A beginner's guide to the conflict in (and country of) Syria - <AUTHOR> http://thehowardbealeshow.tumblr.com/post/59787605249/a-beginners-guide-to-the-conflict-in-and-country-of <comment><USER2> The author missed one of the main reasons the west is involved in Syria: Energy. Syria sits right in between the oilfields in the Middle East and the oil consumers in Europe, so when a pipeline is built connecting the two, Syria has a vote for or against its completion. Since oil pipelines are both necessary and quite profitable, this can lead to very large disputes. Al Jazeera covered this last year here [1] where it was suggested that the West would be inclined to usurp Assad for someone more favorable to the West's long term energy interests. It seems their prediction was correct as the US (along with Britain and Turkey) is escalating relations with Syria, using chemical attacks and civil rights violations as justification.

The Guardian also has a great summary of the issue here. [2]

[1] [http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/20128513344...](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/201285133440424621.html)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth- insight/2013/au...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth- insight/2013/aug/30/syria-chemical-attack-war-intervention-oil-gas-energy- pipelines)

</comment><comment><USER3> This passage : "As the conflict has gone on, more and more foreign powers have supplied their side of choice with aid, both tacit and direct. Whether it be Hizbollah joining the side of the Syrian regime via Lebanon, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran delivering the regime military, political and financial support"

is complete BS. Syria is an historical ally of Iran. It dates way before the protests, and the proof of that is in its control over Lebanon via the Hezbollah (which has been financed by Iran for more than 20 years).

If you want to understand arabs war in general, look at who's Shia and who is Sunni (and from time to time, when sunnis and shias don't fight each other, look at who is a jew).

Now for a quick sum up on the situation : Iran is trying to become a nuclear power. It's a shia country. Sunni don't want that (mainly saudi arabia and qatar). Syria is ruled by shias but the population is mostly sunni, so the ruling party is allied with Iran. Rebels are sunnis and mostly financed by saudi arabia and qatar.

Until there was chemical weapons involved, most occidental countries were quite happy to see iran fight saudi arabia using a proxy war in Syria. They sell weapons (Russia sells to Syria, US sells to Saudi Arabia), and enjoy seeing radical islamists and dictatorial regime kill each other instead of joining forces against Israel or bomb european cities.

But since Mr Obama said there was a "red line" and now that that "red line" has been crossed, US is forced to take side.

On a sidenote, the US has helped islamists gain power recently in Egypt, against dictatorial regimes, hoping for a middle term transition to democracy (a bit like what is hoped for Turkey), but that failed very recently with egyptians wanting islamist party out. So the whole US strategy in the middle east right now is a bit of a mess anyway.

</comment><comment><USER4> More like "a westerners introduction to the Syria conflict, as narrated by our media". I do not claim to know what is true and what isn't, but I do know that I can't even read or understand the language of the majority in Syria. I have no insight into sunnis and shiites. In 2010, Syria ranked place 121 in internet penetration.

Frankly, I would not trust most any of the journalism on this topic. It's not malice or propaganda, it's just very likely to be very poorly researched.

<comment><USER5> > I do not claim to know what is true and what isn't, but I do know that I > can't even read or understand the language of the majority in Syria. I have > no insight into sunnis and shiites.

If the above is true, then:

> it's just very likely to be very poorly researched.

Is just a strong assumption with no factual basis.

I just watched the documentary linked in the post and found it fascinating ( [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E_oOuqsuQs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E_oOuqsuQs) ). I agree with you that it is a westerners introduction to the conflict but that does not necessarily mean it is untruthworthy, incorrect, or poorly researched. It simply means it is seen through the eyes of a westerner.

Think of it as the same photo shot by two accomplished photographers, one 5ft tall, another 7ft tall. Neither is fabricating anything, just looking at the same thing from a slightly different point of view. Just because the 7ft tall photographer is not a native like the 5ft tall photographer, does not mean the photo is unreliable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Too bad the whole post fell short at the end with the Syrian model picture. So what, if people were ugly there, you would not care as much ? That was a really bad way to finish the article, which was otherwise well written.

<comment><USER7> Not so much the photo, but the title:

 _> Also, it doesn't hurt that Syria happens to produce a lot of gorgeous human beings:_

WTH? Doesn't hurt what?

<comment><USER8> It would seem that it could hurt, judging by the weaponry the beautiful carry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A critical piece of the background is missing in my opinion - a lot of what is going on right now in ME, Central Asia and North Africa (I think that the events in all countries in that regions are one global trans national crisis) was set in motion by the Great Game, the colonial era, the messy unwinding of the Ottoman Empire and the less than stellar ending of the colonial regimes.

It has been brewing for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER10> I actually have a Syrian friend who I've recently been talking to about the situation in Syria and what this man said is mostly true except that this has been brewing for a long time.

My friend's grandfather was sent to jail when his mother was 6, becuase his grandfather was a sunni politian against hafez assad's regim.

His grandfather was in jail for 20/30 years and he told me how his mother didnt even know or remember her father until he was let out and she got to know him.

He told me how when his mother was in school soldiers would drag sunni girls wearing hijab (face cover) by their hair out of the schools and they would never be seen again.

The government would treat Sunnis like second class citizens.

And something he didn't mention and most people don't know is that this very same thing is starting to happened in Lebanon.

The army of Lebanon is hizbollah which is a Shia terrorist organisation and they have been mistreating Sunnis and now Sunnis are starting to rebel. I have a friend that was living in Lebanon and moved back to Australia because he told me a civil war is going to start.

</comment><comment><USER11> Another good (and slightly less flippant) introduction to the country and conflict from the WaPo:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/29...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/29/9-questions- about-syria-you-were-too-embarrassed-to-ask/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm ashamed of my humanity after seeing this page.

[http://www.therevoltingsyrian.com/post/50495350134/does- this...](http://www.therevoltingsyrian.com/post/50495350134/does-this-not- outrage-you)

</comment><comment><USER13> This looks and smells like propaganda.

Only a single post, this one, has ever been posted on the account.

[http://thehowardbealeshow.tumblr.com/archive](http://thehowardbealeshow.tumblr.com/archive)

<comment><USER14> Propaganda for who?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This post is seriously flawed as it completely forgot to mention the previous chemical attack. It happened a few months ago and there was a huge uproar by western states, specially US. But the media suspiciously quieted down as soon as many organisation including UN and French investigations proved that the rebels were behind the attack. No actions were taken then by any countries.

And now this article claiming to provide info on the conflict has not a single mention about it. I call BS!!

<comment><USER16> The Le Monde article makes a strong case that there have been previous chemical attacks by the Syrian Goverment.

[http://www.lemonde.fr/proche- orient/article/2013/05/27/chemi...](http://www.lemonde.fr/proche- orient/article/2013/05/27/chemical-war-in-syria_3417708_3218.html)

Can you share a link substantiating that French investigations proved rebels were behind some of the chemical attacks?

<comment><USER13> [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/1...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10039672/UN- accuses-Syrian-rebels-of-chemical-weapons-use.html)

 _UN accuses Syrian rebels of chemical weapons use

Syrian rebels have made use of the deadly nerve agent sarin in their war-torn country's conflict, UN human rights investigator Carla del Ponte has said.

"According to the testimonies we have gathered, the rebels have used chemical weapons, making use of sarin gas," del Ponte, a former war crimes prosecutor, said in an interview with Swiss radio late on Sunday.

