Arcan vs. Xorg – Approaching Feature Parity - <AUTHOR> https://arcan-fe.com/2018/10/17/arcan-versus-xorg-approaching-feature-parity/ <comment><USER2> I really wish Arcan got more attention than it does. It seems like a much more well-thought-out approach than the creaking X11/Xorg or the kludge that Wayland and its compositors has become.</comment>


U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, 'By Mistake' - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-websites-by-mistake-110216/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29 <comment><USER3> Wow, it's not just that they shut them down, but the US government put a big label on all the sites for all the users to see which basically says it was a child porn site, even though it wasn't, it was all some sort of error and most of the sites were small business sites doing normal ordinary things.

Their customers are going to assume that the government would have done some sort of investigation, got a warrant, there was a trial, etc, so they will believe that the claims are true. Some people might be angry enough that they track down the owners of the site or business and kill them.

What has happened is criminally negligent and outrageously dangerous. But the out of control government is not responsible for any of its actions, therefore these abuses will not only continue, but get worse.

</comment><comment><USER4> If affected you should do this ASAP: [http://torrentfreak.com/google-helps- seized-bittorrent-site-...](http://torrentfreak.com/google-helps-seized- bittorrent-site-to-regain-lost-traffic-101231/)

It seems .com is no longer safe for business on top of being ridiculously expensive for no good reason and already filled with domain squatters.

</comment><comment><USER5> I feel much better about the Internet Kill Switch now.

</comment><comment><USER6> So does this render DNSSEC effectively moot? It's not much good for authentication if the government can change the authoritative name servers for any .com/.org/.net domain and then sign that change.

But perhaps I don't understand how DNSSEC works. It seems unlikely that its designers would ignore that concern.

Edit: Or were they only concerned cache poisoning? There's been much talk of using DNSSEC to authenticate websites and even people. If I'm understanding DNSSEC correctly, it seems terribly misguided, even worse than the idea of "government key escrow".

<comment><USER7> My understanding is that DNSSEC neither helps nor hurts in this scenario. It mainly enforces the accuracy of the registration database, which in this case is being modified at the request of DHS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _"Even at the time of writing people can still replicate the effect by adding "22.214.171.124 mooo.com" to their hosts file as the authorities have not dropped the domain pointer yet"_

What's a "domain pointer"? That IP address serves up a seizure notice no matter what hostname you request it with.

<comment><USER9> Yes they have wildcards set up, but the server displays a copyright warning on random names you try. The server displays a child porn warning when you add mooo.com.

126.96.36.199 reallyfakehostname111.com 18.104.22.168 mooo.com

See the difference?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh geesh. What an awful story.

I worked as a subcontractor for a vendor servicing ICE back when it was INS. Nobody that I knew was very impressed with the quality of service that INS was providing, either internally or externally. Changing their name to make them sound better and then putting them in charge of something like this is just, well, very sad. (I don't mean to disparage an entire agency. All I have is my personal experience)

<comment><USER11> Having dealt with the INS and then the Dept of Homeland Security. The changes were for the worse. I get that they wanted to integrate all the agencies now making up the DoHS for better information sharing but there is a point when departments get so big that it just doesn't function anymore. They should have kept them smaller to remove the bureaucratic cruft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It begs the question, is anyone currently building an OPEN DNS?

<comment><USER7> I know of people and groups who are talking about it, the kind of folks who actually do stuff.

The problem is that the single point of failure in this system is the registrar operating in some legal jurisdictions. Registrars do provide a useful service some large percentage of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is one of the reasons I host my DNS outside of the US. Hopefully there would be a few more hurdles to jump over before a mistake like this could happen.

<comment><USER14> But it wasn't the DNS providers for those domains, was it? I'm pretty sure they got it changed on the master .com dns. So unless you mean you avoid all the US top level domains, you are still vulnerable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It sure would be nice if the government just didn't know about the internet.

<comment><USER16> Back when the government didn't know about the internet it was very nice. Then a bunch of folks decided this could be a great new method for selling stuff, distributing porn, etc, and now you see where we are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there some reason I can't select just the title of this article without also selecting half the elements on their page? Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER18> Am I the only one that is amused that the site they redirect to serves a single gigantic GIF totally 205K in size?

It is also exactly 1024x768, which seems even sillier, I guess people browsing child porn run their browsers in full screen mode all the time?

<http://184.108.40.206/>

<comment><USER19> Maybe they were thinking people wanted to use it as their background?

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure I could find a working monitor that small...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I right in assuming that even if a domain name is seized, the IP address will still work? If this is true, couldn't there just be a hosted index of all IP's and their associated domain names so that people could get to these sites by referencing this information? Hell, it could even be a browser plugin, so that if you type the domain name in and it happens to have been seized, it will be redirected to the proper IP address. Is this feasible?

<comment><USER22> DNS is really just a huge peer-to-peer network with a few central nodes, so this shouldn't be too difficult. You can already use an alternate primary nameserver, such as Google's 126.96.36.199. You'd just need your alternate nameserver to maintain a different cache than all of the other servers.

<comment><USER7> It's distributed, but not really peer-to-peer. It's almost completely hierarchical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't really understand how come, in the lawsuit-happy US, there isn't a class action lawsuit in place already to sue the government for the damage caused by this sort of error.

<comment><USER24> My first thought when I saw this was that it wasn't possible to bring civil claims against the federal government.

But looking it up, I found the Federal Tort Claims Act (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTCA>) which changed that in 1946.

<comment><USER25> That bill was passed after the b-25 crash on the empire state building in 1945 to allow for exceptions to soverign immunity in only very specific and sometimes hard to define cases. In 1947 there was the texas city disaster where 581 people died. The largest industrial accident in us history. Under the FTCA legislation the case was taken all the way to the supreme court where they ruled the government wasn't liable for claims of damages.

<comment><USER26> Pretty sure that's why they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

(Not saying you should go shoot up the government whenever you have a minor disagreement, but the only reason why guns are legal at all these days is because the Framers thought that this would help keep the government honest. Not sure that this actually works in real life though.)

<comment><USER16> If you're fuzzy on this allow me to provide clarification. A truckload of assault weapons, bunker full of food and a couple of dozen like-minded compatriots are a hand-written invitation to get raided by the Feds. It's not possible for a citizen or group of citizens to arm themselves sufficiently to provide any kind of real check on the government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's not obvious what technical solutions exist that are practical to combat this.

I feel like a lawsuit against DHS / ICE and related parties is an unfortunate but necessary step.

<comment><USER28> Start with that their seizure notices are not 508 compliant. They should be accessible to americans with disabilities.

<comment><USER27> I'm talking about technical solutions, perhaps in the DNS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have a great idea: Let's give these people more power!! You know, for like, Net Neutrality and stuff.

<comment><USER30> That was my first reaction, too. What could possibly go wrong?!

While I can't definitively say the free market is more intelligent than the USG, at least its actions aren't backed up by force.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have said this before I will have to say this again until we can get a good answer:

What the fuck is the government waisting time doing this crap when they have a war on terror to fight? Concentrate on what is necessary for the war effort, dammit.

<comment><USER32> I assume you're being sarcastic.

How about the government concentrate on reducing the massive debt or getting a decent healthcare system setup?

Waging war and pointless internet censorship aren't high on my list.

<comment><USER7> DNS is bad enough, but you really want these people in charge of your healthcare too?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> While there are more important things in life (like being accused wrongly of child pornography), I wonder how that effects their Google rankings to suddenly have your entire domain ripped out from underneath you and pointing to a duplicate content site.

Is there any recourse for this action? Seems that this would trigger unreasonable search and seizure.

<comment><USER34> _While there are more important things in life (like being accused wrongly of child pornography), I wonder how that effects their Google rankings to suddenly have your entire domain ripped out from underneath you and pointing to a duplicate content site._

My educated guess based on experience working with people affected by dissimilar causes but similar appearance to Google: a massive hit to rankings/traffic within about 48 hours, and recovery to a fraction of normal several weeks later.

I doubt that one can easily convince a judge that loss of Google rankings is a cognizable harm under tort law, but given that an agency of the US government just called you a child pornographer on your own property, if there isn't a sovereign immunity defense you will _hardly_ need to justify what a high ranking on Google is worth to receive damages.

<comment><USER35> The problem seems to be (for lack of better information) that sites are shut down pre-emptively with no warning.

I'm all for prosecuting child pornographers, and shutting down their content as quickly as possible - but that should be possible by a court order against the hosting provider.... or if said provider is unreachable / out of jurisdiction, and has STILL had some reasonable attempt at contact to press charges, then sure, go after the domain - but there needs to be some due process behind things rather than just having the federal authorities and DNS layer just whomping things down with little to no oversight.

