Microsoft opens up on Windows telemetry, tells us most of what data it collects - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/microsoft-opens-up-on-windows-telemetry-tells-us-most-of-what-data-it-collects/ <comment><USER3> The actual list of what it gathers: [https://technet.microsoft.com/itpro/windows/configure/config...](https://technet.microsoft.com/itpro/windows/configure/configure- windows-telemetry-in-your-organization#telemetry-levels)

Included:

"Storage attributes, such as number of drives, type, and size" \-- So ID numbers of all USB storage drives you've connected? Better not put sensitive data on a USB and send it to a journalist...

"the number of crashes or hangs, and application state change details, such as how much processor time and memory were used, and the total uptime for an app." \-- To e.g. determine when you used the TOR browser, since the difference in uptime between two time points is how much it was up during that interval.

"App usage data. Includes how an app is used, including how long an app is used, when the app has focus, and when the app is started" \-- Oh, never mind, they also explicitly state they gather which apps you have installed and how much and when you use them in the next section.

"Accessory device data. Includes a list of accessory devices, such as printers or external storage devices, that are connected to Windows PCs and whether these devices will function after upgrading to a new version of the operating system." \-- Print poster and glue it to a wall -> Printer gets identified via tracking dots ( [https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do- not-d...](https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display- tracking-dots) ) -> Printer is linked back to you, even if you bought it with cash. I hope you didn't print anything your local sheriff would dislike!

Edit: This is all in the 'basic' level, which you can't disable.

<comment><USER4> > > "the number of crashes or hangs, and application state change details, > such as how much processor time and memory were used, and the total uptime > for an app."

> To e.g. determine when you used the TOR browser, since the difference in > uptime between two time points is how much it was up during that interval.

Having personally talked with Microsoft engineers who handle what this data is used for, I can tell you they take PII very seriously and per user details aren't being shared with 3rd parties (at present). Could they be misusing this? Or start selling it? Yes, but it would be an incredibly dumb idea from a brand value perspective, and I trust them to at least protect that. (I do honestly think that like most people, Microsoft employees are well-meaning individuals with good intentions)

What is this data used for? The most common use is to tell a large software developer "you have a memory leak in version 3.1.x when running on 4th gen intel CPUs with driver version 11.3" or similar. So companies with wide install bases (Oracle, IBM, other Microsoft divisions, etc) can fix issues which impact literally millions of users.

If anyone reading this has ever received this sort of Microsoft communication about your software, could you share your experiences?

<comment><USER5> > Having personally talked with Microsoft engineers who handle what this data > is used for, I can tell you they take PII very seriously and per user > details aren't being shared with 3rd parties (at present). Could they be > misusing this? Or start selling it? Yes, but it would be an incredibly dumb > idea from a brand value perspective, and I trust them to at least protect > that. (I do honestly think that like most people, Microsoft employees are > well-meaning individuals with good intentions)

Being an American company, you also have to worry about Microsoft being compelled to disclose per-user details with law enforcement or the intelligence community. They have no choice when it comes to this, so allowing them to have this data _at all_ is dangerous.

<comment><USER6> >it would be an incredibly dumb idea from a brand value perspective

Imagine how damaging it would be to their brand value if they put ads in the main OS interface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I ranted in another article regarding Microsoft's Explorer Advertising about my frustration with MS conflicting with my desire to support the good work some of their teams are doing, such as C#, Visual Studio Code, and Typescript. After reading through the comments here about everything this covers and which cannot be disabled, I'm putting my money where my mouth is and I'm stopping all further use of C#, F#, Visual Studio, Typescript, Azure, etc. I know that my individual loss means nothing to MS, but it's clear that MS is dying to attract developers to their platforms; as such, we who are outraged at MS's privacy violations need to act together to reject MS technologies, as that is one of the few things that they will listen to.

Disclaimer: These concerns of course extend to other companies actions, but in the context of this article MS is the most relevant company.

</comment><comment><USER8> Telemetry at the OS level bothers me to the point that I'm not Windows user anymore and I I'm not planning to become one anytime soon.

But to be fair one should point out that Apple is also collecting telemetry data (search system logs for com.apple.telemetry) without any toggles in the system preferences.

Search results don't bring much info on what is collected and how it is being used. Does anyone here have insight into Apple telemetry granularity?

<comment><USER9> Fun thing is, they probably do the same, but:

\- will do it well enough so that you can't find out

\- control PR well enough so that it won't leak out

\- have enough fan boys that if by any miracle people learn about it they'd be cool with it anyway

<comment><USER10> My take on this is that Microsoft is stuck in an awful compromise. Google's stuff is free because their business model is surveillance. Apple compromised the user experience to preserve privacy until it could push the machine learning algorithms to user devices. Siri lagged (lags?) Google, but it can now find all my locally stored cat pictures, even though Apple doesn't have a copy of them. There are toggles in iOS to prevent Apple from gathering personal info.

Microsoft is trying to double dip: Windows wants to be a premium product like Apple, and the cloud division wants to be Google. The CEO is from the cloud division.

To get more user data, many teams in Microsoft backported data collection to existing Windows devices without an opt-in (or even opt-out) at the same time they made telemetry mandatory, effectively compromising millions of devices.

This completely destroyed any trust privacy-minded users had in them. Now the telmetry team (which is probably actually acting in good faith, and just trying to make stuff better) is the lightning rod for all the other inappropriate data collection being done in Redmond.

This is why there is such a disconnect between Apple's response to privacy issues (usually: "oops, crap. We'll fix it in the next release") and Microsoft's responses, like this article, where the spokesperson doesn't have the knowledge or authority to provide honest answers.

<comment><USER11> Microsoft allows more control over data collection in Enterprise than in Home or Pro. That seems like a calculation about how much each group could push back, not acting in good faith.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It doesn't matter what Microsoft says or how they paint it. It doesn't matter how "transparent" they are. As long as data-gathering (read: snooping) is a part of the operating system, there will be a conflict between that and a user's desire for privacy. The only acceptable option for privacy-conscious users is to not use Windows 10 at all, unless and until Microsoft introduces an "Off" setting.

<comment><USER13> Even if they introduce an "off" setting, there's no good way to verify that they aren't collecting/sending that data anyway.

<comment><USER14> What about using something like TCPView[1], and Process Explorer[2]? Saying that there's "no good way" is throwing in the towel a bit early.

[1] [https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/tcpview.asp...](https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/tcpview.aspx) [2] [https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/processexpl...](https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx)

<comment><USER15> If it's the OS doing the data gathering, it can just hide that stuff from whatever you would use to monitor it. Look at how rootkits hide for an example.

<comment><USER16> Not to mention they bypass their own hosts file to make sure you don't override anything that might stop their data theft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From a quick skim:

There is still no "stop sending my personal information to Microsoft" switch, but Microsoft has published a list of examples of what data the "telemetry" subsystems collect.

There are other Windows 10 subsystems (cortana, start menu, etc) that silently collect data, and they are not covered by the list the article links to.

<comment><USER17> > There is still no "stop sending my personal information to Microsoft" switch

Sure there is. Don't use Windows.

<comment><USER10> :-)

I think that is necessary but not sufficient at this point, sadly.

I don't use outlook, but they announced some feature where it looks up the senders of your emails on linked in. So, if anyone you know uses outlook, then linkedin knows you know them.

I'm not sure if it looks at email bodies (yet), or if they rolled it out yet.

Either way, Microsoft should soon be able to sell employers a reasonably complete list of employees that are looking for a new job (including employees that are not active on linkedin or that do not even have linkedin accounts).

This is one example of many, I'm sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Windows 10 makes me want to move to Linux more than ever. I'm not some FOSS crusader, but I would like an operating system that doesn't spy on me, doesn't put ads in my desktop UI, and doesn't force people into an upgrade to do so.

<comment><USER19> Do it, don't look back.

(and I'll take this opportunity to thank everyone who works on FOSS software, paid or otherwise)

<comment><USER18> It's been years since I've futzed around with Linux... it's a little daunting. I need to be able to exchange Word documents with clients, and I worry about formatting errors and the like showing up if I'm creating those documents in LibreOffice. Also, I do like to play the occasional video game.

Really, what I want is Windows 7 that isn't locked to last-generation hardware and that isn't coming up on EOL. It wasn't FOSS, but it worked very well for what I needed.

