So Long: A Common but Mysterious Goodbye - <AUTHOR> https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/so-long-origin <comment><USER2> > _Wherever the expression originated, it diffused quite rapidly. By the 20th > century,_ so long _became a common expression of farewell—and no one knows > how it happened._

"How it happened" is a hallmark hard problem in studying human language — whether from linguistics, anthropology, neuro-cognitive sciences, art, philosophy...

The gist of the question is this: is language solely "within us" and we "trade it" and evolve it as we communicate; or do the complexity and distribution of its "existence" give the phenomena a "life of its own", so to speak. (it then breaks your mind exponentially to notice that e.g. "math" is also but a language)

Claude Lévi-Strauss famously thought that humans were too 'dumb' to master language and we were mostly rehashing bits and parts of premade sentences, things we'd heard or read before, with slight analog variations (a minor form of what he called "memes", the idea of "cultural genes", memory+gene). He was proved dead wrong by neuroscience a few decades later, we do "think" the language; but the concept of "memes" remained in anthropology (well before, and hopefully after, the homonymous but only loosely related internet-slang- designated .gif phenomena).

____

Recently I heard Jeff Hawkins on Lex Fridman's AI podcast with this interesting suggestion: that e.g. "science" is a distributed super- intelligence. A "thing" which evolves, grows, meets problems, adapts, finds solutions, structures itself internally and in relation to its environment, has external effects in the form of technology and thinking, etc.

I found the view fascinating.

Each scientist as a tiny part of the whole, very limited in spacetime, can never "see" or "think" at the same level that "science" does as a collective organ-ization (alt. organ-ism). Science _is_ in effect much bigger than anyone; it actually survives and endures even better than states or corporations; it may even "cross over" to be furthered by children or allied species of ours, long after or own demise. Science is a "thing" and it's damn smart, perhaps even smarter than any and all of us in some sense, because it never ceases to carry the "intelligence" put into it by giants whose shoulders we stand on in all presents, past and future.

In some sense, science is at times even too big, too grown, too much for us individually. (notice: that's precisely the concept carried by "super")

____

Is "language" such a collective, distributed "thing" with a life of its own?

Writing this, I wonder. What happens when languages meet? Do they recognize each other? Do they battle? Do they communicate and exchange knowledge? Do they mate, engender hybrids? And what would our "science" do when it meets the science of aliens?

I find this great food for thought, in generally questioning "intelligence" and its manifestations.</comment>


Show HN: API for generating invoices on the fly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Invoiced/invoice-generator-api

<comment><USER2> This is awesome, for some of my clients we send invoices monthly (most are paid online) - I'm going to use this to send as an invoice attached to our Accounts Dept. to save them having to do it everytime.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This is exactly the type of use case we were hoping people would use it for. Hit us up at hello at invoiced.com if you have any questions.</comment></comment>


If ICANN only charges $0.18 per domain name, why am I paying $10? - <AUTHOR> http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/61467/if-icann-only-charges-0-18-per-domain-name-why-am-i-paying-10 <comment><USER2> Running a registrar has close to a $500k a year minimum salary bill, which is 50k $10 domains even if you model them as having 0 COGS, which is in fact highly contrary to fact. That's tricky to get to organically, so you start doing things like paid marketing, and then realize that GoDaddy (et al) will _happily_ spend $X0 to acquire $10 a year worth of domain business, both because it has a relatively high LTV and, more importantly, because it has a "backend." (e.g. GoDaddy made a $16 sale for me on bingocardcreator.com back in 2006 and then sold me another ~$5,000 of domains and SSLs over the years, and I don't even use the products where they _really_ make a killing, like hosted shopping carts and what have you.)

Relevantly to HNers: you'll run into math like this for most software businesses. Upfront costs are quite low and COGS may well be near zero, but if you want to actually sustain the business, you get to pay market wages to people, and it is very hard to pay market wages to technologists $1 at a time. There was a story on HN today about a business which just learned this to its sadness. They were not the first to figure it out and they will not be the last.

<comment><USER3> One of the answers on SE also says something along the same lines. Although I have no doubt that running a registrar costs a lot of money, this is the wrong answer to the original question.

.com domains cost $10 because Verisign charges $7.85 for each of them _in addition to_ the $0.18 ICANN fee. Large registrars, of course, get volume discounts, and they might even sell new domains at a loss when they think they can rip you off on add-ons and renewals. But by no means are they pocketing the entire $9.82 as the question mistakenly assumes.

<comment><USER4> I'm not massively clued in on this so apologies if this is a bad question, but what's Verisign's role in this? That's a decent amount of cash, what is the service they provide for that?

<comment><USER5> I own the domain prgmr.com, and control the associated nameservers.

I can make smcl.prgmr.com, and give it to you. I can even point smcl.prgmr.com at your own nameserver so you can make somethingelse.smcl.prgmr.com. You could, in fact, sell other people [something].smcl.prgmr.com. domains, and so on.

It's just a line in my dns config. (then dealing with abuse complaints and the like)

Now, Verisign owns .com. There's no technical difference, really, between .com, .co.uk, and prgmr.com. If you want smcl.com, you need verisign's dns servers to cooperate, just as if you want smcl.prgmr.com, you need my dns servers to cooperate. For this, verisign charges the registrar seven bucks and change. The registrar tacks on a few pennies (or does the same with advertising) and handles all interactions with you.

Verisign has a nice re-seller interface. That's what the registrar/registry split is all about. But if I really thought people would give me money for something.prgmr.com. dns entries, I'm sure I could come up with a re-seller interface, too.

Personally, I think the current price is a little high, but mostly because I don't like monopolies in general, and my feelings for Verisign can only be described with superlative synonyms for hatred. Personally, if someone has to have a monopoly on .com domains, I think a not-for-profit like ICANN would do a better job.

It is a small injustice, though, for reasonable people with one or two domain names.

(On the other hand, the registrars, the people who actually handle the customer interaction, are ridiculously efficient. if you want a domain cheap, you can get it for pennies over what the monopoly charges, or you can pay a few bucks more, and get pretty good service, showing that when there is competition, for-profit businesses can do a pretty good job.)

<comment><USER6> I've been doing a little bit with .dk lately, and I kind of like their model: DK Hostmaster handles almost everything. Due to lobbying from various hosting companies, there is an arbitrary restriction that you can't register a domain _initially_ with them, but instead have to go through a registrar (same as in .com). I think this is mostly because it gives various hosting companies a chance to upsell you on email/Wordpress/whatever, since you have to go through one of them to get the domain. But then once you have the domain, you never have to deal with them again, because you subsequently do your yearly renewal directly through DK Hostmaster. You just log in, pay your $8.50 fee, and that's that. And unlike GoDaddy et al, they aren't trying to sell you a dozen services every time you try to renew.

<comment><USER7> $8.50 still seems quite high given you're paying them to let you use their interface to increment the expiry date on the domain. With the volume they have and once the system is set-up there's got to be almost no action to take beyond the maintenance of a few servers?

<comment><USER8> A registry is not just a MySQL database with some random domain names in it.

Have you considered what kind of resources and expertise that are required to handle issues such as domain name disputes? For example, suppose Alice and Bob run an informal business together, they have a clash and both of them make claims of the business' domain name. Or if Mallory registers someone elses company name and use it for nefarious purposes? [+]

[+] See [http://swartz.typepad.com/texplorer/2006/04/wellknown_rock_....](http://swartz.typepad.com/texplorer/2006/04/wellknown_rock_.html) for a particularly domain name anecdote involving Metallica and a Swedish VC firm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
      + $0.18 ICANN Fee
      + $7.85 Registry Fee (a.k.a Verisign's Ripoff fee)
      + $1.97 Registrar (who you register the domain through) Fee
      = $10.00 Retail Price

Amazingly, Verisign aren't the worst offender. The infrastructure to support the registry MUST cost a fraction of that price - as proven by 'low-fee' registries. I don't know how Verisign can continue to justify their price hikes.

So you are aware, Verisign make just shy of $1 billion a year through this fee. Thats a lot of salaries and infrastructure... The scumbags even tried to increase the cost by 7% per annum to "ensure that .com directories run smoothly amid increases in Internet traffic and heightened security threats." before they forcibly had their prices frozen by the federal government in 2012. Make no mistake, Verisign have certainly been taking advantage of their position as registry of .coms.

That said, I still think the price of TLDs is too low, as proven by the proliferation of squatters. How to solve this, and where the money should go is another question though...

<comment><USER10> Increasing the price of domain names has little effect on "squatting" (a term I highly dislike). Parked domains create a large volume of available inventory in ad markets, driving down costs in SEM.

<comment><USER11> If it cost $500 to register a domain (or even $100 as they used to be), I cannot imagine that it wouldn't significantly decrease the amount of parked domains. So many are squatted because you only have to make back ~$10 in order to pay for it, right? That's a small gamble. Buy a dozen domains and only 1 needs to do decently well in order to pay for the others.

Additionally, $10 is almost an impulse buy, so a lot of domains are picked up in the event that it might be useful someday (I'm guilty of this).

It's so annoying when you have the _perfect_ name for a product only to find that the domain is uselessly parked. And it seems to be 95% of the time.

<comment><USER12> And what if you wanted a domain name for a site that won't make money? People that aren't businesses shouldn't own domains?

