thing out an overhead door and imaged the parking lot. It worked. But it was too big and too expensive for the 2004-2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Over time, ASC units got smaller, range and resolution improved, but pricing remained around $100K. Then Continental, the European auto parts company, bought ASC. Continental's units are smaller, cheaper and more rugged.[1] They haven't announced a price point yet, but being a major automotive parts manufacturer, they know how to get the price down on something when they make it in volume.

Continental is quietly coming out with all the parts for self-driving cars. They make the sensors, actuators, and high-reliability computers. They work on the little stuff, too, such as systems for cleaning the sensors while in use. All the things you need to do it, instead of just prototype it.

[1] [https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Landing- Pages/C...](https://www.continental-automotive.com/en-gl/Landing- Pages/CAD/Automated-Driving/GlobalHighlights/3D-Flash-Lidar)

<comment><USER11> Again, it's not like they don't work, but the point is that it's hard to shrink and make cheaper while retaining good performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I fear that we are moving towards a future that is shaped by monopolies (or the "digitalisation" supports monoposlistic strategies). If you read the slides, you notice that GM understands that by controlling everything (manufacturing the car, supply chain, the app) it makes more profits. I think that there is a trend in many industries towards monopolies, if you for example look at amazon or google. I don't think it's healthy and I am convinced that there is not enough awareness to tame these giants.

<comment><USER13> Vertical integration shouldn't be an outright concern. Even if GM can integrate its entire supply chain, if they're still competing with other companies the consumer should come out alright in the end.

If monopolies start to hurt consumers then we can hope that the anti-trust regulators will step in, and hopefully in the case of a car manufacturer the anti-trust violations would be well defined enough for regulators to actually act.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This will be a blow to Tesla if old dinosaurs are able to execute and deliver smoothly without all this hype and bs

<comment><USER15> To be fair, though: this is literally the definition of hype and BS. GM is just saying what they're going to do. I mean, yeah, if it works then Tesla and Waymo are probably toast. But if Tesla and Waymo haven't made it work yet, what are the serious odds you're putting on General Motors catching up and passing them within two years?

<comment><USER7> GM is already ahead of Tesla in vehicle autonomy. It's even debatable as to whether GM is ahead of Waymo. Waymo is poised to deploy first in Phoenix, but they haven't even begun serious testing in dense urban areas, which are far more challenging and where Cruise is focused and making headway. GM may or may not achieve it's targets on time, but without question they are putting their money where there mouth is.

GM is the most vertically integrated and they're showing very good progress relative to the competition, they're in the best position to deploy at scale. Their acquisition of Cruise was money well spent. GM has a legit opportunity to achieve dominance.

And really, if anybody is spreading hype and BS about autonomous vehicles it's Tesla. Developing an autonomous OS to minimum viable product is a ~5 year job, depending on how well or poorly things go.

Musk was tweeting in the spring that they'd be able to demonstrate L5 capabilities on underpowered hardware by the end of this year. Which is total bullshit. Many car companies are making nebulous claims about when they expect to achieve autonomous capabilities, but Tesla lied outright to get people to reserve their Model 3 orders.

<comment><USER16> > Waymo is poised to deploy first in Phoenix, but they haven't even begun > serious testing in dense urban areas

I've seen Waymo cars in SF around Market st, near Dolores Park and near Noe Valley. I assume that they're also testing heavily in their main cities, so (anecdotally) I don't think this is accurate.

<comment><USER7> Waymo has been in and out of San Francisco since the beginning, but as far as I know it's not full-scale testing in preparation for a deployment. Waymo either is, or has been in 14 different cities, but their primary focus is in Phoenix.

<comment><USER17> >their primary focus is in Phoenix.

For the level 4 driverless tests, yes. GM isn't even close to L4 driverless testing yet.

Also, Waymo has gathered enough road data that they're doing accelerated testing in simulation now. I think you might be underestimating the complexity of the self driving car tech when doing your comparison.

<comment><USER7> The subject here isn't GM's in-house autonomous development program (Supercruise), it's their subsidiary Cruise Automation, who has been doing L4 testing for at least 18 months now. Cruise Automation began in 2013 as a silicon valley robotics start-up, and was acquired by GM in early 2016.

Cruise is also using simulation. They mentioned in their presentation yesterday that they have 3 simulation engines, and together they do 150 simulations/minute. I'm not sure exactly what that means but simulation is an integral part of their validation process just like with Waymo.

<comment><USER17> My point is that your comparing progress by measuring the number of cities they're in is senseless, because at a certain point road data stops and simulations take over.

Also, GM nor Cruise have launched _driverless_ L4 testing yet, which Waymo was the first company (ever) to do last month:

[https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/11/fully-driverless- cars-a...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/11/fully-driverless-cars-are- here/)

<comment><USER18> My understanding is that "driverless testing" here means either (1) moving the safety driver to the back seat or (2) following the vehicle with a second vehicle with a remote kill switch.

Thanks for posting that link though, I've been curious to read more about this.

"""At first, most of Waymo's driverless cars will have an employee in the back observing the vehicle's behavior. If something goes really wrong, they'll be able to push the "pull over" button to stop the car."""

<comment><USER17> Yes, _driverless_ testing involves having a passenger function that where the passenger can request that the car pull over at the next available spot.

I'm not sure why you're splitting hairs on that though, when there's a definitive difference between having testing with someone in the driver's seat and _not_ having someone in the driver's seat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Has the issue that self-driving cars have with snow been solved? Half the country would like to know.

<comment><USER20> I'd buy a self driving car that just doesn't work in bad conditions.

The bigger question is "has the self driving issue been solved in clear conditions." Is there any real evidence someone has a self driving car that is better than human drivers?

I see a lot of promises.

<comment><USER21> There is a wide range of ability when it comes to driving cars, these don't have to be better than everyone to be useful, just better than the worst drivers, which I think it's clear they already are.

<comment><USER22> If all the car reviewers get their hands on it and say it's like a timid person lost in downtown Baltimore driving a uhaul truck it's gonna crash and burn

You have to do something well to redeem that or sales will be a flop. It doesn't look like self driving cars will be much cheaper, better handling, cheaper to own or more luxurious than normal car so the only thing left is for them to drive as better than most people.

The kind of review you want is "this thing costs $10k more than a Prius but being able to sleep off a hangover on your way to work is worth every bit of that $10k"

<comment><USER21> Self-driving cars will first be deployed in fleets that you can request, where the cost of the cars will be amortized over the many people who get to make use of them, making them far cheaper than owning, operating and parking the car. Much of this margin will probably be captured by the self-driving car companies for the near future, but in the long term with a competitive market they should be far cheaper than current cars for the vast majority of users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Competition is a wonderful thing. I might never need to buy another car!

</comment><comment><USER24> Another chapter in the super interesting story of the GM vs Tesla battle. Part of me wants to compare Tesla to strategies of companies who needed more established companies to compete with to generate higher demand, yet still had the best product and came out ahead.

But wonder if GM could pull ahead since it has more of a history of mass producing things, and all the infrastructure around that all built. Time will tell.

<comment><USER25> The possibility is there, but one might also have imagined that Microsoft, Nokia, and Blackberry would be dominating the smartphone market today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A rolling fleet could be amazing.

If say a typical car/insurance payment was ~$500 a month, and an on-demand auto car service was $499 a month or less, it could work.

You never have to park. You can work/browse/call on the ride. Get dropped off right in front of wherever you're going. Could work out really awesome.

<comment><USER27> This is somewhat of a nightmare scenario for city governments due to the properties of induced demand.

A rolling fleet of self driving cars eliminates many of the deterrents to driving. No parking, storage, and insurance costs and one doesn't even need a license. Elimination of all these costs could significantly incentivize people to choose driving as their primary form of transportation, which would significantly increase vehicle traffic and all the associated costs and problems that come along with that.

