Tim Cook's Company-Wide Email on Hkmap.live Doesn't Add Up - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/10/cook-hkmap-live-email <comment><USER2> Apple caved under pressure from China. The explanation Cook gave is not just an embarrassment, it calls into question the veracity of all of his other statements.

Why should users believe that (closed source) iMessage encryption is free from backdoors when we know that Cook will dance around sensitive truths?

And why should the US government be satisfied with a fully encrypted iMessage given that Apple will cave to demands given enough pressure?

<comment><USER3> The US isn't a closed market and can't effectively eject Apple from the market. While I disagree with the choice Apple made, it's a very rational one. Permanent removal from China would probably be worse for freedom in China over 20 years, and massively worse for Apple in the short term.

No company should be expected to back or foment a revolution somewhere, from my perspective they're looking out for their own beet interest and the best interest of their customers.

<comment><USER4> > Permanent removal from China would probably be worse for freedom in China > over 20 years,

I'm curious about how you came to this conclusion.

<comment><USER5> For one thing, pretty much every Android device made for the Chinese market has had its OS adulterated in some way, at OEM build time, at the behest of the Chinese government. Whereas, Chinese resellers can't really adulterate an iPhone's OS; there's just the one OS image (per model), signed and sealed by Apple, and if China wants to put a rootkit on it, they'd have to convince Apple to put it into that same base-image where any random security researcher (outside of China's reach to quash publication) might find it.

(And yes, either way the phone's _baseband_ will be adulterated by Chinese ISPs at the government's behest, but modern smartphones isolate themselves from their baseband pretty well, so this only matters if you're using your phone as a phone [calling/texting], instead of as a tablet with a data modem.)

<comment><USER6> No point in debating the details of which tech is more secure or what is encrypted or adulterated or whatever. Apple has made it clear that they will make sure the Chinese gov't gets what it wants. Even in a supposedly "autonomous" Hong Kong, China complains and Apple submits--flags, apps, speech, whatever. No need to even go to court, and certainly no point.

So Apple has made it clear that if China wants something, the tech details won't matter. "Oh, I'm sorry, we don't have that information to give you." "Well, start keeping it from now on, but don't tell them, because telling them would offend us, and you don't want that...."

<comment><USER7> It's not "whatever." Apple has removed emoji and an app; they don't provide the government with backdoors or biometric data. There really is a line.

<comment><USER8> Apple's iCloud servers for Chinese users are located in China, run by a Chinese tech service provider and provides them with the keys - as stipulated by the Chinese government. Of course the government has access to the data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am not surprised by this. I always thought Tim Cook talks a good talk, but fails to walk the walk when the stakes at hand is real. He's fine with standing up to the CIA/FBI because he knows it's good PR for business and the US government cannot do anything without a lengthy court fight that is mostly fair. Same with other US domestic issues such as DACA, sane sex marriage, etc.

But when it comes to the PRC government, he caves immediately because the threat is real. He knows he CAN and probably WILL lose access the Chinese market and manufacturing capacity, and there's no court system to appeal—-the system is rigged and controlled by the CCP. Therefore, principles bow down before revenue.

Personally I don't care what Tim Cook and Apple does to get and keep access to Chinese market, but I am disgusted by hypocrite with the high rhetoric about privacy, human rights, etc., but compromising immediately when $$$ is at stake.

<comment><USER10> Honestly - Apple could have doubled their prices and gained 90% of the US market if he stood up to China and told the CCP to stuff it. They would have had amazing PR for decades.

<comment><USER11> This is completely untrue.

Most Americans don't care about Apple's relationship with China, and they're probably only losing a fraction of a percent of customers. If Apple doubled their prices, they would lose the majority of their customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can I play devil's advocate for just a moment? Gruber asks for evidence. His only complaints seems to be the lack of evidence and a question of whether the app violates local (Hong Kong) law. Cook's memo directly addresses both of those issues:

> However, over the past several days we received credible information, from > the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from > users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target > individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property > where no police are present. This use put the app in violation of Hong Kong > law.

So then, is the complaint simply that Cook is not providing _direct_ evidence of these claims? Is that a reasonable expectation? What evidence could Cook provide that would directly tie violence (we know that Hong Kong protesters have committed violence) to this particular app? It seems like everyone agrees that this app was useful for organizing Hong Kong protests, and that _some_ Hong Kong protesters have committed violence and broken local laws.

Please don't take this as some statement of political support for any particular government, company, or group. I'm attempting to address the specifics of this memo and Gruber's complaints. I am not attempting to make any argument of the form "the Hong Kong protests are [good, bad] and therefore any tool that helps the protesters is [good, bad]." The overall merits of the Hong Kong protests are not, from what I can tell, relevant to Apple's decision to ban this app or Gruber's complaints about Apple's decision and memo.

<comment><USER13> No, the complaint is not that Cook is not providing direct evidence, and it is a complete misrepresentation to suggest so. It makes your protestations of disinterest rather suspect, as those of supposed "devil's advocates" so often seem to be.

The complaint is that Cook's claims are extraordinary and seemingly impossible on their face because of the fundamental nature of the app in question. Its purpose is to show the aggregated position of large concentrations of police, so as to let users avoid confrontations with them. How can such an app be used to "target individual officers for violence", since it provides no information about individual officers?

When so extraordinary a claim is made, hearsay evidence isn't the issue. What is necessary is an explanation of how the seemingly impossible is possible. Cook does not provide this or even address the apparent problem. A neutral person, reading Cook's memo without the proper background, might be mislead into believing the app in question _does_ provide tracking of individual police officers. I don't accept this is an accident on Cook's part. I think he is deliberately attempting to mislead his own employees regarding the nature of the app, and as a consequence his decision to ban it.

Cook's cited but unenumerated "credible" information received from a government body and users only compounds the situation. Cook could provide plenty of additional material to support his claim. He could provide more detailed information on exactly what information was received, in what volume, and in what form. He could explain the efforts the company undertook to perform independent corroboration of the evidence. He could provide a detailed account of why, in this case, he believes an autocratic government currently conducting a brutal repression of its own citizens can be trusted to communicate honestly about it, given neither it, nor any similar autocratic government, has ever spoken honestly about similar situations in the past.

Fundamentally, the problem isn't whatever evidence does or does not exist. It is that Cook's memo is a weak, politician's attempt to justify a misdeed by making absurd claims for which he provides no evidence at all. He is trying to make a problem go away, not engage with a difficult situation as a human being.

<comment><USER14> I don't understand why people would flag comments as 'suspect', have we reached McCarthyism or the hyper sensitive Chinese level yet? Why is it impossible for people to address the opinions and reasons within a comment specifically without resorting to 'suspecting the motives of the individual'? In other words, why does the motives of the individual matters to you if the opinion expressed within the comments can stand by themselves?

<comment><USER15> Maybe because the poster characterized the problem as: "So then, _is the complaint simply that Cook is not providing direct evidence of these claims? Is that a reasonable expectation?_ What evidence could Cook provide that would directly tie violence (we know that Hong Kong protesters have committed violence) to this particular app?"

