Open-source app releases first complete copy of English Wikipedia with images - <AUTHOR> http://xowa.sourceforge.net/ <comment><USER2> Some people wonder what this is good for. For me, it would have been great, when I worked on a training ship as the IT support. Students were not allowed access to the internet (nor could our meager satellite uplink have supported it), but for my second stint on the ship, I wanted to see if I could provide them with Wikipedia. So, I grabbed the dump, set up MediaWiki, and imported it...and waited...for days and days and eventually the thing loaded, and it was great. But, it would have been super nice to have an easy installer to handle all that. So, yes there are use cases out there.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty impressive. I never had the patience to sit through a full MediaWiki import for en.wikipedia.org.

Just to be clear, XOWA isn't an installer for MediaWiki, but it's own app. This allows it to avoid the dependency on the entire MediaWiki tool-chain (apache, php, mysql, MediaWiki). Unfortunately, this means that XOWA has to reproduce the same logic, which is quite a challenge...

<comment><USER3> It is indeed a challenge. The mediawiki syntax is the weirdest mess I have ever had to parse. There is no spec, real world usage deviates significantly from the help docs, and it's a Turing complete language with heaps of backwards compatibility hacks. So if you have something reasonably complete and correct than kudos to you!

<comment><USER4> The visual editor uses a new parser, Parsoid, which has been implemented separately in node.js (iirc). That may be the answer...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. It also has its own DOM, rather than continuously adding to one string and repeatedly running regex's on it (which is what MediaWiki does today).

I was already pretty far along with my own parser before Parsoid was usable though. (and my parser has its own DOM / hooks)

<comment><USER4> MediaWiki is such an astoundingly fugly piece of software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Space required during initial import: multiply the dump file by 8. For > example, for English Wikipedia, the dump size is 10 GB. You should at least > have 80 GB space free for the import process

> Space required when completed: multiply the dump file by 2.5. For example, > for English Wikipedia, the dump size is 10 GB. When done, your English > Wikipedia will be 25 GB.

Ouch, looks like I won't be trying this here any time soon.

<comment><USER6> It's only ~3 GiB once you leave out the articles about individual Pokemon.

<comment><USER7> Wikipedia doesn't have that. For most Pokémon, they have summary pages like this

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_(252%E2%80...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_\(252%E2%80%93319\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> See also: Kiwix

For one thing, it has an Android app, and it's easy to put the whole thing on your external SD card. It also provides an index for full-text search.

[http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page](http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page)

<comment><AUTHOR> Kiwix's Android app and the full-text search are both great features.

However, I'll point out that Kiwix has not updated English Wikipedia since January 2012. Also, XOWA works directly with the Wikimedia dumps ([http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup- index.html](http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html)) so it's (a) always up to date and (b) can work on any wiki (Kiwix needs to release the zim file first)

Also, XOWA can run from an external SD card (including FAT32 formatted ones)

<comment><USER9> Another Android option is Fastwiki [1]. No images, but provides a conversion tool to convert native Wikimedia dumps. Also works with older Android versions.

[1] [http://fastwiki.qwrite.info/en/index.html](http://fastwiki.qwrite.info/en/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since Wikipedia doesn't have ads (and I'm guessing gets no real benefit from number of clicks), maybe this could be a nice way of lightening their server load and reducing some of their costs.

<comment><USER11> Probably not. In your ordinary browsing, you're not likely to download anywhere near the entirety of wikipedia. Plus, spreading out your requests over time rather than downloading it all at once is more gentle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good observation, but I just want to point out that the full dumps are downloaded from different servers. They are even mirrored by other institutions. See [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_Wikimedia_project_...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_Wikimedia_project_XML_dumps)

<comment><USER12> They could set up a torrent as well and almost assuredly people will seed it full time on servers.

<comment><USER13> There is a torrent distribution channel: see [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents)

However it suffers the number one torrent issue: they do not tolerate change. This means that

\- When an article changes, you need to generate a new torrent \- When a new torrent describes the archive, it needs to be downloaded _from scratch_ by _all_ peers, so that the maximum number of peers are available for a newcomer.

I hope you'll understand that this is not the official way to distribute archives...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, but they're working on incremental updates, so this should make the "from scratch" part much easier. You can look at [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Incremental_dumps](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Incremental_dumps) and [http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/xmldatadumps-l/2013-Aug...](http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/xmldatadumps-l/2013-August/000915.html) if you're interested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wouldn't mind having something like this for long flights without wifi.

Edit: Kiwix looks nice too, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER15> As a thought experiment, assume you were downloading and printing on low acidic paper (or otherwise storing for the long term) the entire contents of Wikipedia for insurance against some near extinction event. Is there a way to allow future generations to correctly interpret the arbitrary text on a page into meaningful information with only using "the page" as a medium?

(I tried googling the topic, but I'm very lost as to even where I should start. The main question that I'm interested in could be summarized as, "How do we ensure our knowledge as a species/society is not lost in an unintelligible format?")

<comment><USER16> Well practically speaking you could just use images and then have the first book as a sort of pictionary with words and pictures that demonstrate them. Once they figure out enough words they can start to figure out other words that can't easily be explained by a single picture, and grammar can be worked out from there. Sort of like the Rosetta stone.

But this is useless to the post-apocalyptic hunter gatherer, civilization would have to be reestablished by then. And hopefully they at least understand the idea of writing words on paper and don't just worship it as a religious thing.

There has actually been work on doing that, attempting to mark radioactive waste dumps in a way even someone in a completely different culture from a distant future could understand. It's really interesting and there is pdf on it here: [http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access- control.cgi/1992/92138...](http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access- control.cgi/1992/921382.pdf)

If you are going to communicate with a _completely_ alien civilization, that is one that can't even understand images, expressing information is even more difficult. My best guess is that you send a message with a really obvious pattern to it, then use that pattern as a basis for sending more information.

For example, send a ton of examples of simple code in a simple programming language, and their output. They can figure out what it means. Then encode your messages in the programming language somehow. Send a simulation of 3 dimensional space and little objects in it interacting, for example.

Somewhat related: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/)

<comment><USER17> A movie might work.

It could possibly be made future-proof by using a flipbook format, assuming we can find a suitably long-lived material to print on.

<comment><USER16> An animation of what? It would be much more difficult and take way more space for a flip book, and it doesn't contain much more information than a few pictures, let alone a book full of pictures.

<comment><USER17> I was thinking an actual film, which wouldn't be difficult.

I kept thinking about the "how to tell future people about radioactivity" example and I think it's hard to convey the actual effects, while it may be easy enough to convey that it's dangerous.

A movie would be much more apt at explaining what was there and what the consequences of irradiation are that a few stills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be interesting if it keeps a version history between each dump file. WP often deletes articles that it finds not notable (these are excluded in dumps) and it would be nice to still retain the last version.

In an odd way, we're going back to days where encyclopedias came in CDs. There was Encarta on a single disc, now we can have a lot more for around 80Gb ( [http://xowa.sourceforge.net/requirements.html](http://xowa.sourceforge.net/requirements.html) )

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting idea. When Wikimedia finalizes an incremental backup solution, it may be possible. They'll release a dump with incremental additions / updates / deletions. You would then have XOWA accept the additions / updates, but ignore all the deletions.

It would place more responsibility on the user to maintain their copy of the dump though.

<comment><USER18> That's true. The burden then shifts to the user. But in a way, that's also good because then you can choose which snapshot to follow.

It's a bit like maintaining your copy of an OS. You can stick to the "stable" branch or, if you're feeling adventurous, you can switch to "release". If you're really into the bleeding edge, you can go with the "nightly" build.

All-in-all, I really like this.

One concern I have is the possible increased bandwidth load for WP. Maybe you can include a small icon or notification to support it by donations. Couldn't hurt to have one there for yourself as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Source control is an interesting analogy. In the same vein, when a user syncs their version with the main branch, there will be hundreds of thousands of changes to review. It'll be pretty harrowing for anyone to figure out what to keep / reject. Just something to consider.

Anyway, thanks for the food for thought as well as your suggestion. I added donation links for archive.org and wikipedia tonight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What's the main target market for this kind of thing?

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally use it for traveling. There are a few other applications as well:

\- low-bandwidth availability, particularly in less-developed regions of the world

\- censorship evasion

\- security concerns. some users want to access Wikipedia without exposing their machine to the internet

There are probably a few others I'm missing....

<comment><USER20> " _censorship evasion..._ "

Unfortunately, having your own copy of Wikipedia could also be used to _enable_ censorship. For example, a fundamentalist school could have their own version of Wikipedia from which they've purged all articles about evolution, etc. Then they could configure their firewall to block the real Wikipedia.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. However, I think it would be less work for them to block access through firewall policy, than to remove them from XOWA.

By and large, for most private individuals, an offline app would allow them to evade censorship. I'd hope that this benefit outweighs the risk of the other's abuse.

