Super high-resolution photo of Trump Inauguration - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/01/politics/trump-inauguration-gigapixel/ <comment><USER2> A bit of context for those who missed this latest kerfuffle.

The picture is relevant to the recent dispute between the Trump admin and the press, concerning the size of the crowd at the inauguration. Trump & co say that the crowd extended all the way back to the Washington Monument (halfway down the Mall) and beyond, like the crowd at Obama's inauguration. Various news reports disagree. The two sides are now calling each other liars and posting pictures in attempt to prove each other wrong.

Why we should care, I have no idea.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's awesome. Anyone know what they use to take a picture like this? I really love the guy standing next to the (i presume) gigantic gigapixel camera taking a picture on his smart phone.

<comment><USER4> I remember seeing a bunch of information when they did this for Obama's inauguration. They used a normal Canon DSLR and a GigaPan Epic Pro, which is a device that will pan, tilt, and trigger a bunch of images in an overlapping grid. Then you stitch all of the photos together using software to unstretch, align, and feather the edges (there's a bunch out there). They then touch up the results. It's not completely automated like most phone software is, so they can fix difficult seams and other issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks pretty packed to me.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the part in the photograph, which is right up front, is packed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The pics on nytimes show far less people compared to this picture.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish are president success. I also wish that the next time he goes on about how he's been personally slighted in some way, that someone tells him:

"It's not about you."</comment>


Metamorphosis and Millimeters - <AUTHOR> http://themetricmaven.com/?p=85 <comment><USER3> I am a non-engineer who has used mm/cm/dm/m/km all my life. For me, 1 km is not necessarily 1000 m, and 5 cm is not necessarily 50 mm.

In everyday use using only the smaller unit implies a precision that usually isn't there.

Millimeters certainly has its place, but so do centimetres.

<comment><USER4> I remember when I was at school the first day of woodwork class (age around 10) we were told that all measurements were in millimetres.

I don't think anybody had problems adjusting. It was just another thing to remember in class.

Outside the class everybody used mm/cm/m/km as needed (nobody used dm where I lived).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmm, don't see a big deal. Maybe it is a big deal to someone striving for some engineering beauty and consistency, but in every day life, centimeters and decimeters even are popular because they relate to sizes on human scale -- size of a palm, thickness of a finger and so on.

But I grew up with those units and didn't encounter them first in the university or high school. Just have everything be divisible by 10 is easy enough and knowing the prefixes is easy.

I was very confused and still am by inches, yards, stones, pounds, ounces, gallons. I don't know how many in each of each.

<comment><USER6> I never encounter decimeter. Centiliter only for shot glasses, every kitchen measure thing I have only shows mLiter. Same with grams. There are no centi/decigram on my kitchen weighing scales.

<comment><USER7> deciliter is very common in cookery here in Norway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this a thing than only happens in countries that doesn't use the SI?

I don't know of anyone that has a problem using m, cm or mm in different circunstances

<comment><USER9> Me neither.

I remember one of the educational toys my school had, which I played with when I was 5 or 6. We called it "tens, hundreds, units" [1]. There were many 1×1×1cm "units", 10×1×1 "tens", 10×10×1 "hundreds" and a 10×10×10 "thousand". You could fill the hundreds and thousand with water, the thousand obviously being 1L.

The British National Curriculum [2] says children \- In year 1 (age 5-6) should be able to count centimetres \- In year 2, recognise place value, choose appropriate units (cm/m, g/kg, °C etc) and use measuring tools for these \- In year 3, to add milli- to that, \- In year 4, convert between centimetres and metres, and other units (time and £ and pence) \- In year 5, to convert between milli-, centi-, base, and kilo- measures. Calculate square areas in cm² and m² \- In year 6, volumes in m³ etc, and converting everything, to three decimal places.

(This hasn't changed since the 1960s or something, so it's a shame the country won't get rid of road signs with miles and yards on.)

[1] [http://www.tts- group.co.uk/shops/tts/Products/PD1723354/Base...](http://www.tts- group.co.uk/shops/tts/Products/PD1723354/Base-Ten-Class-Set/)

[2] [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national- curricul...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum- in-england-mathematics-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england- mathematics-programmes-of-study)

<comment><USER10> Some people know those as cuisenaire rods. [http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00074U7SO/](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00074U7SO/)

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

They're brilliant, but go careful with some of the work books that are available. ("Blue + red = ?" cause confusion.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a first generation Chinese-American, I run into a similar problem converting back and forth between Chinese and English -- where English only has words for thousand and million, the Chinese prefer to speak in units of ten thousand (wan). You get a feel for how unintuitive it is to say things like "twenty-five ten-thousands" to read the number 250000, or "a thousand ten-thousands" for ten million.

With regards to why America doesn't make the change to metric, I recall reading somewhere that the American manufacturing base didn't want to have to convert all their infrastructure, currently set up to manufacture screws, bolts, and other such tools in units of inches, half-inches, five-eighths inches and so forth. It's not just a question of cultural shifts in intuition -- there's a physical cost associated with making the change as well.

Knuth's quote comes to mind -- the root of all evil being premature optimization. I wonder about the full price when you integrate the little costs of these scenarios of suboptimal standards -- not just in the realm of physical measurement, but the QWERTY keyboard, pi vs. tao, English grammar rules, even the base ten number system among others. But at some point you have to declare "good enough", and stop refactoring to instead pay upkeep on the accumulated technical debt. Perhaps it is a shame that America chose not to refactor to metric, but maybe some day down the road we will find a generation generous enough to raise their children with better-optimized standards, and pay the costs of re-learning a new intuition themselves.

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units)

You can use units which are very neat and pretty logical for some things - <USER2> very inconvenient for others.

That's, I think, the reason we have all that variety of units, which don't quite follow the same system. Centimeters are there just because of utility in less than strict cases; may be brains are simplifying by dropping unnecessary precision digits from consideration. Same for Kelvin - we don't measure temperature in, say, electron-volts, not only because Volt isn't a natural unit.

</comment><comment><USER13> _" There is one odd-man-out: Celsius."_

Two remarks: firstly, the unit for temperature is kelvin. Secondly, and more importantly I don't see how temperature would be special. The second is a larger outlier. Whe have milliseconds, microseconds, etc, but rarely use kiloseconds, megaseconds. Another outlier is angles, where degrees, minutes, and seconds are used more often than radians. More examples at [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Unit...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#Retention_of_non- SI_units)

</comment><comment><USER14> As a side note, the French (at least) architectural drawings are in centimeters, that's the only place I have seen centimeters as the default, but it's one of the most important engineering field.

<comment><USER9> Are you sure? "ISO 129 Technical drawings -- Indication of dimensions and tolerances" specifies that SI units be used, i.e. µm, mm, m, km.

I've only seen British drawings, which almost exclusively use mm for things up to the size of a moderate building (school etc). I've seen metres used on really big things, like 10km of railway.

<comment><USER14> I just did a random google image search in French: [http://www.jeanbellanger.com/data/5190/f1f0/d3476/thumbnail/...](http://www.jeanbellanger.com/data/5190/f1f0/d3476/thumbnail/x1410-y885-tfill-k65/jean- bellanger-architecte-plan-entreprise-moderne-angers.jpg)

(it looks like this architect doesn't really understand the concept of thumbnails)

I think architecture is using a separate set of rules than mechanics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's quite unfortunate that the SI system of units is built on top of the base 10 number system.

If we all switched to base 12 instead (especially if we likewise unified measurement for time, angles, geographic coordinates, money, etc.), the arithmetic would be much friendlier for humans.

One example of a base 12 metric system: [http://www.dozenal.org/drupal/sites/default/files/tgm_0.pdf](http://www.dozenal.org/drupal/sites/default/files/tgm_0.pdf)

<comment><USER16> Please give me an example of how base 12 arithmetic is "much friendlier" than base 10.

I've just skimmed the PDF... it looks interesting but a bit cranky. I'll edit when I have a better idea. Table 9 is just... ridiculous to me.

<comment><USER17> Outside of scientific and engineering fields, most everyday interactions people have with their units of measure do not involve translating between orders of magnitude, and yet the metric system optimizes for that to the exclusion of all other conveniences, through its focus on base 10 and "it's so easy, just move the decimal point!"

Meanwhile, in most other areas of life, dividing into halves, thirds or quarters is overwhelmingly more common than dividing into tenths, hundredths or other powers of ten. If you wonder why the "unintuitive" imperial units have such staying power, consider that 12 and 16 are more typical bases for them, and 12 is essentially ideal (evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6) while 16 is better than 10 (evenly divisible by 2, 4 and 8).

<comment><USER9> Nothing stops you taking the advantage of both.

Kitchen cupboards, appliances etc are designed in multiples of 300mm, which has factors of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25, 30, 50, 60, 75, 100, 150, 300. The smallest part is still in mm, not awkward fractions of an inch, and the whole wall can be put in mm: 3880mm. That's easy to understand, but 152 inches is less so (who uses inches for something that long?). 12ft 9in is presumably intuitive for those familiar with imperial, but annoying to convert as soon as it needs dividing or multiplying.

