The Lancet: World population projections by 2100 - <AUTHOR> https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30677-2/fulltext <comment><USER2> For me this stood out: "The reference projections for the five largest countries in 2100 were India (1·09 billion [0·72–1·71], Nigeria (791 million [594–1056]), China (732 million [456–1499]), the USA (336 million [248–456]), and Pakistan (248 million [151–427])."

The big surprise being China,of-course. A drastic _decrease_ projected in the coming 80 years.Should have policy consequences as well, I would think.

<comment><USER3> China's predicted population decrease is a logical consequence of its one child policy ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One- child_policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy))

If you compare [https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/1980/](https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/1980/) with [https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2020/](https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2020/), you see how drastic its effect on China's population pyramid was. Drastically fewer kids means fewer parents 20-30 years later.

(There also is a bit of an effect of richer people having fewer children, but for China, that effect is relatively small)

<comment><USER4> Population Pyramid estimates the 2100 population of China to be 1.06B which is 45% higher than the 732M figure estimated by Lancet.

1B feels like a lot more realistic estimate than 750M.

<comment><USER2> The most interesting thing for me in this report coming out is that societies/governments taking note of this might incentivise outcomes. E.g., if China thinks that 750M is too low keeping its longer term interests, it might tweak the 1-child policy or encourage immigration etc by 2050.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find these predictions fascinating to think about. Did we get them right this time? I remember that we were taught about the idea of overpopulation in school. As I understand, it was believed in the 60s and 70s that the world population would keep massively increasing. People were worried about overpopulation. At this point we know that that's not true - it seems that essentially all rich countries see a decline in birthrates. They might increase in population, but it happens due to immigration. However, will this pattern hold?

As I understand it, before the industrial revolution, the population was what's described as Malthusian. As a country became richer it tended to have a population increase, which meant that an estimate of GDP per capita remained relatively similar. Over thousands of years you'd see maybe a doubling or quadrupling of it. Ie the median person in the year 500 AD lived rather similarly to the median person in the year 1500 AD.

When the industrial revolution rolled around, things changed. The estimate of GDP per capita increased faster than the population. People became richer and their lives became significantly better. This came with a substantial population increase, because people started living longer. The fruits of progress spread to poorer areas. The increase in food availability and medicine made many population counts skyrocket.

At some point during this it turned out that the richest areas started seeing a significant decrease in birthrates though. Why? I'm unsure. Perhaps people wanted better lives for their children and they couldn't afford to have as many children? Perhaps it wasn't necessary to have as many children anymore (social security)? Regardless what the reason is, birthrates have declined in developed countries. This allows us to plot a peak for the human population and decline afterwards. We don't need to worry about overpopulation anymore.

Will this pattern hold though? What if it turns out that when a society hits a GDP per capita of $500k of today's money that the birthrates start increasing again? 3% growth of GDP per capita plotted over 80 years would put US GDP per capita at $668k. What's the chance that there is no societal break point in the future that reverses the birthrate decline? Quite a few countries seem to be actively working on trying to find something like that.

<comment><USER6> Female empowerment is what is listed in the paper and what is generally accepted.

I've typically heard two drivers:

1) children turned from an economic boon/necessity to a sink. They can start helping with farm work pretty early, not quite so much when the industry work, they have to be somewhat older and can't tag along when the parents are working.

2) women could spend their time working and earning money. They could start to support themselves.

We've been able to accelerate this trend by offering access to contraception and decreasing infant mortality.

<comment><USER7> Not just empowerment but education. The higher educated a woman is the more TFR goes down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These studies are fascinating but I think they should stay away from such detailed predictions as 'in the reference scenario, the USA was forecasted to once again become the largest economy in 2098'. That's just way too far out to make any meaningful statements about a simple ordering of economies in relative size.

<comment><USER9> Is that really a prediction in the study? Or does their reference scenario use that (unknowable assumption) as a necessary input in calculating their population predictions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a good (though hour-long) presentation by the late Hans Rosling call "DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population":

* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E)

"Don't Panic – The Facts About Population":

* [https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-...](https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-population/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Do they take into account the consequences of global warming?