<comment><USER28> You are still going to have peak hour traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is Comma_ai's(via George Hotz) take on the relative GM investor presentation: [https://www.pscp.tv/w/1vOGwNgwBQRKB](https://www.pscp.tv/w/1vOGwNgwBQRKB) [direct periscope link]

<comment><USER30> In which George does not understand corporations and investor presentations.

Disclaimer: I work for GM, but not on any of this.

<comment><USER7> I would frame this as comedy rather than any kind of serious analysis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The one thing that keeps me from believing this will happen is GMs history of shooting itself in the foot. They have amazing engineering and design capabilities but deliver low quality cars. Their lineup has had (and has) some exceptions, but generally I avoid them.

It's why I hope GM does not delivers on this statement. Their quality track record[1] doesnt inspire me confidence.

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

</comment><comment><USER32> Do we definitely already know it's going to be possible to deploy self-driving cars in an economically meaningful way?

<comment><USER33> Yes, and that's without accounting for the cost reduction of reduced accidents.

<comment><USER32> Can you provide some evidence? I'm not being snarky. I genuinely don't know how we know this will work.

<comment><USER33> We see a lot of back-of-the-envelope math about total costs. Eg FastCompany has a post [1] that suggests total costs today [with more-or-less publicly available equipment] would be about $300k.

I think if it remained north of $200k, it would be viable for kind of specific applications [eg truck driving] where you're replacing modestly compensated workers over many years. [truck drivers have a median compensation of $40k by a quick search, and hopefully the equipment would have an average expected lifespan of >5 years with nominal maintenance]

However, multiple companies at this point are claiming very inexpensive LiDAR units [2] [3].

If you assume costs drop to $100k [including maintenance] for a self-driving car, now three years of driving a truck would pay for itself [and taxis wouldn't be far behind].

In [1], analysts estimate costs will be down to $10k total by 2025. At that point, car ownership will be dramatically different. Analysts discuss the confluence of electrification, servicification [of rides], and self-driving cars to be kind of unpredictable. Each of these would be a massive shakeup for the industry, and the combination will be pretty interesting to watch.

[1] [https://www.fastcompany.com/3025722/will-you-ever-be-able- to...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3025722/will-you-ever-be-able-to-afford-a- self-driving-car)

[2] "Reduced cost of LiDAR by 99%" [https://medium.com/kylevogt/how-were- solving-the-lidar-probl...](https://medium.com/kylevogt/how-were-solving-the- lidar-problem-8b4363ff30db)

[3] Waymo claims <$10k: [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo- invests-i...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo-invests-in- lidar-technology-cuts-costs-by-90-percent/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Would you invest in a car as of today, knowing that in a few years US, JP, AU and EU (at least) will have driverless cars as a service?

Hm, maybe I'm rushing it a bit.

<comment><USER35> the thing stopping people from switching from car ownership to using a car service is probably not the presence of a driver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm happy that progress is being made. I'm not excited as a person who likes driving to be sharing the road with a bunch of computers. I'm not worried that they'll crash into me. I'm more concerned that they will be in my way.

<comment><USER37> On the other hand, I'm happy that as a cyclist I won't have to worry about drivers using their phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> So what's the best open source self-driving-car platform ?

</comment><comment><USER39> The secret history of GM's Chinese bailout [https://qz.com/594984/the-secret- history-of-gms-chinese-bail...](https://qz.com/594984/the-secret-history-of- gms-chinese-bailout/)</comment>


Tips for Graduate EEs (relevant for software) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daxit0dupF0&list=PLCF57EF884076F6B2&index=1

<comment><AUTHOR> The TL;DW #1. Dilbert is Real - don't expect a job where it's "100% fun stuff". You have to fight for the cool design work.

#2. Always work on your own projects, don't rely on your job for your design satisfaction.

#3. While you're young, get a "one man band" job.

#4. Move around a lot / change jobs.

#5. Never, ever be afraid of losing your job

</comment><comment><USER2> Great! Tip #1, "Dilbert is Real" How painful, but true. :-)</comment>


The Mathematics of the Manhattan Project  - <AUTHOR> http://math-blog.com/2013/07/08/the-mathematics-of-the-manhattan-project/

<comment><USER2> Could it be that the bombs, as their purpose was to be very destructive, required little in the way of safety evaluation other than accidental triggering (not insignificant :) and that they were purportedly very simple devices?

FMEA and safety related strands are a major component of modern day similarly sized projects. Even to the point of preventing them from ever being completed.

An apt metaphor might be the automobile. If it were invented, afresh, today would it be even remotely similar? And what is the ratio of the cost of developing the first viable automobiles compared to the cost of today's relatively minor iterations, per functional unit delivered? Miniscule I imagine.</comment>


As Mass Timber Takes Off, How Green Is This New Building Material? - <AUTHOR> https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-mass-timber-takes-off-how-green-is-this-new-building-material <comment><USER3> The correct term is CLT (cross laminated timber). A big chunk of Katerra's recent big financing is to pay for CLT factories.

The cool thing about CLT is that it can be "printed" in arbitrary shapes and sizes in a factory setting and shipped to construction sites for rapid assembly. Structurally it can replace steel/concrete in a certain range of structures.

The potential for automation and mass customization is absent from the article and the most exciting aspect of CLT.

Factory prefabrication may also be a way to reduce construction costs and schedules in expensive areas like SF.

<comment><USER4> Came here to say this, I've heard it called 'glue lam' also.

Who the hell thought up the mass timber name though?! That just says to me a solid (mass) of unengineered wood.

<comment><USER5> I guess they mean the main structural mass is timber-based? It's really odd terminology but might simply crop up from details of the field's lingo which makes no sense to outsider.

Apparently CLT and gluelam are different methods of engineering wood: in CLT the boards are laminated in cross-frames (so one layer is laid north-south and the next is east-west) to improve structural resistance across non- longitudinal orientations; while for gluelam all layers have the same orientation so the end-result is closer in behaviour to regular sold timber.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I would guess constructions like this make use of both gluelam and CLT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would like to know more about the long term stability of the glues involved and how the entire structure as a whole decays / fails over what timeframes under what exposures.

Most other building materials in use today, the actual core structural elements, have withstood the test of centuries of use and are well proven and stable technologies.

<comment><USER4> Centuries? Reinforced concrete is 150 years old, steel frame construction a little less so.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but we have concrete buildings still standing from Roman times - <USER2> famously, the Pantheon.

I grew up in a cottage a couple of hundred years old, with thick walls built from stone and mortar. It's not unusual to live in a house that's over a century old in Europe.

I've also lived in a wooden house - more of a three room + toilet chalet, really. Biggest irritations were all the noises from thermal expansion in the summer, and the fact rats could eat their way in. I think it's a bit more effort to actively maintain wood and be sure it's in good condition than brick and concrete construction.

That cottage, btw - the roof had a wood frame, but it wasn't the original - that had burned down along with the thatch at least once, and been replaced some time before we moved in.

<comment><USER8> Roman concrete doesn't have the same chemistry as modern concrete.

<comment><USER9> And, Roman concrete doesn't have steel rebar which rusts and cracks the concrete.

<comment><USER10> Eh, properly done reinforced concrete should last hundreds of years.

Of course it's possible to use the wrong concrete formula for the job (the concrete for your driveway is not the same as the concrete for a boat ramp) but if done right it should last.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny that this topic is coming up, we're currently in the execution of building a house made of this material. We did choose the CLT because of the spruce interior look. But not all walls are like that. Most part will be covered by clay plaster. This should also help with soundproofing.