<comment><USER11> They should, but domains don't have to cost as little as $10 for that to be doable. Look at all the crap that people buy that's much more expensive and offers less utility.

Though I wouldn't actually propose they cost $500, I think $100 or so is still reasonable. Myself and many others bought them in the 90s for personal non- profit use at that price.

Add a $100 surcharge which goes to the EFF or some other org of choice. Maybe that doesn't even need to be yearly, but happens when a new domain is registered and each time it changes ownership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am glad that domains are not $0.18. Imagine how many domains would be available if domains were that cheap...

I gather that at that price domain grabbers would just start to register everything (within reason). Then we would deal with some kind of secondary market where domains would be priced by their attractiveness and not sold as a common good (this obviously is already the case for many good domains).

<comment><USER14> Yea, but what if they put a limit of, say 4 per IP address? If you wanted a new domain, you would need to forfeit one? Or, even go farther, and tie a name and social security number to the domain in order to keep track?

<comment><USER15> Unless I'm missing some greater context, certainly your latter suggestion is completely impossible in a global context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I follow this space and am currently doing some research into the renewal/transition of the IANA contract.

[http://www.ntia.doc.gov/press-release/2014/ntia-announces- in...](http://www.ntia.doc.gov/press-release/2014/ntia-announces-intent- transition-key-internet-domain-name-functions)

For a good start read this and the linked PDF:

[http://www.circleid.com/posts/20140426_the_illusion_of_inter...](http://www.circleid.com/posts/20140426_the_illusion_of_internet_governance/)

TLDR; The DNS industry has an oversized representation in ICANN. ICANN makes a ton of money, and no one really seems to care.

You can read the actual contract ICANN has with the government(NTIA) here:

[http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/sf_26_pg_1-2...](http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/sf_26_pg_1-2-final_award_and_sacs.pdf)

Mueller is someone who regularly criticizes ICANN. I don't always agree with him, but I think he's right on with this one.

[http://www.internetgovernance.org/2014/04/16/icann- anything-...](http://www.internetgovernance.org/2014/04/16/icann-anything- that-doesnt-give-iana-to-me-is-out-of-scope/)

</comment><comment><USER17> How did Verisign get the .com TLD monopoly in the first place? I was a wee lad when this all started and don't remember the history.

Can someone drop a good link describing why there wasn't a more distributed approach to the .com TLD (and still isn't for new TLDs?)

<comment><USER18> Verisign acquired Network Solutions, the administrators of .com.

The name registry was initially government funded, but privatized and sold off in the early / mid 90s.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions) [http://mediafilter.org/caq/internic](http://mediafilter.org/caq/internic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My related Ask HN: Would you prefer a non-profit domain name registrar?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7156997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7156997)

<comment><USER20> Since I can't reply in that thread, I'll reply here ...

When you say non-profit, you could mean multiple things, at least here in the U.S.

You might be talking about a 501(c)(3) non-profit, like Mozilla or Wikipedia. Typically, when people think of 501(c)(3)s, they think of organizations such as the Red Cross or Catholic Charities, but obviously (as with Mozilla or Wikipedia) it can be practically anything directed toward the public good. One common critique I've heard about nonprofits in the tech space is that they have a hard time competing for the best talent (at least when it comes to salary/benefits), but if you have a large volunteer base, and a lot of people who truly want the project to flourish, then that's not a critical problem.

Or, you might be talking about a cooperative. A co-op is a non-profit in the sense that (unlike a normal for-profit business) its primary goal is not to make money, but to provide some benefit to its members. So, in the case of a cooperative registrar (such as nic.coop), the members wholly own the registrar, and it exists for their benefit. They may not care about generating a profit, so long as the business satisfactorily provides a necessary service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's like an employee of a company earning $70k per year working on a project that will bring in $500k wondering why they're not getting paid more if the company is making much more than their yearly salary in one go and the answer is: overheads.

The domain aspect of a registrar is one very small part. You factor in insurance, employee salaries, utilities, leasing of office space, purchasing office equipment and computers, storage, maintenance (network and building). A registrar is like any other business, it has to factor in its overheads into the cost of their products. On-top of that, all businesses ensure they bring in a little more than they're spending (ideally) and reinvest that back into the business to improve service offerings and existing products.

Having said all that ICANN aren't the only registrar out there, Verisign are probably the worse in my opinion. There are many men in the middle driving the cost up as well. It's very much a shark industry.

</comment><comment><USER22> Domain business is one of the most shadiest business on the web. I wasn't aware of the verisign fees but honestly, it is about time to either disrupt whole domain industry or start democratizing it. Every registrar company take its users for a ride.

</comment><comment><USER23> In a capitalist economy, companies buy goods and services at a lower price than they sell them for. Positioning, branding and establishment of value allow some sellers to sell at a higher price. Other sellers compete by selling at a lower price and make a lower margin on the sale.

Technical folks such as those at Hacker News are focused on other things typically than this sort of stuff but it's what gets salaries paid.

If you work at a commercial organisation you'll find the cost of producing the goods or services that your company sells are (hopefully) less than the price they are sold for.

If there is a wide disparity between cost and price then companies think this is a good thing as it results in greater profit but typically attracts greater competition.

<comment><USER24> _" In a capitalist economy"_ And yet the only reason the price is this high is because there is a monopoly involved. Yes, government-granted, and given to Verisign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Value based pricing. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value- based_pricing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing)

</comment><comment><USER26> A other answers have said, large portion of your money goes to Verisign. Verisign is essentially government sponsored monopoly over .com and .net domains. You may ask how did that happened when US supposed to so despise monopolies?

Here's how:

Early on registries were free, funded by government and run by InterNIC. Then government decided to privatize it. The contract to manage .com registry was granted to a company called Network Solutions, Inc (NSI). At that time govt actually paid [$5.9M][1] NSI to do this but then NSI managed to convince that registrations should be charged to cover the cost. Eventually Verisign bought Network Solutions and become the entity who manages .com registry.

Everyone was starting to realize that NSI/Verisign was becoming monoloy for some very important function of modern economy. ICANN was formed in 1998 which was charted to introduce competition in this area. But instead they ended up doing almost exactly the opposite thing in next series of events.

Early in 2003 Verisign introduced a service called [Site Finder][2] which redirected users to search engine if domain didn't exist. ICANN said this was "overstepping the contract terms". Verisign shutdown the service but also sued ICANN for preventing it to bring any improvements. Eventually ICANN had to settle with Verisign and the prize of [settlement][3] was that Verisign would be awarded renewal of contract _without any bidding_ plus right to raise prices _without_ showing cost justifications. There were even terms that indicated Verisign can even continue its monopoly for longer term. If you ask me this is blunder and incompetence by ICANN at mega scale.

[Industry was furious][4]. Lot of people [commented][5] on ICANN's proposal of settlement by saying that .com registry is not the property that ICANN owns to leverage in settlements. Others said no other government agency knowingly consented to unchecked price increase without cost justification. But it all went to vein and ICANN directors voted 5-9 in favor of settlement. Due to industry outrage US Dept of Commerce had to intervene and eliminate the clause for Verisign's right to increase prices by 7%. You can say that Verisign showed benevolence for not increasing prices to what was already considered ridiculous.

In cases like this typically competitors brings in anti-trust suits. It did happened against Verisign in 2010 but they [escaped][6] without a bruise because the organization CFIT which had filed this case wasn't considered as competitor or the one who had financial injuries. It also surprises me that real competitors haven't come forward against Verisign to bring in large scale anti-trust suit.

So when you pay that $10, it's ICANN's massive blunders of last decade to allow Verisign continue absolute monopoly. Verisign has benefitted dearly with this. They have $2 billion in cash and $1 billion of yearly revenues from all the payments you hand out to them. Verisign's financial indicates that this is their highest margin business.

One light at the end of the tunnel is that US government has [announced][7] plan to relinquish the control of Internet which means ICANN might not have authority to hand out monopolies any longer. Their stock too big hit when US government announced this.

      [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions#History
      [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign#2003_Site_Finder_legal_case
      [3]: http://www.cio.com/article/18286/ICANN_OKs_VeriSign_Settlement
      [4]: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/godaddycomr-outraged-over-icannr-giving-verisignr-monopoly-55213652.html
      [5]: http://forum.icann.org/lists/com-renewal/
      [6]: http://domainincite.com/4676-breaking-verisign-settles-cfit-lawsuit-for-free
      [7]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/us-to-relinquish-remaining-control-over-the-internet/2014/03/14/0c7472d0-abb5-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_story.html

<comment><USER16> You get your history right, but I don't agree with our analysis. The NTIA's transition of IANA will most likely just result in increased autonomy for ICANN. Which will result in them being granted increased power in delegating monopolies to registries. ICANN made $400,000,000 in revenue in 2013. It's not just the .com TLD, every gTLD that ICANN issues is a monopoly to its registry.

