Burstsort: Fastest known algorithm to sort large set of strings - <AUTHOR> http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~jz/fulltext/alenex03.pdf

<comment><USER2> This is the algorithm used in Hadoop's record setting TeraSort benchmark:

[http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/07/08/HadoopWinsTeraSo...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/07/08/HadoopWinsTeraSort.aspx)

[http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/hadoop/core/trunk/src/examples/...](http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/hadoop/core/trunk/src/examples/org/apache/hadoop/examples/terasort/TeraSort.java?revision=673517&view=markup)

</comment><comment><USER3> Burstsort's design considers cache effects. (A cache miss can easily cost you 200 instructions.) In the grand old days of sorting algorithms it was instruction count that mattered.

Judging from their graphs, Burstsort is fastest by a wide margin for sufficiently large datasets.

<comment><AUTHOR> It also has very consistent asymptotic performance... ie. doesn't degrade as badly as Quicksort when the data is strange in some way. (When a list is already in reverse order, naive Quicksort degrades to O(n^2)).

Also oddly interesting, according to some page I was reading on Quicksort before this, there exist adaptive algorithms that generate worst case data sets for Quicksort no matter what the partitioning scheme is.

<comment><USER4> How general can the partitioning scheme be? Can it generate worst cases for random selection of the pivot?

Also one can always select the median in (deterministic) linear time. This way quicksort won't degenerate to O(n^2) ever.

<comment><USER5> I think Xichekolas had in mind adversarial techniques such as the one described in <http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/mdmspe.pdf>. That paper assumes O(1) pivot selection.

<comment><USER4> I read the paper. Seems like they can not beat a median pivot (that takes O(k) to find at each step, but keeps the quicksort runtime of O(n log n).)

Still, a cool progam.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


10 Principles of the UI Design Masters - <AUTHOR> http://nettuts.com/articles/10-principles-of-the-user-interface-masters/ <comment><USER2> This strikes me as a top ten list searching for content. It's a shotgun-blast of advice: there's a big hole in the wall but it's not clear if there was a target.

If HN were to have a programmatic dampening of "top N list" submission ratings, I would not complain.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pft. Can't stand this guy's stuff -- it's unadulterated linkbait. Thank god we don't have FreelanceSwitch articles popping up in here yet.

<comment><USER4> I'll agree with that, no need to knock what others are doing in making the suggestion though, but you're right, he could have at least added some of his own content

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> just remember that the single most impactful, game-changing, and profitable revolution in web uis in the last ten years was the dramatic simplicity of the google homepage...DESIGNED BY TWO UNIX SYSTEMS HACKERS!

<comment><USER6> I wonder if this is a fact or a fiction.

The legend of the Simple Google Interface.

Not saying it's not true. But are we sure we have a cause-effect here? Sure it worked, it was liked. Bu if they had a different UI, would they be nowhere now?

<comment><USER7> I think it helped. It wasn't the ONLY factor (the search engine was pretty good too ;)), but I think displaying results faster (smaller page size, more focused UI), contributes positively to the experience.

Perhaps there are UIs that would have resulted in faster growth or more total marketshare, but there are definitely UIs that would have made things far worse. I think the "headroom" for growth is pretty low, there were so many competing services then, if you can remember, that I find it hard to believe that there was only Google with a different looking interface.</comment></comment></comment>


Police box: policing a walkable city - <AUTHOR> http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2016/04/police-box-policing-walkable-city.html <comment><USER2> Borderline. Police boxes have their downsides. The OP missed one important distinction between Japanese and North American police architecture: Guns. A japanese police officer may feel comfortable sitting at a fixed point, brightly lit, surrounded by darkness. A north american or even a UK officer will not... and probably should not. That's why those police buildings don't have big windows.

(Note the "best" example is actually Canadian, with a very different gun culture than the US. And the worst is in a rural part of the US where guns are the norm.)

Also, privacy. Japanese police do not interview people in the same manner or with the same regularity as north american police. North American police buildings need to be able to take people inside them without worry of someone snapping pictures from a car outside. They need a closed environment to interview suspects, witnesses, and any number of other people outside of public eye. That extends to police vehicles, which are regularly used to move people to places for interviews away from prying eyes. This is not as common in Japan.

Thirdly, density. North American policing involves a relatively few officers spread over a much greater area. Even our dense urban cores are more spread out than anything in Tokyo. Tying an officer to a fixed point severely limit's their area of operation. And an empty police box gives the impression of an absent force. North American deterrence relies on the concept that police 'might' be watching. Any clear indication that they are or aren't at a given time, whether or not the police box is empty, works against that deterrent.

<comment><USER3> Why does all of that activity have to happen "away from prying eyes"?

<comment><USER2> Because not everyone wants the entire neighborhood to see that they are meeting with a police officer, especially if you are reporting a crime by someone still walking around that neighborhood. Nor do police want to embarrass people. So it is normal to interview someone in a private place, without windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I'm remembering correctly, an ex-Seattle police chief wrote in his book that vehicle-based policing is at least partly (if not more so) driven by "consumer" demand, i.e., people want a response to their calls _now_.

NYPD did something almost like this with:

[http://fort-greene.thelocal.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/nypd-skyw...](http://fort- greene.thelocal.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/nypd-skywatch-tower-comes-to-clinton- hill/)

But it received a negative response from several directions.

<comment><USER2> It was also a reaction to corruption amongst officers walking a fixed beat. Community policing is all well and good, under you realize that having only a handful of officers dedicated to a small area is a breading ground for corruption and cover-up. Using vehicles means that stations can be larger, more centralized/supervised, with officers rotated amongst different areas. But I doubt any former officer writing a book would have mentioned such things.

<comment><USER5> Why would localization have a big impact? In this day and age, if there's corruption to be contended with, it'll be with large monied interests that often span localities.

Honestly, the people being policed simply don't have input into oversight. That's the root cause of corruption.

<comment><USER2> If you read police/legal history, the issue is with the very very small beats. When there is only one officer assigned to a particular street, what do residents do when that officer is the problem? One early answer was to give them mechanical watches and regiment exactly when and where they were to stand during the beat. But that too led to problems as officers prioritized the schedule over actual policing. It's a very interesting history whereby the trust pendulum has swung back and forth many times.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_%28police%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_%28police%29)

<comment><USER6> Yeah. Once you have small groups of officers in the same area for a length of time you start getting pressure on local businesses to contribute to the "widows and orphans" fund.

<comment><USER5> I get that today via mailers. Once we accidentally committed to a donation (did not actually donate), now they are ceaseless in their fundraising efforts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Japanese police also stand outside their police box or station with a big stick doing "ritsuban" i.e. [http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/03/20/reference/police...](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/03/20/reference/police- who-stand-with-big-sticks) which is I suppose the opposite of a motorised patrol where you stand still and the community moves around you whilst you project "the police are watching you". This for me now makes sense of the same practice at airports where there is a guy on a platform with a big stick, just being there, a bit intimidating.

</comment><comment><USER8> San Francisco tried building some koban in the 1980s. One was at 16th and Mission, and the other was on Post St. in Japantown.[1] There was one in Chinatown, and one at the Powell/Market St. cable car turntable. Seldom were there cops in them. They just were not much more useful than cops walking around.

Larger storefront police substations have a better track record, but they're not common. They're expensive to staff. But that's not the problem. Here's what Japan's police agency thinks of their own police box system:[2]

 _Good security conditions are a fundamental prerequisite for the system. Although police boxes are institutions designed to secure public safety, they can only be successful in areas that are already safe. For example, in an area where terrorist attacks frequently occur, police boxes could become easy targets. It is still necessary for officers to make a lot of effort in order to defend a police box against less serious crimes such as vandalism and other attacks. A small number of officers are deployed to a large number of places under the system. Therefore, the police box system can be successful under highly secure conditions such as what Japan has._

 _Japan's good security conditions have been underpinned by the police box system, and also by non-police factors such as sea-bound geographical conditions, a highly homogeneous society, group conscious culture, economic and industrial development, and strict weapons ownership control. In other words, the police box system has been able to contribute to the safety of Japan because it already had favorable conditions for maintaining public security._

That's why it wouldn't work in the US.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/16/us/latest-japanese- import-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/16/us/latest-japanese-import-goes- on-patrol.html) [2] [https://www.npa.go.jp/english/seisaku1/JapaneseCommunityPoli...](https://www.npa.go.jp/english/seisaku1/JapaneseCommunityPolice.pdf)</comment>


A Mess is not a Technical Debt - <AUTHOR> http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/09/22/a-mess-is-not-a-technical-debt <comment><USER2> Totally disagree.

