Basho Releases Riak v1.0.0 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.basho.com/2011/09/30/Riak-1-dot-0-is-Official/

<comment><USER2> Just a heads up if you are looking to dive right in: The client libraries still lag behind Riak itself, so it might be a while before you get all the goodness unless you plan to roll your own.

<comment><USER3> Yup. For haskell users, I have a trivial fork of Mailrank's riak-haskell- client that is tested to work with riak-1.0rc1; I haven't tried the secondary indices stuff yet, but it's possible that it would work too. It's at <https://github.com/tsuraan/riak-haskell-client> for anybody who wants to try it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Made it by the end of the month as promised!

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't seem to find information about weather or not ripple (the official ruby library) supports the new features at this point. Any heads up?

<comment><USER6> There will be a minor gem release (pre/beta/something) next week that supports Riak 1.0 features, then in the next major release those will also bubble up to the Ripple document layer. Sorry for the delay.

<comment><USER5> Any news on this? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations! I hope no Basho employees were injured in the last couple days of what, reading between the lines, sounded like a hard fought battle!

I'm about to dig in and read the release notes, upgrade etc, but I've been keeping up with the betas, so here's my early thoughts on Riak 1.0.

With 1.0 Basho has really started to separate from the pack.

I think secondary indexes are very well implemented and while they can be expanded feature wise over the years, as an %80 solution they are a no brainer-- and pack the double whammy of cutting developer time, and by efficiently reducing scope of Map/Request processing they can also boost performance.

I think the real sleeper hit, though, is riak_pipe. This moves Riak from just being a "database" or even a "batch processing system" into a realtime platform. I think in 3 years, this will be seen as the feature that put the elbow in Riak's growth. I'm hoping to have high level support for riak pipe in Nirvana when its released, and can't wait to start using it. Once again, I think you've saved me a couple months of work.

I know a lot of work was done on supporting new backends, specifically, LevelDB, and consolidating/unifying the existing ones (like merging ETS and Cache into the new RAM backend.) I think a blog post on each of the backends and when best to use them would be very useful (though this might be covered in the new docs.)

And Search Integration. I think this is the first NoSQL solution with built in, scalable, full text search.

Before, if you'd decided to go NoSQL, you kinda had to decide which architecture worked best for you and hope they had the features you wanted. I chose Riak because, I believe, it has the best architecture for the class of problems I'm solving... but now it also has a very complete set of features. I'm not sure if any of the competition is as complete out of the box, but even if they are, Riak should be in a lot more evaluations than it has been in the past.

Further, everything is so elegantly engineered that you've built an exceedingly attractive platform for us developers.

Bravo, and thank you very much!

<comment><USER8> _riak_pipe... moves Riak from just being a "database" or even a "batch processing system" into a realtime platform_

Interesting - could you explain more about this? I've not really grokked Riak's map-reduce yet, and all I understood from the blog post about riak_pipe was that it was a new layer under the hood but didn't change the programming model for map-reduce queries. Is it simply that it's so much faster as to permit new use cases?

<comment><USER7> This is all personal opinion, of course. I think the key to what makes Riak great is that it is fully distributed. Every node is a peer, and this eliminated single points of failure. But this also makes things a challenge for organizing work. Riak was previously a fairly monolithic product[1] with a set of features, including being a KV database and doing Map-Reduce processing. At some point Basho, wisely, decided that making the product more modular would allow them to be more agile in their development.

So, they split the KV database from the ring code, creating Riak_Core and Riak_KV. Riak_Core allows you to crate a ring of virtual nodes on a cluster of physical nodes, and spread work around it. (essentially the dynamo concept.) Thus, Riak KV then became an application running on the virtual nodes of Riak Core, providing a key-value database. At this point (e.g.: post Riak Core split, but pre-Riak 1.0) Raik_KV also managed the Map-Reduce functionality.

With Riak Core, you can create an application that does whatever kind of work you want, and spread it around a dynamo style ring. The ring is just a way of partitioning up work using a hash function so that it can be evenly distributed across the virtual nodes (Which are cleverly distributed across the physical nodes in the cluster.)

Riak Pipe is an abstraction on top of Riak Core that makes lets you build a pipeline of processing. Each stage in the pipeline is called a fitting. Each fitting has a function (that does the work) and a function to decide which vnode to do the work on. When the pipeline has data going thru it, the vnodes that get work create queues and worker processes to do the work. A key feature of this is that if a queue gets full, earlier fittings in the pipeline are stopped from adding to it, such that their queues will eventually get full (say if there's a very slow process near the end of the pipe) producing a "back pressure" to prevent work from overwhelming the cluster (or a particular vnode).

So, for Riak 1.0, they re-worked their Map Reduce implementation to run on Riak Pipe. This will allow for more flexible map-reduce jobs in the future (maybe even now). As an example of how the map-reduce implementation works, a map phase might be described as a fitting that uses a word-count function (to do the work) and uses the hash of the piece of data from Riak KV to determine which vnode on which to run. so, as you fill the pope with documents to have their words counted, the tasks get spread to fittings across the cluster, and then each fitting sends its results to the appropriate vnode for the next stage in the pipe (which might be reduce) ... and here's the key point... without it having to talk to the node that started the job. Previously, the node that started the map-reduce job (I believe) had to coordinate it across the cluster)... now it self coordinates.

The great thing about Riak Pipe, though, is that it is (as I see it) essentially a realtime processing engine. Say you had a job where you were monitoring the twitter firehouse for mentions of your company. The task is relatively straightforward, but you wouldn't want it to all be running on a single node, right? So, you'd have the fittings work function be the code that scans for your company name in the tweet and flags it, and the function that determines which vnode to run on could be a random hash (so it's evenly distributed across all vnodes.) When the firehouse overwhelms your cluster, you don't find yourself swapping because back pressure will stop new tweets from going into the pipe, and if you need to add capacity you just add a new machine to the cluster.

I'm still wrapping my head around some parts of Riak Pipe. I think that it will turn out to be a really killer feature.

[1] Seems silly to call any cluster of a bunch of erlang processes "monolithic", but a better word is escaping me at the moment.

<comment><USER8> Great explanation, thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


LAX shooting comes amid mounting aversion to the TSA - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-tsa-dislike-20131103,0,5433501.story

<comment><USER2> This is the first I'm hearing of this shooting (I live in Australia), but as an extensive traveller, I have to disagree with the general tone of this article.

In no way am I condoning that TSA officers be assaulted in any way, but this article makes it out to be the fault of the general public because they disagree with the practices of the TSA.

The TSA weren't the target because people ride them for no good reason. The TSA was the target because so many people disagree with the actions of the TSA. The TSA needs to be reformed while this article asks that the general public just shut-up and do what their told.

</comment><comment><USER3> For your protection...sounds familiar.

I don't fault the agents, they just need a job. But to think this is an isolated event by a psycho is wrong and dangerous. Very few people like the TSA, or any intruding agency. It will only get worse until we see a logical plan that doesn't compromise privacy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Surprise, surprise. The latimes is trying to blame it on conservatives - mentioning Rand Paul and Adam Carolla.

The latimes thinks the sheeple should just do what their told by the government and shut up about it.</comment>


Building Large Systems in Lisp (2010) - momo-reina http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.clojure.user/34269 <comment><AUTHOR> >In Java I need "factory objects", "visitors", and other such pieces of "design patterns". In lisp, I have never needed to write a "factory". The whole "visitor" pattern becomes a 1-line (map...) call.

You don't need any of those things, although they (regrettably) certainly are in the culture.