"We still have to deepen our investigation, verify and confirm (the findings) through new witness testimony, but according to what we have established so far, it is at the moment opponents of the regime who are using sarin gas," she added. _

<comment><USER16> You have one investigator commenting on preliminary evidence, but the actual commission investigating not backing her up.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle- east-22424188](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22424188)

 _Carla Del Ponte told Swiss TV that there were "strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof".

Ms Del Ponte did not rule out the possibility that government forces might also have used chemical weapons.

Later, the commission stressed that it had "not reached conclusive findings" as to their use by any parties.

"As a result, the commission is not in a position to further comment on the allegations at this time," a statement added.

The BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva says the statement was terse and shows that the UN was taken by surprise at Ms Del Ponte's remarks._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What horrifies me is people saying "Syria this" and "Syria that".

No, it's also consisting of many (perhaps mostly) innocent people like you and me who did nothing wrong and just want to live and get through their day peacefully.

It's not some unified entity. It's a lot of innocent people caught in the middle.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very relevant on Hacker News.</comment>


Busting, Sony's Ghostbusters AR Display (and a Little Sprite History) - <AUTHOR> https://www.kguttag.com/2019/10/14/busting-sonys-ghostbusters-ar-display-and-a-little-sprite-history/ <comment><AUTHOR> I found the history of front-end vs back-end video processing especially interesting. We've become so used to doing everything on the front end and buffering it. New use cases in AR and VR are pushing engineers to change their approach.</comment>


As Democrats gather, allegations of Russian subplot raise intrigue - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-emails.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> From NYT I'd expect something better than "Evidence so far suggests" with zero evidence presented.

Anyone who's done anything related to security knows that it's impossible to discern much from any trace of an attack left behind - at best you might have IPs of proxy servers they used and you might be able to figure out the vulnerability exploited, but if the attackers were any good (and they're saying "evidence" suggests it's government agency level type stuff) - there is no chance they'd leave anything behind other than false traces to confuse the investigation.

Real evidence would be a corroborated confession, but even an excerpt of logs and/or a little description of what happened other than the "Cozy Bear" story would be great.

So basically someone hacks the DNC servers (and my guess would be that it should be trivial given that this is primarily a volunteer-operated organization), and NYT blames it on GRU. Because being hacked by Russia is cool, compared to being hacked by a nobody because your security is sloppy.

BTW - crowdstrike.com was registered in 2010 with GoDaddy, not exactly trust inspiring.

<comment><USER3> I imagine it's more politically motivated than "we don't want them to look like amateurs" but rather, look who is helping Trump, that bad Putin fellow. The unsaid part is, "we don't want someone Putin favors in the white house, make sure you vote for Clinton."

As others have pointed out, it's at least curious that when the Sony hack happened, and the administration came out a few weeks later and declared it was North Korea, lots of InfoSec stood up and said, wait, it's not that clear... We're not so sure... But here there is no such doubt, at least yet being raised --which is an interesting difference.

<comment><USER4> > it's at least curious that when the Sony hack happened...

Not only the attribution is dubious. The whole thing stank down to the timing. My theory is that the Sony hack brouhaha was raised for the specific purpose of obscuring and deflecting attention from the Senate report on torture released on 9/12/2014.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's zero proof of this assertion in the article... But hey whatever deflects blame and attention from the corruption in the DNC.

<comment><USER6> Many people in infosec (epitomized by the Swift On Security account) normally circumspect and cautious about attribution, are claiming with 100% certainty that Putin is behind the leaks.

Politics have a tendency to really mess with a person's nominal judgement.

<comment><USER7> Do you have any evidence of this?

I don't understand why the Russians would be capable of obtaining this data yet not able to release it without revealing that they were the source.

Unless it was their motivation to be linked to it -- but what does that gain them?

It seems like the more likely story is that all of this talk about the Russians is just a method of misdirecting people to discuss the theoretical Russian link but not the documents themselves.

<comment><USER6> You may have misunderstood me. I am saying that while attribution is a very tricky, difficult business fraught with guesswork and spectra of probabilities, in this one instance a ton of infosec people are throwing their typical caution about attribution out the window to claim full confidence in attribution to Putin on the basis of a shared IP address in France and a Romanian who says Guccifer2 doesn't write like a Romanian.

It is a great demonstration of what politics does to the minds of nominally cautious, reasonable people.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the clarification.

That makes a lot more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't buy it. This is a typical tactic -- "Oh look we were hacked by ex- Soviet supervillains, nobody could have resisted this attack."

When we got what looks like a FAQ blog post from Guccifer 2.0 ( [https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/faq/](https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/faq/) ) and I tried to guess some things about him:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12009544)

Here is what I came up with:

"...there is a high chance he is from Moldova, and now works for one of the big IT companies. Probably in his mid 30s. Lives in US or Canada."

<comment><USER9> > Cares and knows about DNC and specific candidates. Guessing they are > following the election process, so probably live in US or Canada.

For this you underestimate the global interest in the US elections. It is so influential on the rest of world many take keen interest. This can easily be lunch-break talk in Australia. Not sure about the other points.

<comment><USER8> Well maybe it was just guessing based on my experience. At least in Easter Europe with friends I talked, aside from generalities about candidates (Trump is building a wall, ha-ha), it nobody worries or cares deeply enough to follow it to the level of DNC, to watch for election fraud, corruption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Okay...let's take all this at face value, even though there is absolutely no evidence for a hack whatsoever. Russia is showing the American people how rigged (at least) one of their major political parties is. So...we should feel sorry for the party that rigged their own supposed open choice of candidates?

Hell, let's take it one step further. Imagine the Russian political world actually wants Trump to win. Is that the end of the world? Does it necessarily mean it is something bad for the USA, and good for Russia? What if it meant it would something good for Russia, __and __good for the USA? Didn 't like half the world want Obama to win in 2008?

</comment><comment><USER11> The one thing that annoys me most about this isn't about who is doing the hacking, but how horribly the DNC had failed at security. Nobody has been talking about this and I find it annoying to see nobody has been focusing on greater security.

<comment><USER12> What makes you think they failed terribly? We haven't seen full analysis (or much of anything yet), but there are mentions of potentially specially targeted malware. Very few organizations will withhold a direct targeted attack by a government which possesses zero days and resources to hand craft attack software and can find personal information of specific people attacked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The title is inaccurate. According to the article, researchers made the link, not any counterintelligence organization.

<comment><USER14> We changed the submitted title ("Counterintelligence Links Russian GRU to DNC Leak and Putin") to the current article title and threw in an "allegations" for good measure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well thats one way to spin it

</comment><comment><USER16> Irrelevant if true. A Trump, Clinton or Johnson administration cannot reverse trends in the middle east that threaten Russia's southwest border. Russian energy fortunes will not improve as pressure from alternative energy and shale/sands sources is irreversible. Global deflation across most commodities will continue to sap income from Russia's natural resources, at least until China can somehow rebalance its economy. I believe all of this is apparent to Russia, and that like other governments they well understand that global stability is essential to their economic prosperity and domestic order. If Russia must involve itself in US Politics in some manner, they would do well to get behind whichever candidate can contribute to global stability. Even if it means a return to 1990's US hegemony - a time that was very good for many Russia.</comment>


Paul Bocuse died - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42758189 <comment><AUTHOR> Bocuse and his far-reaching influence on the world of modern French cuisine was thoroughly covered in the "Lyon" episode of the Parts Unknown series - [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3717664/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3717664/)</comment>


Show HN: Chatparty – host videochat parties with no audio - <AUTHOR> https://chatparty.co/ <comment><USER2> I think it's a cool idea, but why do we need to know your ages? It comes across as ageist.