<comment><USER17> The company I work for, CodeWeavers, sells a commercial version of Wine called CrossOver for exactly that use case. We're a little behind the current versions of Office; 2013 doesn't work very well yet, but old versions work excellently and we're working hard on 2013.

<comment><USER20> How's Adobe CS support?

<comment><USER17> Good question, I don't know. I remember hearing something just this morning about CS5 working well, but I don't know if that was with some internal hacks or with our public product. We offer a free trial if you'd like to try it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Most" being the operative word.

"These improvements are unlikely to appease that minority of users that regard the mandatory telemetry as an unacceptable intrusion..."

by "minority", I assume the author means those pesky, conscientous types who prefer not to have every action disseminated for exploitation. Analytics make the world a better place, and they can be abused as spyware... it all comes down to trust. MS's history speaks for itself.

<comment><USER12> Precisely. Let's paint privacy-conscious users (read: virtually all of humanity, given the choice) as the "minority." Let's make it seem like they are just an annoying vocal minority, complaining for the sake of complaining. This is just a basic marginalization tactic. Disgusting.

<comment><USER9> The real problem is they are right. We are a minority. Most people don't give a damn about it. We are talking about a world in which you can lie to presidency, ridicule yourself and the entire country and still people believe in you. So privacy ? It's not even on people's radar.

<comment><USER11> People accept data collection in part because of the lengths companies go to to hide, obscure, and spin it. Those efforts wouldn't be necessary if people truly didn't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> To be honest, publishing _most_ of what they are collecting makes me trust them less, not more. Why not publish _all_ , what are they hiding?

<comment><USER23> If I understand the article correctly, they are publishing all they are collecting by default.

They are not publishing exactly what they are collecting for the "Full" telemetry setting, which is opt-in. I'm guessing they don't want to commit to that because they want to be free to add and remove metrics they're interested in.

<comment><USER10> Note the Orwellian use of the word "telemetry." They are using it to mean "data collected by the telemetry team" at Microsoft.

This is not a list of "telemetry data collected by Windows 10".

I am beginning to suspect that they do not have adequate internal safeguards to control the collection of personally identifiable information across the entire company (including office, bing, skype, linkedin, etc, etc).

That would mean they are actually incapable of enumerating all the information a clean Windows 10 install and office 365 will phone home. It would also explain discrepancies between todays's list and third party audits of Windows 10.

<comment><USER24> I don't think that is true: the list includes telemetry from the Windows Store, which while a bundled part of Windows 10 I would be hugely surprised if its telemetry (which includes marketing concerns) is anywhere a part of the same "telemetry team" as say crash/error reporting telemetry.

The impression I get is that this information took so long to produce because they did have to sit down with all of the various teams involved.

They also don't seem to be attempting any Orwellian use of the word "telemetry", though it is technically explicit. They start the document by establishing the definition, if you care to question it more directly: [https://technet.microsoft.com/itpro/windows/configure/config...](https://technet.microsoft.com/itpro/windows/configure/configure- windows-telemetry-in-your-organization#what-is-windows-telemetry)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Honestly there is a lot of hypocrisy here in this thread. How many of us work for startups that either collect data on users usage of their app or rely heavily on the data Google/FB/Twitter etc have mined?

Answer: Probably all of us.

<comment><USER26> There's a huge conceptual difference between my data being collected by a service I decided to use and my operating system.

I play games, so I have no choice in the OS. Windows is the only choice. I can choose not to use Google or Facebook.

<comment><USER25> I didn't realize Microsoft was forcing you to play games that only run on Windows.

<comment><USER26> Ahh, the old "nobody's holding a gun to your head, you didn't have to spend $50 for dinner, you could have had Kraft Mac & Cheese!" argument. Good one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> >All crash dump types, including heap dumps and full dumps.

Maybe I should not have used Windows Insider after all which forces you to have it on full...

<comment><USER28> Wow, this means they will store in their databases your private data you had in RAM when something or Windows crashed? Am I wrong? because this sounds horrible, you should have an option on sending your memory dumps.

<comment><USER27> Yes, you are right.

I wonder how this affects something like Keepass. If I had it unlocked open while Windows crashed, does Microsoft now have all my passwords?

<comment><USER29> Yes it means microsoft has your passwords and you have technical recourse.

If you attempt to use legal recourse you will likely fail and your passwords could become publicly viewable evidence.

Change your passwords and don't store them on a close sourced system, this is the only mitigation I see you having that is sure to work.

<comment><USER27> Actually, if you look here [1], it says:

>While KeePass is running, sensitive data (like the hash of the master key and entry passwords) is stored encryptedly in process memory. This means that even if you would dump the KeePass process memory to disk, you could not find any sensitive data.

Either way, it is bad that Microsoft does not really warn people about this.

[1] [http://keepass.info/help/base/security.html#secmemprot](http://keepass.info/help/base/security.html#secmemprot)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > "Marisa Rogers, the "privacy officer" of the Windows and Devices Group, told > us that the telemetry data is genuinely useful to making Windows better. As > an example the company offered us, there was a problem with the Windows > Alarm app. "

So massive levels of enforced data collection are justified by them fixing the Windows Alarm App.

<comment><USER26> I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that telemetry isn't useful to improve Windows. It very clearly is, very much so.

I just want the ability to opt-out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> One can run Windows virtual machine on a Linux host at near native GPU performance with PCI passthrough and KVM for gaming and then besides Windows registry use Iptables to block Microsoft Atlas telemetry. I use that setup for playing Windows PC games which are not yet available native on Linux.

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF)

<comment><USER32> Sounds very interesting. Can I please ask what sort of games you play and what FPS you're getting?

<comment><USER31> I am playing strategy FPS Fallout4 2560x1440 it runs at 60fps ultra setting, car, train simulators. Hardware i7 6700k, Nvidia Geforce 1070p, Samsung 950 Pro M2.

Passmark score 4937, 93th Percentile 3D graphics score 12610, 99th Percentile 2D graphics 710, 72th Percentile Memory 2420 82th Percentile, Disk Mark 10435, 99th Percentile

Passmark link [https://imgur.com/a/mu0ln](https://imgur.com/a/mu0ln)

If you decide to try it do not miss the kvm ignroe msrs=1 setting, otherwise KVM will crash. /etc/modprobe.d/kvm.conf options kvm ignore_msrs=1

/etc/default/grub pass in setting intel_iommu=on and hugepages. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet intel_iommu=on hugepages=4096"

<comment><USER32> Thank you kindly, gaming was the final reason why I was hesitant to jump to Linux. It is nice to see high quality workarounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm unsure if Macs send as much data. For a fact, Android combined with Google apps know A LOT more.

Microsoft tends to get singled out while being the better option, sometimes

<comment><USER34> Sometimes? More like all the time. Microsoft still gets unfair criticism when what it is doing is usually less than its competitors (Apple, Google.)

It's pretty astounding, HN reads like early 2000s Slashdot sometimes in regards to its complete hatred of Windows. This entire thread is almost verbatim early 2000s Slashdot, "I just switched to Linux and I love it" along with all the OSS evangelists piling on. It's more annoying than insightful.

<comment><USER35> _Microsoft still gets unfair criticism when what it is doing is usually less than its competitors (Apple, Google.)_

This is a subjective opinion (i.e., subject to debate), and also a harmful one. "The other guy is worse" is _never_ a good defense.

<comment><USER34> Actually I think the defense of "Microsoft should never adapt to market standards that others have set, because they are Microsoft" is never a good defense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why couldn't microsoft offer a Windows 10 "developer edition" allowing telemetry to be set to "security"? Make it cost $200 more, so typical users won't buy it, but why not make it available at all?

<comment><USER37> It's called Enterprise.

<comment><USER38> Are mere mortals even _allowed_ to buy the Enterprise edition, quantity 1? Somehow, I doubt it.

<comment><USER39> As far as I'm aware it's only available via a volume licensing agreement.

Enterprise still doesn't let you disable telemetry though - just lets you set it to basic.

If you want to disable it fully you need the LTSB version.

<comment><USER40> >Enterprise still doesn't let you disable telemetry though - just lets you set it to basic.

you can set it to security through gpedit

<comment><USER26> Correct, Enterprise and Education versions will work on Security, which is essentially disabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is there a traffic pattern I can block on my home network that will disable telemetry but won't mess with updates?

<comment><USER42> Probably (until they change the telemetry traffic pattern). I don't know what it is.

Why engage in their game and try to whack-a-mole their software, if you have a choice.

