As encryption spreads, U.S. grapples with clash between privacy, security - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national%2dsecurity/as-encryption-spreads-us-worries-about-access-to-data-for-investigations/2015/04/10/7c1c7518-d401-11e4-a62f-ee745911a4ff_story.html <comment><USER2> I always found examples such as the one with the trucker, which keep getting brought up in this context, extremely disingenuous. The same sort of argument could easily be used for any tactic that ever resulted in anyone being convicted for something they most likely did - in a hypothetical alternative scenario, they might just as well have been extolling the benefits of torture by saying how after having a few of his fingernails pulled out, the scumbag trucker was more than happy to confess to his crimes.

Nobody is doubting that giving the prosecutors more powers to produce incriminating material will produce more convictions. Emotionally charged anecdotes like this just serve to distract from the discussion about proportionality and possible abuses that we should be having, while providing no relevant information.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's an unfair argument. The assault by the trucker happened and evidence of it existed on the phone. In the post-iOS 8 world that evidence would be unavailable. It's the difference between him getting off or not (or likely getting off depending on the circumstantial evidence).

<comment><USER4> I don't understand why it would be reasonable to require that the phone have a backdoor which allows them to access the data if they have a warrant for that specifically, but not reasonable to require someone to give up the the password under contempt of court if they have a warrant for that specifically.

Not that I necessarily think either is reasonable, but I don't understand in what way the second would be worse? I suppose if a person turned out to have not committed a crime, and there was a warrant against them, if they were required to give up their password, they might fail to remember it?

Is that risk worse or lesser than the risk of authorities being able to e.g. get data without a warrant via the backdoor?

I'm not really sure?

<comment><USER5> Because if there's something really bad on my device, I'd be better off telling the cops "I forgot the password" and risking possible contempt of court rather than them seeing the actual evidence and getting a far worse sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a European, I'm totally in favor of a mandatory backdoor for the US government. It would do wonders to the development of the European IT industry because many governments and cooperations could not continue using US-based IT products. The amount of hubris required to force a backdoor on a global industry and market is really breathtaking and I think the US would shoot themselves in the foot if they tried doing that. It's not like there is a law of nature that makes software development outside of the US impossible.

<comment><USER7> Would companies based in the US not ship a different version of their products that are exported? What would it mean for companies outside of the US. A large number of the products and services my company uses are from European countries.

> It's not like there is a law of nature that makes software development > outside of the US impossible.

Of course, see what I said above. I think what makes the US attractive for software development is the VC industry and culture there; a quick browse of founders in SF will reveal a ton of immigrants attracted to that culture.

<comment><USER6> > Would companies based in the US not ship a different version of their > products that are exported?

They can of course try that but their clients have little reasons to trust them. Apart from that it might be very costly to develop, test, and distribute two versions of each product and to maintain compatibility, all of which puts US companies at a disadvantage.

There is already plenty of evidence for the idea that the privacy crisis helps the European industry. Many new businesses in several European countries are successfully selling privacy-reserving software and services and their future crucially depends on the trust of their customers, so they have to take privacy serious in ways that US companies don't have to, at least for now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _"I don't want a back door," Rogers, the director of the nation's top > electronic spy agency, said during a speech at Princeton University, using a > tech industry term for covert measures to bypass device security. "I want a > front door. And I want the front door to have multiple locks. Big locks."_

This kind of Orwellian doublespeak coming from officials in power should give all sane people pause.

But, even if our right to privacy was not enshrined in the Fourth Amendment, it would not be possible for any government to have their intrusion into our private lives enforced in the long term. Computers have the means to afford people true privacy and they will have it, without respect to those who would deny it.

<comment><USER9> Long term? Smaller and cheaper devices means people are even more easily spied upon. Privacy must be handled as a sacred law, because technology will blow past it. We simply leak too much information as a matter of physics.

<comment><USER10> > Privacy must be handled as a sacred law

Fully agree with this. Technology is merely an amplifying factor here. If a society is healthy, then applications of technologies of the day are non- issues.

Just keep in mind that 1776 would not have been a meaningful year if the founders could not even "assemble" and discuss legitimate grievances without fear of being subject to misuse of state power. This is why we have a 4th amendment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The use of Stingrays (IMSI catchers) and the DEA's collection of international phone records for almost 20 years are more examples of how any power given to law enforcement or the Federal government will be abused, and that abuse will be actively hidden from view.

You can't "find a balance" when the scales are hidden.

<comment><USER12> And the problem with data is that they store it. You don't just have to trust the current government, you have to trust all the governments for the next 50 years. At least in Europe, History tells us that a democracy can rapidly turn into a violent dictatorship.

<comment><USER13> Do you really think, that this can only happen in Europe? (I know, that you meant history, but I am wondering, if humans are so much more democratic in the US? I for my part am sure, that in my country there can be a violent (or covered) dictorship again very soon).

<comment><USER12> What is interesting in the US is that the composition of the population evolves a lot over time. In Europe too to a lesser degree. One could argue that the US is the oldest (and therefore most stable and rooted) democracy. But as the proportion of the hispanic population grows, from a cultural point of view, Mexico becomes sort of part of the history of the US. And not a long history of democracy there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As Jacob Appelbaum observes in the documentary Citizenfour, "What we used to call liberty and freedom we now call privacy. And now people are saying privacy is dead."

<comment><USER15> That's powerful, and probably accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think they have already quite well demonstrated their total disregard for the public's privacy. Now that the horse has bolted they now suddenly realise that they have backed themselves into a dark nasty corner, where everything is going to be encrypted within a few days years.

Sorry, but you have to earn trust and they are unlikely to get it back. Just look at the way geeks look at Microsoft.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

<comment><USER17> Yes. There isn't some big debate going on. The feds did a bad thing by looking in people's bedroom windows. Now people are shutting their blinds. It's not a debate. It's a response. The feds can mandate that people open the windows again but then there will be no more undressing in front of them. The peep show is over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This whole debate is a red herring.

The NSA already has backdoors[1][2] in your Desktop OS (Windows, OSX), in your mobile OS (Android, iOS), in your smartphone hardware (Qualcomm Baseband), in your ISPs network hardware (Cisco, Juniper), in your server hardware (Dell), in your network hardware (most router firmwares), and there's rumors they have backdoors in Intel and AMD CPUs, too.

Why would they be concerned about encryption that runs on top of hard- and software that they can control at will?

[1] [https://gigaom.com/2013/12/29/nsas-backdoor-catalog- exposed-...](https://gigaom.com/2013/12/29/nsas-backdoor-catalog-exposed- targets-include-juniper-cisco-samsung-and-huawei/)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A)

<comment><USER19> It would certainly be the most expensive and hamfisted possible way for NSA to get access to a target computer system.

The more you know about how encryption software is actually built and deployed in large-scale applications, the sillier this "split key escrow" trial balloon sounds. It is facially ridiculous and will never happen. Good for pageviews, though!

<comment><USER20> What makes it expensive and hamfisted?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What many here are asserting is basically a form of individual sovereignty, that a person should have the ability to create and share information that the government cannot read. This will never happen. The government is always going to assert that your rights are contingent on the government's ability to violate those rights if it thinks it has sufficient cause according to some standard. Many of you are arguing that the government should completely give up that ability for regular crime that probably happens thousands of times across the country every day.

You are now thinking, what about encryption, PGP, passphrases, I have a legal right to not have to give those up, don't I? Yes, we are very lucky that in the United States the Supreme Court has decided that you don't have to give up a password. But this was because it used to be that a password didn't actually protect very much and the legal system hasn't caught up yet. Lock combinations are meaningless when the government can just crack the safe, and passwords to email are meaningless when they can just compel the email service to cough up the mail. The court's aware of PGP, but the times it actually hasn't been able to get the data through other means is currently small so it's still not worth the political battle. When the device that most people can carry around in their pockets is sufficiently secure that nobody can get the contents without compelling the owner to give up the passphrase, legislation will be introduced for backdoor access or the Supreme Court will rule that you have to give up the passphrase. That is why device LE access is, believe it or not, a compromise. They are willing to overlook nerds using PGP because that's still niche, but encrypted unbreakable devices are an existential threat to the government's ability to control everyone's life for good or for ill.

I still think it needs to be fought as long as possible, but I am under no illusions that we will ultimately lose.

</comment><comment><USER22> Let's suppose for a minute that there is some legislation put forth forcing encryption to have back doors inserted, or some other sort of key escrow. Why would anyone with the know-how and a privacy concern not just write an implementation of a known crypto algorithm?

Essentially, how would this legislation do anything but compromise the security of law-abiding people while not at all reducing the capabilities of those the US government wishes to stop?

<comment><USER23> Seriously, it is way too late for this. You can't change the math, which is what crypto is. Now that people know it, you can somehow remove that information from the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't get it (aka hate it), any sophisticated government adversary (terror groups, organized crime, etc) will simply use the existing strong security measures that the government cannot crack (since they have no escrowed key).

