Paypal Freezes Wikileaks's Accounts (Scroll down to donate) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wikileaks.org/#scrolldown

<comment><USER2> I posted the original "Wikileaks needs engineers"[1] story to HN, and emailed them to offer help. I never heard back, and from the thread other people had the same experience.

I still support their mission, but they seem pretty disorganized, an impression this story reinforces.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023663>

<comment><USER3> I did the same, and got the same [non]response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> PayPal really needs to establish some sort of transparent, _independent_ , review board for these things.

<comment><USER5> That would make them more bank-like, with more regulatory oversight. They don't want that, and really neither do you. The Paypal chimera doesn't need any more DNA, it's bad enough as it is.

The US should force its banks to implement better EFT with consumer-initiated direct-deposit and direct-debit, marginalizing the whole Credit Card / PayPal ecosystem.

<comment><USER6> They are regulated by the CSSF.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On a related note, why does it cost $600k / year to run this service?

<comment><USER8> "If staff are paid."

<comment><USER9> I wonder how they would protect against "rogue" staff. I imagine many governments and international corporations would love to get their "people" on the staff. They would quietly ignore stories and report the whistle blowers.

<comment><USER10> Staff don't know who the sources are, submitted documents are reviewed by multiple people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Duh? This happens every single goddamn time anyone takes a bunch of donations via intermediaries like Paypal and Google Checkout, especially internationally, and extra-especially when you don't use their special no- markup program for registered nonprofits.

It looks exactly like you've cashing out stolen consumer accounts. They have every incentive to freeze the account indefinitely, and they never let anyone get away with it for more than a couple thousand dollars.

<comment><USER11> So what, we're just supposed to accept that if we use Paypal or Google Checkout we can't have sales, promotions, or donation drives? That we must sell a consistent number of units per day?

<comment><USER5> Any business relationship can be voided with a proportional amount of effort as it took to enter it.

If you don't want to be cut off so easily, you'll need to use a payment medium that's more difficult to acquire access to and involves fewer middlemen. There are only a handful of levels:

      eCash Account (PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments)
      Payment Gateway + Merchant Account (Authorize.net + Bank)
      Be a big fish that can negotiate + interface directly with Visa, etc.
      Be Visa / Mastercard (since their IPOs), PayPal, AmEx, etc.
      Be a bank

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but one of the most efficient ways to "behead the beast" (so to speak) when an organization is doing uncool things, is to cut off their ability to make money.

Wikileaks is set up to expose stuff that makes other organizations uncomfortable. Make Wikileaks disappear and those organizations feel comfortable again.

It's not hard to file a bunch of complaints with PayPal and have someone's account suspended.

</comment><comment><USER13> That's why there are websites like <http://www.screw-paypal.com>

They have been exposing PayPal for the theieves that they really are for over two years now. I say SCREW PAYPAL. Regulate them as the bank that they really are and be done with them. More oversight!

</comment><comment><USER14> With all the stories out there about similar fiascos, why wouldn't they withdraw funds on a daily basis?

<comment><USER15> This actually isn't that hard to do if they just request it.

I use Paypal for selling my software product and had my account manager setup "auto sweep" where the funds are automatically withdrawn each night.</comment></comment>


I Tasted BBQ Sauce Made By IBM's Watson, And Loved It - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3027687/i-tasted-bbq-sauce-made-by-ibms-watson-and-loved-it

<comment><USER2> Awesome concept. I definitely want to try some of the recipes.

There is more behind "behind the scenes" information about how Watson's recipe algorithms work on the IBM website:

[http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/cognitivecooking/truc...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/cognitivecooking/truck.html)</comment>


In Antipiracy Debate, Media Worlds (and Generations) Clash - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/in-antipiracy-debate-media-worlds-and-generations-clash.html?ref=technology <comment><USER2> Link to the single page version, for those who do not want to read an article chopped up into parts: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/in- antipiracy-deb...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/in-antipiracy- debate-media-worlds-and-generations-clash.html?ref=technology&pagewanted=all)</comment>


Image Based Abstract 2048 (League of Legends themed) - <AUTHOR> http://chrissloey.github.io/LoL-2048/

<comment><USER2> IMO you're kind of ruining it with the chart down the page showing all the images. Everybody has played 2048 now, the only incentive left is to discover what images will show up :)</comment>


Coronavirus tests could be picking up dead virus - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54000629 <comment><USER2> I guess it's better to have false positives than false negatives in this particular context.</comment>


Microsoft's Bing introduces child abuse search pop-ups - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23476089

<comment><USER2> Interesting that they'll combat child abuse but they still haven't changed their attitude towards [suicide].

A Google search for the term [suicide] gets you a onebox search result with a phone number you can call for help, plus some essentially harmless ads and results: [http://i.imgur.com/aEzc1Tt.png](http://i.imgur.com/aEzc1Tt.png)

A Bing search for the term [suicide] gets you no help line phone number but does offer a bunch of prominent "related search" suggestions like [Easy Suicide], [Painless Suicide], [Painless Suicide Methods Pills], [Pictures Suicide Hanging], [Suicide Methods]: [http://i.imgur.com/XEtevKf.png](http://i.imgur.com/XEtevKf.png)

This is actually _better_ than it was a year or two ago, when you would also be offered special media content regions like [Videos of Suicide], [Pictures of Suicide], but it's still not very good!

Difficult to avoid the conclusion that although Microsoft is eager to reduce certain kinds of politically popular crime, they care less about harm reduction than their competition.

<comment><USER3> Or... They simply might not have been as competent as their competition in addressing it. I realize MS-hating is popular around here but we need not jump to the worst conclusion every time.

<comment><USER2> The Bing folks are very competent and extremely sharp — they just clearly have different priorities.

Back when I was with the company, I brought this concern to the internal search feedback team's attention once or twice a year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        2013: Warning child abuse is illegal.

        2015: Warning Tor/VPNs are illegal.

        2020: Warning extremist left-wing sites are illegal.

<comment><USER5> 2013: Warning: _____ is illegal. Your IP address and search terms have been logged and we will give this information to the police if they ask.

2015: Warning: _____ is illegal. Your IP address and search terms have been automatically sent to the Department of Homeland Security's _____ enforcement unit.

2020: Warning: _____ is illegal. You haven't searched for it yet, but your search history to date indicates that you might have _____ tendencies, and your friends include several people who have searched for _____. The Thought Police has been notified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As internet filtering expands in the West, the only bright side of these types of notifications is that they will remind people that nothing they do online is really private and the internet is not really free. I know that I'd rather have filtering with notifications than silent filtering for my non-government- approved searches.

In the case of pedophiles, maybe some will seek help but I imagine most will quickly adapt by seeking abuse images via other channels like tor, hidden wikis, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> The issue of how to deal with people who seek out child porn troubles me. The tone accompanying an article such as this inevitably vilifies those who consume such material, as though this is a clear moral issue. This implies all of us have pedophilic urges, with only those who lack the moral fortitude to resist going on to seek out child porn. But this is not accurate -- I don't have the least desire to view such images, but instead feel a visceral disgust. Most others, I imagine, have the same reaction.

People who _want_ to view sexually explicit images of children are sick, not immoral. They suffer from a deviant urge from which the rest of us are free. The issue, then, should not be how to punish them, but how to cure them of this urge. (Whether such a cure is possible is another matter altogether -- our sexual desires exert regrettable power over our behaviours.) In conjunction, we must do everything we can to halt the dissemination of such material, just as Microsoft is doing here. By shifting our reaction from wanting to punish consumers of child porn to wanting to rehabilitate them, we will encourage more to come forward for treatment, ultimately reducing the amount of such material that is consumed, and thus the number of children harmed in its creation.

<comment><USER8> I appreciate that you are trying to take a reasonable stand here, but I do think there are some things wrong with your reasoning.

First of all, it is not at all clear that mere consumption of child pornography leads to the production of more child pornography. This gets asserted all the time, but I have never seen anyone produce a shred of evidence for it. Because people tend to see red at this point and stop reading closely, I want to be very, _very_ clear that I am not advocating child abuse in any way. Rather, I think that focusing on _consumers_ of child pornography is a waste of energy that would be better directed at the _producers_.