I admit, for some, there is no alternative. And that's why there's the outrage.

<comment><USER41> I actually am keeping several computers in my house on Windows 7. A work laptop came pre-installed with 10 and I haven't yet installed Linux on it.

I think I'll just dump its traffic with no network apps open and see which addresses it calls home on.

<comment><USER43> I found this further down the thread, it might be of interest to you.

[https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker](https://github.com/crazy- max/WindowsSpyBlocker)

<comment><USER41> Thank you, I'll be researching this further

<comment><USER43> As for my take, I have a little shell script that translates hosts files into unbound configuration files, with always_nxdomain rules for each superdomain. I then use that unbound instance as my DNS.

<comment><USER41> I'd use my rpi for this, but it's on the wrong vlan...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> There is nothing that they could do to placate this crowd. even if they stopped collecting telemetry then there would be a vocal contingent of people complaining that it isnt open source. if it was open source and people didnt like the way it handled init a loud contingent would complain.

</comment><comment><USER45> Although I've managed to neuter this crap, we really need a table which details all the data MS, Google, Apple, various Linux apps collect under the guise of 'usage data'. I'm willing to grant that most of this is not nefarious, but there should definitely be an opt-out. As the owner of the machine, I do not want my CPU cycles going towards this, or JS scripts that track me, etc.

<comment><USER46> I don't think Apple collects anything, unless you say explicitly say "Yes, share usage data" during installation.

(Maybe I'm being naive.)

I feel like what we really need might be a legislation mandating easy opt-out (or even better, requiring opt-in).

<comment><USER45> AFAIK, I think its enabled by default on iOS, but you can opt-out.

[https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25654](https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25654)

On OSX this document seems to say no data is sent without explicit instruction, but then it says "data can be sent automatically if one of these events occurs".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I've switched my desktop computer to linux (Mint) with Wine. It's great. Very easy, stable and feature rich. Easier to deal with and customize. There are still some issues with software compatibility or security but it's on par with Windows enough that I haven't really noticed. The only problem I have is games. I hibernate and boot back into Windows 7 for GTA5!

<comment><USER48> linux is useless for sound production as well

<comment><USER47> Yeah, not gonna lie. I've tried most of the free DAWs and they all have stability issues. Random crashes or audio glitches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Even if they would provide a full list of evertyhing they are collecting about you, how could you even prove that is really _everything_ as long as window is not OSS?

I suppose you'd have to take them on their word, but do they have that much trust from their users?

<comment><USER50> Well it's possible to inspect the system and determine if they were exceeding that, and then the backlash would be pretty heavy, perhaps even legal? Sure they could secretly leak stuff, but then we have to think a ton of engineers are in on truly spying on users, not just getting telemetry.

Doesn't stop them from sending down targeted updates to turn on deep telemetry, say, under a legal order.

This is similar to the WhatsApp situation. They claim all this crypto. If they were lying, someone could figure it out and FB would get slammed.

<comment><USER13> Sure, someone _could_. But it's easy enough to obfuscate it so that it would be extremely difficult to tell for sure. There's a reason why making things verifiably FOSS is such a big deal. "Someone would surely catch them and embarrass them" isn't a great reason to trust them.

<comment><USER50> Of course. But is it worth a billion dollars or whatever the, say, EU, might decide to fine them if caught? Plus the added compliance costs of whatever a court decides they need to do? Not to mention press and loss of government contracts, etc.

There should be a project to fund some research into this, verifying some popular closed source clients.

<comment><USER13> It probably is worth it. Look at VW, "surely someone would catch them" worked out for them for years, and was quite profitable for them.

<comment><USER50> I suspect Microsoft's upside in capturing more details (websites visited?) for use in what, advertising?, less than VW's upside in circumventing physics.

Ads make money but it seems hard to capitalise off of secret collection - <USER2> many People involved and you can't advertise your capabilities to clients.

<comment><USER13> > Ads make money but it seems hard to capitalise off of secret collection - > too many People involved and you can't advertise your capabilities to > clients.

Why would it be? You don't have to tell advertisers how you got the data, just that you can show their ads to a certain demographic. And "websites visited" is just one of the things they can collect. Being able to advertise based on your documents, work-flow, social interactions, etc is probably much more powerful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This change in the settings menu fixes absolutely NOTHING. Suppose that as the article describes, you go ahead and chose the Basic setting for telemetry. What happens next week when some update is published and reverts back your settings to Full telemetry? This is not a theoretical scenario, many past updates have changed the state of the user chosen settings (including telemetry) without the users knowledge. In Computer Science parlance, the settings menu is non-deterministic, meaning you cannot be sure what state it is in now, as compared to the next minute.

So for example if you are a lawyer, a doctor, or a stock broker, and are typing a sensitive document for a client, even if you are diligent and checked that telemetry was set to Basic, before and after you typed the document, there still exists the possibility that for a few minutes the setting was changed to Full telemetry due to a background windows update, and minutes later reset again to Basic telemetry due to another update, thus leaking the sensitive document without you even knowing about it. That is what being non- deterministic means and is obviously unacceptable for certain professional software usage scenarios.

But the greatest flaw in Windows 10 is not the keylogger. The greatest flaw is the Delivery Optimization module, its new peer-to-peer software delivery system. Basically, with Windows 10, the DLLs that compose your kernel do not come from Microsoft servers directly, but come from Joe down the street, or worse from Boris the hacker from some other country, due to peering. What could possibly go wrong with that? In effect, your attack surface is the entire internet, and all that it would take for someone to compromise your system is some buffer overflow to nullify the hash thar Delivery Optimization uses to validate the peered DLLs.

Windows 10 has many great features, and one can see truly the significant positive progress Microsoft is making every month. But Microsoft really needs to purge the telemetry DLL and the delivery optimization DLL from the base windows install. They introduce unacceptable risks in several professional usage scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER52> It's still so crazy to me that they do this _in their OS_. But I guess a lot of people either don't mind or just don't know.

</comment><comment><USER53> Does anyone know how the "advertising ID" works or what's included?

E.g., is my web browsing traffic collected by Microsoft?

</comment><comment><USER54> What about the other subsystems that silently collect data?

</comment><comment><USER55> This is the company behind the Halloween Documents:

[http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/](http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/)

Why anyone would choose to trust them is beyond me.

<comment><USER56> You really think the Microsoft of today is the same as the Microsoft of 20 years ago?

<comment><USER57> 20 years ago, Microsoft was convicted as an abusive monopolist. It's up to them to convince me that they've reformed, and they're doing a kind of poor job of it.

Are you arguing that I am to just _assume_ that they've changed due to the passage of time?

<comment><USER56> How hard does a 28 year old person need to work to convince you they're not the same as they were when they were 8 years old? Microsoft has changed CEOs and lower leadership a number of times in the last 20 years. I submit that it would be difficult to find ANY company that can go 20 years without changing.

<comment><USER55> Change? Sure.

But they've done nothing to suggest they've shed their utterly user-hostile philosophy from 20 years ago. It just manifests in different ways.

To run with your analogy: imagine you ran into someone at 40, someone you hadn't seen in 20 years. 20 years ago he was into petty theft and vandalism. These days, he works as a lawyer for a patent troll. The specifics have changed; his character has not.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Angst Swells as Australian Population Nears 25M - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-31/angst-swells-as-australian-population-nears-25-million <comment><USER2> For Americans that don't get what the big deal is: Australia has a livable area about the same size as does California. The rest of the continent is desert that gets so hot they had to invent new colors to describe it [0].

Even towns in the 'habitable' area get in the upper 40C [115F] regularly during summer. The last three years have been relatively cool, but in between 2008-2012 there were days where Melbourne and Sydney basically had to shut down because the heat made infrastructure unusable without damaging it.

There is hardly any water and the cities were designed around cars far more than any city outside Los Angeles. Add a population that's three times what the neighborhoods were planned for and you see why Mad Max was thought up here.

[0] [https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/it...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/its- so-hot-australia-they-added-new-colors-weather-map/319705/)

<comment><USER3> _Even towns in the 'habitable' area get in the upper 40C [115F] regularly during summer_

I'm curious about how "uninhabitable" is defined in this context.

There are American cities of millions of people (Phoenix, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, etc...) where summer high temperatures never get below 100-110° for months on end.