<comment><USER21> A firewall would not hide the fact that censoring takes place. You would have to rewrite content to do that. That might be easier in batch, especially if you are going to do NLP to make cut up sentences grammatical.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh.... That's pretty devious. I was thinking of blocking the entire article, not rewriting content. Still not worth the work IMHO, but who knows what censorship servants would do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This makes me wonder why we couldn't have a DVCS with encyclopaedia content in it. That would be easy to "pull" offline and update regularly and "push" back up with changes. It'd be easier to distribute content and version it as well. Oh and patch queues could be used to review and edit content.

A local HTTP service or desktop app, DVCS and indexer would do a fine job of this.

<comment><USER23> I think it's just not feasible/useful for most people. The latest copy of Wikipedia is 42GB, and that's not including images or earlier revisions.

<comment><USER22> To be honest, a lot of wikipedia is crap.

An abridged version would be a couple of gigabytes perhaps which isn't beyond the realm of possibility. That'd fit nicely on a smart phone/tablet and could be taken somewhere with less than adequate data connections (read most places on this planet).

<comment><USER24> Good luck with getting the editors to agree which parts are crap.

<comment><USER25> You can get the page view logs. You can filter out most of the garbage that way.

[http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts- raw/](http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-raw/)

<comment><USER4> Justin Bieber: 594,757 views in the last month.

Origin of birds: 8,506 in the last month.

Ogden L. Mills (secretary of the US Treasury under Herbert Hoover): 399 views in the last month.

What is in the public interest is not the same as what the public show an interest in. Page views won't necessarily help you filter Wikipedia...

<comment><USER25> With filtering I was thinking about discarding everything with less then 10 views. I consider all of your examples relevant. Getting rid of pages like "Wikipeida_suxxxs" is the first step.

<comment><USER4> If those pages exist, it would be awesome if you could notify admins and we'll delete them.

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

Just edit the page and {{db-nonsense}} {{db-test}} or {{db-vandalism}} as appropriate. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Text-only versions, even straight from dumps, have had some bad formatting and truncation problems over the years, can't wait to try this. And here's a use case: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6676661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6676661)

</comment><comment><USER27> We demand e-ink version + "DON'T PANIC" in large, friendly letters on the cover.

Thanks. :)

<comment><USER28> [http://kmkeen.com/tmp/wikireader1.jpg](http://kmkeen.com/tmp/wikireader1.jpg)

Though it is a reflective LCD and text-only.</comment></comment>


Coders heaven? - <AUTHOR>

How many of you (and I am talking to senior coders) would take this opportunity:
You
...are a senior coder that is working in a company setting right now but who has a good idea about a new product and is willing and able to develop it.
...would be free to develop any product you like - as long as it is related to your coding and will create first revenues in the first 18 months
... would be paid 80k for all your expenses. You could work from home or anywhere you like. But you will have to quit your current job. No safety net.
... would give up about 10-20% of your project/product to the investor.
... would be an active part of a community, being able to share and discuss your projects with other coders and with experts in marketing, product design etc.
I am evaluating this scenario for a VC. Some of the ideas sound similar to YC. But we are geographically independent and do not focus on the SF area at all. <comment><USER2> I think that I would at least want to take a deeper look. If I am a first-time entrepreneur making the jump, the community part is helpful to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Scott, I will put you on the list - I expect this to start before 2010.

<comment><USER2> No, I'm not interested but thank you. I was speaking in the, "If I was a first-time entrepreneur" voice (which I am definitely not).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd want to explore something like that. I've got a lot more iPhone apps I could write.</comment>


How to market my NoSQL technology - <AUTHOR>

I have been developing a technology which best can be described as an object oriented / graph NoSQL database, and I need some ideas on how to market it. Check out my web site at: http://www.clear-objects.com/clearodb
The end users would be software developers who writes distributed applications. I haven't thought to much about it's use for web site development, but maybe that could work too.
I am a bit lost as to what approach to take to get this out. I think, the best way is to somehow find individual users who can see the value and that way step by step build up a customer base. I don't think open source is necessarily the way to go (in my life as a professional developer, I have never made a decision to use a technology based on whether it is open source or not, but rather whether it will save me time). I guess the main problem is to convince people that this technology will save them time.
Questions: - Anyone who has launched products to a similar market who has any experiences to share? - Any thoughts on whether an open or closed source approach is better? Would I be more successful in making money long term, if I have a large number of users who use it for free? - I don't really want to sell this as a database technology, but rather a cost saving tool for creating distributed applications (that was really the problem I tried to solve in the first place, it just turned out to be a graph database). Any thoughts on this? <comment><USER2> There are over 100 different NoSQL databases - so you have to definately show something on how your software is better. Most NoSQL are open sourced and are free to use for limited installs, so it will be very hard to make money with licensing. Some offer a base version for free, but offer clustering or other advanced features at a cost. Some charge money for consulting. Where does your db sit on the CAP spectrum? How is it the best for a specific use case?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I realise there are quite a few nosqls around. But only a few have just recently started to gain momentum. It is still very easy to find developers who have never heard of anything but traditional relational databases (not sure if I would dare to say the majority of all developers). In most cases relational databases is the best option for what they are doing, but I think there are many situations where people choose the old sql just because they don't know better. So, although there might be a point in comparing and competing between different NoSQL technologies, I think all within the NoSQL movement can gain from better marketing to all these relational database users.

Anyway, I think what you are saying is I need to be very good at describing why my technology is better than others, which as a developer I find very difficult. It is easy to be technical about it, but how to describe something at a level that makes sense to the average guy is something I am still trying to learn.

What my solution does very well is integration with object oriented languages and where the data is described by complex inheritance structures and ownership relations (say a financial model with different types of financial instruments, different types of market data, static data, deal data, etc which would be described by a number of class hierarchies; and all linked together).

With the risk of getting too technical, if you are building a C++ application for example, you only create your C++ classes (with any inheritance structure which can be single/multiple etc), and you can use pointers to other objects (polymorphic pointers and cyclic graphs are ok), use standard collection classes etc. Basically what you would normally do when designing a C++ application. You use a minimum amount of declarative code as C++ doesn't have built-in reflection. You send your C++ classes to the database and receive the data as your C++ classes. It traverses your objects to find all linkages to other objects prior to sending and links objects together upon retrieval. In short, the solution tries to make life as easy as possible for an application programmer.

What my solution does in terms of CAP and ACID: Atomicity - A transaction is either committed in full or not at all. A transaction may consist of one or multiple objects.

Consistency - No consistency checks in the sense that there are defined constraints on the member fields. However, all objects are versioned, and if two clients are trying to commit the same version of an object, the second client will fail and it would have to retrieve the most recent version before updating the object.

Isolation - All transactions are processed in isolation, i.e. all objects in a transaction are locked prior to being updated

Durability - Transactions are never overwritten, i.e. new transactions are always added to the end of the data store. If a transaction has completed successfully, you can be certain that the transaction will be completed even after a server crash.

Availability - Concurrency is handled by locking objects. Many clients can read simultaneously, but if you try to read an object that is locked for writing by someone else, you will have to wait (there is room for improvement here). If you try to write to an object that someone else is writing to, you will fail. I have not looked into performance of a large number of clients, however the simple answer is that consistency is prioritised above availability.

Partition Tolerance - None at the moment. I have not looked into distributing the database yet.

<comment><USER2> Please contact me - I would love to discuss. [username] at NoSQL dot com</comment></comment></comment>


Best Jobs of 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/10-best-jobs-2011

<comment><USER2> I went to school during right after the crash and during the height of the outsourcing fears (remember the 2004 election rhetoric?) and I'm pretty sure both of those contributed greatly to the profession's outlook. CS and CompEng enrollments have plummeted while the demand keeps on growing and growing. Definitely a great time to be competent software engineer.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised at this mainly for the stress figures. I don't know if this is the case for everyone else, but I would assume some of those positions would have much higher figures for stress - namely software engineers and actuaries.

<comment><USER4> Yeah that was very surprising especially since the stress number was the lowest for software engineers. I have way more stress than a dental hygienist.

<comment><USER5> So when you screw up you have the potential to fuck up someone's teeth, draw blood, or generally cause pain and discomfort to your client? Personally, I just edit and re-run the program.

<comment><USER4> And the stress I'm referring to is more deadline induced than anything else. It's a fact that people in the dental world have very regulated ~40 hours/week schedules. How many all nighters do they pull? None.

<comment><USER6> and 95% of software engineers don't either. My roommate in college works an exact 40.0 hours each weak doing ASP.NET coding for enterprise stuff. Basically zero stress what-so-ever, and makes $55k at age 22.

<comment><USER4> Unless your roommate wants to stay in the same position (entry level coder) then s/he will at some point have to take on more responsibility and/or more challenging work which in turn leads to working some overtime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was surprised to see Mathematician as #2. That contradicts everything I've read about math careers on HN.