To me that means this measure isn't about the boggy-man of terrorism, etc rather its about everyday criminal investigations. I think people are (overly) willing to give up their liberties when faced with the major boggy-man threats, but I think convincing the public to give up liberty to catch the pot dealer down the street or the dude embezzling from mega-corp is going to be a much harder sell politically.

</comment><comment><USER25> We need to start having key signing parties. And we need better software to manage and run them.

No key escrow proposal (which the multi-party proposal in this article is) will ever be safe. If the key can be assembled, it can be cached; and as we've seen in the past decade it's very hard for any agency to deny itself surveillance powers.

</comment><comment><USER26> If the FBI wanted car manufacturers to design seat belts and airbags with murderers and rapists in mind, it wouldn't have taken months of debate to reject the idea. Just because we've entered the domains math and CS, we get months of dithering, contemplating whether or not to force domestic companies to install complex new self-destruct functions into their products.

Al-Qaeda have been using Mujahedeen Secrets — a Windows-based encryption app — since 2007. Legislators should test whether potential new laws can have any impact on such uncontroversially abhorrent software. If, like split keys, they fail the Mujahedeen Secrets test, they can only damage our collective security.

<comment><USER27> What is abhorrent about this software?

<comment><USER28> Nothing, according to Bruce Schneier - [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/mujahideen_se...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/mujahideen_secr_1.html) \- perhaps OP just doesn't like encryption when used by bad guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> For the sake of argument, if we assume that US government has right to protect its citizens from the monstrous conspiring world, why are they exporting these backdoor technologies to secret services all over the world? Even the countries championing in least human rights, poverty, oppression have these backdoor technologies to use against their citizens. US citizens at least enjoy the freedom of barking, citizen of those other countries don't...

</comment><comment><USER30> Two main thoughts:

> Hailed as a victory for consumer privacy and security, the development > dismayed law enforcement officials, who said it threatens what they describe > as a centuries-old social compact in which the government, with a warrant > based on probable cause, may seize evidence relevant to criminal > investigations.

This is an interesting perspective. I tend to view this the opposite way. Until spring 2013, we tended to believe that the state doesn't rummage around in the private lives of individual citizens, except for warranted investigations of a few tax cheats, drug dealers, racketeers, and the like. Snowden's disclosures were a massive trust-loss event, and both companies and individuals will be loath to offer any concession to law enforcement without a clear demonstration of good faith and limited access to private data.

I'm also glad to see this perspective from the top cybersecurity advisor at NIST:

> "The basic question is, is it possible to design a completely secure system" > to hold a master key available to the U.S. government but not adversaries, > said Donna Dodson, chief cybersecurity adviser at the Commerce Department's > National Institute of Standards and Technologies. "There's no way to do this > where you don't have unintentional vulnerabilities."

Personally, I'm hoping the United States eventually realizes Dodson is right and that preserving both individual security and law-enforcement access is futile. Hopefully the United States will give up on these key escrow / split key schemes and let meatspace force break encryption on a warranted, rare basis as investigations require.

<comment><USER31> > Until spring 2013, we tended to believe that the state doesn't rummage > around in the private lives of individual citizens

Not sure if I'm taking your comment the wrong way, if so I apologize... but a lot of us have known for quite a bit longer than spring 2013

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wonder if the arguments will be the same once there is tech to read human brains.

</comment><comment><USER33> > _"What we're concerned about is the technology risks" bringing the country > to a point where the smartphone owner alone, who may be a criminal or > terrorist, has control of the data [...]_

Wow, it's almost like criminals and terrorists would be secure in their persons and effects, as would the rest of us!

Then law enforcement and the TLAs might actually have to do real, actual investigative work. Oh, darn.

</comment><comment><USER34> It is easy to fall into a nihilistic, hopeless attitude when faced with problems of this size. While this problem can affect anybody, I suspect the these feeling about feasibility of change affect the people that create modern technologies in a specific way: it distracts and hides just how much power _we_ retain, that cannot be collected by the people trying to place themselves at the top of rapidly centralizing power structures.

The power I'm referring to is the power retained by whomever is _actually implementing_ the world we live in. A tyrant can issue all the orders and threats they want - unless someone caries out those orders, the tyrant is just making a lot of hot air. Implementation is what matters in the end, and I think the readers of HN have a pretty good idea who it is that will end up implementing our future.

So the next time someone asks you to implement some bit of the surveillance state, use your power and let some bit of that future go unimplemented. It may be a trivially small thing that may not affect much in the long run. Those little things add up, and the message it sends is important.

I realize that it is hard to take a stand. There is always the possibility of being fired - or worse. Just remember that the engineers working around technology have an advantage over the typical "protest" crowds of the past: the people that want to use the surveillance state need engineers to make their tools. So take advantage of any little bit of power that you have and hold the line in some small way against this creeping tyranny. Above all, remember that tools like this very forum are available.

I'm not saying there is no risk, and I'm not saying there won't have consequences. What I am suggesting is that unless we start making these principled stands _right now_ , the situation is only going to get worse, and the sacrifices required to fix this situation only rise with time.

Please. This is our future, and as clichée as it sounds, there is a lot of truth to the idea that the real power comes form strength in numbers.

==

/* speaking of the power held by engineers... I suspect "work to rule" ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work- to-rule) ) could be a particularly effective tool in the hands of the people the keep important parts of the world running */

<comment><USER35> You only need a few sympathetic hardware engineers to put in hardware back doors, however, and it's practically impossible to verify that the hardware you have is trustworthy by the time it's in your hands. A million engineers all making sure they don't implement surveillance functionality can't undo the work done by the handful of bad guys unless they're somehow able to inspect every piece of hardware down to the lowest level and verify manually that it's safe.

The user has to do the same thing when they receive their hardware for obvious reasons.

And software is no different. There are lots of FOSS devs who would refuse to help implement surveillance systems, yet there's no practical way to prevent one small team of bad actors from injecting code somewhere between software- conception and delivery-to-end-user.

The only possible way to be confident about your technology would be to build it yourself from the ground up. You would need to design and fabricate the hardware yourself, from passive components up, and re-implement the _entire_ software stack by hand.

Even if you did all that, if you're a desirable target then you still face a very high risk that one of the people working somewhere in your project will be employed by your opponent and will compromise your system.

The conclusion I have come to is that if you have anything you don't want intercepted, you simply can't use any modern device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This reminds me of a bully complaining when suddenly everyone is learning martial arts... A bit ridiculous

</comment><comment><USER37> It seems like encryption methods that rely on the government, like some sort of government-run key escrow, are the inevitable solution. Corporations are relatively secure from malicious threats and the government gets the access it wants.

<comment><USER38> Bad actors won't respect the ban on effective encryption tools. So giving the government keys expends massive resources and doesn't actually solve the problem that it proposes to solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can anyone recommend a good read discussing the relationship between security and privacy?

</comment><comment><USER40> Wait, what? You need security, such as encryption to get privacy? How is that a clash?

</comment><comment><USER41> giving tools that help law enforcement do their job is a good thing. but if those tools are so easily replaced by current market or future market alternatives then pushing for those tools just kills your industry.

</comment><comment><USER42> Safety, security, laziness, pick two.

</comment><comment><USER43> Among my concerns are those working for legitimate political change. I expect that's because I have very vivid memories of Watergate, as well as some memories of the Vietnam War protests.

<comment><USER44> There's no need to even go back that far. The treatment of David Miranda, Manning's imprisonment, Kiriakou's imprisonment, Snowden's ensured imprisonment should he ever leave the safety of his current umbrella, continued harassment and infiltration of anarchist and leftist orgs in California and Oregon and elsewhere by all levels of law enforcement.

The FBI continues to disproportionately expend resources on environmental groups despite no cases of loss of life from green direct action, while admitting themselves that right-wing militias present a greater domestic threat than even the dreaded foreign terrorism they're so happy to prove they're protecting us from by spending years deliberately radicalizing and then entrapping harmless fools.

Law enforcement motivations cannot be ever trusted when it comes to your privacy.

<comment><USER45> Law enforcement in its current form can't be trusted period. It's too biased with its own political and financial agendas and does very little in terms of law enforcing and too much of concocting.

If mental healthcare got a sliver of the attention and budgets defense+LE get i personally think we'd all be better off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is there really any "security" lost ? I mean, last I checked, the NSA had little to show for all the snooping around (other than possible economic benefits).</comment>


How to attract people to work on very old and outdated technologies? - <AUTHOR> https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/115206/how-to-attract-people-to-work-on-very-old-and-outdated-technologies <comment><USER2> I've been pondering starting a consulting business to help small companies maintain or migrate old apps written in stuff that's not supported any more, because I suspect this might be a good business opportunity ("where there's muck, there's brass"), with not too much competition, since people tend to prefer focusing on new technologies. I personally have no issue with using old languages, tools and platforms.