<comment><USER7> Well that's just the thing - if someone is unambiguously a child pornographer - throw their ass in jail!

WTF are they doing screwing around with DNS registrations in cases where they know that is taking place?

It sure seems to me like some adversarial government entity simply found a knob they can turn to screw with people when they don't actually have the standard of evidence required for a prosecution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I can think of two questions I'd love to see a journalist track down:

1\. What's the legal process for banning a book?

2\. If it's not equally as hard (or harder) for the government to take down a website, why?

<comment><USER33> From my understanding, there are no 'banned books' in the US, but rather ones that are blacklisted by library, teaching and bookstore groups making them difficult to come by. I'm personally unaware of any book that the US Government has banned, although I'm always willing to be wrong :)

<comment><USER36> hmm… you appear to be right: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most- commonly_challenge...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most- commonly_challenged_books_in_the_United_States)

That brings me to my second question: why don't we have a similar process for websites?

<comment><USER37> The book Bridge to Terabithia (of which a 2007 film was adapted) was at number 8 on the ALA's list of frequently challenged books because:

"The censorship attempts stem from death being a part of the plot; Jess' frequent use of the word "lord" outside of prayer; concerns that the book promotes secular humanism, New Age religion, occultism, and Satanism; and for use of offensive language."

Maybe it's better we don't have a similar process.

<comment><USER36> Fair point, but the merits of the book banning system: are that it appears to be relatively difficult to implement or enforce, and that it's restricted to localities instead of a whole country.

<comment><USER38> The only way to have a publication legally banned in the United States is to have it declared legally obscene. Obscenity is a local consideration and it's practically impossible to get something banned universally. The only way publications are kept out are complaints to vendors and/or the willful adoption of mandatory rating systems, which generally have a rating that is equivalent to a commercial blackout (see "AO" from the ESRB or "NC-17" from MPAA; material so rated is not generally available because most "respectable" vendors refuse to stock it).

IANAL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's amazing that these operations and bills are intentionally wrapped in wording that makes them politically untouchable. I can see why lawmakers wouldn't want to investigate this. Who wants to be the congressman/woman that went against _Operation Save our children_?

<comment><USER40> How about a better question: Why is this allowed in the united states? This is an absofuckingloutely clear violation of the due process in our constitution. Yes save the fucking children, but do it properly. We see the abuses that arise from improper giving of power. I guess people are waiting until basically we live in communist russia where you got to bribe cops to not give you speeding ticket, impound your car, and throw you in jail, because they felt like breaking some balls. And then you get to sit in a nice abusive prison cell for a few months awaiting trial.

Sure it sounds like paranoia, but the government will never turn to a giant powergrab overnight. It will always be gradual, slowly taking power until its too late.

<comment><USER41> What, specifically, is a violation of due process? According to the story, ICE mistakenly included mooo.com in the domains they were seizing. Since that site functions as a DNS provider, the 84,000 subdomains hanging off it had their names resolved to the IP address with the scary law enforcement warning. That's a bad thing, of course, and I'll come back to that aspect of it - <USER2> it's not a violation of due process.

Let's back up a little. There are sites that host child porn or support a traffic in counterfeit goods, and part of ICE's job is to shut that down. Every country has a customs service, and the US is no exception. Art. 1 sec. 8 of the Constitution begins 'The congress shall have power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States [...]' and later in that same section, 'to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States [...]' A1S8 is also the source of authority to act against counterfeiters (of currency), to define and act against piracy, and various 'Offenses against the law of nations.'

So there's nothing unconstitutional about the existence of an agency such as ICE: Immigration and Customs Enforcement are among the specific enumerated powers granted to Congress, and Congress can in turn delegate those powers to agencies that it creates. This is why some kinds of customs activities can be conducted without reference to the judicial branch - no warrant is necessary for inspection of cargo at the border for collection of customs duties, and the various other enumerated powers in that section combine to give the government fairly wide latitude to poke around in people's baggage and so on too. It should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway, that all nations assert the power to decide what may be imported, whether to protect their domestic agriculture or to prevent the spread of things like child pornography. Of course such power can be abused to support despotism too, but that's an issue of governance, rather than some inherent flaw in the law itself - just as a computer and the software it runs can be used for worthwhile or nefarious purposes.

Now when it comes to seizure of websites, ICE is exercising its power (as delegated) to regulate commerce, both foreign and interstate. For this, they do need to get a warrant. Here's an example of a warrant in template form: [http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/FormsAndFees/Forms/AO109.pd...](http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/FormsAndFees/Forms/AO109.pdf) I am not sure if this the same warrant that would be used for a domain name seizure (IANAL) but if not then it will be quite similar - the principle is basically the same as impounding a boat or cargo container. Child porn is certainly subject to forfeiture, and if it's being trafficked across state or national borders, then all ICE has to do is show the court the website, the fact of its illegal content, and request the warrant be issued. And that's exactly what they do - there's no fourth amendment violation.

As for due process, that isn't abridged either in this situation. If the warrant was correctly issued, then the court is already satisfied that contraband exists. When it's executed against the listed websites, their domain names are seized and fall into the custody of ICE who has them redirected to their warning page. If one of the domain owners disagrees - say, because he does host porn but had a statement on the website that all performers are over 18 and he has documentary evidence on file - there is an opportunity to argue that in court. The warrant is not the end of the process; the government puts the seized property into evidence and a civil trial is held; if the government wins, then the domains become the legal property of the government.

Often in customs enforcement, counterfeit goods or money are seized but nobody is caught. The trial is still held; if you look at court calendars you'll see entries in federal district court every week for cases with names like 'United States v. $250,000 in cash,' or 'United States v. 100,000 capsules of a controlled substance,' or 'United States v. 5603 counterfeit handbags.' The US attorney describes the issue of the warrant and the seizure, displays the seized material or documentary proof of where it is stored, nobody shows up to contest the government's claim upon it, and the government wins and takes ownership of it (if it's money) or destroys it (if it's drugs or counterfeit stuff). I always like to imagine an actual heap of cash piled up on the defense table with its own lawyer in cases like these, but that doesn't happen :) Anyway, they will do the same thing as regards these seized domains that had child porn, and likely nobody will show up to claim them as their property - because unless they had ironclad proof that it was not child porn and so a _legal_ mistake has resulted, then they'd be arrested for the criminal act of trafficking in such material.

With mooo.com, ICE made a _technical_ mistake - but they made this mistake while they were in the process of executing a legitimate warrant. they have not any point claimed that mooo.com or any of its subdomains were involved in illegal activity. If they did so, then it would be weeks or months before the matter was put to trial. That the mistake was reversed within hours tells you that mooo.com was never listed on the search warrant in the first place. I'd bet money that the mistake actually occurred at a computer console - as the seized domains listed in the warrant had their DNS altered, the operator miscounted and pasted the ICE IP address over the next entry in the list, which happened to be mooo.com. Why? Because I have made that sort of mistake many times, and so has anyone else who uses a computer.

It is _not_ acceptable, but it is understandable - whereas there is no evidence at all for the picture that's being painted of corrupt authoritarians abusing the helpless public. Imagine the scene: a technician sitting at a console, while some uniformed ICE officers clutching a crumpled warrant in their sweaty hands stand behind her, drunk with power. The technician says 'well, all done officers.' 'Wait! Wait! What is that other site, that m-o-o-o dot com?' 'Oh, that's just the next entry in the DNS database, officer - totally unrelated.' 'Well, I'm on a roll - take that one out too.' 'but, officer, that's not-' 'Silence! Obey, unless you wish to live out your life in a federal prison surrounded by the scum of humanity! I can totally do that, you know. Now, zap it!'

Really? You find that more plausible than a simple screwup, of the kind we have all experienced and which was quickly corrected? Come on.

I repeat, it should _not_ have happened. ICE has a responsibility to use its enforcement powers carefully and accurately, and failed to do so here. Because mooo.com happened to be a DNS business, ICE's mistake did not just affect one site but mooo.com's 84,000 customers as well. And their mistake didn't simply result in those sites being inaccessible for a few hours - they resulted in those sites (and by implication, their owners and operators) being publicly identified as traffickers in child pornography.

