Apple Mac computers targeted by ransomware and spyware - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40261693 <comment><USER2> Why are we continuing to insist that incredibly complicated and unrestricted computing devices which served well a few million highly technical folk a few decades ago can equally smoothly well serve ~8 billion people of varied capacities and hues?

At this point we need to accept that severely locked down and curated devices are the easiest and least painful road ahead for the majority of the world's citizens to participate in digital transactions, while unrestricted computing devices can used by those who are learning or specifically involved in technical tasks or are simply those who agree that they know what they're doing and the tradeoffs involved.

Am not saying unrestricted devices should be banned. It's just that they should come with warnings on the box and an advisory to use locked devices if the intent is to simply buy it and mindlessly use it.

<comment><USER3> _while unrestricted computing devices can used by those who are learning_

You can have a machine where you are actually _more free_ to experiment than simply being unrestricted. If you have a machine where you can roll back changes to a saved point, you are more free to experiment, even with dangerous and esoteric mechanisms. This is what we had in Smalltalk. Smalltalk used to be an OS. (There are 4 hooks in the old Smalltalk-80 image for lifting the drive head, putting it down, and moving it in and out.) When I used it, it was no longer an OS, but this is how I know that doing

        Semaphore allInstances do: [ :each | each release ]

Locks up your image so hard, there's often lag when you try to kill the VM process. I can do that with un-checked in code in the image, then restart from a saved image, replay all of my actions from the change log except for the last one, and I'm back in seconds, all of my code nice and safe.

This degree of rollback ability would also be great for simplifying parental IT. You'd need to add some sort of cloud storage for storage of authentication secrets and the most important data, but then it would be almost bulletproof.

<comment><USER4> a chromebook?

<comment><USER3> Is the Chromebook's rollback as absolute as, say, that of a device running a Smalltalk based OS in a 'kiosk' mode with a hypervisor overseeing the VM and recovery mode?

<comment><USER5> No, but it comes with a popular browser?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use a Mac for work and personal, and I feel like I take the reasonable precautions to avoid malware/ransomware/spyware/*ware (ex. prefer the App Store when possible, only download stuff from trusted sources, etc.) What more can I do to be safe? In 2017, is it recommended to use some kind of antivirus on a Mac? I've always been told it's unnecessary, but it seems like nefarious software is becoming more commonplace on the Mac.

<comment><USER7> we've an air gapped one for the kids

every month I have to go in and clean it up - Malwarebytes gets rid of most of the browser trub - to the point Chrome is usable again

they are casual browsers - something is very wrong when kids can render a Chrome install unusable after an hour or so of clicking flashy things

<comment><USER8> How is a machine with a network connection 'airgapped'?

<comment><USER9> Not op but my reading was that it is airgapped from the other machines in the household, possibly on a secondary network interface. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER10> But... that's not an airgap.

Has the original meaning of the word been lost?

<comment><USER7> bad phrase - it's on another segment

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is practically zero information in this article.

<comment><USER12> Yeah. The TL;DR is "Two people wrote some ransomware for Mac and put it on _the dark web!_"

Well, who really cares about that? That's not an especially novel thing to do. It's basically a drop of spit in the ocean.

Someone wake me up when Mac malware goes viral because it's not entirely reliant on users making mistakes. Or if it uses some sort of vulnerability that I need to get patched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is an interesting tidbit:

> However, they added, any files scrambled with the ransomware would be > completely lost because it did a very poor job of handling the decryption > keys needed to restore data.

In past discussions of ransomware, the question is always asked: if you pay, how can you be sure you'll get your files back? The standard answer seems to be, of course you'll get your files back, the criminals want to keep a good reputation so you'll have the greatest incentive to pay, and they have no reason not to.

I guess this shows one potential weakness of that idea. Criminals may not _want_ to destroy your files, but might do so by accident.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is an argument for only installing things from the App Store. I told my parents only to install from there and we never had a problem.

<comment><USER3> The problem with the App Store, is that the software most likely to have an issue with the sandboxing is often the software that's more critical in terms of security. Such software may not be security software but still have more stringent needs in terms of security review. For example, layout managers might have hotkey functionality that could disguise key-logging.

<comment><USER15> Your typical "parents" are not the sort to need that sort of stuff. Those are profesional tools for people with specialized needs, and they can assess the risks of installing such things.

<comment><USER16> You would be surprised how many "normal" apps are not in the store...

( it's even worse in win10s )

<comment><USER15> Honestly nothing is in the Windows app store, they've got a long, long way to go to get that ecosystem in order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is the best virus scanner for Mac?

<comment><USER18> Common Sense 2017.

Snarkiness aside, you don't need an antivirus on your Mac. As long as you run as a non-admin user, enable a firmware password, and stay away from Adobe Flash, you are golden.

<comment><USER19> Wait.. an "admin user" on a Mac is basically just a sudoer that still needs to enter its password each time for elevated privileges, right ?

Since you do need to install stuff sometimes, I'm not sure what a power user who's careful about password prompts would gain from routinely running as a non-admin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That anyone bothered to orchestrate an attack like this on Apple products seems to say good things for Apple's business. Although at that same time it seems to cast doubt on Apple's perceived superiority on the security front.

Oh well, I'll keep going with my preferred platform: Windows as a host for my browser and SSH to FreeBSD and Ubuntu servers.

<comment><USER21> > Apple's perceived superiority on the security front

Still one of the biggest lies that Apple ever told.

The very first I'm Mac I'm PC was 100% about how they are virus free OS.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfv6Ah_MVJU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfv6Ah_MVJU)

<comment><USER22> Funny thing is that it may have been more true back before OSX than afterwards.

According to Woz the early Mac's held so much of the OS in ROM that a malware could not get a solid foothold.

That said, i have found Apple to be more of a marketing company dabbling in consumer electronics, than a computer company.

<comment><USER15> Are you kidding? Classic MacOS was riddled with viruses and it was made worse by the fact that they were used by designers who, as a matter of habit and necessity, would exchange disks with random people and use them in random computers.

In the 1990s visiting a copy shop with Macs was like going to a sketchy by Thai standards brothel. You were almost guaranteed to come back with some new infection. You'd reasonably quarantine anything that came back from your print shop until you could scan it. The temptation to hold your Syquest disk with rubber tongs was there.

Switching the processor PowerPC made many of the viruses incompatible, but they weren't fully eliminated until the switch to OS X was complete.

<comment><USER23> Switching from 68k to PPC, the emulator was good enough to emulate mixed sections of the actual operating system. Viruses weren't foiled that way.

<comment><USER15> Not many, but some that were from the early days of the 68K line were finally put out of their misery.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Robot as good as real dog at easing lonely hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com/Robot-as-good-as-real-dog-at-easing-lonely-hours/2100-1041_3-6232297.html?tag=ne.fd.mnbc

<comment><USER2> After spending many long nights in a lab with aibos, I for one can stipulate.</comment>


FastPNG - The fastest PNG compressor on Earth - <AUTHOR> https://fastpng.com <comment><USER2> good tool fantastic it really helps</comment>


'Sea Nomads' Are First Known Humans Genetically Adapted to Diving - <AUTHOR> https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/04/bajau-sea-nomads-free-diving-spleen-science/?sf187339380=1 <comment><USER2> We should note that finding an enlarged spleen in animal necropsies is normally a symptom of infection. In humans can be also a symptom of chronic alcohol abuse, but as 95% of them are muslims, we can probably discard that.

People living a nomadic style life in a boat, travelling at open sea, eating and cutting fishes and echinoderms in the ship deck all the time, could be exposed to higher loads of bacteria. Fishermen's boats can stink a lot after a day of work in a hot day.

As nomads, they could also experience a sub par medical care system.</comment>


A Dream Interrupted At Boeing - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/business/06boeing.html

<comment><USER2> Call me paranoid, but I'm not flying on one of these things until SP3.

<comment><USER3> It really takes one accident that can, even partially, be traced back to problems with the carbon-fibre construction, and suddenly the promised 20% fuel cost savings will seem miniscule when compared to the horde of fleeing customers.