<comment><USER8> This would make sense if they're counting Operations Research as a type of Mathematician. Those are the people who design the algorithms (not necessarily write the code) for air flight planning, supply-network chains, personnel scheduling, and most forms of resource allocation. Lots of applications in resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, military, and infrastructure design.

This assumes that they're talking about "Mathematician" as a career, and not just what you can expect with a Math major. If you have a degree in math, you can get quite a high-paying job in a broad range of other industries (like programming and finance, also on the list) because people will just assume you're the smartest person they've ever met.

<comment><USER9> > If you have a degree in math, you can get quite a high-paying job in a broad > range of other industries (like programming and finance, also on the list) > because people will just assume you're the smartest person they've ever met.

I do get people who assume that, especially when they hear what a CMS degree consists of, but I have yet to work out the high-paying job bit.

At work, I mostly only get to do 2D Euclidean geometry, where people seem amazed that you can find mutually tangent circles to make windows look nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Living in the midwest, I always hate looking at national average salaries. My cost of living is great, but its always an ego hit to see numbers like that.

Either that or I need to get a better paying software engineering job :/

<comment><USER11> I feel the same way... 24 yrs old in Indiana and only making $45k + benefits. Granted I never finished my degree (12c short)... :\

I'd like to see lists like this normalized by region taking into acct cost of living, etc. Also, I wonder if outliers are chopped off here -- ie: top google software engineers making several hundred thousand/yr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's nice to compare lists like this to the constant wailing and gnashing of teeth in places on the internet where software careers are discussed.

</comment><comment><USER11> The best job of 2011 is the one that makes you happy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Actually, I'm scared that the florists and cashiers will start applying for programming jobs again after attending a DeVry Insitute program or something similar. I remember suffering through this during the DotCom boom...it sucked.

</comment><comment><USER14> How does a Historian have almost twice the stress of a software engineer?

<comment><USER15> They do not measure stress directly, but base it on a rather narrow rubric of objective factors such as physical demands and travel.

[http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/2011-jobs-rated- methodo...](http://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/2011-jobs-rated-methodology)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Systems?

</comment><comment><USER17> Historian? That blows my mind, who, besides academics, hires historians? I understand studying history is vital to being a competent executive/decision maker, but no one hires solely on that.

<comment><USER18> I had a friend who did history research in Hollywood for movie companies. That is one example of a non-academic historian.

Heck, you could even say that some news reporters and non-fiction book authors are modern day historians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> They forgot Steve.</comment>


Google Talk Goes Down, Suffers Outage Across the World - <AUTHOR> http://techpp.com/2012/07/26/google-talk-goes-down-suffers-outage-across-the-world/

<comment><USER2> This is one of those times when you realize you depend almost entirely on a third party to run your business, and you didn't even know it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This site is so littered with ads it's hard to see what it says. Good thing the title says it all.

<comment><USER4> This is much better [http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1343343599000&iid=a6fb32beebebf8e85b0c986b09a4e69d)</comment></comment>


My Husband and I are Consciously Uncoupling, Too - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/6c8b542d8a64 <comment><USER2> I fail to see what is wrong with 'splitting up' or 'separating' which have never carried any connotations of accidental or inadvertent parting. You'd think that the end of other people's relationships was the result of carelessness or oversight. Talk about self-absorbed.

<comment><USER3> because if you use those terms you are not really a precious snow-flake but just like everyone else!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Poor kid.</comment>


Silicon Valley highway 101 has the strangest billboards in the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-us-101-highway-weird-billboards-2016-10 <comment><USER2> Traditional billboards are a form of visual pollution, but those large LED billboards with excessive brightness are downright _hazardous_. (Examples: at Ravenswood 101 in East Palo Alto, and near Woodside Rd. near the former Circle Star Arena site.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Really.... slow.... news..... day.....</comment>


Project Shield - <AUTHOR> http://projectshield.withgoogle.com/ <comment><USER2> Serious question: what happens if say Wikileaks or Snowden or the next important whistleblower uses this service, and then the head of DHS, FBI, DOJ, etc (not a Court) "gives a call" to Google? Will Google "protect their free expression", or comply with the order within hours, like Amazon did [1]?

Google may have great lawyers and a lot of money, but what if they tell them "hey, you know that tax-free money you're sending to the Bermuda [2]? Yeah, FTC will be knocking on your door tomorrow to ask you about that".

So I guess what I want to know is if Google will actually stand their ground and protect their users till the end by doing the _right thing_ , or they'll "compromise" if the potential cost to their business is too great. Maybe in the past it was easy to believe Google would actually do the right thing, but it's becoming increasingly harder to believe that.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks- websi...](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website- cables-servers-amazon)

[2] [http://www.cnbc.com/id/101104483](http://www.cnbc.com/id/101104483)

<comment><USER3> Google has been pretty explicit about the circumstances in which it will hand user data over to governments or law enforcement. Even if it is required to be done in secret (e.g. a NSL or FISA request), it still requires a valid court order or other legal process.

[http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/userdatarequests)

If you think any U.S.-based company is able to do better, I'd love to hear how.

<comment> workhere-io Snowden mentioned Google as one of the companies that provides direct access to its backend to NSA - meaning that NSA can access information on Google users without needing a court order.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLrPquNK1Mc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLrPquNK1Mc)

<comment><USER4> Which Google repeatedly vehemently denied.

> _I'm not sure I can say this more clearly: we're not in cahoots with the NSA > and there's is no government program that Google participates in that allows > the kind of access that the media originally reported. Note that I say > "originally" because you'll see that many of those original sources > corrected their articles after it became clear that the PRISM slides were > not accurate. Now, what does happen is that we get specific requests from > the government for user data. We review each of those requests and push back > when the request is overly broad or doesn't follow the correct process. > There is no free-for-all, no direct access, no indirect access, no back > door, no drop box._

 _We're not in the business of lying and we're absolutely telling the truth about all of this. Our business depends on the trust of our users. And I'm an executive officer of a large publicly traded company, so lying to the public wouldn't be the greatest career move._

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/19/googl...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/19/google- chief-legal-officer-david-drummond-live-q-and-a) [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html)

<comment> workhere-io _Which Google repeatedly vehemently denied._

Probably because they're forced to do so by the authorities, like Lavebit was. So it becomes a question of who you are going to trust: Snowden (who has nothing to gain by lying) or Google (who is required by law to lie about it _and_ risks losing a lot of money if their customers lose faith in them). I know who I trust in this case.

<comment><USER5> Can you please state what law you believe would force them to lie about it?

As i've pointed out in a few discussions, the law does not (and generally cannot constitutionally) require you to actively lie about something (IE compelled inaccurate speech). It can require you to not speak about something, compel you to speak truthful things (as a disclosure or otherwise), and require you to not tell someone something, but cannot require you to tell them something that is a lie.

AFAIK, Lavabit was forced to _not disclose something_ to their customers, which fits in with what I said.

There are actually fairly important distinctions, legally, between different types of speech, and important legal distinctions between compelled speech and lack of disclosure. So you can't really paint all of these things with the same brush.

(note: The above is about the US, someone asked me privately, and I have no idea, about other countries)

<comment><USER6> According to 18 USC § 2709 (C)(1) it is illegal to "disclose to any person" [1] you have received a National Security Letter. Likewise, the FISA court order used to gather all Verizon call data bars Verizon from disclosing its existence [2].

I don't have the legal expertise to say whether one would be forced to lie about it, and the legislation doesn't explicitly use the word lie. However, according to someone who received one and received legal advice: "Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL [...] When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie." [3]

[1] [http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2709](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2709) [2] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone- recor...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records- verizon-court-order) [3] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2007/03...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2007/03/22/AR2007032201882.html)

<comment><USER5> 1\. As I mentioned, non-disclosure is _very_ different from compelled speech. Compelled accurate speech is even held to a different standard than compelled lies. I have the legal expertise to tell you they are different. :)

2\. This person seems to have missed choice b: "Do not comment". They are not compelled to lie, by the very law you cite. They are only required not to disclose. No court has ever held this to mean "lie when asked", rather than "say nothing when asked". If the government went after someone for not saying anything, that would be ... a tough case.

3\. I am happy to admit the distinction between compelled lying and non- disclosure is, for some people, no distinction at all, but the law does make such a distinction.

<comment><USER6> What you say may be traditionally held by non-secret courts, but the revelations so far indicate the secret courts produce some astonishing rulings.

If the chap quoted in the Washington Post article was actively challenging the constitutionality of National Security Letters with the help of the ACLU, that makes me think he would probably have received reasonably reliable legal advice? Don't you think?

<comment><USER5> First, it is not secret courts who have produced any precedential rulings on the reach of NSL's (at least in the sense of binding any large group of people). It has been normal federal courts. Those that have ruled, have ruled the gag portion unconstitutional.