Also, imperial units didn't have much staying power in the ex-British Empire, apart from in Britain.

<comment><USER17> _Nothing stops you taking the advantage of both._

I think the main question is why we feel a need to impose a single one-size- fits-all universal unit set onto disparate domains with different ideas of what properties make a unit desirable. There are domains where base-10 units are a good fit, and other domains where base-12 units are a good fit, and I don't see why we need to try to force one set of units to serve both.

<comment><USER9> Because mistakes happen when people use systems they aren't familiar with, and the mistakes can be expensive, dangerous, and sometimes even fatal.

Here's one example: [https://psnet.ahrq.gov/webmm/case/293](https://psnet.ahrq.gov/webmm/case/293)

If the nurse had been used to working in kilograms, she would have realised 25kg was a huge sack of coal / much bigger child / whatever. (She would have known that her own weight as a child was 40kg or whatever.) Or, if the country had been properly metric, the scale wouldn't have had the option of pounds.

(Hopefully, you see no reason to divide a child into 3, 4 or 6 equally massed parts.)

<comment><USER17> So... the metric system magically prevents data-entry errors? Or somehow you can't believe that there actually are common everyday tasks involving splitting something into halves, thirds, quarters, etc. and so feel a need to engage with a hyperbolic child-dissecting strawman instead?

You're really not doing a great job of presenting your case here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's almost as if the metric system was designed to be _useful to ordinary people_ rather than to fit a nice-looking model of units.

Most people use a ruler or their hands to measure things, not dial calipers. And most people don't want to have to say "230 millimeters" as opposed to "23 centimeters" (or more realistically, 20 centimeters).

<comment><USER19> The old 12-base system is actually very useful once you put your calculator aside. Dividing 1 foot by 4 is much easier than dividing 30cm.

Also regarding your comment on mm vs cm, in my line of work (organ building [1]), we always talk in mm, just to prevent confusion, even for lengths of multiple meters).

[1] [http://www.blumenroeder.fr](http://www.blumenroeder.fr)

<comment><USER12> > Dividing 1 foot by 4 is much easier than dividing 30cm.

That's of course very subjective. One has to remember that 1 foot is 12 inches, where in metrics one only remember once all prefixes and applies them to all units uniformly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The blog was posted 3 years ago. Sadly the link to the lecture on video.google.com rotted away since then, as if google was geocities.

<comment><USER20> It's probably this one:

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

I agree, though – the Google Video URL invalidation is a _discrace_. One would think that Google, who _owns_ YouTube, should be able to create 301 redirects for all _its own_ videos to their location on YouTube.

<comment><USER21> A little web.archive.org confirms year and title.

I agree about the second point, Google really has been too busy being socially fancy and letting their old resources rot stupidly. Noobs.</comment></comment></comment>


Magic Leap said to be 'doing 1,000 things badly' after raising $1.4B - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2017/02/13/ar-startup-magic-leap-reportedly-stumbles-after-raising-1-4-billion/ <comment><USER2> Every time there is a post about Magic Leap, someone inevitably asks the question if there has ever been a case of a hyped-up tech actually living up to its claims.

I've thought about this and I'll be damned if I can't think of a single example. The closest I can come is some of the old steam engine tech, where they would have a huge public competition and one demo engine would be crazy fast, but the hype was never at these levels.

Basically, as a student of business history of sorts, just considering the base rates for these situations, I'd be willing to give generous odds that Magic Leap absolutely fails to deliver anything worthwhile. It just doesn't seem to happen. The true breakthroughs are built by those quietly plugging away, scared to death that if they take a breath to talk about it their competitors lurking in the shadows will pull ahead.

It really makes me wonder who these investors are that piled on. The first $100M or so I understand; they thought they were getting in on something new and great. But the next $1B? Did they never read a business history book during their MBA program?

<comment><USER3> The Internet. It just took 10-15 years longer than everyone thought it would.

Mobile phones & PDAs as well - they were super-hyped right around 1992, it just took 15 years after that before someone produced a device that was _actually_ exciting.

Actually, it's generally been a pretty good business strategy to take whatever was hyped up 10-15 years ago but was then written off as unworkable, and then reimagine it with modern technology. Think of Javascript apps (DHTML 1997 -> Angular 2012), streaming video (RealAudio 1996 -> YouTube 2006), e-commerce (everybody 1995 -> everybody 2012), webmail (HotMail 1997 -> GMail 2004), GUI interface builders (NeXTStep 1992 -> XCode 2007), mobile phones (Newton & General Magic 1992 -> iPhone & Android 2007/09), lithium-ion batteries (first prototypes late-80s -> widespread cellphone/laptop use mid-00s), etc.

It doesn't do much good for the investors of those early waves of companies, though.

<comment><USER4> These are different than what the OP was talking about. He's basically asking about stealth products like segway etc...

All your examples were ones where the initial hype around the technology/idea just wasn't ready yet, it wasn't one company playing coy and then coming out with some groundbreaking thing like the iPod/iPhone was.

<comment><USER5> Why do people think the iPhone was groundbreaking?

It was evolutionary, it was very, very well polished (something apple are good at) and it was advertised massively. But it wasn't streets ahead of the competition.

<comment><USER6> When the first iphone came out, it was the only mainstream device to ditch the physical keyboard, allowing for a very large (for the time) touchscreen, while keeping the device thinner and lighter than high-end competitors. This screen, along with pinch to zoom, allowed desktop websites (which were basically all websites at the time) to realistically be used on a mobile device. You certainly _could_ browse websites on other devices, but you wouldn't want to, given a choice. The original iphone is what really started mobile browsing.

<comment><USER5> Mobile browsing had been around for quite a while, and I had used Opera Mobile on various phones for some time. PDAs, when they existed as separate devices, tended to have larger screens than phones, and allowed reasonable browsing too.

The iPhone was a great product, I'm not denying it, but I wonder if the perception that it was revolutionary comes from the state of the US market at the time - generally thought to have been years behind Europe and Asia.

<comment><USER7> I browsed web in phones before iPhone, the experience was awful. Though there is some truth in your saying that the US market was much behind Japan and Korea at that point. (Europe and rest of Asia was definitely not significantly ahead.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've tried a hololens and it's pretty amazing. Yes, the field of view is bad, but the tracking (6 DoF tracking!) is absolutely rock solid. Better than a Vive or Rift, and it is using inside-out tracking. There's also no perceptible latency (again in my unscientific head-shaking test I'd say it is slightly better than a Rift or Vive).

Magic Leap are going to have to do something seriously amazing to beat the hololens, especially when they inevitably upgrade the FoV.

<comment><USER9> When I used the Hololens I had the same impression you did. I too was blown away by the incredible accuracy of the tracking. What I don't understand is how Microsoft didn't launch a VR product to compete with Vive and Oculus. Given the strength of the tracking, it felt to me like they were so close to building a VR device that did not require all the cables and tower set-ups that the other two do. Clearly I must be missing something, but I just don't know what it is.

<comment><USER10> Microsoft have Windows Holographic coming soon that will launch on 3rd party sets for Dell Lenovo etc. These are VR headsets with inside out tracking but without the AR tech. I guess they will be a good rival to the Vive but details are thin

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Every time I see a post about Magic Leap I think to myself that a lot of smart people invested a lot of money into this... they must know something we don't. There is no way they are investing in a company that can't deliver, right? But that might be naive / optimistic of me.

Meanwhile my startup has a working product with traction and a revenue model but we are having issues getting funding. At least partially because we aren't in Silicon Valley. (not bitter at all... no I won't name the company)

<comment><USER12> Are you 10x though? Gotta be 10x or more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Technology companies raising significant amount of money without a product are usually not very successful. There were many examples: Color is probably the poster child of such a company, but there are many more.

<comment><USER14> A Better Place was another massive, $1 billion example of such a failure. [https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better- pl...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-place)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I dunno what's going on over there but they need some PR people or better PR people than the ones they have now.

<comment><USER16> >I dunno what's going on over there but they need some PR people or better PR people than the ones they have now.

No, that's the problem. The entire company is PR. They need engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Theranos all over again

</comment><comment><USER18> I believe that Abovitz has something amazing on his hands. All those faked demo videos were very convincing.

</comment><comment><USER19> Meanwhile Meta is taking pre-orders...

<comment><USER20> I wish everyone in this space well, and huge funding rounds can be a huge weight dragging a company down, but I feel like Meta is severely undercapitalized to be in this market.

Microsoft doesn't have a tethered product right now, but it seems very likely that an OEM will[0] and Microsoft will help them build it and will provide the software - somewhere that Meta 2 has been struggling with.

[0] [https://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/01/microsoft-opens- window...](https://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/01/microsoft-opens-windows- holographic-to-partners-for-a-new-era-of-mixed-reality/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wouldn't be too surprised if Magic Leap becomes the next Theranos.</comment>


Advertisers admit it: 'We messed up' the Web - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/10/15/amid-the-adblockalypse-advertisers-apologize-for-messing-up-the-web/ <comment><USER2> Source: [http://www.iab.com/news/lean/](http://www.iab.com/news/lean/)

LOLFR: _We were so clever and so good at it that we over-engineered the capabilities_

That is true, gold plated BS! Beautiful!