Composite fuselage would be a good thing per se but it's one of the technological advances that you can only build slowly, with lots of testing and enough wrecked planes, until it matures into "proven technology". Now it seems that so far they've just patched problems with the construction as they appear.</comment></comment>


The Norwegian art of the packed lunch - bauta-steen http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190103-the-norwegian-art-of-the-packed-lunch <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a Norwegian. This mostly isn't wrong, a lot of us do use "matpakke"s, but I object to this quote:

"In Norway, you're not supposed to look forward to your lunch," says Ronald Sagatun, who works in advertising and hosts a YouTube channel about Norwegian culture. "It's kind of a strict thing. It's easy to make, easy to carry around, easy to eat, but it should be a disappointment."

Maybe it's "kind of a strict thing" in some parts of the country, but certainly not where I am (Oslo). While everyone did eat a "matpakke" for lunch in the first 7 years of school ("barneskolen"), ever since, the places I've been has served hot lunch in a cafeteria. This includes the second level of school ("ungdomsskolen"), our version of high school ("videregående"), university, three workplaces (which is two summer jobs and the place I'm working now).

It's not like it's uncommon for someone to bring a "matpakke" but saying it's "kind of a strict thing" that "you're not supposed to look forward to your lunch" is bullshit, at least in the general form presented in the article.

(I'm also not sure about the pronounciation "maadpukke". Maybe it follows some internationally recognized form of phonetic writing, but if it doesn't, that "d" and "u" is really strange to me. I'd just say you pronounce it straightforward like "matpakke", with the Norwegian pronounciation of "a". Judge for yourself based on how Google Translate says it: [https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=no&t...](https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=no&tl=en&text=matpakke))

<comment><USER2> 10 year expat here. Part which I don't get is how come "warm lunches" for schools typical/natural/expected in the rest of the developed world never caught up here. Equality uber-alles?

<comment><USER3> Where are warm lunches for schools typical/expected? Have never seen them "properly".

<comment><USER4> In the US, it's the norm. When I was in elementary (primary in the UK) school, it was split about half between packed sandwiches (with a box of OJ and a small bag of chips or similar snack) and queuing up at the school's lunch counter for a hot meal (usually cheap, not great quality, and heavily subsidized for those students that qualified). I'm not sure when it started, but my guess would be the 1930s, in an effort to ensure every child had at least one full meal a day. And at least in my current region, the school now offers breakfast before school begins (though this is almost exclusively used by students who qualify for free lunches - I don't know any middle-class families that rely on the school breakfast).

<comment><USER5> From what I know, the food quality and cost varies widely. Here (rural Minnesota, US) the elementary school lunch is about $2.50 (HS is about $3.75) for the kids who don't qualify for financial aid or free meals. Breakfast is also available at a similar cost.

I've never eaten it, but my kids generally enjoy the food and my wife, who's volunteered at the school often and eaten lunch there, says it's OK. They also offer an optional PM snack in elementary school at additional cost. Snack milk is free for everyone.

OTOH, I've heard of other school districts around the country where the food is total crap and only the poorest children who can't afford to have breakfast at home/bring a lunch will eat it.

<comment><USER4> Ours was hit or miss. The pizza was good, if you like a greasy thin slice (I do). Simple things like Mac & cheese were good too. The meatloaf was terrible. The hamburgers weren't great - the patties were cheap meat (possibly with lots of filler) and the buns mediocre. My fav was the thanksgiving lunch - they did a pretty good turkey, stuffing, and gravy.

The real problem was vegetables - they were guaranteed to be over cooked and mushy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hem, I't common in any country of the world, perhaps with different names, different food, different packing but the same principles.

In Italy is called "schiscetta" (read in English Skishetta), in Japan is called "bento" etc...

In few countries however such kind of "productivity" is considered a kind of (self) slavery and it's not really accepted. For instance in Swiss it not common at all eat in your workplace no matter the provenance of food because we do not live for work but the contrary. In French is common only for low- paid labors, mostly young at career start etc.

Have seen the different idea of productivity in few countries and their relevant economic level I think there is no real correlation...

<comment><USER7> Japan's bento seem way more on the crafted and enjoyable side of things though. I'm certain there's a lot of variations, but I've seen folks wax poetic about bento and ekiben (train station bentos).

<comment><USER8> I am Australian, but when I worked in the city one of the most reasonably priced and healthy options was a Japanese restaurant's bento boxes. Quick and easy but also filling. You can also get cheap and hearty meals from the china town food courts. Packing lunches makes total financiak sense but I guess I have a hard time spending my only free hour during the day time at the same place I will be at for 8 hours. A walk and some time lost amongst the hustle and bustle clears my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "That's the Norwegian way and it's most peculiar, because it's not the same > in Sweden or Denmark, Iceland or Finland. It's a very Norwegian tradition"

Bullshit. Madpakke, consisting of open sandwiches on rye is still very common in Denmark, and was the bane of my childhood school years, though thankfully most office places has moved on to provide workers with a decent cantina, and more and more school children are handed money to buy their lunch.

As the article states in the beginning, these stale packed lunches are not much to look forward too.

<comment><USER10> I never saw anyone bring lunch to work when I worked in Copenhagen over a decade ago, but the at work cantinas were a lot more common than they were in Sweden.

Whereas in Sweden, the work cantinas were phased out in the 80's and the norm if you have an office job is that everyone leaves the office for lunch, and you go to a lunch restaurant, sit down, and eat your lunch. I really tried finding something similar to Swedish lunch restaurants in Copenhagen, but I could never find any. There's only "real" restaurants, which are too slow and upscale and expensive for lunch every day, or they're too fast-food-y or only really do take-away, that you're supposed to take back to the office and sit there and eat. Drove me nuts.

I have a bunch of Swedish friends who all came back from work trips to Norway, cursing, because the &¤#&#"&"# Norwegians would schedule meetings over lunch, and then everyone else would just pull up their /¤#&"&!"#&#" matpakke in the middle of the meeting, while my friends were stuck with nothing to eat, because they were used to taking a break, going out, sitting down, eating lunch, and then going back to the office. Instead, they had to sit and starve in meetings.

<comment><USER11> > I have a bunch of Swedish friends who all came back from work trips to > Norway, cursing, because the &¤#&#"&"# Norwegians would schedule meetings > over lunch, and then everyone else would just pull up their /¤#&"&!"#&#" > matpakke in the middle of the meeting, while my friends were stuck with > nothing to eat, because they were used to taking a break, going out, sitting > down, eating lunch, and then going back to the office. Instead, they had to > sit and starve in meetings.

That sounds extremely odd.

I'm 44 years old, and I've lived and worked in Norway for most of my professional career and have had numerous jobs, but I've _never_ experienced anything like what you describe. On the rare locations when a long meeting or workshop extends through lunch ours, there is either a lunch break where we all go out somewhere to eat, or we get lunch delivered to to everyone in the meeting room.

The packed lunch seems to me to be almost exclusively a school thing. At workplaces, only a few people near retirement age or people with very strict dietary requirements bring their own lunches.

<comment><USER12> Let me counter your anecdata with mine: my wife works at a big Norwegian public company and she often has meetings from 10 am to 3 pm. No time to grab lunch, they have to bring their matpakke or starve!

Where I work (Cisco Norway) we would have food delivered to the meeting room, or most likely we would just take a break. But even if we have a nice cantina, some Norwegian colleagues are bringing their homemade matpakke every day! It's not just a school thing :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Related to the last photo: try to not eat anything in front of computer at work. It creates bad habit and links computer work (stressor) with eating (rewarding stimulus) which will probably lead to obesity. Always take a break.

<comment><USER14> I lost a few kilos by eating a packed lunch at my desk instead of going out for lunch.

(With a packed lunch I decide on what to eat before I'm hungry, which tends to be way more reasonable. When I'm hungry all I want is a big burger with fries! By deciding ahead of time I avoid eating that.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm from the US but visited Norway as a kid. The open face sandwich is one of my biggest memories. "But how do you store it without making a mess?" "Wax paper". "But why not just add a second piece of bread?" "We don't do that here".

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm Portuguese and (even having worked in London and Amsterdam) find this line of thought profoundly alien.