Here in fact, it says they verified he's the person through publicly available court documents, which must mean it's likely docketed in a normal federal court somewhere (the article pre-dates the FISC publishing their docket)

Second, there are two issues I do not expect he necessarily received reasonably reliable legal advice. The people who participate in these cases are often _not_ specialists, and often _not_ highly knowledgable about the area (especially at this stage of the game, when things get to SCOTUS or something they generally are willing to engage more competent people). They are just passionate.

Past that, he was not quoted, he wrote the piece. You assume the piece is, for example, not using hyperbole. It does not say the government, or anyone else, has actually made these threats. It does not say what legal viewpoint they take that makes them believe this (and again, given the only gag orders to be challenged have _all_ been struck down, it seems a bit out there ...). There are no details or anything else to support or verify the legal reasoning or implications for what he says.

This is an opinion piece, meant to support his case. Reading it as an accurate view of the state of the law is, well, probably not a great idea (I certainly agree that reading it for the chilling effects part, fine. But to take everything he says as if his lawyer said that was the way it had to be, is a bit far)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On an unrelated note, I had never seen the withgoogle.com domain before and I did some searching and found all these other projects, initiatives, landing pages, and even online courses:

\- Chromebook mobile site: [http://us.chromebook.withgoogle.com](http://us.chromebook.withgoogle.com)

\- Developer Bus: [http://developerbus.withgoogle.com](http://developerbus.withgoogle.com)

\- Full Value of Mobile: [http://www.fvm.withgoogle.com](http://www.fvm.withgoogle.com)

\- Google Analytics Academy: [https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com](https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com)

\- Google Expert: [http://expertbrasil.withgoogle.com](http://expertbrasil.withgoogle.com)

\- Google Wallet Instant Request Form: [http://getinstantbuy.withgoogle.com](http://getinstantbuy.withgoogle.com)

\- Mapping: [https://mapping.withgoogle.com](https://mapping.withgoogle.com)

\- Online Marketing 101: [https://onlinemkt101.withgoogle.com/preview](https://onlinemkt101.withgoogle.com/preview)

\- Royal Baby Congrats Card: [https://royalbabycard.withgoogle.com](https://royalbabycard.withgoogle.com)

\- Tour Builder: [https://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com](https://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com)

\- Web Accessibility: [https://webaccessibility.withgoogle.com](https://webaccessibility.withgoogle.com)

\- YouTube Creator Academy: [https://creatoracademy.withgoogle.com](https://creatoracademy.withgoogle.com)

\- Your Tour (Tour de France): [http://yourtour.withgoogle.com](http://yourtour.withgoogle.com)

Non-English:

\- [http://vpered.withgoogle.com](http://vpered.withgoogle.com)

\- [http://docchinogame.withgoogle.com/pc/](http://docchinogame.withgoogle.com/pc/)

\- [http://minchizu.withgoogle.com](http://minchizu.withgoogle.com)

\- [http://ennovate.withgoogle.com](http://ennovate.withgoogle.com)

\- [http://brasilfreewifi.withgoogle.com](http://brasilfreewifi.withgoogle.com)

<comment><USER8> My guess is that everything on a .google.com domain requires loads of security testing. This let's them put up a marketing site with out tons of auditing.

<comment><USER9> Yeah that's absolutely correct. Google has more initiatives than they can produce internally and so a lot of work is contracted to external vendors/agencies, which can have security concerns. The withgoogle.com domain allows Google to host externally-created sites that do not have any access whatsoever to internal user data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems like its just a straight up competitor to Cloudflare. There doesn't' appear to be any direct revenue gain from this, maybe this is more of a mafia protection kinda thing (as in protecting its interests, the websites hosting its ads).

Does anyone know what it takes to mitigate DDoS, at this kind of scale?

<comment><USER3> Did you seriously just accuse Google of "a mafia protection kinda thing"? Seriously?

<comment><USER11> I'm assuming the OP was referring to a protection racket: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket)

>A protection racket is an operation where criminals provide protection to persons and properties, settle disputes and enforce contracts in markets where the police and judicial system cannot be relied upon.

Of course, Google isn't threatening anyone with DDoS, (even assuming that they somehow make money of you).

Otherwise though, it's somewhat of an interesting analogy. This _is_ a form of protection (of online property). And you can't really rely on the police to protect you from DDoS. I suppose it would be more reasonable to just compare it to a security firm though.

<comment><USER12> > I suppose it would be more reasonable to just compare it to a security firm > though.

That's why the analogy is not interesting; the use of "mafia" is silly because it implies there's some criminal element to Google's intensions. For example, here's the opening line of that Wikipedia page:

> A protection racket is a scheme whereby a criminal group provides protection > to businesses through violence outside the sanction of the law.

The only word this has in common with what Google is doing is "protection". The analogy captures nothing _useful_ that "hiring a security guard" doesn't. But it also captures a whole universe of other implications that are entirely unwarranted and laughably unfair. It's a _terrible_ analogy.

"You're just like a mafia don in that you also drive a car."

I should disclaim that I don't think the offering is above suspicion and criticism, just that the comparison to a protection racket is absurd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can already see the headlines: "Beginning January 1st 2016 Google will discontinue Project Shield"

<comment><USER14> You beat me to it. My first thought was, " _now_ what sub-industry is Google trying to kill off and subsequently force the resurrection of in a couple of years when their product gets pulled?"

<comment><USER15> You make them sound like a forest fire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Based on the wording, technology used is going to be a mixture of IP Anycast (traffic sharding) and cache proxying (serve content through), which is what CF does. Except google has all the cash and resources to throw at the problem without putting a dent on their bottom line.

But the interesting tidbit coming out of this project's going to be the internal packet/traffic scrubbing system they've developed. Will it be commercialized or will it spawn a new startup. So many positive outcomes however it ends up.

</comment><comment><USER17> NVidia already has something named Project Shield -- although it has nothing to do with this. Wonder if this is confusing enough for a trademark case.

<comment><USER18> Not to mention the S.H.I.E.L.D. Nick Fury will be pissed.

<comment><USER19> not to be mistaken with… The Shield! [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286486/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286486/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't it a clear that they set this up to track users to those kinds of sites and feed NSA with that information? Also, they get to control what information they want to let out. Call me paranoid, but I don't trust Google a bit here.

<comment><USER21> You don't have to be paranoid to realize that information given to a third party can be abused or leaked to other parties. I'd like to believe that most of us are already past the whole "trusting an organization" thing and have already moved on to deciding whether the benefits of using a service outweigh the downsides of said service sharing your information with other people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think _protect free expression online_ is too precious of an idea to be used there. But that's just my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER23> Every time I see a new google product launch, in the back of my mind I start to wonder when it will be shut down.

</comment><comment><USER24> "protect free expression online"? and who will protect us from google itself?...

</comment><comment><USER25> Whoa, interesting Captcha (sorry to go on a tangent). Looks a bit like crowd- sourcing their street-view work (though could of course be sourced from all sorts of other things).

<comment><USER26> This started last year. Pretty smart usage, in my opinion.

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using- recaptcha-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-to- decode-street-view-addresses/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Project Shield is an initiative to use Google's infrastructure to protect > free expression online

How peculiar. The tech is DDoS mitigation, but the PR focus is on "free expression online", Syrian gas attacks, and evil Iran.

Wonderfully executed. The internet crowd is cheering the "free speech", the government approves of the Middle East angle.

Meanwhile, PRISM keeps working and very few care about it.

</comment><comment><USER28> How will Google determine which opinions to protect?

As wonderful as Project Shield sounds, there is a fundamental risk of it being undemocratic.

<comment><USER29> Why won't it protect all sites regardless of content? Isn't that the point of free speech?

<comment><USER30> No, Google will decide what will be protected or the people that have the power to control Google in these regards.

Content that will certainly not be protected: \- Content that violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

\- Illegal pornography, snuff videos ...

\- sedition,incitement

\- confidential NSA stuff (you know, because it helps terrorist )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am not being funny, however, shouldn't this form be https? Or did I miss something?

</comment><comment><USER32> Kind of a bad name choice with NVIDIA Shield being a popular topic in tech and gaming circles right now.

</comment><comment><USER33> _Good goy, come host your government neglecting data with us, we promise we won 't hurt you!_

</comment><comment><USER34> Great! Now the NSA can monitor every dissident of the world without the need to search for them.

<comment><USER35> Well, that's what Google is all about - providing good search solutions ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> One more step toward Google creating a complete and comprehensive end to end solution

<comment><USER36> Which provides GOOGLE with even more connected data points about a user when he/she is surfing the net.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> so this is like cloudflare but for people whom google like?

</comment><comment><USER38> Hopefully this project will come with increased openness about Googles complicity in the PRISM scandal. It would be rather ironic if this ends up protecting free speech everywhere except in America.