The bright side is that with ~1,300 new gTLDs being issued in 2014 the power a single registry such as Verisign can wield will decrease. If Verisign wants to charge $1,000 for a .com domain, you can just but a different domain under a different TLD. Expect to see more new websites not using .com in the future as these new gTLDs start propogating. Also, expect many more IDN gTLDs in coming years as unicode character sets become preferable for people in countries that don't use a latin character set.</comment></comment>


How to manage an invention? - <AUTHOR>

I hope I can get some advice from this great community. Here are the pertinent points of my situation:
1. Me: Established academic researcher with international reputation. The invention is in my own area of expertise. No startup experience. Based in major university, but the city is not a hotbed of technology. The university has a poor track record in IP development, must be bypassed.
2. The invention: unpublished, unpatented, undisclosed. It is a technology invention, about making a (digital) device which will address a serious and documented market need, quite possibly with multibillion dollar implications. The idea is new, based on newly available technology (not developed by me), fairly technical (not likely you'll come up with it) but if I explain it to you in 15 minutes I think you could do it. I have a working prototype.
3. The question: I have a conundrum regarding commercializing the invention while protecting my IP. The idea can be stolen and perhaps a variation of it can be built. I don't have the financial resources to file a comprehensive portfolio of patents to protect it. I also wouldn't have the financial resources to defend the patents in court.
Any advice on how I might move forward?
The Aeolist <comment><USER2> Mr. Aeolist,

As a practicing U.S. patent attorney, I get this question quite a bit. What I usually advise clients is that you should protect your invention, but you shouldn't protect it to DEATH. Your goal is to monetize your invention, and that means selling products or services. You can't sell something without showing it to people, right?

I find the best balance between secrecy and disclosure is to file patent applications for your invention, thereby starting the patent process, and then start the process of developing it, showing it around, etc. Legal work related to patents can be expensive, but you could get a provisional patent application filed for $1,500, which is affordable for most. Enforcement is another issue, which can be costly. But law firms take patent infringement actions on contingency all the time, if you have a good case. This would not cost you a cent.

I hope this helps.

Sincerely, Mark Terry, Esq.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, this was most useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reach out to the angel investor community near you. Find an angel willing to give money to create a business that owns your idea and give them a share of the business. Use their money to file the comprehensive patent portfolio needed to protect the idea and defend it in court, if required. I'd guess that $50K and lots of your sweat ought to be enough to get critical patents in place.

With the patent portfolio in place, you can at leisure explore licensing the technology to major players or going into manufacturing on your own.

Going into manufacturing on your own will require additional rounds of funding - but now you quit your day job and tap the venture capital community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. In a sense, this is what I was considering, I am just not sure how much disclosure an angel will ask for before funding an idea. I don't want to come across as paranoid in keeping my idea a secret, but I don't want to be naive and give it all away either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Talk with a patent lawyer, generally the first consultation is free and is protected under attorney/client privilege.

Once you know roughly how much it will cost and what you would need, you can file for provisional patents (at least here in AUS, IANAL), which are much cheaper and don't end up in the public domain but do establish a priority date.

Then you can easily get any monies required to secure your patents/start work, without having to worry about disclosing too much/etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This is very useful. I didn't know that a provisional patent doesn't end up in the public domain.

<comment><USER2> And even a regular, non-provisional patent application does not enter into the public domain (i.e., published on the Patent Office web site) until 18 months after you file it. In fact, you can even request that the Patent Office NOT publish the patent application at all, until it actually becomes a patent (an average 3-year wait).</comment></comment></comment>


Best Watch Ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.getinpulse.com

<comment><USER2> big discussion about this yesterday. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2221579></comment>


Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library goes open source - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/the-microsoft-simple-encrypted-arithmetic-library-goes-open-source/ <comment><USER2> To give some context, this is moving away from Microsoft's "open source" license that basically requires you to give Microsoft access to whatever you make with their libraries.

Moving to MIT is great for this. As someone working on FHE, we'll finally be able to see some interesting applications with this library other than Microsoft's research. Great job to the SEAL team!

<comment><USER3> What does FHE stand for? All my searches are leading to religious articles about spending time with your family

<comment><USER4> I believe they're referring to Fully Homomorphic Encryption [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption#Fully_h...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption#Fully_homomorphic_encryption)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am not an encryption expert, but to the casual techy follower, homomorphic encryption seems like it could be huge for the union of machine learning and digital privacy. Are there any experts on HN who could comment on how mature this technology is? Or does anyone know of any interesting projects that use this? I know Numerai is using something of this sort, but it is hard for me to tell how legitimate it is.

<comment><USER6> I work at Microsoft Research with the SEAL team on applications for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). Batched integer FHE schemes are great for machine learning. The regular data access patterns in neural networks make using the batching easy and the rather "wide" computations lead to good encryption parameters. Also a new scheme, CKKS, gives the ability to divide by certain plaintext constants, which helps control scaling in fixed point representations. This comes in exchange for results being approximate, which is not a problem in machine learning.

Currently what FHE needs is better toolchain support. Selecting encodings and encryption parameters is hard, but a lot can be done with good language support and tooling. We're presenting some of our work on automatically selecting good data layouts for NNs on FHE at the PPML workshop in NIPS next weekend [1].

[1] [https://ppml-workshop.github.io/ppml/](https://ppml- workshop.github.io/ppml/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are the performance costs of using such library vs raw data operations?

<comment><USER8> To give you an estimate: an AES encryption operation takes about 2 seconds to compute in homomorphic encrypted domain on a generic machine.

Non-encrypted AES operation is approximately 10.000.000 times faster.

<comment><USER7> I understand that initial encryption costs a lot, that can be one-off though. My question was more about the computation on data - whether the same computation (using this library?) on homomorphically encrypted data is performing as well as on unencrypted data? Is there a penalty to pay on every operation after initial encryption?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone tried to use this to create a distributed cloud? If storage and certain types of computation could be encrypted, anyone could sell their spare computation power without trust issues.

<comment><USER10> Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption unfortunately only works for a pretty limited set of workloads and FHE is still mind bogglingly slow so a general purpose cloud for arbitrary computation isn't going to be a thing any time soon.

<comment><USER11> Also, by itself, homomorphic encryption doesn't protect against chosen- ciphertext attacks, which makes it very unattractive for 99.9% of real world crypto use-cases.

[https://tonyarcieri.com/all-the-crypto-code-youve-ever- writt...](https://tonyarcieri.com/all-the-crypto-code-youve-ever-written-is- probably-broken)

In my experience, a lot of teams also reach for FHE to solve problems that are easily and securely solved without it (i.e. searchable encryption):

[https://github.com/paragonie/ciphersweet](https://github.com/paragonie/ciphersweet)

That being said, there is the 0.01% problem space where FHE makes perfect sense (mostly in the realm of encrypted databases and machine learning). For those systems, if the database can ever be considered adversarial (your threat model may rule this out, most applications' do not), a simple construction involving HMAC, a secure digital signature algorithm, and an append-only ledger can protect the application that reads from the database against chosen-ciphertext attacks.

[https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/12/assuring-ciphertext- integ...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/12/assuring-ciphertext-integrity- for-homomorphic-cryptosystems)

<comment> Ar-Curunir Why does lack of CCA security make FHE unattractive? The entire point of FHE is to allow malleability of ciphertexts.

<comment><USER11> CCAs have historically been useful for defeating the confidentiality guarantees of cryptography protocols. BB'98, Vaudenay '02, the iMessage attack, etc.

Selling "encryption, but not IND-CCA3" to a lot of (clueful, at least) companies is almost impossible.

If you read the linked article, it discusses a way to hack it in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In case anyone else wondered: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption)

"Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that allows computation on ciphertexts, generating an encrypted result which, when decrypted, matches the result of the operations as if they had been performed on the plaintext."

</comment><comment><USER13> Helpful! This kind of encryption is required to make relational data secure. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.03498.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.03498.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> I recall several years ago hearing about other companies, particularly IBM, patenting technologies related to homomorphic encryption. I wonder if there is any risk to some of this infringing on a patent and what that means for users of OSS when that happens.

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't the "SEAL" acronym a bit overloaded in the realm of cryptography? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEAL_(cipher)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEAL_\(cipher\))

<comment><USER16> I'd never heard of it, a web search turns up only a handful of mentions, and it's not even the only thing in crypto to be called 'seal'.

<comment><USER15> I figured it wasn't the only one. People who have gone through Cisco material have an outsize exposure to this particular flavor of SEAL because it's one of the few presented alternatives to AES in their material: [https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/141879/cisco- sa...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/141879/cisco-says- software-optimized-encryption-algorithm-seal-is-more-secure-than-ae)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not simple. But super cool stuff

</comment><comment><USER18> I know very little about C, C++, or Rust, so I want to ask this to understand why C++ was picked for this. My limited understanding is that people were tolerating C++ libraries like OpenSSL, but that new crypto or security code would likely be written in Rust for safety.

The blog doesn't say much (to me) about the choice:

        In addition to having no external dependencies, Microsoft SEAL
        is written in standard C++, making it easy to compile in many
        different environments.

Is Rust unsuitable for this project? If anyone here worked on SEAL, I'd love to learn more about this -- did the SEAL team consider using Rust?

<comment><USER19> > _My limited understanding is that ... that new crypto or security code would > likely be written in Rust for safety._

Where did you get that impression? The creators of Rust would undoubtedly love that to be the case, but Rust is still essentially in its infancy. To my knowledge there are almost no major projects released that have been built in Rust. It's ranked below such heavy hitters as Ada and Prolog for popularity on the TIOBE index[1]. It's pretty unlikely that Rust will become the standard language for everything crypo- or security-related anytime soon (or ever, but it could happen).

[1] [https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/](https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/)

<comment><USER20> > there are almost no major projects released that have been built in Rust.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18545373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18545373)

This includes Microsoft, which I forgot in that post, who uses it in production for their IOT product, and as part of Visual Studio Code.