<comment><USER12> To some degree. They note that they don't have accurate enough predictions to calculate changes to net migration due to climate change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't the Lancet the publication who promoted that obviously bogus COVID study then retracted it without an apology? Why should we trust them again?

<comment><USER14> Yeah the Lancet has had some questionable publishing standards as of late, but the thing about science is that you should always hold everything loosely, run more experiments, try to disprove pást studies' findings, and take everything with a grain of salt until it's confirmed by several peer reviewed studies. So, we shouldn't trust the Lancet, and we don't need to, because everything in proper science should always be taken with a grain of salt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It stands out that a worldwide event like coved won't alter the trajectory as far as I an see, on these trends. If i missed something long lasting on the natural reproductive rates of these economies id love to know.

Whats strongly causative of the decline is literacy, especially women's literacy, and women's body autonomy and reproductive rights.

US opposition to WHO and to funding contraception and abortion is (thankfully) being counterbalanced by the gates foundations work, and other funding sources. A pox on the religious right, and American foreign policy.

<comment><USER16> > It stands out that a worldwide event like coved won't alter the trajectory > as far as I an see, on these trends. If i missed something long lasting on > the natural reproductive rates of these economies id love to know.

And that's a good thing, right?

<comment><USER15> It would be horrid if covid was visibly altering a long term trend even if it was net beneficial.

<comment><USER17> If covid leads to a long term increase in remote work that itself could lead to a change in demographics as people reduce moving to cities and away from family support networks, which could impact on fertility rates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Approximately correct projection of world population by 2100, given that nothing horrible happens by then."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This study came out in 2020-07-14.

Link to the study can be found on the webpage.

<comment><USER2> PDF of the same : [https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820...](https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820%2930677-2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I refuse to believe that the only way for economic growth is population growth. Thats not sustainable. More investment in replacing the workforce with automation.

<comment><USER20> It's not. People used to believe we couldn't go to the moon. They just didn't see other models, or benefited from old models.

Even more than economic growth is growth in standard of living, quality of life, health, and other things that population growth is now causing to decline, however much it helped before. Plenty of human populations have lived peacefully, stably, and abundantly without economic growth. Plenty have grown to overshoot and collapse.

In Thailand, for example, Mechai Viravaidya helped lead a nation go from 7 children per woman to below replacement level. Think the opposite of the One Child policy -- instead of forced abortions and sterilizations, all voluntary, fun teaching kids about condoms and making them available everywhere. It increased stability, peace, and abundance. Here's his TED talk: [https://www.ted.com/talks/mechai_viravaidya_how_mr_condom_ma...](https://www.ted.com/talks/mechai_viravaidya_how_mr_condom_made_thailand_a_better_place_for_life_and_love) "Thailand's 'Mr. Condom,' Mechai Viravaidya, retells the country's bold plan to raise its standard of living, starting in the 1970s. First step: population control. And that means a lot of frank, funny -- and very effective -- talk about condoms."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "The global population was projected to peak in 2064 at 9·73 billion (8·84–10·9) people and decline to 8·79 billion (6·83–11·8) in 2100."

Baseline of 9.73 billion.

"China was forecasted to become the largest economy by 2035 but in the reference scenario, the USA was forecasted to once again become the largest economy in 2098"

That sounds like they they forecast war?

Also

"meeting the Sustainable Development Goals targets for education and contraceptive met need would result in a global population of 6·29 billion (4·82–8·73) in 2100"

Is the 2.4 billion people missing people a form of genocide or just good heath?

"Funding Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."

<comment><AUTHOR> They explained their methodology on forecasting these populations by factors such as birth rates, migration, and mortality rates. Where did you read the part that mentioned wars?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Gates foundation has a interest in keeping estimates of the population down low.

It's important to help promote global community now, today when it matters.

And given how rich countries progress, extrapolation to poor countries make sense.