<comment><USER10> It is quite ironic how the country that class itself the land of the free, and home of democracy, etc. exudes no fight for freedom within its own borders. Kinda ruins the whole freedom facade, when freedom is only given when it is inline with the government strategic plan.

<comment><USER39> There have been protests, haranguing in the news, even an attempt to defund the NSA's metadata collection program which almost passed. What do you expect, molotov cocktails to be thrown at Congress? It's a big country and most people simply don't care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> github needs this.

</comment><comment><USER41> Wow, what a load.</comment>


YC-Local? - <AUTHOR>

There seems to be a yearning on yc for people to find e/o or just talk to people near them. Why not have local channels for meetups etc? Could be in the form of sub-forums or you could submit a link as local and only those who subscribe to a region in their prefs would see it. Not very creative but I've only slept an hour. Let's hear you ideas. I know the demand is there.
<comment><USER2> if you want to see others in your area look at <http://hackrtrackr.com></comment>


Life - The Dirty Yucky Messy Chaotic Process - <AUTHOR> http://www.alearningaday.com/2011/09/life-dirty-yucky-messy-chaotic-process.html

<comment><USER2> Quite agree with you. Moreover, people who try to find structure are often left with a feeling of being let down. Perhaps it has become part of modern coming of age to realze that there is no structure. I think Tolstoy also tried to bring out this point in his works, esp War and Peace but also other works like Anna Karenina as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. It's hard to embrace chaos though.. because we still love the illusion of control. (That sounds a bit too philosophical but well, it's true.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Generate random traffic for metadata obfuscation? - <AUTHOR> I remember some time ago a scare of meta data or something similar being leaked and specific peoples traffic being available (not security background so sorry if that doesn't even make sense), was just wondering if there were any scripts to randomly send requests to accumulate random meta data and obfuscate your real traffic? <comment><USER2> Scripts like these can be easily circumvented as browsing habits are not random. Using machine learning or statistical methods, you can filter out the randomness. People can be identified by the unique set of websites they use pretty reliably. (see [https://svs.informatik.uni- hamburg.de/publications/2013/2013...](https://svs.informatik.uni- hamburg.de/publications/2013/2013-04-10HBF_Behavior-based-tracking-with-dns- traffic.pdf)) The only way to anonymize yourself using fake traffic is not to generate random traffic but to specifically engineer requests which bring you closer to the global average. How to do this is still an open research question.

<comment><USER3> What if you were to train an algorithm for a given user's usage patterns on a website and then project those patterns onto other users? Use machine learning to generate realistic noise seeded with random keyword topics that would span multiple sites. It would appear to anyone watching as if you really did have a certain number of interests, that you don't actually hold. Then superimpose a bunch of fake usage profiles over your actual browsing.

<comment><USER4> That sounds awesome! "Tonight, I want Google to think that I'm a duck watcher that is interested in skydiving and cooking at low altitudes!" and you just combine your profile to be whatever you want.

You could even use that as a purchasing advantage. "Well, I'm interested in knowing what a gamer would buy in this situation. So, I'm going to use a 23 year old gamer geek profile." or "I wonder what you would buy a photographer for Christmas.." then you just seed it with photographer data and let it suggest you things then you pick something haha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TrackMeNot ([http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/](http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/)) uses this technique to protect against web search tracking.

In general, privacy by obfuscation is an idea that privacy researchers have been considering. Other than TrackMeNot, however, I haven't seen many real- world applications.

<comment><USER6> Hah, awesome add-on, you can even add your own (language) websites/rss feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've given this a good bit of thought; I'm sure its easy to generate plausible deniability, but actually masking relationships is not as simple as it sounds, as an adversary will easily filter out random noise.

You would need chaff deliberately constructed to look a bit like non-random social network/communication data; that's kind of a research project, and its going to be hard to guarantee it is working in the face of unknown statistical attack.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's a couple of papers describing metadata resistant anonymity systems that may help you understand how "chaff" traffic can help obfuscate real traffic. It's not as simple as generating random noise because real traffic patterns can be identified with confirmation or intersection attacks.

Aqua: [http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2013/papers/sigcomm/p...](http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2013/papers/sigcomm/p303.pdf)

Dissent: [http://bford.info/pub/net/panopticon- cacm.pdf](http://bford.info/pub/net/panopticon-cacm.pdf)

Of particular interest to your question are the threat models.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't know what's happening with this now, but I remember the Pond ( [https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/11/10/pond.html](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/11/10/pond.html) ) project working on something like this. I believe they were trying to do this with encrypted data as opposed to plaintext, but their work might still be interesting. IIRC a big part of it was batching transmissions and introducing a delay, sending 'dummy' data when there was no 'real' data, at regular intervals (to prevent timing/traffic correlation attacks).

It kind of reminded me of the old Asynchronous Transfer Mode protocol, with its cells.

</comment><comment><USER10> Set up a Tor Exit node.

</comment><comment><USER11> fteproxy [1] can superficially mask the protocol that you're using (e.g., makes Tor look like HTTP) using regular expressions.

marionette [2] enables control over what protocol it looks like you're using and duration of connections generated, amount of data sent per connection, etc.

[1] [https://fteproxy.org/](https://fteproxy.org/) [2] [https://github.com/marionette-tg/marionette](https://github.com/marionette- tg/marionette)

</comment><comment><USER12> Tor, I2P

</comment><comment><USER13> (xkcd) [https://xkcd.com/576/](https://xkcd.com/576/)</comment>


Google launches its own festival to bring together music and technology - <AUTHOR> https://goodfest.good.is/ <comment><USER2> Playing for generosity? Playing for humanity? What kind of schmaltzy PR BS is this?

<comment><USER3> They're donating all of the ticket sales for the shows to charity.

While it _is_ a PR branding stunt, at least in that regard it is "playing for generosity". Moreso than most branded shows

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Colored text inside black sentences that aren't links? By god...

<comment><USER5> I remember about 10 years ago when Google's UX design was absolutely state of the art. It was a no bullshit, maybe even ugly, aesthetic. It was literally unbelievably fast and supremely useful.

Fast forward to now and it's FILLED with garbage like this across the board. Mystery meat navigation abounds, contrast is poor, inconsistency is everywhere likely due to the complexity of their menu structures. And then there is what the parent postal mentions: colored text in body copy that isn't links. Holy hell.

These are all UX mistakes that are covered in software design 101. I guess the money hose of Google search let's you get away with it all. They just keep redesigning. And their products keep becoming more impenetrable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What does it mean that it is "presented by Pixel"? Will it be streamed from a Pixel phone?

<comment><USER7> In most contexts, an entertainment event being "presented by X" just means that X funded the event in exchange for having their name associated with it. E.g., "Thursday Night Football, Presented by Bud Light" \-- Bud Light has nothing to do with the content or transmission of the event, it just paid the most money for advertising.

However: you're totally right that they may do some cool tie-in with the phone itself in this case.

<comment><USER6> Ah, all right, thanks. That's just me not being a native speaker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of Moogfest. Fusion of music and tech talks. Last year there were a series of talks on AI & big headliners. Instead of taking place in 5-cities, it takes place in Durham, NC home of Duke University and within the Research Triangle Park community.

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://thetrichordist.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-boss- wors...](https://thetrichordist.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-boss-worse-than- the-old-boss-full-post/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Good Fest? That is the best they could come up with?? I'd prefer Don't be Evil Fest 2016 ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> Holy shit; this is exciting!</comment>


The Piranha of Portugal: the Greatest Counterfeiter of All Time (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.globalfinancialdata.com/gfdblog/?p=1862 <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting. A very similar operation is happening today in North Korea: Millions of counterfeit USD/CNY/EUR are printed and laundered through NK banks every year[0]. Turns out somebody has already done it before.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> _" A lowly, underpaid teller who worked part-time at a jeweler to help make ends meet had become suspicious of the Banco Angola e Metropole. The Escudo notes he received were never in numerical order (Reis's plan to shuffle the banknotes to avoid detection actually caused detection),[...]"_

Rats. The Germans got caught with the WWII tank serial numbers, this guy sidesteps that (years before), gets caught.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

</comment><comment><USER4> Being from Portugal I wonder how this was completely unknown to me

<comment><USER5> Not to me. RTP made a whole TV series about it: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424598/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424598/)

(Not that I recommend watching it)

<comment><USER6> JFYI, there was also a (IMHO quite nice) TV mini-serie in Italy long before the 2000's, in 1974:

[https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accadde_a_Lisbona](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accadde_a_Lisbona)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGYt5_UJWF0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGYt5_UJWF0)

etc.

<comment><USER5> That's curious, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More than anything, I find interesting the impact this probably did have on the failure of democracy in Portugal back then.