As for the glue. We asked the producer and they use a glue which has no negative side effect when finished hardening but is not that nice to breath while being in production.

Apparently there are no better glues. Another option would be to use only wood, but this is not CLT, it has another name, but the same result. The difference is that the interior has to be covered by something because the wall looks rough. And it costs a little more.

Termites are no problem in Europe and leaking water is a problem in every type of house, but it won't go undetected for long.

As we live in areas with houses made of wood around 300 to 500 years ago and those houses still standing and being ok, I plan our home to be here for the same amount of time :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Termites are going to love this ;-)

Even with termite treated lumber, they will still need annual inspections to look for damage. If they do find out the structure is laden with termites, it would most likely require a complete evacuation of the building and "tenting" to gas them out - which might be tricky if it's in an urban area.

Also, any undetected leaks in the structure could cause slow rotting of the wood.

<comment><USER13> Concrete rots away if it is not protected properly from water. It soaks up water, the rebar rusts, expands, and splits the concrete.

<comment><USER14> There are different kinds of concrete and there are some that are specially made to be used in such conditions. Best example will be concrete bridge supports which are constantly in the water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would this not be just another form of kicking the can? In particular once these buildings are demolished and replaced with new ones, I don't imagine that the old wood would (or even could) be reused. Instead it'd be sent to a landfill and decay at which point its stored carbon would be released.

In favor of this regardless. Wood is so much more pleasant on the eyes, and creating an incentive for huge sustainable forests is an awesome thing any way you look at it. But unless I'm missing something, framing this as something that could effectively mitigate against increasing emissions seems to be misleading.

<comment><USER16> > Instead it'd be sent to a landfill and decay at which point its stored > carbon would be released.

Even then it's still carbon neutral. Or am I missing something?

Or, since carbon is gonna be released anyway, we could burn it and make some energy as a bonus.

<comment><USER17> Apart from the energy used in harvesting, transport and construction (if not carbon-neutral), yes.

However, what you actually do is add a new carbon sink, with a flux in and a flux out, just like the eco-system, the ocean, the atmosphere etc. As long as you keep the outflow lower or equal than the inflow it's a net win.

Edit: Another point - we might not be in a position to think about this at the moment, but we should not store all available carbon in rock form (some of the carbon sequestration ideas lead to rockform carbon basically) because our descendents may really need it one day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I read this as "Mass Tinder" and it gave me an idea for a group dating app that helps organize strangers into meeting up as a group for "activities".

<comment><USER19> That's meetup.com

<comment><USER20> I think the gp had different "activities" in mind.

<comment><USER21> That's Groupon? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Once you have more than about 150mm (6") of insulation a typical building will be losing more energy through air leakage than through conduction. CLT in particular is excellent for airtightness because it is pretty airtight in of itself and it comes in big accurately machined panels which minimises the number of joints that need to be sealed up.

</comment><comment><USER22> Do anyone know of any project to genetically engineer trees for producing better timber?

<comment><USER16> Not genetic engineering but Acetylation technology can increase wood durability [0]. The company mentioned on the wikipedia page is [1]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylation#Acetylation_of_Woo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylation#Acetylation_of_Wood)

[1] [https://www.accsysplc.com/](https://www.accsysplc.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Bigger question, how fire inspection ever cleared a wooden highrise?

<comment><USER24> This question comes up every single time anything related to wood construction is talked about. The keyword in mass timber is _mass_. It's quite hard to set a big mass of wood on fire. It burns slowly and relatively predictably -- meaning you have more time to evacuate. And because of its mass, an outer layer can char, burn out and leave the building standing.

Also sprinklers.

<comment><USER25> The problem is the glue. When the glue melts (which it does at a much lower temperature than wood burns), the structural integrity is lost.

Firefighters do not enter new construction homes in the US because they often use these as floor joists. The time until failure has been greatly reduced compared to older homes. Things may have gotten better in the last few decades, but I'd like to see the data.

<comment><USER26> You're thinking of I-joists, which are a kind of engineered lumber, not a kind of mass timber. And those do light up like kindling. The glue used in glulams and the like chars at the same rate as the wood, and it's pretty easy to achieve known fire ratings simply by making the members a little chunkier than they need to be since the char rate is known.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Won't we just end up worsening deforestation?

<comment><USER28> Funny, where timber is produced (e.g. Scandinavia) we are always complaining that the forests are taking over. People can basically be subsidized to keep animals to "keep the landscape open" when forests would otherwise take over old farm land. We have 7000 trees per person. We plant more than we cut down. Just buy our timber. "Deforestation" is a problem in various parts of the world because of ecosystems, erosion, desert spread. It's not an issue everywhere.

From a CO2 perspective, cutting down a tree and making a house of is excellent. The CO2 is bound in the timber and a new tree can be planted in its place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I will just say the obvious thing. I thought we were supposed to be planting more trees. Doesn't cutting more of them down go in the opposite direction?

I like the idea of engineered wood for construction. I am just suspicious that a lot of this hype is coming from the logging industry and the CO2 stuff is just a marketing coup.

<comment><USER13> There's a great deal of land that could be covered with planted trees, which pull CO2 out of the air. When they are mature, then they can be used as building material, and a new tree planted.

<comment><USER30> > planted trees, which pull CO2 out of the air

When an old building is torn down and the wood is burnt all the CO2 goes back into the environment.

Unless we start burying old wood into sealed underground chambers (like depleted oil wells) all the CO2 stays around.

<comment><USER31> Concrete isn't carbon neutral therefore mass timber can still be better for the environment.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: AI service proposes content to share based on merit – would you use it? - <AUTHOR>

What would it have to offer for you to pay for it?<p>Thanks <comment><USER3> What's merit in this context? What NLP/ML algorithms would you use? I can't think of any that are suited to or good enough for any definition of merit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Substance is more accurate than "merit". You're right, not meritorious but substantive to pre-selected subject matter of interest.

Using K-nearest neighbor (among others) against training documents to classify content, in areas you designate as interest. If they meet a predetermined relevance score and sufficient length range - they would then be considered for recommendation to the user.

<comment><USER3> That's basically what last.fm does, so that's doable and not too hard. As somebody with a formal training in ML, I'm not convinced by the quality of the results (as much as I'm not convinced but last.fm recommendations…) but it looks like there's a good business case to make.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it certainly would depend on the use case and the quality would be influenced by both the scoring threshold and extent/quality of training materials. Using large data sets, with a particularly difficult lowest sufficient score, could produce a small quantity of highly relevant and substantive content. If the purpose is to discover a handful of articles in a specific subcategory (ex. theoretical physics) that a user could confidently share to social media - then there is a significant utility to the service - not just a business case.

What would this service have to offer for you to actually pay for it? Of course you could say you wouldn't pay for it, simply curious...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do not understand what is meant by "proposes content to share." My best guess is that I would visit [http://proposer.ai](http://proposer.ai) and I would be presented with a list of things that I should tweet/like/submit-to- hn? Why would I vouch for / share something that I had not read myself? Accumulate magic internet points? I hope my interpretation is wrong because it sounds like a product that supports and tacitly condones shallow, insincere, attention seeking behavior on the internet. I realize that sounds harsh but I am really perplexed by the use of "recommend content to share" versus "recommend content to personally consume." It seems that in order to make good decisions about what to share the site would not only need information about me but also information about my social graph.

More than anything it sounds like a wonderful tool for astroturfing campaigns. Corporate PR departments would love to re-brand advertising as "AI based merit recommendations."

<comment><AUTHOR> And what's wrong with magic internet points?