That said, for crypto, there are some less than ideal things. That's not stopping projects from working on it.

<comment><USER19> To be clear, I did not claim no one was using it. "Almost no major projects" implies there there _are_ a few major projects. It's a small set of projects, though, especially in comparison with something like C++.

<comment><USER20> Yep, that's very much true. It's been on a big upward trajectory lately. But that's easy when you're starting small :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Never roll out your own crypto.

<comment><USER19> When people say "never roll your own crypto", they mean _you_ , the amateur who doesn't have the experience, expertise, or scale to get it right. They don't mean that literally no one should ever write crypto code.

<comment><USER22> Yes, if there are experts today on homomorphic encryption, one would assume that Microsoft's department of Cryptographic Research plausibly includes some (if not all) of them.

Their publications are online, if one wants to see what peer reviewed works they've published: [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/group/cryptography-...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/group/cryptography-research/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Perhaps someone can explain why this can be trusted? microsoft has a long history of cooperating with governments across a broad range of oppressiveness (e.g. US, China, etc). I wasn't able to quickly/easily find any peer reviews of this implementation. Without any more information, how do we know this isn't backdoored in some way?

<comment><USER24> I believe releasing it to open source makes the code more trustworthy. Now, anyone can go in and verify how it works. Any backdoor would be visible in the code.

<comment><USER23> > I believe releasing it to open source makes the code more trustworthy

I don't, and I think it's dangerous to assume that. Many open source projects have systems in place for publicly reviewing and approving code, but microsoft does not have a history of conducting public code reviews for their projects. I would never assume that publicly viewable code is being reviewed by others who know what they are doing if it's not obvious that they are.

> Now, anyone can go in and verify how it works. Any backdoor would be visible > in the code

I would only trust those with a high degree of mathematical knowledge, specifically around the subject of cryptography to be able review the code in any meaningful way. The rest of us can verify that it builds successfully and, well, that's about it.

<comment> jf- Be that as it may, if you're trying to hide something releasing it as open source is a pretty terrible way to do it.

<comment><USER23> Not if it's highly unlikely anyone with enough knowledge to know otherwise is going to review it. The upside is that you get folks like the one above who automatically assume open source software is safe, and use it.

<comment> jf- Or just don't bother open sourcing it and running the risk of being caught. In principle I agree with you, but in practical terms it would be a very wacky double bluff to pull.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How should we approach remote code interviews? - <AUTHOR>

We've nearly exhausted local candidates and are starting to look at remote interviewing. How do other companies approach this? We've got a small programming problem that we have people do if they pass a phone interview, but I sure do miss the ability to put them up on the board and see how they work out a problem.<p>Flying the person in for a final interview is an option, but are there other screen sharing strategies or something like that to see how people approach an on the spot problem? <comment><USER2> We were in the same situation recently. We looked for programmers in specific programming/framework forums (ie. Cake Forum, CodeIgniter Forum since we are using PHP framework). After receiving a bunch of applications/resumes, we filtered out to the ones we think are good, then we phoned them and had a chat. With the Internet, you could use video conferencing programs like samratjp suggested. In our case, we were lucky since I was on a trip to where the programmer was so we actually met up before hiring.

Anyhow, good luck with the hiring!

</comment><comment><USER3> Assuming both parties are using Mac OS X, you can try iChat screen sharing. It's awesome: you have a voice chat + ability for _both_ parties to share and operate the screen.

</comment><comment><USER4> You could do an iChat/Skype combination with Google Docs/Etherpad. All you need to know is in the face, so a webcam can be fine to see how they react and such.

<comment><USER5> I think the requirement for the interviewee to have a webcam accessible is a little much.

<comment><USER4> Well, maybe. But, coming across a webcam these days isn't that hard to be quite honest. Of course, you could make it optional, but would be an interesting experiment to see if the interviewee would social engineer to borrow a webcam if necessary; in a way, if your future employee isn't willing enough to make the effort to do this simple thing, would you still hire this person (granted, there will always be introverts in your employee pool, but presumably you will interact with this employee in person once hired)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> see[Mike]code was written for exactly this problem. I haven't used it for remote interviews yet, but we tested it out at the office and it seems perfect for what your describing.

<http://i.seemikecode.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> With caution.</comment>


AI Update, Late 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.piekniewski.info/2019/11/18/late2019-the-wizards-of-oz/ <comment><USER3> This blog gets passed around a lot recently. While I do draw value from the thorough observations of developments, the amount of text the author spends on shallow negativity can feel like the same waste of time as the overhyping PR machine he is reacting to.

There is without doubt something novel in the successes of convnets for sensory perception, deep Q-learning for decades-old and new game problems, artificial curiosity, recent machine translation, generative models and their various applications. Recent models also found their way into for-profit companies. It's legit to be fascinated by this, and I'd rather stand on the side that doesn't remain in their cave.

AI research may have picked all current low-hanging fruits or hit a wall either soon or in ten years, nobody can know yet, so there is no reason to run around predicting the future painted in only positive or negative light.

<comment><USER4> We need contrarian voices for both spotting any issues we might have overlooked, and assuring ourselves we know better.

It's still better than what I can read from "LinkedIn influencers" in my feed like "Logistic regression is still the best" or "Self-driving cars will never work because of long tail"...

<comment><USER5> It's a good read but the negativity makes it appear irrational. It would be better if he left the ranting away and focused on the realistic recap without the PR hype.

Note that AI has a history of being stalled by overly pessimist evaluations (Minsky / Papert on the perceptron, Lighthill report).

<comment><USER6> AI also has a history of being stalled by believing its own hype (the AI winter of the 1990s). Too much money can kill AI as fast as too little.

<comment><USER4> Seems to be happening to VR right now...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting read, I'm glad to see others are beginning to call the bluff on the AI hype machine. The summary is excellent:

> The whole field of AI resembles a giant collective of wizards of Oz. A lot > of effort is put in to convincing gullible public that AI is magic, where in > fact it is really just a bunch of smoke and mirrors. The wizards use certain > magical language, avoiding carefully to say anything that would indicate > their stuff is not magic. I bet many of these wizards in their narcissistic > psyche do indeed believe wholeheartedly they have magical powers...

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I much prefer we would call it statistical intelligence.

Although artificial intelligence is actually spot on. We just understand the wrong side of the ambiguity. Its not really intelligence that we have reproduced artificially - since it isn't intelligence - but a fake intelligence, the artificial kind. We've created the artifice of intelligence, through statistics, but not intelligence.

People knew long before newton that an apple would drop to the ground when released. Statistical experience has allowed us to have knowledge of this very early on. But it took newton to explain what was going on, so that instead of predicting through experience, he could predict by reason and logic. Thus saving him many lives of accumulating experience to make his next prediction ever more precise.

"Statistical intelligence" allow us to do a bunch of neat things though. Many problems are best approached statistically (because noise, lack of formal understanding etc), and these some of these methods achieve impressive results in a wide range of situations.

<comment><USER9> So advances in RL (Deepmind), are not merely statistical intelligence, those are true advancement in AI (not only ML). I.e. those a machine can train on their own data.

<comment><USER8> True but i'll argue a bit. They statistically maximize reward. As far as i'm aware, the engineer is still designing the reward function. She's also designing the statistical method to converge to the optimal solution (as quickly as possible).

So a RL chess algorithm tells your statistically a move (action) from a state S to a new state S' such that you are expected to maximize your reward. Whereas a chessmaster (probably) designs his next sequence of moves based on logic (my opponent will respond in such a way because etc). This is different from « statistically, this move right now has the best odds of leading to a win » a la monte carlo. Now what is surprising, is that statistical algos are better than our best logicians at this particular task. But its the action at a given state is still statistically designed.

Finally, you need your data mining to be representative of the underlying distribution you are trying to model. So you need your simulator to be the most real whereas they are in fact approximations in most useful cases (landing a plane for instance).

So for instance if you want an algo to design the flight path of a rocket landing on an asteriod, you could recreate a simulator modeling spacetime from observations and model its dynamics from eintein's equations, but then what's the RL for, why not just use an off the shelf optimization algorithm like we have for decades? [1]

The bellman equation and DQNs are nice and all, but they're still statistical algorithms, producing - in my mind - statistical intelligence about a particular system. An RL agent will not tell you WHY such an action was taken, but it'll tell you that statistically, it is the action to take.

Very neat results in RL however.

[1] i worked on a RL based agent to control trafic lights, and it wasnt clear whether our solution was better than a classical optimization one. Actually, classical optimization (minimizing an analytical model of the system) seemed to scale much better to larger meshes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sure, take some pot shots - some are valid criticisms - but OpenAI's Rubic's cube solver being lame does not mean AI needs to be re-evaluated.

Sure, AI has its faults; the tantalizing cost savings of automation has created some negative feedback loops - might that be more deserving of the question "what in the hell are we trying to accomplish and how exactly did we get here in the first place?"

A Rubic's cube solver is the problem? Really?

OpenAI (of now infamous Rubic's cube failure :p) released a hide-and-seek demo a few months back that gave me literal goosebumps. Little AI agents facing off in a game of hide and seek start evolving with seriously clever strategies. According to the author's bio (dynamic, time-aware ML systems, etc.) that sort of thing should be right up their ally!