They, too, are in the desert, but not classified as "uninhabitable." (OK, maybe Vegas is uninhabitable... ;) )

Down the road from Las Vegas is a town called Baker, California where the hottest temperature on earth was recorded. 134°, IIRC. Thousands of people still live there.

<comment><USER4> Something useful to keep in mind is that all the desert cities of the American Southwest can only exist because of the Colorado river.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This might be a bit of an insensitive comment, but alas so be it (not living up to my nickname unfortunately). I'm too used to this discussion in my own country and have little sympathy for the other side because in The Netherlands they have been wrong for 70 years now. The "we are getting too full comments" come from emotions, not from facts and I have the prejudiced feeling that in Australia it isn't any different.

Australian planologists should talk to Dutch planologists, and it'll be fine. I am culturally biased but I think it will become a problem once they reach about 200 to 250 million. The Netherlands as well: it can still grow a huge bit before it will hit a ceiling. Yes, it'll get more crammed, it just means you have to organize yourself better as a nation. But my point: if the Dutch can live in a crammed space, so can the Australians.

<comment><USER6> I do still think it's worthwhile for us to have the conversation about growth rate regardless of what we could handle in the long run.

The only issue is that this conversation keeps getting derailed by racists so I just stay away completely :(

<comment><USER7> I agree... its absurd to continually just grow grow grow without looking back to see if we're losing what makes us humans in the process.

We're getting so stuffed in the USA that national parks are starting to limit visitors and close gates at capacity - that for me alone is signal that a) we should take a serious look at our population b) we should do more to preserve and open more public lands for this growing population.

<comment><USER8> I suspect national park attendance: [https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/SSRSReports/Park%20Specific%20Rep...](https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/SSRSReports/Park%20Specific%20Reports/Annual%20Park%20Recreation%20Visitation%20Graph%20\(1904%20-%20Last%20Calendar%20Year\)?Park=YOSE)

has grown much faster than population, due to heavy advertising by national parks and a general increased awareness of visiting national parks as a "thing to do" on vacation rather than e.g. going to Disney Land.

<comment><USER9> And National Parks are an incredibly popular destination for foreign visitors [https://www.ustravel.org/press/study-more-overseas- visitors-...](https://www.ustravel.org/press/study-more-overseas-visitors- choosing-us-national-parks)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like how economists are always touting the economic benefits of immigration. "Sure, government is not coping with the influx of migrants by providing necessary infrastructure, but at least GDP is up 2.5%."

</comment><comment><USER11> 27 years without a recession, a minimum wage of $22/hr, an endless supply of perfect beaches and natural wonder; a most-developed, low crime, strong social safety net country not far from Asia for holiday. Sounds pretty good

<comment><USER12> Our GDP "growth" is largely because property price inflation is somehow considered economic growth.

As an Australian, my conclusion is that Australia has failed to diversify its economy. Money comes in through mining, agriculture, property sales and to a lesser extent tertiary education. The rest is a services economy, and I think the joke about Australia being a country where we all serve each other lattes captures the idea in as few words possible.

I've just left the US, and instead of going home I went to Europe to start my company. Denmark is amazingly progressive with how it spends its public purse setting up an environment for innovation. Australia on the other hand seems to have abandoned any idea of establishing a sovereign wealth fund (mining tax) and instead blown millions courting US dollars which hasn't succeeded in turning Australia into a foreign branch of SV.

For a longer read, this is obviously one person's analysis, but I fail to find a flaw in his conclusions. [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/australias-economy- house-card...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/australias-economy-house-cards- matt-barrie)

<comment><USER13> From the link, on economic complexity [1]:

 _Where does Australia rank on the global scale?

Worse than Mauritius, Macedonia, Oman, Moldova, Vietnam, Egypt and Botswana.

Worse than Georgia, Kuwait, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and El Salvador.

Sitting embarrassingly and awkwardly between Kazakhstan and Jamaica, and worse than the Dominican Republic at 74 and Guatemala at 75,

Australia ranks off the deep end of the scale at 77th place.

77th and falling. After Tajikistan, Australia had the fourth highest loss in Economic Complexity over the last decade, falling 18 places._

Not the behavior of a modern, mixed economy that many Australians pretend that we have. We are an anomaly. A third world economy with a first world standard of living. Will is last?

[1] [http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/rankings/](http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/rankings/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 25M is really small....what are these angst about. Sounds funny...

<comment><USER15> It's not the gross population that's the problem, it the rate of growth in population and the infrastructure that's required to support it.

The basic problem is that if infrastructure last 50 years, you have to replace 2% of it every year. Now, for every 1% of population growth, you also have to (on average) also build 1% more infrastructure, so you need to build 3% in total, or 50% more than if you had no population growth. But you only have 1% more revenue to build it with, so inevitably only a fraction of what you need gets built, hence the problems. And the higher the population growth, the worse the problems.

<comment><USER16> What a really odd logic. So then let's bring immigration down to 0%. Woohoo! Now you still got to "replace 2% of infrastructure every year" with 0% more revenue. How's that working out for you?

You argue 0 immigration -> 2% infra costs You argue 1% immigration -> 3% infra costs but also 1% more revenue to use for infra costs

I fail to see your issue

<comment><USER17> Where is immigration brought up? Poster is taking about rate of population growth which includes all sources of population.

<comment><USER18> Population growth in Australia is largely immigration-driven.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Strong population growth is a key contributor to economic prosperity"

This is the main ingredient of any pyramid scheme.

<comment><USER20> This is especially laughable as a claim when you look at European countries with high immigration and at best very weak economic growth. How do they explain that?

<comment><USER21> I cringe when i hear western european leaders talk about how their countries must accept immigration from third world countries to "save the economy" or "stabilize the social service systems". Even if these immigrants end up to be net tax payers after all the costs of feeding, housing, integrating these people... well, guess what, eventually they get old too and this circle starts over.

<comment><USER22> >> "Even if these immigrants end up to be net tax payers after all the costs of feeding, housing, integrating these people"

So, I don't know how immigration works on your planet, but here in the real world immigrants do not get free "feeding, housing" or free anything-else. In fact a key condition in even the most open/lenient countries is that you must show proof that you can provide for yourself. Any other way would simply not make any sense, and I am always in awe at the level of confabulation needed to believe these nativist fairy tales.

Or maybe you're one of these people who mistake _immigrants_ for _refugees_?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If Australia doesn't have resources for immigration, then what country does?

<comment><USER2> The US.

People don't drink land and we get decade long droughts that make California's look tame by comparison. The majority of Australia has the same hospitality to human habitation as does the Sahara.

<comment><USER24> Right, the only country that receives less rain is Antarctica. Most of the country receives less than 24" of rain in a non-drought year (of which, the last 11 have been).

Many places average 4" of rain a year.

Water supply is a ... challenge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Did Germany really has grown only 1% if we consider migration and the refugee crisis?

WRT to the article Australia seems to be paradoxically "big" and small at the same time (it's the biggest country after Brazil), with the big desert areas making its habitable area much smaller than one could suppose (Japan has a similar problem, even though it's bigger than Germany)

<comment><USER26> I'd love somewhere like Australia to take on a big terraforming experiment. Even "just" digging a channel from the coast to the middle of the desert. Fish, crabs find their way in, birds start feeding along the channel, fertilising the shore, small plant growth, ... or something.

Edit: an example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_\(China\))

<comment><USER27> They did! Although not on the scale as the grand canal, but still impressive. Check out the "snowy mountains scheme", [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_Mountains_Scheme](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_Mountains_Scheme)

Quote: "The water of the Snowy River and some of its tributaries, much of which formerly flowed southeast onto the river flats of East Gippsland, and into Bass Strait of the Tasman sea, is captured at high elevations and diverted inland ".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> One of the amazing abilities of most higher-order organism colonies observed in biology is the ability to self-regulate reproduction within an environment. If native population growth is low, it's usually for a reason. Native human population growth is between -2% and 20% annually, excluding war, famine, and disease. If you have a population of field mice in equilibrium, and you introduce more field mice, the net population does not increase. The number of births drops dramatically, and the number of deaths by causes mentioned above increases from negligible to potentially 100%. It takes a special kind of westerner hubris to believe that we're any different. Japanese understand this, and place blame for lack of growth squarely where it belongs: poor economic and social conditions for raising a family due to failed programs of social engineering from the 70s.

</comment><comment><USER29> Angst is always swelling. 25m or 25b.

</comment><comment><USER30> I just dont get the angst around immigration.