That is a very serious charge, easily enough to wreck a person's reputation or even put their life in danger. When the government says such a thing about a person, even as a mistake which is quickly corrected, many people think no more but accord that accusation the same weight as a criminal conviction. With so many people affected, it's probable that at least a few of them have already been fired from their jobs, or received a visit from their local child protection services, or had their spouse file divorce papers. All those results would be radical overreactions to the sight of ICE's web page, but an official government seal and the words 'child porn' will be enough to provoke that in some viewers - it's literally something that people do not like to _think_ about, and so people do not bother to question the immediate emotional response they feel. 10 years ago in the UK, a bunch of uneducated vigilantes ran a doctor out of her home - they misunderstood her job title of 'paediatrician' on her clinic door to mean 'paedophile,' assumed she was a sex offender, and vandalized her house. Imagine how much more damning an official government warning of actual crime must look to anyone unfamiliar with the DNS or the legal system. You'd be better off being accused of murder than a sex crime; even if you were falsely convicted, you would be able to survive in prison while you appealed. Convicted child abusers usually have to be isolated for their own safety inside prison, and are marked for life outside.

ICE's carelessness seems seriously negligent, and since so many people were affected a class action lawsuit against the agency seems very probable. Suing the government is more complex than suing a private party because the government has immunity from some kinds of liability, so I do not know what technical path the lawsuit might take. But for the government to slap a 'child porn warning' on 84,000 or more people at once, even if it was 'only for a few hours, and only on the internet,' is about as bad a screwup as you can make. With 1, 5, or 10 people it might be feasible for ICE to write some humble letters of apology and offer a settlement to mitigate their trouble, but with tens of thousands a trial is the only efficient solution.

But this was not a failure of due process - it's just another example of internet's multiplier effect. In this case, technology allowed a technical error to affect 84,000 websites at once. The problem here is not the law, but the fragility of the domain name system.

<comment><USER42> Please note more words don't ad validity to an argument. Violation of due process is simple to show. There is no warning or process for trial or appeal. The trial is secret and there is as of yer no appeal. This is a simple end run around the court system.

I really don't understand the need to complicate things this is outside the intended capacity of the customs. There are still people that don't have their sites back that were falsely accused and no means of appeal. How can this possibly be justice? Secret trials are not part of due process either they are not notified prior to conviction.

<comment><USER41> _Please note more words don't ad validity to an argument. Violation of due process is simple to show. There is no warning or process for trial or appeal. The trial is secret and there is as of yer no appeal. This is a simple end run around the court system._

If they're secret, how is it that I can see customs-related asset forfeiture cases on the court calendar, and that they're open to the public?

Here's the annual report/audit for last year on the US treasury asset forfeiture account (where all the money ends up when there's money involved): [http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/terrorist-illicit- fi...](http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/terrorist-illicit- finance/Asset-Forfeiture/Documents/FY_2010_ACCOUNTABILITY_REPORT__Final.pdf)

And here's an easily readable article on the legal concept: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction> The customs service has had powers like this since _1799_.

edit: I forgot to mention that of course the website owners who were affected can sue the government individually or via a class action. I'd be very surprised if they didn't; I'm sure there are attorneys who specialize in such things busy typing articles about it right now, in case any of the persons affected are wondering who would be able to advise them on the subject.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why C# Is Not My Favorite Programming Language - <AUTHOR> https://fredmameri.wordpress.com/2015/09/14/why-c-is-not-my-favorite-programming-language/ <comment><USER2> It boils down to "C# is not C++".

<comment><AUTHOR> that was my same feeling. I'm a C# developer, and even though I consider myself a decent dev, I never thought of C# as a toy language. I guess I'm not that good.

<comment><USER3> Until the author has made systems like Stack Overflow, Exchange, IIS, Office 365, and SharePoint in C++, his comments about C# being a "toy language for small projects" are pretty much baseless. In fact, this entire article is nothing more than an academic exercise, he has no practical examples where any of his concerns had a significant impact on a production system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No feature or optimisation is free

One must eventually compromise in every language/system at some cost according to the value to its intended user

Many of these genuinely interesting criticisms of C# are the "other edge" to the sword we love it for

</comment><comment><USER5> Why Python, Ruby, Javascript, Java, PHP, and etc is Not My Favorite Programming Languages. That's subjective and completely worthless for others.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Basically, he could have gone with almost every modern language there and the result would be the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually prefer C++/CLI to C#. I use it for my UI code and can seamlessly call my C++ code to do the non-UI work.</comment>


Ask HN: Best Tech Books that are not manuals/instructional - <AUTHOR>

I just finished Cryptnomicon.  Superb.
Which tech books are on your list that are not how to, manual or instructional?
They can be fiction or non-fiction. <comment><USER2> Gall, Systemantics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics)

Petroski, To Engineer is Human: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroski#Works](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroski#Works)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for those.</comment></comment>


ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001133.html This is just about the coolest post I've seen in a while.  I use a pretty wide spectrum of these (and had no clue that "tick" and "back-tick" were only rarely used).  I just wish I had this when I wrote my punctuation limerick (http://www.limerickdb.com/?418). <comment><USER4> I present to you, the best of the best...

$ - Big Money

% - Double-O-Seven

& \- Pretzel

{} - Left Squirrely, Right Squirrely

; - <USER2>

# - <USER3>

Anybody work in a startup using solely the above vocabulary? Power to you.

<comment><USER5> The INTERCAL manual had some of the best. I was surprised to see that -- according to the Jargon file ASCII entry -- several of the INTERCAL pronunciations have slipped into what ESR considers common use, e.g. "mesh" and "splat".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Slow news day?

</comment><comment><USER7> I always called < right alligator and > left alligator.

<comment><USER8> That confused the hell out of me in first grade. They were trying to get us to understand comparisons, so they told us to pretend the symbols were alligators, and they wanted to eat the most hamburgers. But I only saw them as arrows, so I thought they wanted us to point to the highest number. I got every single one of those problems wrong!

<comment><USER9> I learned them because I started programming BASIC when I was 5. (I've recovered, thanks for asking.) I had it down pat, and then I was taught the mouth mnemonic in elementary school, and for some reason for weeks after that I had a hard time remembering which was which.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cute story: when my dad would read me program from Family Computing magazine to type into my C=64, he would always pronounce the ':' as 'dit-dit' (spoken quickly).

</comment><comment><USER11> { } have always been chicken lips to me. Everyone I've said that too has understood and although I may have gotten some strange looks, I've never been corrected.

</comment><comment><USER12> My favorite pair up, which I learned at Microsoft, is "slash and whack" for '/ and \'.

Killer is trying to remember which is which, but it sounds awesome.</comment>


Bayes rule explained - <AUTHOR> http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/cogs501/Bayes1.html <comment><AUTHOR> In college I failed to gain intuition about Bayes rule and since then I faced it a lot in every where I go, This links explain the intuition remarkably well.</comment>


Programming Books You Wish You Read Earlier - <AUTHOR> https://startingcode.org/posts/programming-books-you-wish-you-read-earlier/ <comment><USER2> Just another copy of zeroequalsfalse affiliate links with a new wrapper (tag=zeroequalsfalse-20).</comment>


AppFog acquires Nodester - <AUTHOR> http://blog.appfog.com/appfog-acquires-nodester-shares-love-for-node-devs/ <comment><USER2> Seems that most of the discussion is at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4447008>

</comment><comment><USER3> As I posted on their page I love the news. The forward momentum of this company is great. Not only are they based in my beloved town, they have a very clear mission, and a clear path for getting there. It's exciting stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> duplicate</comment>


"Cheating teachers go to jail. Cheating Wall Streeters don't. What's up?" - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/23/jon-stewart-cheating-teachers-go-to-jail-cheating-wall-streeters-dont-whats-up-with-that/ <comment><USER4> You know who _never_ goes to jail? Regulators.

Madoff, for instance, moved from Wall Street into a cell where he belongs, refuting the above headline. His regulators, however, weren't even charged with anything AFAIK. That despite their inaction for many years being either criminal negligence or the result of being bribed.

(From [http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-01-07/jpmorgan- pa...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-01-07/jpmorgan-pays-for- shorting-madoff-without-telling-anyone) \- "The government regulators, led by the Securities and Exchange Commission, also didn't catch Bernie Madoff, even though they were his regulators and that was literally their job. And while yes JPMorgan ignored some red flags, so did the SEC. Like, the many many credible letters they got to the effect of "Bernie Madoff is a big ol' Ponzi scheme." Should the SEC be paying an even bigger penalty than $1.7 billion?")

<comment><USER5> > You know who never goes to jail? Regulators.

Nor should they unless they were colluding with him or accepting bribes.

The punishment for just being bad at your job should be getting fired, not jail. Of course, I doubt many lost their job either.

<comment><USER6> A bad engineer who designed a bridge that later collapsed and injured/killed people will go to jail, in addition to being fired.

<comment><USER7> Can anyone verify that there are cases of criminal negligence where engineers have been imprisoned as a penalty?