Whereas the article says: "The first allegation is that " _the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence". This makes no sense at all. The app does not show the locations of individual officers at all._ It shows general concentrations of police units, with a significant lag. As the developer and @charlesmok, a Hong Kong legislator, have pointed out, the app aggregates reports from Telegram, Facebook and other sources. It beggars belief that a campaign to target individual officers would use a world-readable crowdsourcing format like this."

It could be incompetence, but it seems much more like clear disingenuousness, which is a pretty common thing nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Gruber is taking Ceglowski and HKmap.live's comments at face value, but they aren't disinterested actors. They both have (admirable) agendas in the pro- democracy protests. Of course they're going to characterize the app in the best light possible (it's so you can avoid the protests and avoid inadvertently running into cops).

Apple most likely did get legitimate examples of the app being used for that, and that was all the pretext they needed to remove it. The real issue is that the CCP is also likely holding a gun to their head both in the state newspaper but also privately. And obviously Apple isn't going to light themselves on fire which is what people really want to see them do.

Then there's the bad faith critics that are using this as an opportunity to say they're hypocrites because they are politically active on various issues (like the encryption fight with the FBI), as if it isn't because they're protected by the rule of law in Western nations and they aren't in China.

Ultimately everyone understands this. The real original sin is the fact that the West normalized relations with China in the first place [1]. Corporations like Apple aren't going to liberate China, and they can't even if they wanted to. The US and other countries could decide tomorrow to sanction China and Apple and every other business would be unable to do business with them. They could treat China like North Korea or Iran. That's a political question for governments, not corporations.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Communiqu%C3%A9s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Communiqu%C3%A9s)

<comment><USER17> Why not ban Waze for their police reporting feature?

<comment><USER18> Incidentally, I think that measures by Uber to identify riders who are cops and deny them rides should have gotten Uber the same treatment as any other organized crime syndicate.

<comment><USER17> Incidentally to China's authoritarianism you think companies should have their rights to who uses their services or not relinquished? What if a mall prevented undercover officers from using their property to investigate them, requesting they use public channels with it's law or regulatory enforcement?

I've read a few articles on it and since 2017 no charges have been laid. So clearly Uber didn't break any laws by enforcing their terms of service.

I'd much rather have this sort of thing be written clearly into law so whether or not they can force you to let them secretly use your service or not without identification can be constrained, limited in scope so it's not a fishing expedition, and subsequently challenged in court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> WRT to "is iCloud backdoored" in China, I made a recent submission that didn't make it to the first page, but it's still relevant:

[https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/10/chinas-new- cybersecurit...](https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/10/chinas-new- cybersecurity-system-there-is-no-place-to-hide.html)

> The inspection team has complete access to the network system. Inspection > can cover both the technical aspects of the network system and the > data/information maintained on the servers. See Article 10. The inspectors > can fully access the system and they are permitted to copy any data they > find. See Article 15. The only restriction on the inspectors copying the > data in your company's system is that the inspectors must provide you with a > receipt. Though Article 10 "restricts" access to matters involving national > security, the definition of national security in China is so broad that > there is no real limitation on what can be accessed, copied and removed.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is honestly the most disappointing part of this entire saga. That Apple's leadership realized that this is an issue, that the company's employees do too, and that they think it's appropriate to send out an email to placate the company but contains no real information and falls apart immediately if you look at it for longer than a couple seconds.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a huge stain on the company, the brand, and Cook's leadership.

It's not just censorship—it's active cooperation with an authoritarian power under the fig leaf of TOS violations. Truly astonishing.

<comment><USER22> No disrespect to Steve Jobs but my guess is that he would do the same thing.

<comment><USER23> I doubt it. There are infinite ways to word this email, a different CEO may not have written anything.

Cook presumably had some goal while sending this internal email, I doubt he achieved it. Telling your employees lies as weak as this certainly isn't going to improve morale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just say you've been asked by the authorities in the territory to remove the app, and you've complied. Full stop.

There are lots of apps missing from the China app store.

This whole thing about removing the app to protect users strains credibility.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's already known that iCloud in China is operated by a state-owned telecom (GCBD) see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21217920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21217920) so they could use the data to track the protestors.

And iPhone usages is comparatively small according to [https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market- share/mobile/china](https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/china) (Android 79% and iPhone 20%)

Then [https://hkmap.live/](https://hkmap.live/) is available as a website.

So why the outcry about this? In the end, for-profit companies will do what gives them profit. You should not rely on them for anything that won't give them profits.

<comment><USER26> > iCloud in China is operated by a state-owned telecom ... so they could use > the data to track the protestors.

Please stop spreading lies unless you have evidence to back up your claim.

From [0]: "Apple has never made user data, whether stored on the iPhone or in iCloud, more technologically accessible to any country's government."

Disclaimer: mainlander here.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21209190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21209190)

<comment><USER27> Is that true of the company they've contracted to manage iCloud in China?

<comment><USER26> Sorry the parent post was referring to the latter part: "so they could use the data to track the protestors"; it is a known fact that iCloud in China is managed by a Chinese company starting in 2018/01 [0].

[0] (link in Chinese): [https://www.zhihu.com/question/265371940/log](https://www.zhihu.com/question/265371940/log)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The silver lining here is that a lot of people are thinking hard for the first time about what it means to give up the right to install whatever software you want on your own hardware.

A devil's bargain always seems like a good deal until the bill comes due.

<comment><USER29> Right because the average iPhone user cares about what happens in China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > In this case, we thoroughly reviewed [the facts], and we believe this > decision best protects our users.

When I read Tim Cook's letter, this line at the end jumped out to me as super off. Even _if_ everything else was completely true, how would this decision protect Apple users? Unless all the police have iPhones?

<comment> throwaway-571 Positive Tinfoil hat on: The police would have used / were starting to use presence of the app as evidence that users were participant in the protest and arrested them. Or the police would have been able compromise the users, the app or the data (but then why not keep it as a honeypot?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This reads like propaganda.

I wonder if they have to do this to keep their supply-chain open. Now would be a good time to take that $200bn and invest in some new factories.

<comment><USER32> Cook has said repeatedly that they can't buy the labor they have available n China ta any price anywhere in the world. It's not a problem they can throw money at unfortunately.

<comment><USER33> Why couldn't they cut into their profit margins if he cared that much?

<comment><USER34> Probably because they couldn't get the labor and supply chains they need at any price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I hope I'm not promoting conspiracy theory so much as probability theory.

I don't think we can trust Apple not to have NSA backdoors anymore. We all know about Microsoft's reputation, but Apple may be the slimiest of them all. Everything is closed source and encrypted on the network level, so instead, we have to judge from Apple's corporate and PR behaviour.

Apple care about their branding and profits above all, and not one iota about their customers, truth, or transparency.

Thus, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple had surveillance backdoors in secret, making a complete mockery of the whole 'privacy play' they maintain as a branding differentiator against Google.

</comment><comment><USER36> For those who want to read the e-mail:

[https://pastebin.com/dFyftCuZ](https://pastebin.com/dFyftCuZ)

As for me, I sold my Apple stock yesterday. Tim won't miss my $10k. But I won't miss him when I am able to move to a better platform.

<comment><USER37> yeah...not sure i can ditch my macbook pro yet but next phone is not going to be iphone anymore...