A mess is definitely a technical debt. It's going to take time and money to clean it up. You can put it off more, but it's going to make everything cost more money and take more time than it should. Or you can clean it up now and save that time and money.

Debt is one way that companies get ahead when they are first starting out. Just like borrowing money, you can borrow time from the future as well. Instead of making an immaculate product, you make something that gets the job done and fix or rewrite it later.

And just like money debt, if you don't pay off your technical debt, it will be a real pain. And the longer you wait, the more expensive it is.

Seriously, the analogy is crazy good.

<comment><USER3> Ward Cunningham disagrees with your interpretation of his metaphor.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqeJFYwnkjE&t=4m18s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqeJFYwnkjE&t=4m18s)

He explains that technical debt is code written before you have a complete understanding of the problem to solve. You repay the debt by refactoring it when you have a better understanding. This only works if the code is clean enough to be refactored.

<comment><USER4> Why can't you repay the debt by just rewriting the code instead of refactoring it?

I once paid off a technical debt incurred by a previous programmer who had done a code and dash of epic proportions. The code was utterly horrendous, and so many changes had been done in-place, right on the production server, with hard coded paths, that we had to rewrite it bit by bit. We didn't even know all the _functionality_ in it, other than that it was in active use (we found and interviewed people to get a full sense of what it did). It took years, but we did pay it off.

<comment><USER5> One of the "refactorings" in Fowler is "change algorithm", which I think is a bit of a cheat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A mess very definitely is technical debt. True, as opposed to the "clean" debt that Uncle Bob's advocating, it's a bit like getting expensive cash advances on a credit card or going to a loan shark. A mess is likely to be a lot harder to discharge than the technical debt that comes from careful well-crafted decisions; the approaches you need to take may be different; and there's an increased chance that you won't be able to get out from the burden of debt. But it seems to me that all of those points fit in very nicely with the general analogy of debt, and I'm not sure why Uncle Bob thinks otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree conceptually, though I happen to map different semantics onto the same concepts.

let's coin a term, "muju". What the author describes as technical debt is good muju, and a "mess" is bad muju.

I believe in the same good muju / bad muju concepts. The only difference is that I use the term "technical debt" to refer to both of them. While the author only uses technical debt as a non-pejorative term, I use it as both a pejorative and non-pejorative term.

For me, the analogy of debt still works -- its all a matter of how responsible you spend the money. Take a home equity loan as an example. Spending it on renovating the bathroom and kitchen is (at least historically) likely to be a positive ROI. That's good muju (the author would say "technical debt", I would say "good technical debt"). Spending it on a new sports car would be bad muju (the author would say "a mess", I would say "bad technical debt").

</comment><comment><USER8> What he's calling "a mess" certainly is debt.

In money, debt is debt, whether you acquired it by taking out a responsible mortgage or running up your credit card on bottles of Dom Perignon to impress your friends. In software, technical debt is technical debt whether it was wise or not. The point is, you're paying for it when you try to do other work on the project (interest) and it's gonna take time to fix (principle).

Saying "A mess is not technical debt" is silly. The metaphor is useful whether it was a good idea to get into debt or not.

Edit: s/Don/Dom/ -- thanks for the pointer!

<comment><USER9> Totally tangentially to the post I just confirmed that it is called Dom Perignon and in doing so I learned that they have a massive technical debt with their website. Or maybe the requirements were in the line of, build us the slowest flash website imaginable and can you create a loading graphic that looks like a rendering issue?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm throwing up my hands and giving up on this metaphor. It was a nice try, but from what I can see, the heat-to-light ratio is way out of whack. Every discussion of "technical debt" either gets bogged down in definitional issues ("is there a difference between debt and a mess?", "Is it debt if it was planned but not if it kind of happened by accident?") or it gets bogged down in overextension as people try to figure out the metaphorical equivalent of "interest" or "refinancing" or "bankruptcy". As if any of these concepts necessarily applied.

I think I'll just go back to the plain words. There is good code, bad code, and ugly code. There is flexible code, and brittle code. There are planned short-term jury-rigs, unplanned baked-in design mistakes, and fragile temporary solutions that never get fixed because the company pivots before it matters.

<comment><USER11> I think the metaphor is mostly lost on people who have never taken a business loan. Generally banks don't like lending money to companies purely to cover normal operational expenses. If you simply have cash-flow issues then a line of credit/overdraft is better. If you can't meet your costs out of income, then you want to either reduce costs or find an additional equity injection, not take a loan. Traditionally loans are for things that will grow the business, with a clear path to being able to repay it out of the additional income generated as a result. Obvious examples are buying expensive new equipment to let you produce something you sell at a greatly reduced cost, or opening new retail outlets.

The business world has a fairly well developed set of nuances around whether the debt a company has is good debt or bad debt. AIUI Ward's original point was simply that the "all debt is bad" approach doesn't work in business, and shouldn't be applied in so blunt a manner to technology either. Sometimes it's worth going into some debt now to achieve a future benefit. But, a business should be just as careful with its technical debt as its financial debt: only going taking it on with a clear (and well measured) path out again.

But, as you say, like pretty much any metaphor, stretch it too far, and it falls apart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like this distinction. I think a lot of people hear about technical debt and then feel OK about writing shitty code. But in reality, taking on technical debt is a calculated engineering risk, not sloppy work that "a mess" is.

With that in mind, I've never seen a codebase with any technical debt.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think some people are getting retentive about applying the "debt" metaphor.

Uncle Bob is simply trying to draw a operational distinction between technical debt that is accrued deliberately and technical debt that is accrued out of sloppiness.

That later is a transgression that is definitely a mistake and should be avoided, the former is a calculated risk that is a part of this business. It doesn't matter what you call them as long as you recognize the difference between these two conditions and what they mean.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps Uncle Bob ought use a metaphor that applies better, in that case. I don't think the fault is in the reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Or you could just launch. This technical debt thing has to be the silliest meme ever.

I mean yes, presumably since I haven't saved enough for retirement yet, I have "retirement debt". As long as you live, you always have some kind of debt because you could use your future time to earn more money (or create cleaner code or whatever). So I suppose you owe yourself your future self.

It is debt in the widest sense - but not a useful concept. Obviously you have to do in the future what you can't do today.

Technical debt is merely a chimera created by consultants who want to justify their high costs.

Another illustration: if I build a tent to spend the night, have I accrued technical debt because I owe myself a proper house? _shakes head_

<comment><USER16> I'm far from an expert, but from what I can tell the debt occurs because you'll have to "pay" it to move on.

To use your tent illustration, there's no debt because you don't plan to grow the tent into a proper house - the product is finished.

Now, if you actually wanted to build a two story house, but built a tent instead for now because summer's already here, you'll then have to "pay the debt" of dismounting the tent so you can rebuild the house properly.

<comment><USER15> Sure, but I think you could almost always make the case that whatever you do, you have incurred "technical debt". Otherwise you would make perfect decisions all the time, which is impossible.

Another danger with the technical debt thing is that it could lead to expensive premature optimization. For example while you are camping out in your tent, maybe you get a job offer in another city. Or a motorway is about to be built across your lawn. Had you needlessly started with heavy foundations of your house, that effort had been wasted.