<comment><USER8> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maccabiah_bridge_collapse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maccabiah_bridge_collapse) is one in Israel.

<comment><USER9> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versailles_wedding_hall_disaste...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versailles_wedding_hall_disaster) another Israeli example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mortgage loan offices aren't quite "Wall Streeters." These are people in your local communities and they are defrauding the people loaning the money, who are wall street people. So not like Gordon Gecko or Leo in Wolf of Wallstreet. But the guy in the illfitted suit who pesters you about mortgages when you in line to deposit a check.

I make this point because these people aren't super rich wall street people above the law. And plenty more than one were caught and jailed for it, I've found 4 examples on the first page of my bing search. Stewart is saying only one bank exec went to jail, but bank execs weren't the ones doing this mortgage fraud.

Some "Wall Street" banks do sell mortgages directly and would employ these mortgage offices, but a lot banks don't like Goldman Sachs, the former Lehman Bros.

The question is whether big commercial banks were complicit in the fraud of their lower level employees. You'd need to find an email or someone willing to testify that the banks knew that the loan offices in podunk were encouraging fraud. That is an extremely tough case to prove without solid evidence.

Also, this kind of document fraud was only a minor part of the financial collapse. The big mistake, which Stewart briefly touched on, was that the rating agencies massive fucked up. The financial risk model they used didn't work.

<comment><USER11> _Also, this kind of document fraud was only a minor part of the financial collapse. The big mistake, which Stewart briefly touched on, was that the rating agencies massive fucked up._

Well, no, those are two sides of the same coin.

On the one hand you have people giving out dubious loans and reselling them while claiming that if you mix the shit up the right way it turns into gold.

On the other hand you have ratings agencies who bought into the nonsense.

The two were 100% complicit and, I think, equally to blame.

<comment><USER10> But the dubious loans were known to be dubious, it wasn't fraud. It would have been a problem even if there was no fraud.

The fraud exacerbated the issue further, but I wouldn't say it is two sides of the same coin.

<comment><USER11> I'm not claiming they were equally complicit in _fraud_. I'm saying the ratings agencies and the lenders are equally responsible for the collapse. The lenders knew they were giving out dubious loans. The ratings agencies bought into the mathematical models.

Frankly, I think it was simply stupidity and hubris. On both sides. It's amazing how stupid people are in the face of irrational exuberance. Which is why I say: they're equally complicit.

As are those folks who took the loans (though to a lesser degree, as they may have been poorly or actively misinformed by loan officers), and those folks who bought and sold the derivatives knowing full well what was in them (or at least were aware of the models the risk assessments were based on).

Which is where ultimately regulators and regulations are supposed to play a role: to counteract the market's tendency toward irrationality. IMO, if you want to lay the crash at the feet of anyone, it's captured regulators, toothless regulatory bodies, and elected officials who bought into Wall Street bullshit that they could mind their own playground.

And really, you could lay all that straight at the feet of that granddaddy of all corruption issues: money in politics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Jon Stewart's thesis is that teachers are punished for crimes and "Wall Street" is not.

In this segment he singularly cites the actions of loan officers soliciting incorrect information comparing their actions to teachers falsifying test results.

First of all, loan officers are hardly "Wall Street" fat cats. They are low level employees who are paid an average of $50,000 [1] and do not work for "Wall Street" firms like investment banks.

Secondly, loan officers operate throughout the United States rather than actually on Wall Street or in Manhattan and, as a group, are subject to the jurisdiction of the federal government, 50 states, and 3,144 counties each with independent prosecutors (elected state's attorneys, district attorneys, etc.).

If none of the thousands of entities who could have brought cases have done so, either there is conspiracy vaster than any other or there are not credible cases to bring.

[1] [http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/loan-officer-salary- SRCH_K...](http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/loan-officer-salary- SRCH_KO0,12.htm)

<comment><USER13> Teachers, Garbage men... The DA and judges in Atlanta love to throw low level employees in jail for doing their jobs. Maybe they are too dumb to realise that these employees more or less do what they are told.

No one below the district level should have been on trial for this.

I agree with you to hold the actual loan officer liable is dumb. They were following directions.

[1] [http://fox17online.com/2015/03/09/garbage-man-to- spend-30-da...](http://fox17online.com/2015/03/09/garbage-man-to- spend-30-days-in-jail-for-picking-up-trash-too-early/)

<comment><USER14> So knowingly cheating in order to get a bigger bonus for themselves isn't criminal because they were told to do it? Pretty screwed up world you live in from an ethics perspective, but then I've heard all sorts of "they might be crooks but they shouldn't be held _accountable_ for it or anything" sophistry around this case.

<comment><USER15> Being told by an authority results in people going against their morals for the majority of people. Look up the Milgram experiment.

<comment><USER16> >Being told by an authority results in people going against their morals for the majority of people.

I think it's somewhat simpler: for a lot of people, obeying authority _is_ their morality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is perhaps the biggest failure in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. There should have been many more criminal prosecutions on Wall Street. It didn't help that the Secretary of the Treasury at the time came from Goldman Sachs.

Criminal convictions of CEOs are useful. They're very effective in changing CEO behavior. Sending a few low-level drug dealers to jail for a year does little to change drug dealer behavior in the neighborhood. Sending a few Fortune 500 CEOs to jail for a year tends to result in substantial CEO behavior modification. There was a famous example of this in 1961, when executives of GE, Westinghouse, and Allis-Chalmers were found guilty of price- fixing and sent to jail. That changed corporate anti-trust behavior for a generation.

<comment><USER18> People should not be punished soley to 'make an example' or for large-scale 'behavior modification'. Punishment should only be doled out for actual wrongdoings and only proportional to that individual's actions.

<comment><USER19> You're assuming that the CEOs cited in the example were not actually guilty.

<comment><USER20> Is there any direct, actionable evidence that individual CEO's willingly were involved with illegal activity related to the 2008 finance crisis? Most of what happened at the time was not technically illegal thus a large complex system with many participants makes prosecuting people very hard.

<comment><USER19> Not obviously. I made another comment upthread to the same effect - <USER2> the changes in the regulatory environment and the complexity of financial institutions, it's incredibly hard to prove criminal intent. I don't know what can be done about this - require all board meetings to be recorded? Introduce concepts of strict liability for financial mismanagement involving losses above a certain threshold?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Simple: there _are_ two Americas.

The first is the one that is populated by the wealthy and the elite; some people you've heard of, and a lot you've not. They're former Presidents and senators, important political donors, lobbyists, and a cloud of related individuals that orbit trust funds and old money. This America features well- groomed lawns, catered luncheons, executive offices, first-class health care, golden parachutes and custom transportation.

The second is where the rest of us live. It features waiting both in lines and on telephones, meals grabbed on the fly, taxation, potential observation and harassment by Federal or local security agencies, wildly varying health care, and advertisements on everything.

<comment> atom-morgan Example: Petraeus just got a slap on the wrist

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This could be taken to mean that society (correctly, in my opinion) considers the work of schoolteachers to be more crucial for the future of our society than the work of "Wall Streeters." With a more important role in society comes higher responsibility and just possibly greater accountability.

The _Answer Sheet_ opinion blog, from which this post commenting on a Jon Stewart _Daily Show_ is kindly submitted for our discussion, basically has a theme of decrying any public policy that makes schoolteachers accountable for actually teaching something to the learners in their care. That's a defensible policy position, I suppose, if you think that employment in the public school system is a jobs program for graduates of teacher-training programs. But I think it is also a defensible policy position to agree that spending money on schools is good, good for society in general, but especially so if the schools actually help learners learn. If learners are not learning well in school, and similarly disadvantaged learners in other schools are learning better, let's learn from the schools that are doing better how they are succeeding, and emulate their practices. That doesn't sound very radical to me.

Right now in the United States, the school-to-school variance in learning results of pupils is not very large, not even particularly large between poor and rich neighborhoods (by international comparisons).[1] But the teacher-to- teacher variance in teaching effectiveness within any one school is quite large, and one of the best things schools could do to become more effective rapidly is simply to hire the best available teachers, and let the lowest few percent of teachers (by teacher effectiveness) seek other occupations more suited to their abilities.[2] Other measures to improve teacher quality will also be helpful for schools and the learners in their care.[3] Teachers who cheat on tests used in part to gauge the effectiveness of teachers cheat all of society out of having better teachers.

[1] [http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is- mediocre/](http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/)

[2] [http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication...](http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Hanushek%202009%20Teacher%20Deselection.pdf)

[http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing- teachers-h...](http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-how- much-good-teacher-worth)

[3] [http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication...](http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Hanushek%202014%20Koret%20ch2.pdf)

<comment><USER23> "This could be taken to mean that society (correctly, in my opinion) considers the work of schoolteachers to be more crucial for the future of our society than the work of "Wall Streeters." "

If that were true, wouldn't we pay them more and treat them better?