If you're going to get all in a tizzy about crowded cities and beaches, move somewhere else!

Theres tonnes of places in Australia where you can have beautiful beaches and no-one else around for 100's of km.

<comment><USER31> Goverment should have points added/deducted for moving to crowded less crowded cities. *

Adelaide/Hobart +10 Melbourne/Sydney -10 etc.

This might mean companies that need immigrants have to set up offices in Adelaide and Hobart. Fair enough.

* I'm assuming you read the article re: points scheme

<comment><USER30> I thought I had heard about them doing exactly this, but haven't seen anything about it in a while.

<comment><USER32> It can be simply achieved via income tax change. There's already a tax rebate depending on the degree of 'remoteness'. But it's a political hot potato because the majority of the population lives in three cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Gee, 25M. That's the population of some cities back home.

Australia has all the resources and land in the world to support much, much more people.

<comment><USER20> Land is nothing. Infrastructure is what matters.

<comment><USER34> Hit the nail on the head. Decades of underinvestment in critical infrastructure has left the whole system vulnerable to even small influxes.

Driving down the eastern seaboard of Australia one is struck by the hundreds of kilometres of perfectly habitable empty space. You could put two or three Hong Kongs on the coast between Sydney and Melbourne and no-one would even notice. We just need the damn infrastructure!

Given its land mass, Australia at 25m is a joke. We can support ten times that. That "uninhabitable desert" is no worse than Arizona really. All that's needed is a little bit of long-term thinking and investment.

Anyone familiar with my comments knows I'm no fan of "high-functioning autocracies" like China or Singapore but bloody hell - it would be good to get them in charge for just a few years and _build stuff_.

<comment><USER16> You have high taxes. You have lots of income from mining and your rich natural resources.

Then just build 3 Hong Kongs. What's the problem? Immigrants will be happy to build their new cities. Hong Kong didn't just suddenly show up. It grew over time on an island that had basically nothing on it. It's neighbour Shenzhen was a 10,000 people fishing village and is now a 10 Million metropolis.

<comment><USER35> I believe sho stated the problem. We have dysfunctional government that only thinks as far as the next election.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Weekly Online Poker Traffic Update - <AUTHOR> http://www.pokerscout.com/news/weekly-traffic-update.aspx?year=2013&week=7

<comment><AUTHOR> The 2013 run up in bitcoin prices is highly correlated with the increased bitcoin transaction volume due to bitcoin-facilitated online gaming, e.g. Satoshi Dice, which are especially attractive to US gamers wanting to circumvent banking restrictions.

Besides the privacy that bitcoin affords to gamers, benefits to gaming sites include very low transaction costs and credit card fraud elimination. Thus bitcoin gaming sites can have a lower rake than non-bitcoin gaming sites - which is better for customers.

Accordingly, there is a lot of upside left as new bitcoin gaming sites go live, and existing gaming sites begin to accept bitcoins.

</comment><comment><USER2> Perhaps not the right story to add this comment, but would someone please make an easy way to buy bitcoins using a credit card?

I know about charge-back problem, but I'm too damn lazy to do a wire transfer or skulk in IRC to buy bitcoins. I bet I'm not alone. Solve the problem = make a lot of money. Multi-day escrow would be fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a credit card, but Coinbase offers to link your bank account to their hosted bitcoin wallet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think I've even heard of major poker sites supporting Bitcoin, only some brand new ones.

</comment><comment><USER4> Poker sites do need traffic to attract players. Players love choice of tables / type of games / tournaments / not having to wait before a game starts / etc.

Despite "black friday" (when the U.S. DoJ confiscated all the dot coms from the four biggest poker sites) PokerStars is still number one. Moreover PokerStars bought Full Tilt (which died due to their ponzi scheme being discovered sooner than they had planned "thanks" to Black Friday). Just look at pokerscout.com's main page and you'll see just how big of a % of the market PokerStars+Full Tilt are representing.

Long story short: unless one of the major site starts accepting bitcoins bitcoins ain't going to grab a big share of the online poker market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed - for example Seals With Clubs is 1/1000 the activity of Poker Stars.

Yet bitcoin gaming is currently less than one tenth of one percent of the total online gaming market, is growing very rapidly from this very small base, and has caused bitcoin prices to _double_ since January 1.

<comment><USER5> Source?</comment></comment></comment>


Game Programmers and the C++ collapse - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexisbreust.fr/2019-game-programmers-and-the-cpp-collapse.html <comment><USER2> I work on very large codebases, and I very seldom rebuild the whole thing. 99% of the time I rebuild a small dll in a few seconds. The focus on the time it takes to rebuild 8 million LOC is misguided imho.

Also, not using stl and boost because it is too slow? In my experience people who make this argument often use significantly worse implementations with serious shortcomings.</comment>


7,073 Users Can Be Wrong (Airfoil Speakers Touch back in App Store) - <AUTHOR> http://rogueamoeba.com/utm/2012/06/06/7073-users-can-be-wrong/

<comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: Apple removed Airfoil Speakers Touch because of its ability to receive audio from iTunes and iOS.

In order to achieve this functionality, Rogue Amoeba had to use the leaked AirPlay private key, and Apple objected to this specific functionality being included in their App Store.

<comment><USER2> And of course this isn't mentioned in the blog post so Rogue Amoeba can play the victim.</comment></comment>


DDG's Post-PRISM Growth Actually Proves No One Cares About "Private" Search - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/duck-duck-go-prism-private-search-164333

<comment><USER2> So I read the article, but pretty sure the author doesn't get that rapid growth on a small-footprint search engine IS big news. So what that it doesn't have the reach of Google/Bing/etc, it has proportionately a LOT more now...

</comment><comment><USER3> I almost don't want to mention it, but this is the worst kind of duckspeak imaginable.

Apologies to those of you who (contra Quartz) read the appendix to "1984".

</comment><comment><USER4> _All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident._

\- Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788-1860)</comment>


Ask HN:  Who's going to Strange Loop this year? - <AUTHOR>

Are you going to Strange Loop? If so would you be interested in some kind of mini-meetup with fellow HN denizens? We could get together, talk about the decline of HN, share cat pictures IRL, you know, that kind of thing.<p>If you are interested mail me at email@example.com and I will get a list going. <comment><USER2> I imagine a few of us STL-based HN'ers would be interested in this, and would help promote it too. Shoot me a message if this becomes official, I'll try and help get the word out. firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Some people upvoted the submission, but I never got any mail :( Ohh well, I guess I will just have to randomly interrogate people I meet to see if they are HNers or not.</comment></comment>


The Cheater Gets Cheated - <AUTHOR> http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/the-cheater-gets-cheated/ <comment><USER2> _One company even tried to threaten us by saying that they will get in touch with the dean at Duke to alert them to the fact that we submitted work that is not ours(just imagine being a student who had used the paper for a class!)._

Well, hopefully that student would have learned a valuable lesson about how far your consumer rights apply when you are engaged in an illicit activity.</comment>


Chuck Moore: Forth, The Last Ten Years and The Next Two Weeks - <AUTHOR> http://www.forth.org/fd/FD-V01N6.pdf

<comment><USER2> My first (significant) paid programming job was writing FORTH for an industrial laundry control system. All the software was written in FORTH, regardless of the platform - the PIC CPUs that drove the counting systems were FORTH-based, as was the Windows application that managed everything.

Yes, windows apps in FORTH. It was amusing. If you needed access to more of the Win32 API, you updated a header file and recompiled the FORTH interpreter :) Good times.

Both the company and the FORTH supplier still exist today:

<http://www.microssautomation.com/>

<http://www.mpeforth.com/>

<comment><USER3> Laundry control? I remember a line from a Forth tutorial which introduced what the colon does.

: WASHING-MACHINE (drawn picture of a washing machine) ;

So that wasn't just an illustration after all!

<comment><USER4>
      : WASHER ( -- ) WASH SPIN RINSE SPIN ;

<http://www.forth.com/embedded/swiftx-embedded-systems-7.html>

It's in the tutorial. :-)

<comment><USER3> I've looked it up. The picture I remember was in Leo Brodie's Starting Forth:

<http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/sf1/sf1.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (this seems to be a scan of the March/April 1980 edition of the newsletter of the Forth Interest Group, containing the text of Chuck Moore's speech from the October 1979 Forth Convention in San Francisco)

</comment><comment><USER6> If you find yourself bored with the article at least skip down to the end and read the Q&A discussion at the end. I found it pretty interesting to read his speculation about where the future of computing was heading. His description of the ideal computer is interestingly close to an iphone, although the iphone still lacks a bit.</comment>


Coronavirus: Elon Musk 'child immunity' tweet will stay online - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51975377 <comment><USER2> A description of Zaphod from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reminds me of Elon:

"He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which."