<comment> drevil-v2 Yes because Android has your privacy needs covered! Don't let the door hit you on your way out

<comment><USER38> I didn't see any mention of Android in GP's comment. Can't miss any opportunity we can to have a dig though, can we?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Apple's supply chain is China-based. If Apple doesn't pull app, then China's leadership probably shuts down that supply chain. China's leadership doesn't give a damn about Apple or Foxcomm or even the NBA. It's probably a real blow to Tim Cook since he is famous for setting up such an amazing supply chain. He put Apple in such a dangerous position. He caved and made up an excuse.

<comment><USER40> China isn't going to shutdown Apple's supply chain, that's revenue to Chinese companies. The threat is that they would make it more difficult for Chinese buyers of the iPhone or put regulatory hurdles in front of Apple to make it difficult to __sell __iPhones in China. China is one of Apple 's largest markets.

<comment><USER39> I honestly don't think Xi cares. He is playing the long game and would rather China buy a Chinese company's product. I bet Apple is replaceable in his eyes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> China isn't like the US, where Apple can use their trillions and lawyer up. China will just shut you down and take your shit. Guess where hkmap.live and the Chinese App Store employees responsible for approving it end up when that happens. Similarly if the "moral" thing for these companies to do is to divest from China, then HK will only be served by Chinese companies, and good luck trying to provide a police tracking app there too.

This is totally different from the Rockets situation, where it really is just a matter of principle over money. If Morey and the NBA stick to their guns, the NBA can just leave China, and other than some hazy concepts of goodwill and cultural exchange, nothing is lost except money.

I'd rather have Apple and others in China than without. A Chinese company capitulates immediately to the government, a multinational at least can put up some semblance of resistance, with international relations as a bargaining chip.

<comment><USER42> >Similarly if the "moral" thing for these companies to do is to divest from China, then HK will only be served by Chinese companies

Would it be possible to divest from all of China except Hong Kong?

<comment><USER41> No, because unlike Taiwan, Hong Kong is internationally recognized (as well as by its own government) as a part of China. The Qing government declared a war on drugs in the 1800s, and started seizing and destroying British opium shipments. The British retaliated by occupying HK and forced the Qing to cede it, resulting in a 99 year lease. So while the other concessions were returned to China after the modern era began, Hong Kong remained British until 1997.

Come 1997, the Brits tried to tie various conditions on the return, mostly around them maintaining control over the government despite the territory now being owned by China. These were made under the guise of protecting freedom, but arguments can be made that they were just trying to hold on to some power. Given relative weakness of China at the time, they eventually agreed to this One Country, Two Systems compromise you might've heard of.

All this is to say, it's complicated; China has actually adhered to most aspects of it to date - there's no Great Firewall, HKers have their own passports, various freedoms of speech and assembly you'd be familiar with in the West. But it has no sovereignty of its own, and is very vulnerable to China encroaching on its citizens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Thor's way account for obvious reasons.

I am an Apple employee (Cupertino) and I did not receive this email.

It also reads different than other Tim emails, which never mention specific things such as credible reports and the language seems off.

I also did not here any colleagues mention such an email, and usually it pops up for everyone at the same time and it becomes a topic.

This email pastebin is a fake

<comment><USER44> I was told by multiple Apple employees that it is genuine. Check your spam folder.

<comment><USER44> Gruber confirms it's real. [https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/10/cook- hkmap-live...](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/10/10/cook-hkmap-live- email)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I understand Apple's reliance on Chinese manufacturers, but at the same time, aren't they sitting on roughly a quarter- _trillion_ dollars in cash [0]? If Apple can't use such wealth to pivot production away from China, or at least feel confident in this option as a contingency plan, then who can?

[0] [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/29/apple-now-has-tk-cash-on- han...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/29/apple-now-has-tk-cash-on-hand.html)

</comment><comment><USER46> Three take-aways for me:

1) Android users win this round.

2) Would be great to have some kind of whiz-bang P2P decentralized federated mesh-networked version of Hkmap.live.

3) My opinion on Apple has not improved.

<comment><USER29> Well seeing the app does _nothing_ that the website can't do, developing for the web instead of an app when it's appropriate seems to win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I am an Apple employee. I didn't get this email. Something doesn't compute here.

<comment><USER48> Did you forget to accept the new iCloud ToS?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't Waze show where the police are?

<comment><USER49> And drivers kill a lot more people than protestors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> It's entirely plausible that the Hong Kong police have assembled a documented narrative of incidents of crime and abuse. The call for evidence into what might be a handful of cases isn't interesting.

What is unconvincing is that an app's potential to be used with crime is sufficient for people to understand Mr. Cook's bright-line, process, or thinking around the matter.

This app was likely being used in ways which critically supported the mitigation of risk to life, a fact which Mr. Cook described only as "benign"; the failure to discuss the balance against the app's relation to public health, and the failure to frame the nature of Hong Kong police and law, makes any attempted weighing suggested by Mr. Cook to be of low credibility as a lens into his process.

Presumably Google Maps, Search, and other apps also facilitates crime at a magnitude well beyond the app in question, but how does the weighing work?

</comment><comment><USER51> Apple has their hands tied because of all the factories churning out their products that would come to a standstill if the Chinese government decided it wanted to. It's sad and unfortunate, but what other business decision would a CEO make if 80-90% of their future revenue stream disappeared overnight? Can someone else help me play devil's advocate? In any case, if we're so innovative as a country why can't we make more stuff here, that's the only solution, not globalism. This scenario is an unintended consequence of globalism. Apple isn't intentionally being bad, they probably don't have a choice, right? They put too many eggs in one basket. You can say too bad, but when the banks were bailed out, I was saying they deserved to go under as well.

</comment><comment><USER43> Throwaway account for obvious reasons, but this email I did not receive this email and I am an Apple employee in Cupertino.

Some of the language used doesn't sound correct, it sounds very specific mentioning reports - normally these emails are general.

Again I never received this email, so if it was sent it was not company wide

</comment><comment><USER52> > Moreover, what are these incidents where protesters have targeted individual > police for a premeditated attack? Can Mr. Cook point to a single example? > Can anyone?

The message stated that they had credible sources. That really should be enough in that type of communication. He was not trying to make a court case providing evidence he was describing the company decision to employees.

Now if there actually haven't been any such cases then it adds question to the sources not to Apples decision or communication.

And really you can't expect a company like Apple to start employing foreign government spies to infiltrate government institutions in order to provide credibility checking of information provided. If the police are saying they have reports of misuse of the app and violent attacks Apple has to act on that.

<comment><USER53> The venue really doesn't matter considering that the source is effectively unimpeachable. Sure, it might be proper for Apple to err on the side of caution when violence is involved, but in this case, there is definitely violence on both sides, and one side (the state) definitely has the upper hand.

Plus, the idea that the app could be used for specific targeting of individual police has pretty clearly been debunked.

In the end its really just a question of whether you think Apple should be on the side of egalitarianism or unrestricted profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Like lots of people have pointed out the email makes no sense. Any app can be used to do the things the Hkmap.Live app was banned for. So, in order to force Apple's hand it seems like people should start trying to use Apple's own apps to coordinate HK related protests and information to the point that China asks Apple to ban it's own apps. That seems like the only thing that would get Apple to have to deal with this apparent contradiction.

I'm not familar enough to know what that would be. Can you make custom maps on Apple maps like you can on Google Maps? Maybe someone could gather info and make custom maps once an hour that shows locations. Or they could post a feed of HKmap.Live screenshots to some giant iMessages list. Etc...