More importantly:

 _L.E.A.N. Ads do not replace the current advertising standards .... Rather, these principles will guide an alternative set of standards_

This is hammered home at the end of the post:

 _Publishers should have the opportunity to provide rich advertising experiences, L.E.A.N. advertising experiences, and subscription services_

Translation: They're defining these new, fancy standards, but they're viewed as part of the overall picture, and not a replacement for the current abortion that is online advertising. So if the odds weren't already deeply stacked against them that they'd have an influence in moving the market, this makes it even less likely.

</comment><comment><USER3> >As a result, companies such as Apple, Facebook and Google have developed their own coping mechanisms. Apple offers consumers news content in its Apple News app, bypassing the public Web. Facebook's Instant Articles, which allow publishers to partner with Facebook so their content loads more quickly, follows the same logic.

This is the real tragic legacy of web ads: the balkinzation of the Internet. Emerging countries like India are seeing smartphone plans that incentivize the use of entrenched media on the Internet, to the point that the 'open web' might be too expensive to access with any frequency. This is a hindrance to innovation.

</comment><comment><USER4> What do they mean by encrypted? Do they just mean to support https?

Also, sounds good I think.

Project wonderful ads seem pretty good to me, do they fit this standard?</comment>


Reproduced papers from MLSys'20 are available online with code and data - <AUTHOR> https://cKnowledge.io/?q=mlsys2020 <comment><AUTHOR> The methodology to reproduce experiments is available at [https://cTuning.org/ae/submission_extra.html](https://cTuning.org/ae/submission_extra.html) .</comment>


FBI, stumped by pimp's Android pattern lock, serves warrant on Google - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/fbi-stumped-by-pimps-androids-pattern-lock-serves-warrant-on-google.ars <comment><USER2> I'm okay with the method the FBI is pursuing. They clearly have a case (or enough of a case to take to court), they know exactly what data they need, and they have obtained a warrant for the information. I don't think wiretap laws should come into play on this unless they plan on intercepting communication beyond what is already stored on the phone. The case so far is exactly what the law intended and holds just as relevant today as it did in the 1700s.

Like drivebyacct2 mentioned, though, asking Google for the SSN of a user is kind of odd, and I really hope Google doesn't know that. It's possible the carrier might know, but Google shouldn't unless the suspect was receiving payment from AdWords or Google Checkout/Wallet (do they need SSN for tax reasons at that point?)

<comment><USER3> Here's my issue: Google could, in theory, provide them access to the device. But that's not what they're asking for. They're asking for usernames, passwords, SSN, etc. By all means, the FBI can submit a warrant to a lock manufacturer to open a lock. They can not, however, tell the lock manufacturer to give them the contents of whatever the lock is protecting. That's a separate warrant.

<comment><USER2> This is true, and you've just pointed out a big difference from old to new that I had forgotten about.

But what if the safe in the metaphor is owned by someone else and residing on their property, and contains multiple smaller safes inside? That's kind of like cloud-based apps that Android uses heavily. The Feds have enough reason to believe there is relevant information in email, text, and web searches to convince a court of this (difficulty level of convincing a court is debatable).

There also is generally a lot of shit the man pushes out with the knowledge they likely won't be given a response to, and they will accept that. It's a fishing expedition. It's not right, but it's common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To quote the article:

> In it, the FBI asks for a warrant to be served on Google. It wants to know:

> The subscriber's name, address, Social Security number, account login and > password

I would hope the FBI is bright enough to know that in all likelyhood Google stores their users passwords in hashed form. How would Google actually be able to comply with this request for the password?

What would happen if they can't comply (they can't)? Would this eventually lead to legislation that forces services to store passwords in plain text or reversible encryption (which is pretty much the same thing)?

<comment><USER5> Google can give you a new password if you forget yours. There is no technical barrier to giving the FBI access and clearly no requirement for plaintext passwords anywhere (setting aside how the request was expressed in the article as a request for a password).

<comment><USER6> They can even generate an application-specific password for the FBI, to be revoked after the time limit specified in the warrant is reached. (No idea if this is done or not, but in theory, there is no need to know the password in order to disclose one to the FBI. All they want to do is unlock the phone, but are too dumb to connect a USB cable and run adb.)

<comment><USER7> > but are too dumb to connect a USB cable and run adb.

Or that would break the rules regarding _forensic_ data retrieval, and make the information gleaned in that fashion inadmissible as evidence.

<comment><USER8> How does this violate the rules? He's already signed a waiver to his 4th amendment rights, so no court order is needed - he's essentially given them full control over his own property, including his phone (which I presume would include accessing the data via adb instead of the phone screen).

<comment><USER9> Because then the phone is no longer in the original state as when the defendant turned it over, and the FBI cannot prove it did not alter the contents of the phone (as images cannot be made while the phone is locked).

<comment><USER8> Even with the lock, how can they prove that? If they're able to get information off of it, they're able to modify it....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Soghoian wonders about the legality of accessing a still-operational cell phone. ... But a US Magistrate Judge disagreed._

As a side note, I really dislike this style of reporting. I doubt the judge _disagreed_ with Soghoian if Soghoian published his blog post _after_ the judge published his opinion. The article makes it sound like a stupid judge made the wrong decision by not reading some expert opinion that was available to him. If the judge disagreed with anybody, it was defense counsel. But the article doesn't mention any objection by the defense. Perhaps, because as a lawyer, he is in a better position to know what's legal and what's not?

<comment><USER11> I noticed that too and agree entirely. There is absolutely nothing in the article that suggests this argument was actually made and rejected. At the end of the day, judges are people too and can't possibly have the entirety of all case law in their minds at all times. It is up to defense attorneys to research the case and bring up relevant arguments. I just can't see anything in the article that even suggests that the idea of a wiretap warrant being more appropriate was even discussed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pattern locks are notoriously vulnerable to visual analysis of fingertip grease marks on the screen. Don't count on this to protect your data.

<comment><USER13> Ah I just figured something out. So some people here are calling FBI's stupidity for mucking with the phone, as in trying patterns that eventually locked the device. In other words if phones are known to lock they shouldn't just randomly try patterns on it.

But I believe the attempts were not random. They probably did what you suggested, inspects trace of the fingertip grease and discovered a much more constrained set of possible possible patterns.

So they basically got an un-directed graph and now they thought they could figure out the most likely directed path in the graph that would unlock the phone.

Somebody probably made an educated (but eventually bad) guess about what the unlock path would be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's a pattern lock, so it must not be using disk encryption (only available on Ice Cream Sandwich with either PIN or password). Is there some reason they can't just open it up and see what's on it?

<comment><USER15> Text messages are on internal storage, which becomes unmountable when the device is locked.

Depending on the phone, they should be able to get into recovery mode and connect via adb. However, if it has a locked bootloader, they're SOL, and my schaudenfreude is without limit :)

<comment><USER14> Sorry, I'm not sure I understand - can you explain more? How does the OS making it unmountable when it's locked stop the FBI from physically removing the internal storage and looking at its contents via another device? I can see how it might require specialized forensics equipment depending on how obscure/proprietary the internal storage hardware is, but that seems like something the FBI would have access to or be able to obtain...

<comment><USER15> I would imagine that busting a pimp isn't exactly high up there on the FBI's list of priorities, at least not high enough to desolder a NAND chip (possibly destroying evidence) and reverse-engineer its raw access protocol. Far simpler to just make Google give them the password.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if the FBI is aware of android issue 3006 - <http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3006>

<comment><USER17> Does this still exist? What an absolutely horrifying bug.

Do you know where in the source this is?

<comment><USER16> its still open, and works on my droid, but considering that there are so many handsets that are not updated, im sure this one would still work on most phones. I haven't looked through the code to pinpoint it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They could have just come and asked here.

You must have already have root but since they mentioned it's a Samsung phone then all you do is find a CWM/Rooted kernel tar and flash via Odin then do the steps below.

adb -d shell

sqlite3 data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db

sqlite> update system set value=0 where name='lock_pattern_autolock'; sqlite> .exit

exit

Reboot from there and the lockscreen is bypassed.

Remember kids, use this for good and not evil muahahhahaahhaah

<comment><USER19> (IANAL) Modifying anything on the phone would make the data inadmissible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Direct link to security researchers blog.

([http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2012/03/fbi-seeks-warrant-to- for...](http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2012/03/fbi-seeks-warrant-to-force-google- to.html))

PDF of the application.

([http://www.archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.casd.378626/gov...](http://www.archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.casd.378626/gov.uscourts.casd.378626.1.0.pdf))

</comment><comment> brown9-2 This is probably a tangent, but why would the FBI be involved in a prostitution case? Shouldn't that be state/local?

<comment><USER21> Minor victim and state-lines being crossed -- that would be my guess.

<comment><USER22> is MANN act state or Federal?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can't all of this be gotten just by looking at the storage on the phone? Or talking to the wireless carrier?