Instead we get some sort of selective self-promotion hit piece - <USER2> anecdotal failures while claiming some better AI based robotics startup is coming soon(tm).

<comment><USER11> >Sure, take some pot shots - some are valid criticisms - but OpenAI's Rubic's cube solver being lame does not mean AI needs to be re-evaluated.

There may be genuine criticisms of that particular project, but 'only the actual solving is done via symbolic methods' is a non-sequitur. The Rubik's cube is just a generic physical task that requires dexterity, they could have done the same research with dominoes or blocks or playing Tic-Tac-Toe with random pens in various adverse conditions -- the point wouldn't be that the ML solves or doesn't solve the actual Tic Tac Toe!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sure there is a lot of hype in AI/ML right now, but this post reads like there is an axe to grind with all ML. it ignores true progress made in a lot of areas and denigrates the whole field.

to me it did not read like an objective post, but more like just a "all AI is bullshit" style blog post

<comment><USER13> Yeah that's where I'm at. There's this general sentiment that if AI does not solve everything immediately, then it is worthless and hype. Especially the part about not being able to deal with corner cases, forgetting that all AI needs to be valuable is to deal with such cases better than your average human, which isn't a very high bar.

<comment><USER14> No, I feel like that's the exact other way around. There's a general sentiment that AI _will_ solve everything immediately and lead to a massive breakthrough in every single aspect of our lives, when in fact what has been accomplished so far in this "new AI" boom is improvements brute-force statistical fitting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A refreshing view of AI, this excerpt I particulary enjoyed:

> I mentioned in my previous half-year update, Open AI came up with a > transformer based language model called GPT-2 and refused to release the > full version fearing horrible consequence that may have to the future of > humanity. Well, it did not take long before some dude - Aaron Gokaslan - > managed to replicate the full model and released it in the name of science. > Obviously the world did not implode, as the model is just a yet another > gibberish manufacturing machine that understands nothing of what it > generates. Gary Marcus in his crusade against AI hubris came down on GPT-2 > to show just how pathetic it is. Nevertheless all those events eventually > forced Open AI to release their own original model, and much to nobody's > surprise, the world did not implode on that day either.

<comment><USER16> God forbid that it takes more than a few days for decent chat bots to appear on Reddit from a troll farm in eastern europe/china/wherever based on these new models. Or has that already happened, and we're simply unaware?

<comment><USER4> Already done. It really feels like new dark times are upon us, this time not because of a lack of writings, but because of automated garbage arriving quickly. Previously one had to hire some writers to write crappy ad-driven garbage articles, soon you can do a 1-person operation for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >John Carmack is going to take a shot at AI. Whatever he accomplishes in that field I hope it will be equally as entertaining as Quake and equally as smart as the fast inverse square root algorithm.

John Carmack did not invent the fast inverse square root algorithm. (I'm still rooting for him, though!)

<comment><USER18> Hm interesting, I knew it from Quake and implicitly assumed that it was Carmack's trick. But Wikipedia has some more history:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Histo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#History_and_investigation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The whole field of AI resembles a giant collective of wizards of Oz. A lot > of effort is put in to convincing gullible public that AI is magic, where in > fact it is really just a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

No, you're generalizing the marketing department at IBM over a deeply passionate, hard-working, brilliant community of scientists and engineers.

</comment><comment><USER16> At least one misleading source from the article: when talking about the limitations of Uber's self-driving tech, the author links to a source mentioning Uber may be paying license fees to Waymo for their AV tech, insinuating that Uber is unable to move its AV program forward on their own. The article linked actually mentions Uber being court-ordered to pay for the tech (the Lewandowski case)

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems like people will keep being needlessly negative and dismissive of AI right up until the singularity.

But really, what did AI do to this guy? ML really does have real world applications. Though many self driving start ups are overblown, my Tesla really does drive me to work everyday.

As always, things are easy to critize, and hard to create.

<comment><USER21> >But really, what did AI do to this guy?

He's a founder of an ML startup with published papers.

<comment><USER20> So hes a masochist or?

Seems to hate ML.

<comment><USER22> Reading his post, I don't see anything suggesting that he hates ML as opposed to companies over-promising what the technology is capable of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This post is full of non sequitur like links to the PG&E wildfire prevention shutoffs after talking about how model training (which happens offline in some datacenter) will always cost lots of energy (why would you build a data center north of the bay where it can be affected by wildfires and sky high utility/real estate prices). Maybe it is meant to be humorous and I just didn't get it.

Yeah everything is harder than the first wave of hype made it seem, no this list of ridiculous hype proved to be ridiculous doesn't mean it's all useless or doomed. I get the impression the author knows this from reading the about page though, which makes me think I just missed the joke.

<comment><USER24> It has a fair tinge of typical Polish-style pessimistic humor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> there are a lot of dashcam footages of car crashes on youtube. i wonder if that information can be salvaged in some way

</comment><comment><USER26> It's good to have some skepticism, but there are things that genuinely work, which the author alludes to at the end of his diatribe. Unfortunately they happen to be less trendy things like surveillance, military, retail, factory QA, and other strictly perceptual tasks that are far cry from "self driving" cars or "AGI".

I'd also like to point out that very little of what you can see in those Boston Dynamics videos is "AI". It's mostly just good old fashioned control systems, just very sophisticated.

</comment><comment><USER27> As someone who has worked as a researcher in one of the big AI research labs, I completely agree with this post. There has been true progress in a few ML subfields over the past few years, most noticeably representation learning for image recognition and text/ translation, but 99% of what you read in both scientific papers (which are more PR than ever) and the general media is nothing but hype. Especially over the last 2-3 years or so I haven't seen anything novel. IMO that's mostly a result of the confluence of perverse incentives at various levels:

\- Academics need to create PR and hype to increase their chances for grants

\- PhD students need to publish papers, and thus convince reviewers, with unnecessarily complex and hype-filled language, that their papers are good. They are also more incentivized than ever to create their own personal brand (via hype-filled blog post or videos) to increase future employment opportunities. More PR also means more citations, which is metric academics are often evaluated on. After all, if you work on something related, you're pretty much obligated to cite research that everyone has heard about, right?

\- Startups, as it has always been, jump on the latest trend to increase their chance of raising money from investors. They slap AI/ML onto their pitch decks to differentiate themselves from others, or to become eligible for AI-focused funds. In reality, none of them will ever use any of the new ML techniques because they are too brittle to work in real-world products or require many orders of magnitude more data then the startup will ever have.

\- Big companies want to brand themselves as "thought-leaders" in AI to drive up their share prices, hire better talent, improve their public image, convince investors, etc.

\- The general media has no idea what they are talking about and wants to generate clicks. Same as always.

Put all this together and you get the current AI hype cycle. We've seen this happen with lots of other technologies in the past, what's kind of new this time is the entrance of academia into the cycle. When I first started in (ML) academia I was under the naive impression that I would be doing hard and cold science - I was so wrong. Everyone is optimizing for their own objective (grants, salary, publications, etc, see above), which makes most of the published research completely useless or simply wrong. One of the, sometimes unspoken, criteria of choosing ML projects in many of these labs is "how much PR will this create". This useless "research" is then treated as if it was a proven method and picked up by startups to convince clueless investors or customers with "look at this latest paper, it's amazing, we will monetize this, we're at the forefront of AI!", or by the general media to create more hype and drive clicks.

One important point that the blog post makes that is always overlooked is this:

> Now what this diagram does not show, is the amount of money which went into > AI in corresponding time periods.

With all the hype over the last few years, just think about how many billions of dollars and tens of thousands of some of the smartest people on this planet got into the field, often to make a quick buck. With this many resources invested, would you expect there to be no progress? Obviously there will be, but most of it is smoke and mirrors. People think that the progress comes due to new AI techniques (Neural Nets), but in reality, if you were to take the same people and money and forced them to make progress on the same problems using some other technique, let's say probabilistic models or even rule-based or symbolic systems, they would've done just as well, if not better.

</comment><comment><USER28> The author uses these ([1][2]) diagrams to argue that more compute has diminishing returns. But the 'diminishing returns' are on the accuracy of correctly picking the single right category for a photo out of one thousand. Photos may simply not carry enough information to be able to meaningfully distinguish between them at that level of accuracy; existing models already exceeded humans' ability at top-5 accuracy in 2015 [3]. It wouldn't be surprising if SOTA models exceeded humans at top-1 already.

It's possible that the human baselines were bored and so performed sub- optimally when picking between the 1K classes. But the argument has now become a subtler one, much less clear cut.

As an example of categories that may be difficult to distinguish between, do you feel confident that you can reliably distinguish between the Norwich terrier [4] and the Norfolk terrier [5]? These are two separate categories in ImageNet1k.

[1] [https://i0.wp.com/blog.piekniewski.info/wp- content/uploads/2...](https://i0.wp.com/blog.piekniewski.info/wp- content/uploads/2019/11/AI_scaling.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1)

The first diagram shows exponential growth in the compute usage of state of the art deep learning architectures.

[2] [https://i1.wp.com/blog.piekniewski.info/wp- content/uploads/2...](https://i1.wp.com/blog.piekniewski.info/wp- content/uploads/2019/11/wsl-image.png?w=928&ssl=1)

The second diagram shows diminishing returns on Imagenet1k top-1 accuracy from doubling the size of Resnext.