</comment><comment><USER2> > So, yes, lisp does not HAVE a lot of libraries. But what people miss is that > lisp doesn't NEED libraries.

This sounds a bit overly optimistic to me...

<comment><USER3> > I am the lead developer on Axiom which is a very large lisp project (about 1 > million things of code) to do computer algebra. The help system and graphics > were implemented in C but browsers did not exist at the time (1970s). These > are being reimplemented in lisp using Firefox and the canvas facility.

> In the past I helped develop a product for building rule-based programs > which was sold by IBM. It was entirely in lisp.

> I helped develop an expert system (FAME, a Finance and Marketing Expert) to > price and sell IBM mainframe hardware. It was written entirely in lisp.

> I developed a language (KROPS) which was a symmetric representation of a > knowledge language (KREP, Knowledge Representation) and a rule-based > language (OPS5 A rule-based language). It was entirely in lisp.

> I developed a robot planning program to build and assemble objects from > their computer-aided design descriptions (BOXER - A Design- to-Build > system). It was entirely in lisp.

This sounds a bit like if he hasn't needed libraries yet, lisp probably doesn't need libraries.

<comment><USER4> This is an impressive list, but it sounds like these programs are all within the same general category, and that category is a particular sweet-spot for lisp.

I think when people complain about a lack of library support in lisp they aren't looking for libraries for symbolic manipulation but for more mundane things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I searched for this so many times. I thought it was a blog post, not a ML one.

</comment><comment><USER6> I presume that "graph" here means "data structure" rather than "graphics". I could see creating the data structure in Lisp code just in passing, with no library needed. Easy. Computer graphics? Not so much.</comment>


How to recruit a hacker partner - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to apply to one of the various startup programs like YCombinator/SeedStart/TechStars, but I don't have a partner.  I'm more of the business type, so if I could partner with a hacker type that would be great.  What would be the best way to go about recruiting and evaluating a partner if your not close friends with someone like that? <comment><USER2> Well, first off, (no matter what your _possibly very good_ intentions) saying that you're a business type looking for a hacker type to do a startup is kind of a red flag.

It sounds to hackers like "I've got a great idea, all I need is for some one to do all of the work for me, preferably for free, kthxbai."

The best way to attract a hacker type is to build something insanely cool (or at least make a good start of it) and project a trajectory of much more where that came from. Without that, I don't think any idea is cool enough all by itself. I admit, its kind of a chicken and egg deal but there it is for what its worth.

<comment><USER3> I agree with all of this.

You could also explain what you bring to the table. Past history is useful.

Think about how you would evaluate a software person - you wouldn't just bring a hacker onboard because he went on news.managersspecial.com and posted that he was looking for a business person, would you? You would want to know a lot more about what they were up to, what they've done; and most importantly, what they can bring to the table. Just having good ideas isn't really a qualifier any more - it's what you've done with them that's important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Go become close friends with "someone like that". Turns out hackers are people too. A solid partner isn't someone you recruit and evaluate. A joint venture isn't going to succeed if one person in it forms an entitlement complex wherein "it was my idea, and I brought you on, so you should be grateful", or "that is your job, so don't complain to me, also I need you to change all the underlying structure in a week."

</comment><comment><USER5> Let's go the other way... Let's suppose I am a hacker and I am looking for a business type or partner for YC, what kind of guy am i looking for?

Assuming that there is already trust and respect - I would want someone who can bring this to the table:

1\. someone who understands a particular market & its needs 100%

2\. someone to bounce design/sales/marketing discussions off

3\. someone who has social and professional connections that I don't have

4\. someone who can cook (because I don't have this skill)

Out of all these 1 & 2 is most important - as hackers don't usually have a good sense for UI and users.

If you find a hacker you want - sell yourself with these points.</comment>


Internet Explorer 9 downloads: 2.3 million in first 24 hours - <AUTHOR> http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/17/6288002-internet-explorer-9-downloads-23-million-in-first-24-hours

<comment><USER2> Everyone who can should download IE9. Those on XP who can't should download Chrome or Firefox 4. If IE9 gets enough buzz, maybe it will attract the attention of people who just live with whatever browser came with their machine, and they'll feel compelled to get a "modern" browser.</comment>


John Carmack: Steps to Avoid Aliasing in VR - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1818885715012604&id=100006735798590 <comment><USER2> Post content:

 _In almost all of the public VR critiques I have made, I comment about aliasing. Aliasing is the technical term for when a signal is under sampled, and it shows up in many ways across graphics (and audio), but in VR this is seen most characteristically as "shimmering" imagery when you move your head around, even slightly. This doesn't need to happen! When you do everything right, the world feels rock solid as you look around. The photos in the Oculus 360 Photos app are properly filtered -- everything should ideally feel that solid.

In an ideal world, this would be turned into a slick article with before-and- after looping animated GIFs of each point I am making, along with screenshots of which checkboxes you need to hit in Unity to do the various things. Maybe someone in devrel can find the time...

All together in one place now, the formula for avoiding aliasing, from the most important: Generate mip maps for every texture being used, and set GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR filtering. This is easy, but missed by so many titles it makes me cringe.

If you dynamically generate textures, there is a little more excuse for it, but glGenerateMipmap() is not a crazy thing to do every frame if necessary.

Use MSAA for rendering. Not using MSAA should be an immediate fail for any app submission, but I still see some apps with full jaggy edges. We currently default to 4x MSAA on Mali and 2x MSAA on Adreno because there is a modest performance cost going to 4x there. We may want to go 4x everywhere, and it should certainly be the first knob turned to improve quality on a Qualcomm S7, long before considering an increase in eye buffer resolution.

In general, using MSAA means you can't use a deferred rendering engine. You don't want to for performance reasons, anyway. On PC, you can get by throwing lots of resources at it, but not on mobile.

Even 4x MSAA still leaves you with edges that have a bit of crawl, since it only gives you two bits of blending quality. For characters and the environment you just live with it, but for simple things like a floating UI panel, you can usually arrange to use alpha blending to get eight bits of blending quality, which is essentially perfect. Blending requires sorting, and ensuring a 0 alpha border around your images is a little harder than it first appears, since the size of a border gets halved with each mip level you descend. Depending on how shrunk down a piece of imagery may get, you may want to leave an eight or more pixel cleared alpha border around it. To avoid unexpected fringe colors around the graphics, make sure that the colors stay consistent all the way to the edge, even where the alpha channel is 0. It is very common to see blended graphics with a dark fringe around them because the texture went to 0 0 0 0 right at the outline, rather than just cutting it out in the alpha channel. Adding an alpha border also fixes the common problem of not getting CLAMP_TO_EDGE set properly on UI tiles, since if it fades to invisible at the edges, it doesn't matter if you are wrapping half a texel from the other side.

Don't use techniques like alpha testing or anything with a discard in the fragment shader unless you are absolutely sure that the contribution to the frame buffer has reached zero before the pixels are discarded. The best case for the standard cutout uses is to use blending, but if the sorting isn't feasible, using ALPHA_FROM_COVERAGE is a middle ground. Avoid geometry that can alias. The classic case is things like power lines -- you can model a nice drooping catenary of thin little tubes or crossed ribbons, but as it recedes into the distance it will rapidly turn into a scattered, aliasing mess of pixels along the line with only the 1 or 2 bits of blending you get from MSAA. There are techniques for turning such things into blends, but the easiest thing to do is just avoid it in the design phase. Anything very thin should be considered carefully.