</comment><comment><USER24> I just assumed that they had search warrants allow this form of discovery for years now. It is funny to thing that an investigator tried one time too many pattern attempts and accidentally erased the phone contents. I'm going to go on record as haha'ing the slip up.

</comment><comment><USER25> How could the FBI not know his SSN?!

<comment> lost-theory They want to know the subscriber's SSN, the person who owns the phone. He said the phone belonged to his sister.

<comment><USER8> How should Google know that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seriously? Pattern locks are almost as easy as Face Unlock to get through.

<comment><USER27> Are you referring to smudge attacks on pattern locks?

Face unlock was even weaker since anyone who had access to your photo could unlock it.

<comment><USER28> "Face unlock was even weaker since anyone who had access to your photo could unlock it"

I thought that rumour was debunked by Google engineers within the first hour that it launched?

edit - The quote is "Responding to a Twitter message from someone who say Face Unlock could be hacked [with a picture of the person], Bray said, "Nope. Give us some credit.""

<comment><USER29> how would they make it photo proof ? I mean any guesses on the algorithm they use.. my dart in the dark would be that a photo would be absolutely still while a real person's face might twitch, shake, bat eyelids etc..

<comment><USER30> Maybe they do something really clever and rely on faces being 3D and the phone not being held 100% still?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm confused, can't they just write a GUI in Visual Basic to track the perp's IP?

</comment><comment><USER32> The FBI Forensics Lab mis-entered the pattern lock too many times? The FBI uses the same tactic as my little brother to get into peoples phones? At a forensics lab? And the stuff they want from google kind of blows my mind. "The times and duration of every webpage visited"... As far is I can see that's completely undeliverable by anyone but possibly the carrier. Who do they have working down there?

This is also super interesting: "His parole conditions prevented him from doing anything to hide or lock digital files."

So if convicted of a crime they can require you to not use basic personal and identity safety measures.

<comment><USER33> > _So if convicted of a crime they can require you to not use basic personal > and identity safety measures._

Not really a new concept, it's fairly similar to banning a paedophile from going near schools, banning someone on parole from leaving the country (or state), or enforcing a curfew, etc. Similar in that it's restricting what would normally be anybody's right.

<comment><USER34> I know that is not a new concept, but it seems troubling because of its scope. It would be like saying "You may not shred credit card statements."

But more to the point, so man computers now expect password-protection. I don't see how this amounts to something other than a ban on general computing and for reasons that are not distinctly related to the offence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Some of the things they're asking for are beyond absurd. How does someone work at the FBI and not realize that asking Google for a user's SS# or detailed browsing logs not realistic?

<comment><USER36> IANAL, but I'm assuming Google doesn't have to hand over anything that's not explicitly listed in the warrant. If you're the FBI, you might as well ask for the world and see what you get back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> the implications at the end are really lame. "the phone may have received sms after the judge issued the order"

like that would be held in court for anything? let's thing analogically: would a mob king be freed if a judge authorized a safe with evidence to be opened on the 4th but it was only opened on the 7th, and new evidence was put into the safe by other agents on the 6th?

<comment><USER38> It's not a matter of new evidence becoming available, but private data becoming visible unlawfully.

<comment><USER37> how it's different from the safe example?</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook blocks Crypter which helped users encrypt messages before sending them - <AUTHOR> https://crypter.co.uk/ <comment><USER2> Note: I'm the author of a similar tool.

About 2 years ago I wrote Taniger which is a tool that does the same thing but without having to set a preset password for all chats (each message has its own encryption key).

What I found out during these 2 years is that facebook changes it's chat HTML from time to time making the encryption "not work" as it cannot detect the encrypted text. I believe this is what happened with crypter - but I can't be 100% sure as I don't have time today to check if that's the case (I tried installing it but I got an error message when I tried to set its password).

P.S. The Taniger site is currently offline as I'm re-writing it to support PGP encryption, but you can see a demo at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU57xQcAcd0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU57xQcAcd0) and get the code at [https://github.com/sadreck/taniger](https://github.com/sadreck/taniger)

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/facebook-puts- an-e...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/facebook-puts-an-end-to- message-encryption-app-crypter/) says

> Update on February 5: A Facebook rep on its security team tells us that, to > the company's knowledge, nothing has changed on its end and isn't sure why > the app isn't working, indicating Facebook did not intentionally block > Crypter from the network. The story has been updated accordingly.

Did anything more happen to indicate that it was intentionally blocked?

</comment><comment><USER4> Hello guys,

Would really love some help with the final steps of reviving Crypter. We have now had to do a messy job in automating keypresses... But we are finding it very difficult to automate the enter keypress for the auto-encrypt function. Currently with the [GitHub]([https://github.com/maxisme/crypter/blob/master/Chrome%20exte...](https://github.com/maxisme/crypter/blob/master/Chrome%20extension/background.js)), the user has to press enter twice (rather than once) when the Auto-Encrypt function is checked.

Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER5> Two things come to my mind.

If you live under a regime that looks for dissenters in social networks, encryption will protect the message but not yourself: you'll stand out and they can come and ask you about the content of your messages. I won't feel much safer. They probably already know your contacts anyway.

What if you encrypt locally outside the browser and paste the ciphertext into FB? Are they going to block your account? Incidentally that would increase your security because you'll be forced to use more secure communication channels.

</comment><comment><USER6> It boggles my mind that Facebook blocks message text between mutual friends. This could admittedly be useful for stopping hacked accounts from exploiting your trust to make you click bad links. But it should be enough to display a warning message, like Chrome does.

I suppose they're designing for users who don't want to deal with error messages, or wouldn't understand them.

<comment><USER7> They are designing for moderation, datamining and surveillance. If they stop being able to read your conversations, their value to advertisers and powerbrokers drops to zero. Nobody wants to be a dumb network switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe you have to be a special kind of crazy to use facebook or google communication products. Letting a company who's business revolves around knowing as much as possible about it's users be a central part of your communication and how you interact with society is outright stupid.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's like they're schizophrenic. They want people to use Facebook over Tor, but refuse to allow encrypted messages?

<comment><USER10> Tor means they can sneak through state-level internet blocks and surveillance. Once they're on Facebook, they're (ostensibly) obeying their Real Name policy, so Facebook knows who they are. Their Tor support doesn't protect their identity or communications from Facebook itself, other than obscuring their IP address.

Encrypted chats, on the other hand, treats Facebook itself as untrusted. It lets people use Facebook without Facebook knowing exactly what they're up to.</comment></comment>


Cantor diagonalisation - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lat7h/blog/posts/124.html <comment><USER3> Cantor's theorem is better stated as "Let X be infinite. If f: powerset(X) to X, then f is not injective.". This is completely uncontroversial, and its proof is by diagonalisation in a context where it really does intuitively "just work". Set X to the naturals, and prove that the reals are equipotent with the powerset of N, to obtain "the reals are uncountable".

<comment><USER4> > This is completely uncontroversial

I think it is still intuitively surprising that some infinite sets somehow have more elements than other infinite sets. The powerset operator is very special because it can create this difference.

<comment><USER3> I suppose I really meant "why should one expect that f might be injective anyway?" Once you're no longer in the context of a set like N which is very familiar, there's just no obvious reason for the theorem to be false.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A most merry and illustrated explanation of the diagonal argument: [http://www.coopertoons.com/education/diagonal/diagonalargume...](http://www.coopertoons.com/education/diagonal/diagonalargument.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I've long had a question that might be a variation of the third concern listed: couldn't diagonalisation just show that considering all real numbers to be an infinite sequence of digits is a flawed representation? Not necessarily that they don't exist somehow or that they are necessarily countable, just the diagonalization argument seems flawed to me.

Edit: Actually maybe this is just the first concern mentioned :/.

Edit2: Maybe clearer explanation: you can produce an infinite sequence of digits from many real numbers, but it doesn't seem to me to be valid to consider that infinite sequence to actually be the real number.

<comment><USER7> You are looking in the wrong place for the key philosophical issue, but didn't land on it.

When we talk about "an infinite sequence of digits", what are we talking about? Are we talking about ACTUALLY having an infinite sequence of digits in front of us? Or are we talking about having a RULE that will in theory produce them?

Platonists believe that they actually exist in a reality beyond human conceptual limits. (Maybe in the mind of God?) Formalists side step the question by making everything an abstract symbol manipulation game. (Though the rules of the game are chosen to result in something matching platonic intuition.) And Constructivists take the rule approach, and not just that, but a rule that we can write down and actually evaluate.

Cantor's diagonalization argument obviously works according to Platonists. Formalists choose their rules to make it work as well. But Constructivists, well, it doesn't work there!

Why not? Well when you get down to it, how do you define a rule and how do you prove that it works? Well, a "rule" can be thought of as just a computer program. And now we have the problem that, thanks to the Halting Problem, it is impossible in general for one computer program to predict what another program will do!

You can, of course, attempt to write Cantor's number down. You can implement the rule that he describes using a theorem prover to filter a list of all programs to just the ones that we can prove are numbers. We can write a perfectly well-defined program that produces Cantor's number. BUT THERE IS NO CONTRADICTION?

Why not?