While it is true that there is a trend towards longer lunchtimes here, packing your lunch, eating in and not taking the time to leave the office and have lunch at different places nearby (and socialize while doing so) has a bunch of negative connotations...

For me, at least, the dietary implications alone make this (and the typical British work lunch) a major put-off.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am living in Denmark working for a famous toy company. I moved from Southern Europe to Denmark a few years ago and the thing that struck me the most was the 20 minutes lunch break (since the schedule is 7.40 hours and 20 minutes of lunch break). I feel it was too rushed and my stomach had hard times adapt to those time frames.

<comment><USER18> A tip from my blue collar days, when I also only had a 20 minute lunch: eat a decent breakfast, and pack something like an apple/granola bar that you can quickly snack on at ~2-3 pm. If i try to wolf down food that quickly I just feel ill & sluggish, but eating a smaller lunch & a mid-afternoon snack actually left me feeling better. I continue to do this, it helps avoud afternoon sluggishness.

Although I would miss the rest of break time, I'd much rather work 0.5 hr later in the day and have a brief moment of respite.

<comment><USER17> That is what I ended up doing as-well, extending my lunch break for about 15-20 minutes. But that in retrospective puts me in the situation where I am left sitting alone in the canteen due to colleagues finishing long before me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We have a more or less similar practice in the Netherlands and Japan (bringing a homemade lunch, not necessarily bland), but I find that I really enjoy going out and trying different places to lunch.

I guess I could save a ton of money if I didn't, but it's worth it to me. Lunch is indeed something I look forward to.

<comment><USER20> I feel the same. Sadly it's quite hard to find a healthy lunch near my office, and this is why I'm overweight.

<comment><USER21> Your inability to find healthy lunch near your office isn't why you are overweight.

<comment><USER20> Of course not, I wasn't being entirely serious, but it's certainly a contributing factor. I enjoy the social aspect of going out for lunch (and the flavour aspect, of course). It's difficult to eat out and eat something healthy, even salads are soaked in high-calory dressings.

Perhaps this Norwegian "art" of eating a bland lunch that "should be a disappointment" is someone's twisted idea of a good time. But it's not mine.

<comment><USER22> To be fair: I'm American and live in Norway and have for a bit over 5 years now. I have found lunches to be a bit different. While you can sit by yourself and read, you can also be part of a group really easily.

In language and civics classes, we were encouraged to sit down and talk to others at lunches and breaks - especially if we were working somewhere with a common lunch time. I don't find social pressure to bring what everyone else brings and others are usually a bit jealous when someone brings in something yummy. In context, the lunches are about like a peanut butter or baloney sandwich or something. Not really... bland, per se, but non-offensive. You can also pass some of the options off as healthy, which helps. In any case, you still get some of those social aspects even if you don't get the change of scenery that usually goes along with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have found a similar approach extremely effective for productivity. I have to admit, however, that when I worked at places like Microsoft and QSC I enjoyed lunches with my colleagues immensely because they were all so damn smart and interesting.

However...

> Another hallmark of the matpakke is the addition of small, bread-sized > squares of mellomleggspapir – between-layer paper – between each slice of > bread; these can be peeled off as you eat your way through the layers.

Could one of you Vikings give me a better explanation of this practice?

<comment><USER24> That paragraph makes it sound exotic but I believe it is simply the equivalent of parchment paper we have between slices of presliced cheese.

<comment><USER25> Correct, it's basically pre-cut parchment paper.

The thing to watch out for though is that the parchment paper is not suited for baking (mainly thinner and cheaper), we once baked a pizza on the matpakke type and it was a pain to get the paper off the crust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> love the sandwiches, but "Norway is a rich country with one of the world's highest rates of GDP per capita. This is partly due to oil reserves in the North Sea, but it's also to do with the nation's productivity."

hahahahahahaha "partly" \- understatement of the year.

Norway without oil is like Alaska without oil.

That said, Norway has managed their endowment brilliantly and at scale, to such an amazing degree that it gives me hope for the human race.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow. Kind of nice to hear the US isn't the only place with a traditional hurried low-nutritional-value lunch, and that at least one other country has made the same kind of mistake we have.

But also that comments here indicate nutritionally healthy hot lunches are now a thing in Norway, same as they're now common at least in tech worker cafeterias.

May we all eventually move away from cheap processed meats and old preserved pates, to meals with fresh healthy protein and fresh healthy vegetables!

</comment><comment><USER28> Am I missing something? This seems to be an overview of Norwegian lunch culture plus a summary of the benefits of having a routine, which the author thinks can be accomplished just by having lunch? Do they not routinely eat meals at roughly the same time where the author lives? Can confirm the art of American lunch includes sometimes bringing easy to make, cheap, boring food to work, and that most Americans eat lunch on a routine basis.

</comment><comment><USER29> I find the matpakke thing to be agreeable, at least he way my Norwegian friends do it. Pack what you like!

In the US anyway, lunch can be expensive and time consuming if done at restaurants.

Portions can be large and that makes me sluggish. My biggest problem with it is the concept of choice - that eats up my time allotment more than the eating! And for social time I would rather talk with coffee than over mouthfuls of food.

</comment><comment><USER30> Norwegian here. I pack a lunch like this about every other day. I enjoy eating it much more than you would think from reading this.

</comment><comment><USER31> I find it very hard to believe you would get "stern looks from colleagues" simply because you made yourself a different sandwich... It this for real?

If I had to bring a sandwich to work, I would certainly make it with something I do enjoy eating, colleagues be damned.

<comment><USER32> Read up on "janteloven" or Jante law and this will give you some background as to why in nordic countries standing out by doing things differently is frowned upon.

<comment><USER31> I live in the Netherlands, where we have the (I think) famous "doe normaal": act normal, don't stand out. Still, bringing a roast beef sandwich for lunch seems to me far from not acting normal... Oh well, _vive la différence_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> For several months i am taking my lunch to work for that reason - lunch break takes less time (also the food in those restaurants is so expensive and worst of all doesn't taste that good) Now I know that I am following progressive Norwegian best practices!

</comment><comment><USER34> The horror. We get something like 29000 lunches in our lifetime, and 16000 are at work. To piss this away with boring bad sandwiches is an abomination.

A good meal is one of the major pleasures of life. A whole culture that fumbles this in so fundamental a way is a tragedy.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think the discussion here is missing a vital point in the article: Work when your at work, then go home.

This is key to getting a better work life balance and also to make it easier for people to combine careers with kids and family.

</comment><comment><USER2> Oh boy, I would call it an "art of 'meaningless journalism'".

There are a numerous reasons, for the bland "bag lunch" (literally "the food pack" (matpakke)) - where do i start?

\- the sandwich price in the shop is 4-8 quid, make the math, cook at home

\- sky high prices in the cafes, etc

\- weak selection of meats /cheeses in local shops (agricultural- protectionism/limited EU import)

\- high prices on meats /cheeses in local shops + 4x of the EU average (agricultural-protectionism/limited EU import)

\- the poor past + jante thing

\- the stubbornness of general local population - "(grand)parents always did it like that"

\- strong creeping low-profile nationalism - "norwegian way", "buy norwegian", "eat norwegian, etc"

\- everybody is making "foodpack" why should i stick out

\- 30 mins - not enough time for anything(cafe, etc)

\- sparse cafes and cantinas etc.

\- most cantinas serve just this specific company or this specific office building. More often than not, you are not expected to go into the other company's cantina.

\- some work places are way too far from any cafe, etc.(say you are a tree logger)

\- automatic thing, don't have to think much - going out (work, hiking, skiing, whatever) - take a foodpack. You dont know when/where you next meal will be "thinking" as most of Norway is non-urban.

Army rations taste probably like 10x better than the typical bland norwegian foodpack.

But you can continue to gourge on the "Norwegian" propaganda on bbc and elsewhere.

p.s. Downvote all you want, reality hurts, huh?

<comment><USER36> A lot of the reasons you specify are pretty much true, it's the way you word it (and posting more than once when not responding to anyone) that is hurting your comment the most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Here goes Norwegian propaganda:

"BBC noticed us and our "SPECIAL NORWEGIAN WAY" of making sandwiches, oh my!"