I over-simplified the premise. We want to identify interesting and unique content, produced by individuals/publications that may not have any real visibility. This would serve as a win-win for the creator and sharer. Obscure content - that isn't fortunate enough to be on HN or some equivalent - needs a way to be identified and considered for digestion besides popularity. I never said users wouldn't read it before sharing it. While companies could certainly abuse it, that's not the purpose. If I had a smarty-pants blog, but no blog followers, I'd be happy that a deep-learning service classified my theoretical physics blog for consideration/syndication somewhere based on substance of the posts...

<comment><USER4> I am extremely suspicious of the continued emphasis on "sharing" instead of "consuming."

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I'll baby step my logical jump, people would share things they have consumed first...

1\. Identify stuff you would not have known about. 2\. Much wow - <USER2> imploding 3\. Share something that is different and substantive because I happen to hate most shit on social media (not required, but in reality sometimes people share stuff they get excited about) 4\. Make the world slightly smarter, expose smartguy's blog to others

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If it were better than existing content/news aggregators, sure.</comment>


How Curiosity, Luck, and the Flip of a Switch Saved the Moon Program (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/john-aaron-apollo-12-curiosity-luck-and-sce-to-aux <comment><USER2> > (For the astronauts, speeding into space at one and a half times the speed > of sound, a mile and a half up, time, according to Einstein, was literally > slowing down.)

Indeed! Those intrepid relativistic explorers, at Mach 1.5, would experience 0.99999999999855 seconds for every 1 we poor earth-bound non-moving folks did.

Of course, once they were on the way to the moon, moving at the far faster 11 km/s, then they'd _really_ start to get some relativity going on: 0.9999999993 seconds for every 1 in our rest frame.

<comment><USER3> The relativistic effects of just being a satellite in Earth orbit are enough that GPS has to correct for it.

Don't discount the impact of even tiny errors in this stuff.

<comment><USER4> Don't discount the importance of context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a dumbed-down version of a story told in more detail in various histories of Apollo. I think it's in Mike Collins' book. Anyway, there are key points here that the story doesn't mention. The Saturn V booster's control system was completely independent of the crew capsule systems. It had its own guidance, gyros, computers, and telemetry, those were all working, and the ground knew they were all working.

The astronauts had no control over the booster anyway; they could abort, but that's all. They weren't driving at that point. As long as boost phase was going well, there was no urgent reason to abort; more altitude offered more return options, along with time to fix the problem.

The Apollo stack had a good grounding system; the possibility of a lightning hit had been considered. Lightning didn't, in fact, do any significant damage to the onboard systems.

</comment><comment><USER6> > There was a driving rain on Cape Canaveral on the morning of November 14, > 1969 ...

Interestingly, Cape Canaveral didn't formally exist in 1969. The name was changed to Cape Kennedy six years prior, and restored four years hence.

Great article though. _Vice_ has come a long way.

</comment><comment><USER7> Funny how there was a small fumble with the 'SCE to AUX' and they didn't try to use the phonetic alphabet to solve that

</comment><comment><USER8> > _burning some thirteen metric tons of fuel per second_

Whoa, the mind boggles.

<comment><USER9> I suppose when you have 5 of these, [http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/eande-...](http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp- content/uploads/2013/03/eande-f1scale.jpg) , you can push a lot of fuel through.</comment></comment>


Settling the startup ecosystem debate by asking Cui Bono - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rafaelcorrales.com/2010/05/picking-right-startup-ecosystem.html

<comment><USER2> You sure like to link your blog a lot.</comment>


Anonymous Cancels Operation Cartel as Los Zetas Track Hacktivists - <AUTHOR> http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/11/report-anonymous-cancels-operation-cartel.php <comment><USER2> It's difficult to wage an information war with gangsters. The ones who get to the top by killing and torturing are not likely to be threatened by having a few emails released. All the shit runs downhill to the relatively innocent civilians being extorted by the gangsters.

If knowledge of who the crime bosses are was enough to take them down, they would not exist in the first place. Organized crime does not require secrecy to operate when the police are corrupted.

<comment><USER3> The only way to fight criminals at a scale where they threaten the state is through intelligence and military techniques, not law enforcement.

Find them, build up decent evidence, kill them; don't try to prosecute. The risk is turning into a star chamber or right wing paramilitary, but I would trust the professionalism and morality of an organization like the us military to resist that. Plan Colombia worked out ok, compared to Peru vs shining path, for instance.

<comment><USER4> Or end the futile prohibition on drugs and tax them instead. Worked for alcohol.

<comment><USER5> That is an over-simplified solution to a complicated problem. Organized crime would change, not cease to exist. Countries where prostitution is legal still see organized abuses in the industry, like brothel owners not following regulations, etc. Moreover, marijuana has the highest likelihood of being legalized of any drug (still not likely) and yet, it is the lowest profit margin for organized crime. Cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, etc. are much more profitable, and legalizing these would be socially irresponsible, if fiscally lucrative.

<comment><USER6> Profit margins should be expected to be proportionate to illegality : Since the threat of punishment forces vibrant competition out of the market.

Similarly, one can track the effectiveness of the war on drugs by looking at the street prices of drugs over time. If the war was effective, prices would be rising. Unfortunately, basic economic theory shows that the war on drugs is a complete failure.

<comment><USER5> Right. And like I said, it might be a fiscal improvement to legalize drugs. You could earn money from it. But, and i mean this in all sincerity, do you want to live in a society where they're freely accessible?

<comment><USER7> If you live anywhere in North America, you're already living in a society where they're freely accessible, so in that respect prohibition has clearly failed.

I understand we've all been propagandized to believe that drug use is inherently evil, however it's a mistake to lose site of the fact that (at least in the US) the prison system is largely a subcontracted for-profit industry. An industry with a clearly vested interest in maintaining soaring drug-related conviction rates as well as mandatory minimum sentencing.

I, for one, would absolutely prefer to live in a society where drug dependency is treated like a disease and treated.

<comment><USER5> I agree that rehabilitation is more important that penalization for drug abuse, but towards the original point, drugs aren't accessible in the sense that they're not legal. You cannot get them as easily as you can a gallon of milk.

<comment><USER8> You're right, I cannot call the milkman to open up the store and let me buy some milk at 3am, or better yet get milk delivered to my door with less than a 30 minute lag time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like Los Zetas tracing the Anonymi is just coincidentally concurrent to their decision not to release the information. The real reason why they're not releasing it is because the civilians they were intending to expose aren't actually members of Los Zetas, and would just get killed by the cartel if they were to be exposed.

<comment><USER10> And they probably won't bother to trace actual Anonymous folks exposing this information but may end up targeting random people who are into computers, or even heavy social media users.

<comment><USER11> I think you're underestimating the reach of these cartels. I doubt they have the resources to find hackers, but they _do_ have people feeding them information from inside the Mexican and US governments.

Also, the Anonymous people have made themselves a pain in the ass to governments who have the resources to find them. Even if the cartels don't have ears in the right place it's not hard for me to imagine a list of probable Anonymous members somehow making it into their hands.

<comment><USER12> > I doubt they have the resources to find hackers.

The Los Zetas cartel, being the second largest cartel in Mexico, probably has revenues of well over a billion dollars per year. (It's estimated that the overall earnings of all Mexican drug smugglers is $13-40 billion.)

I'm pretty sure that's enough money to hire a hacker or two.

<comment><USER13> You need more than money if you're buying something illegally. You also need a certain amount of sophistication to know you're getting what you want.

<comment><USER12> In this case, I'm pretty sure that money is enough. It's not like the cartel needs to know anything about hacking or how to choose good hackers. All they have to do is tie the monetary reward to the result they want (track down the Anonymous member who said this), and _somebody_ will figure it out, through hacking or other means.