Who benefits from the TD theory is the builders of the house foundations. Or the consultants who want you to use Java Enterprise Beans instead of Sinatra.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You may choose not to call it technical debt, but you have to call it something, and it seems very much a debt to me. The term you use to describe it doesn't get to cast judgement as to the merits of the debt. The debt may be inherited debt from an acquisition, for example. Any judgement you would choose to cast regarding the debt's merits does not necessarily reflect on the current holder of that debt, but the debt is just as real. If I buy your company and you have debt on your books from stupid decisions that did nothing to advance your company, it's still debt that I now owe.

If it causes inefficiencies that could have been avoided, it's technical debt, regardless of the cause.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's another way to look at it. Technical debt is real when you see it first when looking forward, before it's realized. Technical debt is bogus when you see it first when looking backwards, after it's 'realized.' Like real debt, it doesn't just 'appear' without a conscious decision to incur it.

For example, a system was built crappily, and you refer to it later on as incurred technical debt. _bzzt_ wrong, if you didn't call it technical debt when the system was being built, it probably was just a mess and now you're calling it technical debt to hide the crappiness.

<comment><USER19> > For example, a system was built crappily, and you refer to it later on as > incurred technical debt.

But, a crappy mess will _become_ a technical debt the moment you recognize it and make a business decision not to spend time on fixing it right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The way I define technical debt is something that risks wasting someone's time. If you decide to make a change quickly to get something working and create a mess in the process, then it's possible that that mess will waste someone's time when it comes to making other changes. Note this is separate from a mess that can cause bugs. For example a significant lack of unit tests I would classify as a business or data risk - anything that risks losing customers should be given higher priority than technical debt.

</comment><comment><USER21> "When you buy a house and take on a big mortgage debt, you tighten up all your spending and accounting."

No, actually it's the exact opposite, both in the short term, and in the long term.

Short-term vs. existing homeowners: [http://www.nahb.org/generic.aspx?sectionID=734&genericCo...](http://www.nahb.org/generic.aspx?sectionID=734&genericContentID=106491&channelID=311)

Long-term vs. non home-owners: [http://www.philadelphiafed.org/research-and- data/publication...](http://www.philadelphiafed.org/research-and- data/publications/business-review/2010/q3/brq310_benefits-and-costs-of- homeownership.pdf)

More: [http://econ.jhu.edu/people/ccarroll/papers/COS- WealthEffects...](http://econ.jhu.edu/people/ccarroll/papers/COS- WealthEffects-Literature/Papers/Engelhardt.pdf)

There is a lot more info out there about this, but the economics of it are pretty simple. The fact that the author can't even get this right makes me question any other assertations made in the article.

</comment><comment><USER22> The author is unfortunately conflating two (albeit related) arguments.

1\. There is a difference between a bad decision and a trade-off that you will (probably) have to re-visit in the future.

2\. Writing messy code is a bad decision.

Irregardless of whether you think point two has merit, point one is the the soul of the article.</comment>


Show HN: ZenMail – Hey for Gmail (an email screener) - <AUTHOR> https://zenmail.shapea.com/ <comment><USER2> This is exactly why Hey was never a good business model. It's something that someone could do for free, with much less overhead. Did I mention it could be done for free? I guess you get a fancy @hey domain but... I mean that's hardly a selling point.

Regardless, this is a really cool project that further drives the point home. Props @sandipagr for a slick looking extension.

Me personally, I've just committed to ~5-10 minutes every week actually unsubscribing / marking spam every single email that doesn't belong and creating filters for the rest so they're neatly organized.

After literally 1 month of this commitment, I had a completely clean, inbox 0 about 90% of the time. Today every single email (with very few exceptions) that comes into my inbox is something I care about, or quickly ends up unsubscribed and I never see it again. Maintaining inbox 0 takes about 5 minutes / week.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for leaving feedback and the kind words.

I personally think Hey does have lot of neat ideas that they deserve credit for. Email management takes decent amount of effort in today's marketing/spam driven world. Gmail filters solve some of the issues but it's painful to create/update. It requires a strong discipline as you mentioned. This browser extension exists to simplify and make this a breeze.

As a business model, I think Hey will do fine -- as there are tons of people for whom 99$/year is a small sum to help ease this pain. With only 100K users, that's 10M ARR.

And congrats on setting up a clean Inbox!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I have been jamming on this new project and wanted to share it with you all. It's inspired by Hey (the new email service) and the idea is to bring some of the concepts directly on top of Gmail.

ZenMail works as a browser extension (Chrome and Firefox currently). The core idea behind ZenMail is the concept of Screener, a new place where all unknown emails go and where you get to decide not only if you want to receive emails from someone but if you do, where they should automatically go (e.g. Inbox, Feed, or PaperTrail) with just a single click.

Under the hood, it uses Gmail labels and filters to add all these functionality. The extension therefore needs access to few Gmail permissions. This of course is a privacy concern. However, ZenMail is 100% local to your browser (except using Gmail APIs). I do not send or collect any information (also verified by Google's Gmail API access process).

On roadmap is to add screening to any of your existing labels (available next week). I want to also add some sort of attachments viewer, contact page, email bundling, private notes and so on.

I would love it if you could try it out and share what you think of it. I would also love any ideas you have on how ZenMail could be more useful to you.

[Chrome] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zenmail/kbhafncken...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/zenmail/kbhafnckenhchoejjiebccaehcnphgja)

[Firefox] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/zenmail/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/zenmail/)

Pro-tip: When you install the extension and go to Screener, you will see it's empty at the beginning as only new emails from now onwards will arrive here. As a one time action and to start setting rules, I highly recommend moving some of your emails (or all) from your Inbox to Screener (Gmail's Move to)</comment>


Show HN: Profiling Your AWS Lambda Functions with Python - <AUTHOR> https://read.iopipe.com/a-tale-of-two-fibonacci-lambda-functions-6d4504d0b0ae <comment><AUTHOR> More on Python profiling: [https://github.com/iopipe/iopipe-python#profiler- plugin](https://github.com/iopipe/iopipe-python#profiler-plugin)

Node.js profiling: [https://github.com/iopipe/iopipe-js- profiler](https://github.com/iopipe/iopipe-js-profiler)

Java profiling: [https://github.com/iopipe/iopipe- java/blob/master/PROFILER.m...](https://github.com/iopipe/iopipe- java/blob/master/PROFILER.md)</comment>


A stackoverflow clone for User eXperience  - <AUTHOR> http://uxexchange.com/

<comment><USER2> Vote me down if you like, but while I do agree that there are tons of clones - I actually find value in some of the niche sites - that bring the same UX that I am accustomed to, to a community that is knowledgeable about a niche I am interested in.

There will likely be many of these sites going out of business indeed, however the good ones will last. I really like the answers.onstartups.com version, and there are a few other good ones.

Would be nice if people could customize the interface a lot more though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yet another stack exchange site.

Sorry if I seem negative, but I find it hard to get excited about these by now.

<comment><USER4> don't worry they'll all die off soon. Once they get out of beta, not many people will be willing to pay $129/mo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really dislike the stackoverflow user experience :/

<comment><USER6> Ya, but compared to what? I have _many_ issues with it, but overall, it is excellent, and I think it will get much better over time. If you listen to the SO podcasts, Jeff is extremely focused on user experience. For a site that was built in such a short period of time, with so few developers, and had to support the load it does, I think they've done just fine.

I will say though, that the interface for stackexchange users is sorely lacking....there are really very few ways to customize your site. To be fair, selling this as a service was an afterthought, but some crucial things (pre- defining tags, for example) are still not available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a stack exchange site for spelling? ("experiance"!?)

<comment><USER8> The title alone is enough to dissuade me from visiting. That particular kind of misspelling is often a symptom of carelessness or ignorance.</comment></comment>


Pragmatic Functional Programming - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/07/11/PragmaticFunctionalProgramming.html <comment><USER2> Pretty disappointing article. All the arguments are pretty weak. For example, the article argues that FP is necessary going forward because immutable data helps avoid race conditions. However, immutable data does not make a programming language functional. I could just use Rust, which (although it incorporates functional constructs) is still clearly imperative, and avoid race conditions through its particular implementation of immutable data structures.