Is anyone doing something similar? My main fear would be failure to deliver, since there is more uncertainty in the process; you have to make sure you have the source code from the client, and that you can find not just the development tools (eBay, etc.) but also the manuals and the OS to run them, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER3> _"I work in a IT company that is deeply specialized in projects made with old and outdated technologies"_

If I was in his position, I think I would just leave the company. Think of it as a Kobayashi Maru solution.</comment>


How the U.S. Could Retaliate Against North Korea - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-18/how-the-u-s-could-retaliate-against-north-korea.html <comment><USER2> Interesting how so much of the discussion in about retaliation and how little seems to be about being certain who was behind what.

<comment><USER3> I guess what really happened doesn't matter much, what's important is what people believe.

How fun would it be if the US started an all-out war against NK (ok, that's really unlikely but let's just imagine it) and then find out it was all the doing of some 15yo American kid in his parents basement.

<comment><USER4> > How fun would it be if the US started an all-out war against NK

Like against Iraq,you mean,which had nothing to do with 9/11 and which half is now basically run by the worse terrorists in the history of terrorism?

<comment><USER5> And now another Bush is aiming for the white house...

Then again, do NK have any natural resources that the energy corporations could make a dime on?

<comment><USER6> Probably lots, but there would be no exploitable occupation. The south would take over a unified Korea, and they have plenty of qualified resource extraction companies.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, i guess Samsung (seriously, that company is a real life ACME) would be quite happy to move into NK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the US should retaliate by flying drones/ballons overhead that will jam their state-controlled media with the "The Interview" played on a constant loop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now that.... that is the best idea ever! Absolutely fitting, funny and fair.... oh, and totally non-violent too.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some good resources to get started with Information Retrieval? - <AUTHOR>

I haven't been in touch with hardcore academics since around 2 years.
Recently coming across a few IEEE papers on twitter(finding hot trends, ranking tweets, etc), I'm thinking of teaching myself some information retrieval from scratch, but from this standpoint topics like NLP, IR seem quite hard to fathom, or even to begin with in the first place.
Any pointers to make the journey smoother, essential foundations? trusted/good books? fun experiments for self learning? IR specific wikis/discussion groups?
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> _Managing Gigabytes_ is one of the more well-known textbooks...

Really though - if you want to get started with IR, your best bet is probably to get a job at Google. This is one of those fields where industrial practice is light years beyond academic research, and once you get a job at Google in basically anything, it's relatively easy to transfer to Search and learn how the system works.

<comment><USER3> I am not convinced though. I don't think nooglers are assigned to Google Search team. They won't expose their search-algorithm to a rookie.

<comment><USER2> It's significantly easier to get into Google and then transfer to search quality than it would be to get into a graduate program, get the Ph.D, and then get the necessary data and machines to do top-level work in IR. Just look at the number of tenured professors that accept jobs at Google.

FWIW, I've been working in Google Search Quality since I joined the company nearly two years ago. I don't work in ranking, but I have high-level knowledge of how the whole system works that's better than you'd get out of a textbook.

<comment><USER3> After a bit of googling I found out that I was wrong in assuming that search- team of Google is reserved only for veterans and freshers are not allowed. Also it's a fact that you learn more from industrial exposure than that of textbooks.

As for OP, I got a nice resource, which may help him currently: <http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/ir/></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ctrl Shift Face: A growing 'deepfakes' YouTube channel - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/28/youtube_deepfakes_channel/ <comment><USER2> I would imagine that in the future video encoders will start to automatically include a cryptographic signature every X frames, which then players will become aware of and show an indicator for "original / modified" content.

<comment><USER3> It'd be too easy to fake, just replace the sensor in an approved camera with your own data feed.

And that's assuming it wouldn't be somewhat trivial to dump keys from one or more cameras on the market to create a an easy tool or resignvideo.com... which is a massive assumption.

As the movie industry has already seen, cryptography doesn't help you when you push out the keys to everyone. It'd be about as effective as DRM is at stopping video piracy.

<comment><USER4> You're not thinking this through.

The problem isn't that creators can make fake videos (which would be analogous to DRM). Let them. There is no harm in it. The problem is that users have no way of verifying true videos. This _can_ be solved with cryptography, because both parties involved (creators and viewers) would want this to work.

In other words, DRM is about forcing _everyone_ to do a thing. Verification is about allowing _willing participants_ to check a thing. Different scenarios.

Companies could make tamper-proof sensor modules that do the signing right where it matters. The important thing is to make sure they aren't astronomically priced and don't compromise privacy.

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry, but you're not thinking this through. Being able to prove that a video file is the unaltered output of a particular camera is in no way a useful protection against fake videos. Proving that file A is genuine tells us nothing about whether file B is fake.

Let's say I want to create and circulate a fake sex tape featuring a senior politician. In a world where signed sensors are common but not mandatory, the absence of a signature says nothing at all about the integrity of my video - there are still millions of cameras in the world that produce unsigned files. In a world where they are mandatory, I can simply fake the video in software and then re-record it using a high-resolution display and a signed sensor. A digital video expert might be able to prove that such a re-recording process took place, but I highly doubt that they'd be able to say so with any degree of confidence if there's a bunch of sensor noise and a couple of rounds of low-bitrate transcoding.

Signed sensors won't do anything to undermine the credibility of fake videos, but they may have the opposite effect if they're hacked - I can "prove" that my deepfake is genuine, because I've extracted a signing key or injected a bitstream into a camera module.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2018/09/09/why- dig...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2018/09/09/why-digital- signatures-wont-prevent-deep-fakes-but-will-help-repressive-governments/)

<comment><USER6> You don't need to be able to prove the video is raw footage, you just need to be able to verify that a publisher you trust says they recorded it. An HMAC allows you to verify that a message (like a video file) was not modified after the author signed it.

<comment><USER5> Hypothetical: An anonymous source releases CCTV footage that appears to show a public figure urinating on a homeless person. Do you really believe that we'll all ignore that footage because the signature doesn't belong to a major news organisation?

<comment><USER7> Yes. We will.

Because the future us will be conditioned to do so by our cryptographically integrated devices. There'll be so much fake video out there that we'll get accustomed to seeing it on our devices with the big huge "fake" sign flashing on it.

(Or, again, even worse, it will not have the "real" sign flashing on it that the video from validated publishers and cameras will have.)

We can be conditioned to do this extremely quickly. Again, ActiveX is what made all the plugin security warnings start popping up everywhere. But after a while, plugins like flash and unity even fell to the reality of us having been conditioned to click "Do Not Run Plugin" whenever we saw that warning. Are we better off without flash and unity? Probably, but that's beside the point. The point is that masses can be conditioned to implement their own control when you set up a system where only data meeting a certain standard is accepted. And it's a hardware standard. Consider very carefully the position over us that such a system would put hardware makers and those with power over hardware makers in.

Now again, I'm not arguing that fakes are not a problem. They are indeed a problem. Just saying we should go about solving the problem with extreme care and caution.

<comment><USER5> So you're arguing that at some point in the future, nobody will give even the slightest credence to amateur footage captured on camera phones, small business CCTV systems and a million other sorts of non-corporately-owned camera? Because I think that future is worse than the one that's full of fake video.

<comment><USER8> > So you're arguing that at some point in the future, nobody will give even > the slightest credence to amateur footage captured on camera phones

I think that's the end goal of all the "deep fake" hysteria we're being primed with. In the future if some damning video of a politician or other elite member of society pops up the defense will simply be "well you can't rule out that it's a fake, look, it's not signed and it's not in our database of trusted videos!"

<comment><USER9> Or the end goal of the "fake news" scare in general (not to say that there aren't sites that specialize in making up news.) To combat "fake news," you start whitelisting "true news," and defining it by the influence of the provider, not the content. In the end, you just end up with state news sources.

related: It's telling that "factchecking" isn't a dialogue between various authorities, but instead just a bunch of weird private judicial systems with no appeals courts, selected and assigned to specific stories by internet aggregation intermediaries. Eventually, this can't help but shake out as stories being divided into two categories: _factual_ and _banned from distribution._

I sadly feel that we're about 10 years away from licensing journalists with a security clearance-type process that must be sponsored by an approved outlet. The PropOrNot at the Post shook me a bit.

<comment><USER10> 1st amendment won't allow that, but then again people seem to want to throw out the 2nd without a constitutional convention so it's not impossible. I can see the arguments now, "it's the freedom of the press, are you the press? Then why do you have a own a fully automatic printing press?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Someone has to put a deepfake Zuckerberg video up on Facebook where he forecasts a terrible financial quarter.

Maybe that would have some influence about how seriously they take takedown requests.

<comment><USER12> To any one who reads this, don't actually do that. I wouldn't put it past Facebook to file a serious lawsuit against you. If it spread far enough, you could cause serious damage, and the SEC might even get involved.

<comment><USER13> If I were going to do this, and I thought it would cause such a storm, I'd take a raspi wardriving and find an open router somewhere, and then upload it via TOR to liveleak or imgur or something like that using an old netbook sourced from Craigslist. Then wipe the devices used and sell 'em back on Craigslist, or drop 'em off at Goodwill or some recycling company. Plausibly deniable and all that.