Don't try to do accurate dynamic shadows on GearVR. Dynamic shadows are rarely aliasing free and high quality even on AAA PC titles, cutting the resolution by a factor of 16 and using a single sample so it runs reasonably performant on GearVR makes it hopeless. Go back to Quake 3 style and just blend a blurry blob underneath moving things, unless you really, really know what you are doing.

Don't use specular highlights on bump maps. This is hard to get really right even with significant resources. Specular at the geometry level (still calculated in the fragment shader, not the vertex level!) is usually ok, and also a powerful stereoscopic cue. This applies to any graphics calculation done in shaders beyond just sampling a texture -- if it has any frequency component greater than the pixel rate (a clamp is infinite frequency!), there will be aliasing. Think very carefully before doing anything clever in a shader.

Use gamma correct rendering. This is usually talked about in game dev circles as part of "physically based rendering", and it does matter for correct lighting calculations, but it isn't appreciated as widely that it matters for texture sampling and MSAA even when no lighting at all is done. For photos and other continuous tone images this barely matters at all, but for high contrast line art it is still important. The most critical high contrast line art is text. It is hard to ease into this, you need to convert your window, all textures, and any frame buffer objects you use too the correct sRGB formats. Some formats, like 4444, don't have an equivalent sRGB version, so it may involve going to a full 32 bit format.

Avoid unshared vertexes. A model edge that abruptly changes between two surfaces has the same aliasing characteristics as a silhouette at the edge of a model; you only get the MSAA bits of blending. If textures are wrapped completely around a model, and all the vertex normals and other attributes are shared, you only get the edge effects along the "pelting lines" where you have no choice but to have unmatched texture coordinates. It costs geometry, so it isn't always advisable, but even seemingly hard edged things like a cube will look better if you have a small bevel with shared vertexes crossing all the edges, rather than a knife-sharp 90 degree angle. If a surface is using baked lighting, the geometry doesn't need normals, and you are fine wrapping around hard angles as long as the texture coordinates are shared.

Trilinear filtering on textures is not what you ideally want -- it blends a too-aliased sample together with a too-blurry sample to try to limit the negatives of each. High contrast textures, like, say, the floor grates in Doom 3, or the white shutters in Tuscany, can still visibly alias even with trilinear. Reducing the contrast in the image by "prefiltering" it can fix the problem, or you can programmatically add an LOD bias.

Once aliasing is under control, you can start looking at optimizing quality._

<comment><USER3> fold --spaces --width 75 | sed -e 's/^/ /'

      In almost all of the public VR critiques I have made, I comment about
      aliasing. Aliasing is the technical term for when a signal is under
      sampled, and it shows up in many ways across graphics (and audio), but in
      VR this is seen most characteristically as "shimmering" imagery when you
      move your head around, even slightly. This doesn't need to happen! When
      you do everything right, the world feels rock solid as you look around.
      The photos in the Oculus 360 Photos app are properly filtered --
      everything should ideally feel that solid.

      In an ideal world, this would be turned into a slick article with
      before-and-after looping animated GIFs of each point I am making, along
      with screenshots of which checkboxes you need to hit in Unity to do the
      various things. Maybe someone in devrel can find the time...

      All together in one place now, the formula for avoiding aliasing, from the
      most important:

      Generate mip maps for every texture being used, and set
      GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR filtering. This is easy, but missed by so many
      titles it makes me cringe.

      If you dynamically generate textures, there is a little more excuse for
      it, but glGenerateMipmap() is not a crazy thing to do every frame if
      necessary.

      Use MSAA for rendering. Not using MSAA should be an immediate fail for any
      app submission, but I still see some apps with full jaggy edges. We
      currently default to 4x MSAA on Mali and 2x MSAA on Adreno because there
      is a modest performance cost going to 4x there. We may want to go 4x
      everywhere, and it should certainly be the first knob turned to improve
      quality on a Qualcomm S7, long before considering an increase in eye
      buffer resolution.

      In general, using MSAA means you can't use a deferred rendering engine.
      You don't want to for performance reasons, anyway. On PC, you can get by
      throwing lots of resources at it, but not on mobile.

      Even 4x MSAA still leaves you with edges that have a bit of crawl, since
      it only gives you two bits of blending quality. For characters and the
      environment you just live with it, but for simple things like a floating
      UI panel, you can usually arrange to use alpha blending to get eight bits
      of blending quality, which is essentially perfect. Blending requires
      sorting, and ensuring a 0 alpha border around your images is a little
      harder than it first appears, since the size of a border gets halved with
      each mip level you descend. Depending on how shrunk down a piece of
      imagery may get, you may want to leave an eight or more pixel cleared
      alpha border around it. To avoid unexpected fringe colors around the
      graphics, make sure that the colors stay consistent all the way to the
      edge, even where the alpha channel is 0. It is very common to see blended
      graphics with a dark fringe around them because the texture went to 0 0 0
      0 right at the outline, rather than just cutting it out in the alpha
      channel. Adding an alpha
      border also fixes the common problem of not getting CLAMP_TO_EDGE set
      properly on UI tiles, since if it fades to invisible at the edges, it
      doesn't matter if you are wrapping half a texel from the other side.

      Don't use techniques like alpha testing or anything with a discard in the
      fragment shader unless you are absolutely sure that the contribution to
      the frame buffer has reached zero before the pixels are discarded. The
      best case for the standard cutout uses is to use blending, but if the
      sorting isn't feasible, using ALPHA_FROM_COVERAGE is a middle ground.

      Avoid geometry that can alias. The classic case is things like power lines
      -- you can model a nice drooping catenary of thin little tubes or crossed
      ribbons, but as it recedes into the distance it will rapidly turn into a
      scattered, aliasing mess of pixels along the line with only the 1 or 2
      bits of blending you get from MSAA. There are techniques for turning such
      things into blends, but the easiest thing to do is just avoid it in the
      design phase. Anything very thin should be considered carefully.

      Don't try to do accurate dynamic shadows on GearVR. Dynamic shadows are
      rarely aliasing free and high quality even on AAA PC titles, cutting the
      resolution by a factor of 16 and using a single sample so it runs
      reasonably performant on GearVR makes it hopeless. Go back to Quake 3
      style and just blend a blurry blob underneath moving things, unless you
      really, really know what you are doing.

      Don't use specular highlights on bump maps. This is hard to get really
      right even with significant resources. Specular at the geometry level
      (still calculated in the fragment shader, not the vertex level!) is
      usually ok, and also a powerful stereoscopic cue. This applies to any
      graphics calculation done in shaders beyond just sampling a texture -- if
      it has any frequency component greater than the pixel rate (a clamp is
      infinite frequency!), there will be aliasing. Think very carefully before
      doing anything clever in a shader.

      Use gamma correct rendering. This is usually talked about in game dev
      circles as part of "physically based rendering", and it does matter for
      correct lighting calculations, but it isn't appreciated as widely that it
      matters for texture sampling and MSAA even when no lighting at all is
      done. For photos and other continuous tone images this barely matters at
      all, but for high contrast line art it is still important. The most
      critical high contrast line art is text. It is hard to ease into this, you
      need to convert your window, all textures, and any frame buffer objects
      you use too the correct sRGB formats. Some formats, like 4444, don't have
      an equivalent sRGB version, so it may involve going to a full 32 bit
      format.