The most upsetting part is when the author brags about how Clojure programs can manipulate itself at run-time, on a website that's literally called "Clean Coder Blog". Self-modifying code is a clear opposite of clean code. Also:

> Maybe we don't have to worry about chips with 32,768 cores on them.

Author apparently has never written a GPGPU program.

<comment><USER3> I have another gripe with these kinds of immutability / FP praising articles: The assumption that this must be faster, because multicore. As an example, many if not most of scientific applications (for which Haskell wants to position itself) are memory bandwidth bounded, not CPU bounded. These applications also deal with Gigabytes of data for each timestep, applied over dozens if not hundreds of kernels. So we're talking about thousands to tens of thousands of functional updates over data objects, each on the order of Gygabytes. The way this is dealth with efficiently in many cases is by doing pointer swapping - after each timestep, or even for intermediate kernels, the old output becomes the new input and the old input is overwritten by the new output. Swapping allows this to be an O(1) operation. Allocating new memory at each kernel launch for the output would absolutely kill the performance - we're talking one to two orders of magnitude here. Even if an FP compiler comes along that is able to optimize this, if this ever breaks I have zero trust that it will be a simple thing to figure out why the compiler doesn't do what I wanted, and at that point I'd rather just program it procedurally. To my knowledge, game programming is pretty much the same thing, so these usecases are rather wide spread.

I think there must be a (probably not yet invented) language somewhere that would allow me to write computations in immutable FP style, either as pointwise operations (i.e. stencils), or as matrix operations, _but_ allows me to pass in some information that directly instructs the backend what it should do with the memory. I.e. I want to be able to program my own memory pools and link pointers to memory slots needed for the computations. Maybe that part could even be done using visual programming, akin to linking up GUI elements to properties in XCode: Let the compiler figure out where a memory slot is needed, do a dependency analysis for the memory slots and show graphically what slots are linked to what input and output. Then, let me add constraints to that linking and recompute a new solution whenever I move something around. The next step would be to do a performance model for each processor and figure out the best solution using machine learning, _but_ let me actually see what the solution is without me having to go look at assembly (which, frankly, for FP frontends seems near impossible since it has even less to do with the frontend code than if you compile down something like C or Fortran).

<comment><USER4> Exactly. I've actually been giving this a fair amount of thought, as it also relates to "GC for everything", another obstacle for real time programming (soft or hard). I like many things about the FP approach, especially in terms of reasoning about the code. I just think the computer science community needs to focus on basically what you're advocating, immutable recycling alongside of garbage collection.

It seems to me that this is a fairly easy problem really, and things should move to more of a mixed memory handling model, where one could use one or more of manual memory management, recycling, or GC as needed. FP language scala- native is providing both manual management and GC already, for instance...

<comment><USER3> Thank you. Yes, well, from the CS people I usually just get blank stares. "What did you say, you prefer _Fortran_ "? I feel like there's a big divide between engineering and CS. The latter would rather never care about anything to do with hardware. IMO the real innovation usually comes at the intersection of hardware and software - like the recent boom of neural nets. Those things are known since the 80ies and then promptly dropped because the hardware wasn't ready, until someone 30 years later took the time to make a good CUDA library and make it work fast enough to be useable. Meanwhile the CS community focuses on adding more abstractions until no-one can figure out the hardware implementation anymore. Sorry for the grumpyness, guess my mood isn't the best today...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The speed of light limit had been reached. Signals could not propagate across the surface of the chip fast enough to allow higher speeds."

Sorry, this is blatantly wrong. The 'wires are too long' problem was solved a couple of decades ago by adding pipeline stages.

Processors can easily get faster, today, by increasing the clock speed. Problem is, the generated heat fries them. Heat is a function of voltage and frequency. You can only lower voltage so much before switching states becomes unreliable. After that the only option is to lower frequency.

<comment><USER6> I am not an expert, but I heard differently. IBM z13 CPU had to decrease the frequency compared to its predecessor, because they had a rule that the CPU should be able to operate on contents of L1 cache in one cycle, and they decided to expand L1 cache a bit. So I think "wires are too long" problem is alive and well when it comes to L1 cache size.

<comment><USER7> Of course, long circuit lines will limit further increase in clock frequency. But in practice, heat is the lower bound. In CMOS, heat arises from charge dissipation, or voltage times clock frequency. Unless we can switch to transistor fabric that does NOT dump charge with every state change, heat will remain the dominant problem for future CPU speedup.

Despite what some claim, multicore is no solution to speedup. Coarse or fine grain parallelism is useful only when data parallelism is possible, which applies to less than 5% of today's software (graphics, speech, deep learning, et al). Functional programming may free code from explicitly addressing variables, but FP's implicit addressing does not magically eliminate sequential dependencies.

The vast majority of processes in mainstream software are inherently sequential. Simply implementing them in an FP won't make them parallel, so adding threads won't increase speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Now you know 95% of Lisp, and you know 90% of Clojure. That silly little > parentheses syntax really is just about all the syntax there is to these > languages.

And yet I still can't do anything useful with them. A language isn't just the syntax, it's also all of the functions that are defined by default.

</comment><comment><USER9> FP is going to kill it when compilers catch up to utilize new SIMD instructions.

I think we are going to see more per core "L0" caches and less reliance on the shared "L1" cache. With that many caches to juggle you want a strongly typed compiler doing it, not by hand.</comment>


Bitcoin: Are we looking at a revolution? - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/27/bitcoin-are-we-looking-at-a-revolution/ <comment><USER2> Was hesitant when I clicked on this article because of what "revolution" the author could be reffering to. Luckily he seems to realize that Bitcoin is an excellent accounting system rather than some miracle way of opting out of the financial system as a whole. Not to discredit other motives for using Bitcoin, but this article seems to be one of the more realistic evaluations of the currency's potential in my opinion.</comment>


Soviet Defector Yuri Bezmenov Explains Ideological Subversion - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdDmeyMJls <comment><USER2> The future of warfare is ideological. Since the presence of nukes prevents a large scale hot war due to MAD, the only alternative is to hope that your opponent defeats themselves.

This can only happen through the spread of 'bad' ideas that lead to action.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think everyone should watch this as it really is reflected in what's occurring today.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are some interesting points in there but also a lot of BS.

I mean for one how can you trust him not practicing subversion himself.

It feels like he is proposing a state that is concretely tied down to whatever current stable that state is in and staying there forever.

Any change can be considered a foreign subversive action.

Another point of criticism is that is USSR taught those lessons to its people then how come they literally fell into that trap, resulting in break up of USSR.</comment>


Growth marketing book free for accelerator & seed stage startup founders - <AUTHOR>

Anthony W. Richardson here, author of Full-Scale: How to Grow Any Startup Without a Plan or a Clue. We're giving away 10,000 copies of my book to any accelerator, incubator or seed stage founder / marketing employee that signs up with their startup's email address before it releases on November 18th. No spam, no b.s..
Details here: http://fullscale.launchrock.com/
Additionally, feel free to use this thread to ask any questions I may be able to answer about... anything. My day job: VCs assign me to tech startup companies that they've recently funded in order to ensure that they're spending their growth capital in the most efficient way possible. <comment><USER2> Bad Link... What do you think Launchrock?

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed, thanks.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Analytics Academy - <AUTHOR> https://segment.io/academy

<comment><USER2> I've been looking to compile a list of non-coding resources that are AS important as learning to code for founders. Essentially, things for non- technical co-founders to master before they start the process of learning to code.

See, you're a non-technical co-founder with a technical co-founder, learning to code can really help your business. But what's better is to first master everything BUT coding that can actually have a huge impact on the early development of the business, to take that 100% off the technical co-founders plate.