<comment><USER12> Some one's been watching too much Mr. Robot... for what it's worth, don't bother with imgur over tor; they block uploads from those ips. You can, however, use the lunapic upload to imgur feature. Public library also might be an option, though I might reccomend i2p. Whether it's really "more secure", I dont know, but it doesn't have the same mainstream knowledge (or use by journalists), so three-letter guys would be slower to break it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Could we get the link changed to the actual YouTube channel? [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKpH0CKltc73e4wh0_pgL3g](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKpH0CKltc73e4wh0_pgL3g)

</comment><comment><USER15> How hard is it for news sites to include links to other websites other than their own? Like thanks for at least calling out the name of the channel but maybe make the name a hyperlink?

<comment><USER16> Agreed that they should link to the channel explicitly, but if you click on one of those videos, they take you to the channel

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Articles like these make me eager for advances made in the 'authenticity' market. I recently learned of a company called Truepic[0] that specializes in photo and video verification.

From the New Yorker article I read:

 _" Truepic, a startup in San Diego, aims at producing a new kind of photograph—a verifiable digital original. Photographs taken with its smartphone app are uploaded to its servers, where they enter a kind of cryptographic lockbox. "We make sure the image hasn't been manipulated in transit," Jeffrey McGregor, the company's C.E.O., explained. "We look at geolocation data, at the nearby cell towers, at the barometric-pressure sensor on the phone, and verify that everything matches. We run the photo through a bunch of computer-vision tests." If the image passes muster, it's entered into the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain. From then on, it can be shared on a special Web page that verifies its authenticity. Today, Truepic's biggest clients are insurance companies, which allow policyholders to take verified photographs of their flooded basements or broken windshields. The software has also been used by N.G.O.s to document human-rights violations, and by workers at a construction company in Kazakhstan, who take "verified selfies" as a means of clocking in and out. "Our goal is to expand into industries where there's a 'trust gap,' " McGregor said: property rentals, online dating. Eventually, he hopes to integrate his software into camera components, so that "verification can begin the moment photons enter the lens._" [1]

[0] [https://truepic.com/](https://truepic.com/)

[1] [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/in-the-age- of-...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/in-the-age-of-ai-is- seeing-still-believing)

<comment><USER18> How does Truepic work? What's stopping me from spoofing sensor data on my client?

<comment> frosted-flakes Probably nothing. But it solves 99% of the problems it's meant to solve. Casual insurance fraud, for example.

<comment> munk-a Preventing casual insurance fraud and guarding against deep fakes are very different problems, with a very stark contrast in terms of the effort and technical aptitude available.

Occasionally a security minded computer savy person might pull one over on the insurance company - but most clients aren't going to have the expertise or dedication to correctness. To contrast that - the pool of people who would try and produce a deep fake, especially in the political realm, have already decided to invest a good amount of investigation and effort and are likely rather technically minded.

So this would stop the script-kiddie equivalent actor in the deep fake realm, but I am more concerned about dedicated nefarious actors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> a few days ago, I was searching YouTube for a video on my TV and I found Bill Hader's impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is impressive BTW, but I didn't realize what was going on with his face. At first I thought, wow, he's physiognomy is like Arnold, but something weird was going on. It took several trials until I realize that Arnold's face was superimposed on Bill's face. Spooky.

<comment><USER19> I had a similar experience with that same video. It was suggested to me in the YT recommendations (I had watched Bill Hader on Late Show with Stephen Colbert previously).

I genuinely thought "wow, when he squints his eyes he really looks like Arnold". The transitions between Bill's own face and Arnold's were totally seemless to me.

I finally realized what was going on when I saw the channel's name, and it spooked me that I had fallen for it.

<comment><USER16> > I genuinely thought "wow, when he squints his eyes he really looks like > Arnold". The transitions between Bill's own face and Arnold's were totally > seemless to me.

my experience, exactly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing I don't see talked about much is the Uncanny Valley. No other technology has made it past it and looking at these they definitely have not either. Is there any reason to think that "deepfakes" will leapfrog it somehow?

<comment><USER21> I can't say that though... had these videos been sent to me and it was mentioned "Arnold lost weight" or "Brad Pitt reshot the scene after shedding some pounds" I'd have probably been less of a sceptic and in a quick pass this "fake news" could have got a pass from me or others. It's an interesting time and if you're doing cursory browsing of news bites for the day this may fly right past...

<comment><USER20> The Fight Club one I couldn't tell was I looking at Edward Norton or Brad Pitt the whole time. Definitely in the valley for me but I guess I was looking for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Generally the best way I've found to detect deep fake video is to listen to the audio.

When we have deepfake video _and_ deepfake audio we'll be in trouble. At least for moving images.

<comment><USER23> [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.06006.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.06006.pdf)

These authors worked/work at baidu.

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3k7mgn/baidu-deep- voice-s...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3k7mgn/baidu-deep-voice- software-can-clone-anyones-voice-with-just-37-seconds-of-audio)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is multi-layered problem with no simple answers but many comments here touch on solutions, note there will not be 1 solution. Here are a couple of concepts I know are being worked on

\- Secure Data at the Source -

Public Created - I have seen some demo's of phone apps that put video and pictures from phone directly on the blockchain with gps, time stamps etc.. Also have heard of dongles being added to phones

Professionally Created at Device - have read about hardware getting processors to secure data directly on the blockchain at the device.

Created at Editing Software - This could be connected to the identity of the original on the blockchain and then the edited version has notes with it and added to the blockchain as an edited version of the first.

Security cameras for Customs and Border Patrol are getting blockchain capabilities added per this quote - " Factom (blockchain) has integrated their technology into two brands of cameras used by CBP at border locations to ensure data collected from these cameras is tamper proof" \- [http://www.activecyber.net/dhs-st-lays-out-a-broad-yet- innov...](http://www.activecyber.net/dhs-st-lays-out-a-broad-yet-innovative- portfolio-of-cybersecurity-research-in-this-years-showcase/)

IoT Devices - This micro processor can be added to an IoT (raspberry pi and the like) device and secure data the source - [https://iot- sas.tech/](https://iot-sas.tech/)

Professionals (media) and citizens can then have proof of what and when they created the video and potential a certification can be added in manor and tool for others to check the video is in fact the original.

\-- Identify Fakes -- Two articles from universities working on it [https://jsis.washington.edu/news/deep-fakes-fake-news-and- wh...](https://jsis.washington.edu/news/deep-fakes-fake-news-and-what-comes- next/)

[https://medium.com/jsk-class-of-2019/six-lessons-from-my- dee...](https://medium.com/jsk-class-of-2019/six-lessons-from-my-deepfake- research-at-stanford-1666594a8e50)

None of the above completely solves the issue but with implementing these and having standards the public can start to trust what they are watching is authentic.

</comment><comment><USER4> The scare over this is overblown.

1\. If the image quality is good and if you pause the video, the artifacts are pretty obvious.

2\. Making meme videos is not a problem. You have to think about serious scenarios and ask yourself whether they were impossible before. In a lot of cases they were possible before without using AI. People edited interviews and staged recorded events since forever.

<comment><USER25> Memesters are at the end of the tech hierarchy. They're using stuff that's cheap or free.

That doesn't mean everybody is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think where this will shine, creative people who want to make movies but not enough money to cast more than maybe a handful of people.

</comment><comment><USER27> How about training a neutral net on fake videos to make it able to detect faked videos.

<comment><USER28> easier said than done my friend.

<comment><USER29> whattya mean? you just train it. it's a neural network. /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What are some of the libraries out there to do this stuff with?

<comment><USER31> [https://github.com/deepfakes/faceswap](https://github.com/deepfakes/faceswap)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not knocking it all, but much like CRT's used to provide free anti-aliasing, it seems as though part of the blending is achieved by the compression artifacts.

</comment><comment><USER33> our benevolent media is worried about losing control of the propaganda machine..

<comment><USER34> I really don't see a reason to celebrate our accelerating slide into solipsism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I find that putting a deeply faked face of an enemy on a video where someone is brutally killed or executed to be strangely pleasing.</comment>


Facebook threatens to sue man who changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/12/16/facebook-sue-mark-zuckerberg/

<comment><USER2> I feel bad for his family ("he says he plans to change his family's names as well"). I imagine him having a teenage son or daughter that can't wait to be seen at school the next day.

</comment><comment><USER3> Man sells likes, Facebook sues. What this has to do with someone's name or why anybody, Facebook included, should care, is beyond me.

<comment><USER4> Ignoring the name of the business owner, what are the grounds for the lawsuit that Facebook is filing, or threatening to file?

<comment><USER5> Israeli entrepreneur Rotem Guez has legally changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg. It's his latest response to a legal battle he's fighting with the social networking giant over his Like Store.

[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-is-suing-mark- zu...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-is-suing-mark- zuckerberg/6375)

<comment><USER4> It seems like this guy violated Facebook's Terms of Service, so they shut down his account. I don't understand how violating Facebook's ToS gives Facebook the right to sue. I was asking about that legal detail.

If a business were to pay 5000 third-party individuals to "Like" a page, that business might not have a Facebook page and may have never agreed to the Facebook ToS. In such a case it seems to me that Facebook's only option would be to shut down the 5000 accounts who posted fraudulent Likes.