Some ideas of what might happen if they can get China to make the request to ban Apple's own apps.

1) Apple bans their on apps in response to requests from China the apps are being used for bad things

2) Apple ignores China and risks China banning Apple from China

3) Apple hastly separates the app store from the phone so they can claim they don't control the apps (probably can't happen fast enough to be an actual response)

4) other?

Of course if China never asks for Apple to ban it's own apps then nothing would come of this but the idea is basically to force a stronger response so that one way or another something happens.

</comment><comment><USER55> Previous threads:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21217401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21217401)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210678)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159872](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159872)

</comment><comment><USER56> If I were Tim Cook, I'd have said: "Sure, we'll comply with your demands" and then I would have immediately mobilized a covert engineering task force to push out an urgent bug fix that rigs every Apple device in the entirety of China to turn into a Winnie the Pooh brick on Xi's birthday

<comment><USER57> And that's why you'll never be CEO of Apple.

<comment><USER38> Or anything, for that matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> "For a company that usually measures umpteen times before cutting anything, it's both sad and startling."

Apple measured their risk of people getting upset over a BS excuse to ban an app and compared it to the risk of pissing of the Chinese government, and made the appropriate cut. It seems to me that Apple have been incredibly careful and precise here. What's happened though is that the author of the post made the all-too-common mistake of thinking that Apple is a friendly, caring company who are "different" when it comes to things like this - they're not, they're just a regular company.

It's sad, but entirely unsurprising.

<comment><USER59> Will a lot of westerners boycott us if bend over for China? Probably not.

Do we care enough about Hong Kong customers? Not really - they are <8 million people!

Do we care about China? Yes, a lot. Both about the government and the 1.4 billion potential customers there!

<comment><USER58> Yep that's the sad arithmetic behind capitalism - Apple are no different from any other corporation in this respect. But the problem is that people often see them as friendly and caring, when they maybe should step back and realise that such corporations are _not_ their friends, don't care about them and would sell them out in an instant if it benefit them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Jeez... when Apple loses Gruber you know they've fucked up. But what can they do? Generations of greedy American CEOs handed over the reins to China and turned them into a superpower. And now we're all fucked.

</comment><comment><USER61> What was he supposed to say? We were asked to take it down and did just that?

<comment><USER62> At least that would be honest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Simply put then....

As an American citizen, you should run a Chinese iPhone so YOUR messages go to a hostile foreign government.

As a Chinese citizen, you should run an American iPhone so YOUR messages go to a hostile foreign government.

:)

</comment><comment><USER64> "You are holding the phone wrong" ... typical Apple BS which people don't call them out on because they well Apple.

<comment><USER65> Lots of people call Apple out on all sorts of issues, several times a week. Figuratively "no one" believed "You're holding it wrong".

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I said it on another thread: that is most likely a copy paste from a mail sent by the CCP. I am sure the iPhones have been used many more times AS PHONES to convey the location of officers and demonstrators. But that is harmless?

</comment><comment><USER67> > that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for > violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are > present

The email has to be fake. Lots of apps can be used in malicious ways.

</comment><comment><USER68> Apple is under pressure from China to remove App. Billions of dollars at stake for Apple. That's why Apple does that.

If you'd be offered $1B to agree to remove the app, would you do that?

You know the answer.

<comment><USER69> $1B for me is a life changing amount of money. $1B for Apple is less than .4% of their revenue.

I imagine you're a software engineer earning 100k per year. Would you take away a tool a group of people are using to try and fight for their freedom for $400?

<comment><USER68> So, it is much easier to judge others (Apple and whoever) and avoid acknowledging that for sufficient amount of money most of the righteous commenters here would be willing to sheepishly sacrifice their beliefs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Why haven't they banned other police tracking apps like waze?

</comment><comment><USER71> This is what happens when you're the sole arbiter of your platform. Give us the ability to control our own hardware and maybe this kinda PR scandal wouldn't happen.

</comment><comment><USER72> The mindset of people expecting Apple to do certain symbolic acts, but finding it perfectly fine to continue pushing billions into China is somewhat baffling.

</comment><comment><USER73> This is like the anti-encryption folks in government arguing no one can have secure communications because kiddie-porn. Baby, bathwater. rinse.

</comment><comment><USER74> No question of how the walled garden brought that. But the walls are too profitable to tear down now. It was never about user protection.

</comment><comment><USER75> Are there people working on an open source web app version of this app? I'd love to see if I could involved at some level.

<comment><USER25> It's a website already, try [https://hkmap.live](https://hkmap.live)

Which is why I don't understand the outcry coming from what Apple is doing here.

<comment><USER76> Does the website work from behind the Great Firewall?

<comment><USER25> Let's hope so, because probably it was/is being used as the backend for the mobile applications too! Otherwise there is probably mirrors, both the front- and back-end

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Fuck your fiduciary duty. I cannot think of two words that have done more damage to humanity than those two.

</comment><comment><USER78> What's to stop someone building similar functionality for the web? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

</comment><comment><USER37> hacker news admins should investigate the downvote patterns on articles critical of china ...there seems to be a very strong downward pressure on articles critical of china — so much that i suspect there may be a down vote ring..

<comment><USER79> Dang explained yesterday [1] that there is a "common news item" penalty to stories to avoid very hot topics from dominating the front page, but that they have removed this restrictions from some articles.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21211124)

<comment><USER55> I don't have time to dig up specific links at the moment, but if you look through [https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang](https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=dang), you'll see that I've written about this extensively in the last few days.

China-related stories are anything but suppressed here—it has been the most- discussed single theme of the last week, and one of the most of the last several months. See these #1 stories from the last few days:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-07](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-07)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-10](https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-10)

<comment><USER37> got it. thanks for the response.

Just worried that HN could be a target for concerted manipulation just like facebook/reddit/twitter

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> And I'm sure that China could just block or otherwise disable this app or just go kill the protesters if they wanted. But that's not what they wanted. They wanted Tim Cook to drink a cup of Xi's diarrhea in public and Cook happily did it.

</comment><comment><USER80> Tim Cook is the Steve Ballmer of Apple. Part XVIIXDXC

</comment><comment><USER81> Ban "Waze" it shows us where police are !

</comment><comment><USER82> Nvm

<comment><USER83> .

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Designed by Apple in California; Made in China.

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rules China.

Apple is moving to more Services.

Changing the pie chart takes time.

They have numbers to make this assessment for their shareholder stakeholders.

How many iDevices does the company sell?

The calculation is simple. CCP rules ... Apple

If HK blood is shed, Cook's pet Product(RED) may take on a different connotation.

</comment><comment><USER85> tim cook: blood on your hands

</comment><comment><USER86> This seems like a perfect opportunity for Apple to allow apps to be installed outside of the App Store (like macOS).

I was absolutely shocked that Apple rejected the Gab app. Their rules are arbitrary and constricting.

<comment><USER87> The single page app at [https://hkmap.live/](https://hkmap.live/) opens on iOS with a note telling you how to add it to your Home Screen. That gives you a custom app icon, which opens as a live full screen map app w/o browser chrome.