This belongs on that list (I hope)

</comment><comment><USER3> You people really need to distinguish between web analytics and plain-old analytics.

</comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't have been more timelier for myself (and company)! Thanks for the share.</comment>


Beyond Biohazard: Why Danger Symbols Can't Last Forever - <AUTHOR> https://99percentinvisible.org/article/beyond-biohazard-danger-symbols-cant-last-forever/ <comment><USER3> I've always thought the concern of future generations finding a radioactive waste disposal site is overblown and is one of the weaker arguments advanced by the anti-nuclear movement.

If civilization remains on an upward trajectory of technological development, or even stays flat, we will continue to understand the risks of radioactive waste. We won't go poking through waste disposal sites for no good reason. Barring a major collapse, we are unlikely to forget about them, either - <USER2> will either reprocess the waste down the road when breeder tech catches up, or we'll continue to make risk-appropriate investments in maintaining the perimeter fence and keeping the sites secure. Now, one could argue that 10 millennia of site maintenance is an expensive endeavor to foist upon our descendants, but that's a different discussion.

The only scenario where we forget about these sites and the dangers of them is some hypothetical future collapse of civilization, where records are gone and the survivors have regressed to a pre-industrial understanding of the world.

If you're an optimist, you don't expect that scenario to happen. But suppose it could - doesn't it make more sense to invest in carbon-neutral power technology like nuclear and maybe help stave off a potential collapse, rather than worry about a small number of the survivors dying of radiation sickness?

<comment><USER4> > _We won 't go poking through waste disposal sites for no good reason_

We don't need a global collapse to make disposal sites problematic. Imagine the total dissolution--think post-Ghadaffi Libya or Iraq and Syria at the height of ISIL's power--of a state containing nuclear waste. Keeping nearby civilians, who could have forgotten or never known of the hazard, from harm seems like a good enough reason to give this some thought. (I agree with your general sentiment, however.)

<comment><USER5> > Imagine the total dissolution

Even that doesn't have to happen: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident)

<comment><USER6> Perhaps more relevant are the accidents in Tamiku (Estonia), and Lia Lilo (Georgia), that followed shortly after the dissolution of the USSR and involve the inappropriate handling or complete abandonment of radioactive sources:

[1] [http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/IAEABooks/4738/The- Radiologica...](http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/IAEABooks/4738/The-Radiological- Accident-in-Tammiku)

[2] [http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/IAEAbooks/10602/The- Radiologic...](http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/IAEAbooks/10602/The-Radiological- Accident-in-Lia-Georgia)

[3] [http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/IAEABooks/5968/The- Radiologica...](http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/IAEABooks/5968/The-Radiological- Accident-in-Lilo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of a striking example during our UI design class, which eventually led me to conclude that there is no intuitive design of anything, unless you can make specific assumptions about the users.

You have a steering wheel, and turn it to the right. What direction do you turn? It's such a simple question. And if you're used to a car, or a bike, it's so easy to answer. Turn right, go right. Well except every captain with his boat will tell you they will go left.

And there are so many examples of this if you look at them. Our monitoring has a lot of graphs, but why would a rising or a falling graph be good? If it's latency, you want it low but not 0, because 0 would be weird. If it's available capacity, you want it high, but too high is right out as well, since it's a waste. In some cases, we need ports open because we kinda need to answer productive HTTP requests, in other cases, it would be rather silly to expose elasticsearch to the internet.

Intuition and intuitive meaning is such a hard thing.

<comment><USER8> And then there's motorcycles, where the direction you'll turn will change depending on how fast you're going. :)

At very low speeds, a motorcycle behaves like a bicycle. Turn the handlebar right, go right.*

However, once you get up to normal vehicle speeds, it reverses and countersteering takes over. Turn the handlebar right, go left.*

It's one of the things they spend a lot of time drilling into your head if you take a motorcycle safety class, because a lot of folks get it wrong or incorrectly think that you turn by leaning. It's a UI problem that can very easily get you hurt -- but I'm not sure how you'd make it any more intuitive.

(*: Technically, countersteering is still in play at low speeds, even on a bicycle... but it's very subtle and most folks don't notice it, because you quickly correct the other way to re-balance the bike.)

<comment><USER9> > It's one of the things they spend a lot of time drilling into your head

Which is why most training for practical things is pretty bad. You can't shove physical skills into student's heads. Tell them once or twice, then create a drill where they get to learn it themselves.

In this case, I would have the student do low speed turns from straight. Ideally on a bicycle.

<comment><USER10> Also I find a lot of instructors are bad at physics, especially in skiing. 'Copy me' tends to work better than trying to follow a somewhat off explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This whole time I thought the biohazard symbol was supposed to be abstractly evocative of a microscope with three lenses, seen as if you were looking up from the slide/stage. Indicating, I supposed, something dangerous that you need a microscope to see. I thought "Hey that's a cool way to convey that idea graphically."

Well, come to find out they were trying to have it not refer to anything. So it becomes just another example of how we (well, I) love to find meaning where there is none.

Examples, none of which is from the right angle:

[http://www.scienceprofonline.com/images/science-image- librar...](http://www.scienceprofonline.com/images/science-image- library/microbiology/equipment/microscope-40x-objective-SIL.jpg)

[https://abm-website-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pharmpro.com/s3f...](https://abm- website-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/pharmpro.com/s3fs- public/featured_image/2016/04/Lens-of-microscope.jpg)

[https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/232/512560597_fa29e4d5a4.jpg](https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/232/512560597_fa29e4d5a4.jpg)

This one's closer to the angle but has four lenses:

[https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/detail- microscope-3429613.jp...](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/detail- microscope-3429613.jpg)

<comment><USER12> I always thought it was deliberately designed to invoke beetle pincers, or bug jaws.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, spiky evokes sharp and maybe poisonous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Linguist Thomas Sebeok, for instance, proposed creating an atomic > priesthood, where an exclusive political group would use its own rituals and > myths to preserve knowledge of radioactive areas, like a church.

Minor spoiler alert: this is a side element in the wonderful novel "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson.

<comment><USER15> Not sure a spoiler alert serves any purpose if I have no idea what work is being spoiled until I read it.

<comment><USER14> good point!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't lick Mr. Yuk!

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

Don't touch Mr. Ouch!

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

<comment><USER17> From the link

 _At least two peer-reviewed medical studies (Fergusson 1982, Vernberg 1984) have suggested that Mr. Yuk stickers do not effectively keep children away from potential poisons and may even attract children._

<comment><USER16> You're just not putting enough stickers on your children. It takes several layers to safely seal their mouths from poison and fully insulate them from shock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Even now, the power the biohazard symbol once had to inspire awe and fear > has begun to diminish. Today, it appears on everyday clothing and products, > slowly becoming more ordinary than extraordinary.

This always annoys me, though it's a form of linguistic change. The worst example of this, IMHO, is the stickers and accessories you can get for guns to make them look like children's toys (e.g. red cap on the end) -- specifically subverting something designed to make children safe. I do think people who do this have a first amendment legal _right_ to do so, but just because you're allowed to do something doesn't mean it's a good idea (there's no law to prevent me from drinking bleach if I want to, but that doesn't make it a good idea).

<comment><USER18> Disguising a real gun as a toy sounds very similar to the famous example of unprotected speech of falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater. First, it is a type of falsehood. Second, it is likely to cause real harm. I would be surprised if disguising guns would be viewed as constitutionally protected speech.

<comment><USER19> Popehat wants you to stop saying "fire in a crowded theater".

[https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a- ha...](https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackneyed- apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article references someone worrying about the problem of marking future radioactive waste dumps, but doesn't mention how real ones are marked. Here's a real one.[1]

That's the marker at the SL-1 reactor burial site in Idaho, from 1962. It's a stone slab, etched with a "no pedestrians" road sign symbol, a radiation trefoil, and a bottle with a skull and crossbones. Already it looks dated.