<comment><USER22> Teachers have job security that is very rare in the private sector. They also have fully funded benefits of a kind that is rare in most occupations at matching salaries. They also get a lot of psychic rewards from their jobs, and graduates of teacher-training programs are in large supply, changing the supply:demand ratio for that occupation. I would indeed be glad to pay teachers more in salary, but I'd also like to be sure that wherever your children or my children go to school, the friendly local school is hiring only effective teachers, not ineffective teachers. If teachers get behind public policies that ensure that, then I think they will see increases in pay. (See the links in my earlier post in this thread.)

<comment><USER24> How many teachers do you actually know? I ask because both my parents were teachers and most of their friends are teachers and it's a lot of hard work for not much reward if any, whether financial or otherwise.

Students arguing about their grades. Students refusing to write papers or read articles about subjects they cannot handle intellectually (because it "conflicts with their religion or politics"). Many students who simply don't care about the subject material or education in general. Poor pay and long hours spent gradings papers and tests. Administrative duties outside of their teaching duties. Low pay and patronizing moronic administrative staff. Pensions reduced so that state legislatures can give ill-advised tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations (but I repeat myself).

Teaching is something done out of passion and while I can understand the passion I've seen derived from touching one life, it sure isn't the cake-walk you're alleging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Because it's easy to understand why cheating on tests is wrong, and easy to explain to a jury what people did that was wrong. Try to explain LIBOR manipulation to a jury and explain why it's wrong.

<comment><USER26> A regulator or prosecutor needs to first be willing to charge a bank or Wall Street executive before anything can get to a jury.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Politically connected & Rich people do not go to Jail for White-collar crimes. Think about the revolving door between Wall street and the Obama/Bush/Clinton administrations.

Would you put your "buddy" in Jail if it meant that the political contributions would dry up and your opponent is going to get a war chest to fight you? Of course not!

But an educator? These people cheated to keep their jobs and get (minor) pay raises - by definition they cannot fight back so the full weight of the Criminal Justice system (Racketeering Laws - typically used against Mafia figures) was used to toss some of them in Jail for upto 20 years!

Let's face it - the American Criminal justice system basically preys on those least able to protect themselves from its abuses.

<comment><USER28> Charles Keating was fairly well connected: remember the "Keating Five"? (US Senators who tried to influence regulators to go easy on Keating)

He spent over four years in federal prison after being convicted of white collar crimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> You don't have to go any farther then the fact that Navinder Sarao might go to jail for 20 years, but Jon Corzine, the CEO of the brokerage Sarao used, continues to walk free as one of the must successful failures ever.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think prosecutors would rather fine the banks tens of billions of dollars rather than throw people into jail.

For instance, the JPM $13 billion settlement (summarized):

\- $2 billion to the Justice Department, which will then deposit the money into a fund at the United States Treasury.

\- $7 billion, will flow to a range of government authorities, some more obscure than others

\- JPMorgan agreed to make a "lump sum payment" of $4 billion "payable to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, divided between them,"

\- The National Credit Union Administration, the federal agency that regulates credit unions, said it would collect a $1.4 billion share of the $7 billion pie "for losses incurred by corporate credit unions as a result of the purchases of the faulty securities."

\- $515 million goes to FDIC

\- $613 million to NY Attorney General (expand homeowner assistance programs)

etc, etc, etc...

[0] [http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/where-does- jpmorgans-...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/where-does- jpmorgans-13-billion-go/?_r=0)

</comment><comment><USER31> Jail is for people who can't afford to get out of it.

<comment><USER32> I was thinking that when watching a doco about western tourists to Thailand who get caught with small amounts of a drug on them. They get shaken down by the local police for a few thousand dollars, up to whatever they can afford. Those who can't pay get put in jail for a while. Not sure if it was bribery or what, but it seemed accepted by everyone involved.

<comment><USER33> That's not really an apples-to-apples comparison. Places with lots of tourists usually go pretty easy on them whenever it's possible. You don't want to scare your meal ticket into going somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There is a huge cultural problem and the teachers and MBS scandals are just the tip of the iceberg.

When it is acceptable that results count no matter what the means. When it is acceptable that results are measured by a single number. When conflicts of interest are ignored by regulators

Then you get:

      - inflated grades

      - inflated assessments of property values

but also:

      - inflated arrests by policeman chasing quotas instead of helping citizens (in other parts of the world police are reluctant to arrest people due to dislike of paperwork)

      - inflated claims by prosecutors turning a blind eye to weak evidence (in other parts of the world prosecutors don't fear for their own job)

      - inflated money printing

      - inflated tech stock valuations

      - prolonged ignorance of default risks

      - <USER3>

Markets work but there is such a thing as externalized costs. Regulators have a duty to monitor and step in when the line is overstepped. If they don't the benefits accrue to the powerful who cheat and the cost are born by the powerless.

It is a good thing that the "regulator" stepped in and stopped the teachers grade inflation.

However the way the regulator did this here is another example of single minded black and white thinking. Just because the grade inflation problem is bad it does not mean one can fix it with a single blow of a heavy hammer. Fear of rare random enforcement actions will only intimidate the people but won't stop further crimes.

Hard real life problems need well planned, consistently implemented and balanced measures.

</comment><comment><USER35> If we really cared to prevent "financial crises" like the one under discussion, we wouldn't be wringing our hands about whom to imprison. Instead, when firms went bust, we'd leave them that way. When all the money is gone, shareholder lawsuits will punish corrupt and incompetent executives more than prosecutors ever dreamed.

EDIT: for those who've forgotten what actually happened, Taibbi has a good primer:

[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies- of...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/secret-and-lies-of-the- bailout-20130104)

</comment><comment><USER36> I would hope that adults entrusted with the care of our children and betraying that trust would be punished much more severely than wall streeters engaged in some sort of shenanigans.

<comment><USER37> I would hope that adults entrusted with the care of our children would be paid more to get the top talent the job requires. Even a 1% change in a students learning is an immeasurable sum of profit to an organization and someone who can eek that out should get the compensation due.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Stewart's comparisons remind me of Eddie Izzard's riff on mass murderers. Small numbers of crimes, committed by a small number of people: easy to grasp and easy to prosecute; large numbers of crimes committed systemically: the mind boggles; medals more likely than punishment.

Izzard (NSFW): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk_pHZmn5QM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk_pHZmn5QM)

</comment><comment><USER39> Privileged Wall St. firms can afford better lawyers than schoolteachers in Atlanta? I had no idea...

</comment><comment><USER40> Black people get shot up by police, white people don't. What's up?

<comment><USER41> White people get shot by police. You have to look to find the cases, though, because they don't generally make the national news.

Here are a few.

[http://wreg.com/2014/11/25/salt-lake-cop-cleared-in- shooting...](http://wreg.com/2014/11/25/salt-lake-cop-cleared-in-shooting-of- unarmed-white-man/)

[http://wreg.com/2015/04/22/family-of-unarmed-white-man- kille...](http://wreg.com/2015/04/22/family-of-unarmed-white-man-killed-by- police-to-be-paid-3-million/)

[http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/27/white- teen-g...](http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/27/white-teen-gilbert- collar-killed-by-black-cop-trev/?page=all)

In fact, more white people than black people are shot by police in the US. The rate for blacks getting shot is higher, but not the number.

<comment><USER42> Yet these stories don't make it onto the national news? They aren't plastered all over CNN? Where are the riots for these deaths?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> What about those teaching cheaters?

</comment><comment><USER44> It's called money.

</comment><comment><USER45> Seriously.</comment>


Aura: shipping software that was delayed for 4 years because of patent licensing - <AUTHOR> https://alastairs-place.net/blog/2018/02/21/aura/ <comment><USER2> The cherry on top is that in the four year limbo between this software's completion and release, Apple removed the optical audio port that it requires to function from all new Macs.

<comment><USER3> It sounds like people have a love-hate relationship with Apple. If you hit the sweet spot, you are minting money, but they can cut you off at any time by exercising their control over the ecosystem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >AC-3, like the competing DTS standard, is a non-optional part of various other standards, including ATSC, ...

At this point it appears that Dolby has managed to worm its way into the new ATSC 3 broadcast TV standard as well in the form of something called AC-4.

Dolby started as a tape hiss reduction system that actually was useful. Since that time it has more and more become just a way to extract license fees from companies making electronics that involve audio.