<comment><USER3> This describes most geniuses. Just in these (hackers and engineers) circles I've met quite a few extraordinarily intelligent idiots. This includes one outstanding biomedical genius who thinks the Earth is 6000 years old, one almost superhuman programmer who thinks Hitler was misunderstood, and one who thinks the Earth is flat.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's unique to geniuses, or that Mr. Musk is a genius. I think it's just mathematical odds, and also human beings being human.

If a homeless guy says that drinking pee is good for your health, people say he's crazy. If a guy with 20 million Twitter followers says drinking pee is good for your health, people say he's a genius.

<comment><USER5> Nah, I got another theory.

Basically, people that tend to be more 'intelligent'/'successful' are better at learning. You optimize learning in a similar fashion to a start-up. By failing fast.

In general I think you tend to hear alot of silly thoughts from very 'intelligent'/'successful' people because they tend to speak their thought often and early (even if they do not have a grasp on it yet). Which leads to quick correction and refinement. Or in other words faster learning.

<comment><USER3> I agree about being better at learning. Maybe they (we?) tend to sometimes vastly underestimate the difficulty of learning in certain highly complex areas (like medicine) due to past successes learning difficult (but not as difficult) things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Read his whole comment, he's actually suggesting kids stay away from the elderly. He's not saying "kids are immune, let them do whatever." He's saying the opposite. They're basically not going to be showing as sick, and essentially make the best carriers.

It was a tweet...you all can read that far at least.

Edit: also, the headline (both here and on bbc.com) have "child immunity" in quotes, which are two words he did not say. He said, "Kids are essentially immune, but elderly with existing conditions are vulnerable." Yes, you could twist it around and say it was on the topic of 'child immunity', but it was put in quotes directly next to his name and was designed to inflame.

<comment><USER7> I usually try to take a charitable reading of people's online thoughts, but it's difficult to parse the difference between saying "Kids are essentially immune" and "child immunity." Kids are synonymous with children (unless Elon meant baby goats), and immune and immunity, well, if you can't agree that those are identical...

<comment><USER8> Playing devils advocate.

Try and add up known cases of children dying. I have been looking and I don't actually see any support for the often quoted 0.2% fatality risk. In China people under 20 made 2.1% of known Coronavirus cases, but they represent a vastly larger share of the population. Italy and South Korea show mortality by age but zero deaths under 30.

I would now say that as "essentially immune," but it does support them being at 1/100th the risk of 80+ year olds.

Further it also means shutting down schools early is extremely important. A largely asymptotic population in close contact with each other for hours a day is a nightmare for disease transmission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> During January the official line from the WHO was that there was limited transmission between people. Should Twitter have been removing any tweets which contradicted the WHO's position at this time under the 'misinformation' rules? I think it is important people are able to express opinions that contradict the 'official' knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER3> Elon's dumb tweets about coronavirus are a great example of the non- transferrability of expertise. He is a great engineer in many areas and a great founder and visionary business leader (in the Jobs mold), but seems to have major issues understanding epidemiology and public health.

The assumption that expertise is transferrable is probably one of the biggest fallacies in the public discourse.

Jobs displayed a similar blind spot around medicine, likely killing himself by attempting to treat severe cancer with alt-med crackpottery. Then of course there are all the celebrities that gave us all that nonsense plus the anti-vax movement. Medicine seems to be a popular area for this. For whatever reason when a person gets rich or famous they seem to develop the need to play amateur doctor with zero training and zero willingness to actually undertake the requisite study. Maybe you know you've arrived when you develop a strong desire to be a medical crank.

<comment><USER10> Musk isn't a great engineer. Look at the mistakes made with the Model X falcon wing doors and the Model 3 factory automation debacle.

Nor is he a great businessman. Didn't found Tesla, and it's spent $22B and lost $6.5B. None of his companies are consistently profitable.

<comment><USER3> Jordan was a horrible basketball player. Just look at that time he missed an easy shot.

Nobody gets a perfect score at anything, but on balance Musk is quite an engineer.

As for business: I consider success to be measured as product of value created and profit. Casinos and herbal quack MLM companies are highly and consistently profitable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Elon also predicted that there will be close to zero new cases in the US by the end of April.

<comment><USER12> To be frank, I made similar predictions. I knew exactly what kind of virus this was, but I kind of assumed the US government was preparing this whole time.

It was only towards mid-to-late February that I could see we had a problem, when none of the expected government responses happened, or happened weeks after they would have been helpful.

<comment><USER11> He made that prediction on 19th, three days ago. Either he isn't following the numbers or he predicts a total shutdown and a cure.

Maybe if he's a genius it's possible for him to make "meta-level" predictions e.g. "research for cure is accelerated by 100% for every mortality %", and thus actually the epidemic severity would always be balanced by a faster cure.

In any case, the prediction contradicts his views that the shutdown is unnecessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> this guy went from...having almost religious love of the people, to...just a lot of facepalming. I feel like dr. fauci now.

you're smart, mr. musk, but in SOME thing, not all things. his entitled ass needs to learn that sometimes you need to just stay in your lane, man. stay in your lane

<comment><USER14> Harder to do when you're getting less than 4 hours of sleep a night and being kept awake with amphetamines and caffeine, I'd imagine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So irresponsible. Infection rates are the same. Symptoms are just mild in most cases. He should be ashamed of himself, but he won't be.

[0] "Epidemiological Characteristics of 2143 Pediatric Patients With 2019 Coronavirus Disease in China" [https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/ea...](https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/early/2020/03/16/peds.2020-0702.full.pdf)

[1] "Epidemiology and Transmission of COVID-19 in Shenzhen China: Analysis of 391 cases and 1,286 of their close contacts" [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v2)

<comment><USER16> While that study just looks at children, I'm not sure if we can claim that "Infection rates are the same" between children and adults, if that's what you mean?

Either way, I think the paper you cited is worth reading. Many people think children are all safe to this, but they do still get infected. What is truly important to pay attention to is that _infants are vulnerable to this virus_. As the father of an infant, I am very worried.

As for Musk, he can say some dumb stuff like everyone. I just hope he follows through and helps manufacture ventilators with GM and other companies [0, 1]. We're going to be in for a lot of grief if we end up like Italy.

[0] [https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/21/21189184/gm-ventec- ventil...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/21/21189184/gm-ventec-ventilators- tesla-musk-coronavirus)

[1] tesla not mentioned but GM is [https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-trump-gm- medical-supplies-...](https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-trump-gm-medical- supplies-production-9a490add-0eb9-4c10-a647-3f57ae148028.html)

<comment><USER15> Correct, that particular study does not draw this conclusion but this one does: "Epidemiology and Transmission of COVID-19 in Shenzhen China: Analysis of 391 cases and 1,286 of their close contacts"

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.03.20028423v2)</comment></comment></comment>


Eric Schmidt worried about privacy risk posed by civilian drones - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/google-head-worried-about-privacy-risk-posed-by-civilian-drones/

<comment><USER2> Google has a fleet of automobiles that shoot pictures of every house on the planet without an opt-in and is planning eye-glasses that record everything that a person will see and upload it to google — yet Eric Schmidt worried about individuals having that same personal power.

<comment><USER3> My inner cynic says Google has already collected aerial and street level photography at great expense. Thus it is in their best interests to keep the barrier of entry high for competitors, leading to their desire to suppress any technology that can recreate their mapping imagery at a lower cost.</comment></comment>


No, More Running Probably Isn't Bad for You - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/upshot/no-more-running-probably-isnt-bad-for-you.html

<comment><USER2> The article claimed that the (original) article's conclusions about strenuous running were suspect because they were based on 2 deaths out of a sample of 40.

But is that really the case? I get sick of hearing that "the sample size was too small" when no analysis is done of the statistical significance of the results. In this case, the difference between death rates for strenuous vs moderate runners was significant (by my calculation based on their 95% intervals).

Given the small sample size, there are still questions to be asked about the methods they used to correct for age, sex, etc. But still, outright dismissal based on small sample size is not reasonable. If the sample is big enough to give statistically significant results, that should be an _a priori_ reason to accept the results.