<comment><USER3> I don't know for sure, but I feel like this app probably was born out of Indie Hackers and for whatever reason Indie Hackers puts a huge emphasis on age (it's the first thing listed in everyone's bio, before location or what they do).

I think their goal is to be inclusive (anyone, of any age or gender or race, can be a maker!), but I can see how it feels odd out of context.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, I was just super tired and filling out my bio was one of the last things I did. I think a lot of people mention age because it's something to say when they can't think of anything else. Didn't mean to come off as ageist.

<comment><USER2> I know, thanks for your response. I'm 42 so paranoid my tech skills are becoming irrelevant. What a pathetic thing to worry about during a pandemic. Anyway, I think you're really onto something because as a musician I always want to video chat but have everyone be responsible for tuning into a 3rd party, like for group jamming for instance. Keep up the good work!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey HN, one of the creators here! This was for a hackathon project where we wanted to play around with a unique twist on video chat. It was also a chance to learn how to build video chat with the daily.co API (surprisingly easy). AMA.

<comment><USER5> Just wondering, what is the appeal of doing a video chat with no audio? Thanks.

<comment><USER6> I did a mystery murder on Zoom yesterday where only the organizer/host had audio. It had the feelings of an IRC chatroom but with video. More people could actively talk (30+) than on a regular Zoom call, which are rife with interruptions in even very small groups.

<comment><USER7> I'm really interested in this, as we are building something to enable more people talking in different groups: joinvoiceplace.com

Would you be available for a couple of questions: \- Are you planning to repeat it? \- Did you use one or many rooms? \- Do you know about break-out rooms in Zoom? \- Have you thought about how giving attention/directing speech would work in "IRC + Video" ?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, gonna repeat it next weekend! Everyone had a lot of fun. TO answer your question: we did indeed use multiple (break-out) rooms. As for speech/voice... I spent a lot of time on Omegle as a teenager, so video + no audio is natural to me but may not be for some people. Feel free to ask me more questions via email: cbswishes at gmail.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Implementing "Prism Break" - <AUTHOR> https://eschnou.com/entry/implementing-prism-break-62-25013.html <comment><USER3> The problem with this whole mentality is that is probably made him _more_ vulnerable to surveillance, not less. No organization in the world spends more money to protect email and messaging services than Google does. This is a fact that frustrates people on HN endlessly, but all I can tell you about that is "sorry".

Your assurances that OVH adequately protects its IMAP servers, particularly from newly discovered vulnerabilities in its server software, are very poor. On the other hand, you can generally take assurances about Google's seriousness on these issues to the bank.

The mentality in this article is that hosting information outside of Google makes you less susceptible to lawful intercept requests from the USG. But that doesn't make game-theoretic sense given the worldview that mentality arises from. The only thing moving your data off of Google protects you from is a "lawful" request. But if you think that the USG is willing to bend or break the law to get your information --- an article of faith on HN --- moving that data elsewhere doesn't help you at all. They'll just use extralegal means to get the data.

Meanwhile, you've expanded the class of external actors that can get your data, by hosting it somewhere less secure.

Moxie Marlinspike, on this same topic, suggested on a liberation-tech mailing list that a dissident asking him how to securely communicate online would be steered towards Google Talk.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree. Google may have spent a lot of money, but that hasn't kept them off of the PRISM list and so far I've not read any really convincing explanation from anyone at Google about why they're on that list.

I think in the post-Snowden world it's game over for the idea of expecting reasonable privacy or data security from the likes of Gmail. Once someone can routinely exfiltrate 100% of your data without a warrant - particularly if you are a "non US person reasonably believed to be outside the US" then the security model is not just a bit wonky, it's utterly destroyed.

<comment><USER3> You haven't managed to disagree with me here, because my point accommodates the fact that Google might cooperate with the USG.

<comment><USER5> Google cooperating with the USG is a much larger risk factor for being surveilled. Currently, the USG does not need to exploit server vulnerability to access Google messages, but for a foreign-owned ISP, they don't have this back door, at least not as readily. That means a targeted attack, which is inherently more expensive.

<comment><USER3> Vulnerabilities in your mail provider present a _superset_ of the problems of Google Mail.

<comment><USER5> Not really. They're more of intersecting sets. Is a foreign mail provider as likely to succumb to PRISM? No. Is it possible for GMail to have vulnerabilities unique to GMail and not to a more standard mail setup? Of course.

<comment><USER3> I think the issue is that we disagree, probably very very strongly, about the relative likelihood of vulnerabilities in Google Mail versus vulnerabilities in any other mail service provider.

It's O.K. to disagree! We don't have to agree on anything, let alone this. Just know that my opinion is a professional one in this specific case. There are extremely smart people working on Google Mail's security, and on the security of every component in the stack that Google Mail depends on, and that is an arrangement (in both degree and kind) that is pretty much unique to Google Mail.

<comment><USER5> I'm just pointing out that asking for data from a database is always going to be easier than exploiting a system, no matter whose it is. From what we know, it seems that the USG has the ability to do surveillance on Google Mail by querying a database, but likely does not have that same ability on a foreign mail service. Therefore, it is likely that it is easier for the USG to read mail from a Google user.

As you know, security is not about making things impossible but making them more difficult and resource-intensive. So far, we have little evidence that Google has been making anything difficult for the USG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would someone please invent or do a kickstarter project for an "email server in a box" project. A plug and play email server with webmail, TLS, etc? Maybe running the whole thing on a pi that you just plug in to your home network so you can host your own mail?

<comment><USER7> That's what the FreedomBox Foundation (started by Eben Moglen/Software Freedom Law Center) is trying to make: [http://freedomboxfoundation.org/learn/](http://freedomboxfoundation.org/learn/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I applaud the tenacity with which people want to be "self-secured", but this is misinformed.

It would not be hyperbolic to say that Google is one of the greatest companies in the world in terms of network security fidelity. It uses literally _billions of dollars in resources_ , some of the greatest minds of this generation to implement them, and cutting edge technology to secure its data.

By contrast, the author has a somewhat hacked together approach here, with capital _orders of orders_ of magnitude lower, and, frankly, less expertise than the combined skill of the GMail engineering team alone.

Google, for all the slander it received during the NSA scandal, is like a secure island oasis in a sea of vulnerabilities. You are _much more secure_ with the large corporation that everyone loves to hate than on your own.

Let's talk strategy as well. Do you imagine you'll be safe from the NSA - <USER2> any agency - because you boycotted one of their alleged sockpuppets and decided to run your own stack? If they _really cared about your data, do you think this would stop them?_ And, more importantly, as I detailed in the first paragraph, _do you have more engineering chops than the combined weight of even a single Google team?_

<comment><USER4> The Snowden leaks indicate that assuming your data is safe and secure from warrantless access while residing blissfully in plain text on the cloud servers of the PRISM list member companies is at best a hopelessly naive expectation. That applies particularly if you are a "non US person reasonably believed to be outside the US", which means that you're considered to be fair game for any and all exfiltration schemes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What I truly love about this article is it shows how many open source alternatives exist out there. I think the big problem with people is they think there isn't a tool that can be equivalent to what they use now. I am also stuck on facebook. I like your indirect solution though!