Because THAT program is one that the theorem prover CAN'T prove works! (In fact the theorem prover will prove what it is doing, and prove that if it always works, then its set of axioms is consistent. And now you're up against Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem!)

The result is that in the two most popular philosophies of math, Cantor's argument works. But in the third, it doesn't, it can't, and the reals are countable. There the complications of diagonalization are simply another illustrations of the challenges of self-reference, and not the assertion that more numbers exist than can be written down!

<comment><USER8> > But in the third, it doesn't, it can't, and the reals are countable

Isn't that a bit of an overreach? It seems that in Constructivism, Cantor's diagonalization doesn't work as a proof. But that doesn't mean that the reals _are_ countable, just that this proof isn't valid.

<comment><USER7> Well, you have to be careful about what countable means.

If countable means "put into a one to one correspondence with" then the reals are not countable because there are pairs of reals that can be proven to be real whose equality or inequality can't be proven. So in such cases you can overcount, or undercount, but you can never exactly pick each real only once.

But the set of possible constructions can be enumerated. We may not know which actually are real numbers, and which pairs are equal. But we can list all of the possibilities. So there is a countable list of things that contains them all..multiple times..along with other stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's an argument I've found sometimes works better for people who can't see what the diagonal from the list is supposed to do, or if they think it's rather arbitrary. It's essentially the same argument, just written differently.

Definitions: 2 is the set {0,1}. N is the set of natural numbers {0,1,2,...}. An infinite sequence of 0's and 1's c_0,c_1,c_2,... can be thought of as a function c : N -> 2 (that is, the values in a sequence are a function of their position: c_i = c(i)). A set X is countably infinite if there is an invertible function f : N -> X (which, in other words, is a sequence f_0,f_1,f_2,... where each element of X appears exactly once). Let's write A -> B for the set of functions from A to B, rather than the usual B^A.

Suppose for sake of contradiction (N -> 2) is countably infinite, so there is an invertible function f : N -> (N -> 2). Let F : (N -> 2) -> N be the inverse, so I can save having to type f^-1. Let g : N -> 2 be defined by g(n) = 1 - f(n)(n). Then, g(F(g)) = 1 - f(F(g))(F(g)) = 1 - g(F(g)), so g(F(g)) must be 1/2, contradicting the fact that it ought to be 0 or 1 instead.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sure, that's the story the government tells everyone. It sounds plausible enough, but is it the whole story?

* Apply Downward Lowenheim-Skolem to get a countable model of set theory

* Construct the reals using whichever technique you want.

* Since the base set theory is countable, so is the set of constructed reals.

The same technique can give you countably many groups, countably many rings, countably many points in the plane, etc. Everything is countable.

<comment><USER11> it is very much not possible to construct the real numbers in such a way that they are countable. (the set of real numbers is the object that "happens" when you fill the "holes" in the set of rational numbers).

cantors diagonalization argument is proof of that. you can't pull some silly trick to make them countable. there are many properties of R that are countable, but that doesn't make R itself countable.

<comment><USER7> The truth of your statement depends on what philosophy of mathematics you accept. Which itself is not something that can ever be settled by pure reason.

Here is a definition of the reals to consider. A real number is a computer program which implements a function f from positive integers N to the rationals such that |f(n) - f(m)| < 1/n + 1/m. This is a reasonable definition of real numbers, and all real numbers that you're likely to hear of are real numbers under this definition.

But now consider. There are a finite number of symbols that we build programs out of. Therefore for every N, there are a finite number of possible computer programs of length N. Only some of which represent real numbers under this definition. Therefore there is a countable sequence which contains all real numbers in it!

What is the key philosophical difference between this system of mathematics and the usual one? Quite simply this. Classical mathematics asserts the existence of things that cannot be written down or calculated by humans. This system of mathematics denies the existence of things which we cannot write down.

Now about a hundred years ago there was a major debate between these two philosophical camps. In the end the classical school won simply because most mathematicians don't care about philosophy, and classical mathematics is easier to work with. But the purportedly inescapable logical conclusions that you're taught about are not actually as inescapable as you've been lead to believe.

<comment><USER12> I haven't the slightest idea what "n" and "m" are supposed to be, so I can't make any sense of your definition.

Beyond that, you say: "all real numbers that you're likely to hear of" \- this is a fallacy twice over.

First, since my lifetime is finite, it's easy to count all the real numbers that I will hear in my life. But I don't think that's the argument you want to make.

Second, there are people who professionally construct unlikely real numbers; just because you choose to ignore those numbers doesn't mean that your countable sequence of all real numbers can. There's a difference between "things that cannot be written down" and "things _you_ can't write down".

<comment><USER7> The statement "you are likely to hear of" is a concession that I know of numbers which can't fit that definition. Their key characteristic being that they cannot be calculated by humans, because evaluating them requires operations that are not actually possible for us.

Whether or not such numbers are well-defined at all is a point of philosophy. What does it mean to declare the truth of statements that cannot be verified either way?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think this blog post will delight anyone who liked this submission: [http://math.andrej.com/2007/04/08/on-a-proof-of-cantors- theo...](http://math.andrej.com/2007/04/08/on-a-proof-of-cantors-theorem/)

<comment><USER14> I am already struggling right at the beginning.

 _If we open a book on set theory, we will find a proof of Cantor's theorem which shows explicitly that for every map e : A → P(A) there is a subset of A outside its image, namely S = { x ∈ A ∣ x ∉ e(x) }_

What about e(x) = { x }? In that case S would be the empty set, wouldn't it? Does map imply some additional properties in this case? Am I misunderstanding the statement and it does not try to imply that S is non-empty for every e?

<comment><USER13> Yes, in that case S is {}. {} ∈ P(A) but is not in the image of e.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, now it clicked. I misinterpreted the image as the image of x instead of as the image of e. And then did something weired that now makes no longer any sense at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> alok-g Genuinely asking:

Consider decimal numbers between 0 and 1 in binary.

Here's how I am going to synthesize this set.

Step 1: Take non-decimal binary numbers and consider them to be padded with an infinite of zeros at the left.

...0000000

...0000001

...0000010

...0000011

...0000100

...0000101

...0000110

..........

Do we agree that this will contain _all_ the non-decimal non-negative binary numbers?

In particular, is the following number in the above set? ...111111 (all ones, not zero-padding on the left). If not, why not. And if not, this seems to be a matter of definition to me. If yes, move on.

Step 2: Place a decimal at the end of each line above and flip left and right.

0.0000000...

0.1000000...

0.0100000...

0.1100000...

0.0010000...

............

Do we agree that this contains _all_ the decimal positive binary numbers between zero and one: [0, 1).

Let's now apply diagonalisation on this.

It says that the number 0.11111111... will not be present in the above set.

Perhaps someone can see my confusion and enlighten me. :-) Thanks!

<comment><USER11> The confusion in your argument is rather simple. You construct the set of INTEGERS in a binary representation.

Then you flip them over to the other side,in an operation that you yourself do not fully understand.

The first number that you flip (0.1) turns into 0.5 decimal

The second number that you flip (0.01) turns into 0.25 decimal

The third is 0.75

0.125

and so on. You are creating a subset of the rational numbers, which is obviously countable. It is countable because you constructed it to be countable. You constructed something that was countable and then tried to prove that it is countable.

Happens all the time :)

<comment> alok-g This was helpful. Thanks.

I did understand before how flipping changed the numbers into 0.5, 0.25, etc., but had missed that this process would only create rational, thereby missing the irrationals altogether. There's enough food for thought for me now. :-)

<comment><USER11> What you really want to understand is "where's pi", right?

Pi looks somewhat like this: 3.1415... "and so on". Let's ditch the 3.

0.1415... and so on. flipped over equals:

...5141

Easy enough, right? But pi had infinite decimals. Infinite decimals on the left side means what? You tell me :)

Infinity is not an element in the real numbers. All the irrationals, when flipped over, get absorbed into infinity - and infinity itself has no decimal representation. For people who are not in math, saying "and so on" is fine. But you can't do math on "and so on". "And so on" is a handwaving way of saying that you lack the mathematical language to describe whats going on. Which is fine, for casuals.

<comment> alok-g You have gotten to exactly what my confusion has been!

I had assumed from the middle school itself that the set {1, 2, 3, ...} includes infinity, and I still am questioning if this not being is just a matter of definition or it has to be that way. More below:

We say that the size of the set {1, 2, 3, 4} is 4, in which scenario, the number 4 happens to be an element in the set. Likewise for {1, 2, 3, 4, ..., 100000}. Now we say that the size of the set {1, 2, 3, 4, ...} is infinity, but infinity is not an element of that set.

It seems what I am missing is the _formal_ definition of this "..." or "and so on". If these two were not allowed in any of the proofs, how would you word Cantor's Diagonalisation and other theorems in mathematics that currently involve these. (Or alternatively, what is the formal definition of "...")

PS: I do understand limits and calculus but perhaps from an engineering perspective, not for pure mathematics where I have these confusions.

Thanks! :-)

<comment><USER11> The problem that people who don't REALLY learn mathematics is that they dont understand that EVERYTHING has to be defined in a way that makes it an absolute truth.