<comment><USER3> "But still, outright dismissal based on small sample size is not reasonable."

The burden of proof, in my mind, is the one making the claim.

<comment><USER2> As I said, statistical significance is a prima facie argument for the claim. If someone wants to dispute it, they need to show why the alleged statistical significance does not support the claim. The statistical significance trumps the sample size, unless someone can show otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The use of the term "strenuous" running is also misleading; it may make people think that "running hard" is harmful.

In terms of this study, it means running four hours a week; probably 20 miles a week or more. That's not a level of activity that most people are in danger of crossing.

</comment><comment><USER5> All of this, all of it, is excruciatingly stupid. There are not enough people for a reasonable conclusion, the arguing is amongst a bunch of people who don't understand statistics or that this is an extremely hard subject to study and one in which the results are very person specific.

We don't need more poorly done, argumentative, non tech related research on a news site for computer programmers.

Can we please, please stop with the diets that have only been tried on mice and the exercise warnings. None of this in informative or even interesting, it's just trash tabloids masquerading as research that's pertinent to anyone's life.</comment>


Star Trek's Wil Wheaton thinks Google+ is becoming an annoying mistake - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/star-treks-wil-wheaton-thinks-google-is-becoming-an-annoying-mistake/2358

<comment><USER2> Wil Wheaton's response:

        ZDNet writes a misleading headline about me,
        calls me Wesley Crusher, uses a 20 year-old
        photo, and tells me to "deal with it."
        Very classy.

<http://mobile.twitter.com/wilw/status/198149699574837249></comment>


A Cryptologic Mystery - <AUTHOR> https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/neinnines/ <comment><USER2> Whoa. Nice job Matt, that's a really interesting possible correlation to discover.

> The author recounts watching from the street as Vavilova received encrypted > shortwave "numbers" transmissions in their Cambridge, MA apartment.

I haven't read the book, but I had to wonder exactly what was involved in "watching" this.

Here's a video I shot a while back, a clip of the numbers station in question...I do hear a nueve in there so I guess this was either legit traffic or Crypto-filler v. 1.1 ;-) (IIRC they have also used Windows XP freeware for data encryption in the past)

[https://www.facebook.com/friendlyskies/posts/101564738378132...](https://www.facebook.com/friendlyskies/posts/10156473837813284)</comment>


OpenCL University Kit (lectures from AMD) - <AUTHOR> http://developer.amd.com/zones/OpenCLZone/universities/Pages/default.aspx <comment><USER2> This is cool, but it's too bad I can't download without filling out a 1.5 page registration form... _closes tab_

<comment><USER3> If anyone does get around to downloading it, and it's freely redistributable, I'd like a copy.

<comment><USER2> [http://s3.amazonaws.com/opencl_download/opencl_univ_kit_1.0....](http://s3.amazonaws.com/opencl_download/opencl_univ_kit_1.0.zip)

<comment><USER3> Thank you very much!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Predictions for the World in 2030 - <AUTHOR> http://www.ilookforwardto.com/2010/11/10-predictions-for-2030-that-may-sound-outrageous-today-but-will-not-in-the-future1-by-2030-learning-a-language-will-no-lo.html#more <comment><USER2> 2030 is less than 20 years away. Can we look back on 1990 and really feel like an equivalent amount of innovation happened? I feel like these predictions are too optimistic. Not to mention just because we have the technology to do something doesn't mean it's practical, desirable, profitable or many other things that are required for something to become reality.

<comment><USER3> In 1991 (20 years ago), DOS 5.0 was released.

In 2005 (14 years later), autonomous robotics cars successfully navigated a course in the desert. Two years later, they did the same in a city, with no traffic violations.

In 2007 (16 years later), for a few hundred bucks you could carry several orders of magnitude more computing power in your pocket, with remote access to the sum of all human knowledge.

Today, we have affordable 3D printing and are on the cusp of quantum computing. Cryogenic preservation is offered at feasible prices by multiple companies. Political revolutions happen with live commentary which is beamed through space into my pocket. Several new nanotech-based products are released to market every week. If you don't stop and look around, it's easy to miss the fact that we live in the freaking future.

That said, I'm not sure I buy that space tourism will be that big in 20 years, nor that poverty rates will be so low. But the rest don't seem outrageous at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Didn't we have a long thread on #4 (By 2030, the best food will be grown in skyscrapers) and had a pretty big majority conclude it was bull?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I think this is what you're referring to: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1701724> & <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024252>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a prediction: 20 years from now we'll look back at articles like these and think "wow those were stupid predictions," in the same way that we look back at those Popular Mechanics articles from decades past that foresaw pill food and robot maids.

<comment><USER6> To be fair, I bet a list of predictions from 1990 wouldn't have been too far off the mark. I would imagine they probably would have said something like:

1\. The Internet will grow.

2\. Computers will become more common.

3\. Computers will become smaller.

Of course I'm sure there would have been a ton of dumb predictions as well, but I think it's easier to predict 20 years in the future than 50 years in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I believe the most impactful event that is likely to happen in our lifetime isn't listed here. It's the peak of human population and even possible decline. (Even if it doesn't happen world wide in your lifetime, it will very likely happen in the country you live in, and already has in Japan, much of Europe and Russia.)

Urbanization and rising out of poverty drastically reduces population growth, often times below the replacement rate. It will be interesting to see what happens if/when for the first time in human history, the number of people on the planet goes down.

<comment><USER8> > _first time in human history_

The black death in the 14th century made the number of people on the planet go down quite dramatically, as did the plague of Justinian in the 6th–7th.

If you're willing to look at geographic regions smaller than the whole world, populations have been quite frequently ravaged by disease and invasion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One good rule of thumb is that a transforming technology was in existence 15-20 years before it became revolutionary. Applying that to this list:

1\. Machine translation already exists and is getting better. Will it be ubiquitous? Unlikely. Only tourists and those interacting with them will normally carry them.

2\. No way. We cant even see the way to go. Cure a disease and another pops up to take its place. By 2030 we may know enough to start.

3\. Another no. If people have the freedom to make bad choices, there will always be extreme poverty. Will the police do daily roundups to force people into shelter, into mental helth facilities? Singapore maybe.

4\. No, except for a few exceptions, like pot. It's economics. Who is going to grow wheat in Manhattan?

5\. Of course. Google already has the prototypes.

6\. Yes, but somewhere along the line technology will enable the trend to reverse,

7\. I dont think so, even if the technology. We wont see flying cars because of cost and liability issues and the publicity of even infrequent crashes. Airliners will still have pilots because of public confidence. It's possible that cargo planes will perhaps have ground based pilots/monitors. In the military, of course.

8\. No way. The economics arent there, except for a few hundred rich people per year. The experimental technology doesnt exist today.

9\. Yes for low budget films and a lot of TV. Blockbusters will use actors, because stars sell films. We still have theater, opera, and concerts an films will still have actors.

10\. Probably so.

11\. If large numbers means several of your friends, even hackers, the answer is no. I dont think having a robot, can compare to having a real girl tell you she loves you. And I dont think a real girl will put up with the competition.

</comment><comment><USER10> _5\. By 2030, driverless cars will be commonplace._

I think peak oil, the rising cost of energy, and increasing urbanization might actually increase the usage of mass transit compared to any type of car. What cars remain, however, very much may be driverless.

 _9\. By 2030, most film actors will be out of work due to competition from cheap computer animated actors._

 _11\. By 2030, a large number of people will have robot lovers._

I'm sure robot lovers and CGI actors will exist, but I can't see them entirely displacing their human counterparts. Those are two places where most people will want an actual flesh and blood human, even if the alternative is indistinguishable.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't see self driving cars being commonplace in 19 years time. People tend to like control.

<comment><USER12> Those things change fast.

I remember when in the 90s most people preferred POP3 (for mail transfer), because for privacy reasons they didn't want their provider to have access to their mails. And quite a large number of people used encryption, even if they weren't technically inclined.

Today almost no one cares about privacy anymore. Expectations have completly changed within a century. Today it's, e.g., common for most people to store all of their chat logs on Google's server, without regularly deleting them. Or another example: Today we have much more advanced surveillance systems used against the general population than the techniques used in the DDR. For most people back in the DDR those surveillance systems where not acceptable. Today most people accept them if it helps the government "to find terrorists and criminals".

If privacy expectations can change within a century, why shouldn't the expectations on one's car change?