This open mechanism to "sideload" what a regular user can't tell the difference from an App Store app was the original iPhone app distribution strategy for both live and offline HTML5 apps, provided to developers before the App Store existed.

It remains relatively trivial to distribute apps this way.

Start here:

[https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap...](https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/ConfiguringWebApplications/ConfiguringWebApplications.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Apple lied about being in bed with the NSA, too... I don't know why anyone consider Apple much better then Google when it comes to privacy...

<comment><USER89> can you give a source?

<comment><USER88> first search result that I found: [https://www.cheatsheet.com/technology/apple/is-apple- lying-a...](https://www.cheatsheet.com/technology/apple/is-apple-lying-about- its-involvement-in-government-surveillance.html/) (didn't read it though, but they lied about being part of PRISM)

<comment><USER90> Do you mean, being a victim of prism? When tech companies found out about the NSA wiretapping unencrypted connections between their datacenters they pretty much flipped out and got serious about security against nation-state attacks.

<comment><USER88> I don't. PRISM doesn't work how you described it, as far as I know... It is basically a backdoor to Apple for the NSA (so whatever Apple can see, the NSA can also see).

<comment><USER91> PRISM doesn't work the way you've described it. It ingests data from the FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles court ordered wiretaps on individual accounts from Internet communications services. You can see this in the slide Snowden leaked.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/special/politics/prism-...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/images/prism-slide-7.jpg)

[https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism- and-...](https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-not-get- entirely-blown-off-if-youre-an-activist-e2a79d2cd2ad)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> It works for me as a share-holder. Apple's iPhone 11 is again popular in China and there are even reports of Apple increasing the 11's production to meet the high demand. Apple should not be doing anything to mess with the Chinese consumers and the Chinese government as China is a very difficult growth market to crack into. I believe that Tim Cook has done a great job of appeasing China and at the same time has worked a very fine line with Trump to keep i Phones out of the Trump's tariffs .

<comment><USER93> As a shareholder, you are morally bankrupt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> I hope the FCC can somehow massively fine Apple for this. It's completely disgusting and pathetic.

I can hope, even though it won't happen.

<comment><USER3> How would they?

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Tim Cook is a crook and a moral coward. Single signature signing authorities for software will always be inevitably used for evil, and here it directly has been.

Apple does have a choice here. An easy one. It could remove the requirement that all iOS apps have to be signed to run on Apple devices. Simple. And at that point the Chinese government have no further way to blackmail them.

But Apple has decided it's future ability to behave in an anti-competitive fashion is more important than democracy for the people of Hong Kong.

<comment><USER96> Honestly, as a person who prizes Apple's products and happily depends on them for work, personal life, etc. I think Tim Cook needs to either open up sideloading or be promptly fired and replaced by somebody who will. None of this sits well with me. It is a situation we do not need to be in. I agree that he is a moral coward, and in far too important and dangerous a position to be so.

<comment> throwaway-571 The first duty of public companies is to the shareholders. Users fuzzy feelings figure very little in the incentive structure. Sideloading is probably too damaging to the short term profits of the company to be on the table. Or it might not even be a question worth considering for the board .

<comment><USER96> I agree. I hope this will be enough of a disaster in terms of optics that it renders him unfit and forces this outcome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> On balance, I think Apple did the right thing.

The police in London raided properties and arrested people before the Extinction Rebellion protests had even started.

Removing the app as a precaution in case some crazies out there decide to use it to ambush and murder people seems reasonable given the situation.

For those who want the app, just use the website.

[https://hkmap.live/](https://hkmap.live/)

However, since the data is crowd-sourced, it wouldn't be hard for an attacker to inject bogus data rendering the entire website and app useless.

Which could be extremely dangerous for innocent civilians if people simply make up stuff. Someone could write, "guy in red shirt, blue jeans and white baseball cap having coffee in McDonalds is an undercover officer and beat a protestor last night".

Given the mob justice and violence that we've seen, it might be better that everyone simply ignores the site.

</comment><comment><USER98> In the last week, HK police vehicles have been singled out, ambushed, officers mobbed and attacked with molotov cocktails. Rioters are shot in self protection. Mainland owned stores are targeted when police are not near. All aided by this app that is facilitating extreme violence on the ground.

Of course this doesn't add up to western main stream media news readers who were presented with one-sided peaceful protest narrative that is further perpetuated by savvy HK social media users trying to push the same propaganda. Any news to the contrary have been heavily suppressed on western social media to the point of forming an impregnable filter bubble escalating to the bewildering responses seen here. The cognitive dissonance is strong.

The entire controversy is couched in ridiculous language like kotowed or caved or capitulated when the simple reality is US companies have to conform to local laws and realities. I can see how people are confused, they were sold the idea that US companies are there to export morality, and now expect US companies to behave like foreign policy tools wielded for US geopolitical interests, ironically a charge frequently levied at Huawei. If China had an app that allowed US alt-right or antifa to target PoC/whatever antifa equivalent owned stores and attack the police, it would be pulled in a heart beat.

<comment><USER99> >If China had an app that allowed US alt-right or antifa to target PoC/whatever antifa equivalent owned stores and attack the police, it would be pulled in a heart beat.

If you're going to end with this sort of false equivalence, it kind of colors the rest of your argument and makes me wonder if you are being disingenuous here. I further note that you make a lot of assertions with no facts to substantiate them, and refer to news reports on Hong Kong as propaganda, so perhaps I don't need to wonder anymore.

<comment><USER98> It's only false equivalence to those zero familiarly of HKer/Mainlander dynamic. Which is the majority of western readers, hence their extreme susceptibility to biased reporting.

>If you're going to end with this sort of false equivalence, it kind of colors the rest of your argument and makes me wonder if you are being disingenuous here.

The closest analogy to HK protestors are alt-right, they match all the hallmarks: disenfranchised, social media savvy, economically anxious youth who see their culture being displaced and their privileged being eroded by immigrant mainlanders. Rich ones come in to buy all the property, poor ones use up all the social services. These are common complaints to the mainland locust narrative - when the mainland sends their people, they're not sending their best.

[1] [https://www.scmp.com/article/991355/anger-mainland- visitors-...](https://www.scmp.com/article/991355/anger-mainland-visitors- escalates-locust-ad)

A row between Hongkongers and mainlanders is reaching boiling point after internet users raised more than HK$100,000 in less than a week to finance a full-page 'anti-locust' advertisement in a Chinese-language newspaper in the city.

...

Mainlanders have already crossed our bottom line,' said Yung Jhon, who refused to disclose his real name. 'Why are mainland mothers flooding in to take up resources in public hospitals, getting our benefits and social welfare? Why do mainlanders ... refuse to follow our rules and order? We can't accept that.

Sounds familiar?

30 years ago, common HKer could get a low-skill industry or service job and make a comfortable living based off mainland exploitation. Then China's manufacturing growth made HK Detroit. After handover, 1 million mainland immigrants entered HK on one-way permits under family reunification plan in the last 10 years. That's 15% of the city. This culture clash is the same script causing right wing nationalism everywhere in western liberal countries. But because it's HK, and the sufferage angle plays well to western MSM, people close their eyes, pretend HK is some woke utopia, and that all those Pepes memes are innocent, because English proficient HKers who use western internet are somehow just like us in the west but also that naive.