When I press people on this (which is not usually a popular move), the response I always get is along the lines of "they wouldn't make it if people weren't watching it", which is, in addition to begging the question, totally at odds with what we know about human sexuality in general. Look at non- pedophiles and you'll find no shortage of people documenting their sexual experiences in various ways that are never meant to be public. Hell, the whole "revenge porn" thing can only _exist_ because people enjoy documenting their sexuality. Perhaps if you _eliminated_ consumption of child pornography, so that the producers of it were truly shouting into the void, you would cut down on some of it. But that's not going to happen, and there's no middle ground. As long as they have _some_ audience, those seeking an exhibitionist thrill will keep doing it.

And if CP stopped existing, would that really plausibly lead to less child _abuse_? I seriously doubt it. It seems overwhelmingly likely that people who abuse children on camera are doing so primarily because they like to abuse children. Yes, having images of their abuse float around the internet probably adds to the child's psychological pain. But that seems like kind of a drop in the bucket compared to the abuse itself, and the globs of shame and disempowerment that our society smears on victims.

And that's my point here. We waste a tremendous number of resources on trying to solve what is a fairly minor part of the problem. Why? Well, as far as law enforcement is concerned, I suspect that it's because it's easier to catch the consumers (there are more of them), and the rest of us cheer just as hard for either. As far as the rest of us are concerned, I reckon that part of it is that we need _someone_ to pin our anger on for the injustice that's happening to these children. And, reaching into the darker parts of our psyches, we _really_ love to see someone get stomped down, and not have to feel guilty about cheering for it, or worried that we might be next (for evidence of this, pick a random page from any history book and start reading).

Now sometimes, every once in a while, someone notices that consumers of CP are _people_ , like you did. But seeing the cognitive failure is often not enough to recognize the damage that it has done. People's brains are consistency engines, and wrong ideas tend to pollute the ideas they're connected to, like a ripple of wrongness. It's natural, then, when you see a problem with the way people are thinking, to smooth over the inconsistency by saying "well, we should focus on curing them instead of punishing them", and to miss that we're actually focusing on entirely the wrong part of the problem.

And that brings me to one last point: pedophilia is very likely not something we're going to cure - at least, not until we're able to do extensive, direct brain modification. A lot of effort has been put into trying to cure paraphilias and sexual orientations, and it just doesn't seem to be something you can do.

But what we _might_ be able to do is help people who are sexually attracted to children to find harmless outlets for their urges, and teach them to handle them without acting on them. It would also help if we could stop filling them with shame and guilt over something they can't control.

And it would help even more if we could stop filling the _victims_ with shame and guilt over something they can't control. When someone says something like "child abuse is soul murder", we shouldn't let that slide, and we certainly shouldn't nod sadly in agreement to such a fucked up sentiment. We have to stop telling people that they're broken, that they're lost causes, no matter how much delicious anger at the perpetrators it stirs in us. It's selfish.

And it's also selfish to bask in our moral superiority as we obsess over the easiest and most futile part of the problem.

<comment><USER9> I just can't understand how mere reading, watching or even private storing any content could be illegal.

I just don't like where this (or that NSA thing) goes and I don't think trading freedom for safety is neccessary a very good deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am one of them. Some of you know me, but seven proxies.

I will never make advances on a child. The law has nothing to do with it.

Still it's aggravating when people offer to cure me, just like it would a closeted homosexual to tell them they are going to hell because of how their brain is wired. Society wisened up about homosexuals, but I still have to hide.

It might be surprising that I am an opponent of child abuse; but these laws help nobody, especially children, who get terrorized with "stranger danger", "online safety" and other gobbledygook, ignoring that child abuse almost always happens within the family. Banning child porn prevents a father from abusing his child in private... how? Might as well ban condoms to prevent rape.

You think the war on drugs was a disaster? Sexual urges are even more basal than the drive toward altered states of consciousness. Abusers will abuse and druggies will drug. It sucks, and I don't know what the real solution looks like.

But this whole CP thing? It's a political tool to piggyback agendas onto, like the anti-piracy lobby or thinly veiled justification for sweeping spying programs. Anything can be justified if the discussion can be conveniently derailed into For The Children territory.

<comment><USER11> Personally I have some sympathy for the argument that possessing child porn should not be criminal. There are arguments for this. They satisfy urges and curiosities without victimizing real children. They are documents of abuse that could lead to more victims being discovered and perpetrators being prosecuted.

We do not, for instance, ban rape porn (yet) because there is no evidence it harms society. Cp is somewhat different because the children can not legally consent, whereas in produced rape porn the acts are consensual.

[http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22803502](http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22803502)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's also concerning is that child abuse help sites will likely get caught up in all this depriving victims of much needed resources. Just like already many gay help websites and now being blocked and hidden.

And so in the naming of helping vulnerable victims we're actually hurting them.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if these warnings will also pop up for search terms into fictional art that depicts children in sexual situations, even though no children were obviously harmed in the production of such material... After all, "but think of the fictional children!" has been getting more popular around the world lately.

Japan's going through one of these phases once again[1], with some politicians wanting to ban such things. The thing that truly boggles the mind about this is that they have no intention to do anything about "junior idols", which are much closer to actual child abuse (how about some camel toes of 12-year-olds in suggestive positions?) than any drawn fictional art ever will, even if it's hardcore tentacle rape pornography or something.

[1] [http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2013-05-27/japan- ruling...](http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2013-05-27/japan-ruling-party- to-reintroduce-child-pornography-law-revision)

<comment><USER14> Probably, as even fictional images are illegal in the UK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> just think how great this technology would have worked back in the day when homosexuality was taboo. Think of how many people could have been cured or could have found help for their illness.

<comment><USER11> Yes. In the future when child abusers are liberated from political oppression we will look back shamefully on these offensive popups suggesting they seek help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> See this is the thing: I can guarantee you the majority of the people that are getting those type of images aren't using a standard web connection and searching generic search terms into Google/Bing.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am just thinking here - has anyone really seen any child abuse images outside of Torspace?

Torspace is a wild west and anything goes there, but I haven't really seen any child abuse on normal web...

<comment><USER18> My assumption would be that they exist outside of Tor too, just hidden away in private communities. I'm sure there are even legal things on the web that you've never come across because you haven't looked for them, and I would imagine child abuse images aren't particularly easy to search for.

Even on Tor... where do you find them there? It's not like suddenly when you load a site through Tor you see child porn on every site yo visit.

<comment><USER17> By "torspace" I meant websites running as Tor hidden services.

Anything flies on there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Clearly the Huawei "Great Firewall of Britain" can be additionally tasked with blocking horrible images like these are protecting children.

Piracy and malware, too. Protects vital British IP.

</comment><comment><USER20> Any measures to prevent a sinister variation on rickrolling [1]?

Are Microsoft planning to keep records of the IP addresses/MAC addresses triggering the popups?

I think Google's approach is more sensible. Most people leave Google's safe search defaults switched on anyway.

Edit: oops, does Google search default to safe settings on Windows these days? Just checked on Firefox/CentOS and found the safe settings _unticked_. This is a fresh install.

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

<comment><USER21> I don't think Microsoft, Google etc... keep IP addresses _specifically_ with regard to filtered searches, but they do keep logs of all searches/IPs for analytic purposes.

We should all be conscious of the fact that any amount of "web usage" generates logs somewhere. How much of your details end up in these logs depend on what your system/browser leaks and how much detail your ISP has on you.

<comment><USER20> Yes I am aware of server logs, and very unlikely to trigger one of these pop- ups as I use Google safe search all the time.

Rickrolling could be an issue though with a spammed link to a Bing search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Technical solutions may help to combat the issue, but imagine a society where

\- you're not judged for seeking help (maybe even applauded or even rewarded?)

\- everybody receives complete information about how to get help

\- everybody is socially integrated (called "social life") and therefor gets feedback on his/her behavior (and thus gets a hint on when it's time to correct an issue)

<comment><USER23> > everybody is socially integrated (called "social life") and therefor gets > feedback on his/her behavior (and thus gets a hint on when it's time to > correct an issue)

That sounds horrifying.