The definition of the number 2 is by axiom. The peano axioms state this:

1\. There is a number. We call it 0

2\. For every number n, there is a successor S(n). The successor of 0 is called 1

3\. Let m and n be numbers. m=n is equivalent to S(n)=S(m). This means that if two numbers are the same, they have the same successor

4\. For every number n, S(n) is not 0. This means that 0 is the first such number

This completely describes the natural numbers. If you want to say that 0 is not part of the natural numbers, just write down the same things and say that 1 is the first number, and construct 0 later. For some funky reason, this doesn't actually matter. Although you'd think that difference between 0 and 1 is pretty big.

Nowhere in this does infinity appear. Infinity does, in fact, not belong to the natural numbers. Infinity as a NUMBER is only defined much later in mathematical literature. As a concept, it just means "big". When we talk about infinity in terms of the reals it just means "if we construct a series of numbers that get succeedingly bigger and they are not bounded, then they 'tend toward infinity'". But infinity is not a thing. Its just a name for "this shit gets big brutha".

The problem is that I can't give you a formal definition for "and so on", because it can mean many things.

I will give you a formal definition for a number instead.

Pretend again that we look at the number .111111111...

and now we flip it around. We look at the number ...111111.0

What this means is the following. This number is the sum over all the exponents of 10. The number is obviously identical to 1 + 10 + 100 + ... = 10^0+10^1+10^2+...

We still get the and so on. Now we need to find language that seeks to eliminate the notion of "and so on". Keep in mind that this number is not part of the real numbers, because it would be identical to infinity.

We prove this in the following way:

Our number is obviously bigger than 1, because it is 1+10+...

It is obviously bigger than 10, because it is 1+10+...

Now, we perform something devious. An argument by induction. This happens in the first week of math education and it is precisely when we leave the realm of "all the things we can write down".

We prove that for every n, the number ...1111.0 is bigger than 10^n.

1\. We already know this for n=1, because 1+10+... is bigger than 10^1 = 10.

2\. For n>1, 10^(n-1)+10^(n) is clearly bigger than just 10^(n), and our number contains all the exponents of 10.

(^Up there is a tautological proof. You already know this, I just write it down "semi formally". Proving a fact about natural numbers by induction is always somewhat tautological because the mechanism that makes induction possible IS the natural numbers themselves.)

Now we know that for every exponent of ten, our number is bigger than that. This means that for every natural number that we can possibly think of, our number is bigger than that. Therefore, the number we are looking at is not part of the natural numbers and by extension, not part of the real numbers.

This is because every natural number has a successor and by definition, the successor is bigger than the number itself. But our number is bigger than all the numbers already. In order for it to be a natural number, it would have to have a successor, which would be bigger than itself. But our number is bigger than all the numbers. This sounds a bit clunky. I could write it down mathematically, but that would just confuse you, probably.

Now I'm just being wordy. The proof was over long ago.

edit: Writing this down mathematically goes like this: Let b=...1111 and n be an arbitrary natural number. b>n => n is not successor of b => b is not in N. (You see that I had to reduce the argument to something I already knew - <USER2> successor axiom - in order to wrap it up).

I've shown that your number is bigger than all the possible number on the real line and if its not on the real line, it is not part of the real numbers.

Now you would ordinarily say that it is infinite. And that's kind of true, but you can only say that once you understand that infinity is just a concept, not a number in the way you understand numbers.

tl;dr: Infinity is not part of any of the ordinary sets of numbers (natural numbers N, integers Z, rationals Q, reals R, complex C, ... - yes, there are more of these)

<comment> alok-g Very helpful. Thanks! I can now see why infinity cannot be a natural number, under Peano's axioms. I follow mathematical induction arguments also. Thanks a lot! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This seems to come up over and over again, and it always comes down to what assumptions you start with. If you accept all of the axioms and methods, the proof holds. If you don't, it doesn't. Articles like this one, aimed at an audience that already assumes that its techniques are valid, are never going to convince a non-mathematical audience that doesn't know what the basic assumptions are, because that's not their goal.

</comment><comment><USER16> This theorem blew my mind on the Set Theory 101. A particularly interesting implication is that we can't say anything about the vast majority of the real numbers. Anything we say or write, all texts created by the humanity now and in the future creates a countable set. Since the real numbers are not countable, we can't assign them with the definitions.

<comment><USER17> For some added fun: algebraic numbers are the set of all numbers which are roots of rational polynomials. You know, things like sqrt 2, along with all the rationals themselves. Algebraic numbers comprise the vast majority of real numbers we ever have a reason to actually use.

These are also merely countable...

<comment><USER18> t0mek noted that all possible definitions of a number are countable. That would include all algebraic numbers.</comment></comment></comment>


Absolute Horizontal And Vertical Centering In CSS - <AUTHOR> http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2013/08/09/absolute-horizontal-vertical-centering-css/ <comment><USER2> Vertical centering isn't that useful when you already have to know the height of things... I mean, if you already know the heights, you can just put the numbers in straight.

The best way to do _real_ vertical-centering that works with variable heights, and doesn't use JavaScript, is to take advantage of the fact that table cells do this with "vertical-align: middle". Inexplicably, _only_ table cells allow true vertical centering with variable heights.

So you can either convert the surrounding element to a big ole

, or you can use CSS to give it a property of display: table-cell. And in both cases, give it a "vertical-align: middle". Then you're good to go!

And of course, horizontal positioning in the table cell is easy.

<comment><USER3> you can do (real) vertical-centering with display: inline-block too

See [https://twitter.com/giuseppegurgone/status/38820349236545126...](https://twitter.com/giuseppegurgone/status/388203492365451264)

<comment><USER2> Very interesting, I never saw that before!

But I can't figure out, for the life of me, why the bizarre ".container:before" declaration is needed -- it would seem to be entirely superfluous, but if you remove it, the whole thing breaks. Can you explain what's going on?

<comment><USER3> Here is a visual explaination: [http://dabblet.com/gist/7359467](http://dabblet.com/gist/7359467)

The pseudo-element (in red) is 100% tall and both .container:before and content are inline-block with vertical-align: middle;

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The fact that this is an interesting article is a huge indictment of CSS. It was developed for a different, simpler use case, and it's obviously the wrong abstraction at this point. Too bad it's entrenched.

<comment><USER5> I've been saying this of JS/HTML/CSS for years, but people seem to suffer from severe stockholm syndrome.

<comment><USER6> What do you suppose we do about it? Like it or not, people use web browsers to access the Internet, and as long as web browsers render HTML and CSS, we have to use the tools we have.

<comment><USER5> My complaint is that a lot of people _like_ CSS/HTML/JS. Because they have learned it and gotten comfortable with it. They don't know/understand anything else and their identity and sense of self-worth is challenged if you speak ill of these technologies. That's a big problem.

Pragmatically: I suppose that we embrace CSS/HTML/JS as object code. And I mean this in a much more dramatic way than CoffeeScript or SASS. This is finally starting to happen, thanks to browser support for things like source- maps. This is one reason I contribute to ClojureScript!

Idealistically: We should be pushing for lower level platforms for code distribution and execution, as well as host platform integration. Portable Native Client and similar efforts shouldn't be so controversial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Next time when I want to explain why HTML/CSS can be a pain, I'll take this example.

"Imagine it's 2013 and there is a website that has been online for years, where the greatest hackers and entrepreneurs exchange exciting ideas. When somebody posted an easy solution how to center something in HTML horizontal AND verical it was the favored post on that site for a day" ... ;)

</comment><comment><USER8> Before the inevitable complaints about CSS start flying in, you really actually hate the Box Model and should direct your anger towards it. To wit, the article itself says:

"Other Techniques

Absolute Centering is a great solution for centering, but there are other methods that may fit more specific needs. The most commonly used or recommended methods are Negative Margins, Transforms, Table-Cell, Inline- Block, and now Flexbox. They are covered more in depth in other articles, so I'll only cover the basics here."

Pray your support matrix allows you to just stick to Flexbox soon and all of this will start to feel like a bad dream from the bygone past.

First we abused tables, then we abused divs, now there are actual sane hooks for this, it just took 20 years is all.

</comment><comment><USER9> I personally think it's just incredible that vertical centering in CSS has been so woefully neglected over the 16 years we've had CSS. Every time I read another article about how somebody just maybe has figured out a kludgy way to vertically center things with CSS, I just shake my head. Aren't there any graphic designers on any of the W3C working groups surrounding CSS? Back in the old days when everything was a table-based layout, there was a clean, one- to-one mapping between the grid framework that your graphic designer created and the code underlying the page.

Then the semantic web pedants came along and decreed that tables shall never be used for layout. Fine -- but nobody ever bothered to come up with a DIVs+CSS replacement for the grid-based layout that any serious graphic designer uses to build a page.

And do you know what happened to the web? Debate cause and effect all you want, but webpage designs are far more boring now than they were 10 years ago. Now it's all just blocks of large-print scrollable text, some images here and there (or maybe a wall of them), and a cute logo. It's like everything is a Geocities page with better fonts and color choices, minus the gifs. I feel like I never see anything really cutting edge or creative in the design space on the web.