As an aside, I don't know of any billion-dollar industry that doesn't have a fairly high level of sophistication. I don't see why the cartels should be any different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This whole op was fishy from the get-go. For one, the person speaking in the original video had a mainland Spanish accent but used Mexican vocabulary. Two, no anons within Mexico spoke out in support of the op. Three, nobody was able to verify the claim that an anon was kidnapped in the first place. Four, nobody could figure out where this op was discussed or planned. It came out of the blue without any previous involvement from the main organizing channels.

The whole thing is just bizarre.

<comment><USER15> How do we know this op was announced by the "real" Anonymous? How long until the CIA is posing as Anonymous to incite rebellion in other countries (and/or make Anonymous look bad)?

<comment><USER16> Since when _is_ there a "real" Anonymous? Heck, I went to an anti-scientology protest one time, surely that gives me as much of a right as anybody to claim to be Anonymous.

<comment><USER17> It's heavy with irony, but it is suspected there are a few masterminds with the "keys to the kingdom" of Anonymous- for example, the twitter feed- and anything not publicly endorsed by those sacred sources is not considered to be "the true Anonymous".

Again, yes, I see the irony in that.

<comment><USER18> Indeed. There are no leaderless, emergent movements. All modern seemingly complete democracies merely have a shadow government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting that they would cancel when many other de-centralised organisations would be pretty resilient. In fact, losing a member to the enemy would cause an outcry and drive more to join the cause.

eg Taliban, Al Qaeda, IRA, guerrillas, and more.

Whoever cancelled the operation just confirmed to the adversaries that they're easy to squash and immediately put the cause at risk. Adversaries are now more confident to risk further resources if it means they can destroy the cause.

They chose unwisely.

<comment><USER17> Anonymous is not a paramilitary group. I doubt their members are willing to put their life on the line for the cause.

Decentralized paramilitary groups are hard to fight because you can track down & kill members without hurting the group- not because you cannot track down & kill members.

<comment><USER20> I would say that being involved in hacking that would result in your becoming a felon, getting extradited, and/or going to jail for over 5 years qualifies as putting your life on the line.

<comment><USER17> "Men with guns will come and arrest you because you broke esoteric law" seems very surreal and a lot less intimidating than "Men with guns will come and kill you because you pissed them off".

Don't forget the part where the Zetas have set a very, very strong precedent, while the FBI haven't. I can say even for myself I would take the FBI over the Zetas _any_ day of the week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The lulz stop when people start getting killed.

<comment><USER22> Sadly Anons are less and less about lulz these days. Too much white-knight'ing going on there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wish I could buy a letter of marque and reprisal from the us government to interact with Los Zetas.

<comment><USER8> Maybe you can buy one from Mexico?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I applaud their desire to try and fight the cartel but its extremely dangerous and don't fault them for pulling back.

<comment><USER24> Just look at the photo at the top of the article of policemen with automatic rifle _wearing masks to protect their identities_. That is some terrifying stuff.

<comment><USER25> > Just look at the photo at the top of the article of policemen with automatic > rifle wearing masks to protect their identities.

FWIW, US swat police seem to do the same thing.

<comment><USER26> If you really want to get into it UK riot police seem to do the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> There's so many ways to analyze this and so many possible ulterior motives. It's also unfortunate that their anonymity is under threat, even if they don't release the info they are still in danger.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't think the Zetas will cease hostilities just because of that. Their best chance is to flee to the US and ask for asylum. With the data.

Simply releasing the data would make killing them pointless, but being pointless never stopped the Zetas before.

</comment><comment><USER29> Instead of the Government tracking down anon. Just let the Zeta's do it for them(CIA style). Anyone vindictive enough could fake being anon. Now we just have to convince the Zeta's that Al Qaeda is going to bring the heat down on them.

</comment><comment><USER5> The trouble with movements like Anonymous is that there is no centralized authority. Further, a group pushing for anarchy is either hypocritical if it's effective (because it will be organized) or ineffective because it's anarchical and disorganized.

Anonymous is not a serious threat to large corporations. It may cost them a minor inconveniencr, but without centralized authority, the group has no real internal integrity (the question of whether or not a group claiming to work under the auspices of Anonymous is moot...because anyone can be Anonymous).

<comment><USER30> What does anonymity have to do with anarchy? I realize that they often go hand in hand, but that's a sad generalization.

<comment><USER5> I was just following a train of thought and making a comparison, not a real correlative relationship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This whole affair is a good test of the adage that the pen is mightier than the sword. Is the submachine gun mightier than the modem?

</comment><comment><USER32> Speaking truth to powe....what? Oh yes, well then nevermind!

</comment><comment><USER33> Maybe it's time to legalize drugs.

</comment><comment><USER34> If only there was an easy way to take away much of many cartels' power that has been endorsed by a dozen current and former leaders of several countries.

<comment><USER18> Surely Anonymous, or a more skilled hacker group could do this. To hit the cartel where it hurts they must hit their money supply. Instead of publishing members, track the money and reveal where it's coming from and where it's going to. With an annual income of $1B there has got to be something sizable to be tracked.

<comment><USER34> Sorry, that was (I thought thinnly) veiled sarcasm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> title is miss-leading, Mexico arm of anonymous has pulled back..however UK arm is going ahead with the Nov 5th plans

<comment><USER36> Source please?</comment></comment>


Mobile apps must die - <AUTHOR> http://www.netmagazine.com/node/1446

<comment><USER2> Despite the deliberately provocative title, there is no suggestion that web apps are superior to native apps. Instead, it gives an example of just-in-time device interaction which can't easily be served by the native app model. Such a gap could incidentally be served by a web app, where the one-time usage costs are much lower.

Think about waiting at a bus stop in a city you're visiting for the weekend. You probably won't care enough to download a bus timetable app, but it would still be nice to know if it was easy enough to find out, such as via an NFC tag pointing to an HTTP URL.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought the creation of the mobile App store was in response to Web apps.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good luck. I think they are here to stay for quite a while.</comment>


A ranking of the highest tech salaries in the US, adjusted for cost of living - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1195354/tech-salaries-in-austin-texas-are-effectively-66000-higher-than-in-nyc-thanks-to-the-cost-of-living/ <comment><USER2> Naively adjusting CoL like this always over-corrects and favors lower cost places. This would only be a valid comparison if you saved exactly $0 each year. If you are able to save a portion of your income (as hopefully anyone with any of these salaries is), linear comparisons don't make sense.

You need to compare the difference in CoL as the percentage of that salary that goes towards CoL. In other words, if you save 50%, to keep the same standard, you need to CoL adjust only the other 50% (and maybe a bit more to keep your emergency fund weighted).

 _grumble_

<comment><USER3> > You need to compare the difference in CoL as the percentage of that salary > that goes towards CoL.

Great insight. Here in NYC, I know a few frugal programmers who share a 2 bedroom with a friend such that he pays about 25% of his income in rent (that's A LOT of money to save/enjoy life with). Another is nearing 40% but because he prefers living alone. And there's always the "I want to live like they did in Friends/I want a 10 min commute" coworker that spends 60%+ on rent.

These kind of studies make it seem like most people live like the latter, when my personal experience as an engineer in NYC, the city is not unaffordable at all ... unless you want to own property ASAP. Honestly, what I've learned is that COL discussions are hard because people spend money differently and value different things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reflects more or less what we found, in 2016, in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey:

[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#salaries- and-...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#salaries-and-rent-per- city)

TLDR: Move to Montreal.

<comment><USER5> glad to read your conclusion! I live in Montreal and I do think it has a surprisingly low CoL combined with a high-quality lifestyle. Glad to see it is confirmed by your data.

I personally live in a 3 bedroom apt I rent for $635 a month ($795 if taking into account the electricity used for heating) and the apt is located 25 min by public transportation (foot + metro) away from downtown.