<comment><USER24> Paedophiles are often socially isolated; hated by society. They only speak to other offenders.

This means that they can start to have thoughts about offending behaviour which are reinforced by other offenders.

If paedophiles had access to non-sex-offenders to talk to they'd get early nudges about how unacceptable their thoughts are, and guidance about avoiding those thoughts and behaviours.

I'm not sure how the "friendship circles" worked out. Maybe they were hopeless? ([http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/3873083.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/3873083.stm))

<comment><USER25> Saying that paedophiles often only speak to other offenders suggests that paedophilia is a crime. It could be better to make a distinction between people of certain sexual orientation and people who commit certain crimes, unless you believe that these two groups of people intersect completely.

I have not encountered any evidence that a certain treatment or social surrounds can change a person's sexual orientation, so avoiding unacceptable thoughts may be impossible for these people. Avoiding unacceptable behaviors is certainly achievable, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is almost annoying enough to make me switch away from Bing and give this Google thing a try.</comment>


Announcing formation of new angel network....The Angel Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.scoopswap.com <comment><USER2> I welcome more investors onto the scene. I'm a little perplexed by the way they are marketing themselves though. Did you look at their site? It looks like an ad for a retirement home or for life insurance or something. One thing that YC does an amazing job of is marketing to their audience. Unfortunately, some of these other funders seem oblivious to who their audience is: 20/30 something year old programmer guys.

</comment><comment><USER3> For us, the main reason for going with Angel funding is to benefit from the advice and expertise of the Angel's network - the money is not very significant. Y combinator seems unbeatable in the level of help they give their teams. The Angel Project seems to be missing this kind of benefit unless I'm missing something.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the lame seeming website....trust me we know who our audience is and we are going to change the way startup funding works.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Frustrated by traditional sources of capital....The Angel Project ...TAP Capital is Born</comment>


FlappyBird hack using Deep Q-Learning - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yenchenlin1994/DeepLearningFlappyBird <comment><USER2> Finally we're trying to teach algorithms to feel anger! I love it!

EDIT: Just to be clear, this is a joke based on the game being flappy bird.

Seriously, though, this is awesome. I love this kind of stuff!

</comment><comment><USER3> First AlphaGo and now this. Our world has truly come to an end!

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting implementation detail

while "pigs" != "fly":

<comment><USER5> My favourite when writing C is:

        #define ever (;;)
        ...
        for ever {
            ...
        }

<comment><USER6> Hello, I'm the author, this is nice! Please send a PR if there's a Python version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> LSTM would converge even faster.

A K-level breadth first search mimicking the optimal policy and a simple learning to search algorithm with a cost sensitive binary linear classifier would work well too.

After training it would be a constant time evaluation of what to do next.

<comment><USER6> Hello I'm the author. Cool idea, would you please provide some paper so that I can absorb?

<comment><USER7> Checkout Dagger [2], SEARN [3] and LOLS [1] (LOLS is available in vowpal wabbit search capabilities). A lot of interesting stuff on mimicking optimal policies, local optimality, joint learning and similar stuff :D

The whole point of playing is doing your decisions jointly, dependent on the previous decisions. If you learn your model that way it'll make its decisions trying to minimize future regret.

Local optimality is a very nice property. It means that if you play out a game, not a single change of any of the previous moves could lead you to a better result. Of course, local optimality is hard but for some problems it's pretty easy to achieve if your optimal policy is good, and your features are adequate (which they will be if you use neural networks).

Of course, flappy bird is pretty local game and all of this might be an overkill :D

AlphaGo wasn't trained jointly over Go games, so it's lacking in that regard. But the power of neural networks is compensating. Who can imagine what AlphaGo would be like if they trained their policy networks jointly? :D

A nice introduction to LSTMs: [http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding- LSTMs/](http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/)

[1]: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.02206.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.02206.pdf)

[2]: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.0686.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.0686.pdf)

[3]: [http://searn.hal3.name](http://searn.hal3.name)

<comment><USER6> Thanks a lot. I'll read these exciting material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting. Here's a similar project from a couple years ago:

[http://sarvagyavaish.github.io/FlappyBirdRL/](http://sarvagyavaish.github.io/FlappyBirdRL/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to see this hooked up to a physical phone and actuator. Anybody here seen anything done using a realtime physical loop in the learning process?

</comment><comment><USER10> I was sort of hoping that the bird would hit a pipe at the end of the 6-minute video.

<comment><USER6> Hello, I'm the author, actually it did hit a pipe at the end of the 6-minute video. I accidentally trim that part, sorry ...</comment></comment>


Search Google for "comic sans" - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?q=comic+sans

<comment><USER2> Or search for helvetica <http://www.google.com/search?q=helvetica>

<comment><USER3> I tried <http://www.google.com/search?q=zapf+dingbats> but no luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this an April Fools' joke, or just another little easter egg from google? There are usually some good April Fools' jokes like the one by Starbucks last year.

<comment><USER3> I think you are looking for <http://mail.google.com/mail/help/motion.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not seeing anything different.

</comment><comment><USER6> Owww, my eyes!</comment>


Teaching Two Programming Languages in the First CS Course - <AUTHOR> https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/228006-teaching-two-programming-languages-in-the-first-cs-course/fulltext <comment><USER2> My concern with most research is that it often attempts to generalize/control for "type of programming language" with "a specific implementation of that type of programming language".

At least in my experience, the implementation matters. And then the number of papers that generalize results about "an object oriented language" when they mean "Java" is sickening. See also research on productivity w/ "static typing" vs. "dynamic typing".

One of the worst things about learning to program at school in the oughts was that Java was the language of choice. I have no problems (more than any other language) with Java as a professional tool, but Java as a first language is a disaster with its conceptual overload.

</comment><comment><USER3> At my university we started with C (and some Assembly) and contiued with Java (and I privatly learn Python). I really liked to start with C and then move to a language with a higher abstraction – so you can understand what these higher languages make easier, and what kind of control you lose when you use them. Now knowing the basics of three languages, I find it easy to transfer concepts like functions/loops etc. beetween them, however, the different syntax can be confusion and I think the switching costs sometimes really decelerate the learning process.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't agree more. We started with java, then moved on to C and it was a colossal failure. They tried to explain concepts like vtables and static methods vs instance methods to people who had never seen a program in their life and it was a disaster. I basically guessed everything on the exam, and I remember thinking "this is such random nonsense, how could anybody ever know how static works?" The next semester we move on to C, they casually explain how you would implement vtables and classes using structs, and suddenly everything clicks. I retroactively retook the Java course in my mind that semester.

I have always thought of that first semester as a total waste of time. I am still a bit angry at the sheer stubborn incompetence of our department that led to this curriculum.

Jesus. Vtables. Who even thinks of that? Java is so complex. Ugh. Teach your maths freshmen calculus before you cover arithmetic, while you're at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A friend attended UC Berkeley (long ago) and said the first semester language was Scheme and the second semester language was assembly. Subsequent classes used C/C++. That sounded like a useful round trip from high-level algorithms to the metal and back to a practical language in between.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is so hard about it?

At my university it was common to teach C++ and Pascal during the first year, to both CS and EE degrees.</comment>


U.S. Army fudged its accounts by trillions of dollars, auditor finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG <comment><USER2> In my experience, this will cause anger and outrage, someone high up will be sacrificed--but that's it.

The military is an absolute money burning machine. In my seven years of experience the following were in-the-open examples:

* End of year spending binges on equipment no one wanted or needed to max out budgets, to justify the next budget year's sum

* Pre-inspection trashing of inventory to mitigate write ups for discrepancies between on-hand and on-book items.

* I met a team of inspectors in Iraq who were tasked with finding some number of billions worth of equipment that was paid for, but no one was able to locate.

* Getting rank often involves pushing through big expensive projects, no matter the need, in exchange for bullet points on personnel review files.