For the TV standard they could of just used the open Opus codec, but since the people who are creating the standards are the ones getting the licensing revenue there is no real incentive to do something like that. These "industry standards" have become a kind of a scam.

So no, Dolby is not all that interested in licensing software implementations of their codecs for random programs. That is simply not where the big money is and it isn't really their business.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if the big players creating the hardware are part of these patent collectives and are also receiving some of these licensing fees. That would be a good way to keep smaller competitors out of an industry.

<comment><USER5> I work for a rather large company that works with audio and video and we used Opus but have since switched to a Dolby based audio stack as it offers much better sound quality, reduced transmission bitrate and is generally more robust. However this needs a direct involvement with Dolby and not just of the shelf stuff.

<comment><USER4> So Dolby has some sort of audio compression method much better than the state of the art that they are keeping secret? Why would they do this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought this is a "shipping software". But it's a music related app for Mac (Which seems to be pretty cool).

So, I am thinking this post deserves a better title.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does the optical input for the amplifier _only_ suport AC-3? Why don't manufacturers use a more naive patent-free method that might be slower? Are they really starving for bandwidth enough to justify the cost of an AC-3 license? Even uncompressed PCM times 6 channels could easily be transmitted over USB 2.0, and I was under the impression that these optical formats were even faster.

<comment><USER8> Usually the four codecs supported over optical are uncompressed (limited to 2 channels), AC-3, DTS, and MP2.

The patent status of MP2 seems to be hard to determine.

DTS seems to be still patented.

<comment><USER7> Weird, so manufacturers just haven't implemented uncompressed 6-channel optical audio? Is it bandwidth?

<comment><USER9> Uncompressed stereo 16 bit 44.1khz sample rate (cd quality) is <150 KBps so it's definitely not bandwidth.

<comment><USER10> It's bandwidth. More specifically, standard TOSLINK only has the bandwidth to carry stereo audio in uncompressed form. If you want full surround sound it needs to be compressed to fit into the same bandwidth that stereo audio would use.

<comment><USER11> I thought the problem wasn't toslink (the physical optical layer) but rather s/pdif (the software layer) which is constrained by its support for the rca physical layer?

IIRC, toslink 1.0 (circa '82 or '83) had a limit of 2 or 3 mbps while modern toslink is well over 100mbps (constrained more by distance than speed).

<comment><USER12> SPDIF is not a software layer, but a limited version of AES3 for consumers. In the OSI model, AES3 would be considered layer 2.

Layer 2 is not considered software, although it can be performed by software in systems where such a concept makes sense. However, in AES3, this does not make sense, and has always been handled in devices via a chip that merely turns AES3 into I2S to be fed to either a DAC or another interface chip (ex: conversion between AES PHYs is often done by just bridging the receiver of one type to the transmitter of another type semi-blindly via I2S).

Also, the AES3 protocol is incredibly simple. It only has a very limited set of flags (very limited in today's sense, more than enough for what was intended in 1985, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES3#Channel_status_word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES3#Channel_status_word) ), and was never actually meant to do anything but stereo audio at conventional rates. Doing encoded bitstreams across it is largely a hack, and is limited to the base versions of Dolby and DTS.

Using >3mbit over Toslink is not done involving an AES3-purposed PHY, but instead with other unrelated protocols, such as Digital ADAT. Distance on typical Toslink is already constrained to about 30 feet.

I have seen other people quote this mythical 100mbit number, but no one has ever been able to cite such a use in the real world: no standard I have ever seen that uses Toslink as a PHY has supported such a transmission rate: ADAT maxes out at around 12mbit, and MADI does not use Toslink at all.

Also, in further irony, in use, I have found unbalanced AES3 (such as via RCA or BNC) to be more reliable than Toslink; and virtually all of professional AES3 usage is done by 3 pin XLR because of how unreliable Toslink is...

Although a lot of professionals have moved on from AES3 entirely, and use MADI or Dante, or don't use digital transmission pipes inside of their studio at all and run it entirely on a single PC.

<comment><USER11> Very interesting reply, thank you. I meant to say "protocol layer" rather than "software layer" but misspoke. The correction is appreciated.

I think I'm going to do some more research on that 100mbps number. Perhaps they meant Bd/s?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What happens if you connect a Mac to a receiver using an HDMI cable? (And then chain your monitor to the receiver.)

HDMI can carry uncompressed 7.1 channel audio - will a Mac send that? If it does, does any playback software support that?

<comment><USER13> Yes, just tried it from a 2015 MacBook attached through HDMI dongle to a Denon AVR. Playback of Dolby test videos and the receiver shows 7.1 audio with correct perceived sound position. Tested with VLC, Quicktime and Elmedia player. It's possible the audio stack is remixing on the way through, because I tried a 5.1 AC3 file as well and receiver was still showing 7.1 _except_ with Elmedia player configured for audio pass-through, upon which it showed 5.1 audio (and issued a noticeable click when the change of format occurred)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This deserves a better title. HN's title submission rules are going to hurt chances of it being up voted despite the good story. Something like:

Aura: delayed 4 years by "Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory" licensing

edit: Thank you both folks who replied. I posted this comment, emailed the mods, then saw your replies. :-)

<comment><USER15> Agreed. Thanks! and thanks for the email.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why so few front end positions? - <AUTHOR> It seems like there are very few job postings for exclusive front end development positions. Many postings are for back end or full stack developers. Is the market saturated with front end developers, or do managers just not want front end developers, or am I looking in the wrong places?<p>I work exclusively as a front end developer on a large web app. It is very technically challenging. Our team has been growing but every dev that we have added has needed to be trained basically from scratch for front end work. Even supposedly full stack staff engineers with a decade of experience. A pure front end dev is literally 10x more efficient, and the technologies we use these days are just as complex as back end tech (if not more complex, and not saying that is a good thing). Are front end devs not valued, or not needed? <comment><USER2> Front and back end have re-diverged. Years ago we had event driven UI and OS provided widget toolkits. It was less artistic but more efficient than the web for the longest time. Front end development wasn't a position. Instead, companies had designers for advertisements.

Until recently you needed a decent amount of artistic skills to style a website and make it look nice. This is where front end work was important. Now we have many standard toolkit UI libraries to choose from like bootstrap, foundation, electron etc...

It's taken a lot of the artistic side out of making websites, but websites are more like programs now and economics dictate that function is more important than looking cool.

However, since the web also replaced advertising, companies have totally split their sites between WebApp and advertising site now. The frontend dev is still in demand for the advertising side where a unique look is important. These jobs are mostly WordPress.

The front and back end dev jobs will continue to merge as the frameworks get better and the chasm between WebApp and website grows. Front end has become a designer job for advertising platform sites, that's why more and more jobs are "full stack". I doubt your assertion that front end devs are more productive, especially because the technologies being used there now are so similar to back end work. For anyone using Node they're the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah - there's tons of jobs. I think you're looking in the wrong place. I just looked at Indeed and put in "front end" and there are 22,886 results :)

I think they are broken down more systematically when titled. You might find something advertising "rails or MEAN stack" or whatever you are working with.

Front end is complexed because it has backend baked into it, so it safe to say that front end is not "just as complexed" or "if not more". That's a stretch.

Rather than invent the wheel, I will just copy a quota comment....because it has good language...

[https://www.quora.com/Is-It-true-that-backend-developers- do-...](https://www.quora.com/Is-It-true-that-backend-developers-do-more- complex-things-than-front-end)

Yes. Simply because the environment is wider. On the front end it's all about the browser, and occasionally REST API calls.

On the back end it's database and the languages around that, server-side platform and the languages around that, often lots of 3rd party integration (to produce clean and useful REST services for the front end) and the languages and APIs around that, and more. It is a more complex set of abstract concepts that must be integrated into a seamless system.

It's not that front-end isn't difficult or important. It is. And it's absolutely critical to the success of the project. It is just lower in complexity than back-end because it's a smaller environment space.

Hope that's helpful.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best bioinformatics books you've read? - <AUTHOR> I got a biochemistry degree 12 years ago but have been writing software outside the field ever since. I'm curious about what the state of the art in bioinformatics is these days -- if there are any experts here I'd be grateful for some interesting resources! <comment><USER2> I'm far from claiming expertise in the field. But I'd start with the UCSD Bioinformatics Specialization course

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics](https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics)

The Biostar Handbook and BioPython library also have active communities for self learners

[https://www.biostarhandbook.com/](https://www.biostarhandbook.com/)

[http://biopython.org/DIST/docs/tutorial/Tutorial.html](http://biopython.org/DIST/docs/tutorial/Tutorial.html)

Best of luck ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, great resources!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yea, if you are looking to get up to date. I'd start with maybe a semi-recent reference book. But after that it's going to be all papers.