      Avoid unshared vertexes. A model edge that abruptly changes between two
      surfaces has the same aliasing characteristics as a silhouette at the edge
      of a model; you only get the MSAA bits of blending. If textures are
      wrapped completely around a model, and all the vertex normals and other
      attributes are shared, you only get the edge effects along the "pelting
      lines" where you have no choice but to have unmatched texture coordinates.
      It costs geometry, so it isn't always advisable, but even seemingly hard
      edged things like a cube will look better if you have a small bevel with
      shared vertexes crossing all the edges, rather than a knife-sharp 90
      degree angle. If a surface is using baked lighting, the geometry doesn't
      need normals, and you are fine wrapping around hard angles as long as the
      texture coordinates are shared.

      Trilinear filtering on textures is not what you ideally want -- it blends
      a too-aliased sample together with a too-blurry sample to try to limit the
      negatives of each. High contrast textures, like, say, the floor grates in
      Doom 3, or the white shutters in Tuscany, can still visibly alias even
      with trilinear. Reducing the contrast in the image by "prefiltering" it
      can fix the problem, or you can programmatically add an LOD bias.

      Once aliasing is under control, you can start looking at optimizing
      quality.

<comment><USER4> TIL 'fold', thank you.

I've always been a big fan of including the command you use to get the output you're quoting - people sometimes pick up even subtle tricks or flags from doing this.

<comment><USER5> Oddly this is one of the tricks in Programming Pearls that I love, but can't get others to want to do.

It doesn't help that json prohibited comments. So, anything that modified json is incapable of adding a breadcrumb of what it did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember reading that the Galaxy phones have trouble with pixel refresh rates. In that blacks can ghost because the nature of amoled.

<comment><USER7> The Rift and Vive also use AMOLED screens, so I don't think it's the pixel tech that's the issue. LEDs can turn on and off extremely fast. It's probably that the screen's electronics were made for power-sipping mobile devices running at most 60 FPS and not 90+ FPS gaming.

<comment><USER8> OLED is the issue. Look into the black smear problem on Oculus DK2 and how they had to half-way fix it by overdriving for a frame and then falling back.

CV1 of the Rift headset is OLED and has the same issue. They have to run the panels at a notch above minimum brightness to work around it and as a result they lose out on true blacks.

[https://vrwiki.wikispaces.com/Black+smearing](https://vrwiki.wikispaces.com/Black+smearing)

<comment><USER7> None of those threads mention the Rift CV1, the Vive, or the Samsung Galaxy S6 or S7 (the ones that fit in the current Gear VR headsets). I tried the test image from this thread [http://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?t=2765793](http://forum.xda- developers.com/showthread.php?t=2765793) on my S6 and didn't see the issue. That thread and this one [https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/10924/true- bl...](https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/10924/true-black- smearing-in-dk2) say it's only an issue around areas where the screen is actually black, so keeping things very dark would seem to be worse?

<comment><USER8> I think I wasn't clear. It isn't a notch above minimum brightness as in running the panel very dim.

It is a notch above minimum as in: minimum is pure black, and instead of every allowing pure black they set it to one notch higher, because pure black causes the smearing.

It isn't an visible issue in Rift CV1 or Vive because they do that as a workaround.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's the problem with specular lighting on bump maps? I think I see what the issue can be, specifically, that when the bump map texture is smaller than 1-1 texels-to-pixels, then the normal chosen will 'shimmer' between the possible texel values. But can't one use mipmaps for bump maps as well to reduce this?

<comment> Ono-Sendai I think the problem with mimmapping bump maps is that it effectively smooths the surface, so you loose the bump effect.

<comment><USER9> Can't the same be said for mipmapping textures? Losing detail at low LOD is expected, though I can't picture if bump maps lose 'more' perceptually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone here doing HTC vive dev? I'm really interested myself, but as a poor student I'll settle for hearing other's stories.

<comment><USER11> I guess you could try google cardboard?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> unclosable popup

<comment><USER13> There is a "Not now" link to partially hide the popup.

<comment><USER14> Upvoted you, but the substantive point surely is that Facebook is a bad web citizen for doing this. OTOH every sane person already has a (negative) opinion about Facebook and this is not the forum to air those.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In an ideal world this article would not be posted on Facebook.

<comment><USER16> That article is shared to 'Public': it should be visible to non-logged-in users. Not sure what changed — could be an issue with excessive crawlers…

I've very convinced that Facebook is very comfortable to let the minority who are not comfortable having an account read a public post -- especially when it's about engineering. Those are usually on the company blog (without log-in block); Carmack probably was just using internal tool, and didn't want to bother.

It's probably less high on the priority list than "give affordable internet access to 1 billion people", but in an ideal world, posts that are meant for "everyone" should not be gated.

<comment><USER17> i can read it logged out of facebook

unfortunately there is an annoying box covering up 1/3 of the page asking you to login or signup. it does not "block" any content in that you can still read all of it. but it is highly annoying (and i assume purposely so).

<comment><USER18> The main question is why Carmack doesn't use the Facebook Engineering Blog. There are no popups or other annoyances there. For example:

[https://code.facebook.com/posts/265413023819735/surround-360...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/265413023819735/surround-360-is- now-open-source/)

<comment><USER16> Facebook employees generally communicate internal results or opinion with Facebook posts, a lot like this, using a Company-only privacy setting. Posts like this one sound like something he posted internally first, and just reposted, or changed the privacy setting. I wouldn't read any more into it than marginal laziness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Carmack: Some times you read HN. If you are reading this, please consider writing on a blog or something neutral.

It is extremely disgusting for your readers to have to log in or else...half of your screen is occupied with spam.

There is people out there that prefer not to report everything they read, when, where, how, how long to a big multinational associated to the US secret services.

<comment><USER20> "Extremely disgusting" sounds like an overreaction. "Not ideal" maybe, or "not helpful to those of us who don't want to read things in Facebook for privacy or security reasons". But "extremely disgusting" is over-exaggerating the importance of the choice of medium for a text post.

<comment><USER21> I was going to say "criminally atrocious" but then the popup div literally made me vomit excrement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> there is literally nothing wrong with jaggies or aliasing

</comment><comment><USER23> New project: A script that extracts public posts from Facebook for a given user, and formats them for consumption via RSS, or generates content/markdown to be served by Jekyll/Lektor. I should get on that...

<comment><USER24> Might I humbly suggest a project name? FFSS. For F(acebook|uck)'s Sake Syndication. :)

<comment><USER25> You just wrote Facebook Fuck's Sake Syndication with 1 extra character, and with more reading difficulty!

<comment><USER26> Looks like you need to brush up on your regular expressions.

> For F(acebook|uck)'s Sake Syndication

The pipe (|) means or, so the regex is indicating that FFSS can stand for either:

For Facebook's Sake Syndication, or

For Fuck's Sake Syndication

I thought it was clever, anyway.

<comment><USER23> I don't know about clever, but it's a common idiom on tech forums.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I downvote "tl;dr" comments on Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://raganwald.posterous.com/why-i-downvote-tldr-comments-on-hacker-news

<comment><USER2> _Sorry to write such a long blog post, but I didn't have time to write a short one._

Another solution is an appendix, as a sort of purgatory for zombie passages. Or a short and long version of the same blog post - your own tl;dr.

Perhaps best is the idea of chapters: treat the first blog post as an introduction or introductory chapter (or even as an abstract thereof), and the cool sentences you think of - that in reality are expansions of the main point - can move to a chapter, where they become first-class citizens, being directly relevant to that chapter's own thesis. Each chapter is a blog-post (and named, and linked to, as such). If you don't yet have enough material for one of these chapters, leave it as a draft for a while (or publish it as a skeletal chapter).