The internet is a really young medium of course, and it will naturally go through phases, where certain types of design come into fashion while others go out. And I would love it if somebody would prove me wrong by posting some links to some really kick-ass-looking sites. But from where I'm sitting these days, from a design perspective the web is a big yawnfest. Maybe today's websites are more usable and easier to index and work well on a screen reader, but from a graphic design perspective... zzzzz....

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm wondering, why does even CSS3 not have a simple way to vertically center text (or even vertically center anything)? It's a pretty basic and wanted thing afaik... Seems like a higher priority than shadows and 3D effects to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> The history of CSS is one where Microsoft earned an awful lot of bad will and what an epic fail the W3C has been in this regard.

Microsoft of course deviated from the nascent "standard" such that we've been burdened for years with "if IE ..." blocks to the point that the latest version of IE pretends not to be IE.

You reap what you sow.

But every time I come across the issue of "how to vertically center in CSS", an issue that has existed for years, I get angry. I get angry because the old way (vertical alignment on table cells) just works. As much as the CSS purists (some might call them "anti-table zealots"), it's hard to argue with something that works all the way back to IE4 and probably beyond (well valign="middle" probably does, CSS vertical-align: middle is probably IE5/6).

But beyond this there are so many things in HTML/CSS that should be simple but are hard. This is just one of them.

Consider spacing between table cells. There's (still) actually no way to do this... if you want no spacing between the leftmost and rightmost cells and the edge of the table, which I find is a pretty good use case. People end up doing things like:

        td { margin-right: 0.3em; }
        td:last { margin-right: 0; }

Any such solutions had varying backwards compatibility issues, a problem we're now largely getting behind us, but still...

Why can't I specify (separately if need be) the vertical and horizontal spacing between cells separately to the edge of the table (which should really be a property of the table rather than the cells IMHO).

The problem here is that the CSS WG seems to have started with a model and then just run with it without running it through very common use cases.

Looking at the article, it looks fine. One thing I'll say is it starts off with the "margin: 0 auto" trick, which everyone who does anything with CSS needs to know. Why is centering that hard? Why can't I just say "put this in the center"? Why can't I then use margins to offset from center or something?

Also FWIW, the margin: 0 auto thing didn't work in older versions of IE if you didn't specify a DOCTYPE and force "standards compatibility mode" (rather than the euphemistic "backwards compatibility mode".

</comment><comment><USER12> There are, in-fact, and have been for a while several known ways do do this in CSS 2.1 this just being another with a similar long list of restrictions and context requirements.

[http://css-tricks.com/centering-in-the-unknown/](http://css- tricks.com/centering-in-the-unknown/)

They're all much of a muchness, at least we'll be able to just use flexbox soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's so frustrating that it still requires all sorts of gymnastics to do something so conceptually simple in CSS, and yet many people seem to see CSS as a self-evident imperative to be used in all cases.

</comment><comment><USER14> _> This will break cross-browser compatibility._

That kinda ruined all the excitement for me :( Good of the OP to include all of the alternative techniques that might be better for cross-browser or other specific situations.

Seems like transforms are better than the original main suggestion though... why not stick with those?

</comment><comment><USER15> Also same link was on HN 84 days ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6214314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6214314)

</comment><comment><USER15> Stephen Shaw's (author of the OP article) codepen of the same I sometimes find easier to read, less advertising noise than smashing ...

[http://codepen.io/shshaw/full/gEiDt](http://codepen.io/shshaw/full/gEiDt)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm curious why there isn't something like TypeScript or Coffeescript for CSS? I'm aware of LESS and SASS but to my knowledge they don't go as far as their JavaScript complements in adding future-looking functionality. Is it simply not possible to add CSS grid or flexbox (or both!) support to LESS and have it compile down to plain ol' CSS?

<comment><USER17> Not sure what you mean by "future-looking functionality". I don't know anything about TypeScript but CoffeeScript is just an opinionated way to generate JavaScript. Isn't that what both LESS and SASS do for CSS? Regarding grid or flexbox, that is ultimately a design decision/preference of the architect.

So using your example, if SASS inherently used grid that would be like CoffeeScript introducing MVC into your project.

<comment><USER16> TypeScript adds some features planned for Javascript such as classes with inheritance and modules. The thinking is that when these features become standardized your TypeScript code will be valid Javascript. (Or at least as far as those features are concerned.) So in the same vein, why doesn't SASS provide the next generation of CSS functionality? That is, you use the proposed syntax for CSS grids and it transforms that into whatever mess is necessary to emulate it in today's CSS. Later when CSS grid support is available no translation is necessary.

I suppose the answer is because it can't do so in CSS alone and that emulating CSS Grid would require CSS, DOM, and Javascript to be emitted from the compiled SASS script. It would be neat if someone who knew more could confirm my suspicion.

I'm not sure I follow your example regarding CoffeeScript and MVC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is the first time in my life going to HN while I'm futzing with a problem has actually helped. Thought I was going to take my mind off - instead I found the answer immediately!

</comment><comment><USER19> I can't wait until the new version of flex box has widespread support and we can stop relying on these dumb hacks to do the most basic layout operations in CSS.

</comment><comment><USER20> Good grief, if the element to be centered has a fixed height and width, then there's nothing to this. I've been using the negative margin method for years:

[http://jsfiddle.net/mBBJM/2155/](http://jsfiddle.net/mBBJM/2155/)

Not that it's any less Stockholm-Syndrome-y than the linked article's solution, but still, I have no clue why this is on the front page of HN.

<comment><USER21> Front-end stuff always seems to make the front page of Hacker News. I think it's because front-end is easier, and possibly more "hip" right now (as far as jobs go), so there's more interest in it.

<comment><USER22> I'm a full-stack engineer that started out on the front end. I don't think frontend is easier - in terms of the amount of background you need to know to produce something useful, being a frontend engineer is significantly harder than being a backend one. However, frontend stuff _demoes better_. If you do a fancy machine-learning analysis of some public data set but present it as a command-line app or a table on some bare-bones website, people will be like "Uh, what's the deal?" If you make things fly around the screen in cool patterns, they'll be like "Woah! I didn't know you could do that!"

A lot of this is also because a frontend engineer's job is to lower the cognitive processing a user has to do, while a backend engineer's job is to come up with useful things to cognitively process. In other words, when a backend engineer comes up with a demo, they make the viewer _work_ to understand it, while when a frontend engineer does the same they make the viewer go "Ooh! Aah!"

<comment><USER20> Fair enough. This seems like CSS Positioning 201 to me, but I've been dealing with this stuff for a long time now, so my perspective is probably pretty skewed.

I completely agree with your point re: cognitive processing: good CSS communicates _intent_ to the reader, so if this kind of stuff is unclear to people and the Smashing Mag post helps the concept click in readers' minds, then it's a win :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What about using the HTML5 calc() to figure out the center?

<comment><USER24> If you are willing to use something as bleeding-edge as calc, you may as well do it the right way:

[http://philipwalton.github.io/solved-by- flexbox/demos/vertic...](http://philipwalton.github.io/solved-by- flexbox/demos/vertical-centering/)

<comment><USER25> Only that doesn't work in IE10 :( [http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox](http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> CSS grid is the future.</comment>


Tell HN: Why all this after our beloved Aaron is dead? - <AUTHOR>

He deserved better when he was alive.  I apologize to his family for not supporting a prodigy.  I have no excuse.  I will take the punishment.  I urge everyone to awaken.  We all are equally responsible for Aaron's death. <comment><USER2> 1\. What concrete steps can people take to prevent cases like Aaron's from happening again? What enduring commitments can be made, and to what causes or organizations?

2\. Who should we be listening to and supporting who is of like mind with Aaron, and has been neglected so far? Who is doing good work out of the public eye, like Aaron was?

I join you in commiseration. I'm going to look for a local organization to join in support of online freedom. Perhaps find a club to mentor promising youth in tech. I hope the Americans here will take every feasible step in correcting overzealous prosecutors (and nonetheless calling for justice where it hasn't been meted out). Aaron's passing must not be in vain.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am with you in this.</comment></comment>


SXSW 2011 Roll Call  - <AUTHOR>

Are you going to be at SXSW 2011? If you are check in here! <comment><AUTHOR> I am flying into Austin today.</comment>


Need feedback for Startup Weekend Project - <AUTHOR>

I need your help. I am working on a Startup Weekend project and need some alpha testers. Here is the pitch: Ever forget info about the people you meet? Ever find a business card in your pocket and don't remember where you met them and if you should follow up? Does looking at their Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter not help you remember? What if you could be reminded of what you thought about them, the name of their wife, and that they work at Microsoft but are looking for new work?
"Remembr Me" is here to help! Just text 1 (240) 821-6250 (We won't spam you or share your number or info) with the word "JOIN". Then follow the simple prompts to get started.
Our current commands include: "met" and "about". Meet someone new? Text "Met John Smith" (MET FIRST LAST) and we will ask you where you met them and then a few (comma separated) words or phrases you want to remember. Then when you meet John Smith again, just text "about John Smith" (About FIRST LAST) and we will text you a little about him and where you met him.
Be the person who remembers those details about people that show you really care. Remembr Me: It's the little things that matter.
Our next steps are integrating your Google address book and Calendar to give you contextual reminders about people right before scheduled meetings with them. I am on the list of the first people getting Google Glass, so next is integrating into this system and displaying this information when you see them (facial recognition).
Let me know what you think. <comment><USER2> So a scenario I run into often, but I'm not sure if this type of service would work very well for me. Before I go into specific cases, I initially wondered why an SMS interface? An app for the phone that works offline/online would be something I would more expect.