This looks decent: [https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Bioinformatics- Introductio...](https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Bioinformatics-Introduction- Mathematical- Computational/dp/1420070339/ref=asc_df_1420070339/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=241914467431&hvpos=3o4&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15711499340664576922&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9013538&hvtargid=pla-584595553911&psc=1#customerReviews)

</comment><comment><USER4> Wouldn't use books (just read papers, I liked Bioinformatics back in the day but it's a bit too math-y, generally the quality is there though). Do you mean genomics or some of the other subdomains of bioinformatics? Do you mean more for human health or ecology applications?

On a semi related note I got a biochemistry degree 10 years ago and have been writing software outside the field ever since. My partner still is in genomics so I do somewhat keep up but I definitely still love biochemistry and miss keeping up with it. So, uh, do you think you'd like to talk to someone about your projects or share good papers or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested in modeling biochemical systems -- a lot of work falls under this umbrella. Thanks for the offer of chatting about this stuff, if you're still interested my email address is firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a book I loved: [https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642072857](https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642072857)

</comment><comment><USER6> I only know of 2 that deserve the term bioinformatics, which is really abused when data wrangling should be used in place.

Those are Durbin et al 1998 and Pevzner et al 2000.

Durbin et al is a classic on HMMs, but some sections feel incomplete.</comment>


In 2017, only 34 black women raised more than $1M in startup funding - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/13/an-update-on-black-women-raising-startup-funding/ <comment><USER2> Stopped reading at:

"Still, the median amount of funding raised by black women is $0. That's because the majority of startups founded by black women receive no money."

'Majority' does not mean 'all'. Credibility lies significantly in precision and facts; especially for causes like these.

<comment><USER3> IMO that's not a sufficient reason to stop reading. One mis-use of a mathematical term misses the larger point. YMMV. Rather than dismissing entirely why not send a brief, polite message?

<comment><USER2> When an article is generalizing 'all' for a civil point that is being thrown around like a Frisbee, credibility is gained when precise pieces of information are presented in a thoughtful, transparent way. The larger point is not reinforced by their article that exaggerates. Facts win arguments; emotions only handouts. Thank you for your reply.</comment></comment></comment>


Introduction to Computer Graphics Online Textbook (2018) - <AUTHOR> http://math.hws.edu/graphicsbook/index.html <comment><USER2> I think that there's a disconnect between academia and industry in the field of computer graphics. This is probably because professors usually mistake profusion for broadness. You can spend one chapter each on:

HSV colors | Bezier and NURBS curves | Vector (font) scaling/rotating/etc. | Scene graphs | OpenGL lines API | OpenGL rectangles API | OpenGL texturing API | OpenGL rotation API | OpenGL colors API | GLUT (busywork to get 3D graphics on the screen) | JOGL (busywork to get 3D graphics on the screen) | SVG file format | 3D Model/View/Projection matrices | linear algebra | Lighting (from an OpenGL 1.0 perspective, which misses a lot of lighting theory) | OpenGL material API | OpenGL MipMaps API | More scenegraph, this time with camera and lights | How to do a bunch of stuff you already learned, this time in Three.JS instead of OpenGL | How to do meshes, in Three.JS instead of OpenGL | How to do fixed-function shadows, this time in Three.JS instead of OpenGL | The programmable pipeline (finally) | WebGL busywork to get something on the screen | GLSL syntax | texture units | 2D transforms, this time in GLSL instead of fixed-function | Lighting in GLSL | Textures in GLSL | Multiple framebuffers | deferred shading | ray tracing | path tracing

and feel as though you've taught a lot of stuff, but in reality it's not a honest simplification of later graphics knowledge.

I think that a better approach would be (1) Explain 3D math, linear algebra, etc. (2) Explain raytracing algorithms, show the student some simple raytracing code (3) Explain the basics of modern GPU-based rendering (4) Show the student some simple software-based raster rendering, which mimics what the GPU does (5) Explain the shader pipeline (6) Using WebGL (no need to teach three.js and OpenGL 1.0 also!), show the student all the various principles of 3D graphics, going into theory when appropriate.

Scenegraph? That's irrelevant. GLSL syntax? We don't need a comprehensive explanation, the documentation already does a better job than we would. We just need to cover enough to let them know what's possible. HSV color? Bezier curves? MipMaps? OpenGL 1.0 API in gory brutal detail? GLUT? JOGL? Those deserve a mention but not an entire section.

<comment><USER3> Much of that is mostly of historical interest. Today, either you're using the scene graph of some game engine, or you're down at the Vulkan and shader level, working on the engine and programming the GPU. A theoretical understanding of the whole pipeline is helpful for both, but how much of the old mechanics should be taught is a question.

WebGL is easy for students to start with, since all you need is a browser. It's not really used much on the Web; most of the good demos are over 5 years old. Despite that, it's probably worth teaching WebGL simply because students can use it to get something they can show to others.

Here's the Utah teapot in WebGL: [1] Udacity uses that example. Once students understand how that works, they probably know enough unless they intend to do game engine development.

[1] [http://www.realtimerendering.com/teapot/](http://www.realtimerendering.com/teapot/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I highly recommend this wikibook on the topic of CG progamming: [https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cg_Programming](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cg_Programming)

<comment><USER5> Aren't you conflating the field of computer graphics programming with the Cg programming language?

<comment><USER6> If you take a glance at the linked document, as I just did, it appears to cover the hardware graphics pipeline which is more than just a Cg programming language reference. Cg as a language is more or less the same as any other high level shader language of the same era.

<comment><USER5> I did look at the linked document and poked around, it was all Cg (the programming language) centric. Which obviously overlaps substantially with computer graphics, but isn't what I'd consider an ideal introduction to the field unless the goal is to work with the Cg language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow OpenGL 1.1 in 2018! then to Three.js which doesn't use any of the 1.1 API. Weird.

<comment><USER8> "However, modern OpenGL in its pure form has a very steep initial learning curve, and it is really not a good starting place for someone who is encountering 3D graphics for the first time."

<comment><USER9> Just imagine what would happen if you tried to start a newcomer with Vulkan. ([http://sol.gfxile.net/temp/hellotriangle.png](http://sol.gfxile.net/temp/hellotriangle.png))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would not recommend this to aspiring graphics engineers today. There is far too much here that is completely disjoint from how computer graphics is done pretty much everywhere (CAD industry, games, film, etc).

<comment><USER11> What text would you recommend to aspiring graphics engineers?

<comment><USER10> I'm very partial to "Real Time Rendering"!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Chapter 2, Section 7: "SVG: A Scene Description Language," looks interesting.</comment>


Filesharing site launches (Volafile.io) - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
For quite some time I've been working on http://volafile.io, a real-time filesharing site that allows users to share files in 'rooms', each with a chat and a (live) list of files. It has advanced features like filtering, searching and it can even play most audio formats (mp3, ogg, opus etc.) directly on the page.
I would be very thankful for feedback on the idea, execution and even the current design. Also I'm currently not making money of it, but plan to at least get expenses for the servers back with a 'donation' based model in the future. I can go more in-depth on that in the discussion.
Again, I'd be thankful for any feedback HN can give, plus I'll stick around to answer any question that might come up.
Edit: I've created a room for HN here: http://volafile.io/r/FK86r <comment><USER2> I use this site. It's excellent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well thanks for the feedback and all, but I was actually looking for opinions of people who have not been around the entire time ;)</comment></comment>


The best advice I ever got - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0804/gallery.bestadvice.fortune/index.html <comment><USER2> Some gems:

"when the customer says yes, stop talking."

"always assume positive intent. Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent."

"I've noticed that some of the most effective leaders don't make themselves the center of attention. They are respectful. They listen."

"you shouldn't go chasing after fancy titles, but try to find people who can teach you something. "

<comment><USER3> A side note, completely off-topic. In Japan, if the customer has stopped talking, you need to shut up as well. One of the reasons a lot of Western salespeople get toasted over there is that they don't appreciate the value of silence. When you're negotiating a deal, and your client sits there silently, he is thinking, and watching you to see how you act.

If you patiently wait and show that you are engaged in thought, this is good. If you keep offering more and more, just to close the deal, you will get taken to the cleaners. And, if you press things too hard, you will be shown the door, ever so politely.

Just my two cents; seemed to fit, a little. _grin_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favorite: "Focus on those things you do better than others."

After years of doing "okay" at things I don't particularly shine at, I'm coming to realize that the above advice could really yield dividends.

</comment><comment><USER5> Should it bother me that the Chairman of one of the largest equity funds in the world doesn't know Smith from Ricardo?