* My favorite: an enormous dining facility was built on a base in Iraq, but it was too close to the exterior fence, which presented a situation where there would potentially be slow-moving line of hundreds of military, closely grouped together, within "throwing distance" of the perimeter fence. Thus, the contractors were required to complete the building, to make-good on the contract, to force the military to pay them in full, for a facility that was unusable due to above.

<comment><USER3> > * End of year spending binges on equipment no one wanted or needed to max > out budgets, to justify the next budget year's sum

This seems pretty standard in any large corporation. The best times to ask for new "shit" is during the holiday season. Thanks corporate Santa! :/

<comment><USER4> I will NEVER forget working as a student in the college bookstore during EOY spending. I watched department chairs throw anything and everything into shopping carts, as if they were gameshow contestants trying to beat the clock.

"What is this Mathematica software? What does it do? I'll take 4 copies."

The idea of course was insanity to me: if you didn't spend your department budget, you were in danger of having it reduced next year. So you were punished for leaving money on the table.

<comment><USER5> "... punished for leaving money on the table"

Are there any alternative strategies to this?

I find this concept insane whereby spending more and more is good but spending less is bad.

<comment><USER6> force ROI reports on all expenditures? sure you will get a lot of BS, but there is a disincentive to recklessly spend

<comment><USER7> There's a lot of stuff you can't put an ROI on. So instead people waste time trying to come up with a poor model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm left with two thoughts.

First, who is getting fired for this and what outsider will be brought in to fix this to keep it from happening again.

Second, is a larger question. Why do US citizens tolerate spending a disproportionate amount of their financial resources on their military?

<comment><USER9> 2-a. The Unites States spend 3.3% of it's GDP on the military. This is in line with other countries. Japan and EU are spending less only because they are under NATO (US) defense umbrella. France, for example, is at 2.1%, so 3.3% is hardly disproportionate.

2-b. Military spending (along with other public spending) is the cornerstone of Keynesian economy. It's the best way known to man to stave off deflationary spiral.

2-c. Military spending is the driver of innovation. Pretty much all of US technological dominance is rooted in military spending. Nearly all of our jobs here on HN came form that.

2-d. Projection of power brings tangible benefits to the US economy.

So 3.3% is a real bargain, all things considered.

[EDIT] Many comments ignored the _benefits_ part of my argument. Yes, 3.3% is larger than 2%, it was not lost on me. Now consider that in exchange for the 1.3% the US managed to snag the first place in the high-tech industry with a huge lead over the rest of the world. Until just recently almost everyone who is anyone in the high-tech world was based in the US. Boeing, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Google, Yahoo, Uber, AirBnB, the list goes on and on. It's not an accident. That 1.3% comes back many times over. And it's just _one_ of the benefits.

Look, I dislike people-killing as much as the next guy. But you can't ignore the economic realities, _especially_ if you want to change the status quo.

<comment><USER10> 3.3% of GDP but what percentage of tax dollars?

It just seems a shame that a country that somehow can't afford to pay for the health care of it's citizens manages to lose track of literally trillions of dollars.

<comment><USER11> Oh my. Can someone check my numbers?

        France revenue:   953,000 million EUR
        Military budget:   41,300 million EUR (approx)
        = 4.33% of tax revenue military spending

vs

        USA revenue:     4,260,000 million USD
        Military budget:   597,500 million USD
        = 14.03% of tax revenue military spending

Damn.

I used:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures) (2015 numbers)

[https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united- states.pd...](https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pdf)

[https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics- france.pdf](https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-france.pdf)

<comment><USER12> I believe your numbers are accurate but I also don't think that they tell the whole story. Is France's subsidy of Airbus military spending? Because America's subsidy of Boeing is. Is French scientific research spending military? Because America spends its research dollars via DARPA. And so on...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm all about gov't waste, and oh my god numbers are hard, but pretty sure they fudged it by Billions not Trillions. In the article they mention that the total true-up of all the problems was ~65B. So this headline is off by a couple orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER14> I'm not seeing that number anywhere in the article, but it does say:

>the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year

Do you have another source?

<comment><USER15> That's misleading because it makes it sound like they were off by a total of 2.8 trillion, but that actually means they made that many adjustments. There is no way they were off that far because that's beyond their entire annual budget.

<comment><USER16> It would probably be better to focus on the number of adjustments that were made rather than the dollar tally (the number of adjustments will give some sense of the scope of the problem without counting the same dollars over and over again).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "The spokesman downplayed the significance of the improper changes, which he said net out to $62.4 billion. "Though there is a high number of adjustments, we believe the financial statement information is more accurate than implied in this report," he said."

Wow, the bubble that is the military-industrial complex. That's 62 Billion dollars that could have gone to education, infrastructure, or helping the poor.

If you were this careless with a fraction of this dollar amount on your personal income taxes you would be thrown in prison.

<comment><USER18> How about not taxing the shit out of the taxpayers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Scot Paltrow cover's this beat regularly

[http://www.reuters.com/journalists/scot-j- paltrow](http://www.reuters.com/journalists/scot-j-paltrow)

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

All the services are at fault. Part of this no doubt has to do with the sheer amount of turnover in the military: people change jobs every two or three years, sometimes in one year. The civilians have more insight, but the active duty officers are virtually guaranteed to make errors in cost estimates for new programs and only shut down old programs after there are obvious overruns.

</comment><comment><USER20> This appears to be the source document: [http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2016-113.pdf](http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2016-113.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyone who has been in the military would be completely unsurprised by a total inability to track spending.

<comment><USER21> The same is true for almost any government position, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "DFAS also could not make accurate year-end Army financial statements because more than 16,000 financial data files had vanished from its computer system."

I am impressed. I did an internship at a financial company and helped do end of month closing balance adjustments. We had a onsite and remote paper copy storage of each document, an onsite server room that hosted a copy, a off site tape copy and an offsite digital back up. Hard to think of what must have happened to get that level of mishap.

<comment><USER23> Depends if it's a mishap or a 'mishap' I guess.

I used to work for a massive retail company and our variance on the total at the end of a single day when cashing up was usually 1p, over 1 pound and people would start looking into it, over 10 pound it had to be reported to loss prevention.

It's a different world I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can't imagine how the DoD could clean up it's books. There have been long standing complaints that the military uses non-standard accounting software. Combine that with a lack of historical knowledge as personnel rotate in and out within 3 years or so and frankly disincentives aligned against the effort at every level and you have a massive project on your hands to get the right data. I'd have to imagine it would be a 5-10 year project

</comment><comment><USER25> Well considering me and my soldiers' pay were fucked up regularly requiring us to visit S1 this doesn't surprise me.

</comment><comment><USER26> > "Where is the money going? Nobody knows," said Franklin Spinney

An ex army ranger once told me that the 'missing' money in the military budget goes to operations like the ones he was part of, which of course he could not tell me about. Of course there is also waste and pork, but I think the majority of this money is for black ops.

<comment><USER27> > An ex army ranger once told me that the 'missing' money in the military > budget goes to operations like the ones he was part of, which of course he > could not tell me about.

Sounds like he fed you some bullshit. I see no reason why it wouldn't be placed under a generic category with zero information regarding it possibly even lumped into something else. This is how it worked with classified projects when I worked in DoD contracting; not sure why this would be any different.

<comment><USER26> Sure, he could have been lying, so could I. Are you really suggesting that classified projects are on the same level as black ops?

<comment><USER27> > Are you really suggesting that classified projects are on the same level as > black ops?

They're different for sure but the required secrecy is essentially the same. Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it won't get accounted for. Granted the DoD accounting practices are horrific but where they exist it will get counted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Some of this money is going to secret operations, but also a lot of it is getting embezzled. If even the inspector general can't get a truthful accounting, then there's no way the army is able to prevent that.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is this really a surprise to anyone? Government historically has no incentive to save money, because if they do, they will get less money the next time around.

I worked for a nonprofit organization based on government funding for almost a decade and this is exactly how the industry (anything based on funding from the government) works. We were told to buy the most expensive of everything and if we had a surplus, we had to spend (and many times waste) the rest.

This is why we need to have less government involved in our economy, not more.