<comment><USER8> Probably no real impact. I'm not an expert and my knowledge on this comes entirely from a free guided tour of Lisbon I went on today, but the democracy was already a complete disaster. The second paragraph on this wikipedia article[0] says it all:

> The sixteen years of the First Republic saw nine presidents and 44 > ministries, and have been described as consisting of "continual anarchy, > government corruption, rioting and pillage, assassinations, arbitrary > imprisonment and religious persecution".

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

<comment><USER9> The linked article actually gives a decent amount of credit to the forgery for the downfall of democracy.

" _The revelation of the counterfeiting plot created a huge loss of confidence in the corrupt, democratic government. Military officers who were aggrieved over their pay failing to keep up with inflation, overthrew the democratic government on May 28, 1926. ... A scheme to counterfeit currency and make a forger rich had led, indirectly, to the downfall of a democracy which was followed by a forty-year dictatorship._ "

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like that one of the high end techniques was to social-engineer a banknote printing company of repute, to print your banknotes.

Those moments when high end US government officials get given proof sheets of banknotes, one-sided half-printed notes, Steve Woz gets his banknotes bound into a cheque-book like thing.. They're on the fringe of 'what is money' questions too.

</comment><comment><USER11> No less than 330,000 banknotes introduced in circulation. The man is a legend.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Historical examples of government-induced debasement include: [...]"

Does the switch of many EU countries switching to EUR count in this context as a valid example as well?

<comment><USER13> Care to explain in what kind of bizzaro logic universe a country adopting a currency counts as debasement?

<comment><USER12> I'm asking it as question, not stating it like a premise I agree with.

I can explain what happened in my country:

First, we had the guilder (NLG) since the 17th century [1], then we adopted the EUR. The conversion rate for us was approx 2.20 NLG for 1 EUR.

When we adopted the EUR basically within a few months everything became as expensive in amount as it was before but then in EUR. That's not a normal recession or normal inflation.

This inflation often gets directly attributed to adoption of the EUR. Whether that is factually correct or not, I don't know. If it _would_ be factually correct (ie. let us assume it hypothetically _is_ ), would it be a correct example as a debasement?

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

<comment><USER13> Now I understand the question, thank you.

So, _inflation_ is a term normally used for increase of good's prices over time as measured in the currency of the country where you're buying the goods. So you can't use the term inflation to mean "the conversion rate was 2.20 NLG for 1 EUR and within a few months everything because as expensive in amount of EUR as it was before in NLG." This isn't a mere technicality. You can't measure increase in price across the moment when the EUR was introduced, because the EUR didn't exist before that and the NLG didn't exist after that.

In my opinion the conversation onwards should be: if something happened, what interesting metrics should we be looking at to detect it and measure it? Let me suggest one: number of hours of median salary needed to buy the CPI basket of goods. Measure that before and after the introduction of the EUR. If that number increased, then you can say that consumers lost purchasing power. Loss of purchasing power does not necessarily follow as a consequence of inflation (although it can) but is usually the bad consequence of inflation that people worry the most about.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Infantryman Learns to Code - <AUTHOR> http://aybabt.me/posts/an_infantryman_learns_to_code <comment><USER2> I wish I had written some code that saves lives. This is pretty good read

</comment><comment><USER3> machine guns and code ;)</comment>


Uber and Waymo Reach Settlement - <AUTHOR> https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo-settlement/ <comment><USER2> Good behind the scenes analysis of why Waymo's case was flimsy here from Sarah Jeong, a lawyer and journalist who has been live tweeting the trial:

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber- tria...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16993208/waymo-v-uber-trial-trade- secrets-lidar)

Summary - Waymo was claiming Uber violated 8 trade secrets (down from 100s), and had only directly discussed these trade secrets for 45 minutes over the past week. "Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes?"

"And then there's the part where Anthony Levandowski is not on trial, Uber is. Even if Levandowski took 14,000 confidential documents, that doesn't mean that Uber did something wrong — there isn't a clear link to how those documents got onto Uber computers or were used in Uber self-driving cars."

<comment><USER3> She makes a number of fair points, but:

> Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes?

Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I think I can do that in 45 seconds.

      - hey what's your learning rate scheduling for module X?
      - we use an EMA with coefficient 1e-4
      - oh great, and for Y, do you do constant strides?
      - no we use backtracking to figure out some sampling heuristic

etc.

<comment><USER4> Parameters are probably the lowest hanging fruit in any machine learning optimisation, being a trade secret is a big stretch.

Also use LBFG so you never worry about learning rate.

<comment><USER5> Hyperparameter optimization for neural networks can be insanely expensive though[1], to the point where there are even startups (e.g: SigOpt) that do this. [1] [https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/961263599674150912](https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/961263599674150912)

<comment><USER6> the tweet you link to is architectural search, or figuring out what the neural network should look like (along with its parameters).

If self-driving car ML is "data scientists replacing a driver with computers", architecture search is computers replacing data scientists. $1.2M is roughly 3-4 data scientists' annual compensations at a company like Google or Uber.

Finding hyperparameters for an existing architecture is much easier because you would typically deal with a much lower cardinality in hyperparameter space. SigOpt is helping with that. Google has an internal solution that is able to take advantage of parameters within their job scheduling infrastructure (they actually have a bunch of them, the one I'm talking about is called hyperband [0]). CERN, as far as I know, was using hyperopt [1]. Avant uses an open-source version of SigOpt that we wrote in 2016 called loop [2].

[0] - [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06560.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06560.pdf) [1] - [http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt](http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt) [2] - [https://github.com/avantoss/loop](https://github.com/avantoss/loop)

<comment><USER7> Before this gets inundated with people making comments about Googler data scientists making $400k, these are folks with PhDs in math or statistics, very accomplished academic literature, leaders in their fields. These are not people messing around with Haskell on the weekends and leaving an insurance firm's IT department to go to Google.

<comment><USER8> They also don't make $400k – an engineer that costs $400k doesn't get that in take home pay.

<comment><USER7> There are enough non-executive engineers at Google making half a million or more base/cash comp that you could fill a room with them. That's not the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Really surprised this ended so quickly. Did Waymo and Uber reach a settlement that early because:

\- the former felt this was the "best" it could get in such a situation as their case was not as strong as they initially thought

\- the latter was not keen on having its image dragged into the mud any further and may also be aware that more incriminating material could surface if Google or others dug further?

IANAL, but I find the resolution of this case quite puzzling... Also what does it mean for Uber's self-driving car development efforts?

<comment><USER10> It does have the feel of a TV show at this point. Given @sarahjeong's coverage on Twitter and in the Verge I would not be surprised if Waymo's legal team felt they were going to at least not win, and might lose.

And to my thinking Waymo had lots more to lose than Uber did. (and I think that is reflected in the settlement being not quite 13% of what they were asking, and in stock which may be completely worthless). Waymo loses and it might embolden other Google employees to go to competitors, it might embolden those competitors to try to recruit their top engineers to bring their ideas into the competitor. It might completely blunt Googles ability to get any engineer to believe what the company thinks of as trade secrets would actually be considered trade secrets in a court and so they aren't as threatening as before. And on cross examination Uber might have pulled some things into open court and the public record that Waymo would rather not have out there.

Uber on the other hand already has a reputation as being a rule breaker, and skating over the line. So what do they have to lose? I Waymo can take $1.9 billion in _cash_ out of Uber (maybe more if they can get lawyers fees etc) they can take them off the board completely.

According to the coverage they were being berated by the judge and their case had gone from being about patents to about trade secrets to about 8 trade secrets. That is not a legal case gaining steam, that is one that is trying to stay alive.

<comment><USER11> Lewandowski's credibility is in the gutter after this. There is proof of him siphoning confidential documents, data, from Google's internal systems.

I'm not sure how Waymo losing would make it less threatening for people to do the same thing? They now know more than ever that anything they do to internal/confidential data is being monitored.

<comment><USER10> Lucky for him he seems to have escaped with enough money that he can live comfortably without ever being employed again. If you look at his situation objectively I find it hard not qualify him as pulling off the heist of the century. He gets a ton of bonus money from Google, he gets a bunch of buyout money from Uber, he gets Uber to indemnify him from any legal repercussions. And he has plenty of cash to make it super painful for Google to try and claw back anything as well.

So change your name, move to a different area, change your hair style and voila, playboy at large.

<comment><USER12> Why change his name and haircut? As Silicon Valley becomes more like Wall Street this behavior is not condemned but celebrated and even admired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Waymo is getting .34% of Uber's equity in the settlement, which at a $72 billion valuation, is valued at about $245 million."

[https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424](https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424)

<comment><USER14> That's a stale valuation, Uber's latest round was significantly down from that. The Softbank tender valued Uber at $48B, so a more up-to-date estimate would be:

      0.34 * 0.01 * $48B = $0.163B

<comment><USER15> They aren't directly comparable given the difference between common and preferred shares.

<comment><USER16> Do we know if Uber is getting preferred or common shares in the settlement?