<comment><USER8> It isn't equivalent to what they use now! How would a private cloud someone hacked together be as secure as the billions of dollars Google has poured into engineering elite, class-A data security?

Before someone accuses me of fanboying Google, recognize that (as I stated in a top level comment), Google as a company is probably one of the safest in the world for your data.

The only leg someone has to stand on in saying an open source alternative might trump Google is that the company _willfully_ allows access to their data, bypassing the heavy security entirely. If you want to make that argument, fine, but you better have something else prepared aside from the NSA scandal regurgitation.

<comment><USER9> [http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/keeping-your- da...](http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/01/keeping-your-data- safe.html) [http://gcn.com/articles/2011/11/10/cloud-hack-via- google.asp...](http://gcn.com/articles/2011/11/10/cloud-hack-via-google.aspx) i guess this was before google poured the billions into it with it's engineering elite, class-A data security. Google may be more secure but google is also a big target. a personal cloud is less likely to get hacked. if i live in the woods with $1000 and only have one lock, i'm probably less likely to be broken into than a giant bank filled with tons of money in the middle of a city, even with it's heavier security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 1\. Doing everything yourself means knowing how everything works and being able to manage it all. No one knows enough or has enough time to do that properly. You've increased your attack surface all while giving yourself a false sense of security.

2\. If you communicate with anyone that hasn't broken out of prism, you are still observed and recorded. Watchers may not know what you say, but they will know when and to whom. What was said isn't all that hard to obtain or infer if they own one side of the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER11> I made a couple of skeletal Dockerfiles for pump.io and roundcube, which might help somebody get started: [https://github.com/Joeboy/dockerfiles](https://github.com/Joeboy/dockerfiles)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure why he's switching from Google search to Duck Duck Go if he's concerned about privacy. Using _any_ cloud service poses a risk and Google has one of the _best_ records for privacy (check the EFF "Who's got your back" list.). Also, shutting off your Android phone instead of just not using the cloud & GPS services (and maybe installing a custom ROM if you're extra concerned) seems silly. Android works fine without Google's (or anyone else's) services.

<comment><USER13> I may be wrong, but I don't see how anything is worth doing while the security services can quickly and easily compromise ISPs, and while we believe they can also crack encryption, or force us to reveal keys we may not have.

All that is really left is to alter out behavior in order to up the amount of work the security services have to do and to send a message. So, using services like DDG simply send a message. If enough people do it, the message _might_ get heard. IMHO, that is really all using DDG achieves. And frankly, I suspect that is more about annoyance at creepy google data slurping than NSA type slurping. The NSA would still be able to compromise DDG, but using DDG tells google something. I use, or try to use DDG not because I think it makes me safe from the NSA, but because I don't like google's policies on using my data. Im not kidding my self that using DDG makes me NSA immune.

There is no way to ensure electronic privacy. Frankly, there really never was. Its was an illusion we kidded ourselves was real. In the end, a wire goes from an ISP to my house. That wire is traceable.

The worst part is that if reports are to be believed this has been going on for at least a decade. Cant find a link, but there is that ex-FBI officer who has claimed that they can get phones calls from 10 years ago, or there abouts. They already have our data archived, available for their use when ever they like for what ever purpose they like.

Now they have this power, they will never ever let it go. Neither will our data from the past decade be destroyed. Now we are so dependent on electronic communication, we are pretty much penned in. No one will take the risk to change it. Just imagine if they cancelled PRISM, and destroyed all their archive data, and then 9/11 Mk2 happened... Would we all say, "that's OK, we the people took tyhe risk and we are fine with possible consequences"? You might, I would, but would the general population agree?

We now live under electronic totalitarianism. It is here to stay. Get used to it.</comment></comment>


Autonomous quadrotor navigation with a Kinect  - <AUTHOR> http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/autonomous-quadrotor

<comment><USER2> What will we do when they learn how to operate door handles?

</comment><comment><USER3> I must admit Kinect is Microsoft's most interesting hardware piece since the Z-80 Softcard... I hope its next firmware update is as hacker-friendly as this one.

</comment><comment><USER4> Predator drone logo... ominous.</comment>


Is Android Leaving the Door Open for Microsoft Windows Phone - <AUTHOR> http://aseidman.com/2010/07/android-leaving-the-door-open-for-microsoft-windows-phone-7/

<comment><USER2> I have to disagree with part of what seems to be the thesis here, which is that the smartphone market is a zero-sum game of some kind, and that Android is leaving open a door vs. smothering Windows Phone - I think that's a little bit too binary. I think there is all along a particular niche for MSFT to leap into, if it can leverage its worldview successfully.

Microsoft operates through a synergistic platform lock in that makes its world go round. Office feeds Windows and Windows feeds office; throw in developer tools as well and it all works together. The more dependencies you create, the stronger the system becomes -- or at least, that's how it used to be, especially when market power could be brought to bear. Billions to lose is valuable (Bing!) but unless you start paying people to take your phones and create a market, it's hard to start from nowhere, no matter what you're selling.

This said! I think that if Windows Phone offered super ultra mega strong support for Office products and the like, there would be a compelling business / corporate use-case, above and beyond the competent Exchange support you see competitors offering. Some differentiation and good execution makes the difference here, because the problems that face Android are 1) not necessarily going to persist and 2) not necessarily going to stop its steamroller march to market penetration dominance.

I think we will see a lot of changed expectations going forward with Android 3.0 gingerbread and beyond. The Android team's stated goal is to do away with the demand for 3rd party UIs and, while there will doubtless still be those who want to cover it with ugly and add bloatware, I think there will be compelling reasons to stick with stock, or at least, not to ruin it.

Besides, what's the prize here? Consider Windows. Setting aside differences between Mac v. PC and Android v. anyone, the fact that Windows can be skinned and filled with bloatware hasn't stopped the platform's dominance, or the Microsoft gravy train. Apple has great margins on their hardware, but they're not on the fast track to displace Windows, are they? Likewise, if everyone is selling Android phones filled with crap, well... they'll still be selling Android phones : ) Though I'd be sad to see that state of affairs, and it definitely would open up more room for competition.

Finally: "After killing Windows Mobile 6 and the KIN Microsoft finally has their shit together." Really? Let's hope so :) I am rooting for the folks in Redmond, because I think more innovation is always best here! I am excited to see what comes out, but seeing what has happened before, I am not going to be waiting around for a Windows phone -- for starters, because I just got a lovely new Incredible a few months ago! :D</comment>


Great Classical Books by Legendary Scientists and Mathematicians - <AUTHOR> https://abakcus.com/15-great-classical-books-by-legendary-scientists-and-mathematicians/ <comment><USER2> [https://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Finding-Things-Out- Richard/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Finding-Things-Out- Richard/dp/0465023959)

What do people think of Feynman's book?</comment>


To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/tech-climate-change-luddites-data <comment><USER2> It's interesting to see this article for me because it is similar to the "Bitcoin is bad because CO2" articles and arguments that arise from time to time. To which I've unsuccessfully attempted to argue you can't really say Bitcoin is bad and shouldn't be allowed to exist for that reason without also agreeing that other stupid things we do with computers should suffer the same fate. Which surprisingly attracts a fair amount of defenders for the Snapchat et-als.