[1] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/SL-1Buri...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/SL-1Burial.jpg)

<comment><USER21> I think the skull and bones will be a good symbol for millions of years, unless evolution takes a really weird turn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think their Jolly Rodger example is a poor one. It didn't mean "danger", it meant "pirates". It still means that, it's merely our belief about whether pirates are dangerous which has changed.

I suspect if you are in the water off e.g. Somalia you'd feel very different about a ship flying the Jolly Rodger than if you're on a Disney cruise...

<comment><USER23> I was skeptical. But there is also a difference between coming across people flying the flag and a desolate place marked with the symbol. In both cases, the symbol means pirates, but in the first case pirates mean danger and in the second case pirates mean abandoned treasure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thinking 2D for lasting symbology its not smart; the best symbol for danger will always be realistic corpses sculptures (at least for as long humans exist); If you see a corpse down your path, then later on see 2, then see 3, a few neurons is enough to realize you may become the next one if you keep walking that path.

<comment><USER24> Of course, physical deterrents are much better than psychological deterrents, so if you gonna make an underground deposit of radioactive materials you better surround it with (non-lethal) spikes, so at least whoever opens it has to be really smart to be able to do so.

<comment><USER25> A physical deterrent often means "Valuables within."

<comment><USER24> If they are motivated enough to bypass it they are probably motivated enough to ignore any symbol even if they understand 100% what it means ("oh they put a radiation symbol here? I don't believe it, its just scaremongering, this cave must be hiding a treasure")

<comment><USER25> So an alternative might be to try to hide the danger, rather than announce it. Bury the waste as deep as possible in an area with few natural resources, and then restore the site to a natural state. This carries other risks, of course...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It would seem like the likeliest scenario for a future dark age is neighboring towns (or tribes, I suppose) tell tales about how everyone who goes into area X eventually dies not long after.

Every few generations some brave, ballsy kid shrugs off these old wives tales, goes and camps out in area X, and gets ill and dies not long after. The legends endure... at some cost.

Of course, it depends how strong the radioactivity/toxicity is. If it leads to cancer 30 years down the road, and no immediate signs, then it gets a lot messier.

<comment><USER4> > _how everyone who goes into area X eventually dies not long after_

Nuclear waste generally isn't this scary. Exposure causes death years, maybe even decades, afterwards. Enough time for cause and effect to get muddied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Too bad that symbol has recently come to mean "contains a multitude of fidget spinners"

</comment><comment><USER6> Radiological accidents caused by people picking up radioactive sources, because they had no idea what they were, are a bit of a hobby of mine (and in general radiological accidents).

The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) is normally called to help local authorities deal with such accidents and of course the first thing they do afterwards is compile a report. Unfortunately they don't have those reports in one place- you have to trawl through their site and their yearly publications to find it.

So I've taken the liberty to put all the reports I could find on my server, here:

[http://www.goblinopera.com/iaea_reports/](http://www.goblinopera.com/iaea_reports/)

These include the most well-publicised cases, like Goiânia, but also more obscure ones, including my favourite ones, the three accidents in irradiation facilities in San Salvador (El Salvador), Nesvizh (Belarus) and near Soreq (Isral).

Apologies that these are just on my (rented) server- I understand people might consider it a non-trusted source. I'll try uploading the lot on github if enough people are interested.

Btw, the IAEA copyright gives premission for copies to be made and distributed over web pages:

[http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/rights-and-permissions](http://www- pub.iaea.org/books/rights-and-permissions)

</comment><comment><USER28> I thought the article too quickly dismissed the skull-and-crossbones. Sure, it has been trivialized, but if you came across a door with a skull-based symbol on it, I would guess you would give that more thought than an abstract shape that you did not recognize, and words in a language you do not know. My guess is that skulls and skeletons will hold up better as warnings than abstract shapes, in which case the desire for a meaningless and abstract shape was counter-productive.

Similarly, the symmetry criterion strikes me as unnecessary, as people are good at recognizing shapes regardless of orientation, especially when the shapes are figurative.

On the other hand (literally), the corrosive substance symbols (not shown in this article - [1]) are figurative, asymmetric and, IMHO, pretty clear.

The one other figurative symbol in this collection is the postal one with a snake, but it could be mistaken for a caduceus as long as that symbol is known. There is also the possibility that we might drive snakes to extinction.

There is a need for distinct symbols for different types of danger, but perhaps they should all include a skulls-or-skeleton generic danger motif.

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

</comment><comment><USER29> That's partially why I like the idea (if not the implementation, apparently) of Mr. Yuck and his friend that I just learned about, Mr. Ouch [0]. To me, it looks like he gets the point across pretty well-- come near here and die. There's no need for left-to-right reading and the cause and effect are in one clear image.

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

<comment><USER30> The semiology of such a graphic, Mr. Ouch symbol, may be adequate, but its utility and practicality is severely lacking. Imagine if you were to put instructions together to be able to reproduce Mr. Ouch; or, imagine if you were a construction worker trying to follow instructions to mark this logo on a hazardous surface -- Simplicity and reproducibility are the hallmarks of an optimal graphic symbol. Mr. Ouch fails at this. Furthermore, rather subjectively, Mr. Ouch does not convey sophistication nor a professional aesthetic -- it looks like someone made this up using Clipart, and it does not convey a sense of seriousness and an authoritative tone.

<comment><USER31> > Simplicity and reproducibility are the hallmarks of an optimal graphic > symbol.

The primary goal is to communicate something. Simplicity and reproducibility are always secondary to this - and it's difficult to have something simple and reproducible that clearly communicates danger.

<comment><USER30> There are lots of options to communicate clearly. To be able to communicate clear _and_ have simplicity/reproducibility is what makes a good graphic symbol.

Further reading: [https://books.google.com/books/about/Semiology.html?id=kZXCQ...](https://books.google.com/books/about/Semiology.html?id=kZXCQgAACAAJ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder why we didn't go for stronger legal protection for these symbols? Water bottles with the biohazard logo on them and other gratuitous uses reduce how much caution it induces and diminish its value as a symbol.

</comment><comment><USER33> There is a 2010 documentary called "Into Eternity" about building an underground nuclear storage facility in Finland. It also covers the problem of how to warn people very far into the future.

<comment><USER34> Is it not sufficient to blow up the access tunnels, such that any civilisation capable of digging it up will can be presumed to have the technology to detect radioactivity? This presumes a stable geology and no asteroid impacts.

<comment><USER33> If I remember right, the plan was to fill the tunnels with concrete when the facility is full. I think drilling is a lot simpler than detecting radioactivity though. The most plausible scenario is that a future civilization tries to drill in the area and brings a bunch of waste up to the surface inadvertently.

<comment><USER34> If wonder if when our civilisation digs (deep holes), do we test for radioactivity?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> At my last job they were constantly asking me to create symbols to represent abstract concepts. They wanted them to be instantly, universally recognizable at 24 pixels by 24 pixels with no text.

This is sometimes easy, often impossible. I ended up finding a simple rule of thumb to cut through that work quickly, if I couldn't think of one clear symbol for the concept in 10 seconds then I would never find one that fit all the requirements.

I passed that rule on to my project manager and he got a lot better at not making impossible symbol requests.

</comment><comment><USER36> The comic that's suppose to demonstrate the meaning of the radioactive symbol.. I viewed it as a story about how symbols lose their meaning: guy finds box with weird symbol on it, makes a t-shirt with the symbol on it, walks off to lay around in the grass taking a nap, the symbol now some random thing sold on t-shirts. Like the three-armed-spiral icon that represents some part of a turn table my father has a shirt of. Most don't know what the is shirt of

</comment><comment><USER37> The article begins by saying the jolly roger has lost it's original meaning.

I doubt the author would be very successful getting people to interact with an unknown substance of unknown origin if it's in an old unfamiliar container with a skull and some text in an unknown language on it.</comment>


Decline of '60 Minutes' Continues With This Week's NSA Whitewash - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenation.com/blog/177598/sad-decline-60-minutes-continues-weeks-nsa-whitewash <comment><USER2> I am really glad people (or at least some) saw right through them.