<comment><USER16> s/Uber/Google

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This isn't about something new happening in the fight itself- it's about the economy lately (imho).

This was a fight they could have drawn out. They could have claimed it wasn't their fault, they could have paid enough legal fees to win the day. But it was always going to be a waste of time, in a literal sense. Years could have gone by before any decision, holding back Uber the entire time.

Uber is still a black hole for money but VCs see it's potential and keep throwing money at it. So long as that money kept coming, Uber could do anything they want really.

But then the market started crashing. The last week has been a wake up call that things are a-changin'. In another six months, there may not be VC money being thrown around anymore. And then you'd have Uber actually in a crunch. What then?

By settling today, Uber may have the time it needs to get their self-driving fleet in the road before the money runs out for good. That's all that matters to keep the company alive, and Khosrowshahi knows it.

But if he'd been smart, he'd have settled six months ago instead.

<comment><USER18> Lawyers don't work fast enough for this to have anything to do with stock market pullback.

<comment><USER17> They can if you pay them enough. Or if this contingency plan was written 3 months ago just in case the economy finally faltered.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, no. That's not how this works.

<comment><USER17> Seriously though- beyond a dismissive snarky reply, what is your view on it? Why now? Why not six months ago and why not fight to the end?

It's fine to disagree, but don't just tell me I'm wrong, convince me I'm wrong!

<comment><USER19> Apologies, you're right. My reply was pretty dismissive and snarky (hey, it's HN, that's what we do, right?) but I should have been more thoughtful in my response!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think what happened is Levandowski and Uber acted in a very suspicious way that lead Waymo to conclude that Uber must have stolen its IP. But then when it came to discovery they couldn't find solid evidence (either because the property was not used, or Uber managed to destroy the evidence), and so Waymo realized it was probably going to lose the trial.

In the meantime, the lawsuit helped kick Kalanick out, and he was replaced by someone much more reasonable who wanted to end the lawsuit. As a consequence the two parties were able to come to an agreement.

<comment><USER21> This theory is so wildly off from what my lawyer friends have told me about the case (including one who has 5+ years of IP law experience)

They are mostly in agreement that Google had enough to win the case but that they likely had the worry that juries are always unpredictable and you really never know what will happen. They seem to believe that the thing that Google cared about the most was restricting Uber's usage of the stolen technology. They believe that Uber felt they had a decent chance of losing so they mutually agreed to setting, giving Google what they wanted (restriction of the technology usage). Once that was offered Google immediately moved to settle since that was what they wanted from the outset and any additional cash or destruction of Uber's image would have been beyond their needs.

<comment><USER22> If you look at the settlement number, 0.34% of Uber at 72B (yes, 72B, not 45B as the recent down round which would equate to 150M), then you'll see that Google did not expect to win this case.

<comment><USER23> Nobody said that Google expected to win the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone who thinks this is a loss for Uber doesn't know what was at stake in this case. At one point an injunction against Uber's self-driving division was on the table. If that were still any sort of possibility Uber would have ended up paying far more than a couple hundred million in equity to settle the case.

I think it's safe to say this wasn't really about theft of trade secrets by Uber. We can infer this because Google's lawyers would have known exactly how weak their case against Uber was when nothing of substance turned up as part of discovery. Google decided to go to trial anyway. They knew that Uber's ailing brand would make them _seem_ guilty in the public eye even though they clearly weren't.

I can't prove this, but I think this was a chillingly opportunistic move by Google that was designed mainly to stop the loss of top engineering talent to Uber ATG. After all, who would want to go to join a company which appeared to be in serious legal jeopardy?

I'd speculate that Uber's current leadership saw an opportunity to immediately stop the damage to their brand and took it. Part of me wishes TK were still running the show because he probably would not have settled.

</comment><comment><USER25> "To be clear, while we do not believe that any trade secrets made their way from Waymo to Uber, nor do we believe that Uber has used any of Waymo's proprietary information in its self-driving technology, we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work."

I feel like there's a contradiction inside this sentence.

Is this an admission that some of Uber's technology came from Waymo, but merely things that are not trade secrets / proprietary information?

<comment><USER26> While there may in fact be some truths to the allegations this seems more like a standard settlement phrase to me.

Got sued a lot of times myself for various (business related) reasons. Sometimes just faster to pay than see how it plays out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> So what is Lewandowski's final status here? I know he doesn't work at Uber anymore, but did he keep all the money?

Seems like he got a pretty good deal if so, he's retired with hundreds of millions.

<comment><USER28> He made very little off of Uber since his comp was tied to milestones related to Otto's technology

<comment><USER24> The equity he received from Otto's acquisition was also clawed back because he was fired with cause. He ended up with nothing from Uber.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _" But the prospect that a couple of Waymo employees may have inappropriately solicited others to join Otto, and that they may have potentially left with Google files in their possession, in retrospect, raised some hard questions."_

"Hard questions" \-- That's a good one! Not only because of its velvety-smooth use of euphemism, but because it's basically true: We enlist the help of the judicial system to answer questions that are hard. And an accusation that the accused denies, fits in that category. Filing a lawsuit is essentially asking a "hard question" along the lines of "Should the other party be obligated to compensate us for damages?" One side says yes, the other says no. Hard question!

I'll have to use that one sometime. I really need to learn the art of executive-speak if I'm to advance in this life. But I suspect I'll just stubbornly stay my same tactless self.

</comment><comment><USER30> > " _may have potentially_ "

This kind of language must be intentional given the team that reviewed and edited the memo, which makes it worse to my ears. Either "may have" or "potentially" would have sufficed.

<comment><USER31> The lawyers get paid per weasel word!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> google used to own 7% of uber. I don't know what it is now, but lets say its 5% that stake would be 3.5bil at 72bil valuation . If they are getting .34% essentially they are losing money from GV losing money as a share holder while waymo is gaining some, but they are both google companies.

I don't see how this lawsuit benefits google shareholders as a whole. They just wasted money on lawyers.

<comment><USER33> Google has an in-house litigation team that would have already been on payroll. Sure they had to pay for expert witnesses and court fees, but the total would be far less than what they settled for

<comment><USER34> Charles Verhoeven, afaik the lead attorney for Waymo is definitely not on Alphabet payroll.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Estimate of total legal cost to Uber and Waymo combined?

</comment><comment><USER36> Kind of a disappointing end to such a lengthy and publicized build up.

<comment><USER37> It was always going to end with money, this just fast forwards it a bit.

<comment><USER38> When Intel stole Digital's alpha technology the lawsuit ended with intel acquiring the Digital chip business. I guess that's also sort of money, but not exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if this means Levandowski is also personally off the hook now as well.

Also, I'm not clear how much he actually netted from Otto, since lots was probably based on vesting that didn't happen.

<comment><USER40> Is there any motivation for Waymo and Uber to work together to burn Levandowski?

If not, he's {probably} off the hook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I recall earlier news stories that Waymo's first settlement proposal last year included demands for a public apology from Uber. Is this that? I wonder if Uber is also paying $1b like Waymo initially demanded, or if that part changed as well.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-uber- lawsuit/exc...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-uber- lawsuit/exclusive-alphabets-waymo-demanded-1-billion-in-settlement-talks-with- uber-sources-idUSKBN1CH0QC)

</comment><comment><USER42> That was quick. What would Uber and/or Google have been embarrassed to see become public? And will Lewandowski get to quietly sneak away, or will both companies now pillory him?

<comment><USER43> Once evidence is revealed, there isn't much new for lawyers to discover: good, experience negotiators know what angle the other side is going to take and after opening arguments, even that is pretty settled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I appreciate the overall conciliatory tone (with the usual "we did nothing illegal" caution) but I'm not seeing mention of any financial settlement. I can't imagine that didn't happen.

<comment><USER44> "Waymo is getting .34% of Uber's equity in the settlement, which at a $72 billion valuation, is valued at about $245 million."

[https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424](https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/961993637348327424)

<comment><USER45> Still less than Uber paid for ottomotto. Crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is there any precedent for settling with stock? I would imagine this could create a dangerous standard.

<comment><USER47> Tons of precedent. In fact, Google paid Yahoo stock worth about the same amount to settle the Overture suit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I have to say that this is kind of surprising but thinking about it all logically it seems like there is a lot more to this story.

First off as others have pointed out Waymo's case wasn't a slam dunk. So they settled for way less than they originally wanted.

But there are several other interesting things to note. Because of this case there is now a criminal investigation into Uber's acquisition of Otto. I feel like part of why Uber settled was because they knew this was being investigated and dragging out this case in court may have made public some really incriminating evidence in the criminal investigation.