<comment><USER6> >I personally live in a 3 bedroom apt I rent for $635 a month ($795 if taking into account the electricity used for heating) and the apt is located 25 min by public transportation (foot + metro) away from downtown.

Wow thats incredible. What are salaries like though?

<comment><USER7> For junior back-end node.js dev (right out of school) it was between 50-55k CAD a year ago from offers from gaming places I've got, although video game companies (very big in MTL) are known to pay a bit less and compensate with lifestyle/cool job.

Seniors can certainly reach 100k+.

 _edit_ Another offer I got, Entry level Production Support at a bank pays 60k with 3 weeks of vacations. Deloitte also had a job of customizing ERP for clients in similar $ range if you're interested in corporate stuff.

All of the above example are for <1 year of experience.

As far as actually getting a job I would say it's very easy, even with little experience. A LOT of companies (tech and non-tech) are looking for talent and you easily get offers, although top/elite companies are mostly similar to the US in term of selection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suspect studies like this trail reality by a few years. Austin cost of living, particularly housing, has sky-rocketed in recent years. It's still obviously much cheaper than Silicon Valley, but it's not cheap compared to surrounding major Texas cities like Houston or Dallas.

It may still be a good balance of salary to cost of living, and probably is since most tech hubs are also very expensive. But, it's not like it once was (I first bought a house there in the early 2000s, and have rented, and shopped for real estate, there on a number of occasions since then).

</comment><comment><USER9> These kind of CoL comparisons have obvious flaws as pointed out by other comments. I brushed them off when moving from Toronto to SF, only to realize later how accurate they are, if you don't plan to dramatically reduce your living standard.

On a side note, there are legit reasons why most people try to keep up their appearances as opposed to live frugally and save every penny.

<comment><USER10> Hey I did the same thing late last year. I gave up a bungalow I payed $1200 a month (bought it 2011) for for a one bedroom apartment I pay $2400 a month for. Yay! But I live alone so a 50% boost in income offsets the doubling in housing costs (I think). And honestly, outside of housing (and healthcare) I don't really see anything else being too crippling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is no way that 73k in Toronto is the same as 153k in San Fran. I wonder if the 73k is in CAD or USD... Regardless, the average home in Toronto is around $1m CAD, plus you lose a bit more to taxes because you live in Canada. I have a hard time believing that things are 3-4X as expensive in San Fran. Are people really paying $60 for a burger?

<comment><USER12> Average Toronto home value is $775k to the Bay area's $825k. Don't know how the other stuff compares though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The entire list is expensive cities. This is a typical problem for such lists. It's easy to ignore nearly all of the country.

Austin did best, but that isn't cheap.

</comment><comment><USER14> This entirely depends on what you spend your money on.

Suppose NYC real estate is 8x the cost compared to my current city of Lehi, Utah.

* If I want a large house with a yard, I'll pay $500k with $1.8k/month mortgage in Lehi, or $4 million with $14.4k/month mortgage in NYC.

* If I want to share a smallish apartment, I'll pay $400/month in Lehi, or $3.2k/month in NYC.

Non-real estate items like groceries, gas, and gym memberships are not 8x more in NYC. (They're more, but not that much more.)

\---

So.....what am I comparing? Good housing, or good transportation, or good hobbies, good savings, etc.? I'm assuming the measurement averages these, but people prioritize and consume these different than the average.

If you live in a cardboard box and save most of your pay check, you'll get an overall pay raise in NYC.

<comment><USER6> >* If I want to share a smallish apartment, I'll pay $400/month in Lehi, or $3.2k/month in NYC.

That's not even remotely realistic. $3,200/mo in NYC will get you a luxury 1bd in Manhattan. $1500 is more like it for a small studio or roommate situation.

<comment><USER14> (1) NYC has rent controls but not property value controls, so that does throw things off.

(2) Perhaps I should have done the numbers with 4x. The idea is the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another thing to consider about CoL comparisons is local lifestyles. Those who are living in SF or NYC are probably out of the house enjoying local nightlife a lot, those in warm sunny places are probably out enjoying nature, while those living in cold suburbs probably spend a lot more time on home and hobbies. So, in some places you can buy a lot more house while in others you need a lot less house. In places where housing is expensive there's also a lot less peer pressure to have a big house; it's not like all your coworkers in a SF startup are talking about their 4 bedroom ranch houses.

<comment><USER16> > _it 's not like all your coworkers in a SF startup are talking about their 4 > bedroom ranch houses._

No, but they can't talk about something more reasonable, either; the price of the majority of the Bay Area's housing exceeds the income of the majority of Bay Area engineers.

(This assumes a median house price of ~$750k (cf, [1]), and an unwillingness to pay 45% of your after-tax income in housing.)

[1]: [http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/12/29/bay-area- median-...](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/12/29/bay-area-median-home- price-november-2017/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> These cost of living calculators are severely flawed. It fails to capture that RSUs form a significant % of compensation in the Bay Area. It also fails to capture the exponential impact of high dual income. Also, fails to account for rapid income gain from real estate appreciation. Finally, fails to account for the ability to switch jobs quickly and climb corporate ladder.

<comment><USER12> The average silicon valley programmer is not taking advantage of the rapid gain improperly values. On the contrary, they can't afford to buy so they rent... And their rent goes up every year as values skyrocket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How's Toronto double of what it is adjusted? Toronto living is not that low. It is in real estate bubble, and food is expensive compared to US. No way that's accurate.

</comment><comment><USER19> Since when Atlanta is not a major metropolitan area? Based on a super quick research, I would expect ATL to, at least, lead the chart, if not land at its top.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice to see San Diego up there. Thinking of moving there after 10 years here in the bay.

</comment><comment><USER21> Unfortunately one meal at Franklin Barbecue, while delicious, will immediately exhaust any extra savings one might accrue through the cheaper cost of housing.

<comment><USER22> True, but the HEB tortillas are so cheap it's a wash.</comment></comment>


PencilCase: An iPhone and iPad app maker and private publishing platform - <AUTHOR> http://robotsandpencils.com/pencilcase/

<comment><USER2> I could see this being like Scratch where it enables younger kids to make apps and explore that without knowing how to program fully. Very Cool!</comment>


FCC, FTC Demand Gateway Providers Cut Off Covid-19 Robocall Scammers [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A1.pdf <comment><USER2> The named offenders are:

> SIPJoin of Suffolk, Virginia; Connexum of Orange, California; and VoIP > Terminator/BLMarketing of Lake Mary, Florida

SIPJoin: [http://www.sipjoin.com/wholesale](http://www.sipjoin.com/wholesale), [http://www.sipjoin.com/about-us](http://www.sipjoin.com/about-us)

Connexum, a subsidiary of Gawk ([https://www.globenewswire.com/news- release/2016/02/02/124061...](https://www.globenewswire.com/news- release/2016/02/02/1240612/0/en/GAWK-Completes-Acquisition-of-Connexum-Nearly- Triples-Annual-Revenue.html)): [https://www.gawk.com/voice- servers.php](https://www.gawk.com/voice-servers.php), [https://www.gawk.com/about-us.php](https://www.gawk.com/about-us.php)

VoIP Terminator/BLMarketing: [https://www.voipterminator.com/](https://www.voipterminator.com/)

Here's the FCC letters sent to these carriers, which name the customers as well: [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A4.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A4.pdf) (about "VoIPMax," Philippines), [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A3.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A3.pdf) (same), [https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A5.pdf](https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363522A5.pdf) (about "Oberlo Peer BPO," Pakistan)

</comment><comment><USER3> Publicly naming the providers and threatening to block at the provider level with a short timeline. Some action from what has been a paper tiger.</comment>


Yes, your code does need comments. - <AUTHOR> http://mikegrouchy.com/blog/2013/03/yes-your-code-does-need-comments.html

<comment><USER2> The example given is an example of using comments very effectively as a countermeasure against the confusion caused by imperfect code. Look what it actually uses that oh-so-well-documented ssl variable for:

        if self.ssl:
            relay_host = smtplib.SMTP_SSL(hostname, self.port)
        else:
            relay_host = smtplib.SMTP(hostname, self.port)

Half the constructor parameters and the entire configure_relay function could be ditched completely if this class stuck to a single responsibility and instead allowed the configured smtplib object on which it depends to be injected.