How does one distinguish a fraudulent Like from a true Like? If someone gave me money to Like something, I might go check it out, and actually, truly, like it. Then what? What if I Liked the thing but gave the money back? It seems to me that a judge or jury would have to decide these things, after gathering evidence and testimony, and there's no way to scale _that_.

Obviously Facebook will be able to find the businesses offering to pay for Likes, but I don't see how they can go after them (legally) if they have no direct connection to Facebook.

(The 'Like Store' in this story did have a direct connection to Facebook, so Facebook was able to shut that down and able to invoke the Facebook ToS.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope facebook sues this psycho guy out of his mind, he is a disgrace as an "entrepreneur"</comment>


Faster Spelling Correction algorithm (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.faroo.com/2012/06/07/improved-edit-distance-based-spelling-correction/

<comment><USER2> Pre-processing a fixed data-set in order to optimize search is a pretty well known technique (the phone companies have been using "preordering" (specifically Modified Preorder List Traversal [1]) as a means of routing phone calls and diagnosing network issues for a very long time.

The downside to any preorder algorithm is that you must rerun the preorder generation code anytime the input changes (in this case a dictionary) and often you must allocate extra storage to hold the pre-processed input.

This is a really interesting algorithm but, as always, you have to know the pros and cons and apply it where if fits (i.e. Not somewhere that needs a compressed dictionary).

[1] [http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/31669/Hierarchical- Tree-...](http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/31669/Hierarchical-Tree- Represented-by-Modified-Preorder)

</comment><comment><USER3> See also the Levenshtein Automatons used by Lucene 4.0 for fuzzy matching ... fun story, although they had to treat some Python code as a "black box" when implementing it ...

[http://java.dzone.com/news/lucenes- fuzzyquery-100-times](http://java.dzone.com/news/lucenes-fuzzyquery-100-times)

Looks like some interesting research and dev going on in this space at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmm...

They don't mention the approach I'd take for a naive spellcheck:

Generate a (giant) trie from the dictionary. Then perform a DFS on the trie allowing only <the current closest word's number of edits> edits from the input word, keeping track of the edits done so far - try no changes at each node first, then a deletion, then a change, then an insertion. This works better with a smaller alphabet size.

An optimization: a DAWG is potentially even better space-wise than a hashmap (effectively it ends up compressing the input data), but takes a while to precompute.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a nice approach, I've implemented it in Golang a while back. It's really fast, but the cost in memory is huge, especially if you store bigrams and not just single words. But it's really elegant in its simplicity.

BTW - if anyone's interested in the Go implementation let me know, I'll try to find it and post it somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting, though I'm curious about whether this type of algorithm is state of the art for accuracy. At this time spell checkers are pretty much fast enough, but aren't always terribly good at suggesting replacements. I would imagine that systems based on n-grams are more effective.

<comment><USER3> it mentioned it's for search engines, in which case you may be checking against a massive wordlist taken from a search index, so accuracy isn't (quite) as important as speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4080791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4080791)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8201598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8201598)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7048225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7048225)

</comment><comment><USER8> To me, it seems to be the same as the Norvig algorithm, except that only deletes are considered. Which allows them to pre-calculate misspellings with modest storage cost.

Am I mistaken?

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know how this compares to the FST/DFA stuff in Lucene 4.x?

</comment><comment><USER10> More or less a repost of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7048225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7048225).

</comment><comment><USER11> Note; this article is from June 2012.

</comment><comment><USER12> hmmm... 1000x? how does it scale though?

<comment><USER13> It's easy to say "1000x" when they don't mention the reference :)

Actually even reading the article I'm not completely certain where that 1000x comes from, I suppose it's when compared to the naive approach.

<comment><USER14> I think it's compared to Peter Norvig's approach:

> This is three orders of magnitude less expensive (36 terms for n=9 and d=2)

Three orders of magnitude is 1000. Peter Norvig's approach was described above with:

> still expensive at search time (114,324 terms for n=9, a=36, d=2)

So 114,324 / 36 = 3,175, so "three orders of magnitude", and I suppose he went conservative by saying "1000x" rather than "3000x".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 1000x is still O(1000N) == N. So technically not significantly faster.

<comment><USER16> Except that 'spelling' is a bounded problem. There aren't going to be more words in the dictionary, at least not orders more, any time soon. 'Scaling as the word list grows' is meaningless. So the only definition of 'faster' that matters is the one they used.

<comment><USER17> That's a rather "English only" view on the topic. Spelling is not a bounded problem in every language.

Some power languages (Dutch, German) have an infinite number of words, as you can take 2 nouns (fe a and b) and concatenate them to form a new one (ab means something else than ba). Some languages also have inflection....</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: My MVP has no name, should I wait until I can think of one to show it? - <AUTHOR>

I'm coming to a point where this project that I have been working on over the past week is in an MVP-type stage. There are only a small number of changes I'd like to make before pushing it to a production server. The only problem is that I do not have a solid name, yet!
I'm not asking for name ideas, but I am wondering how important you all think a name is at this stage?
Obviously, everyone's day dream is to make your Review My Startup post and have it get positive feedback and perhaps written about by somebody on TechCrunch or any other big tech website. Although it'd be a great problem to have, I'd hate to have all of this happen with me using my current domain name. I think my current one is a little too difficult to say - it doesn't quite roll off my tongue as well as I'd like. It's also a little clumsy to type. It's 8 letters, 4 syllables. It's just type words mashed together, nothing fancy. I guess my main complaint is that it's not catchy, or fun to say, or anything ... it's just bland kind of.
I realize I can brainstorm good names all day long, but in the end it's users that have to agree. So, the name I have may be loved or not. I don't know. But, what do you all think? Should I wait until I have a solid name picked out so that I don't have to risk changing it and losing any initial tracking I may gain if I release it under this other name? <comment><USER2> One thing you could do is refer to your project by a codename (Longhorn, Snow Leopard, Project X, etc.) until you come up with a final name & specifically mention on your site that this is the project code name.

Once you've decided on the final name (and domain name), you can then 301 to your new domain.

</comment><comment><USER3> You are thinking only like an engineer, to have the best chance of success you also need to think like a marketer and salesperson.

A name IS part of the product. I don't think you have a true MVP without one.

How you determine the name is a separate discussion, and there are some good ideas posted here. But you DO need one to launch.

</comment><comment><USER4> Find a name. Pick a name. Commit.

I can't imagine launching with a "plan on changing it later" name. We're on the internet. Your name is a huge part of your product. Changing a name later is possibly one of the most disruptive things you can do. I can't even really get started on a project without a solid name.

</comment><comment><USER5> Your most recent submission:

 _Ask HN: How can I quit talking myself out of my own ideas?_

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2080239>

My inference: This is probably another bullshit excuse. Get on with it already. :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> Tell us the current name! We'll let you know how it sounds.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just release it. If you suddenly have to worry about press and having massive traction, then the name wasn't a huge problem. If not, there'll be plenty of time to change it and put a redirect.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's probably easier to give you some name suggestions than a list of a reasons why a name is or isn't important.

</comment><comment><USER9> sorry, what does MVP mean? Model-View-Presenter? Most Valuable Professional?

<comment><USER5> Minimum viable product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> emveepee.ly

</comment><comment><USER11> Well apparently the domain name reveals the purpose of the MVP, so even if it might be bland it at least describes the product. You can always change the name and say "formerly known as ..."</comment>


Samsung recalls 2.8m washing machines after reports of explosions - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/04/samsung-washing-machine-recall-explosion-risk <comment><USER2> WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), today announced it is issuing an emergency order to ban all Samsung washing machine devices from air transportation in the United States. Individuals who own or possess a Samsung washing machine device may not transport the device on their person, in carry-on baggage, or in checked baggage on flights to, from, or within the United States. This prohibition includes all Samsung washing machine devices. The washing machines also cannot be shipped as air cargo. The ban will be effective on Saturday, November 5, 2016, at noon ET.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess you could say Samsung really exploded this year

</comment><comment><USER4> And this is why I like my older tech washing machines. At least everything was bolted down instead of tabbed and roll-fit. Unbalanced load? Just walk over to it, lift the lid, re-adjust, close lid. No worries about a broken jaw from the top flying off.

</comment><comment><USER5> Was the washing machine division taking notes from the mobile division?

<comment><USER6> Maybe it's a systemic problem and they neglected quality control after previous successes. A classic example of why you should never neglect quality control. The alternative costs more by orders of magnitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is a recall of this size (just like the Note 7) a cost companies try to cover with a special insurance they set up in advance or usually pay themselves?</comment>


Did American Missile Defense Fail in Saudi Arabia? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/04/world/middleeast/saudi-missile-defense.html <comment><USER2> The core design problem with using the Patriot missile system for ABM applications is that its terminal guidance system fundamentally isn't designed for it. It uses radar for terminal guidance because it was adapted from anti- aircraft applications. That this works at all is impressive, in a "dancing bear" sense, you wouldn't expect the discrimination to be good enough for the purpose.