I guess not.

....

 _My father wrote in my sixth-grade yearbook quoting Hamlet - Polonius to his son, Laertes: "To thine own self be true."_

      No!  I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
      Am an attendant lord [viz, Polonius], one that will do
      To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
      Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
      Deferential, glad to be of use,
      Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
      Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
      At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
      Almost, at times, the Fool.

</comment><comment><USER6> 'When it comes to business and relationships, I don't buy this idea of diversification. It neglects comparative advantage. The best way to lower risk is to specialize: Put the things that you love into one portfolio.'

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe it's just me but I couldn't begin to guess what the best advice I've ever received is/was. I'm only 37 but I'm guessing that there have been 1000 pieces of great advice that, if I hadn't received, I'd be far worse off.

</comment><comment><USER8> Best advice ever: Put a single paragraph of content on each web page! You can increase your ad impressions 10-fold!

</comment><comment><USER9> Great read. Amazing how succinct and helpful someone can be when forced the distill their thoughts down into one thing.

2 suggestions:

\- Dust the slide show and put it on one page. It's 2008.

\- Get rid of the military person. Who wants advice from someone who's handed someone else's trillion dollars? You're talking to an audience who has to earn their own revenue.</comment>


PAC Fundraising with Ethereum Contracts? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/OpenZeppelin/zeppelin-solidity/issues/502 <comment><AUTHOR> I'll cc this here with formatting changes (extra \n and ---) for Hacker News:

\---

### Background

\- PAC: Political Action Committee [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee)

\- [https://github.com/holographicio/awesome-token- sale](https://github.com/holographicio/awesome-token-sale)

### Questions

\- Is Civic PAC fundraising similar to e.g. a Crowdsale or a CappedCrowdsale or something else entirely, in terms of ERC20 OpenZeppelin solidity contracts?

\- Would it be worth maintaining an additional contract for [PAC] "fundraising" with terminology that campaigns can understand; or a terminology map?

\- Compared to just accepting donations at a wallet address, or just accepting credit/debt card donations, what are the __risks __of a token sale for a PAC?

\--- Is there any way to check for donors' citizenship? (When/Where is it necessary to check donors' citizenship (with credit/debit cards or cryptocoins/cryptotokens?))

\- Compared to just accepting donations at a wallet address, or just accepting credit/debt card donations, what are the __costs __of a token sale for a PAC?

\--- How much gas would such a contract require?

\- Compared to just accepting donations at a wallet address, or just accepting credit/debt card donations, what are the __benefits __of a token sale for a PAC?

\---- Lower transaction fees than credit/debit cards?

\---- Time limit (practicality, marketing)

\---- Cap ("we only need this much")

\---- Refunds in the event of […]

### Objectives

\- Comply with all local campaign finance laws

\--- Collect citizenship information for a Person

\--- Collect citizenship information for an Organization 'person'

\- Ensure that donations hold value

\- Raise funds

\- Raise funds up to a cap

\- (Optionally?) collect names and contact information ( [https://schema.org/Person](https://schema.org/Person) [https://schema.org/Organization](https://schema.org/Organization) )

\- Optionally refund if the cap is not met

\- Optionally change the cap midstream

\- Optionally cancel for a specified string and/or URL reason</comment>


Ask HN: about multi-core computers and OSs - <AUTHOR>

What are the limits and problems associated with multi-core computers and the software that controls them?
Currently the top-of-the-line consumer products seem to be quad core computers, and I've read about octo-core and up computers existing (Intel's products: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_microprocessors#.22Westmere-EX.22_.2832_nm.29)
I suppose one big problem on the software side is that most operating systems wouldn't be set up in a way to optimize performance gains from these CPUs, making them an expensive waste of money. I'm also curious as to what some of the hardware limitations are (floor planning and signal timing constraints perhaps?).
I'm thinking of pursuing research opportunities in systems programming for multi-core computers, so I wanted to try and get some insightful info and input if that's going to be (or already is) an important field.
Cheers. <comment><USER2> Concurrency is the biggest area of study and contention here.

I still think an exciting problem that hasn't received much attention is thread/process affinity.

When scheduling threads the operating system picks a logical execution unit to do the actual processing. Logical execution units have some kind of shared resource between them. Let's say we had a machine with 2 Intel Core i7-2600K in it. That computer would have 16 logical execution units (2 CPUs x 4 cores x 2 threads per core) All 16 units would share the same RAM. 8 logical units on the same CPU would share the same L3 cache. 2 logical units on the same CPU and same core would share the same L1 and L2 cache.

Now I want to apply Fast-Fourier transformation to a stereo audio signal and want to process each channel in it's own thread. When the operating system schedules those threads to run it it might be best to pick two logical execution units on the same CPU core and reschedule it there every time it executes. This would maximize hits on instruction caches and data caches, with the benefit of not polluting unnecessary caches. The opposite of this would be having the threads run on logical execution units on different CPUs and never rescheduling them to the same logical execution unit twice in a row. This would drastically reduce the likelihood of cache-hits and possibly pollute the caches of every logical execution unit.

I lost my train of thought here. In any event. Processor affinity and scheduling are two things ripe for improvement on the operating system level. That said most modern operating systems handle SMP pretty well and there is far more improvement to be made in the userland.</comment>


Could we move Mars or Venus into Earth's orbit and live there? - <AUTHOR> http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2869/could-we-move-mars-or-venus-into-earths-orbit-and-live-there <comment><USER2> The answer is yes, but it would take a long time. The method is having dozens of asteroids pass close to the transportee over and over for a very long time.

I am a little skeptical. Wouldn't this slow drifting into the earth's orbit cause all kinds of unpleasantness, like collisions or tidal locking? However, I am not an orbital mechanic and leave it to those so inclined.

The blog is full of all sorts of questions that I didnt know I needed the answers to, but I have bookmarked it, just in case I need an answer. The question be damned.</comment>


Ask HN: Fun project ideas to make $10? - <AUTHOR> My friend and I are having a friendly contest to see who can build a project/webaite/app that makes $10 first.<p>So I'm looking for fun projects or cool frameworks/stacks to experiment with . <comment><USER2> Create a program that pulls the top posts from subreddits on Reddit and put it into a book then sell it. You could do this automatically by using Reddit's API and then using a library to convert the text into PDF, ePub, etc.

<comment><USER3> Copyright issues?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Buy something from China in semi-bulk (e.g., 6–12x) on Alibaba / AliExpress and resell for profit from the US.

Even on very small purchases, like $3 phone cases, people are willing to pay 2-3x the price to be able to get them quickly from someone shipping from inside the US. While it's not _highly_ profitable after fees, I think you could automate and outsource most / all of the work.

Not sure if this totally aligns with what you and your friend are doing, but just an idea I've been wanting to try lately.

<comment><USER5> The caveat to this might be the longer shipping times from China. I'm just bringing it up since this contest is also a race of sorts.

<comment><USER4> Yep, it totally is. So the person running it has to act more as a "cache" vs dropshiping. I look at it as time arbitrage because people are happy to pay more to wait less.

I think there's some interesting detail in optimizing against the market for how much higher cost and shorter delivery time people value, kind of like a convenience store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're charismatic and can tell a good story I feel pretty confident you could tell your story on Reddit and get people to just give you $10 to win your bet.

</comment><comment><USER7> You could try to do some automated trading with Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency. Odds are just as good you would lose $10, of course.

<comment><USER2> You could lose a lot more than $10. Looking at the first BTC trading platform I could find, SimpleFX[1], they are saying the Bitcoin/USD pair is going for $2k+ while Ethereum is around $219 and LiteCoin around $40. At 1:10 leverage you would need to put in over $200 to trade bitcoin, $42 to trade Ethereum and $4 to trade LiteCoin. Leverage is a risky game too.

[1][https://simplefx.com](https://simplefx.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why not create your own coin as a smart contract on Etherium?</comment>


H1-B visa and the need for reform - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@fwiwm2c/lets-talk-about-the-h1-b-visa-6e5d5def2b00#.p8vbw6254 <comment><USER2> Seriously? 5 submissions in less than 24 hours. Just let it go.</comment>


Tripling an Engineering Team in Six Months (Part One) - <AUTHOR> https://www.zacsky.com/blog/2017/8/tripling-an-engineering-team-in-six-months-part-one-the-background-story <comment><AUTHOR> In November 2016 the company I worked for was acquired, injected with cash, and told to 'go faster'. Over the next six months I led a recruitment drive that saw the engineering team (more than) triple. This is a 5-part blog series on that massive recruitment process; starting with the background story that led us to need to scale at such a pace.</comment>