[https://www.nettavisen.no/livsstil/mads-og-ronald-lagde- vide...](https://www.nettavisen.no/livsstil/mads-og-ronald-lagde-video-om- matpakke-plutselig-ringte-bbc/3423576335.html)

p.s.And this sort of food is definitely not healthy.

p.p.s. "hot food" \- It is not a big thing, until you consider the notion that sandwiches of any kind are one step away from cancer/ gastric ulcer inducing ramen packs and 'snickers' snack. Then you kinda start thinking how good are any sandwiches for you during the lunch time. Same goes for kids. This is why warm soup is anyday better than "fast-track unbalanced(no veggies) sandwich"(R) as described here/in the article.

Of course 'hot food' type makes a difference - balanced potatos, salad, meat/fish combo or a soup is 100 light years away from say 'hot pockets' fake food.</comment>


Ask HN: is the California state park website leading to malware? - <AUTHOR> California state parks use a reservation system that seems to be hacked by malware, by using a DNS typo masquerade, then tries to install Chrome extensions.
What do HN readers recommend to 1) stop the problem now, 2) protect the website for the future?
To reproduce:
1. Visit this California parks page: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=616
2. Notice the highlight text: "go to reservecaliforrnia.com to view available campsites" and see the misspelling with the extra "r".
3. Go to that misspelled domain name. It redirects to "gogetsplendidapps" and/or to prompt to install Chrome extension "Keep Safe Search". Google reports this as malware.
Update: I'm reporting the issue to the real website, and to the real domain name registrar.
What are approaches to terminate the hack website?
What are suggestions for long-term defense against this kind of attack? For example to install software for many users that would have blocked/refused the hack website? <comment><USER2> It looks like a simple typo, double hitting the r. I would contact a couple people from the website to alert them to the error.

If it were malware, they would have gone ahead and made it a real link

</comment><comment><USER3> Not for me. Check your browser's installed extensions/add-ons, and remove any that might have been taken over.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for helping! I just added more to the report above-- the problem looks to be upstream, and due to a domain name error.

<comment><USER3> oh yeah, it's a typo and someone is using the typo-squatted domain for nefariousness!

1) correct: reservecalifornia.com

2) incorrect: reservecaliforrnia [dot com]

Note two 'r'</comment></comment></comment>


YouTube Created a Generation of Young Stars. Now They Are Getting Burned Out - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-created-a-generation-of-young-stars-now-they-are-getting-burned-out-11576762704 <comment><USER2> It sounds like we've combined the intermittent reinforcement dopamine machine with financial insecurity and created a monster.

> PewDiePie, who was the first individual creator to hit 100 million > subscribers, said in a video that he was taking a break

On the one hand, it's amazing that one person can produce a show which reaches what previously you'd have needed a multinational TV organisation for. On the other hand, doing it alone makes it a lonely business with a higher risk of drifting off in a bad direction with nobody to correct you.

> YouTubers say they are afraid to take time off, out of fear it will hurt how > their videos are highlighted on the site, which uses an algorithm to > determine which ones to recommend. While the algorithm is a mystery

This is why so much of the "is youtube good or bad" question is misled by looking inside the videos. The really important action of youtube, the thing which prevents people leaving it, is (a) the recommendation and (b) the funding .. both of which are completely opaque to those whose careers depend on them. They're left with chaining themselves to a video camera to appease their machine god.

<comment><USER3> What I quite frankly struggle to understand is why this deal seems to be a good proposition for people. Your odds of becoming the next PewDiePie are Powerball odds, essentially. The work offers no security, no benefits, and very lumpy income. You say one wrong thing, and you get cancel cultured (some cases, it's justified. But is it always?). My point: Why would you pick this up as a primary source of income? It's a terrible deal, yet so many people choose it. Maybe I'm really privileged in being able to walk away from bad deals. I wouldn't take a new job for less pay.

<comment><USER4> No one who gets into this is thinking of it as a "deal". There's no single point of transaction where they do the entire cost/benefit analysis. What happens is more like:

1\. They record a video of something on their phones and upload it to share with their friends. Practically every human with a smartphone does this at some point.

2\. Maybe they enjoyed that and the feedback they got from their friends, so they make it public and maybe upload a few more. They start thinking about sharing videos to an audience bigger than the people they personally know. This is a completely natural transition because most people on Earth are frequently watching YouTube videos that were shared just like that.

3\. Now it starts to feel like the video itself is the goal and not the experience they were having that they happened to film. Instead of "we were doing X and recorded it" it's "I'm making a video of X". They make more little videos and upload them. They enjoy seeing their production skills improve, and it feels good to make things. Their friends think they're funny and it feels really nice getting a positive comment or thumbs up on the video. They are getting zero money. It's entirely about intrinsic reward.

4\. Some small fraction of the people who reach 3 stick with it enough and have the right personality/video skills/topic/whatever to get a bit of traction. Now they're making a tiny amount of money and being a "YouTuber" starts to feel like more of who they are. They start to wonder how far they can take this.

5\. Now that some trickle of money is coming it, they naturally start thinking about _investing_ in what they do. It makes sense to maybe get a better camera, or buy Final Cut Pro. They start putting real time into this, at the expense of other hobbies and activities.

6\. At this point, being a YouTuber starts to involve actual _trade-offs_. They're putting enough time and money into it that they are sacrificing other opportunities. Raising their production value and keeping up with posting frequency means they need to make videos even when they don't feel like it. They start doing the calculation of whether it's worth it.

7\. Those who decide it is worth it now need to start taking it more seriously. The sacrifices they are making are clear and fixed, but the rewards (popularity and money) are less predictable. Now they are at the point you mention where they start really caring about optimizing for YouTube's opaque algorithm. Those who do it well may actually be able to make a living, but it always feels tenuous and uncertain. Staking your income on the combination of popularity contest/machine learning algorithm/ad platform is pretty sketchy. But for some it actually works. And, at this point, you're in pretty far, already have a lot of experience and time put in, so it makes sense to see how far you can ride it.

<comment><USER3> #7 seems to have hints of sunk cost fallacy, but #1-6 really explain how this organically happens for people. They don't go into expecting the outcome to be #7, which would explain the fallacies I was making. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> I think people tend to over-correct when discovering the sunk cost fallacy. It is definitely a fallacy people fall for, pretty frequently. But there are also things that look like sunk cost fallacies that are actually trying to extract value from previous investments.

In the case of YouTubers, if you already have thousands of followers, video gear, lighting, hard-earned performance skills, and video editing proficiency, then it is entirely rational to try to continue to leverage those investments for your future income.

I've got two decades of experience in software engineering. It's not a sunk cost fallacy for me to continue looking for software engineering jobs, it's me trying to capitalize on that investment.

The _real_ hard part is figuring out when some past investment like that is winding down such that you're better off discarding your potential future earning from it order to spend that time building up a new investment. You don't wait until the copper mine is _completely_ empty to shut it down. You close it when the copper you can extract is worth less than you could get from spending that time elsewhere. Making that calculation for our intangible skill investments is really difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> PewDiePie made a video the other day where he called these articles out as grossly misrepresenting what he said (he was going to take a break because he has uploaded a video every day since he can remember, including having a shorter honeymoon to accommodate it).

This isn't burning out, it's having a holiday.

<comment><USER6> The video, from 2 days ago: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoFSqtrivFs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoFSqtrivFs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was an indie filmmaker. (It's a hobby, we knew there was no money in it.) It was pretty clear to us that the YouTube algorithm was all about high volume, low quality. The kind of ambitious projects that were all about writing and acting we could spend a year creating would never find a home our audience there.

This has two consequences:

1\. It sucks to be a producer for the platform.

2\. The audience is pushed towards endless junk content instead of quality because that's what the algorithm favors and incentivized producers to put into the world.

It did not have to be this way. It still doesn't. The algorithm is an intentional decision to favor one style of content and production over others.

<comment><USER8> Somehow Mark Rober does pretty well only making 12 videos a year. The YouTube algorithm recommends his videos almost instantly upon release.