</comment><comment><USER30> Are we storing this all in cash, or are there bank records is what I want to know.

</comment><comment><USER31> _Both presidential candidates have called for increasing defense spending amid current global tension._

FFS, I despite this kind of lazy reporting. Hello, there are _not_ two candidates for President!!! So the phrase "both presidential candidates" is meaningless. I suppose you mean Gary Johnson and Jill Stein right?

<comment><USER32> There are two major party candidates. Check out Duverger's law[0]. Basically, a first-past-the-post/plurality voting system very often results in a two- party system. In the US, issues like disproportionate media representation and gerrymandering further enforce this framework.

So, colloquially, it makes sense to say "both" candidates rather than (unnecessarily) acknowledge that there exist third-party options. This article is not about the presidency (although it might be relevant), and the reporting isn't lazy just because it omits Johnson and Stein from its discussion.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law)

<comment><USER31> I know all about Duverger's Law, but that isn't the point. There _are_ more than two candidates and refusing to acknowledge that only accentuates the problems caused by the first-past-the-post polling system. It's lazy reporting and people should rail against it.

<comment><USER32> The article isn't about the presidential candidates or the upcoming election. The article is about U.S. Army accounting. The only mention of the presidency is in a single sentence in a single paragraph:

> The significance of the accounting problem goes beyond mere concern for > balancing books, Spinney said. Both presidential candidates have called for > increasing defense spending amid current global tension.

They could have omitted this paragraph and the article's contents would still be relevant. The quality of the journalism would be unaffected, because _the actual journalism in the article has nothing to do with the presidency_.

<comment><USER31> _because the actual journalism in the article has nothing to do with the presidency._

If that were true, then why did the author feel the need to introduce a mention of the candidates for President?

Anyway, all I'm saying is that it's lazy journalism, which it is. It would not have been much harder for the author of TFA to be accurate by simply saying "both major party candidates for President..." instead. That such a small change could have been made, and wasn't, is why it's lazy journalism. That, or introducing an irrelevant sidebar, if your thesis is correct.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google buys Doubleclick for $3.1 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070413/20070413005593.html?.v=1 <comment><USER2> Official blog post with a 5 page FAQ: <http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/next-step-in-google-advertising.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> "Q. Does Google plan to eventually offer DoubleClick's existing services for free? A. At this time, we will continue to operate DoubleClick's services as they have been. They have proven to be a successful business and we don't have immediate plans to change their business model."

This question sounds like they assume publishers think adsense is a free service when in fact, they refuse to reveal what percent of revenue publishers are getting per click/impression.

Don't be evil - Sneaky - We want to store the world's data - Evil tyrant.

<comment><USER3> I think its .9 cents per impression ... and about 5 cents per click.

<comment><AUTHOR> They don't tell publishers what share of the click revenue they receive. I barely have any traffic on my blog, but the clicks payout anywhere from pennies to a buck and change. I'd like to know which links are clicked on and what % of the advertisers money I'm getting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> $3.1B in _cash_. That's pretty sick.

I'm guessing Doubleclick is basically going to stay independent (especially since they don't have any stake in Google). There's probably substantial culture mismatch, in which case integration of the company would be tricky.

<comment><USER5> I believe Google primarily bought DoubleClick for its audience reach and vast customer base, aside from playing keep-away from Microsoft. You could think of this deal as more pricey customer acquisition versus corporate integration.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft made a mistake!!! They better buy Yahoo NOW!

<comment><USER3> I think MSFT heard me ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Talked to a friend at doubleclick and the office is going wild!

<comment><USER6> Dismay or joy?</comment></comment>


Akaros - open source, GPL-licensed operating system for manycore architectures - <AUTHOR> http://akaros.cs.berkeley.edu/akaros-web/news.php <comment><USER2> Cool to see this posted here, I know one of the guys working on it. It would be nice if they provided some compiled/preconfigured images for VirtualBox or VMware to play with though.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's what I expected to find when I clicked on "Getting Started." However, that just shows you the location of their code repository.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would appear that this project shares some goals with Dragonfly BSD[1] -- apart from the choice of foundation (fork FreeBSD vs GNU/Linux) -- are there any notable differences?

[1] [http://www.dragonflybsd.org/](http://www.dragonflybsd.org/)

<comment><USER5> The license. (GPL vs BSD.)

<comment><USER4> Well, yes. I sort of thought I'd covered that with "...choice of foundation (fork FreeBSD vs GNU/Linux)".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Resources section of that webpage needs to have more. Until I look at the source code, I can't figure out what exactly is different from linux and how said differences matter/help.

</comment><comment><USER7> Poking around a bit, I can't see much that this adds beyond what you can do with the Linux kernel, except where it basically breaks virtualization containerization. If you care enough about workload performance to break the strong statement of separation that virtualization affords, why not just run unvirtualized in the first place. The rest looks a lot like LXC+cgroups.</comment>


FounderSearch.com FAQ, v1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://foundersearch.com/faq/

<comment><USER2> "We have our reputation to loose. That's our most valuable asset."

You've just lost your reputation for good grammar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Thanks!</comment></comment>


How to Take On a Passion Project When You Have a Job - <AUTHOR> http://www.good.is/post/working-better-how-to-take-on-a-passion-project-when-you-have-a-job/

<comment><USER2> "but realistically, you tell yourself, you need a steady paycheck."

why.</comment>


Entrepreneurial strategies have different implications for different actions - <AUTHOR> http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-04/w-esh040308.php <comment><AUTHOR> Also, a previous paper: Discovery and creation - alternative theories of entrepreneurial action ([http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi- bin/abstract/11684464...](http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi- bin/abstract/116844647/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0))</comment>


Google's recipe for recipes - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/03/googles_recipe.php <comment><USER2> Would people prefer setting their own standards for search? How about if there is a search engine that takes into account your preferences (needs, likes, wants) and then shows results that are filtered by 'you' and not by refining the algorithms?</comment>


Why SATA is now obsolete - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-ssds-are-obsolete/ Article based on paper: http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/yiying-thesis13.pdf <comment><USER2> "why maintain two logical address spaces? Why not have the file system directly manage the flash?"

Because managing flash is hard. For this to work, the amount of exceptions in the filesystem it's self would make it unmanageable.

an example is this: a Fusion-io card up until recently used low quality flash, yet managed to get stella performance. Much higher performance than the equivalent intel ssd card (who have access to much higher quality flash) some of that is down to layout, the rest firmware.

Then you have the flash that lives on a device like your phone, however the firmware of the SoC is tweaked to run that particular flash controller.

At its heart, flash/hdd is just a key:value database (presented with 4k value size) why would we want to complicate that (sure we need to indicate to the hardware that we've deleted a page, but to be honest not much else)

<comment><USER3> It seems like the article maybe misrepresents what the thesis that inspired it says[1]. From the abstract:

"... the device still has its freedom to control block-allocation decisions, enabling it to execute critical tasks such as garbage collection and wear leveling ... Next, we present Nameless Writes, a new device interface that removes the need for indirection in flash-based SSDs. Nameless writes allow the device to choose the location of a write; only then is the client informed of the name (i.e., address) where the block now resides."

So it sounds like this approach is actually removing responsibility from the filesystem, not the firmware.

[1] [http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/yiying- thesis1...](http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/yiying-thesis13.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Nameless writes save an indirection layer -- but quite a cheap one!

They add significant latency to write operations, though, which is a high price to pay for such a small gain.

<comment><USER5> SSDs are so fast let's make them slow again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Article based on paper: [http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/yiying- thesis1...](http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/yiying-thesis13.pdf)

<comment><USER6> "De-indirection for Flash-based Solid State Drives", Zhang 2013 [http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/yiying- thesis1...](http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/yiying-thesis13.pdf)

"Flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) have revolutionized storage with their high performance. Modern flash-based SSDs virtualize their physical resources with _indirection_ to provide the traditional block interface and hide their internal operations and structures. When using a file system on top of a flash-based SSD, the device indirection layer becomes redundant. Moreover, such indirection comes with a cost both in memory space and in performance. Given that flash-based devices are likely to continue to grow in their sizes and in their markets, we are faced with a terrific challenge: _How can we remove the excess indirection and its cost in flash-based SSDs?_

We propose the technique of de-indirection to remove the indirection in flashbased SSDs. With de-indirection, the need for device address mappings is removed and physical addresses are stored directly in file system metadata. By doing so the need for large and costly indirect tables is removed, while the device still has its freedom to control block-allocation decisions, enabling it to execute critical tasks such as garbage collection and wear leveling.