All purpose-built ABM systems use infrared imagers for terminal guidance with classifiers that pick out both the target and desired point of impact on the target. These are vastly more effective but we also don't sell them to foreign countries AFAIK.

<comment><USER3> IMO, this article is designed to get readers attention with a technical bent, but is used to reinforce the Saudi Lobby position.

An interest research that shows the number of times in the past 70 years the NY Times has depicted various Saudi dictator as reformist [0]

 _Indeed, M.B.S. instructed me_ is the most bizarre choice word by Thomas Friedman in his op-ed [1]. As a writer, I'm so surprised he would even use such a word or the NY Times op-ed editors would actually allow that.

BTW, there seem to be an orchestrated media Blitzkrieg to show the new Saudi Ruler. Who is basically follow the same playbook as Saddam Hossein did (eliminating all possible opposition) or Stalin for that matter as a moderate person or country. _Saudi Arabia, and other moderate Arab states would also welcome a more engaged U.S. into their backyard_ [2] Calling Saudi Arabia a "moderate" country is a bit of stretch

[0] [http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/34727/Seventy-Years-of- the-...](http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/34727/Seventy-Years-of-the-New-York- Times-Describing-Saudi-Royals-as-Leading-Reform)

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince- mbs-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince-mbs-arab- spring.html)

[2] [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2017/11/28/how- obama-a...](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2017/11/28/how-obama-and- trump-left-a-vacuum-in-the-middle-east/)

<comment><USER4> This confuses me a bit, is he not more moderate than his predecessors? They've had some movement on women's rights with ability to drive and run for office.

Yes they're still terrible with human rights and they're still killing people in Yemen, but they were doing that before without the current improvement.

The NYT article about M.B.S did sound like a general improvement in direction.

<comment><USER5> > Yes they're still terrible with human rights and they're still killing > people in Yemen, but they were doing that before without the current > improvement.

Apparently MBS was been behind the devastating involvement of KSA in Yemen from well before his taking power.

<comment><USER4> And Booze Allen Hamilton has been providing guidance along the way - at least there appears to be hope for some social issues and a reduction of religious extremism.

Not all problems are going to be solved quickly at least this appears to be trending a better direction.

I'm not dismissing the terrible things the country does, but it does seem like MBS is at least better about social issues and religious extremism.

<comment><USER6> If it's true he is behind their Yemen policy (which I haven't heard), then letting women drive doesn't really make up for targeted genocide.

"Mussolini made the trains run on time"

<comment><USER4> I'm not claiming that it does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've read a few stories about the lack of confidence in America's missile defense systems. We have THAAD missile [0] in Asia as a counter punch to North Korea but from what I've read confidence in the system is pretty low.

Israel's Iron Dome [1] system seems to be effective but I would assume there are differences in the system and proximity of Palestine to Israel and the missiles fired that allow it to be so effective.

As a further point, the fact that our missile defense systems are so poor just emphasizes how reckless our approach to North Korea is, their missile technology is getting better and better while our defense system is unproven and yet top Trump administration officials talk about war as if it's not a big deal. Truly scary stuff.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_Defense) [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome)

<comment><USER8> I think Iron Dome has a high success rate due to the type of missile. Mostly 80mm unguided 'Katyusha' and 122mm 'Qassam' unguided rockets, which are destroyed by multiple interceptor missiles with proximity fuzed explosive warheads.

I was in Tel Aviv in 2012, when larger Fajr-5 330mm rockets were fired at the city and I saw several of them being successfully intercepted, a few thousand meters out from their targets. Sadly there was one rocket that hit Tel Aviv, killing several people, and another 'failure' of sorts when debris from an intercepted Fajr-5 landed in a Tel Aviv street, however the warhead did not explode and it was simply falling at terminal velocity... Iron Dome also has an interesting optimisation mode where it tracks the impact point and will not waste a salvo against the incoming threat if it will land somewhere harmless like the sea or open countryside.

<comment><USER9> Yes, this was my thought too. Rockets fired at Israel are generally cheap, short-range subsonic jobs, not substantially harder to shoot down than a World War 2-era V-1 buzz bomb. Medium-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles reach speeds of many thousands of miles per hour, making them much harder targets to intercept.

<comment><USER10> >Rockets fired at Israel are generally cheap, short-range subsonic jobs,

not exactly. Most seems to be manufactured either in Iran or China and a follow on or similar development off basic USSR/Russian systems, like Grad, Uragan, Smerch - these rockets have speed anywhere between 2M and 3M. It is outside of capabilities of many air defense systems on the merit of the speed alone. Add to that multiple rockets in a salvo. Iron Dome being capable of dealing with that is a very huge achievement.

<comment><USER6> The 'Katyusha' and 'Qassam' rockets are subsonic, or perhaps just transonic in the case of the Katyushas (which are quite varied)

"The Qassam's speed in the air is 200 meters per second." (= ~750km/h)[1]

The Katyusha rockets fired from Gaza are commonly quoted to hit Tel Aviv in 2 minutes (35km in 2 minutes = ~1000 km/h)

[1] [https://www.haaretz.com/news/iron-dome-system-found-to-be- he...](https://www.haaretz.com/news/iron-dome-system-found-to-be-helpless- against-qassams-1.239896)

<comment><USER10> there is a range of rockets used by Hamas [https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/hamas- qas...](https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/hamas-qassam.htm)

The 'Qassam' are the low-end of Hamas rockets, and they are locally made low quality stuff. The rest is imported military grade production.

>The Katyusha rockets fired from Gaza are commonly quoted to hit Tel Aviv in 2 minutes (35km in 2 minutes = ~1000 km/h)

Judging by the distance and the name Katyusha, it is probably Grad ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BM-21_Grad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BM-21_Grad)) rockets as by looks and function it most closer resembles Katyusha. The Grad is 122mm and it is the starting system in that type of weaponry and its rocket speed is ~700m/s. The higher-end, 200mm and 300mm, systems fly a bit faster and much farther (typically Chinese versions are even faster and longer range than original Russian).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why is it so hard to shoot down a missle? I always thought that ballistic missles travel with a very predictable speed and direction.

So hitting them should be an easy task for a guided missle as long as it got enough time to reach it at all (which I think is not the problem here). So the only problem I can see is to disarm the missle during flight but am not sure if that is what is meant here.

Does anybody know why it should be hard to shoot down a ballistic missle?

<comment><USER12> Missiles go extremely fast. Like _stupid_ fast. Most ABM systems today use hit-to-kill, which means that you actually have to make contact with the missile to kill it. Physically hitting something that small and fast from a long distance away is hard even if you know exactly where it's going to be. Terminal guidance needs to be very accurate, since in the last second the missiles are a mile apart. With an update rate of about 10 hZ, you have to make your final correction that is accurate to about two feet (the diameter of the missile) over about 1/10th of a mile. That's tough.

Most other missile systems (like surface-to-air or air-to-air systems designed to kill planes) have proximity fuses, and don't need direct contact, they just blow up nearby and throw shrapnel into the plane. That's enough to kill a plane, but doesn't work very well to knock a ballistic missile off it's trajectory.

<comment><USER11> So I understand that it is quite hard to catch a missile when you fly in the same direction as the missle, but couldn't you just intercept the missile by flying towards it and park you own missle in the tradjectory of the incoming missile.

Why is that not possible?

<comment><USER13> That's exactly how Patriot missiles work. They just get in the way. The entire trick is, to be in the right place at precisely the right time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lol. When I saw the headline I though this was a rehash of the Gulf War "intercepts" that did fail. If 20+ years later Patriot is still failing at the same task ... much is wrong with the procurement system. As a kid I was on the ground during the first gulf war. We thought these things were working. They put pieces of them in hotel lobbies on plinths. Only years later did we learn that all those explosions in the sky were meaningless, that the scuds were not being intercepted but rather simply missed their targets.

The article has issues. The plume is irrelevant. The cited pic from syria looks similar but that has more to do with wind and temperature than similarities in warhead. Conclusions based on the launch angle of the patriots may also be incorrect as there the outbound patriots need not follow a strait line. The best intercept for their warhead might not be a head-on approach. We don't know if they turned mid-flight to intercept, which they can do.

And don't criticize patriot for firing five times. This thing was coming down as several objects on very similar trajectories. Each missile might have been targeting a different inbound part, any one of which might be the warhead. If 4/5ths of the inbound objects were intercepted, but the one that wasn't turned out to be the warhead, it wasn't a total failure.

</comment><comment><USER15> > _missed their target ... A kilometer is a pretty normal miss rate for a > Scud_

Assume a target of 0.1km x 0.1km, but the missile may hit anywhere in an area of 1km x 1km around the target. That means the area of the target is 1/100 the size of the overall area. They'd have to launch at least 50 Scuds to have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the target.

Can someone tell me if that calculation is way off? It sounds like this attack, other than spreading fear and panic, was very unlikely to work.

<comment><USER16> I got the feeling that SCUD was always intended to deliver wire-area weapons, such as biological or chemical, and not small explosive warheads. If you're firing area-denial weapons, precision doesn't matter much.