>I further note that you make a lot of assertions with no facts to substantiate them, and refer to news reports on Hong Kong as propaganda, so perhaps I don't need to wonder anymore.

Propaganda via omission. How long did it take for western news media to finally acknowledge the frequent violence happening on the ground? The racially motivated on mainland citizens and mainland connected businesses. The doxxing of police families. Why don't you do some research yourself. The fact that people here, beneficiaries of a free 5th estate somehow reliably have their opinions shaped to reflect US foreign policy positions is... interesting. It's Manufacturing Consent, Iraq WMDs all over again.

<comment><USER99> You have an incredibly condescending, disrespectful and aggressive tone, one that seems to suggest that you believe that everybody you speak with here is utterly uninformed when it comes to China. It's not a good look, and probably does more to damage your point than if you had just argued in good faith instead.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


HTTPie is a command line HTTP client, a user-friendly cURL replacement - <AUTHOR> http://httpie.org <comment><USER2> This is one of the little known gems I recommend often. the readability difference is just amazing for me. On that note for those of us having to use Windows at the workplace there are a few things that make life easier:

1) Chocolatey (package manager)

2) HTTPie

3) ConEmu (Shell)

4) gow (Unix command line utilities in Windows)

5) WinMerge (win diff)

6) TortiseSVN

7) SourceTree (git)

Makes day to day stuff much smoother....

<comment><USER3> I have moved away from windows and miss Fiddler the most. It's ability to record, filter, edit and replay requests made debugging a breeze.

<comment><USER4> I like Mitmproxy. [http://mitmproxy.org](http://mitmproxy.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd just wrap a simple program around curl to improve its argument passing complexity if that's your pain point but I wouldn't go on rewriting an HTTP client.

Curl is a very mature code base by now and that's something to appreciate. It handles all the edge cases well and has dealt with all the mess that you'll discover over time.

<comment><USER6> Httpie doesn't come close to Curl in terms of features. Its selling points are colourised output (using pygments) and (slightly) better json formatting. Here's an unobstructed side by side comparison for the same request: [http://i.imgur.com/Bj2wRkq.png](http://i.imgur.com/Bj2wRkq.png)

While it won't replace Curl, it can prove quite useful while testing APIs.

<comment><USER7> Why is the order of the headers different between those two examples?

<comment><USER8> I haven't looked at any code, but I would strongly suspect that it's because either HTTPie or python-requests is using a plain dictionary instead of an ordered dictionary under the hood.

<comment><USER7> That would appear to be a bug to me. When you want to see the headers of such a transaction you want to see them in the order in which they left the server.

I checked the server and it looks like CURL has it right.

Colorizing is one thing, reordering is quite another, debugging tools should show the situation with as much fidelity as possible.

<comment><USER9> Requests does use an ordered dictionary for handling headers.

<comment><USER10> Requests might but that's irrelevant. Requests is built on top of urllib3 which is built on top of httplib which does use a plain dict. Also the relevant RFC says order is irrelevant.

<comment><USER7> Debugging starts with having an accurate representation of what is going on.

<comment><USER11> Ok, so this tool is only for all the situations in which you don't care about header order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I seem to spend my every waking moment reporting defects for HTTP APIs. HTTPie's interface is far more intuitive than cURL's, and pretty-printed responses are a kindness not just for me but for the people who have to read the bug reports, too.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure about httpie but using curl with jq also gives nice formatted and coloured responses.

      curl ... | jq '.'

<comment><USER14> jq is awesome, particularly if you need to filter or otherwise process JSON, but the great part about httpie is that it works with just about everything so you don't have to remember a different filter chain for each type of content.

It uses pygments which means you also get nested formatting for e.g. CSS or JavaScript inside an HTML document.

<comment><USER13> Awesome, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Determining the type of an argument by looking up the presence of ':', '=', or '==' is brilliant. I liked it.

It can also be used to replace Wget, which not only breaks a multibyte filename sometimes, but also requires the --content-disposition option to handle the Content-Disposition header.

</comment><comment><USER16> At first I thought, what is so unfriendly about cURL? Then I saw the screenshot that shows a comparable cURL request behind the HTTPie request and I'm convinced.

<comment><USER17> That was my first thought, too. Then I saw the colorized output and I'm convinced, too.

<comment><USER18> Isn't the HTTpie command simpler because it uses defaults for the content type and charset? If Curl did the same (not sure why it should because not everything is JSON/UTF-8), the command would be about as short as the HTTPie one.

<comment><USER19> This is probably different for different people, but I find myself constantly looking up the right flag for controlling a part of a request with curl even though I use it a lot. Having the command line be smarter about interpreting which argument is which seems like a productivity gain to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Somehow I used to hate curl because I began using it through the PHP Curl extension,which has the most horrible API(no,the other API for HTTP requests in PHP is even worse, it creates adhoc variables,yes variables can appear like that in PHP which leads to "variable name collisison"... ).

But with time,using it in the shell it happened to be quite powerfull for testing apis.

HTTPie coloring is a plus,does it work with XML too?

</comment><comment><USER21> While I don't think it will EVER replace curl, it does seem like a fun piece of software to play around with. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER22> This is amazing! Will definitely be switching away from using curl. I put a the basic examples here to easily play with httpie [http://runnable.com/U5wOrMxHLYsVkYbX/basic-httpie- examples-f...](http://runnable.com/U5wOrMxHLYsVkYbX/basic-httpie-examples-for- curl)

</comment><comment><USER23> The sessions, the wget-like download mode, the binary detection, the upload capabilities... there is a lot to like here. I will definitely be checking this out. Thanks for posting!

</comment><comment><USER24> Instead of curl I was usually writing [https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests](https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests)

<comment><USER25> That's what httpie uses internally: [https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie/blob/77955c9837259b1...](https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie/blob/77955c9837259b1159e87d4a47bd67d47b1c7d6d/setup.py#L32)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Tried it just now and I see non-ascii characters messed up, while curl shows that page fine. Probably there's some case-specific reason for that, but still…

</comment><comment><USER27> Now if I could pipe the request from Sublime Text and get the results back in a buffer it would be awesome to deal with JSON. Any idea?

</comment><comment><USER28> Big fan of this one. HTTPie is a lovely replacement for cURL, especially when you just want to quickly test a JSON API.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is there a curl replacement written in Node (for us Windows users who don't have a proper curl out of the box)?

</comment><comment><USER30> D'oh! HTTPie doesn't support SNI

<comment><USER31> If you use Python 2.x and need to talk to servers that use SNI (Server Name Indication) you need to install some additional dependencies:

$ pip install --upgrade pyopenssl pyasn1 ndg-httpsclient

<comment><USER30> Ah, I'm not a python man. Thanks for the heads up

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I use this tool on a regular basis and just love it. Thanks for building HTTPie :)

</comment><comment><USER33> Is there any chance get this into Homebrew for an easier installation on Mac?

<comment><USER34> I just installed it on my mac by doing $ sudo pip install httpie

It was not too tricky

<comment><USER33> Sure, but i dislike installing other tools like pip just for a single tool.

<comment><USER35> As a python dev, I use pip all the time. My first thought was, "nice, just use pip." I appreciate your comment because it helps remind me that people approach problems from different frames of mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Tried it, works great! Nice work!!

</comment><comment><USER37> I will keep using wget.