<comment><USER9> These and the aforementioned YouTubers have their videos accelerated to the top after 10 or more years of consistency in quality, non-controversy, and positive audience engagement. The Algorithm knows any video produced by those creators is going to be of high quality, high information, and have positive response from millions of people, so it behooves YouTube to push those videos to the top.

<comment><USER10> I don't think that's true. Oversimplified for example has only been around for like 3 years.

It's certainly true that "people will like this" is a factor in the recommendations, but that seems... correct? It would be pretty silly if Youtube kept pushing indie films people don't want to watch at them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Generally speaking, "the algorithm being a mystery" seems to be causing a lot of societal ills. What news we see on Facebook, what sources we see on Google, what pressure content creators feel. All of it causes a lot of anxiety and really only profits a small handful of companies by allowing them to dodge moderation duties. Moving companies that rely on UGC closer to a publisher probably is a good thing for the world (and content creators).

<comment><USER12> Serious question, are we at the point where some algorithms are so important in our society that they should be a public good?

Should the government require that Google search, Facebook and YouTube recommendation algorithms be published? And should changes to those algorithms need to meet certain criteria at by regulators, in order to prevent ill effects on society?

I'm thinking there must come a time when our machine algorithms are so impactful in society that we can't afford to leave them in the stewardship of a single private company with only profit motives. I think we probably reached this point a while ago.

<comment><USER13> _> Should the government require that Google search, Facebook and YouTube recommendation algorithms be published? _

Many folks often wish that ranking/recommendation algorithms like PageRank search engine, or Youtube "watch next", or email spam heuristics, etc, be revealed to the public. E.g. the exact algorithm is required by law to be published on Github.

That would hurt society more than help because once the algorithms are public, the code's inner workings can then be _gamed and abused_.

That's the paradox or contradiction: for the algorithms to be _effective_ , they have to be kept a secret to prevent gaming.

Recommendation/ranking algorithms are not to be confused with "security by obscurity" memes. Yes, you can publish the exact algorithm to derive a SHA-256 but that's not the same domain as a ranking algorithm. For Google to transition the algorithms from basic PageRank to Panda to Penguin to Hummingbird, etc ... the inner workings must be kept secret to be effective.

I know it drives people crazy that the algorithms are secret but you can't make them public in a way that stops abusers from using that knowledge against us.

<comment><USER11> "That would hurt society more than help because once the algorithms are public, the code's inner workings can then be gamed and abused."

This happens without it being public knowledge and is commonly referred to as SEO. Keeping the black box a block box hurts more than helps because the privileged few that do have it figured out completely control the narrative. In addition a publicly published algo helps re-introduce competition. I see it as no different than food products being required to list ingredients.

<comment><USER13> _> This happens without it being public knowledge and is commonly referred to as SEO._

I'm not claiming that absolutely zero gaming is possible. For all the successes that the SEO industry achieves, it's still a version of the proverbial blind men (SEO experts) feeling different parts of a giant elephant (the opaque Google algorithm). That's why SEO practitioners still get blindsided by new search engine changes by Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I worked building content sites pre-youtube stars that the same audience gravitates towards. Primarily, I was one of the main designers on giantbomb and gamespot over the years.

The publishing industry is kind of terrible, and the line between real journalism and critique died somewhere around 2008. If I were to pick a point, I'd look to when Jeff was fired by CNET after he gave Kane and Lynch an unfavorable review. But you can see it in the degradation of every major gaming news outlet that used to have full-time employees with a platform stable enough to not bow down to PR teams.

That type of blowback would never happen today because any journalistic wall between the PR folks pushing these products and the content creators no longer exists. YouTube has successfully weaponized content. We like to talk a lot today about how great it is that we don't see ads. That's kind of lie. They are certainly there and we see them everyday, it's just now embedded in the content itself. The journos can't compete, because the PR firms block access to coverage unless the story is preconceived. As an example, back in the day we used to boycott Call of Duty "review" events where they'd fly you in a helicopter at a hotel so you could play the game for 6 hours with someone over your shoulder.

Fandom and "fun" content creation was always a loose proposition ("will i still be doing this at 40" was the bar night saying), but now it's just a quick hit slog. I sympathize with these folks to a degree. They're all independent, they all have no idea if this will be a job even next year, so of course they will take on any sort of shilling to keep their dream going. They need to hustle. It's like running a one-person startup.

I'm more worried about the 10s of thousands of other sad bedrooms where this is pushed as a real industry and a way of life. When startups fail, we engineers and designers fall back to jobs with the skills we learned. It's not as easy for people whose skill was trying to be funny on camera. There's a lot of people chasing the dream at the moment, and of course that's no different than trying to be a movie star, but part of me winces when I open up twitch and see that all this awkwardness is so public and often permanent.

If anyone is curious about where some of this could go, I'd recommend reading Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, a sort of near-future fiction that got a lot of this stuff right before it happened. I consider it the Network (as in the 70s movie) of our age. I fear for the day when the influencers and streamers make their way out of their bedrooms and into our public spaces, and we'll all be part of the show.

<comment><USER15> > I fear for the day when the influencers and streamers make their way out of > their bedrooms and into our public spaces, and we'll all be part of the > show.

I read a lot of complaints about Instagram influencers at Burning Man and how people (men) are trying to sabotage their video shoots by wandering behind the shot with no pants on.

<comment><USER2> That's hilarious. The way to privacy is to ... wander around naked, because male nudity is outside the commoditisation zone?

<comment><USER15> I don't know why, but there is something really unattractive about an older man wearing a t-shirt and no pants (the recommended sabotage outfit.) I imagine the teen audience of the influencers would feel uncomfortable by this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Something my kid said to me about YouTube last year (when he was 10) has always stuck with me, even if it was just a kid's throwaway comment:

"There are basically four generations: the grandparents, the parents, the YouTubers, and the kids."

The YouTubers seem to occupy that niche of ephemeral stardom previously occupied primarily by pop musicians, movie actors, and professional athletes.

The athletes, actors, and musicians are still there (and some of them are of course YouTubers too), but I'm sure my son and his friends know far more 'native' YouTubers than other celebrities.

Not sure what this all means, although it did make me start paying much more attention to YouTube and led to some discussions with my son about what "infotainment" is and the dangers implicit in it.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm repeating myself a lot. Life, and especially adult life, is far from easy. The old world was slow, but it made people grow to their natural spot in a somehow stabler way.

internet 2.1 feels like lightning.

<comment><USER18> I'll tell you a secret: The world is pretty much the same as it's always been, including the people. There are just more of them.

People don't deal with change well, but choosing to believe that the present is an exception to how the human world has operated for millennia only has a short term benefit - validation for those of us in the present. The negative effects of this belief include cutting one's self off from all the experiences of all the humans who came before us.

To learn how to deal with "Internet 2.1" in your life, consider reading some Aristotle, Plato, Alvin Toffler or Eric Higgs.

<comment><USER19> The world didn't have mass many-to-many communication as little as 20-30 years ago. There are a lot of changes in play that the current breed of humans simply don't know how to deal with, _in addition to_ the fact that there are simply more of us.

See: resurgence flat-earthers, neonazis, and other previously-buried-by- irrelevance groups, resurgence of measles + polio, seemingly endless toxic videos dispensed to young children via the 'next video' and 'recommendation' engines, and so on

Sure human behavior is the same as it ever was, but never before has it been so easy for me to affect some random schmuck in France, for example

<comment><USER18> >The world didn't have mass many-to-many communication as little as 20-30 years ago. There are a lot of changes in play that the current breed of humans simply don't know how to deal with

All humans, or the ones you've met? ;)

You prove my point for my by mentioning all those groups... those sorts of people have ALWAYS been around, and probably will be as long as humanity exists. Ever hear of the Luddites? Or the Optimates in ancient Rome?

Certainly, mass media and the internet are new iterations of information distribution, but so were the printing press, the printed word itself, and even bardic songs going back centuries. Each time, the ability to spread information farther, faster and easier Changed Things.

There's a comfort in wanting to believe we live in an age that breaks all the rules, so a lot of people soothe themselves by thinking that it's ok if they're afraid of or not comfortable in the world because after all it's something no one has ever had to deal with before. That lie gives us a comforting feeling, and people prefer a comforting lie over a cold truth anytime.