I tend to meet new people in bulk. For example, I go to meet a new client and get introduced to 5 people. Or I go to a networking event and am bouncing around meeting some new people. In either of these scenarios, your solution wouldn't work well for me.

In the first scenario, it would be a pain for me to send 5 different texts and walk through the prompts. So an interface for mass input would be great. In the second scenario, I'm not looking to break away from my conversations to type in information into my phone. This is a much tougher problem because really I want to remember who I just met without having to distract myself from my next conversation.

Good luck with SW!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the input.

We have been going back and forth about focussing on a mobile app. Some of the mentors have urged against doing that, since there are already lots of apps to handle more mass input.

However, the very next feature we are looking to roll out is the ability to add a contact, location, and a few tags about them in one text. It would look something like this: "Joe Schmoe @Starbucks & Developer, Daughter Sally plays violin, from Boston"

I know that Evernote Hello is trying to solve the issue of meeting a bunch of new people at the same time and helps you remember people based on who you met them with.

Our focus is making something that is and short and simple as possible to trigger your memory. The ultimate goal is something that requires no active input from the user based on your contacts, your calendar events, what your Google Glasses see and hear. Although, we run into a ton of privacy issues very quickly.</comment></comment>


Here's why apps won't be ready for the new iPad - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57396760-37/heres-why-apps-wont-be-ready-for-the-new-ipad/

<comment><USER2> > _While the iPad renders things like text for the sharper screen > automatically, ... textures and other art assets need to be redone to better > utilize the extra pixels._

> _... some applications have ballooned in size, which includes Apple's own > apps. Pages ... went from 95MB to 269MB while Numbers ... increased from > 109MB to 283MB._

I find it hard to believe the that bumps of this size are primarily to do with the resolution of graphics for interface purposes, even if they are keeping two copies of everything (one for hi resolution and one for low). If it is then the team working on those apps is doing something very wrong. I've not looked into the details but I suspect the feature sets have ballooned significantly too.

<comment><USER3> I think those numbers make sense. It is not just a new set of images (which could duplicate the application size) is a new set with four times the size of the biggest size you already had.

<comment><USER2> My problem with the sizes is that I wouldn't have thought there war _that_ much graphical content in that sort of application. Just toolbar (and other) button images, a few for fancy effects on the apps "crome" and a high res image or two for splash screens. Perhaps I'm behind the times there?</comment></comment></comment>


A Curated List of 50+ NoCode Tools - <AUTHOR> https://www.nocodeportal.com/lists/all-tools/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's a growing list, presently at 50+, but will be kept updated.

NoCode Portal is my new side project. I developed it using 11ty and TailwindCSS - a combination I truly loved and thus enjoyed building the website instead of getting frustrated!

If you would like any of your favourite no-code tool to be added please let me know. Thanks!</comment>


'Sailing' spiders prove escaping from them is futile - <AUTHOR> http://www.ajc.com/news/news/national/sailing-spiders-prove-escaping-them-futile/nmrtP/? <comment><USER2> Ok kill it with fire doesn't work anymore, we'll need to use thermite...

<comment> norea-armozel Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Wiby – A Minimalist's Search Engine - <AUTHOR> http://wiby.org <comment><USER2> As I've used the website before, I was surprised to see a larger number of search results than usual. Turns out [https://wiby.org/](https://wiby.org/) is distinct from the older version, [https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/), which only indexes few sites.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wiby.org is my homepage. I occasionally click "surprise me..." to view 90s style websites. I find them more interesting than scrolling though modern stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a very early version of searx, which is an open source privacy- respecting metasearch engine:

[https://searx.me/](https://searx.me/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I really like the wiby.me version of this. It displays results only from early web style pages; a great throwback to an era where not everything was "corporate".

</comment><comment><USER6> I used to know of a search engine that supported a bunch of added functionality for searching some selected popular sites. Like "wp whatever" would search just Wikipedia. It supported many man little command shortcuts.

It was popular among dwm/i3 users, and I have forgotten it :(

I was a fan of MacOS performing searches with Command + Spacebar, so on Linux I scripted a similar popup-prompt that would open Firefox and feed my input to this search engine.

<comment><USER7> _"Bangs are shortcuts that quickly take you to search results on other sites. For example, when you know you want to search on another site like Wikipedia or Amazon, our bangs get you there fastest. A search for

        !w filter bubble

will take you directly to Wikipedia... [DDG offers] 13,505 bangs and counting..."_

[https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> OMG! I can actually search for something and not end up in some conglomerate corporate non informational results. This is a dream! How are you able to filter out all the garbage.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is mixing Wiby's index with pages from Bings index. Wiby has criteria for the types of pages that can be part of its index, and those pages must be submitted directly by users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tested my app: [https://videohubapp.com/](https://videohubapp.com/)

Searched for "Video Hub App" and it didn't find my website :(

<comment><USER10> Search results are powered by Bing and its own index, so if you're not showing up you can just submit yourself

[https://wiby.org/submit/](https://wiby.org/submit/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> wow, I really like this! I'm really fed up with what google has turned into and miss when search was just a simple list of blue links w/o the unnecessary noise. Will start using this, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm impressed with the quality of the results.

</comment><comment><USER13> I get 502 bad gateway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wish I saw this earlier heh. I have a bug to fix!

Edit: I believe the bug which caused the crash is fixed now (knock on wood)

<comment><USER13> It works now - and it is awesome and fast. Will definitely try this more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it powered by Bing?

<comment><USER15> Partially yes. [https://wiby.org/about/pp.org.html](https://wiby.org/about/pp.org.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I got a chuckle of the 'wibyplex' photo in the about page.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like there is an increasing need for alternative search engines</comment>


China plans to launch artificial moon bright enough to replace streetlights - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-18/chinese-city-plans-to-launch-artificial-moon-by-2020/10392862 <comment><USER2> Other ongoing discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18248230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18248230)

</comment><comment><USER3> Goodbye stars.

I wonder what kind of dreadful ecological effects this will have on nocturnal wildlife?

</comment><comment><USER4> My first thoughts were that it sounds like the plot from a Bond movie, but jokes aside, this may be a good thing, essentially 'free' lighting at night for the area covered, i wonder how long it would take for the cost savings to match the cost of the satellites

</comment><comment><USER5> The full moon already have effects on our behaviour (and the one other animals), a permanent and brighter one will make things worse.

Besides that, night illumination (depending on their wavelenghts) affects our sleeping, that artificial moon will have a blue filter?

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what the impact will be on wildlife that depends on the hours of darkness?

</comment><comment><USER7> This sounds disturbingly like a plot of supervillainy. We'll really be in the shit when this thing goes live, only for U.S. intelligence (or maybe MI6?) to discover that that's no moon -- it's a battle station!

</comment><comment><USER8> Would be great if it works, could on net reduce emissions.</comment>


Flaws in diamonds might hold the key to a new type of secure communications - <AUTHOR> https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/07/05/implanting-diamonds-flaws-provide-key-technology-quantum-communications <comment><USER2> Reminds me of this Physics Girl episode on the Magic Russian Diamond: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bS7p3e6Lb4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bS7p3e6Lb4)

Sounds like they're doing something similar but with lab grown ones?</comment>


Ask HN: Typical bay area data scientist salary? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I recently moved from Europe to SF bay area, and received an offer from a startup in San Francisco to work as a data scientist.
I'm not sure whether the offer they've made me is a good offer for someone of my age and experience.
I'm turning 32 in June, have 2 masters in business and a Phd which I did on data and text mining. I worked 6 years at a university teaching programming classes to business students and working on my PhD. I've analyzed a big data set of a European retailer, wrote many sql queries, shell scripts and custom Perl programs to analyze the data set. Besides my experience at the university, I've worked 1.5 years as a data analyst in a company in Europe.  I have broad analytic as well as programming skills.
I also like'd add that I have permission to work in the US.
So, this is what they offer me. Before hiring me full time they would hire me as contracter +/- 100usd per hour (no benefits) for 2 weeks. After these 2 weeks, they want to hire me as an employee and would pay me 115K/year (including benefits).
What do you guys think about this offer?
Any feedback is highly appreciated.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> That seems low to me unless you're getting equity. That would be seriously low for a senior data analyst/scientist at a large corporation NOT in the Bay Area, even. Unless you want to take it for the experience, I think you could do better.

p.s. My comment comes from experience as an IT leader at a large Bay Area tech company, not as anyone with startup experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! What do you think would be a fair offer?</comment></comment>