</comment><comment><USER38> HTTP::Tiny

</comment><comment><USER39> Poor choice of name. All I can see is HTTP Internet Explorer.

<comment><USER40> ditto. HTTPy would have been better, methinks.

<comment><USER41> 'hc' might have made it successful, at least then it would have one benefit over curl.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does Weiqi AI work? - <AUTHOR> Anybody plays Weiqi around here and understands how Go AI works?
I have been playing Weiqi for many years and even represented Singapore several times when I was much younger and won 3rd place at the World Youth Amateur Tournament and 12th place at the World Amateur Weiqi Tournament.(though I play much less in recent years)
When I first started out, Go AI was weak, really really weak like 30 kyu or something and a 5 year old kid who had learned Go for 2 weeks could defeat it easily.
Now I see Go AI reaching strong 5-6 dan level like ZenBS and the program seems pretty strong to me. (I could probably win 50-60% of my games against ZenBS if I play seriously). And ZenBS even won a game against Takemiya Masaki even though it was given 4 stones handicap.
How do Go programs like ZenBS work ? Does it perform brute search or does the AI play "intuitive" moves that resemble human intuition ?
Cai GengYang <comment><USER2> I can't speak as to how to individual particular programs work, but at least as of a year ago, most of the good AIs used something called Monte Carlo Upper Confidence Trees.

They're, unfortunately, not based on intuition. Just statistics.

Basically, the machine plays many, many random games. The more winning games which play a particular stone, the more valuable that particular position is. Then the position with the highest value is chosen.

This alleviates the need of brute force search (which is just too large for Go).

As far as I understand, most of the more successful AIs use UCT for the general game, but then fall back to heuristics and brute search for small, local conflicts (like if forced some stones to be played until death) and counting stones.

Sensei's library has some nice high level information written about the topic: [http://senseis.xmp.net/?UCT](http://senseis.xmp.net/?UCT)

More recently, DeepMind (and someone else independently at Edinburgh, I believe) has published a couple papers about training a neural network to play by teaching it to predict the next move of pros given the board state. These use modern computer vision techniques and data. Last paper I saw, this did much better than GNU Go (which doesn't use UCT, and is very weak), but still not as good as monte carlo based methods. There has yet to be a combination of the Neural Network and Monte Carlo methods, but they're quite complimentary.

I believe we'll see that combination in the next year or so, and this will nearly close the AI-human gap.

Edit: Monte Carlo. :P Hooray for autocorrect.

<comment><USER3> The idea that top-level programs use UCT is just folklore at this point. I know that at least MoGo uses a greedy version of Monte-Carlo Tree Search enhanced with RAVE (Rapid Action Value Estimation), a way to share information between branches of the search tree, a pattern database which runs an evaluation function on small patches of the board, and a set of simple heuristics.

The consensus is that UCT is bad because it tries to minimize cumulative regret (the average performance over all simulations) at each node, rather than the strength of the chosen move, and that the various heuristic strategies used by strong engines introduce enough noise to make greedy playouts the better option.

If you want to learn more, you might want to check out these two papers:

[http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Silver/web/Applications_fil...](http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Silver/web/Applications_files/mcrave.pdf)

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.3382.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.3382.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I highly recommend the computer-go mailing list ([http://computer- go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go](http://computer- go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go)), where most of the top-tier engine authors collaborate (including the authors of Zen, Pachi, etc).

If you can read research papers, look into the bibliographies of Remi Coulom, who's work in ~2005 revitalized the field of computer go and is pretty much responsible for the quantum leap in engine strength over the last few years: [http://www.remi-coulom.fr/](http://www.remi-coulom.fr/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great, didn't know there was a computer Go mailing list !

I am at the moment planning on paying some money to attend programming courses in basic languages like Python, Ruby and C++ in Singapore and start hacking a GO AI prototype.

My idea is to build one that thinks more strategically rather than just relying on brute-force search. Since Go is such a large game, there are some areas especially mid game areas where computer programs in their current form simply cannot compete with the human brain at the moment.

Professional Go players use strategic thought and positional awareness in huge chunks of the game , especially mid game when they are vying for territory.

My intention is to try to capture some of these professional Go player's strategic awareness and sense of positioning through software and translate this into a machine that is more "intuitive" and able to think creatively and come up with new moves and variations by itself ..

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi, I'm a Go player (only around 9 kyu though).

The programs don't make "intuitive" moves, but nor do they exactly perform brute search - the search tree is far too wide.

They actually use a mixture of techniques. For example, in the beginning they may select moves from fuseki databases of accepted good play, and have some knowledge of joseki for plays in the corner.

During the very end game they may be able to brute force search and make sensible decisions about the order of play - however there is also a book about using simulated annealing with neural networks to decide the order moves should be played. Mathematical) Go: Chilling Gets the Last Point.

There have been attempts to code "rules of thumb" into the Go algorithms, such as knowledge of bamboo joints, table shapes, etc., but the recent improvements have largely been down to techniques such as evaluating the position after allowing two consecutive moves and even simply trying various random plays rather than an exhaustive breadth-first search.

There certainly used to be a mailing list for people interested in the development of Go-playing programs. I can't remember the address but if you broaden your search terms to include "Go, wei-chi, weiqi, baduk" you should be able to find it.

<comment><USER6> > using simulated annealing with neural networks

Are you sure about that, or are you basing it on the word "chilling" in the title? My understanding is that Berlekamp's book is all about applying combinatorial game theory to go, and the "chilling" in question has very little to do with the "temperature-decrease" schedule in simulated annealing.

"Chilling" in combinatorial game theory means, in effect, making players pay a penalty for each move they make. The simplest games to analyse are ones in which it's always a disadvantage to have to move; these are equivalent in a certain sense to _numbers_ ; the "chilling" operation tends to turn games into simpler games. See e.g. [http://senseis.xmp.net/?Chilling](http://senseis.xmp.net/?Chilling) for a little more information.

The only connection between this and what happens in simulated annealing is that temperature happens to be a good metaphor for both. In combinatorial games, that's because the "value" of a position changes less wildly with each move in a cooled/chilled game. In simulated annealing, it's because the configuration you're looking at changes less wildly on each successful update as the temperature decreases.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, yes, you are correct - my memory was playing tricks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Playing tricks about what ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Computer Go is actually a huge topic. There are many different solutions, and they compete and still discover new things every year. If you want to get seriously into it you should get in touch with the people who work on it daily. There are people who write doctor theses about parts of a Go AI nowadays and what they create might not even be top notch.

When I last checked, it was basically a set of very complex brute force algorithms. What they (need to) do is limit the search space a lot because there are just so many options. And that's where the smartness comes into play, removing subtrees from search space without visiting them.

And as far as I know they tried pattern recognition (which is what we humans do) but it didn't work well for AIs. They work more often with density maps for some factors they calculate depending on the position, imho.

But all that I know is really only very flat knowledge, and might be wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know who are these people who work on Go AI daily and how to get in touch with them ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [off-topic] As a Chinese, I do know what Weiqi (围棋,圍棋) is. I was surprised to see the English name of Weiqi is Go. (When I saw Go in this post, I thought it's Golang.)

<comment><USER7> A few Weiqi players like me were really angry when they used the name "Go" for the language where nearly all software engineers know that there is already a game with that (english+japanese) game.