Sure, the ability to affect a random person in another country is sort of new, but that's an artifact of the present level of technology we have. Having new technology to deal with is actually the status quo of human history. We just keep inventing.

Going back to the past, you could argue that the first printed bibles made it possible to spread a religion faster and farther than ever before, which is true... but the age in which the printing press was invented was not that unlike all the other ages of man... looking back, it was a significant change, but not an all changing event like the discovery of extra terrestrial life or the human machine singularity would be.

We can deal with the world just like we always have.

<comment><USER19> > There's a comfort in wanting to believe we live in an age that breaks all > the rules, so a lot of people soothe themselves by thinking that it's ok if > they're afraid of or not comfortable in the world because after all it's > something no one has ever had to deal with before. That lie gives us a > comforting feeling, and people prefer a comforting lie over a cold truth > anytime

You are right that the printing press was very disruptive for its time. But I would say that every day since the beginning of the industrial revolution is living in a time that "breaks all the rules" as you say

I could retort that it is comforting to call me the crazy one but I still believe that this age of instant, accessible global communication is indeed unique and that, psychologically, we as a species are not ready to deal with it. All throughout history the groups that you and I speak of were always relatively localized; it was very difficult to build a movement that affected all of Europe, for example. Not impossible -- ideas were and are as infectious as ever -- but beset with much much more entropy

Could Russia have facilitated the kind of propaganda/misinformation campaign that it did for the 2016 elections without any of its ever needing to leave their Moscow office in WWII? All else held constant, could these flat- earther/antivax morons have reached nearly as many people and had their movements spread as far and wide as they have in the age of the printing press? No, because entropy. And even when movements did (Lutheranism, for example), it took years to take hold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wish there were alternatives to the Youtube recommendation algorithm. The algorithm in my opinion gives too much weight to frequent uploads of shallow 10+ minute videos (2 minutes of content stretched out to 10 minutes) filled with filler and clickbait-y titles with obnoxious thumbnails. Perhaps there'd be less burnout and increased viewer satisfaction if there were was a way to watch Youtube with alternative recommendation algorithms.

<comment><USER21> I've been watching way too much YouTubes lately and their algorithms seem to do a fairly good job tracking my changing interests while also keeping me current on the channels I like watching all the episodes -- all without ever hitting the subscription button and only ever liking one video. Got on a guitar videos kick lately and through the recommended videos discovered some artists I really like listening to so win/win in my book...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not a huge surprise though, if you consider how much people (myself included) spend just bindging YT videos, the pressure to produce more is crazy high. And they take so much more time to create than watch.

But, nobody is forcing them.. So I mean.. Its self inflicted.. So its a bit hard to garner sympathy.

<comment><USER23> Taking a break for them is directly losing them money. Imagine how much money a company loses by shutting down for say an entire week.

Imagine losing an entire week of revenue for the company. That's a big deal to them.

Especially because their revenue is directly dependent on their popularity. If their content isn't available, people will just move on to the next best thing.

<comment><USER24> That's the same if you're a contractor or work on per hour basis.

Everyone's time has value. It's just more visible in certain cases. Streaming and other modern entertainment stars are not the only ones who have this problem. If fact it's true for everyone.

I guess it's kinda like with terminal disease. Everyone will die and noone knows how much time they have ahead, but when you get a kind of tangible upper limit then suddenly this awarness materializes, even though it shouldn't change much. I think the parallel is that when you can estimate how much money you could get for your time it's harder to discard it. If your time were worth the same without your knowledge it'd be easier. It's just matter of being aware of the number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> From what I've heard, YouTube ad revenue drops significantly in January after the holiday season, which is also sometimes a (contributing) factor in YouTubers taking the month off

</comment><comment><USER26> They are managed by Robots. Just like Uber and Lyft. What did you expect?

</comment><comment><USER27> You can always just... queue a bunch of videos and schedule them for upload while on vacation.

...right?

<comment><USER9> Yes, but you lose recency in whatever you're talking about, especially if you consistently upload a daily video that talks about yesterday's events. Even in a gaming video some of the quips and tangents might be temporally relevant. In other words, a two week old video talking about yesterday's impeachment is no longer interesting to viewers because everyone's kneejerk opinions are already settled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Pretty much any social media job like this, be it YouTuber or Instagram influencer or whatever, seems to be all life-consuming. I would never advise any friend to enter this business. Burnout is practically guaranteed with the level of content the services demand.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _any social media job like this, be it YouTuber or Instagram influencer or > whatever, seems to be all life-consuming_

Isn't this older than social media? Mass media stars, _e.g._ post-War movie stars, were similarly all-consumed.

Maybe one has to go back to _e.g._ Charlie Chaplin to find an era when this kind of celebrity wasn't the norm?

<comment><USER29> Plenty of stars got burned out in Charlie Chaplin's era

<comment><USER30> Including Chaplin himself who mostly stopped acting and releasing films by the 1930s other than one or two a decade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Prob getting burnt out on having to push clickbait via their partner network. If people are upset at Facebook due to the 2016 elections, they should be looking into these networks on YouTube.

<comment><USER32> We can only guess since the article is paywalled :)

<comment><USER33> Click "web", then click the article. They allow you to view the full article if you come from google.

<comment><USER32> Cheers I didn't know this.

I tried both in private tab and normal tab if firefox and article was still paywalled.

Trying again in Chrome did the trick.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will you play video games on a next-gen console? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I enjoy watching game trailers.

I own a PS3 and would love to pick up a PS4.

I will not do so.

On the PS3 I used to play Call of Duty and after a few weeks, I looked at the number of hours I had spent on the system. It was in the range of 50-60 hours I believe.

I basically decided that although fun, I wasn't getting anything long term out of playing. So I stopped. I can use that time to learn, read, spend with family and friends.

The bad thing is that these games aren't designed for short term game play. I know myself and getting a PS4 would involve me spending a large amount of time playing. It would be tremendously fun but the time sink would not be worth it.

So, regretfully, I'll stick to playing World of Goo or some other quick play game on my iPhone instead of getting the big guns.

</comment><comment><USER3> Before having a child, and while she was at home (and sleeping) most of the time, I enjoyed playing the PS3. I actually bought very few AAA games, and mostly played games that came with my PS+ subscription. I did put untold hours into Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3. The last game I bought was GTA IV when it was $20 with all of the extra content. I sold the system when I realized I could only scratch the surface of this massive game that was otherwise enjoyable, and that would be the same story with virtually anything else.

I feel like it's impossible to keep up with big expensive AAA games, because they are simply too big and too awesome. So, I got a 3DS instead, and I can play Animal Crossing with my daughter in the evening, or play strategy games by myself on the train. Even if they are expansive games, they are still portable and don't require big startup time.

I also have a deep desire to _build_ games, along with other things, and I simply can't do that while I am playing these big titles _and_ have a job _and_ a family.

I can see some circumstances in the future where I would feel better about spending lots of time playing immersive games.

</comment><comment><USER4> Unlikely, but not because of a lack of appeal. I'm getting older, having a kid next year, and time for video games has slowly vanished for me.

I sure do miss those teenage years of being able to pour hours a day into an immersive masterpiece like FFVII.

</comment><comment><USER5> Possibly on the new Steam box. I'm slightly curious about whatever the heck that is, but doubtfully on the others. The last console I actually owned was a Nintendo 64. Then I used only computer games and then I gradually phased most of those ou. I couldn't shake the feeling I was wasting time with them as I got older, so I generally only find myself playing games that are less involved like, say, Android games. (Not to start a flamewar or anything. )

</comment><comment><USER6> No. The next generation of consoles needed better game distribution and choice of games, not better graphics. Systems have far outpaced games in graphics power to utilization of that power for a while now.

I want to easily and quickly browse and play different games, without investing hours and $50+ to find out if it sucks or not. That's the problem I have with consoles and they don't seem interested in solving it. I want quick and immediate selection and playing of games, like Netflix is with movies. Like I'm in an arcade, not in a checkout line. Nintendo had the right idea with the Wii. Gaming is more than the latest 3d engine.