<comment><USER17> The very first SCUD warhead accepted into service was 50KT nuclear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are we really expecting Patriot batteries to work now? Have they changed fundamentally since the 1991 Gulf War? I know they hit a few SCUDs but I don't recall any sort of expectation that it would keep a major population center safe from attack, especially from a smaller warhead.

<comment><USER19> The Patriot system actually has seen substantial changes since the first Gulf War. The first Gulf War used what are called 'PAC-2' systems. They've since developed and deployed PAC-3 systems. The list of changes is comprehensive. If nothing else, it uses a new missile that was designed from scratch to act in an anti-ballistic missile role (the PAC-2 used a missile designed for aircraft intercept - the two roles have really different end-game requirements). The radar, the intercept software on the missile itself, mission management software have all been modified.

The PAC-2 missile relied on its ground based radar to guide it onto the target, and relied on an explosive warhead to damage the target. The PAC-3 has an integrated radar to guide itself onto target and is capable of hit to kill intercept.

Now, those are all the claims anyways. We'll have to see how useful all these changes actually were.

<comment><USER20> To quote Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, _Well, I don 't think it's quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a single slip up._

The PAC-3 is based on the SDI ERINT, a missile which itself failed several tests and then finally passed a rigged test.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#E...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#Extended_Range_Interceptor_\(ERINT\))

<comment><USER21> According to [https://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/patriot- ac-3-fo...](https://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/patriot- ac-3-fote.htm) , as of 2006 the PAC-3 was 19 of 22 on intercepting ballistic missile targets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Patriot doesn't work, Thaad doesn't work. The only ABMs worth a damn are the Israeli Arrow, Russian S500, and perhaps Aster 30 BMD when that enters service. The Americans have always relied on fighters for strategic air defence, and now those chickens are coming home to roost.

<comment><USER23> Aegis and SM-3 seem to be working for some forms of missile defense, including some BMDs.

It's a hard problem space and a lot of the apparent success/failure is really a matter of choices and tradeoffs made by the 'customers' who specify the design constraints.

<comment><USER22> Aegis + Aegis Ashore definitely seems to have potential. Assuming a Nork threat you would want to intercept mid-trajectory if you could, and that means pre-positioning your platform in the mid-Pacific. If you are intercepting on the terminal phase then things are pretty desperate...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> given that warhead in those Iranian designs does separate on re-entry and given the state of the engine block, specifically 1. the lower half seems to have been broken into a number of pieces while still in the air as the spread of the pieces indicates and 2. the upper part only deformed as result of hitting the ground - it seems that the Patriot directly hit the engine block into the lower half. Basically the engine block played the decoy role, or may be the Patriot was going for the warhead and missed, and with the engine block flying at some distance behind and slightly off course it just was hit accidentally.

</comment><comment><USER24> I remember when the conspiracy folks at Reddit claimed the Saudis shot the missile by themselves from the airport to justify or silence the crackdown on the family. So it looks like they were wrong, again.

</comment><comment><USER25> That was all over the Russian media about a month ago when it happened. Not sure if it's coincidence or not if the decision to buy Russian defense systems was influenced by this event.

<comment><USER26> Saudis are currently working on two transactions:

\- buying S-400 from Russia for 3 billions

\- buying THAAD from USA for 15 billions

S-400 is totally unproven system.

<comment><USER27> For $18 billion you could probably hire the Yemen rebels to work jobs for many years and distract them from war.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone know what generation missiles were fired? The PAC2 can really only hit aircraft... sometimes. PAC3 was a massive upgrade and does hit-to-kill instead blast fragmentation

</comment><comment><USER29> O.o The NYT is framing this as Saudi being attacked? The Saudi forces are executing a genocide in Yemen backed by US military targeting, weapons, and mid-air refueling (some of this was stopped but not all of it). This is on the back of Thomas Friedman's laughable piece on MBS ([https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince- mbs-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/saudi-prince-mbs-arab- spring.html)). Is the Times executing a propaganda campaign? Sickening.

<comment><USER30> Kind of curious what context you have that you consider the Friedman article laughable - I must not be versed in the subject.

<comment><USER29> Here's a good rundown.

[https://theintercept.com/2017/11/29/very-bad-men-trump- the-s...](https://theintercept.com/2017/11/29/very-bad-men-trump-the-saudi- crown-prince-sexual-assaulters-and-robert-mugabe/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is sort of beside the point, but I wanted to point out how great a piece of journalism this is. The integration of maps, video, and pictures is exactly what old print-media organizations can provide online and take advantage of. This is a really compelling narrative that shows real, honest reporting. That's worth noting.

<comment><USER32> That's some researchers sharing their analysis with NYT.

<comment><USER33> In particular, Union of Concerned Scientists researchers. But they're not really researchers, because they'll never report results that don't support UCS political positions.

Also, "analysts" from Middlebury Institute of International Studies — apparently another nonproliferation shop.[1]

And finally, anonymous "U.S. officials".

[1] [http://www.miis.edu/about/newsroom/experts/jlewis](http://www.miis.edu/about/newsroom/experts/jlewis)

<comment><USER34> Do you make the same distinction with researchers who work for petroleum firms that hid their findings on anthropogenic climate change or tobacco firms that concealed their findings on the health risks of tobacco consumption?

If so, I applaud your sense of equity.

<comment><USER33> Sure do. And of course, missile defense is hard so I have no problem believing there may not have been a successful interception (I see no evidence here one way or the other). My point was only that the grandparent is incorrect — this is not good journalism. The journalist took a story ready-made from a bunch of people with an angle. I'm familiar with the practice, as a good friend of mine has won prestigious awards for publishing a ready-made story from an NGO.

<comment><USER35> You're 100% correct that this was a case of good presentation and not investigation by the reporter.

Questions:

1\. Can you point me where to find more info on UCS ignoring results that contradict their political positions?

2\. What "angle" does a nonproliferation shop have in this matter?

3\. The article attempts to present some evidence (obviously mostly not to a level required for independent, academic confirmation). So when you see you "see no evidence here", are you saying you need to see it presented in greater detail and to a higher standard, or do you think that the evidence is flawed or misrepresented in some way?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This article skirts dangerously close to helping one side in this war kill folks from the other side. It also has little redeeming social value aside from poking at the current president and missile defense, all of which can happen in other ways. For those reasons, I consider it irresponsible journalism.

I like the general subject, and I'd love to hear more about it, but this is not good. It's just going to encourage more launches -- and perhaps more deaths.

<comment><USER37> It is very important that we know from real life examples that the missile defense systems they are claiming will protect us are not functional, and that the resource allocation and strategic planning being made around these false promises be re-evaluated.

<comment><USER38> What is most important is that we avoid death and destruction from these missiles.

Part of that is understanding the weaknesses of the existing systems and working to improve them. Another part of that may be convincing the attackers that the missiles are ineffective.

Unfortunately life is not a linear program and we often don't find maxima at the extremes.

<comment><USER39> > _Another part of that may be convincing the attackers that the missiles are > ineffective._

This raises an interesting question: is there evidence that anti-missile systems have actually deterred missile attacks?

The Iron Dome system has a (disputed) success rate vastly higher than the Patriot system, but I can't find evidence that missile attacks against Israel have substantially declined in response to its deployment. Perhaps better organized entities like national militaries would react more thoroughly, but that also raises the specter of a displacement effect that fails to save lives.

I definitely agree with you that "improving defenses" and "promoting defenses as deterrents" may be conflicting aims, but I'm curious why the original poster here is so confident anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect in the first place.

<comment><USER36> _"...I'm curious why the original poster here is so confident anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect in the first place..."_

I find it fascinating this HN thing we do where we skim over a comment, decide whether author agrees with us or not politically, and then pile on.

I didn't say anti-missile systems have a deterrent effect. The topic was not part of my comment. At all. My only point was a simple and pragmatic one: if you have a stockpile of missiles, and you shoot one? Having somebody give you a moment-by-moment account of what happened on that missile's journey is a quite valuable thing that you will use the next time you shoot one of your missiles.

My comment had zero to do with missile defense (aside from noting my interest in the subject). It was just pointing out that in general it's a really bad idea to give critiques to people shooting missiles at you.

I'm not going to comment on missile defense. Not relevant to the point I was making.

<comment><USER20> > This article skirts dangerously close to helping one side in this war kill > folks from the other side.

You said _this_ but then failed to cite anything from the article remotely supporting your claim.

> in general it's a really bad idea to give critiques to people shooting > missiles at you.

Saudi Arabia is not _us_. Hell, I don't even like KSA, an autocratic regime with a value system completely antithetical to ours but yeah, with a boatload of oil.

<comment><USER40> I think it is important to remember that personal feelings have almost no bearing on geopolitics. Plenty of French and British citizens couldn't have cared less about the Sudetenland or Poland.