What further leads me to believe this is the case is the fact that the current CEO has basically admitted that the acquisition of Otto should have been handled differently. It seems like they knew that Otto may have stolen trade secrets from Waymo. It also appears that Uber may have had helped set up Otto from the start to acquire such information. For this we will have to wait and see how the criminal investigation shakes out. At which point we could see federal charges appear against Uber and Levandowski. We may also see the SEC step into this as well if they did appear to set up Otto as a Shell company to acquire stolen technologies. Time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER49> The statement might as well have just been the title. It was completely void of substance.

</comment><comment><USER50> That is called a positive attitude towards accepting mistakes and moving forward. Uber finally got a good CEO.

</comment><comment><USER51> I wonder if Uber will license Waymos driverless technology?

<comment><USER43> If they do, Waymo will most likely have a clause that allows them to pull if away or a price point that prevents Uber from operating profitably once Waymo is in full force.

A small sign of that: I generally order Ubers from Google Maps. Until recently, I was sent to Uber app; lately, it's an entire experience through GMaps. I suspect they are planning to switch that default to Waymo wherever they are.

<comment><USER52> Can you select which one you'd prefer to use? This seems like another anti- trust case in the making.

<comment><USER53> You can book either Uber or even Lyft from Google Maps (assuming they are available in your location). Once the ride starts, you can follow progress from either Google Maps or the Uber app. You can still book and track the whole thing from the Uber app, of course.

I prefer GM because it has all my bookmarks, it doesn't download the same map tiles again, etc. Until recently, it was quite annoying, because you were trapped in "Uber mode" during a ride. As of a few months ago, you can go back to the base map, start new searches, look up transit directions, etc. and later return to your ride's status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The page redirects to a non-existent page in some countries, here's an archive link for anyone else who can't access it: [http://archive.is/0YuQe](http://archive.is/0YuQe)

</comment><comment><USER55> > To be clear, while we do not believe that any trade secrets made their way > from Waymo to Uber, nor do we believe that Uber has used any of Waymo's > proprietary information in its self-driving technology, we are taking steps > with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work.

At what point do statements like this start to harm a company rather than benefit it? It is plain to see that they are lying; if the first is true the second part would not be happening.

</comment><comment><USER56> Uber and Waymo announced on Friday that they had settled a high-stakes court battle with Alphabet subsidiary Waymo over trade secrets related to self- driving cars.

As part of the settlement, Uber will pay Waymo 0.34% of Uber equity, valued at Series G-1 round at an approximate $US72B valuation.

Uber's CEO also "expressed regret for the actions" that led to the lawsuit.

<comment><USER43> It is interesting that Alphabet will accept stock because that means they believe they can carry it to market (or at least, won't lower its value until it does) which might still take more than a year.

This could mean Waymo will probably not be able to announce anything significant until then: Uber would suffer from having such a big rival step up. Internal politics at Alphabet must be fun.

<comment><USER57> > It is interesting that Alphabet will accept stock because that means they > believe they can carry it to market (or at least, won't lower its value > until it does) which might still take more than a year.

It doesn't mean Alphabet thinks the stock won't lose value, it means that they think that it won't lose _enough_ value to be worth less than what they could have gotten in cash, either in a settlement or (discounted for risk and time, and netted against the expense of continuing) from taking the lawsuit to it's conclusion.

> This could mean Waymo will probably not be able to announce anything > significant until then: Uber would suffer from having such a big rival step > up.

Is $245 million really worth any significant risk to Alphabet's position in self-driving cars? I suspect they'd accept the risk to the value of the Uber stock to maximize their own future prospects in that market.

<comment><USER58> Google already has 7% of Uber so just adding to what they already have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Uber was right to cave. Google is not a litigious company, and would not have sued unless Uber had behaved really badly.

<comment><USER60> It doesn't make sense to apply anthropomorphized motivations to giant corporations. Google's IPR management is not that different from the others. They will litigate if it's to their advantage.

Maybe the reason Google hasn't been suing much until now is that they've largely been on the borrowing end of the deal (cf. Android's debt to Sun and Apple).

<comment><USER58> Just not Google's approach to sue others. Think in this case just too much too let it go. You can see it elsewhere with all the research papers and open sourcing so much software. I mean OS K8s was a little nuts, imo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Very good lesson:risk pays off. Lewandowski risked and it paid off.

<comment><USER62> > Lewandowski risked and it paid off.

Levandowski was fired from Uber, is still in arbitration with Waymo, and possibly has a federal investigation pending against him (which is why he has, and was planning to, take the fifth amendment). I'm not sure how it "paid off" here.

<comment><USER63> I think his firing was only PR. Seems like he is still at Uber:

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony- levandowski-8164291/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony- levandowski-8164291/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I would like to see more actions that show they mean what they say.

<comment><USER43> They did get rid of a handful of employees that were considered rowdy, handsy or sexist. Internally, I'm told the changes are quite dramatic. The public tone around the legality of their offering, notably in London, is a bit like this note: far more consensual but not clearly stepping down. They want to serve London and Londoners need the service (minicabs aren't able to produce software at the quality Uber does) so to me, that sound much better. More recently, they did publish detailed data to help a conversation on gender- balance of their driver compensation (not where I expected them to have their main problem, but good for them to inform the conversation on pay gap).

I don't think Dara is an angel, far from it — I got internal rumours that he's more than willing to punish good people if that makes him look tough and, honestly, he needs to. Rather than let him cull randomly until he feels like he's done enough, we could help him pick the bad:

Were would you expect them to lead? Serious question: I know many employees read HN, and I'm happy to point some of the more respectful and change-prone ones to your suggestions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> It's amazing how judicial system works fast in the USA. In my country both companies would go bankrupt and would still be suing each other due to sunk cost fallacy.

</comment><comment><USER66> «...we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work.»

Waymo will have access to Ubers Lidar and software.

And an admission of guilt.

</comment><comment><USER67> Uber has bad connotations in my head. To be honest, I'd rather Google didn't hold a stake at it.

</comment><comment><USER68> google is looking like microsoft of yesterday, although i had high hopes from google.

</comment><comment><USER69> Big victory for Uber

[http://ideas.4brad.com/uber-and-waymo-settle-lawsuit- giant-v...](http://ideas.4brad.com/uber-and-waymo-settle-lawsuit-giant- victory-uber)

</comment><comment><USER70> The statement from Uber's new CEO on this settlement is concise:

[https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo- settlement/](https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo-settlement/)

<comment><USER29> Yes I believe I saw that recently...

<comment><USER71> If not, you can find it here:

[https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo- settlement/](https://www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-waymo-settlement/)

<comment><USER72> link to the HN discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16341094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16341094)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> This is disgusting. I recognize that the moat that the government provides via the nonsense system that is IP is an incentive for investment, but the very notion of intellectual property should fly in the face of the moral code of every single person who works at a business built on Linux or HTTP.

The future the Earth needs is only delayed by these moats of who-can-use- which-research.

You don't own your discoveries or ideas, any more than you can own a song that you sing to another person. The moment something leaves your head, that information is no longer yours—it enriches the whole world, and that is how it should be.

I am the staunchest defender of property rights—but information can never be property.

<comment><USER73> > information can never be property

Property is an artificial construct, it's up to society how we define what property is and how laws protect it. In this case, Google and Waymo are literally building fake cities to create this IP. That money needs to come from somewhere or that research won't happen, and a temporary monopoly on the IP it generates seems like a fair trade-off for society.

<comment><USER55> Property is not an artificial construct; it is a natural right. You must physically harm me to remove that which is inside of my closed fist.

Intellectual Property, however, is made-up fairytale nonsense.

<comment><USER74> How many of your belongings can you hold in your closed fist?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Poweliks: the persistent malware without a file - <AUTHOR> https://blog.gdatasoftware.com/blog/article/poweliks-the-persistent-malware-without-a-file.html

<comment><USER2> This is exactly why, on a Windows computer, you should:

1\. Never run under an administrator account unless you are performing administrative duties (i.e. temporarily admin to intentionally install an app, and not opening Word docs).

2\. Use Software Restriction Policy to only allow executables to run out of C:\Windows, "C:\Program Files", and "C:\Program Files (x86)".

If I had to pick one or the other for my grandmother - antivirus software or the non-admin/SRP config - I would choose non-admin/SRP hands down and sleep easy. It's that effective. Unfortunately almost no one operates in this state because it's not default when you buy a new Windows PC. Companies selling antivirus software might go out of business if this were the default configuration.</comment>


Are you making a real web application? Or just a Chrome application? [2019] - <AUTHOR> https://erik.itland.no/are-you-making-a-chrome-application-or-a-web-application <comment><USER2> Great post. Also thanks for the write.as introdiction. Introduction to, I mean. Great post anyways. Upvoted.</comment>


Capture Invoices Using Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> We have rolled out Cognitive Invoice, a invoice data extraction platform to automate Invoice Processing. Get a free trial here and let us know you feedback. https://docacquire.com/cognitive-invoice/ <comment><USER2> Drop the word Cognitive it sounds douchy.</comment>