In this dissertation, we first discuss our efforts to build an accurate SSD emulator. The emulator works as a Linux pseudo block device and can be used to run real system workloads. The major challenge we found in building the SSD emulator is to accurately model SSDs with parallel planes. We leveraged several techniques to reduce the computational overhead of the emulator. Our evaluation results show that the emulator can accurately model important metrics for common types of SSDs, which is sufficient for the evaluation of various designs in this dissertation and in SSD-related research.

Next, we present _Nameless Writes_ , a new device interface that removes the need for indirection in flash-based SSDs. Nameless writes allow the device to choose the location of a write; only then is the client informed of the _name_ (i.e., address) where the block now resides. We demonstrate the effectiveness of nameless writes by porting the Linux ext3 file system to use an emulated nameless-writing device and show that doing so both reduces space and time overheads, thus making for simpler, less costly, and higher-performance SSD- based storage.

We then describe our efforts to implement nameless writes on real hardware. Most research on flash-based SSDs including our initial evaluation of nameless writes rely on simulation or emulation. However, nameless writes require fundamental changes in the internal workings of the device, its interface to the host operating system, and the host OS. Without implementation in real devices, it can be difficult to judge the true benefit of the nameless writes design. Using the OpenSSD Jasmine board, we develop a prototype of the Nameless Write SSD. While the flash-translation layer changes were straightforward, we discovered unexpected complexities in implementing extensions to the storage interface.

Finally, we discuss a new solution to perform de-indirection, the File System De-Virtualizer ( _FSDV_ ), which can dynamically remove the cost of indirection in flash-based SSDs. FSDV is a light-weight tool that de- virtualizes data by changing file system pointers to use device physical addresses. Our evaluation results show that FSDV can dynamically reduce indirection mapping table space with only small performance overhead. We also demonstrate that with our design of FSDV, the changes needed in file system, flash devices, and device interface are small."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author is on to something. Flash memory devices can emulate disks, but that's an inefficient way to access them, especially for reading. You have all the overhead of Linux system calls and file systems to, basically, read a RAM- like device that's orders of magnitude faster in access time than a rotating device.

The question is, what non-file abstraction should a flash device offer? Slow persistent RAM? A key/value store? An SQL database? Computing has had "RAM" and "disks" as its storage models for so long that those concepts are nailed into software at a very low level.

The NoSQL crowd could probably find uses for devices that implemented big, fast key/value stores.

<comment><USER8> The problem with NAND flash is that it is not "RAM-like device" even for reads (smallest addressable entity is block even for reads).

It can essentially do three operations: read block, write block, erase bunch of blocks at once. For the purposes of filesystem, this is actually an workable storage interface that does not need any additional abstraction layers.

<comment><USER9> You are both right. It's a RAM-like key-value store with large (block-sized) values.

<comment><USER4> It's not RAM-like, because you can read small parts of keys, but have to write large ones.

<comment><USER9> You can't read or write individual bits or bytes in RAM directly either. Word size is very small compared to disk blocks, but it's not atomic.

I'm not an architecture expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong about this.

<comment><USER10> It depends on what kind of RAM and what kind of bus you are using. Some do let you write bytes at a time, others only allow N byte words at a time.

Though I suppose a byte is still not a bit! I'm not sure I've ever seen a bus interface that addressed individual bits…

<comment><USER4> But the read and write are symmetric, of same sizes.

<comment><USER10> No: some buses let you write different sized words to the memory controller or RAM chip. For example, picture a bus that's 32 bits wide, but there are control lines that let you specify that you're writing (or reading) 1 byte, 2 bytes, or 4 bytes. During a single byte wide bus cycle you are _not_ sending 4 bytes to the part, even though there are 32 bits connecting to it.

Certainly not everything out there is byte addressable, but neither can one say unequivocally that all RAMs have large atomic word sizes.

<comment><USER4> Again, in your scenario read&write are symmetric. In Flash, they're not.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand what you mean by "symmetric". If I can write a 32 bit word out and read 1 byte of it back, I don't consider that "symmetric".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It sounds like a great idea to "get rid of abstraction" and have the file system handle the NAND directly if you don't think about it.

But if you think about it for even a little bit you realize that you can't just get rid of the abstraction, you're just moving it out of the drive's firmware and into the file system. And that gets you nothing because now the file system has to be compatible with every manufacturer's NAND drives. And the file system has to be updated any time that system needs to be changed. You can't just pop a new NAND drive in and have it work, you have to download new NAND drivers for the file system, etc.

I'm also skeptical of just how much performance gain you'd see. The article doesn't include these figures, which makes me skeptical that they are significant.

Delegation of duties is important for good system design. Drives necessarily need to present themselves in a standard way to the system. Having SSDs appear like normal drives is fine. They aren't memory and they shouldn't be used as memory.

<comment><USER12> Flash Translation Layer _is_ critical to performance. Googling "flash translation layer performance" should be enough to convince you of this.

Moving it from firmware to file system does not improve performance by itself, but it enables optimizations. And FTLs in firmware are far from optimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _The obvious question is: why maintain two logical address spaces?_

There are perhaps 10 more address spaces and translations. It the way OS and hardware are build.

> _Why not have the file system directly manage the flash?_

Too slow innovation, it takes decade to replace operating system. Also main CPU is very power hungry and slow...

More likely the SSD controller will become part of CPU and SOC.

</comment><comment><USER14> _now that non-volatile memory technology - flash today, plus RRAM tomorrow - has been widely accepted, it is time to build systems that use flash directly instead of through our antique storage stacks._

Hear hear! The basic storage model that arose in the 50's and 60's being the best fit for recently developed hardware seems as likely as the security models from the 50's and 60's being the best fit for the Internet.

(If the obnoxious popup adverts from ZDNet strike _me_ as archaic, they are not doing well.)

<comment><USER15> If NAND continues to function the way it does today, we would still need to standardize on some kind of interface to get traction. The advantage of SATA, SAS, PCIe, et. al. are their pervasiveness in the PC world. His proposal basically boils down to "NAND on SATA is kinda slow because of all the latency from stuff. We should just hook the NAND up to one of the upstream buses." It's unclear to me how this is different from what is already being done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you're interested in this subject from a Linux/storage expert, here's Ric Wheeler's talk from FOSDEM last year: [https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/persistent_me...](https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/persistent_memory/)

</comment><comment><USER17> One word. Separation of concerns. Okay, three. Why would you want to mix managing files and transistors?

</comment><comment><USER18> I like "news" articles like this. Harris takes a scientific publication, adds his own opinion while making the topic easier to understand, and cites his source.

<comment><USER19> Personally, i believe his armchair dismissal of FTL requires far more justification than he gives. This blog post is pure postulation that doesn't even attempt to take up the argument of the dissertation, let alone take that argument far enough to justify that title.

In fact in the thesis' abstract, the proposed solution is still a layer of indirection. Instead of the FTL giving an abstracted address space, the "device" is given the responsibility of controlling wear, gc, and parallelism by dynamically reallocating blocks itself, and the filesystem picking up some more of the management stuff.

I am certainly not qualified enough to read this dissertation critically enough to know if it is fundamentally sound theoretically, but as a scientist I know that it is close to meaningless until it has been experimentally tested and reviewed..

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a related note, if you upgrade to a SSD be sure to change the SATA type in BIOS from IDE to AHCI. Not only did I see a doubling in write speed [1], but after making the change, my system felt much more responsive under heavy load.

[1] [http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/Why-do-i-need- AHCI-...](http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Crucial-SSDs/Why-do-i-need-AHCI-with-a- SSD-Drive-Guide-Here-Crucial-AHCI-vs/td-p/57078)

</comment><comment><USER21> Basically the author is calling for a return to the Multics file system, where files were just a way of referring to capability-managed subsets of an enormous pool of pages.