 _Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out._ aka _kill your darlings_

</comment><comment><USER3> Why does everyone insist on putting a semicolon in "tl;dr"?

It makes a perfectly good acronym 25% longer than it needs to be.

<comment><USER4> now I am laughing tears... :D I'd love to give that one 10 votes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I have no problem with the OP down voting tl;dr I do think as a comment its an important pointed stick:

First off to remind you that most people hardly read anything - either through lack of time, lack of attention span or just that they only read stuff they agree with. If you want to get a message across you need to meet the needs of these people too. This is a lesson I learned a long time ago in the work place.

Secondly - for those who do read - sometimes you start reading something and your eyes/brain glaze over. Rambling, unpolished prose etc. all do this to me. By the same token there are texts that you start reading - just to see what it is about and are compelled by the authors carefully constructed prose to read to the end.

And of course sometimes as a comment tl;dr is just funny....

</comment><comment><USER6> I like reading long posts, and it makes me sad to see people I like to read, like yourself, Steve Yegge and a few others start to write as if you're embarrassed and you're wasting our time. You're not, and here's why:

You write well, you're interesting, and (for me, anyway) reading is an experience; I enjoy it. Sure, I'm learning things or being exposed to different ideas etc, but I also _enjoy_ reading it. The shorter your writing, the less time I get to spend reading it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't decide whether my inability to tell whether this is satire reflects a failing of mine or of the author.

Writing a long-winded blog post about a simple idea, which itself is about distilling ideas to their essence is too obvious, right?

</comment><comment><USER8> Another reason to downvote tl;dr comments is that such a comment is simply not up to the quality level expected at HN. If you can't be bothered to read the original article & post a thoughtful comment, simply don't comment.

<comment><USER9> "tl;dr" doesn't only mean "It's too long so I didn't read it". It's also commonly used as "I thought this was too long, and can get across what I consider important in a much smaller space. If you might have found this too long and didn't read it, here's a summary for you."

I agree that bare "tl;dr"s should be voted down. But clear condensations shouldn't be just because of a "tl;dr" prefix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does this mean there's no place for <http://tldrd.com> ? :-)

</comment><comment><USER11> never posted tl;dr or knew what it stood for. If its posted though, it may not add to discussion but should educate the OP to post shorter, why you shouldn't downvote it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I tend to be long-winded. I have been criticized for that at times. But I have also found that when I shorten my comments too much, people really misunderstand me. My take on the world seems to be uncommon. So it apparently takes extra effort most of the time to effectively communicate my views.

I also found that if I ignore the eye-rolling and complaints of long- windedness, other people eventually get more comfortable speaking at length. And the end result tends to be better online conversations. I think the "blurb" culture where no one has time or interest to read more than 2 sentences at a pop is one that is really very socially rejecting. My opinion: If you don't actually want to engage in social intercourse, you are free to just read the articles and not click on "comments" here. I never can wrap my brain around the practice of joining a _discussion_ group and then bashing people for talking. The "comments" are the discussion part of HN and are totally optional.

</comment><comment><USER13> tl;dr (sorry, had to)

</comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr :)

</comment><comment><USER14> tl</comment>


Supercell Raised $130M, Made $179M Last Quarter - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/17/supercell-round/

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry, and I don't mean to be rude, but what do 90 people at a company that has 2 games in production actually do?

HR department (2 people?) Sys admins (1? maybe 2?) Design department? (4 or 5?) Programming? (4 or 5?) Management (4 or 5?) Marketing (1 or 2?) the website is nothing special, but lets call it 1 person (or a programmer takes care of it on their down time)

maybe a team prepping the next game to be release? another 5 or 10 there (half design, half programming)

I'm counting 40 or 50 max.

Love Clash of Clans though - perfect time waster - not happy you have to buy gems ($50 spent in the last month that I've been playing it and it takes to long to earn them otherwise) but thats why games are free and they have in app purchases...

<comment><USER3> From the Forbes article([http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/04/17/is- thi...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/04/17/is-this-the- fastest-growing-game-company-ever/)):

"Most game studios have an autocratic executive producer green-lighting the work of designers and programmers. Supercell's developers work in autonomous groups of five to seven people. Each cell comes up with its own game ideas. They run their ideas by Paananen (he can't remember ever nixing a proposal), then develop those into a game. If the team likes it, the rest of the employees get to play. If they like it, the game gets tested in Canada's iTunes App store. If it's a hit there it will be deemed ready for global release. This staged approach has killed off four games so far, with each dead project a cause for celebration. Employees crack open champagne to toast their failure. "We really want to celebrate maybe not the failure itself but the learning that comes out of the failure," says Paananen."

The rest of the head count are these cells with failed launches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I Love this game too. And I can't believe they are making so much money out of this game. Addictive.</comment>


The Broken Window Fallacy (wish silliness in first 30 seconds wasn't there) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG4jhlPLVVs

<comment><USER2> Is it still a fallacy if the baker never had the money or intention to buy a suit and borrowed or withdrew from savings the money to fix the window?

Cute animation aside, the fallacy only holds up as long as we assume all income immediately becomes debit. A cursory glance at society and business demonstrates that is not the case.

<comment><USER3> society is still out one window. destroying wealth doesn't somehow create wealth.</comment></comment>


SF TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon Team Search - <AUTHOR>

Hi All, i'm a junior rails developer.  I'm looking for some people to work with at the upcoming SF TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon.  I'm into food, adventure, music etc.. Would like to build a simple, well designed web-something.  If you would like to chat more please let me know.
Cheers,
John @jcdavison <comment><USER2> Wish I could make it, was thinking about going for the Startup Alley after not making it to the finals, but decided to pass cause plain tickets from Tokyo are not cheap right now…</comment>


Mark Shuttleworth Reddit AMA today - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge/x/4068980?c=activity <comment><USER2> I have to give Mark credit. Ubuntu changed Linux for the better. No matter what you think about Ubuntu now, Linux is far better off for Ubuntu.

My biggest question for Mark would be if he regrets not going his own way earlier. IMO, Ubuntu stuck with some dead-end upstream projects for far too long. Ubuntu should have gone the mobile/phone/tablet much sooner. Ubuntu _SHOULD_ have been what Android is now.

<comment><USER3> No reason it can't be. Android has several big issues:

1\. Lots of it is ugly. I don't mean the core OS, but lots of the apps don't fit the main theme.

2\. It runs on diverse hardware so performance varies.

3\. OS version segmentation. This is made worse by manufactures putting their own lipstick on the vanilla OS.

4\. It's not proper FOSS. Yes, you can read the source at some point later, but chances of someone that's not Google, Motorola, Samsung, or HTC having their commit actually show up in the upstream are slim to none.

5\. Phones and tablets are of varying quality and come with various levels of support. The manufacturer may back it, or they may drop support as soon as they can. Flagship phones become crap phones all the time.

Ubuntu may play their cards right and provide an integrated platform a la Apple's iOS devices, where software and hardware play nicely together. If they then insist on high quality apps, they may be able to get a foothold in the market. The question is, how long can the "crowd" support the right way of doing things before some exec somewhere says "We need it to have our own distinct UI"?

<comment><USER4> Point 4 is orthogonal to the others.

Points 1-3: If you have an proper, FOSS system, you can't keep people from doing all those things, which they will do if it gets get any kind of meaningful traction.

Point 5: You can't force manufacturers to provide support at a certain level. You can probably avoid "TIVO-ization" with licensing, but as soon as you're venturing out of "supported" territory, there's only so much you can do for regular users.