[3] [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.725...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.725.4861&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

[4] [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&as_q=norwich+terrier&...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&as_q=norwich+terrier&tbs=isz:lt,islt:4mp,sur:fmc)

[5] [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&as_q=norfolk+terrier&...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&as_q=norfolk+terrier&tbs=isz:lt,islt:4mp,sur:fmc)

<comment><USER29> I can easily learn to distinguish between a Norwich terrier and a Norfolk terrier.

1\. Google "difference between norfolk and norwich terrier".

2\. Click first link: [https://www.terrificpets.com/articles/10290165.asp](https://www.terrificpets.com/articles/10290165.asp).

3\. "The Norwich terrier has prick ears, or ears that stand up, seemingly at alert, while the Norfolk has drop ears, or ears that seem to be folded over".

SOTA models are merely doing black-box pattern matching on who-knows-what, and are highly likely to fail dramatically outside of the training dataset confines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Mehhhh. BERT is mind blowing, Waymo has started fully driverless service.</comment>


DNSimple Offers 100% SLA - <AUTHOR> https://dnsimple.com/business <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a bit skeptical on this 100% SLA claim they do... all 4 of FANG have downtime, but DNSimple doesn't?</comment>


The Emperor's Woke Clothes - <AUTHOR> https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/272486/political-correctness-minority <comment><USER2> I think "political correctness" as a term is generally interpreted by people to be "a level of sensitivity beyond what I think is reasonable", so it stands to reason that most people are going to be against it.

In order for this to make any sense, you'd have to break it down specific things. Most people are going to agree with something like "racial slurs are not ok". They're not going to consider it "politically correct" to not use racial slurs, they'd just consider it common decency.

Maybe the same person who doesn't think racial slurs are ok, thinks it's unreasonable for someone to get bent out of shape about being called the wrong gender pronoun. But someone who takes the pronoun issue seriously is going to consider that just common decency and is going to draw the line for "politically correct" somewhere else.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. I think people have been conditioned to see "political correctness" as something bad, and have different views of what it means. You can oppose "political correctness" and have literal nazis and KKK members nodding along because they think it means "anything other than white supremacy", while at the same time you can have centrists nodding along because they think it means "using the correct gender pronoun in all settings."

I think this is a result of an intense propaganda campaign on the right that has distorted the meaning of political correctness so that it can mean anything the reader dislikes.

<comment><USER4> > I think people have been conditioned to see "political correctness" as > something bad, and have different views of what it means.

> I think this is a result of an intense propaganda campaign on the right that > has distorted the meaning of political correctness.

I haven't looked up the etymology, but I've always assumed the term has been pejorative/satirical/tongue-in-cheek since its inception. Think about it -- it implies there's a different form of "correctness" that isn't actually "correct", but merely " _politically_ correct" \-- i.e. correct only in the context of overly carefully worded political pandering. I can't imagine somebody unironically choosing to describe their own speech as "politically correct".

<comment><USER3> What I mean is that the definition of what counts as "politically correct" has expanded to include lots of stuff. It's such a nebulous term that it can be applied to anything the reader dislikes.

<comment><USER5> But hasn't that come to be because activists want to broaden and redefine what is not politically correct? Most people do not want to broaden the term, on the other hand there are people who want to make specific topics and utterances unacceptable things as mundane as stereotypes. Of course _some_ stereotypes are malicious, but many are simply lazyness. Some people would rather suppress data if it counters an agenda, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TFA struck me as strawman hand-wringing. As pointed out by other comments, "PC" is already a loaded term, defined by an individual's tolerance. The one person quoted,

"It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say."

seems to worry more than I do. I don't keep tabs on this ever-changing carousel of ethnic labels, but I do know what _not_ to say, and that seems to have kept me out of trouble. Jew? Jewish? C'mon, is it really that common that a Jew is getting bent out of shape because you didn't use "Jewish"? Perhaps a vocal/powerful minority will hold the feet of other vocal/powerful people to the fire, but it's not like their minions infiltrate the common man. My Jewish neighborhood doesn't appear to care enough to say anything.

I've often wondered if those complaining aren't really saying, "Black? African-American? I'm always confused on which term to use when denigrating another ethnic group. For instance, in the following sentence, 'Blacks are _always_ the ones...'." Maybe if you're polite, no one cares as long as you at least tried to use one or the other.

</comment><comment><USER7> This backs up Nassim Taleb's idea that this a small minority forces social mores, when the perception is that we think it's the majority: [https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the- dict...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship- of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15)

<comment><USER8> Yup. Societal norms aren't built around the lowest common denominator, they're build around whatever get the loudest complainers to STFU. Sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes that's a bad thing. When it comes to being offended on behalf of other people I think it's almost always in the "bad thing" category.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African- American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country._

<comment><USER9> >With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives

The "small tribe of devoted conservatives" is much, much larger than "progressive activists". Activists in general tend to be richer and better educated and since income corresponds with race, white. That's because if you're poor, you don't have the time or the money to become an activist.

This isn't really saying very much.

<comment><USER10> The study itself describes "devoted conservatives" as 6% of the population compared to 8% for "progressive activists".

That said, the actual amount of racially homogeneity described in the study is:

Progressive Activists: \- Eleven percent more likely to be white - 80% V. 69% – Seven percent more likely to be between ages 18 and 29 - 28% V. 21% – Twice as likely to have completed college - 59% V. 29%

Devoted Conservatives: \- Nineteen percent more likely to be white - 88% V. 69% – Fourteen percent more likely to be older than 65 - 34% V. 20% - and much less likely to be born between 1985 and 2000 - 11% V. 27% – More likely to come from the South - 45% V. 38%

Link to study in question: [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a70a7c3010027736a227...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a70a7c3010027736a22740f/t/5bbcea6b7817f7bf7342b718/1539107467397/hidden_tribes_report-2.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Sorry I only read the article. I didn't realize that "devoted conservative" refereed to a specific subgroup within the study.

Regardless the study sorted people into groups and then the article attempts to draw conclusions from that sorting that doesn't necessarily follow.

The demographics of the "progressive activists" doesn't say anything about the makeup of people are likely to support policies that could be defined as politically correct--just the makeup of people who are likely to support all progressive policies.

The only thing you can get from the GP's quote is that white people tend to be overrepresented on both extremes of the political spectrum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Of course people are against political correctness. It's almost exclusively used as a pejorative term.

People who support behaviors that other people would label politically correct, wouldn't use that term themselves.

<comment><USER11> Hell, the modern usage of the word was _coined_ as a pejorative term:

> The contemporary pejorative usage of the term emerged from conservative > criticism of the New Left in the late 20th century. This usage was > popularized by a number of articles in The New York Times and other media > throughout the 1990s,[12][13][14][15][16][17] and was widely used in the > debate about Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American > Mind,[7][9][18][19] and gained further currency in response to Roger > Kimball's Tenured Radicals (1990),[7][9][20][21] and conservative author > Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education, in which he condemned what > he saw as liberal efforts to advance self-victimization and multiculturalism > through language, affirmative action, and changes to the content of school > and university curricula.[7][8][20][22]

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

<comment><USER12> Yes, my understanding in the 90s was the term was used in some leftist/progressive circles sarcastically [0] but was latched on to by their critics as if it was meant sincerely. I'm sure some young people on college campuses at the time happily adopted the sincere use.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#1970s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness#1970s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Replace "political correctness" with "being polite" and pearl-clutching about thoughtcrimes and the death of democracy seems absurd. Can someone explain how the two differ?

<comment><USER14> Yes.

When "politically correct" is used as an attack on someone else's words, it nearly always means "being polite to a person or group the attacker dislikes".

When "politically correct" is used by a small number of academic theorists to describe the conscious substitution of vocabulary in order to conform to a particular subculture, it means... what I just said.

There are a reasonably large number of people who think that the second definition describes every situation actually covered by the first.

<comment><USER8> >being polite to a person or group the attacker dislikes"

If person A describes person B as homosexual" or "African American" instead of "gay" or "black" instead of in order to not offend person C who is straight and white is that an example of being polite or political correctness?

I would say the latter.

<comment><USER13> I think the language we'd use around person C depends on the context. "Gay" and "black" are fine to say at a bar but weird in a more formal setting like a courtroom or company-wide presentation. There's a ton of other language like this, nobody is upset that they can't tell fart jokes in a courtroom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article would be a lot better with concrete examples. There are vague descriptions of some kind of power struggle, but I can't tell who is fighting, what they are fighting about, or what their tactics are.

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems a case of what Taleb called 'Tyranny of the Small Minority" or, "the most intolerant wins", In his book "Skin in the Game".

Anyway I only gave the book 3 stars, but an example is Subway removing pork from stores after strong demand from a religious group.

<comment><USER9> >is Subway removing pork from stores after strong demand from a religious group

Subway didn't actually do that though. Some franchises in India have lamb and chicken instead of pork and beef, and some have no meat options at all. 185 franchises in Muslim neighborhoods in the UK (out of over 1500) serve only halal meat, which means by definition they don't serve pork.

Those were just business decisions based on local preferences. You can't get pork at a Subway in a 90% Muslim neighborhood because there isn't a demand for it, not because people forced subway to stop selling it.

<comment><USER16> Right local pressure, not worldwide.

I was under the impression there was some pressure and not just lack of demand, but if that's not the case then a possibility is Taleb's use of the kosher lemonade example.