What we can do is to be neutral to how it's used, and instead make sure that electricity is appropriately priced to cover its externalities. That means a carbon tax. The same solution is still the right one for Bitcoin as it is for other silly computer uses mentioned in this article. If it becomes too expensive to deliver Snapchat when electricity is properly priced then Snapchat won't exist. So on.

<comment><USER3> carbon taxes are regressive insofar as the poor spend a larger % of their income on fuels than the rich and this is often not negotiable - people can't choose to e.g. not commute half an hour to work when they don't have much disposable income to start with, whereas the rich can generally pay for whatever quantity they want to consume already.

so the point of the tax (reduce consumption) unfairly hits the poor.

<comment><USER4> A Carbon tax would also disproportionately help the poor, especially the global poor, so it's not fair to call it regressive without finding a way to put some numbers on both the costs and benefits. Besides, the money gained from a carbon tax isn't lost, it can be reinvested in things like public transit infrastructure.

<comment><USER5> You could even use it for a universal basic income. It wouldn't be enough to live from, but could nudge people to, for example, spend a weekend in "nice city a 100 km train ride away", rather than "nice city a 2,000 km airplane flight away".

<comment><USER6> You'd have to have trains for people to ride. The US systematically dismantled trains and made highways in their place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My cellphone (pocket computer) needs 10 Wh to run all day. For the same amount of energy, the lights in my office will run for 6 minutes. I'm not buying this "must decomputerize" pitch.

<comment><USER8> yes, but the masts, wifi, network and servers to support that consume a lot more than 10Wh

<comment><USER9> How much do they use compared to 24 hours of constant, valueless office lighting?

<comment><USER10> Total, all-in energy costs is actually a pretty interesting question and intellectual exercise. Paint is actually super high on the list

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Alas, the author failed to do adequate research before getting on their high horse.

Yes, cloud computing sucks power (which is then vented to the outside world, it could be recycled _and_ cut latency)

but you know what pushes out more CO2?

Poor house insulation.

<comment><USER11> > Poor house insulation

And you know what emits more CO_2 than poor insulation? Transport! And what emits more CO_2 than transport? China!

With that logic, we'll never cut emissions anywhere.

<comment><USER8> So you're saying that insulation, which makes an occupant _more_ comfortable, and spending less money on energy, is going to be more popular than taking away _all_ computing and plunging everyone into the 1950s?

gotcha.

<comment><USER11> No, I'm not saying that, evidenced by the fact that I didn't say that, and that saying that would be stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a surprising amount you can do with just 8-bit microcontrollers which on average (using extensive low-power mode) use less energy than a housefly. Performance can be as good as 1 microwatt per MIPS. We could run most "smart device" applications off of those little solar cells used for calculators.

For house applications, virtually any kind of efficiency gain that computerization gives us would offset the energy consumed in computation.

The problem is not the presence of computing, it's that fossil energy does not pay for its externalities.

Which isn't to say that computation-intensive ads _aren 't_ the worst thing ever.... And it does seem that some of the most hype-driven applications of digitization rely on exceedingly (and often intentionally) inefficient algorithms (blockchain and deep learning), but overall digitization can often be done with very little energy usage for the same benefit. I'm reminded of this cellphone that works on about 4 milliwatts. (although granted, it's using wireless electricity) [https://www.wired.com/story/this-cell-phone-can-make- calls-e...](https://www.wired.com/story/this-cell-phone-can-make-calls-even- without-a-battery/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I appreciate the sentiment but this article is riddled with factual errors.

1) digitization (which includes tracking objects in the real world with IoT tech) increases efficiency, which results in moving fewer real objects around in the world, thus reducing total energy consumption. Think of Netflix vs manufacturing and shipping DVDs to stores then driving to the store to buy them.

2) data centers are far from the biggest carbon creators. Transportation and construction are, by far, #1

3) data centers can run off green energy. Combustion engine cars cannot.

4) data centers can be built in far away places that provide the most efficient and greenest energy

<comment><USER11> Productivity (reciprocal to your efficiency) has been surprisingly flat in exactly the timeframe of about 1980 to today that we have seen digitisation taking hold: [https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&...](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNT8FsPVu0No9lNaKo7dBq5xovib7g:1568831632309&q=productivity&chips=q:productivity,g_1:growth:aXLEkvxEHno%3D&usg=AI4_-kTZ7IsxURJ9aLa04HF_1oWGOiAaeA&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi5tZ- hgdvkAhUSDWMBHZjuD5wQ4lYIVSgV&biw=1722&bih=822&dpr=1#imgrc=GssmqQGTnOGgEM):

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author doesn't mention decarbonizing electricity in the first few paragraphs. He simply claims ML is driven by fossil-fuel electricity, when in reality the electricity mix for computation is increasingly green over time. Since computers don't need anything except electrons to run, it's all about power sector emissions here, and that's a bright spot in climate relative to transportation, industry, and agriculture emissions.

It'd be far more effective to have a Renewables revolution which pushes the scale of wind, solar, and batteries much higher. That would be far more cost- effective than a Luddite revolution which would ban computationally and data intensive practices in all the most valuable companies.

<comment><USER15> The author also doesn't mention black holes, but there's a huge one at the center of our galaxy which will gladly do away with us and all our problems.

Electron arguments aside, computers need matter and a lot of that matter in them is rare, which requires things like strip mining and other non-Earth- friendly activities. If we manage to pull off a walking/talking/joke cracking AI, it and its little AI buds will likely demand every erg of power they can get. Sorta like my dog at dinner time.

Also, the amount of compute we are creating is accelerating at a non-linear rate, which is why there was a discussion about Bitcoin using so much energy at such and such a point in time in the future.

The speed of networking is not increasing at the same rate as compute.

<comment><USER16> The article didn't really make that argument though. It could have gone into things like your strip mining example and that would have been better than a lot of the arguments used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Computers are stupid: babies know what a face is within the first few months of being alive. For a computer to know what a face is, it must learn by looking at millions of pictures of faces."

Actually this is a completely inaccurate representation. The network to understand a human face can be transferred to a computer in milliseconds. The network to understand a human face gets baked into a human over many many months. Developing that network took a computer millions of images and several hours. Developing that network took biology many eons and billions of lifeforms.

</comment><comment><USER18> What about a proposal to make journalist write their articles with a typewriter?

EDIT: Following the general rquest of writing substantive comments, let's extend this.

The problem is that the authors see the cost of computers in other applications, but he doesn't see the benefits. For example using machine learning to detect face has a cost, but it can be applied to many things. From trivial applications like decorate your face in the phone to security applications like face recognition of justice fugitives, to more realistic faces in movies to deep fakes. You may like some of them and dislike other, but for some people the new technology provides benefits that hopefully are most than the cost.

For a journalist, probably the most important use of a computer is to write an article. Perhaps also to keep the small parts of info that must put in the article. Make some research by internet instead of traveling to a library. And modern cellphones are quite a powerful computer. You can perhaps replace the cellphone by a line phone, use a lot of cards for contacts and store information. But I think that the journalist will see immediately the benefits of using a computer to write the articles instead of a typewriter.

</comment><comment><USER19> Stop computering in places where fossile fuel is used for electricity. Build datacenters next to cheap renewable or nuclear energy and access cold air and water. There are hundreds of abandoned industry sites near lakes and rivers in Northern Europe for example.