I liked the idea the first time around so I like it again. But it's harder than it sounds.

I find something lovely and poetic in the fact that Lisp is over 50 years old and Multics is almost that old, and both may be having a bit of a renaissance.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yes, the SATA interface to flash storage is obsolete. Just like internal combustion engines! And it will be almost as hard to get rid of.

<comment><USER23> SATA and AHCI are already on their way out, being replaced by PCIe and NVMe. That removes most of the abstraction that is actually obsolete, but it doesn't pretend that SSDs aren't fundamentally block devices. About the only thing NVMe does that is perpetuating a fiction about the underlying flash is that the read block size and write block size are the same thing. All the rest is abstraction that's absolutely _necessary_ until we completely change our conventions for computer architecture and operating systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Linkbait title is linkbait, but content is sound.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm not a hardware expert, but my intuition tells me that the general thesis -- that any given hardware module _could be_ implemented in some way that's light years ahead of where we are now -- is often true. But there is more to widespread adoption than being the best technology: marketing, timing, industrial realities, legacy software limitations... Legacy enterprise software and OSs in particular seem they probably make significant architectural changes to the very core of every computer difficult to effect.

</comment><comment><USER26> This isn't an entirely novel idea. I remember in 2009 Steve Wozniak giving a talk in Waterloo about becoming the Chief Scientist for Fusion-io ([https://fusionio.com/](https://fusionio.com/)), a company building PCI-E SSDs, bypassing the SATA bus.

<comment><USER27> This is somewhat tangential, but my professor recruited Steve to come to Fusion-io and always speaks incredibly highly of Steve. When he was leaving the CEO position to give it back to the founder of Fusion-io he offered Steve some additional shares and Steve told him to give the shares the engineers who actually produce the technology. Incredible humbleness there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> all he means behind the sensationalistic crap is that the sata controller is not actually needed, its there for compatibility.

"hard disk" will not be the ram. its just is made of the same chips, but still logically separated. and there is no need for a sata controller to address it really.

That's all. You still need a file system if you want to address the files. Just like address blocks of ram or anything else. If you give free reign to the app, there is no security, reliability, etc. Even ram is actually indexed as well.

On top of that you need a representation for the human behind it - no matter how hard they try to remove that (because its much easier to lock you in when there is no generic way to browser a memory device), its not very convenient compared to a file system.

</comment><comment><USER29> That sounds fine in principle, but please don't tell me the future is jffs2!

<comment><USER30> I think the proposal is something like ZFS/Btrfs but with even more complexity to handle wear leveling and such.

<comment><USER31> Is this going to have a net benefit? To my mind it makes more sense for specialized functionality to be built into the drives firmware rather than letting the CPU deal with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My SSD has a three core cpu dedicated to it. Removing the layer of indirection isn't going to make it faster. At best it's going to make the ssd cheaper by a minuscule amount due to a simpler controller.

<comment><USER30> One core of your main processor is faster than those three embedded cores; that's why Fusion-io mooches off the main processor.

<comment><USER32> Its probably fast enough for its purpose. If it isn't, making it faster is way easier than changing existing abstraction layers. In the extreme, it can ever be an asic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> the basic premise is that remapping is necessarily expensive. unfortunately, neither the thesis nor its citations really support that. and we have plenty of examples where remapping is pervasive and apparently efficient (MMUs, for instance). it's hard to imagine how a filesystem could reasonably handle wear- levelling, not to mention the now-common practice of using MLC cells to hold SLC data for faster writes, etc.

the "nameless writes" idea is OK - a FS person would just call it even lazier allocation, not anything really different.

</comment><comment> mark-r I've always wondered how much performance gain you could get if the very large blocks required for erasure were known to the file system, rather than being hidden behind an emulation layer.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think the author misunderstands the word "obsolete." Something is only obsolete when there is something better to replace it with.

</comment><comment><USER35> Anyone else think it's a little ironic to read about something being obsolete on ZDNet?

</comment><comment><USER36> The title is odd. Should be "Why SATA is now obsolete."

The article is of course correct, and some manufacturers are already offering SSD-like storage which is connected like a stick of RAM.

I'm sure the gap between storage and the main system pipeline (CPU-GPU-RAM- etc) will only shrink as time moves forward. However as an interim solution things that acted like hard drives were convenient.

<comment><USER37> Yes, but if the title was honest then not as many people would click, and we can't have that.

<comment><USER38> and that's exactly why I read the comments first</comment></comment></comment>


Oft-quoted paper on spread of fake news is retracted - <AUTHOR> https://retractionwatch.com/2019/01/09/oft-quoted-paper-on-spread-of-fake-news-turns-out-to-befake-news/ <comment><USER2> > "Our work is not fake news," Filippo Menczer, a professor of informatics and > computer science at Indiana University and a coauthor of the study, told > BuzzFeed News. "In the moment that we found the error, we immediately > contacted the editors to retract it. It was our own initiative. We were not > trying to trick anyone. This is how science works."

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/fake- news...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/fake-news-study- retraction)

<comment><USER3> >> we immediately contacted the editors to retract it.

And that's how the most effective fake news works. A tiny fraction of the people who see (and spread) the original article will ever see the retraction. And ever fewer will spread it.

<comment><USER4> That's true, but it's an unavoidable consequence of research publication. You don't produce new science and hold onto it for years waiting to see if someone challenges your non-published result.

Alternatively, I think fake news is artificially engineered to achieve the effect. So unless this group was deliberately producing fake conclusions I personally wouldn't call them fake news.

<comment><USER3> I'm not even talking about research publication. I'm talking about today's mainstream press. The algorithm there is simple: issue a bombastic, click grabbing "story", let people generate traffic (and ad revenue) for a few days. Then either change the article, or delete it, or issue a milquetoast "retraction".

A team I ran at one of my past jobs was interviewed by NYTimes once. What was published was extremely editorialized to drive clicks, and as a result bore little resemblance to what people actually said. We didn't even bother asking for a retraction, but after that incident I've been extremely distrustful of basically everything I read in the media, no matter the source, unless I see direct, unedited evidence. And even then I'm distrustful if evidence appears to be taken out of context, which it is at least 90% of the time. I just wish the "journalists" would stop killing their own profession, and start behaving like adults. The only prominent voice I trust these days is Glenn Greenwald.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the title of this article is a bit unfair; pretty much all of our understanding of science is going to be wrong at some level at some point in time, either due to mistakes in the experimentation, or in this case a software bug; good scientists realize this and issue corrections or retract the paper. Doesn't "fake news" imply dishonesty?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not necessarily, which is why I've always disliked the term, even apart from how it's used so often as to be meaningless rhetoric. Plenty of people might take "fake" to mean _false_ , regardless of intent. And I would also argue that "fake news" can also be interpreted to mean that something mundane/previously known is falsely insinuated to be shocking "news" e.g. "Barack Obama discovered to have lived with single white teen mom", which is technically true (his mother was white and living alone at the time of his birth), but the intent of the headline is obviously to imply scandal.

That said, I don't think it's normal for a "software bug" to result in such an egregious error as to require a retraction of the study. I'd like to know why the peer review process failed to detect the problem.

<comment><USER6> >That said, I don't think it's normal for a "software bug" to result in such an egregious error as to require a retraction of the study. I'd like to know why the peer review process failed to detect the problem.

Only because most papers never get the work checked at that level. Software bugs causing errors in studies is extremely common. There's a reason a tiny tiny fraction of researchers share their code without kicking and screaming, and it's not because they'll be scooped on their next paper if they do. (I'm slightly jaded here)

<comment><USER7> In what field? I work in research and people love to share their software and have you cite their tools in your papers. Software has no chance of being popular or vetted enough to become a standard without sharing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It demeans the scientific process to call this fake news. If you want fake news to stop, probably don't do that.

But it is true that it is a difficult battle to fight.