I caught only like 10 minutes of it, but one of the NSA official was talking about how they discovered a state sponsored malware that could infect your BIOS and brick your computer. I was like, wait, what? So you spy on our phone and internet communication so you can protect us from computer viruses?

But if you were to view that as a lay person, what the NSA official said about cyber attacks must have sounded really damn scary. After hearing something like that, most people would accept that the NSA's actions are justifiable.

<comment><USER3> IMO we're past the point of the layperson being so technically hopeless they'd swallow this whole. I grant the numbers are still out there, but I think the people convinced/reassured/calmed by this kind of PR are that way because they genuinely think it's worth it. Maybe even a "better the devil you know" scenario?; it's worth "our guys" having their hands on all of this power, with its potential for abuse, than the "other guys".

What I don't get is why, if you're the NSA, would you go through the PR effort for people already on "your side"; you're not going to sway a large swath of the population and there surely can't be that many fence sitters on this issue.

<comment><USER4> A college friend of mine that works in DC defended the NSA in a FB comment by saying, "we sort of knew all along they were doing this anyway." So, because they haven't done anything bad that we know of they should continue the course. This is a college educated, engineer grad defending NSA practices. I feel the layperson knows this is wrong but feels mentally, outgunned by all the smart people telling them they are right in doing this.

<comment><USER5> > "we sort of knew all along they were doing this anyway."

In the wake of the original leaks, reading this particular snippet on FB posted by otherwise intelligent friends was one of my ultimate pet peeves.

It neatly encapsulates both self-affirmation ("oh _I_ totally knew this was going on, because I'm wicked smaht") and a shocking degree of complacency.

<comment><USER6> .. Or just disgust at the complacency pre-Snowden and continuing adoption of broken technologies stemming from lack of critical forethought. The centralized data silos of web 2.0 were and are never not going to be used against you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think its good to remember that these people are professionals in disinformation and psyops. If we don't understand what they are attempting then it's more likely due to our lack of experience in the area rather then their incompetence.

One plausible explanation is it is an effort to give cover to friendly politicians during political campaigns. They can't just leave these people without a story. They need to supply them with something to counter all the negative news. The story doesn't have to be airtight. It just needs to be good enough for the majority of the population to remain accepting of the status quo.

As an example of another bit in this campaign I would point to the recent instances of politicians claiming that Snowden must have had help from the Chinese or Russians. No proof was given but he just had to have help because how else could he have done it.

It would be good to remember that the first goal of any organization is survival. There is no reason to think that the offensive capabilities of the NSA and the rest of the defense establishment aren't being used to protect themselves.

</comment><comment><USER8> CBS is really pumping up the PR for the NSA.

Recent episodes of NCIS have a NSA agent on loan to the NCIS staff. She's cute, smart, and quirky and does a great job protecting us all from the scary people.

Also, Hawaii 5.0, had a hack attack on an episode lately and they were all "Thank god we have the NSA to protect us". Ok, I forget the details on that one, but I remember rolling my eyes.

Now with 60 minutes jumping on board, it's plain to see there's a coordinated effort to spin the NSA in a good light. Not just a whitewash, the message is "The NSA spying on Americans is a good thing".

<comment><USER9> This is true. I wonder how much of it is just CBS pandering to its demographic rather than coordinated propaganda, though. The CBS audience skews old ([http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-06/from-cbs- adv...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-06/from-cbs-advertisers- get-the-older-viewers-they-want)), and _loves_ police procedurals, which as a genre unfailingly cheerlead for institutional authorities. (Think how many procedural plotlines turn on the Good Guy Cops lying to or physically threatening someone they've got in an interrogation room, for instance. This is always presented as the Good Guy Cops being smart and savvy, not as an abuse of power.)

So if you've got an audience that wants to be told that the authorities are always right, you could decide strictly for business reasons to just give them more of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> An easy bite for a real journalist would've been Alexander's statement in the opening segment that NSA does not collect data ("phone calls and emails") on Americans. He then goes on to detail all the safeguards (FISA courts, access controls) to prevent analysts from mis-using this actually-collected "uncollected" data.

A real journalist, which Miller isn't, would've been all over that. But if it hadn't been Miller, and it had a real journalist, there would've been no way NSA would've allowed CBS inside any part of the complex.

Later in the segment, it is mentioned we share all this data with our FIVE EYES partner countries, where presumably, they don't have safeguards regarding foreign nationals (eg. Americans). Another something a real journalist would've jumped all over.

Another little aside: Miller asked Ledgett (the Snwoden task force head and soon-to-be Deputy Director, NSA) how many times he's been interviewed by the media and he replied "One. Now.". He's been interviewed at least a few times before, most recently by the WSJ. A quick Google search pulled up this URL: [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230460710...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304607104579214673029584730)

</comment><comment><USER11> I am one of the few who remember a time when 60 Minutes actually did investigative journalism and not biased propaganda pieces for the likes of the NSA. Now you'll be hard-pressed to find any investigation in a 60 Minutes story, let alone the journalism part. Sad.

<comment><USER12> What should they have done differently? I think the sentiment here mainly is going to be any report from 60 Minutes that isn't 100% negative about everything the NSA is doing is not going to be good enough.

<comment><USER13> How about asking some hard questions instead of tossing softballs? For instance, why wasn't Keith Alexander confronted by the fact that he lied to Congress and the FISA courts? But no, that would have cut into their driveby on Snowden. Did you know that Edward Snowden kicks puppies? &c.

I watched the interview and it was a real puff piece. Last week, 60 Minutes doled out advertising to Amazon. This week, they did it for NSA.

<comment><USER12> The lying to Congress issues aren't so black and white as I mentioned in another thread. Here is a writeup about Clapper:

> There is an added wrinkle here, however, is that it is not clear to me > whether Clapper could have given a direct (and truthful) answer in a public > hearing, as such an answer would have required him to disclose the existence > of a then-classified government program. Even a non-answer or evasion could > have revealed the existence of operations the NSA was trying to keep secret.

[http://www.volokh.com/2013/06/11/did-james-clapper-lie-to- co...](http://www.volokh.com/2013/06/11/did-james-clapper-lie-to-congress/)

<comment><USER14> He could have said "I can't comment on that in a public forum".

<comment><USER15> I think that might where the miscommunication comes in with lay people. Commenting at all would confirm the existence of a classified program. That's the rule everyone is taught when you get read in. You're taught to never divulge. So whereas a case could be made that this program was illegal, the fact that it's classified means it's next to impossible to comment at all about it in a public forum. So, you lie

As far as lying to congress, I seem to recall that both parties leaders trotted out to say that all was well, and that this is done to keep us all safe. It's hard to claim anyone was lied to when it seems the intelligence committees and leaders in both houses knew full well what was going on. Does anyone really believe these highly connected politicians didn't know? It's just seems like political convenience for congress to continue that meme, when the intelligence committees seem to have know exactly what was going on. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I suspect the politicians knew and are more than happy to throw anyone else under the bus. Otherwise, if they'd didn't know, then why haven't they done anything?

<comment><USER16> "It's hard to claim anyone was lied to"

His statements are on the Congressional Record. That means he lied to _everyone in the world_ , since the record is public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unsurprisingly, the words "targeting" and "collecting" were used interchangeably when convenient.

In similar fashion, "metadata" was again used as a red herring.

All domestic communications within the United States are currently intercepted and stored for at least 5 years, including content. Perhaps that wasn't a desirable talking point.

</comment><comment><USER18> EDIT Did anybody find that segment about the codebreakers and the Rubik's cube kind of silly? It seemed to send a message to me like, "These guys can solve a damn Rubik's cube okay. Their work is way over your head. Don't ask questions, just trust them."

<comment><USER19> Agreed.