Here's some more comments from that class:

        def send(self, To, From, Subject, Body):
            """
            Does what it says, sends an email. If you need something more
            complex then look at lamson.mail.MailResponse.
            """

Look at that comment: "Does what it says, sends an email". It's a terrible comment. The method should be called send_email, and that sentence should be deleted.

This codebase is a poor example of how to use comments, overall.

        def process_message(self, Peer, From, To, Data):
            """
            Called by smtpd.SMTPServer when there's a message received.
            """

The above comment simply reiterates what happens in some unknown distant piece of code. This is a classic example of bad commenting: somebody could very easily change the behaviour of the referenced code without updating this comment.

<http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1326509>

</comment><comment><USER3> Generally, he is right. But he gets this point wrong:

> Comments are the only way to capture the intent of the code at the time of > writing.

The main and most important way to express intent is meaningful naming of variables, fields, and methods. A declaration like "String username" conveys much more intent than "String x". Similarily, if you have a block of code that needs a comment, you should first move it into a separate method with a good name. Then, if it still needs commenting, you should comment on that method.

Also, with comments, it is like everything that improves your code: there is a tradeoff between effort and effect. If you have one hour to improve your code, where do you invest it? Cleaner structure? Better namings? More comments? More tests? UML-Diagrams? Flow charts? Other documentation? Adding features? Something else? Comments are unlikely to take the top spot here.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree with this definition of intent. For me _intent_ is about why a piece of code is written the way that it is, which is also what the article itself equates it to.

Also, I don't think you can write many useful comments when returning to a piece of already written code. The only way to understand the why of a piece of code is to trace all its implications, and it is not efficient to make that sort of investment after the fact. The easiest way to produce high quality comments is to write them during the act of programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, when thought through, what he is proposing is just "Literate Programming" <[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming>](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming>).

It has been around since Knuth coined it in the seventies, but I guess it is one of those concepts just bound to be "reinvented" by every new generation.</comment>


Using Clojure in the command line with Babashka - <AUTHOR> https://www.karimarttila.fi/clojure/2020/09/01/using-clojure-in-command-line-with-babashka.html <comment><USER2> Clojure is a recurring gravitational pull for me. I haven't had time to properly explore yet but I will before end of year.

It's not a "first" language like JS, Python, Java, C#, Ruby etc. so the community appears to benefit from a higher than average level of skill. In the same way that i imagine Erlang or Elixir might enjoy the benefit of more capable than average users.

The fact that entire paradigms can be implemented as libraries is attractive to me - it suggests to me that the Python 3000 or C++11 problems are unlikely to affect Clojure.

For example, Go is a language I find interesting. The whole CSP concept makes a ton of sense to me in writing enterprise software - mainly from a "keeping the architecture cheap to own and change over time" point of view. I appreciate this isn't where CSP was targeted but it lends itself very well IMO to solving this problem because you could decouple components and grow them independently so effectively.

Go is an entire language but core.async is just a library in Clojure, they didn't have to change the language to implement this which is mind blowing to me.

Another example is types. Only some of the code I write actually benefits from types AND most type systems in "enterprise" languages are pretty anaemic. Typing is also really hard to do well, like really really hard. You had a problem, you adopted typing and now you have two problems is generally my thinking here.

Scala was to be my saviour here but that missed the mark quite spectacularly and the compiler is still ridiculously slow today but then along came TypeScript which is pretty darned awesome IMO.

Thanks to TypeScript and modern Python i had learned that i wanted "optional typing" and i was undecided about type erasure at runtime - i don't immediately see a problem with it, i've written probably thousands of lines of Java with generics then used reflection at runtime without losing sleep, but it fills an awkward space in my head - to invest in types but only benefit at compile time seems like a miss.

In Clojure i can follow the TypeScript model but actually take it further to runtime.

This post is too long already. Long way to say Clojure appears very interesting.

<comment><USER3> I like Clojure quite a lot---for a while, it was actually my main language.

Ultimately, however, I largely gave it up because the library ecosystem just doesn't feel quite right to me---at least at the time I was writing a lot in it (2016-7ish), most of the popular libraries seemed to have a very strong refugee-from-Java sense to them, as in, very influenced by ideas more commonly seen in oo-land. For example, people loved to use (and, more importantly, bundle in other projects) libraries like component/mount that attempt to implement ideas like dependency injection and other design pattern/architectural concepts that just... don't really feel lispy. I remember trying to build a fairly simple web application with one of the main frameworks and just having no clue which piece of the hyper-complicated and indirect code that the lein template built for me I'd need to change to debug some problems with the database. Alas.

(To be clear, I'm not saying this is wrong! It just wasn't for me.)

<comment><USER4> I've been playing a lot with the idea of just using ClojureScript for everything, both backend and frontend.

Shadow-cljs [0] makes interop with the NPM ecosystem a breeze, and ClojureScript is stable, mature, and feature-complete in its own right.

Although you lose out on some of the features of the JVM (threading), you get access to a lighter weight runtime, and the massive world of JavaScript libraries (which don't bring much OOP baggage with them).

I'm not sure how viable it is long term, but so far it's been fun, and pretty trivial to write simple wrappers over JS libraries (when repeated direct interop doesn't make sense).

Somebody else in here mentioned that Clojure isn't a "first" language, but I think if there was an "easier" (yes, I said easier, not simpler) path to get into it, more people might pick it up as their second language.

[0] [https://github.com/thheller/shadow- cljs](https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For me the most interesting part is how it gets rid of the JVM startup time.

So there are two parts to the solution: The first part is Small Clojure Interpreter (sci) which is a "(subset of) Clojure written in Clojure", so kind of McCarthy for Clojure. A cool project in itself but it still needs a VM to run.

So here is where the second part comes in: the GraalVM produces native binaries from various things, including Clojure code and SCI is simple enough to work with GraalVM.

It's cool how these two pieces of tech combine together to create something greater than the sum of the parts.

<comment><USER6> The startup time of the jvm is negligible. This myth keeps coming up. Most of the startup time is Clojure itself.

<comment><USER7> This high startup time in Clojure is a side-effect of the JVM. If you have a hello world program that does nothing it is indeed fast.

If you are running Clojure you need to run at least clojure.core. Loading that is handled - surprise - by the JVM. As would be expected, if you run other implementations (like Dalvik), this can change dramatically (for worse, usually).

So it is correct that loading the JVM itself is not what's taking most of the time. But loading take so much time _because_ of the JVM.

[https://blog.ndk.io/clojure-bootstrapping.html](https://blog.ndk.io/clojure- bootstrapping.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been looking again at Clojure recently, and it seems to have that feature of lisps that their language feature-set seems to just _settle_ over time; unlike Javascript and even Python, it's pretty much the same as it was a few years ago. Instead, it's implementations like Babashka that are providing most of the innovation.

I think this is a good thing! Though I do worry a bit that Clojure can look more moribund than it is. I see a lot of people exploring the language for the first time saying "this tutorial is from 2013, is it still valid?". The answer is mostly yes, but with some changes in tooling that can be dispiriting for beginners, and may make them think the whole ecosystem has gone rusty.