Btw, the Korean name "baduk"/"badook" is also used quite often. Sadly Chinese version is the least well known, which I think is because China and USA are the least connected of the three big Weiqi countries.

<comment><USER8> "they used the name "Go" for the language" just because Google named that programming language 'Go'. Personally I don't like the name 'Go'. It's a verb. It should not be used as a name of a programming language or a board game.

<comment><USER7> The name for the game is actually reasonable though, because it's the Japanese word. And in Japanese it doesn't mean "walk" but "chess-like game".

The complete word is actually "Igo", using characters not too different (maybe traditional?) from the characters for Weiqi. Together Igo/Weiqi means "surround + chess-like". The last character Qi/Go refers to the corresponding more famous chess-like game, so in China it's Xiangqi, but in Japan it's Igo/Weiqi.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its actually surprising to me that I have played this game for such a long time and still don't know the origin of the word "Go".

I have always called it Weiqi as I was taught in mandarin. From what I understand, Weiqi originated in China, and for most of history was the dominant player in this game, until Japan took over around World War 2 (the rise of Japanese military power , technology, and standards of living probably all contributed to this).

The Japanese took up the game, called it Go and helped spread the game to the west and the name has stuck ever since.

Japan has since been eclipsed by both Chinese and Korean players though.

International Go Tournaments are now mainly dominated by Chinese and Korean national team players it seems to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go)

</comment><comment><USER10> If you are wondering about intuition, google's deep mind and a number of other companies have applied deep convolutional neural networks for playing go. That is probably the closest to human intuition. Although I am not sure how you play a game on pure intuition, but I'm not a good Go player so I shouldn't comment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Human beings (us) currently use a combination of pure calculation and intuition to play Go.

Pure calculation is useful in small battles and corners where you can actually calculate the outcome of battles to pretty much 100% accuracy.

However , there are still large chunks of the game where it is difficult for the human brain (even seasoned professional go players) to process huge sequences with similar levels of precision, for example early to mid game areas when both opponents are vying for influence and positional advantage.

That's when the experience and intuition comes in. Professional go players are much much better at this due to years of experience playing top-notch games against other professional go players.

The interesting question for the software developer and Go AI researcher is to attempt to use technology to capture a top-notch professional Go player's "intuition " in such situations.</comment></comment>


Product Requirement Documents Must Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.mindtheproduct.com/2016/03/product-requirement-documents-must-die/ <comment><USER2> Tangent to that is... if you are a consulting firm your SoW must have an unambiguous list of deliverables. Not having one is asking for trouble if the client changes their mind or decides they interpret a deliverable differently than you. Or worse, the client got the wrong thing because you didn't ask what they actually wanted.

</comment><comment><USER3> The worst I see is that the requirements come from management who are "sponsoring" the project. The have no clue how their employees do their jobs or even what their jobs are, yet they make crucial decisions on how the software to do them works.

<comment><USER4> A PRD is not really required with a single team. A URS (user requirement spec) is mandatory, which goes from the PM to the dev team.

A PRD might be useful with multiple, possibly remote teams. Esp. India or China, because with problems they usually play hardball down to the spec and nothing more. Right so. But it's the dev team management job to come up with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of the issues described here seem like they stem from a lack of good project management. Requirement docs should never go straight from sales / marketing to engineering.

</comment><comment><USER6> _1\. Waste. Very little in a product is actually required_

 _2\. They focus on solutions, not problems._

Sounds like he's been in too many environments completely lacking in adult supervision, where no one seems to know the ABCs of writing good design documents (of any stripe).

I find it's just that hard to teach the basics, and once people get points 1 and 2 (which, as he correctly identifies, are huge) things work out much more smoothly for all concerned.</comment>


HTML-Based Indented Markup Language for Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/amatsuda/himl <comment><USER2> I love this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Won't be able to use it productively without support from Sublime Text :(</comment></comment>


This Is What's Happening in Venezuela Right Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.policymic.com/mobile/articles/82777/this-is-what-s-happening-in-venezuela-right-now

<comment><USER2> Some points that must be mentioned; opposition leaders are struggling to monopolize the discomfort of Venezuelans and not the other way around.

In the past the opposition politicians had full control of that monopoly and negotiated with the government for their own benefit (for example Capriles called fraud on the elections but then stepped back so that his party could win local elections); so people is apprehensive about them.

Devaluation and inflation produced by the government (they control the central bank and the banks that pay the huge state´s payroll), insecurity, corruption, communist Cuban domination, new absurd reppresive laws every day, elections fraud, one-party domination of all public entities and now brutal reppresion against protests make venezuelans now feel under siege with no other way out than energic protests.

The death toll of the events is higher. Two girls were killed this week; two neighbors were killed a few blocks from my home. Plus the cases of missing persons and torture.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ugh, these popups are getting out of hand. "DO YOU AGREE THAT OUR GENERATION NEEDS A VOICE? [FB Like button] [Twitter Follow button]"

Immediate Ctrl + W.

<comment><AUTHOR> gk1, this is not about website design, it's about current situation in Venezuela.</comment></comment>


Referly Discontinuing Rewards, Paying Existing Links Through March 31st - <AUTHOR> http://refer.ly/please-read-referly-discontinuing-rewards-paying-existing-links-through-march-31st/c/67f9d3fa890311e2bfbf22000a1db8fa

<comment><USER2> Good PR move.</comment>


If Apple didn't hold $181B overseas, it would owe $59B in US taxes - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/10/apple-google-microsoft-hold-more-than-336b-overseas-via-legal-tax-loopholes/ <comment><USER2> I'm curious what others think about it. Should corporations be tax exempted just because they hold a lot of money? For me it sound like a vicious circle, we give you more power, because you have a lot of power.

<comment><USER3> They aren't tax exempt because they hold a lot of money. Their earnings overseas are tax exempt when a subsidiary they create in that foreign land collects the income from licenses granted to it by the US company. This means the money never enters the US banking/taxing/regulation markets. So while people might disagree or be critical of the companies doing it, from what is understood it is legal and good business for them to do this.

The flip side to this, if the governments where these subsidiaries are run from decide to change their tax laws they could tax that money and make it very painful for US corporations. But as you can imagine large businesses doing this have substantial influence on those governments, just as they do here in the US.

Also, there has been open discussions between the US government and some of these companies (but doubtful it would ever happen) to allow companies to repatriate overseas funds for a lower one time tax on those funds. Thereby at least collecting some taxes but also allowing that money back in the US to help create jobs here etc. The companies have no need to do this mind you, but at least a couple have said they would be open to it. But in the end (and in simple terms) if a US company wants to use the money they have overseas in the US without repatriating it, they loan it to themselves from their overseas holdings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for posting, Im joining Citizens for Tax Justice, FYI: "Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) is a 501(c)(4) organization. A contribution to CTJ is not tax-deductible"</comment>


Dissecting The Opening Lines Of 25 Famous Novels - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/3026864/infographic-dissecting-the-opening-lines-of-25-famous-novels#2

<comment><USER2> After reading the article I found diagram cute, that's true. But I still don't understand the method how they are generated. It's not even discussed in the article. I don't know the benefits of it, how do you analyse a diagram?

It sums up to a big text advertising a cute poster.</comment>