Governments are obviously made up of people, just like corporations, but they seem to become an entity unto themselves. I see this often when Europeans talk about policy initiatives in the US (and vice versa by Americans when discussing mass immigration in Europe). While KSA does not (yet) enjoy a mutual defense pact with the USA on paper, neither does Israel. And yet, in certain circumstances, an attack on Haifa is an attack on the West. I don't particularly like Bibi and his buddies, but that doesn't change the strategic geopolitical situation in the slightest.

So the KSA is sometimes an extension of the US, for better or for worse, which is what i think the commenter you were responding to was implying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> All the more reason to replace it with David's Sling.

<comment><USER12> Saudi Arabia buying weapons from Israel? That could start a war between KSA and every other Arab country.

<comment><USER41> Have you been following the Middle East news lately at all? Israel is clearly allied with Saudi camp, and there already have been plenty of almost official visits.</comment></comment></comment>


Three Things I Expect from a Software Architect - <AUTHOR> http://www.yegor256.com/2015/05/11/software-architect-responsibilities.html?2015-19 <comment><USER2> Three things I expect from a "Project Manager":

1\. That he will increase the amount of busy work done by everyone while at the same time providing NO VALUE to the project in terms of speed or quality. Typical examples of such busy work include multiple status updates each week.

2\. That he will demand deliverables from people who aren't actually responsible for them. One PM even wrote a blog post about what he demands from "software architects" as though these guys were team leads!

3\. That he will invariably measure project status and quality in terms of meaningless but quantifiable-sounding metrics, like percentage of completion for each task (mistakes are "unforgivable" \--snicker--), and demanding a 0-9 "score" for both probability and impact of each risk. Why actually ask your reports for cogent explanations when they can wrap it all up in a single dubious digit for your consumption.</comment>


Ask HN: Software developers what do you do get in the zone? - <AUTHOR> What are some of the routines that work to minimize time before one can do great work with good focus? In addition to knowing time of day when one is most productive, what other strategies do you employ to be excellent and deliver great work when you sit down to work? <comment><USER2> All I have to do is start working on a problem. After a short time I'm oblivious to what's around me. I often "listen" to music but that's just make the office noise less obtrusive - after a while I don't hear the music.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tidy my office/workspace.

Move all none work related stuff onto virtual desktop 2 or 3.

Put on film OST's that lack lyrics (The Equalizer, Oblivion, almost anything from Hans Zimmer).

Make fresh coffee.

I've used that routine for over a decade and it's become a habit, once I've done all that I'm ready to work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Forcing yourself to do some very small change can often get you going. You can make this easier on yourself by noting some easy pieces to do in the future, then picking one of those the next time you want to work on that project.</comment>


Tips for Better Deep Learning Models - <AUTHOR> http://www.lauradhamilton.com/10-tips-for-better-deep-learning-models

<comment><USER2> A note on dropout:

If your layer size is relatively small (not hundreds or thousands of nodes), dropout is usually detrimental and a more traditional regularization method such as weight-decay is superior.

For the size networks Hinton et al are playing with nowadays (with thousands of nodes in a layer), dropout is good, though.

<comment><USER3> I've found a combination of the 2 to be great. Most deep networks (even just the feed forward variety) tend to generalize better with mini batch samples of random drop out on multiple epochs. This is true of both images and word vector representations I've worked with.

<comment><USER2> I've found that with a large enough network, using the two together is good, but as your network grows smaller and you lose redundancy, dropout starts to hurt you when compared with using weight-decay alone.

In huge networks in which you have a lot of non-independent feature detectors, your network can tolerate to have ~50% of them dropped out and then improves when you use them all at once, but in small networks when you have a mostly independent features (at least in some layer), using dropout can cause the feature detectors to trash a fail to properly stabilize.

Consider a 32-16-10 feedforward network with binary stochastic units. If all 10 output bits are independent of each other, and you apply dropout to the hidden layer, your expected number of nodes in 8, so you lose information (since the output bits are independent of each other) without any hope of getting it back.

<comment><USER3> Definitely agreed. The networks I'm typically dealing with are bigger. I would definitely say the feature space needs to be large enough to get good results.

That being said, most problems now a days (at least for my customers are bigger numbers of params anyways)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Who is Arno Candel and why should we pay attention to his tips on training neural networks? Anyone who suggests grid search for metaparameter tuning is out of touch with the consensus among experts in deep learning. A lot of people are coming out of the woodwork and presenting themselves as experts in this exciting area because it has had so much success recently, but most of them seem to be beginners. Having lots of beginners learning is fine and healthy, but a lot of these people act as if they are experts.

<comment><USER5> his linkedin profile looks pretty legit to me. [http://www.linkedin.com/in/candel](http://www.linkedin.com/in/candel) I wouldn't want to get into a ML dick measuring contest with him anyway. H20 looks awesome too.

I think you are misinterpreting what he is saying about grid search. The grid search is just to narrow the field of parameters initially, he doesn't say how he would proceed after that point.

Just curious, what do you consider the state of the art? A Bayesian optimization? Wouldn't a grid search to start be like a uniform prior?

The rest of his suggestions looked on point to me, did you see anything else you would differ with? (i ask sincerely for my own education).

<comment><USER4> Bayesian optimization > random search > grid search

Grid search is nothing like a uniform prior since you would never get a grid search-like set of test points in a sample from a uniform prior.

I didn't really want to write a list of criticism for what is presumably a smart and earnest gentleman and the similarly smart and earnest woman who summarized the tips from his talk, but here goes:

The H2O architecture looks like a great way to get a marginal benefit from lots of computers and is not something that actually solves the parallelization problem well at all.

Using reconstruction error of an autoencoder for anomaly detection is wrong and dangerous so it is a bad example to use in a talk.

Adadelta isn't necessary and great results can be obtained with much simpler techniques. It is a perfectly good thing to use, but it isn't a great tip in my mind. This isn't something I would put on a list of tips.

In general, the list of tips doesn't just doesn't seem very helpful.

<comment><USER5> I appreciate you taking the time to give more detailed criticism, I learned from it - thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would just like to link to my comments from before for people who maybe curious:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7803101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7803101)

I will also add that looking in to hessian free for training over conjugate gradient/LBFGS/SGD for feed forward nets has proven to be amazing[1].

Recursive nets I'm still playing with yet, but based on the work by socher, they used LBFGS just fine.

[1]: [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rkiros/papers/shf13.pdf](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rkiros/papers/shf13.pdf)

[2]: [http://socher.org/](http://socher.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> A question about the actual slides: why don't they use unsupervised pretraining (i.e. Sparse Autoencoder) for predicting MNIST? Is it just to show that they don't need pretraining to achieve good results or is there something deeper?

<comment><USER7> I've only been watching from the Deep Learning sidelines -- but I believe people have steered away from pretraining over the past year or two. I think on practical datasets it doesn't seem to help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Direct link to slides: [http://www.slideshare.net/0xdata/h2o-distributed-deep- learni...](http://www.slideshare.net/0xdata/h2o-distributed-deep-learning-by- arno-candel-071614)

</comment><comment><USER9> direct link to slides anyone?

<comment><USER10> [http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/0xdata/h2o-distributed- deep...](http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/0xdata/h2o-distributed-deep- learning-by-arno-candel-071614)</comment></comment>


A Glimpse Inside NYC's Startup Scene - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/225681

<comment><USER2> Like most places, their surrounding culture was a huge influence on their companies. To the point where I'd say these businesses weren't made in New York, they were made by New York.

 _Can't live with the daily offerings from Banana Republic, Nordstrom and Fab.com, and yet can't live without them?_

 _So when one of his business school buddies left his $700 glasses on an airplane, the idea of selling inexpensive eyewear directly to consumers became crystal clear._

 _Students pay $1,499 per eight- to ten- week course, which include video conferences with career coaches and real world professionals._

Fashion, shopping, and luxury goods for wealthy individuals. There's nothing wrong with creating a business to serve your local market, and in fact that's precisely what you should do -- start with the market you know best. But when people like Bloomberg want to see more hard-core technology coming out of New York like other competing areas, it's a long hard road requiring a massive cultural shift. The engineering school will help, but it's going to take decades to break away from fashion, finance, and food.

But the best part by far:

 _...we would never speak badly about our city, but the rent is too damn high._

Yeah, well, growing the market for designer underwear sure isn't helping.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article seems to be a sequence of fluff profiles of companies that already have quite a bit of publicity and success. And are not tech businesses, but merely businesses that effectively use the Internet.

I can assure you that there are many technology driven startups that have genuinely interesting engineering challenges going on in NYC (coupled with viable intriguing business models). These places are not them.

Note: I'm a tad old school in this regard, having a website element to your business can not be a modern definition of a technology company unless every company is a tech biz ... :-)

</comment><comment><USER4> Apparently "A Glimpse Inside NYC's Startup Scene" == "A glimpse at 8 randomly selected startups in New York City"

A nice treatment of the "scene" would talk about the incubators (TechStars), work spaces (General Assembly), VCs (USV) and meetups. Those are more important to the "scene" than any particular company, at least until one of the tech startups in NYC grows into a 10,000 person company.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nothing encourages me to close a tab faster than a slideshow-style presentation.

Bonus points if Ghostery blocks the JS required to run it.</comment>