<comment><USER9> It's pretty much by design, as the syntax and standard libraries with lispS are intentionally small. In other languages, you see new language syntax or semantics being added, while in a lisp it's pretty much unheard of to change the syntax, there's so little to change.

Macros can do a lot of stuff, and as such libraries themselves can add pretty elaborate functionality.

Having said all this, what I do notice with my experience of Clojure is that there are certain "trends" in how you write code. The language itself may not evolve that much, but the styles people write code in it, and how they solve problems, certainly does.

<comment><USER10> I've been using Clojure in isolation and I have "style anxiety". Can you elaborate (or point me somewhere) on the trends and changes in style you've observed? Thanks!

<comment><USER11> I think the closest we have to a "agreed upon style guide" that is written down, is [https://github.com/bbatsov/clojure-style- guide](https://github.com/bbatsov/clojure-style-guide)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is one of those tools that proves that explicitly solving for ergonomics really makes a huge difference.

</comment><comment><USER13> We've been writing clojure cli utilities a lot since babashka came out. It's really nice killing some of our reliance on bash.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, babashka has become our go-to form of scripting in the past 6 months or so. Super handy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Babashka is only half the magic.

It is built up from SCI (small Clojure interpreter). Which is a Clojure interpreter written in Clojure. That's super cool!

Sci is awesome, and it allows you to create custom Clojure interpreters with whatever subset of Clojure + any additional functions and macros of your liking.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a nice post. I wrote my own exploration of bb (Babashka) recently here, and it includes some comparisons to Python and JVM Clojure as well:

[https://amontalenti.com/2020/07/11/babashka](https://amontalenti.com/2020/07/11/babashka)

</comment><comment><USER17> Seeing this makes me wonder if a concatenative/stack (factor?) variant wouldn't be even better. For small script .. when you need larger you go full lisp.

ps: just installed it on my old core i3.. and omg, this loads faster than sbcl.

</comment><comment><USER18> BB is really cool, I just used it to run an ETL-type process I wrote, and I didn't had to change the Clojure program at all. Also, the built-in batteries were just what I was using anyway (JSON parsing most importantly).

</comment><comment><USER19> He concludes that Python is just more practical and superior for these scripting tasks but went through all the trouble because he likes Clojure.

<comment><USER20> That is not the conclusion at all. Literally the conclusion:

> It's nice to have another scripting tool in my toolbox: Babashka. Time will > tell if I start using Clojure instead of Python as my preferred scripting > language, thanks to Babashka. At least in this exercise Babashka did really > well.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple, virtualenv powered Django test and deployment web-app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/farslan/Django.kdapp

<comment><USER2> It's not obvious what's going on here. This appears to be a custom solution for multiple projects on the invite-only koding.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

It's a custom web-app for Koding.com. Everyone can build something like that. It's a simple app that shows how to build stuff like that with the in-house UI API in Koding.

I've built this to make Django beginners/testers the life more easy. Just think like Wordpress.com, but together with the builtin Terminal app, Koding.com is a excellent way to work in the cloud and learn new programming skills like that (they are still in beta).

I'll get in touch with someone working there, hoping they sending some invites here in HN to let test it :)</comment></comment>


The Future of Tech: Interoperability, and AllJoyn Doesn't Realise Its Potential - <AUTHOR> http://samlanning.com/2014/01/19/the-future-of-tech-interoperability-alljoyn-doesnt-realise-its-potential/

<comment><USER2> The easy answer to the question is exactly where the cloud was heading up until NSA made the news. The problem was never the the hardware nor is it software as the author reckoned, it is the data. At the bottom of this is a collection of person preference data collected and consumed by each and everyone of theses devices.

API solves the interoperability problem, the standard of data format etc.. But driven by the desire of the power of influence consumer, the API and interoperability are small problem will be taken care in the process, and are not the reason that current state of our digital life has called behind of technology. It is the data especially the sharability of the data that has been in a slow progress. Who can collect data, where to store and wholes can use that data, are all problems pending serious attention and technological innovation.

The classic resolution to the data problem, evidently google and others are working on, is to resolve the interoperability by monopolize the data "sensor" market, with its ubiquitous existence in hardware and software platform. The stack covers a range of cloud providers, platform providers and consumer product manufactures. All of these were working according to the plan, then BAM!, all a sudden came along the whistleblower and nobody wants to trust cloud with their person data thereafter.

It does not matter anymore if one company can win through the competition and control the data market like Bill Gates controlled the PC market 20 years ago, not unless there are convincing data protection and sharing technologies invented. Ironically, this used to an opportunity for government to step in and set the rules to pave the way, but not this time when government self is being questioned too.

The key to the problem is not interoperability between systems/products, but the data sharing/use/storing etc., something like a monopoly of the play field will not be able to resolve this time.</comment>


Show HN: Markdown + Bootstrap + Bootswatch = text based themeable mind maps - <AUTHOR> http://www.memofon.com/

<comment><USER2> signup is not working!

<comment><AUTHOR> It worked, i swear! Seriously, if you experienced any problems in signup process, please just drop me an email about the problem, i'll try my best to fix it asap.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the difference between contractors, consultants, and freelancers? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Speaking only for myself and my own personal experience, here's my take:

1\. Contractors are medium to long-term, and can usually be renewed indefinitely, over a period of years or decades. When I worked as a civilian employee in DoD, there were plenty of contractors who had worked on certain projects for many years, and they frequently provided the long-term stability for the project as the military and civilian employees changed more rapidly. They might be employed by one company this year and a different company the next, but they were the same people doing the same work, only this year it might be for CSC (or a subcontractor) and next year SAIC might win the contract — and turn around and employ the very same people through a different subcontracting company. Contracting is almost always technical in nature, although you could be a contractor project manager.

2\. A consultant is there for a short period of time. They are in, work for a few hours or maybe a few days, and then they are gone. They don't typically come back. You can have consultants who are self-employed, or they might be employees of a consulting company, but to the customer it doesn't really matter much. Consulting can be technical in nature, or business oriented. Many consulting companies are smaller than contractor companies, but there are always exceptions.

3\. A free-lancer is someone who might be working for multiple customers more or less at the same time, but they are only self-employed. They also typically get paid a flat fee for project work of potentially unspecified duration. Your wedding photographer is most likely a free-lancer. Much commercial art is done by free-lancers.

I've worked for a consulting company, on two separate occasions — Collective Technologies back in the late 90s, and MomentumSI in the early twenty-teens.

I'm now a contractor working for a large company headquarterd in Austin that was recently acquired by a much larger company from Seattle.

</comment><comment><USER3> 'Freelancer' and 'contractor' more or less are synonymous terms although the former is more common in the software industry. The latter arguably is a bit less prestigious, too.

The difference between a consultant and a freelancer is that a freelancer solves a technical problem while a consultant helps with solving a business problem (which might involve solving technical problems, too).

Freelance jobs typically are more hands-on while consulting gigs tend to be more high-level.

As others on this thread mentioned this is also why consultants usually get higher rates than freelancers.

Consultants also come in an employee variety, i.e. as in working for larger consulting agencies. In that case and depending on their seniority within the agency their work can range from anything a freelancer or employed programmer would do to work a self-employed consultant would do.

</comment><comment><USER4> The terms are interchangeable. You negotiate your own rates of compensation in all cases. The scope of your responsibilities are also based on the job requirements. Contractor is more tightly coupled to W-2 employee. Consultant more likely a consulting firm employee. Freelancer most likely a C2C contract.

</comment><comment><USER5> You tell contractors what to do. Consultants tell you what to do.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's not much between them, especially freelancers and contractors, although I'd say consultants are generally more expensive and are often brought in to 'advise' rather than to 'do'.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not much, but consultants tend to get paid more than freelancers.</comment>