The 1:30 solve for a rubix cube is a bunk time too. I think I got mine down to 45 seconds which I referred to as "faster than anyone who can't solve a rubix cube" since it sounds impressive, but most guys who are amazing at it can do it in less than 15.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "The fact is, we're not collecting everybody's email, we're not collecting everybody's phone things, we're not listening to that."

Uh... [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/)

How easy it has become for them to lie.

<comment><USER21> The word "collecting" means something different in NSA vocabulary than it does in our vocabulary: to them, it is defined as "specifically looking at". Gather/store and collect are completely different things, to them...

It allows for them to make such statements to people who don't know their definition, and later claim they did not lie.

<comment><USER22> I really don't understand why they're allowed to redefine terms like this.

Shouldn't the media be calling them out?

<comment><USER23> Yes. they should. now think real hard about why that might not be happening here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> FRONTLINE seems to be the only investigative journalism program of note left on television. Will be interesting to see their report on the NSA, assuming that they're working on one.

<comment><USER2> They already did. Even before this whole Snowden business.

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/)

<comment><USER25> Additionally, the 'Spying on the Homefront' [1] episode in 2007 brought up FISA, domestic wiretaps, AT&T's 'Room 641A' [2], etc.

[1] [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/)

[2] [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Once Rooney died they were all free to stop complaining which does not make for good news. That grumpy old man was protecting our freedoms by protecting our lawn.

</comment><comment><USER27> I saw the show here[1]. It's beyond ridiculous. The saddest thing is how stupid they consider average Joe to be.

[1] [http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/12/60-minutes-nsa- good-...](http://www.thewire.com/national/2013/12/60-minutes-nsa-good-snowden- bad/356174/)

Another question that always puzzles me... Are operating system _THAT_ vulnerable? Every Agency, Criminal, whatever-organization has a remote 0day windows/linux/macosx exploit????

<comment><USER28> Some more than others. But I'm pretty sure that the average consumer os is vulnerable to someone with the skills. Even if the os itself isn't, there will typically be hundreds of unaudited programs running under escalated privileges. Any one of those would suffice.

<comment><USER29> I think that the situation is hopeless for joe users, if someone wants to own their computer they will. I wouldn't really even trust many IT admins to not get owned if someone actually targets them (instead of the normal random stuff everyone gets). Even if you know what you're doing, in the worst case you just need to browse to the wrong URL to get instantly owned without user interaction. I think it's hopeless for systems that are used in standard "desktop" manner, the attack surface is so large.

See for example this: [http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/03/fake-femme- fatale...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/03/fake-femme-fatale-dupes- it-guys-at-us-government-agency/)

<comment><USER30> "Even if you know what you're doing, in the worst case you just need to browse to the wrong URL to get instantly owned without user interaction"

You'll have to make a better case. In the exploit in your link, the user was tricked by social engineering, had his computer configured to automatically run Java applets from arbitrary sources, and in all probability was running Microsoft Windows - hardly someone practicing good security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 60 Minutes pawned by Jeff Bezos and now a paid stooge for the NSA who tried to further discredit Snowden.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sigh, more about phone records.

Phone records! Just metadata collection! Data collection? Oh, right, we do that, too.

<comment><USER33> Shit, somewhere in there is a point.

<comment><USER32> My point was that phone records is often used as a distraction from the rest of the programs, "see look, it's just the outside of a letter!".

In reality, two things are wrong: a lot of letters' insides are analyzed as well, and keeping a central database of just the outsides turns out to be a huge privacy violation, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> And the first example they use is a "pirate"??!! That justifies a lack of privacy and an ungodly sum of tax money?!

:throws up in mouth:

<comment><USER35> Those Somali warlords tap undersea fiber optic cables, intercepting file transfers. Right now, there at least three different safe houses in the outskirts of Mogadishu with several terabyte hard drives rigged to blow up if their demands aren't met. Billions of dollars worth of the world's music is blown up every year by these monsters. Music piracy is a major threat to the US recording industry, and a legitimate target of the NSA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The notion that 60 Minutes had a position from which to decline is curious.

</comment><comment><USER37> NSA and there mass media partners are basically running psyops on Americans. The sad thing is that it will probably work on many of the sheeple and provide ample cover for morning talk shows and op-ed articles ad nauseam.

</comment><comment><USER38> Are they this bad in their other current reporting?

<comment><USER39> their love affair with the current administration has basically neutered them.

<comment><USER40> So was it a hate affair with Bush that led them to unquestioningly believe something they wanted so hard to be true with the memos?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Since when did anyone still consider 60 minutes serious journalism? They've long gone the way of "gee-whiz" reporting for the aging (and probably sleeping) baby-boomers. You want hard hitting journalism covering the worse situations around the world? Frontline has you covered.

<comment><USER42> Watch the commercials. They're aimed older than the boomers. Aimed more for the Lawrance Whelk generation than the Beetles. They kept Rooney around because he reminded their average viewer of themselves.

Please make a distinction for me that I'm not saying all old people are senile or even that its a good idea for one of our very few media corporations to push the idea that all old people are senile, but I am stating objectively there exists an infotainment news magazine format TV show oriented specifically toward the idea of selling advertising to nursing home viewers and their editorial spin is based on the idea the viewers are senile.

They're pretty good at their job, for better or worse. What I mean, is if you don't like it, you're probably not part of the target market.

(Also I agree with you, Frontline gives the BBC a serious run for their money)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think the majority of the US public doesn't even need any of that propaganda to hang Snowden in public and continue to put up with corrupt DC.

</comment><comment><USER44> Who is the target? I mean, seriously. Nazism had Jews. Communism had bourgeois. Who is the enemy of the US Totalitarian Government. Because as we all (well, maybe not all) know from school, the totalitarian Government to exist needs two types of enemies: internal. And external. We know who the external enemies are: so called "terrorists". So this begs the question, who the internal enemy will be. They will probably also be called "terrorists". But will these be "islam fundamentalists" like in the case with external enemy. Or maybe so called "patriots"? Or OWS movements? I have no clue to be honest. Who is the enemy? Which group the propaganda machine will sacrifice to keep the wider populace in check, obedient and scared?

Seriously asking because from me this is the only point from understanding if we are in fact dealing with totalitarians already or not yet. I assume this is morphing slowly into a totalitarian state. But who will be sacrificed? Who will be the internal enemy. That puzzle is missing for me. Who will be used to keep us scared?

The scenario I think is possible: like with world trade centers, via/nsa/whatever will do some kind of horrible 'terrorist' attack on the US soil. Thousands will be killed. And the whole thing blamed on OWS -- or -- Patriots -- or -- both of these groups at the same time -- and prosecuted without courts in concentration camps a.k.a "Gauntanmo Bay". I know, I know, sounds like sci-fi. Anyone taking bets on that though?

Because that's the only part of the puzzle they are missing. And if you ask me, the reason why they selected 'terrorism' as the target is not an incident. That's the only tactics that can be employed successfully against strong, organized total government effectively. Both Polish and French underground soldiers were called terrorists by the Nazis.

If you take away democracy from people - at has already happened in the US where whoever we vote into the office will just do the same thing - the only option you leave them is violence. Terror. If you know and understand that - as they USG had known for a long time - your first step will be making them the public enemy #1 even before you start morphing the country into a totalitarian state.

Who can be accused of terrorism? Even 82-old nuns are. [http://jezebel.com/5943373/82+year+old-nun-breaks-into- the-f...](http://jezebel.com/5943373/82+year+old-nun-breaks-into-the-fort- knox-of-uranium-to-expose-lax-security)

Why not me for writing the above? The punishment? No right to lawyer, no right to due process, torture, indefinite imprisonment in de facto concentration camp. WAKE UP!

<comment><USER45> > Who is the target?

Every other nation. But there are no clear opponents. The struggle is to keep the US economy alive and growing. Industrial espionage. Trade agreements. Deregulation of markets if it is beneficial strong regulation otherwise. Enforcement of policies that are beneficial to US based industries.

The war is an economic one.</comment></comment>