[http://www.investmentwatchblog.com/subway-removes-ham-and- ba...](http://www.investmentwatchblog.com/subway-removes-ham-and-bacon-from- menu-after-demand-by-muslims/)

This post said it was removed by 'Strong demand' so you can see where I came to my understanding. Whereas it did not say removed by lack of demand, as what I think you implied.

See it is easier to remove the product, than it is to keep the surfaces clear of the offending product. Do you see how it would be wise to remove it? The point still stands.

<comment><USER9> Strong demand refers to demand for halal meat, not demand that they remove anything.

The article you reference is a rehash of a sensationalist Daily Mail article. The orginal article is even linked at the bottom.

That article distorted a PR release by subway talking about customer demand for one type of product, and presented it as something else.

The demand for halal meat was actually in opposition to animal rights groups who campaigned against halal meet because they don't agree with the way the animals are slaughtered.

This story is actually a counter to your point in that respect.

The problem is that the Daily Mail took something akin to McDonalds serving biscuits in some places and english muffins in others, and turned it into a "Muslims are taking over" scare piece.

There is a better example of your original point. McDonald's stopped carrying halal meat in the US after a lawsuit by animal rights groups.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for your thoughtful reply

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think it's hilariously ironic that most of the comments here are along the lines of "well, people generally interpret political correctness as 'things I don't like', so of course they think it's a problem". Sounds an awful lot like the Progressive Activists mentioned in the study. It's not us that's out of touch, it must be the majority of Americans!

<comment><USER18> But the "majority of americans" doesn't consistently agree on what is and isn't political correctness, so it really is based on "things I don't like".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article takes one finding from a survey (that most Americans feel "political correctness is a problem") and runs free with broad interpretations that are not supported by the study. The article borrows the study's credibility, but not its broader point about polarization.

My instinct, on seeing this finding, was to unpack how people might understand the term "political correctness" and the rhetorical contexts in which it is used. Considering how much the article relies on one survey question, there is very little unpacking of the term--just one paragraph which poses two slanted alternatives and concludes that people probably mean what the author thinks they mean. I'm open to discussing how some activism might be more valuable to the activists than to anybody else, but this article doesn't make a very strong case.

I wonder how Americans feel about "chain migration" or "fake news." Meh.

</comment><comment><USER20> _> How did an elite, repressive minority policing speech and culture through political correctness come to browbeat the American democratic majority?_

Setting aside whether or not this situation is good, the author clearly thinks it is not, or even accurately describes the situation, the answer to this sort of question can be found in this excerpt from "Skin In The Game" by Nassim Taleb:

[https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the- dict...](https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship- of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15)

</comment><comment><USER21> This article makes the mistake of conflating dislike of political correctness with opposition to political correctness.

Nobody likes having to be PC, but I think we all to some extent realize that there are words that we can use whose very usage is considered offensive. For example, Donald Trump is often called non-PC by his supporters and racist by his opponents; but even he's not going around using the "N-word" (which I'm not even comfortable writing in this pseudononymous context).

Of course we chafe at perceived restrictions to what we are "allowed" to say, and we all dislike that things not intended as offensive will be automatically interpreted as offensive even if we were not aware of the offensive implications. Nobody likes that we have all become mini-police officers who wince when someone makes an innocent mistake. And it's entirely possible that this has a slippery slope of treating things as offensive that nobody actually finds offensive because we're worried that some possibly imaginary people will be offended -- that is, we are offended on other people's behalf.

But even so we continue to tiptoe around the fringes, waiting for pop culture and colloquial usage to tell us whether it is appropriate to say "black" or "the gays", both of which seem to have entered ordinary non-offensive usage, but at one point felt pretty offensive.

<comment><USER22> _For example, Donald Trump is often called non-PC by his supporters and racist by his opponents;_

To be clear, even if he had used entirely politically correct terms, the "racist" charge would still be there over the clearly-racist-in-intent immigration ban, supporting literal white supremacists, and dog whistling on the national stage.

Reality is that you won't suffer much at all in repercussions if you get a word slightly or somewhat wrong. Most people know to avoid using the N-word, or "chinks", or "fags", etc. You see repercussions when it's clear you also carry actual racist beliefs, or when it's clear that you're intentionally calling someone by the wrong pronoun because you're trying to take a political stand.

I've used the wrong pronoun plenty of times, and people have subtly corrected me, but nobody has batted an eyelash because I wasn't making some sort of stand. "Oh, it's 'she' now, ok, sorry." Despite only living in extremely liberal areas, I've also never been asked to use any exotic pronouns. The more I see people complaining about it, the more I think that it's a straw man.

Sure, there are examples of people being oversensitive, but oversensitive people are a fact of life. You can choose not to be around them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> >How did an elite, repressive minority policing speech and culture through political correctness come to browbeat the American democratic majority?

Does the author of this article not realize who controls literally every lever of power in the country?

By "the American democratic majority" does he mean "people who spend too much time on Twitter" and "tenured college professors?" Because that's the only way this thesis about anyone being browbeaten into submission can have even a tenuous relationship with reality.

</comment><comment> village-idiot Honestly, I have no idea what in the hell people are talking about when they mention "PC Police". I have never actually witnessed this IRL, even back in college when I was self assured and more likely to run my mouth without thinking.

I occasionally had people stare at me like I was an idiot, often when I was being an idiot. But I never really got silenced or punished for it.

Maybe my college was an unusually free speech kinda place, but I am yet to be convinced that there's actually a problem of any sort.

<comment><USER24> Sounds like you've yet to have the pleasure of encountering a diversity program in your workplace.

<comment> village-idiot They just make it very clear that you can't discriminate (or appear to discriminate) by protected characteristics during hiring. I have yet to have my speech "policed" for correctness.

I mean, professionalism is expected, but not "PC".

<comment><USER24> Ah, OK. Where I work (Bay Area tech company) it would be basically impossible to question (however politely) dogma such as

"The pipeline isn't the problem; the work environment is the problem". <== This refers to the hiring pipeline and difficulties of hiring programmers from under-represented backgrounds

"Seeking to hire candidates from under-represented backgrounds does not mean that the standards for evaluation are being lowered even slightly for anyone."

<comment> village-idiot Sounds like a bay area problem.

Where I'm at (LA), I've never heard of anyone saying that. Not the biggest sample size, but around here it seems like the general attitude is "so the best you can" not "it's your responsibility to fix all wrongs, no matter the cost"</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


For the First time ever, scientists reanimated cryogenically frozen mammal brain - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/tech/scientists-successfully-recovered-cryogenically-preserved-225738140.html <comment><USER2> Two errors in the headline: it's not freezing, it's vitrifying, and it's not reanimating, it's simply scanning and demonstrating that it looks extremely well preserved. And this is also old news that was discussed on HN at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070528)</comment>


Show HN: Browser extension to make Gmail filter management easier - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gmail-filter-enhancements/jgaakhkfphnnffjimpoefbamjgcijdpk

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello! I've recently made a Chrome extension that automatically fills "From", "To" and "Subject" fields when you create a new Gmail filter from existing email. I did it for my personal purposes, but probably somebody will find the extension useful too. Have a look at the screenshots to understand how it works: [http://i.snag.gy/z4OTF.jpg](http://i.snag.gy/z4OTF.jpg).

If you have some ideas or suggestions for the extension - please drop me a line here or use email@example.com.</comment>


Ask HN: Recommend resources(books/online) for learning design patterns - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Try this one: [http://sourcemaking.com/](http://sourcemaking.com/)

They have video tutorials, written tutorials for multiple programming languages. The videos and articles / tutorials are easy to understand.</comment>


Every Building on Every Block: A Time Capsule of 1930s New York - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/28/nyregion/nyc-property-tax-photos.html <comment><USER2> You know what's nice about these pictures? The near absence of brands --from franchise restaurants to clothing. It's refreshing. There are some like Canada Dry, but it's sparse.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a bit buried in the article, but here's the link to the complete and searchable digital archives: [http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet](http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet)

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently an archive (color) for Manhattan taken in the 1980s also exists [0]. For those who are interested, you can purchase prints from the archives of individual buildings in either 8" x 10" or 11" x 14" size. Expensive but a nice complement to family genealogy for those with NYC roots.

[0]: [http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/RECORDSPHOTOUNITMA...](http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/RECORDSPHOTOUNITMAN~2~2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it amazing that buildings (specifically the last one, the hotel) can be maintained in essentially the same state for over 100 years. I guess to a European this is normal but it feels like here in North America old things are much more rare.

<comment><USER5> Would love to see stats on building lifetimes across cohorts, e.g. do buildings from 80s, 90s etc have similar life span or are they demolished sooner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who enjoys this may also enjoy [http://80s.nyc](http://80s.nyc) \- an interactive map-based version of photography of NYC from the 80s made by the talented Brandon Liu. You can peek into how he used ML to filter out duplicate photography, too! [https://twitter.com/bdon/status/1044760314804224000](https://twitter.com/bdon/status/1044760314804224000)

</comment><comment><USER7> Backstory on the NYT photo archive's digitization: [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine- learning/h...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/how- the-new-york-times-is-using-google-cloud-to-find-untold-stories-in-millions- of-archived-photos)

</comment><comment><USER8> It's sad how ugly my old neighborhood in Queens became over the years when you compare the 1930s to the 1980s to today.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is amazing, thanks for sharing!