<comment><USER5> Point 4 will apply to Ubuntu as well... they're using the Google/Android style FOSS where they work on major releases mostly in secret and then do a large code dump.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Link to AMA:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shut...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j166z/hi_im_mark_shuttleworth_founder_of_ubuntu/)

<comment><USER7> Rush Holt's doing one today as well!

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j17ir/hi_im_rush_holt...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j17ir/hi_im_rush_holt_im_a_member_of_congress_a/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if Indiegogo takes their normal percentage for projects this large.

<comment><USER9> Why wouldn't they? It'd be an easy way to make ~$2 million

<comment><USER5> They could have tried to work a deal with indiegogo/kickstarter for a lower rate for such a high value target.

<comment><USER10> With the weight of the name ubuntu, I wonder why they outsourced their crowdfunding to an foreign entity. They could easily have razzed up something on their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Is there a site which makes AMA's easier to read? Something that scans the page and picks out the comments he's replied to so I don't have to?

<comment><USER11> I found this site when the Bill Gates AMA was out a while ago. I don't see Mark Shuttleworth on it yet, but check it out later today and it should help out.

[http://www.topiama.com/](http://www.topiama.com/)

<comment> k-mcgrady Excellent, just what I was looking for. Thanks!

<comment><USER10> I think I have what you were really looking for: [http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/1j1gbv/table_iama_hi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/1j1gbv/table_iama_hi_im_mark_shuttleworth_founder_of/)

Check out /r/tabled and /u/tabledresser - a bot that condenses the threads from /r/IAMA and /r/AskScience into easy to consume tables.

<comment><USER11> Whoa, that's awesome! Thanks, I didn't know about that before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it looking likely that they will hit the target? They already had HN bump and most Ubuntu fans were made aware of the project already.

<comment><USER13> If I were them I'd offer a 32 GB version for $600, for people who will only/mainly use it as a phone, and not a full-time computer. It's still plenty of space.

That price level seems to have been pretty popular, and at that price level they may be able to hit the target. I'm not sure why they absolutely need to sell only a 128 GB version.

Also, they'd be insane not to add 802.11ac Wi-fi.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'm not sure why they absolutely need to sell only a 128 GB version.

I'm just guessing here but it might be more expensive to make smaller batches with different models the to just make one.

<comment><USER14> They can give them the same model with only a 32 GB partition on the flash. And then charge $200 for an upgrade to 128 GB. It's a proven business model. :-)

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately it sounds like the $600 price point only covers their BOM right now. If they put in extra engineering to disable some hardware, that's a net loss for them per unit (but they'll make it up in volume!). All the people who would upgrade have already splashed out for the 128GB model.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Offbeat Guides Public Beta: On-Demand, Personalized Travel Books - <AUTHOR> http://www.offbeatguides.com/ My new company just went live to public beta today - Offbeat Guides. After months of effort, over 6,000 private beta testers' feedback, and hundreds of bugs quashed. we just went live.
What's the big idea? On-demand, personalized travel books, for over 30,000 cities around the world. All the details are here: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2008/11/offbeat_guides_public_beta.html
Would love to get your thoughts and feedback! <comment><USER2> A great idea poorly implemented. Most of the info seems to be cadged without attribution from wikitravel, often with the formatting poorly stripped.

I'd really love to be able to create a guide tailored to my interests, but this isn't anywhere near it. The best thing they could do right now is discard the whole database and start small, with one city at a time done in extreme detail. Know how to get from any point A to point B in a city at any time of the day, by every means and keep that info up to date. List every possible tourist attraction, categorise them and keep that list up to date too. Get more detail on local events. Contract a local contact on a piecework basis to help maintain the city guide and add to it as appropriate. If this is too expensive, do one city and seek funding based on that demo.

As it stands, the guides offered give far less value than an off the shelf travel guide.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback - we're learning a lot and all feedback and commentary is valuable and useful, so thanks for your comments! We have a team of editors and curators, but obviously we can't cover every place at launch, so we work hard to cover the long tail of destinations algorithmically. What city did you try to build? I will have out content team have a deeper look into it to fix it up.

Regarding attribution, we do use information from sites like Wikitravel and Wikipedia, and there's a References chapter in every book - you can find it, along with the URLs that we used to pull together your book in that section.

Your points are excellent ones, thanks for the feedback! This is just the initial release of the beta to the public, and getting feedback, criticism and suggestions like yours is VERY valuable. Thanks again!!!

Dave

<comment><USER2> I tried a number of cities, your own home of San Francisco, my own of Cambridge, UK as well as some others I'm familiar with like Bangalore and Tapei. I was very disappointed that the San Francisco guide was of far worse quality than the Cambridge guide for example. I would have expected since the company is there, you might have something interesting to say about the city. Apparently not.

The list of events is worse than useless, it's cheap and tacky. For example, the events for Bangalore lists events in places such as Shanghai and somewhere on the Indian coast over 500Km away, as well as events tourists couldn't possibly be interested in such as agricultural machinery expos. You just can't do this sort of thing by pulling events unfiltered from external sources, that just doesn't work. Full stop. I want a sensible listing of events that I can filter by my interests, each one with a map of the location and public transport details.

The issues you have can't be fixed with copy editing. You simply can't produce a guide to a place you've never been, and you really shouldn't try. This talk about covering a "long tail" of destinations depresses me. Leave that stuff to wikitravel, you should be producing a polished commercial product. At a minimum you need to at least have had one person representing the company visiting each place you produce a guide to. You aren't in the business producing a general purpose guide, you're in the business of knowing everything there is to know about a city and giving people a decent interface to filtering it. Quite frankly, I don't see how you can do that without a team of people going to a place for at least a month.

Some features I'd pay for:

* Suggested itineraries for days, based on a database of places and activities filtered by my interests and biased by predicted weather.

* Some sort of more/less detail slider for each page enabling me to customise the text.

* Complete and up to date public transport listings for the destination, cross referenced with the events and places I've chosen to add to my guide.

Above all, if I'm paying for something that costs about the same as the rough guide I want something at least as good quality as the rough guide. You aren't going to get that with wikitravel and creative commons photos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback, you make some very good points. This is, after all, what a beta is all about - to get out there, learn as much as we can, and iterate iterate iterate.

Thanks for being brutally honest, this is just what we want to learn!

Dave

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nothing on the front page of the website says beta. It's only when I get to the step of my book being created that I have multiple timeouts and I need to refresh multiple times. In fact, the page even has in bold:

"We're having some occasional time-outs; until we crack that, if the information takes longer than a minute or two to come up, just refresh this page."

I think this is poor user experience, and not having the site clearly marked as beta may give users undue expectations. Not trying to be too harsh, but I have spent five minutes and haven't seen even the TOC of my personalized travel guide.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. We actually had the _beta_ label in there, but somehow it got dropped out when we did our final QA. We'll get it back in there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My initial complaint is that its kind of expensive. Travel books at my local bookstore (that I can buy the day before I travel) generally cost less than $20.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Blog post announcing the public beta, along with a whole raft of informationa bout what it is all about is here:

[http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2008/11/offbeat_guides_...](http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/2008/11/offbeat_guides_public_beta.html)</comment>


Cisco routers in at least 4 countries infected by highly stealthy backdoor - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/09/attackers-install-highly-stealthy-backdoors-in-cisco-routers/ <comment><USER2> So it requires a Cisco router that has a default username and password, and the router has to not have any kind of input firewall for its SSH.

Then you log in and install a patched firmware containing your backdoor.

It's hardly Cisco specific. Surely any router (or any device for that matter)that has a known default username and password can be exploited in this way?

Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER3> Can anyone explain how something so basic as changing the default password is left out? Do enterprise routers, such as Cisco's, have web-based management interfaces or must everything be provisioned either manually over SSH or via some other provisioning software?

<comment><USER4> So, I worked at an internet provider up to several years ago, and we were using quite a lot of Cisco routers. Maybe something has radically changed, but I'd be surprised. Please someone correct me if that's now totally different.

A cisco router with a blank config will come up with all interfaces configured "shutdown" and with no passwords set. You access it via a serial port on the front, labeled "Console". It provides a command line almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a unix shell :-) where you enter commands (ping, show routing tables, ..) or configuration statements (config terminal // Interface FastEthernet 0/0 // ip address 10.1.1.1... // no shutdown).

If the only thing you do is to give it an ip-adddress on an interface and enable it, it will have a passwordless login via telnet.

Every ISP/network department not run by complete imbeciles will have a "standard config" regarding login and passwords: Ours back in the days was a TACACS server for running user authentication, setting access levels for particular users (and automated logins for configuration management) and logging of logins/executed commands. You can also configure access lists that logins are only allowed from specific IP addresses. Probably also have a hardcoded password as fallback when the authentication server isn't reachable, disable the console port for when your router isn't in a locked box, ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> turk- hmm I wonder who could be doing this.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140518/17433327281/cisco...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140518/17433327281/cisco- goes-straight-to-president-to-complain-about-nsa-intercepting-its- hardware.shtml)

<comment><USER5> Probably not: "The initial infection doesn't appear to exploit any vulnerabilities in Cisco devices. Rather, attackers seem to be taking advantage of routers that use passwords that are factory default or are somehow otherwise known."

<comment><USER6> This rhetoric of casually discounting the possibility of government breaches in commercial networks might have sounded insightful and worldly several years ago. Now it just seems ignorant.

The person you were responding to had no evidence to back their claim (in this particular instance), but neither do you.

<comment><USER7> Quoting facts from a story that rebut someone's theory isn't "rhetoric of casually discounting", even if you don't like where those facts take us.

<comment><USER8> I don't know, I think it could be seen as that if the facts quoted do not support the position they were used to bolster.

<comment><USER7> I don't think so. Maybe you could point out the part of the comment I replied to that supports that argument?

<comment><USER8> I don't think how "easy" or low-tech the infection method is really points one way or another towards whether it was a government agency, whether it be the NSA or some other, or not. Using such a fact, whether it be from the story or not, does not strongly indicate to me, and I do not think it should strongly indicate to others, that this was or was not the NSA. I can see that as "rhetoric of casually discounting".

I'm not particularly a fan of the comment in question, it was a bit confrontational for my taste, but I also think evidence in support of a position should be relevant, and I view this evidence as only loosely relevant, if that, to the stated position. Whether it's from the source article or not is besides the (or at least _my_ ) point in this case.

If someone were to make a persuasive argument that the initial method of infection actually mattered to the NSA (which I haven't seen yet), I might change my position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> FWIW IOS backdoors were already being researched by 2003, this isn't surprising at all, and I imagine by now the true scope of the problem is a little bigger than a few routers

<comment><USER10> > FWIW IOS backdoors were already being researched by 2003 [...]

I recall there was a Swede (the grue?) on the Pull the Plug IRC network who was cross-compiling and linking in backdoored object code in Cisco IOS images already back in 2000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is why your routers should run open source software. At least then you can reinstall it and be reasonably assured it does not have malware.

Also we need an inventory of where things can be hidden in devices. Are there embedded flash areas where are they?

A modern reinstall should:

1) Reinstall the operating system from a known good source 2) Flash all firmware and flash chips with known good code.

Both operating system and firmware should be open source so you can inspect the code.

<comment><USER2> Routers used by most networks are proprietary boxes from specific vendors. There is no such thing as open source software for them.

I do not know of an open source router hardware that is available (at ISP scale)

Getting an X86 box and throwing freebsd and quagga on it might work for small amounts of traffic. But for ISP scale bandwidth your stuck with a few main vendors...

<comment><USER12> "I do not know of an open source router hardware that is available (at ISP scale)"

You're basically correct but it's worth remembering that it _is_ possible to add a bunch of quad nics to whitebox and run bpf on it, courtesy of one of the BSDs and do real routing at an ISP scale.

That would be completely open source (and quite secure).

Probably pretty performant if you knew what you were doing.

<comment><USER2> yep, but you are never going to get a generic processor architecture to have anywhere near the performance of custom silicon ASICs designed for specifically for routing packets. No matter what software you put on top of it.

Its never going to work in a core network routing 100s of gigs of traffic. So it's not going to work for ISPs

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> First, I don't think this is the NSA. It is far to sloppy for something like this. You probably wouldn't be able to detect them so easily. It is possible to be from another nation state though, or smart attacker. Also, we know that the NSA tries to cover their tracks: [http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2014/08/snowden-the-nsa-n...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2014/08/snowden-the-nsa-not-assad-took-syria-off-the-internet-in-2012/) "Instead, the TAO's hackers "bricked" the router, Snowden said. He described the event as an "oh shit" moment, as the TAO operations center team tried to repair the router and cover their tracks, to no avail."

What I am confused about is that I assumed IOS images were signed. How are people creating backdoored IOS images without failing signature checking? Maybe they patched rommon?

</comment><comment><USER14> Why is a country relevant in this context?

<comment><USER15> Because it's likely a state did this.

> In an interview with Reuters, FireEye CEO Dave DeWalt said, "That feat is > only able to be obtained by a handful of nation-state actors." In any event, > there's no doubt that the devices were infected by a professionally > developed and fully featured backdoor.

<comment><USER16> this presentation says as much, but the techniques have been widely known for...ever. yes, most likely the only group with the will power and means is a government, but it certainly doesn't _have_ to be.

[http://www.phenoelit.org/stuff/FX_Phenoelit_25c3_Cisco_IOS.p...](http://www.phenoelit.org/stuff/FX_Phenoelit_25c3_Cisco_IOS.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So FireEye posted the original article. Anyone surprised?

</comment><comment><USER18> >The initial infection doesn't appear to exploit any vulnerabilities in Cisco devices. Rather, attackers seem to be taking advantage of routers that use passwords that are factory default

<comment><USER19> I'm waiting for a hardware feature that prompts the setup administrator for credentials upon factory reset boot (preferably an SSH key rather than a password) and doesn't function till properly secured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Whoever trusts Cisco at this point are living in la-la land where they refuse to acknowledge the _reality_ that Cisco has been helping governments build surveillance capabilities into its routers to spy on its customers.

Whatever negative impact this has on their own business is fully deserved at this point.

<comment><USER21> The problem is, how do you know who you _can_ trust? I mean, really, you can't, as long as network devices are closed source, proprietary black boxes. Right now I have no particular reason to think Juniper or anybody else ship routers that are less likely to be exploited or back-doored, relative to Cisco.

Yet one more reason to say that rms right was right all along.

<comment><USER22> Plenty of sites can replace a black box router with a plain linux or bsd box with a couple of good network cards and some iptables/ipfw rules. That solves a number of issues right there.

<comment><USER23> Of course, if you were _really_ paranoid, you'd worry that somebody intercepted your Linux box's motherboard as it was being shipped to you so they could install a backdoor in the BIOS or EFI...

<comment><USER24> If you felt that way, you could configure a read-only filesystem once it is setup. Not a terribly complex solution.