<comment><USER20> Believe it or not, cooling is almost never the bottleneck, aircooled datacenters can be built in relatively warm places like virginia. The infrastructure for datacenters is often the bottleneck - each one takes up the electricity of a small town and many out-of-the-way places don't have the infrastructure set up to support such things, nor do the local renewables provide enough energy to run the datacenters.

<comment><USER19> Yes the data enters need to be built in small towns with the energy production large cities or small countries, such as Facebook near the massive hydro plants in Luleå, Sweden.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No one is voluntarily giving up progress, ML or not. The far easier sell to the public is a faster move to nuclear, wind, and solar, with battery powered cars. Then we won't need a Luddite revolution, and progress can continue making lives better.

</comment><comment><USER17> This article is completely wrong headed. Any profit heavy use of energy can be a boon to decarbonization. The price of renewables has been plummeting due mostly to economy of scale but also to funding of new developments. At current prices, it only takes a nudge of incentive or regulation to push new energy use to renewables. And it's a feedback loop, the more renewables get used, the cheaper their production becomes.

<comment><USER17> Governments that continue to subsidize fossil fuel industries while failing to properly incentivize renewable or regulate/tax carbon emissions are the thing that holds the feedback loop back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are a couple of different facets to this that the article ignores. The energy consumed by computers can be offset by recovering waste heat to offset space or domestic hot water heating (which is the bulk of your energy consumption in colder climates). You can do this at a building scale, and even at an urban scale with the use of district energy systems.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Banning adtech would be a good start.

<comment><USER2> That sounds like a sensible way to go about it to me. Suddenly all those services that nobody would actually pay for, that are simply designed to hook people and consume their time, would go away. A whole lot of services that people would actually pay for would suddenly change in focus because now they wouldn't be driven my ad metrics and engagement metrics. E.g. You'd be paying for email so your email provider would just be a damn good email provider. So on.

<comment><USER23> I hoped huge popularity of adblock would do the same, without the need for regulation. No need for clickbait title when visitors are only a cost.

<comment><USER24> If Mobile Safari and Chrome for Android supported extensions, it probably would already be ubiquitous.

<comment><USER25> Mobile safari does support adblocks. [https://1blocker.com/](https://1blocker.com/) seems to be the one most people recommend (I personally haven't tried it)

<comment><USER24> Does it have the ability to do ad/tracker blocking properly, or is it cripple in some way that still makes the data ads/trackers are able to collect valuable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why is this flagged?</comment>


Facebook opens artificial intelligence lab in Paris - bra-ket http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/06/02/facebook-artificial-intelligence-research-lab-in-paris/28351577/

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be nice to see AI technology used for more than just sifting through videos and posts, but I guess with regards to Facebook there isn't much else is there?

That was an interesting read by the way. Thanks!</comment>


How the Young Are Indoctrinated to Obey (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://chomsky.info/20141201/ <comment><USER3> I agree that students of all grades are indoctrinated to obey and comply. And that this is rooted in the establishments explicit desire to create ideal assembly line workers.

But this analysis seems really muddled, confused, and all over the place. He liberally attacks conservative politics, yet fails to make a case which supports his assertions as to who is to blame.

I'd also disagree with his assessment of California as having had the best educational system in the world. Wow. Really? Or his assessments that the problem is enrollment freezes or reduced funding. Many other countries do education cheaper, and more effectively.

I'd also argue that public education has, for nearly a century indoctrinated students to be compliant and obedient. This isn't a new thing.

But this is the reason my wife and I will be homeschooling our kids. Not out of a desire to indoctrinate them or whatever, but to save them from being indoctrinated to be docile and subservient. I want our children to be free thinkers, confident in themselves and capable of living outside the box effectively.

<comment><USER4> Personally, the feeling imbued from my schooling in California is one of neglect and indifference. "Indoctrination" assumes some kind of educating was happening at all and would have been a step up actually.I'm speaking of the formative middle and high school years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Schools condition us to accept social hierarchy and to fear authority - <USER2> of these are counter-productive to achieving success in real life.

I have spent much of my adult life trying to unlearn these lessons. It's really hard work - Being compliant was practically part of my personality.

A side effect of this education which I carried into my professional life was that I often ended up telling my bosses what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear - That might work in sales, but it's not great in engineering. It was mostly because I had this deep seated fear of authority and didn't want to upset them with my words.

Also, strangely, it seems that a lot of project managers tend to react more negatively to cynical projections than actual missed deadlines... Which only reinforces the pattern.

</comment><comment><USER6> In the U.S. the problem is the Department of Education handing out billions of loans creating artificial cashflow. Universities raise their tuition because they know the student can squeeze the federal government out of an extra $20,000.

End the loans and the tuition crisis will abate. Yes there will be turmoil as professors making $200k go back to making $100k; but institutions will go back to a true needs based financial aid where students once able to pay $20k in loans above minimal amounts pay minimal amounts again and graduate debt free.

<comment><USER7> > Yes there will be turmoil as professors making $200k go back to making $100k

How many professors actually make $200k in salary, outside of medical/law school schools?

The University of California has a salary schedule and, from what I know, they stick to it pretty consistently. You need 12 years as a full professor before you're making even $110k in salary. [http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel- programs/_files/1617/...](http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel- programs/_files/1617/t1.pdf)

<comment><USER8> [https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/](https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/)

There's literally 30 pages of UC Berkeley professors and admins making >$200k.

At UCI, the cost of living is less than Berkeley, but there are 650~ people making that much.

<comment><USER9> Interesting database. At Berkeley, the 6 highest paid employees are all coaches, with total pay of $2 million, $1.87 million, $1.8 million, $628K, $560K and $560K. Their compensation seems to be mostly incentive-based, with their "gross pay" far exceeding their "regular pay" \- maybe they get a cut of the ticket revenue? Looks like sports is a big profit center for Berkeley.

UCLA's two top earners are also coaches ($3.5 and $2.7 million).

But this is not true for all the schools. At Davis, the highest paid employee is the CEO of the Medical Center, who makes $1 million, with no coaches near the top.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it me, or does the title not match the argument put forth in the article? I guess "Political currents affecting US education funding" didn't have a good ring to it...

<comment><USER11> It hinges on the interpretation of "indoctrination." I think we colloquially use "indoctrination" to mean teaching people to consciously hear and repeat rote beliefs, aware of them but trained not to question.

But Chomsky's use of the term "indoctrination" in this passage is subtler. He's talking about instilling beliefs through confusion, omission, and financial obligation, not inculcation.

<comment><USER12> > inculcation

This is the third time in a week I've seen this word, or a tense of it. The first time I had to look it up, as I'd never heard it before. Perhaps that's irony since I grew up in the US school system, or perhaps the term is merely gaining favor as of late?

<comment><USER13> That's an example of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon[0]. The other uncovered-by- the-article-at-the-link reason appears to have something to do with priming, which means that your neurons are freshly acutely aware of that stimulus.

[0] [https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof- phenomeno...](https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This essay reads like FUD. Gloomy statements are presented without context.

> Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student > protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and > elsewhere.

What protests are you referring to? When?

> The Los Angeles Times reports...

Link please.

> Similar defunding is under way nationwide.

Since when? I'm not saying he's wrong, but in what year did the federal government last provide what you feel was an appropriate level of funding, and what legislation or federal budget was the beginning of what you consider "defunding"?

>... which was recently dealt yet another crushing blow by the collapse of the housing bubble that was ignored on doctrinal grounds, triggering the current financial crisis.