We have Google street view now, but I think one of the charms of photos like this is you can actually see peoples faces and styles of dress etc.

We're (rightly) very privacy conscious now but in 100 years will people be missing out because we cover up all the faces?

<comment><USER10> Google presumably has the original, unblurred images. After enough time has passed, it might be acceptable to release them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> WOW. THANK YOU. This is so unbelievably helpful for my research.</comment>


Solaris 11 Source Leaked  - <AUTHOR> http://0xfeedface.org/blog/lattera/2011-12-19/solaris-11-source-leaked <comment><USER2> > I'm sure FreeBSD and IllumOS developers alike are researching the legality > of incorporating the leaked code.

There isn't any legality. Do you remember the waste of time and money that was the SCO case against IBM for possibly incorporating SCO unix code into Linux. This leak is a leak of stolen IP and no one can legally use it, very plain and simple.

This won't hurt them much other than to embarrass them a little.

<comment><USER3> Well, it depends if the CDDL has been stripped off the files or not. If the CDDL has been stripped off and replaced with anything that denotes that the source is now a trade secret, then yes -- it's stolen IP. But if the CDDL is still there, the situation will be murky, and I would hope that Oracle would clarify it one way or the other. Remember, this is not simply a proprietary system, it's a system (1) that was open source not very long ago (2) that was closed without a public announcement of any kind and (3) for which an internal commitment was made to make the source code available after Solaris 11 shipped. [1] Point is: this isn't SCO by a long shot.

[1] [http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and- develop...](http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-development- of-illumos-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _I'm glad the source has leaked. It serves Oracle right. They've proved that all they care about is greed._

What a dick, I hope he doesn't make a living doing anything related to software.

 _I'm sure FreeBSD and IllumOS developers alike are researching the legality of incorporating the leaked code._

Yeah, that's clearly not going to be happening.

<comment><USER5> I agree, this does not end up helping any open source products at all. In fact this increases the chances of companies using FUD to target the OSS solaris efforts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A better link would have been [http://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana- discuss/2011-De...](http://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana- discuss/2011-December/006542.html) (OpenSolaris mailing list thread) or even [http://news.softpedia.com/news/Oracle-Solaris-11-Kernel- Sour...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/Oracle-Solaris-11-Kernel-Source- Leaked-241597.shtml) , which is at least a somewhat-researched article, instead of the current awful blog post, which contains both baseless speculation and no original or useful information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for posting the links.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought most of the source code was open via OpenSolaris?

<comment><USER8> Oracle stopped publishing their changes a while ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The linked presentation looks like a great, opinionated piece of OS and Sun history. It's too bad Google Video went away, since being able to easily download presentations like this for offline viewing was a useful feature.

</comment><comment><USER10> Flame bait, content void post. If you are interested, "solaris11.tar.bz2", ~104MB. Not more information on the linked source or the linked source's sources either.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's a thorny legal issue, all right. I'll need to refer to the case of Finders v. Keepers.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're complaining about the legality of incorporating the leaked code, you aren't ready for a world where free software rules. The end game of free and, to a lesser extent, of open source software is to live in a world where copyright and patents no longer apply to software. Basically, software will be treated like mathematics.

Incorporating the leaked code if it is indeed highly useful brings us closer to that world. It's forced expropriation but I think we need some of that, especially since companies like Oracle are trying to limit how much open source software they produce.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's an outlaw version of FreeBSD or IllumOS that's released over Freenet or Bittorrent or patches are encrypted and traded over IRC if the leaked code proves to be very useful. In fact I would _hope_ that that happens.

<comment><USER13> Said outlaw software would be considered utterly radioactive by any corporation. It wouldn't get legs, especially when there are so many free alternatives that are unburdened by their illegal provenance.

<comment><USER12> That's okay. Free/open source software in general is still considered to be utterly radioactive but there's enough developers out there willing to work with and on it that it isn't a problem. There's no reason why we should let corporations direct what we use and work on all the time ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Free/open source software in general is still considered to be utterly > radioactive

On what planet exactly do you live?

<comment><USER12> The one where less than 99% of software is free/open source and where proprietary software is still considered a viable option unfortunately.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought you said you came from one where free software is radioactive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mechanical Proust: An automated crowd-written blog - <AUTHOR> http://blog.crowdflower.com/2010/09/mechanical-proust-an-automated-crowd-written-blog/

<comment><USER2> I think a hacker Questionnaire should be more appropriate here. But this is not new, for example there is "my road to Lisp" that explains the motivation and context when learning Lisp.

HN is like an evolving Questionnaire filled with the technology news that shape the future of technology and start-ups.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat!

I'd consider tweaking the selection algorithm. Especially if word gets out you may be looking at a "frist psot" situation pretty quickly. Some human selection is probably unavoidable if you're going to avoid that. (Or spamming.) But big thumbs up on the core idea.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for the mention (I made mechanical proust) - I agree that there's a lot of dross, but some responses are poignant, funny or interesting. It would be interesting to play around w/ how questions get posed.

</comment><comment><USER5> A fine stream of mediocrity.

<comment><USER6> Yes, though I find that answering this questionnaire can be an interesting personal tool, it doesn't mean that reading answers from random people can be interesting. Actually even Proust's answers are rather bland, which contrasts starkly with the deep psychology in his books.</comment></comment>


OpenBSD 5.0 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.openbsd.org/50.html <comment><USER2> My favourite bit from the (as always, impressive) changelog:

        For additional security, security(8) was rewritten in Perl.

<comment><USER3> That reason seems pretty shallow coming from the OBSD team... How can changing the language make it more secure by itself? Is a rewrite in C the next planned enhancement?

<comment><USER3> At the risk of dumping yet more karma, let me rephrase more constructively. OpenBSD has focused on security from the beginning. Precisely for that reason, and considering all the audits they run, it feels like, if OpenBSD has used (up to 4.9) shell scripts for security(8), there mustn't be any compelling reason against using the shell. Surely they must not have them.

I realize this was a changelog and not an article, and probably due reasons were found and discussed by the team. I still feel, nonetheless, that "For additional security, security(8) was rewritten in Perl" is either too short (provide a brief reason such tedunangst's) or too long (omit half-baked reasons and simply provide the fact that "security(8) was rewritten in Perl").

<comment><USER4> From the CVS log 7 months ago:

Work in progress to replace /etc/security, not yet linked to the build.

Main design goals: 1\. Safely handle untrusted file names and file content. 2\. Output compatibility with current security(8) to please people parsing the output with scripts (except when improving functionality right away saves considerable implementation effort). Substantial functional enhancements are for later.

Prodding to do this in Perl by deraadt@. Using some feedback from espie@.

[http://www.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/cvsweb/src/libexec/security/s...](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/cvsweb/src/libexec/security/security)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to love OpenBSD but I've had to abandon it:

\- no sendfile implementation to accelerate web servers

\- ancient userland pthread implementation

\- worst SMP implementation of any mainstream OS

\- no unified buffer cache

\- no working TRIM support

\- no 802.11n support

\- video card drivers aging, ~3 years behind mainstream

\- no adobe flash support / hackarounds

The only thing I really miss is PF.

<comment><USER6> > \- ancient userland pthread implementation

There is support for kernel threads in the form of a flag on rfork(2). The golang port uses this. The pthreads library is still the shitty userland one though.

OpenBSD is great because the man pages aren't absolute shit like Linux and networking is so much better. Linux wifi drivers are absolute crap in comparison.

Configure WPA on OpenBSD: ifconfig <interface> nwid <ssid> wpa wpakey <wpakey> up; dhclient <interface>

The equivalent on linux is left as an exercise...

It's still a pretty usable desktop though. The new ACPI support is amazing and a completely new implementation, rather than being built on the reference implementation everyone else used.

> no 802.11n support

That's going to require some work on the 80211 layer.

<comment><USER7> > Configure WPA on OpenBSD: ifconfig <interface> nwid <ssid> wpa wpakey > <wpakey> up; dhclient <interface> The equivalent on linux is left as an > exercise...

      wpa_passphrase <ssid> <wpakey> > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
      wpa_supplicant -i<interface> -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -B
      dhclient <inteface>

Everything is easy when you know how to do it.

<comment><USER6> On OpenBSD, all of your interface configuration is done with ifconfig and it's all documented with 'man ifconfig'.

On a linux system 'man ifconfig' doesn't even mention iwconfig or wpa_supplicant.

I think that makes it a little easier to learn how to do it.

<comment><USER8> I guess in Linux ifconfig is deprecated in favor of iproute2.

<comment><USER9> Really? No Linux SA that I know...and I know a lot...is using iproute2 over ifconfig.

<comment><USER10> The "ip" command has been the preferred way to configure network interfaces in Linux for a few years now. Most functionality isn't available through "ifconfig" at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> CD sales support OpenSSH and PF development as well. PF is part of Mac OS X since 10.7.

<comment><USER12> too bad apple doesn't support OpenSSH and PF development.

<http://www.callfortesting.org/macpf/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My favourite part is that NULL is now (void *)

</comment><comment><USER14> Song is amusing. <http://www.openbsd.org/songs/song50.mp3>

<comment><USER15> I didn't like the song as much as some of the original(older) songs

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Mad props for the Alfred E Neumann pic.</comment>