<comment><USER25> How would that protect against an EFI or BIOS backdoor?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Woman Finding Tech Jobs for the World's Poorest People - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/07/leila-janah-samagroup/ <comment><USER2> I am friends with a guy from central Africa living in the US. He is nice and is eager to work. But at the moment his computer skills are very basic. Even applying for regular non tech jobs means he needs to be proficient in general internet browsing and data entry. This can be intimidating.

I try to to balance showing with letting him try to figure out navigating sites himself and sometimes making a mistake. As a result he has got a few temporary jobs that pay $15 (no benefits of course). Not a lot but a start. Without being able to use the web he would have not got these jobs. I think Janah's approach is a good one. That being said he is looking to learn a skilled trade, not be a temporary sharing economy worker.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a great story. It's so nice to see real philanthropists: people helping others before helping themselves. In the Tech industry, many startups claim they will make a change and make the world better when they actually think that they will make their own life better. This woman is a perfect example how the Tech industry can give to others directly.

</comment><comment><USER4> >Getty was looking for vendors to tag photos they'd acquired when they bought iStockphoto. Machine learning can handle a lot of the image recognition, but images of celebrities from different angles or with shadows needed to be processed by a human.

How does one find out about such vendors who are looking for contractors to do the work? Is there some B2B board for the tender process?

<comment><USER5> Samasource has its own sales team. It's not designed for tiny self-serve projects, but it completes projects for larger organizations, including quality assurance.

Source: Used to work at Samasource.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds great but perhaps it could be more laudable an initiative which could offset more profits, maybe not lowering too much the cost of the service, towards offering this people an educational path into more qualified jobs, so they don't get stuck in the same low field forever.

Don't want to be harsh, but it seems these days - even without taking into account the opinions made by those close to the company related to the article du jour, that it is quite widespread the notion of being a positive thing creating jobs at whichever price; all the time at the expense of the worker. Also it is a bit ironic reading the PR related to these internet/sharing economy companies, coloring the legal abyss as an opportunity for depressed sectors. But what amount of the demand is new and which is redirected to the same working class but with worse benefits?

</comment><comment><USER7> I like this idea, even with the problems of the benefits, stability and carreer path on these jobs.

I have an idea for somethng like that, if someone could critic it, it would be great. Homeless people covering the streets of a city and mapping every single business location, then selling the data to Google Maps and others of the kind.

</comment><comment><USER8> _> I grew up believing in meritocracy and the American dream._

Well, that's the very definition of outsourcing!

 _> "... benefit the most vulnerable people in society ... They want to live in a country with a strong middle class..."_

Let's ruin the previous middle class with outsourcing and replace it... With new one? What's different - the colour of the skin will be "better"?

 _> "A lot of people are happy to give money ... city of San Francisco, bastion of liberalism, were more innovative when it comes to how to spread the wealth."_

Why are labor/liberals always about taking/getting money from people who earn it and giving it to people who don't?

</comment><comment><USER9> i was very excited by this, and was thinking about donating money. then i read [http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Samasource- Reviews-E483520....](http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Samasource- Reviews-E483520.htm) \- in particular, the 40% turnover rate within a year is very concerning.

</comment><comment><USER10> That's great I can't even find a job!

<comment><USER11> Are you implying someone should help you find a job before they help someone in Uganda?

<comment><USER12> I read the comment as "That's great" (thanks for helping people out) "I can't even find a job" (and I don't have the additional hardships they do).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I personally am a bit apprehensive about this. This is introducing yet more low cost labor in an industry which is already heavily populated by low cost IT workers from China, India etc.</comment>


Create your own Twitter with Yonkly - <AUTHOR> http://yonkly.com Yonkly is a hosted, white label solution for creating your own microblog network. <comment><USER2> You'd be surprised.. Twitter is like a cess-pool. I think these niche- microblogs have a lot of value

</comment><comment><USER3> * Would be very surprised if they can keep using the word "Twitter" all over their app.

* Kind of ignores the whole point of Twitter, which is a deliberately trivial application carried by a huge network effect.

</comment><comment><USER4> Actually, we make it deliberate not to use the word twitter and if you see it on our site then it is probably accidental :)</comment>


Welcome To The Era Of Design - hippee-lee http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2012/05/03/welcome-to-the-era-of-design/

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to say that a lot of this actually is superficiality, which should not be applauded.

Having said that, I do think that design matters and that overall this new design consciousness has resulted in an improved status quo. I think that part of what may be driving that is the dramatic increase in the number of web, mobile and desktop applications and devices. I think that there are a lot more programmers, especially targeting consumer applications. I also think that part of this is the result of the rise of web development and having quite a lot of people with a web design background moving into application development/design which has infused more aesthetic and marketing attention.

When there are a (large) number of different applications and devices with the same important features for around the same ballpark amount of money, details that are secondary to primary function become more important for making a product stand out. Previously, much of application development was focused on providing more and better features.

Now, when there are already two or three or a hundred applications in most niches, developers have to invest their time in things like usability, appearance and marketing, or there is a good chance that a very small percentage of the population will learn of the existence of their application.

If there were really only one application available to perform a key function in someone's life, they would be less inclined to dismiss it if they found the color scheme or font distasteful or difficult to read or menu hard to navigate.

</comment><comment><USER2> Good design absolutely makes a difference, but good design can mean a lot of different things.

It doesn't necessarily have to be beautiful. Understanding the user, what they're trying to accomplish, and how they want to accomplish it is just as important (if not more so) as making something look good.

I think it speaks to the progress of the software industry more than anything: Where before, everything was function and something actually working was close to amazing, the software industry has become so mature at a technical level that design has become a key differentiationg factor.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps more of a realization than a new era -- design and branding have always been important, it's core to the concept of identity and human perception of others' value (and power).

Comment edited to add that the power of a product, organization, or even political parties and states exists in its identity and reputation (the core ideas behind branding). These perceptions may or may not be well-founded. Recall the Danish folk tale of the "Emperor's New Clothes". Popular perception created around design and branding can become a cult following that is a distortion if not blindness to reality. In the article Apple is used as an example, but I would suggest history may show Apple to be a notorious example of this as many refer to Steve Job's 'reality distortion field' that extends to many loyal to the brand. (This coming from someone at this moment typing on a Macbook Pro).

</comment><comment><USER4> I recommend checking out the linked page to the UK govt design principles for websites.

<https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples>

For something produced by the government it is a surprisingly good set of principles and well illustrated with examples.

</comment><comment><USER5> What era did we come out of in order to enter the Era of Design?

<comment><USER6> The Era of Engineering?

<comment><USER5> Isn't the definition of engineering to use scientific principles to design and build things?

<comment><USER7> While your definition is accurate I think that engineering, by definition, ignores aesthetics. This is the differentiating factor that we are starting to see. The emotional aspect of design per se. You can usually tell when something was designed by an engineer or designed by a designer. (For better or worse.)

This image from the Dash documentation tool homepage outlines my point:

[http://kapeli.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/08/Screenshot-16.p...](http://kapeli.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/08/Screenshot-16.png)

I'd venture to say that this image was composed by an engineer.

<comment><USER6> Engineering is a hard thing to define, and the line between the definition of "engineering design" and plain "design" is a blurry one, but yes, that's what I meant.

It's basically a question about the field of design -specifically the nature of the system/product/service to design- that determines the formation of the individual designer. There is a cultural dichotomy between science and art, specially in university. Engineers are "formed" as applied scientist, while designers are applied artists. One tends to reductionism, the other to holism. One tends to function, the other to form.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>