<comment><USER9> You can be cheeky and still take the matter seriously. Just 'cause the paper describes (or, used to describe?) a serious problem, doesn't mean one has to tread carefully around such an obvious foundation for situational humor.

<comment><USER8> I don't believe that is true. I've witnessed too much satire of that sort become reality, both offline and online. Of course, I can't speak to the rate at which it is harmful.

<comment><USER9> I believe you're exaggerating the threat a laugh at the "fake-newsness" of a scientific study about fake news can bring.

One can't account for everyone, but there's no conversation to be had _ever_ , about *anything, if you automatically presume that the other person is not at least somewhat serious about the subject matter and does not care about it at least a little bit.

I'm sure grown men and women will not lose their capacity for critical thinking after a laugh. If anything, the humor's role is to relieve tension. Maybe it would enhance the conversation.

Not that there is any, at the moment. The paper got retracted, and we know why, and we know the reason wasn't a matter of falsification, but in the following of the ethics of science. The way I see it, there are other subjects around the news that are worth considering – for example, as someone in the comments has already mentioned, how come the bug hasn't been noticed before.

<comment><USER8> I believe we have very different personal experiences with this sort of thing. I'm jealous of you! I am constantly surprised at how many people are very much not serious about a subject -- even when they think they are -- because they are more interested in winning than learning.

I am, of course, guilty of this all the time. The nuanced difference is when the individual no longer cares about correcting that vice (I know because, well, they've said so).

You're right, I am exaggerating the danger. I will assert, however, that the danger is nonzero and deserves more than dismissal. Mostly I urge thought about how the weight of these sorts of jokes can subtly affect the perceptions of people rather than insisting on the triviality of a single event.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is so deliciously meta... news about the spread of fake news appears to itself be fake news, and the spread of said fake news displays all the properties described in the paper.

<comment><USER11> Wrong science is not "fake news". A retraction by an author isn't a refutation by an antagonist. The conflation of the two, however, is definitely on the spectrum.

They messed up and told everyone so. That's pretty much the opposite of propaganda falsehoods.

<comment><USER12> I think the key point here is that nobody knows _precisely_ what fake news is, so we all create our own often times incompatible definitions. This probably goes back to the source of the word. The terms usage seems to have been organized by mainstream media outlets to attack smaller sites. If that sounds controversial check out the trends on the term [1]. It was a basically nonexistent term, in spite of what it means having been a thing for many years, which then spiked to ubiquity everywhere in a matter of days. That reeks of collusion.

And so does it's demise. The term backfired and began to be used against mainstream sites when they ran articles that were 'factually challenged'. And though 'fake news' has hardly faded, now that the big players have almost entirely stopped using the term - as quickly as they had chosen to start using it in the first place, it's trending back to 0. You even now have articles such as CNN suggesting we "ban the term 'fake news'" [2], a WaPo columnist suggesting, "It's time to retire the tainted term 'fake news.'", and so on. [3].

The moral of the story being just yet another telling of Frankenstein. 'Fake news' as a term probably did well in focus tests, but once the term was used in the wild it took on a life of its own leading those that created it to desire nothing other than its extermination.

[1] - [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=fake%20news)

[2] - [https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/26/opinions/fake-news-and- di...](https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/26/opinions/fake-news-and- disinformation-opinion-wardle-derakhshan/index.html)

[3] - [https://www.wired.com/2017/02/internet-made-fake-news- thing-...](https://www.wired.com/2017/02/internet-made-fake-news-thing-made- nothing/)

<comment><USER10> The other key point here is that it's a lot funnier if you choose one particular interpretation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone else here not even bother reading about new psychology findings? Ever since learning about the "replication crisis" and seeing how so much popular psychology has fallen victim to it (e.g. priming, ego depletion, power poses, impicit bias, stereotype threat)

I wonder if news organizations will bring in rules not to report on them until there's been a number of successful replications. They just mislead people.

</comment><comment><USER14> Glad that authors retracted it by themselves. Surprised that no one found the mistake in such a popular paper for so long.

<comment><USER12> It's confirmation bias. When you want something to be true because it confirms your biases, most people are not going to actively try to refute it. This is one big argument for avoiding ideological homogeneity in academia. Homogeneity reduces the quality of work since ideas that are not properly supported are less challenged than they would be in cases where ones idea goes against the biases of other researchers.

Consider the replication crisis in psychology as another embodiment of this. This was all really started when a replication study attempted to replicate a number of impactful studies from top tier psychology journals. It turns out that 64% of all studies, including 74% of social psychology studies, could not be replicated. That means if somebody actually tried to replicate any given study, they'd more likely than not find it was dodgy. But nobody did this, because there was not much motivation to do it. Refuting others' studies hurts them, likely creates enemies for you, and doesn't do all that much for your own career.

It's a messed up system that basically needs ideological heterogeneity to create that motivation needed to ensure good quality. But such heterogeneity is practically nonexistent in many soft sciences now a days, and to some degree the problem is even starting to seep into the hard sciences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems exactly how researchers should behave in this case? Putting the search for truth ahead of potential reputation hits. In my eyes at least, this makes me more likely to trust them, as I know they're standing behind their work.

</comment><comment><USER16> Now the question lies in how far said retraction will be spread. How many of the news sites who posted about this paper in the past will post about the retraction as well?

That's a huge issue with finding credible media sources nowadays. Depressingly few will admit they're wrong/update an incorrect story, and those that do will barely advertise that.

</comment><comment><USER17> Archive: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190110014608/https://retractio...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190110014608/https://retractionwatch.com/2019/01/09/oft- quoted-paper-on-spread-of-fake-news-turns-out-to-befake-news/)

(Source appears hugged to death.)

<comment><AUTHOR> The notice as it appears in the original journal can be found here (though it lacks the context about how this study was popularly shared/written about): [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0507-0](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0507-0)

<comment><USER18> Adding another layer of complexity, versions of the paper both pre- and post- retraction are available on arXiv: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02694](https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02694)

It wasn't clear from the RetractionWatch page that the authors think that at least some form of the paper is still worth republishing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would love to never hear that term again.

<comment><USER20> Yes, I prefer the term "rumor". But maybe that is not persuasive enough, hence the emphasis using "fake".

<comment><USER19> Where do you envision that term being applied exactly?

It would make sense if the term was only leveled against specific news that is not based on openly verifiable fact. However, some individuals use it to refer to entire news organizations, seemingly ones that oppose their views, while not applying it to other organizations that clearly have the same or lower standards for verifiability.</comment></comment></comment>


Schibsted wants to circumvent the mobile adblocking apocalypse - <AUTHOR> http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/schibsted-wants-to-circumvent-the-mobile-adblocking-apocalypse-by-making-better-more-effective-ads/ <comment><USER2> There is a BIG problem with the current model of the advertising industry. It's based on STEALING attention from people. This is an outstanding lack of respect.

How about treating people like intelligent beings who know what they want for themselves and that stay informed ?

Make specialized advertising sites where companies can promote their products and services and let the users come when they want to chek out what's new or look for something they need. They will come. And they will be happier and the companies will be happier.

This is a civilized advertising method in my view.

<comment><USER3> I think just being static text or images is respect enough. When I read magazines my attention wasn't distracted by any ad, they were all static. I could look at the ad first, last, or not at all, and I could focus on the article to my heart's content.

As for specialized advertising sites, isn't that what amazon is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aftonbladet was the reason I started using an adblocker to begin with. Much better nowadays when I visit their mobile page on my phone, though I did get a slightly annoying fullscreen ad over there a couple of weeks ago. But overall it's much better.

<comment><USER3> So maybe that's a benefit of ad blockers, a publisher notices and changes behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well they didn't test text ads (a la Google pre-doubbleclick) so I guess images are the least invasive.

I wonder if they tested against content blockers like iOS9 safariviewcontroller ?

</comment><comment><USER6> Which leads to the question: Then why did all this evolve to the chaos it is right now, if annoying users actually doesn't work? Short-term benefits while it was new?

<comment><USER7> Maybe it does work, and they were just able to get away with it until adblockers (and earlier, popup blockers) started to reach a critical mass.</comment></comment>