</comment><comment><USER7> PS3 perspective: I am not aware of any games that take full advantage of the current generation console. I'm currently playing GTA Online. Aside for the poor quality release, the rendered game world is lush and the game experience is fully engaging. What I understand of the PS4 is that the rendered game world will be even more vibrant and the game experience will not change much. I'll stick with the PS3 and the huge catalog of used games for $20. If the PS4 supported PS3 games, I would consider upgrading.

<comment><USER3> The jump from PS to PS2 was like VHS to DVD. The PS2 to PS3 transition was like going from DVD to Blu-ray (no coincidence that those machines played those respective formats).

But where do you go from "Blu-ray" level gaming? It sure isn't 3D, and 4K console gaming won't be here for a while...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Only if I need to in order to play whatever Bungie builds next - and it appears that Destiny will be available for XBox 360. The only reason I own an XBox is because of Halo, and because I had played every Bungie game since Pathways Into Darkness and would have purchased whatever console I needed in order to do so. I would like to know what others reasons are for ending up with whatever single console they own. What came first? The console or the game?

</comment><comment><USER9> I will eventually, yes but I only just bought a PS3 and have quite a large catalogue of games that I still want to play on PS3 and Xbox 360, even though I've had the 360 for 4/5 years!

I've always been a gamer and even though I have a wife, 2 year old son and another baby on the way I can still find time to play.

</comment><comment><USER10> I bought a PS4 first day. I really enjoy Killzone: SF and Resogun, and Flower is still great. Not much else so far and being released 2013, but I look forward to some exclusives next year.

However, if I had to decide between a XB-ONE, a PS4 and a SteamBox / PC, I'd instantly pick the last one. =)

</comment><comment><USER11> I have the first world problem of having a huge gaming backlog for the PC due to the extra-cheap Humble Bundles, so I'm passing on a console until the consoles become cheaper or offer a bundle.

</comment><comment><USER12> Waiting for MGS5 and FFXV on the PS4.

<comment><USER13> Watch Dogs will be the tipping point for me, I think.

<comment><USER12> Yup, that too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I play my WiiU. I'm going to assume that counts.</comment>


Ask HN: Where best to sell an established website? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have advice/recommendation for where best to sell an established website?<p>The site was once mentioned/interviewed on The BBC, CNN, CNET, TheRegister, Forbes, Silicon etc and was receiving large numbers of unique visitors, now not so much though still steady. I have written an ad but am stuck on where best to promote it. Thanks <comment><USER2> I'm testing out an auction on Flippa.com:

[http://flippa.com/auctions/83341/Innsbruck-Austria-rental- li...](http://flippa.com/auctions/83341/Innsbruck-Austria-rental-listing-site ---Ski-Season)

So far so good. It was a pretty smooth process, and even though it's a niche site, I've gotten a few bids. I'm hoping the price goes up a bit, but I just want to unload it at this point, so from that point of view it looks like I'll succeed.

<comment><USER3> Can you give a few more details on the site itself? I'm fascinated by the idea of "flipping" websites, and wondering what your experience has been. Even though you may not have started out with the intention of selling it to the highest bidder, it sounds like that's your best bet at this point.

-How many hours did you put into it?

-Have you tried any other business models (advertising, subscription, ad words, etc.)?

<comment><USER2> I put enough time into it that I don't think I'll get my money back, but I wanted to at least give it a try, and see how Flippa worked out, and I do want to get rid of it, because I don't live in Innsbruck anymore, and don't speak German well enough to really get the most out of it, and not having it will mean one less thing to worry about maintaining (although it doesn't require much time at this point, it's one less thing on my server).

I put some adsense on the site, and it made a bit of money, but not that much. Subscriptions might work out, but I think you'd have to invest more time in promoting them and the site, which brings you back to doing stuff in German...

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the reply. I completely understand about having "one less thing to worry about" and it sounds like selling to the highest bidder is your best bet at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This thread is extremely relevant to my interests.

I've thought about this for a long time and I'm completely shocked when I see dog-allergies.com (which has only been online for 5 months) selling for $600! I know SOME of this is modern day snake oil salesmen, just working the system to eek out some small profits, but people are obviously making some money at this, right?

</comment><comment><USER4> Why don't you post it here. I am sure lot of HNers would be interested

<comment><AUTHOR> I have put the website[1] up on Flippa along with a domain name[2].

I'm unsure if I should put a low starting price and expected reserve, or expected start price and no/low reserve. Thoughts?

[1] [http://flippa.com/auctions/85671/Planet-Tolkien-com-as- seen-...](http://flippa.com/auctions/85671/Planet-Tolkien-com-as-seen-on-CNN- Forbes-BBC-TheRegister-Silicon)

[2] <http://flippa.com/auctions/85677/alert-ly></comment></comment>


Text on your computer with Messages for web - <AUTHOR> https://messages.android.com/ <comment><USER2> If this was on Android five years ago I would've finally dropped iOS for it. Now: meh.</comment>


The forgotten Americans who ended in the gulag - <AUTHOR> http://www.nysun.com/arts/banished-the-forsaken-by-tim-tzouliadis/82839/

<comment><USER2> Sad stories. It's interesting, that similarly how Western media painted a distorted picture of Soviet communist regime, they now paint a distorted picture of China communist regime. The same deception tactics still works, the existence of forced labors camps (gulags) is very rarely mentioned, horrible human rights abuses go unreported in mainstream media, etc.

When will mankind learn their lessons?

<comment><USER3> Is your argument that conditions in China are comparable to those in Stalinist Russia, and, if so, can you support that argument with evidence?

<comment><USER4> The Soviet regime ran a large system of forced labor camps. China currently runs a large system of forced labor camps. Horrible human rights violations occurred under the Soviet system and are currently occurring in China.

Here's a recent, quite representative, example of the sort of thing that can happen to someone in China:

"Chinese teacher sent to labour camp for earthquake photos" [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/30/chinaearthquake....](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/30/chinaearthquake.china?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront)

Excerpt:

      A Chinese teacher has been sent to a labour camp over his
      internet photographs of schools that collapsed in the
      Sichuan earthquake, a rights group said today.

      Liu Shaokun was ordered to serve a year of "re-education
      through labour", according to Human Rights in China. The
      system does not require a formal charge or criminal trial
      and there is no appeal.

<comment><USER5> This quote doesn't capture the main reason for his jailing. When looking at superficial reasons, it seems unrelated (taking a photo, reading a book, eating ice cream, joining a religion, etc), but the root reason is "causing social unrest". He was taking pictures to expose possible government corruption in the building of the school. This would have caused people to protest and blame the local government for the students' deaths.

Likewise with Falun Gong. Suppressing religion isn't the end goal. It's the fear of someone having influence over a large number of people, and thereby possibly causing social unrest.

Don't read this as a defense of the Chinese government. I'm just trying to clarify the quote to prevent the "how can they jail someone for THAT?" response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess "One Day in the Life of John Smith" didn't sound as interesting.</comment>


Synthetic Data for Deep Learning (2019) - arseny-n https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11512 <comment><USER2> Interesting for sure, I actually contributed to developing tools for making synthetic data recently. This Python module => [https://github.com/artemis- analytics/dolos/tree/master](https://github.com/artemis- analytics/dolos/tree/master) is what we developed. We ended up hitting a snag with our initial research as scaled synthetic data generators are generally not open-source. We put this together to fix that.

It's pretty cool, because both the branches let you create custom generators. One we tinkered with was using T-Digests to profile large datasets to produce synthetic data, rather than just fake data. Basically we're working on something that lets you take in data and spit out something with identical statistical information inside. One thing you can use this for is stripping out confidential data (in theory at least). Another use case was to expand dataset sizes.

<comment><USER3> Having worked extensively on synthetic data, what's your "verdict" on the topic? People seem to be very divided about it.

<comment><USER2> I think it definitely has its uses. Is it an effective drop in replacement for sensitive data in all scenarios? I never really got that impression. My biggest takeaway was that it is excellent for development and early refinement.

Having access to synthetic data like this would let you give lower level analysts or people with lower clearances data similar to the confidential data you're working with. That's a good way to reduce costs, while also developing skills that would have otherwise been difficult to develop without providing access to the data itself.