... The financial crisis that ended in ~2012? That one? This article appears to be from 2014, how was it a "current" crisis?

> Justifications are offered on economic grounds, but are singularly > unconvincing. In countries rich to poor, including Mexico next-door, tuition > remains free or nominal.

This to me was the only interesting line in the article, in that it gave me something new to think about.

> One illustration is the decision of state colleges to eliminate programs in > nursing, engineering and computer science, because they are costly – and > happen to be the professions where there is a labor shortage...

Source please?? That's a very bold statement, but a very interesting one if it's true! However without a source I'm inclined to disregard it.

The whole thing reads like it was written by someone wearing a tinfoil hat, and though there are a couple interesting points, it seems like this essay will do more harm than good for his agenda. And just because Chomsky is famous that doesn't make him so authoritative that he's excused from citing his sources.

<comment><USER15> >> Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere. >What protests are you referring to? When?

By using the search terms "student protests britain 2012" and varying the third term to "canada", "chile", or "taiwan", I found the following:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_Kingdom_student_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_Kingdom_student_protests)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%9313_Chilean_studen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%9313_Chilean_student_protests)

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

>> The Los Angeles Times reports... >Link please.

Chomsky quotes the following line from the article: "California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment at most campuses." By using that string as a search query I found

[http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/20/local/la-me-cal- stat...](http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/20/local/la-me-cal- state-20120320)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > ...similar defunding is under way nationwide. "In most states," The New York > Times reports, "it is now tuition payments, not state appropriations, that > cover most of the budget," so that "the era of affordable four-year public > universities, heavily subsidized by the state, may be over."

Some people here on HN already know (I think?) of my 30 seconds of fame that came from being targeted by SUNY for retaliation for my successful run for Student Body President (chronicled in a video project called Campus Coup[0], made by a bunch of us who were there).

But what you might not know is that during that time, I had the pleasure of meeting and receiving the support from many of the brightest faculty (and other) reformers of higher education. Their counsel helped me understand and formulate the following conclusion:

A great move right now is to let the state continue to withdraw funding and at the same time supplant its control over Student Union Buildings, Offices of Residence Life, Offices of Academic Affairs, Academic Deans, and many other areas where it exerts undue control and coercion.

The reality is that, at many of the most politically prominent campuses in the USA - UConn, UMD, Cornell, and my alma mater, New Paltz, among many others - all the best campus functions are being run by faculty or students already, with relatively little management from state officials.

In my estimation, it's possible at each of these schools (and many others) to eliminate or nearly eliminate 3-5 top Student and Academic affairs officials, and their support staff, without anyone noticing for days or even weeks and without any long-term negative impact. It is also likely possible to eliminate their counterparts at the state level, ie SUNY SysAdmin.

This amounts to a savings of thousands of dollars per student per year in SUNY - in fact, it makes it easy to imagine completely eliminating state involvement at these schools. I'm not familiar with the numbers in the other state systems.

It's a very exciting time to be an education activist; there are some incredible students leaders on these campuses, and their level of understanding and sophistication is far beyond what we demonstrated in 2005-2008.

The internet has fomented a culture of knowing every detail of budgeting and recent history, and this has rendered a lot of what "administrators" used to do irrelevant.

0: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lhBceaH_G4&list=PL11F04BB46...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lhBceaH_G4&list=PL11F04BB4661C2CC3)

<comment><USER17> > In my estimation, it's possible at each of these schools (and many others) > to eliminate or nearly eliminate 3-5 top Student and Academic affairs > officials, and their support staff, without anyone noticing for days or even > weeks and without any long-term negative impact.

The problem is that these administrators are loyal to the top of power pyramid at the university (the president & the board of trustees), and conversely the top relies on them for support and means of asserting its power. As a result these midlevel administrators and deans enjoy protection from above.

Then the question is who can work through the motions to get rid of these administrators? Undergrads only spend 4 years in school, doubtful they care enough during their first two to participate in university politics. Grad students and faculty have pressure to produce research, teach/TA, or get tenure. Then you have the issue of incentives: administrators have much more to loose compared to those who would prefer to get rid of them and save a few $100s on tuition. As a result administrators will fight much harder than those trying to get rid of them.

Realistically budget cuts mean class sizes increase by 20%, and students pay more tuition (more work for the professors, less attention for the students per dollar). Hopefully online universities continue to gain traction and disrupt traditional schools.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This was flagged. Is it really breaching the guidelines? If so, I'm sorry for posting it.

I felt it's political alright but not quite "politics" (e.g., not discussing specific people, or parties) and I felt that the subject (education) is definitely of interest to HN readers. There has been a lot of interest in the past in political subjects, like income distribution (universal wage etc), training and education (coding bootcamps) and generally, issues of equality of opportunities.

I particularly found this passage interesting to me and everyone who has graduated from computer science, especially people from the US:

 _One illustration is the decision of state colleges to eliminate programs in nursing, engineering and computer science, because they are costly – and happen to be the professions where there is a labor shortage, as The New York Times reports. The decision harms the society but conforms to the business ideology of short-term gain without regard for human consequences, in accord with the vile maxim._

Finally, I didn't think this is likely to cause much controversy, or start any flame wars. I rather expected it to sink off the new entries page with nary an upvote.

Also, I think I forgot to add the year in parens. Sorry about that, too.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for posting it. I enjoyed this read a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The topic of fees vs grants (specifically in the UK) came up with a friend over the holiday period. I wish I'd read this article earlier, and had had this quote to hand:

"There has been a shift from the belief that we as a nation benefit from higher education, to a belief that it's the people receiving the education who primarily benefit and so they should foot the bill,"

</comment><comment><USER20> Oddly enough, I've heard this thing about indoctrination, yet I know a lot of teachers, and not one of them has ever expressed such an objective. In fact, most of them would oppose it fairly vigorously.

And I know plenty of people who got through public school without becoming obedient or authoritarian, myself included.

It's certainly possible that some prominent people have expressed such a thing, but connecting it with the actual conduct of education seems problematic.

</comment><comment><USER21> Meh, my parents always indoctrinated me to disobey. All it got me was bad grades and narrowed career prospects, and it got _them_ a lot of frustration.

But I turned out all right.

<comment><USER22> Isn't that kinda the point? Parenting is a huge guessing game with no guarantees. It is hard to draw the regarding how much to respect authority.

<comment><USER23> Maybe the point is that authority is neither inherently good nor bad, and the best thing to teach is to have a nuanced response to it?

<comment><USER11> The passage from Chomsky explicitly argues that institutions in the USA have been, over the last half century, restructured to indebt and disenfranchise young people while maximizing short-term material gains for the people in charge of those institutions.

The point is that "authority" has sought to produce a populace that is not capable of mustering a nuanced response to authority.

<comment><USER24> How do we suppose that authority got so sophisticated as to know how to do this fancy indoctrination if they themselves are a product of it?

<comment><USER11> They aren't. From the passage:

"That was true as well in the United States itself when it was a much poorer country after World War II and huge numbers of students were able to enter college under the GI bill – a factor in uniquely high economic growth, even putting aside the significance in improving lives."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The food is awful, and the portions are so small.

</comment><comment><USER18> Reading Chomsky is always a breadth of fresh air to my mind. Such a powerful thinking that forces to see the world differently.</comment>


Google is winning the battle, but will Apple win the war? - <AUTHOR> http://thetechblock.com/google-winning-battle-apple-win-war/

<comment><USER2> I agree that the users have won. Despite everybody's initial whining about Apple Maps, our options are much better now than prior to the shake-up.