<comment><USER13>
      > And quite a large number of people used encryption, even
      > if they weren't technically inclined.

I agree with your broader point that expectations and perceptions can change fast, but I don't ever remember a time when "quite a large number" of people used email encryption. Perhaps a larger group of users then than now had a _desire_ for email encryption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _3\. By 2030, only 2% of the world's population will live in extreme poverty.

The eradication of extreme poverty will happen in our lifetime. In 1990, 42% of the world's population lived on less than $1.25 (constant 2000 dollars, PPP). In 2005, that number had fallen to 25%. The UN estimates that by 2020, only 10% of world citizens will live in absolute poverty. My bold estimate is that by 2030, only one in 50 will._

Would be awesome, but it won't happen if the world population keeps increasing at the rate it is increasing. We've already surpassed 7 billion people, which wasn't originally projected to happen for at least a couple more years.

<comment><USER15> The rate is already falling, isn't it?

<comment><USER16> Precisely, and the Malthusians are just torn up to absolute _tears_ over it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My thoughts:

1\. IMHO learning a second language will largely be no longer necessary because English will increasingly be the lingua franca. That being said, on the fly translation will clearly continue to get better.

2\. 150 year life expectancy? This one I don't buy. Medicine here has to be differentiated in two areas: curing and preventing the causes of "premature" death (eg disease) that stop us reaching a "natural" age when we die. That lone won't get us to 150 years. We're probably not far off that limit now. To get to 150 we need to extend the age to which humans can live, which is getting into some fairly serious genetics. I can see such technology coming about but IMHO will be the province of the wealthy for some time and will probably take longer than expected (again IMHO).

3\. I disagree with this. Despite all the efforts to stop poverty, even in developed nations, there is a segment of the population who remain poor. It might be controversial but a certain segment (IMHO) are poor and remain poor because they make poor choices.

Also, the definition of "poor" constantly changes. Poverty in the developing world is lack of access to basic health care, food and clean drinking water. In the developed world, poverty seems to mean your iPhone is two generations old.

And yes I realize there is true poverty in the developed world. There are people who are homeless but the scope of "poverty" in such discussions extends way beyond those when we're discussing social policy.

4\. Possible. Food production will need to change.

5\. Agreed. I think future generations will look back on this age of manually driven cars as being somewhat barbaric, especially considering the number of people who die on the roads.

6\. I also agree that the world's will become increasingly urbanized and you will see "mega-cities" as a result. There are efficiency advantages in concentrating populations in such cities.

7\. I was just having a conversation with a colleague at work on Friday about flying cars. My position was (and is) that personal flying vehicles won't happen before driverless cars. Humans won't simply be able to reliably fly such vehicles. Also, the energy costs I believe will possibly scupper such plans so we need to find a far cheaper source of energy for this to happen, especially considering we've probably passed peak oil production.

8\. This too is dependent on finding a new, cheaper energy source. Without that space travel will (IMHO) still be too expensive.

9\. I think this will be partially true but human labour is extraordinarily cheap and will be incredibly hard to completely displace. It's the same reason we still have humans doing incredibly menial work even when such work could be done by robots, that are comparatively much more expensive.

10\. Probably true.

Predicting the future is hard. 1900 to 2000 had a _massive_ amount of change, unparalleled in human history. Think about it: we went from the birth of the automobile to handheld computers, putting a man on the Moon, the global Internet and cheap, almost ubiquitous air travel. How much of that could've been predicted?

What's more, how much of that is on the back of cheap non-renewable energy that is ultimately unsustainable? Not just energy, but other resources like metals. The rate at which the world population is growing and using resources is unsustainable so something has to change: whether it be new energy sources are found or the population problem corrects itself.

I seriously urge you to watch:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY>

if you haven't already.

If you think of sci-fi as a predictor of the future (which it has been in many ways), we've vastly exceeded predictions in some fields (eg computers) and vastly underperformed in others (eg space travel). I heard Jerry Pournelle talking abot this with the predictions from the Mote in God's Eye. The handheld computers exist now, being smartphones, less than 40 years after the book was published. But in space travel terms, we're, if anything, _behind_ what we were in the 20th century.

To me the predictable aspects of the future are:

1\. Urbanization;

2\. Ubiquity of computing and networking;

3\. Genetic engineering.

Other things depend on the big question mark that is cheap and abundant energy. We may not find anything, in which case the future will be bleak. If we find something however the world will change beyond recognition.

<comment><USER18> 2\. Why do you think that only the wealthy will have access to these treatments? Its quite likely that some number of people won't have access, but most new medical technologies are available to most people because the largest cost of any new medical technology is its development. For some disease that everyone suffers from I wouldn't expect the treatment to end up costing more than, say, your typical run of chemotherapy. Something expensive, but that should be covered by most health insurance.

3\. He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction, and while I agree that completely eliminating poverty might be impossible getting it down to 1 in 50 seems doable.

EDIT: Edited for clarity.

<comment><USER16> > Why do you think that only the wealthy will have access to these treatments?

To begin with, the companies providing them will have to reach break-even and, in a field like biotech with huge up-front costs, that means making a lot of money from the first clients. Rich people have a lot of money.

> Something expensive, but that should be covered by most health insurance.

Then we're talking about different things. How often does health insurance pay for treatments that are still somewhat unproven in the real world?

> He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction

Right, and everyone seems to ignore the fact that, as measured on an objective scale, how a culture defines 'poverty' creeps up that absolute wealth scale as the culture's wealth grows. For example, at one time kings and rich industrialists could die of appendicitis; now, only the most desperately poor are so deprived of healthcare that having an inflamed appendix is a death sentence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> By 2030 we have long passed peak oil, renewable will not be able to provide sufficient amounts of energy, nuclear power will not be used in many countries because of irrational fears, and we will destroy the climate by using coal to produce energy.

Economically China will have surpassed the US and Europe and will therefore also have a higher standard of living than US/Europe (but still a lower standard than today's standard in US/Europe).

<comment><USER6> By 2030, China will be a humanitarian disaster area. They're doing ok now simply because they have such a massive workforce, but their notorious one child per family policy is rapidly reducing the working age population.

<comment><USER19> Most developed nations have population growth less than the replacement rate. They will have fewer workers supporting more retirees, who happen to be living longer and wanting more expensive medical care.

After a few generations of "one child per family" (by law or by choice), most kids won't have siblings or aunts or uncles!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't buy any of that. Unless, of course, the number of people playing WhateverVille games stops rising so fast, in which case some of those things might actually be possible :-)

IOW: By 2030, we'll have single Farmvilles producing more food than the entire world today, and CityVilles bigger than New York, sucking up most people's times faster than any other diversion in history of mankind

</comment><comment><USER21> In 2030, Diablo III will finally be released.

<comment><USER6> The real question will be if Duke Nukem Forever will be released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder what it says that out of that entire list of predictions I find the ones about industry in space the least credible - the very ones which people in 1950 might have predicted for 2010.

</comment><comment><USER22> In 2030, we still need to code exceptions for IE6 (I hope not)

<comment><USER23> If businesses haven't upgraded after 12 years, why would another 18 make any difference?

I'm beginning to think that IE6 is the new COBOL -- something that's locked into irrevocably locked into business practices. I'm working on a B2B site that is less than 10% IE6 in its day to day traffic, but when a major marketing event brought a flood of potential investors and customers, IE6's share spiked to 25%.

Our only hope is that companies will at least install an additional browser, and train their employees that IE6 should be used only for the legacy apps.</comment></comment>


8 strains of the Coronavirus are circling the globe - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/27/scientists-track-coronavirus-strains-mutation/5080571002/ <comment><USER2> I think this article is wishy-washy.

Firstly, a strain with increased rates of transmission (R0) should dominate other strains over time? Or does the randomness of early super-spreaders dominate? A strain with a higher R0 would cause more deaths (even if it isn't more deadly).

Secondly, we simply don't know if some of the genetic differences are causing significant differences in symptoms, rate of infection, or death rate. To statistically tease out difference between strains we would need to be testing for different strains and correlating that against outcomes. Some differences we can predict are likely to have no effect.

Aside: in countries with enough testing, there would be strong selection pressure for a virus that isn't detected (presuming most tests are similar). Maybe also selecting against causing a temperature. I'm unsure whether I hope that our Darwinian selection pressures are creating a milder strain, or whether to hope we can eradicate it (seems unlikely).</comment>