What I found is that it's a valuable tool for bringing something up to a state where it can be applied to real data, and refined further. So, long story short would be that I think it certainly has uses, however those uses eventually lead back to using real data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In some sense, one could think of human dreams as synthetic data generation. Surely looks a lot like one part of the brain (one network) generates samples to train some other networks in the brain. Perhaps to consolidate the knowledge across all systems, or transfer it from one high-level, flexible slow network to another - a fast, responsive, dumb but highly customized one, both to be used in different situations or for different aspects of life.

<comment><USER5> as a neuroscientist it seems that sleep + dreaming is a lot more complex than that (and nobody really knows what either of those does). but in terms of learning and bridges to regression (DL) and other machine learning, my suspicion would be it helps with generalization + relating experiences to one another, as well as consolidation.

<comment><USER6> I've often wondered if nightmares serve to prepare us to act quickly in worse- case type scenarios. Our mind responding to stress by saying, ok if this goes really bad, what are you gonna do about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're doing synthetic data generation to predict complex 3D character deformations—basically, a full anatomical bone/muscle/fat/skin simulation is computed in thousands of poses (each pose is determined by comparatively minuscule numbers of inputs), and then training on that data set so we can predict high-quality deformations in real-time from live mo-cap data.

Photo-real 3D worlds are particularly appropriate for generating high-quality synthetic ML training data sets—I know a bunch of autonomous driving companies are doing it with great success. (We also use Houdini to generate our 3D data sets.)[0]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKb8ZL3bUbw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKb8ZL3bUbw)

<comment><USER8> Very cool!

We're using GANs to generate synthetic transactional data that preserves temporary and causal correlations [0].

[0] friends link to avoid paywall: [https://medium.com/towards-artificial- intelligence/generatin...](https://medium.com/towards-artificial- intelligence/generating-synthetic-sequential-data-using- gans-a1d67a7752ac?source=friends_link&sk=1ab69626e19b95556cc3b2db83e64cf9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've actually done work on synthetic data development --

[https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont- necessarily...](https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont-necessarily- need-data-for-data-science-48d7bf503074)

Generally, we use it to avoid utilizing 'real' data. Accuracy usually is the same using either synthetic or real data. There are edge cases where one fails due to particular issues about how synthetic data suppresses outliers, etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems that we still don't have a real breakthrough training a machine learning algorithm on synthetic camera images alone and using it in real applications. This is already done successfully for depth images by Microsoft for the Kinect [1], but I haven't seen something like that for normal images. The GTA V dataset is close, but not the real thing... [2]

It is difficult to create high-quality photo realistic images at big scale with enough variance. It is interesting to see, if one can train a network that transfers images (both synthetic and real) to some intermediate representation and then train some detector/classifier/semantic segmentation on it...

I had a lot of fun playing around with a open-source game engine called VDrift to generate ground truth for optical flow, depth and semantic segmentation. I think the video with the ground truth is nice [3], but the graphics of the game weren't that good. All the code is open-sourced on Github if somebody feels like playing around... [4]

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/main-39.pdf) [2] [http://vladlen.info/papers/playing- for-data.pdf](http://vladlen.info/papers/playing-for-data.pdf) [3] [https://vimeo.com/haltakov/synthetic- dataset](https://vimeo.com/haltakov/synthetic-dataset) [4] [https://github.com/haltakov/synthetic- dataset](https://github.com/haltakov/synthetic-dataset)

<comment><USER11> The GTA V dataset doesn't really have enough modes of variation, in my opinion.

To my knowledge, the best public attempt at this is represented by the OpenAI Rubik's Cube / Shadow Robotics dexterous hand demo. [https://openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks- cube/](https://openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks-cube/) [https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07113](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07113)

NVIDIA are also doing some interesting work in this area, but again, I'm not really sure they put enough different modes of variation into it. [https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2018-04_Training- Dee...](https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2018-04_Training-Deep- Networks).

CVEDIA also get really impressive results using similar techniques:- [https://www.cvedia.com/](https://www.cvedia.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Synthetic data is huge right now! I'm currently doing work on synthetic generation with photo-realistic physical models to do inversion problems with CNNs (particularly in the surf-zone and nearshore area, paper coming next week ;) ), and eventually domain adaption. If you want to get your project funded make one of your keywords is "synthetic data"!

<comment><USER13> I'm also interested in potentially looking at inversion problems using CNNs in coastal regions. Is there a way I could reach out to you and chat some time?

<comment><USER12> Sure! Ive had a couple conference papers published on it but am always doing work to improve what we're doing. I added my email to my profile, with a slight typo to avoid spam ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." \- John von Neumann

One might argue that the point of synthetic data _is_ to produce pseudo-random samples, but they are only ever going to reflect the biases of the interpreter and so the critique will still be worth holding for its cautionary significance.

<comment><USER11> The point is to be able to _control_ the correlations that you introduce - <AUTHOR> you can therefore control what your learning algorithm learns.

<comment><USER14> Nice in industrial settings, poor in scientific ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not familiar with the topic. How do you measure the quality of the synthetic data? That is, how close the synthetic samples are from the real ones. Moreover, can you control this quality while generating synthetic samples?

<comment><USER8> You have similarity measures like mutual information score and generally comparing correlations and distributions.

You can also A/B test for specific use cases, for example train a model on the real and the synthetic data and compare relevant metrics.

You can see some of these illustrated on eg: [https://hazy.com/blog/2020/03/23/synthetic-scooter- journeys](https://hazy.com/blog/2020/03/23/synthetic-scooter-journeys)

<comment><USER11> There's also some really interesting research from last year on local dimensionality of a manifold that I really really want to try out.

<comment><USER16> You have a citation on that for me to read?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Typically we find that without further adjustments, there tends to be a substantial domain gap between the synthetic data and the real world data.

We're building something that helps us narrow or completely eliminate the gap between synthetic data and real data at Creation Labs and will have some exciting things to show in the next few weeks on our website (creationlabs.ai)

</comment><comment><USER18> Submitted a lit review for this recently, such an amazing topic that could have huge implications for learning algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER11> For machine vision problems, synthetic data with domain randomisation _definitely_ works, provided, that is, you are able to generate a large enough number of different modes of variation.

In fact, it works so well it feels like cheating.

</comment><comment><USER19> Synthetic data always reminds me the practice of feeding cattle with the meat and bone of other cattle. Will this make our generation's mad cow disease?

<comment><USER20> Maybe, since garbage in is garbage out. But if there's no grass in the first place, what are you going to feed your cattle?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Im working on this for generating synthetic EMR data for researchers to potentially use to study various interventions on Covid-19. Early stages...

</comment><comment><USER22> I have not been able to create synthetic data for 3D bounding boxes. Is there something available that can help?

</comment><comment><USER23> Why does the process of synthesizing data and then training a model on it work well, when hard-coding an algorithm never does?

<comment><USER11> In my mind it's because you have a more direct route to the underlying physics of the problem than either hand-coding features or trying to learn them from real data (at least when that real data is as poorly managed and controlled as it usually is).

Our ML algorithms are _really_ good at finding correlations -- but we don't necessarily know if the correlations in our data are actually the ones we _want_ our system to learn. When we're using synthetic data, we have many more levers at our disposal to ensure that this is the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I live in a higher dimension and my mood always collapses

</comment><comment><USER25> How does this work in an information theoretic sense?

</comment><comment><USER26> very cool</comment>


Reposurgeon's Excellent Journey and the Waning of Python - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8161 <comment><USER2> Rough summary: They moved Reposurgeon from python3 to Go.

python is bad because: GIL Unhappy with python 2 to 3 management Unhappy with python 3 unicode philosophy Library paths

Why Go is good: Faster "small semantic difference"

The tone is quite abrasive and he says that within the year unless python makes dramatic changes, Go is going to take the python developers.

For my comment - he goes into detail about his specific requirement for massive performance on large datasets, doesn't really say why Cython didn't solve the speed problem. I don't think a large fraction of people have those requirements.

The two reasons I think a Go is unlikely to completely swamp python in the near future:

people who need python libraries people who have a strong aversion to a strongly typed language with a primitive typesystem</comment>