Totally off-topic, but that's a really obnoxious photo. Why is the author mean-mugging me as I'm trying to read his article? It's distracting, and makes me wonder why I should bother giving him my time.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree with you. These companies are great because they always think about the users. The users won. For this story, I love Apple for such a great device and I love Google for such a great app. I just need my directions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm going to be admittedly contrarian and claim Apple, along with their users, won. After all, they got turn-by-turn navigation from Google for free which supposedly Google was wanting to license to Apple for a considerable sum of money.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps, but there is an undeniable PR cost that Apple has paid in having to stand around waiting for Google to come rescue their users from a terrible product.

That said, I don't think anyone outside the tech news echo chamber actually cares about this crap. But it definitely has shown the tech world that are chinks in Apple's armor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I vote for none of the above. Let's try not to be pawns in all of this (difficult to achieve I know).</comment>


How to Make Money Using Grep, Sed and Awk - <AUTHOR> https://openmonstervision.github.io/blog/posts/how-to-make-money-using-grep-sed-and-awk/ <comment><USER2> "How to make money by posting a pretty boring article to HN and asking for book purchases at the end of it"

<comment><USER3> I didn't mind, I actually lolled when reading his other blogpost about how he botched the personal question part of an interview: [https://openmonstervision.github.io/blog/posts/how-not-to- ge...](https://openmonstervision.github.io/blog/posts/how-not-to-get-a-job- with-an-elite-tech-company/)

<comment><USER2> That article /is/ funny.

It also doesn't beg for book purchases for books he didn't write... :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dude! You need help with using your tools' features to reduce your pipeline lengths.

\- grep derp | sed whatever is the same as sed '/derp/ whatever' (you might be interested in sed -r for that matter)

\- sed whatever | sed whatever\ else is the same as sed -e whatever;whatever\ else

This list is by no means complete but saves a lot of external processes already, and seriously: think about writing the whole thing in pure bash or awk. There might be just too little gain to justify including all these tools without composing the many features they provide.

<comment><USER5> I disagree, unless it's slow enough to effect performance, I prefer to combine simple pipes.

The only time I have to use more complicated constructions is to get around the stupid problem that passing filenames with pipes is almost impossible to do safely.

<comment><USER6> I learned when writing bash scripts for cygwin under Windows that Windows doesn't support copy-on-write fork()'s. This means that any new process is extremely expensive to fork, because it copies the memory from the process it was forking from, even if it doesn't need it.

As a result, I did as much as I could using only bash internals, and very rarely did I use pipes, because they always fork()'d a bash subshell in addition to whatever the process was.

In about 7k lines of bash script written to completely automate the iterative development of two games with a shared game engine featuring dockerized server containers, I was able to avoid using sed in almost all of it. When I did use it (pretty sure only two places), it was basically for mass substitution of variables inside of text files, and the multi-line syntax worked very nicely for this, as I could form the sed line with a loop over all the variables I wanted to replace.

It turns out for most bash scripts, you can do the most common sed substitutions using bash's rich variable substitution expressions. For instance, you see in a lot of bash scripts calling commands like "dirname" and "basename" to get the directory and filename of paths. There's a much faster way to do this in bash:

      path=/tmp/my/path/to/stuff.txt
      dir="${path%/*}"
      file="${path##*/}"
      other="${path/stuff/other}"

That dir line means "delete the shortest string that matches /* from the end of the string". That file line means "delete the longest string matching */ from the start of the string." That other line means "replace the word stuff with the word other in this string".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I looked up the freelance job in question, it pays $36 for a 215 page publication from the 80s, including checking where automation has failed.

A question to those who do freelance work: sites like Upwork often have low budgets, where do you guys find better projects with better compensation?

<comment><USER8> I gave up with all of them. A friend of mine is using Upwork and Freelancer (awful) to find gigs, and he tried to get me involved so I could help him out with overspill. It seemed like you had to put ludicrously low rates to get terrible work, and despite paying peanuts, everyone expects amazing results.

I ditched it, joined some communities online, did a tiny bit of networking, and announced I was looking for work related to X - that was far more fruitful than sending 10 pitches a day for gigs on those sites and getting nothing in response because someone in India will do it for a dollar. Although I did love seeing the same projects re-appear a week later to fix the crap that their offshore team delivered.

<comment><USER9> I'm from India and I'm horrified that so many people are willing to do work for nothing or next to nothing...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A man who eschews Perl, and all later and more usable tools, in favour of a bastard hodgepodge of shell and awk with a smattering of sed: It's like looking in the mirror.

</comment><comment><USER11> At what point it pays off to switch to python/node instead of keep growing a bash script?

<comment><USER12> The beauty of bash scripts is that anything with u+x in your PATH, aliases and user-defined functions become a first-class citizen with the same interface. The usual plumbing with pipes and redirection -- and sometimes some more advanced stuff like process substitution -- is often all you need.

Moving to Python, say, makes the control flow and the "software engineering" easier, for sure. However, don't underestimate the power of grep, sed and especially awk. I wouldn't want to reimplement a half-arsed, presumably non- bug-free version of awk in Python when I could have just used awk in the first place.

<comment><USER13> There's no reason you can't orchestrate awk and other tools from python though. (I doubt I'm the only one that's done that before).

<comment><USER14> I wrote a tool to do that:

[https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit](https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit)

Among many other things I use it to test Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters in Vagrant for Chef recipes:

[https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit-openshift- cluster/blob/ma...](https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit-openshift- cluster/blob/master/shutit_openshift_cluster.py)

and here's some others in a more 'native' python format:

[https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit- scripts/](https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit-scripts/)

[https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit- scripts/blob/master/logme...](https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit- scripts/blob/master/logmein/logmein.py)

[https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit- scripts/blob/master/gnupl...](https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit- scripts/blob/master/gnuplot/graphs.py)

<comment><USER15> > crazy talk about pushing awk through python

> oh! I wrote a tool to do that!

 _sniffles_

That might just be my favorite HN exchange ever. Y'all remind me of emacs users. Between this and the unusual number of Perl mentions on HN today, my cockles are suitably heated.

That _is_ a compliment. Nary a day passes where HN doesn't give me a reason to keep clicking links and learning.

I started off giggling and now I'm moved from my tablet to a laptop so that I can investigate your shutit - as it looks like a handy tool for learning. The scales look the most interesting.

I have been here for a while, but only recently (past couple of months) decided to comment. I lurked for like 12 months, just to see if I'd fit in. Why? HN continually has commentary about things I haven't yet learned.

In short, this is my awkward attempt to thank you. I'll be spending the afternoon trying to enjoy your shutit scales.

<comment><USER14> Great, thanks!

You can find more info here on my blog:

[https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/](https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/)

do ping me with your experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The best way to make money with grep/sed/awk is to become sufficiently l33t in them, you can be gainfully employed by others to "do things" on "the goddam unixes"

hey.. we got more unixes here. can somebody grep them out the way?

<comment><USER17> grep -v .*[nN].x will solve the infrastructure problem...

As you say, the way to make money (with any tool) is to get good enough at using them to be useful to someone that wants to pay you to do so

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If author used better variable names, then the code would not have been as hard to look at

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fair</comment></comment>