But it's not how it will go down, look at attempts 80 year ago what they thought 2020 would be

Not a great example, but it's well under -

[https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study033.pdf](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study033.pdf)

There are massive changes coming, and they won't be in the negative direction.

Longevity will mean increased fertility.

UBI means things other than money will matter, like it or not when jobs start decreasing.

<comment><USER12> > The Gates foundation has a interest in keeping estimates of the population > down low.

The paper says:

 _Role of the funding source The funders had no role in study design, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, or writing of the report. All authors had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication._

> But it's not how it will go down, look at attempts 80 year ago what they > thought 2020 would be

> Not a great example, but it's well under -

> > [https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study033.pdf](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study033.pdf)

They estimated 2025 US population to be between 225M and 392M depending on the projection methodology used. The current population of the US is 328M, so this seems pretty good for an estimate 70 years ago!

> Longevity will mean increased fertility.

This would seem a bold claim. It hasn't anywhere in the world so far, and the correlation between increased longevity and decreased birthrates is _very_ strong.

<comment><USER22> > The funders had no role in study design,

The Funders know how it'll come out.

Studies don't take into account the leaps that will happen because we don't know what they are. Things don't just continue as the previous 80 years. These jumps happened even when we didn't have the internet to super charge stuff.

> 2025 US population to be between 225M and 392M

That's 2050 in the document.

2020 is 210 - 305 million estimate. (pdf p29)

> decreased birthrates is very strong.

But not fertility. You won't be living to 120 without being a healthy and fertile 60 year old. It's fun to have work as number one for 20 years, but if it's easy to have kids in your 40's without IVF things will change.

<comment><USER12> >> 2025 US population to be between 225M and 392M

> That's 2050 in the document.

Yes, you are right, my apologies.

2025 predictions are between 221M and 318M (table, page 16) which makes their "projection B" scenario almost exactly correct.

>2020 is 210 - 305 million estimate. (pdf p29)

Page 29 is a table called "Relative comparison of dependant and productive groups in the United States". There are no population numbers.

Page 25 has a graph which you maybe referring to. That doesn't have numbers, but they seem to be plotting the numbers from page 16.

> But not fertility. You won't be living to 120 without being a healthy and > fertile 60 year old.

What evidence do you have of that? Increased life expectancy for women so far hasn't been matched by an increase in fertility beyond 40 years old.

<comment><USER22> > Increased life expectancy for women so far hasn't been matched by an > increase in fertility beyond 40 years old.

You've said this with some certainty, were are you getting this from? This doesn't fit with all current data about general health and longevity, so I'd like to see who's saying this and what their case is.

<comment><USER12> The ovarian reserve doesn't somehow increase with increased longevity. The chart from Wikipedia is as good as anything on this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovarian_reserve#/media/File:Wa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovarian_reserve#/media/File:WallaceKelseyModel.jpg)

The ovarian reserve only decreases from birth, so it becomes less and less likely for a woman to conceive as they get older.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility) also notes: _A review in 2012 came to the result that therapeutic interventions to halt or reverse the process of reproductive ageing in women is limited, despite recent reports of the potential existence of stem cells which may be used to restore the ovarian reserve_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age) has some further good reading on this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why TV, not Facebook or Twitter, is still revolutionizing the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/revolution_in_a_box?page=full <comment><USER2> Why can't they all be revolutionizing the world? This meme where only one thing can be revolutionary at a time really bugs me. Revolutions happen _all the time_ and they are _all awesome_.

I also dislike that an article like this needs to open with the typical anti- TV comments. Ray Bradbury always struck me as a whiny brat of an old man who refused to embrace technology as being really neat. Whenever somebody quotes him just because he's Ray Bradbury I sigh a little.

<comment><USER3> You're missing the point: television is everywhere. Even if you're generous and you assume continued exponential growth of the internet, it won't have the same global reach for a long time to come.

When most of the world is still at the stage where clean water is revolutionary technology, it's kind of silly to suggest that Twitter is _"changing the world"_ of much more than people who live comfortable lives in first-world countries.

<comment><USER2> Again I'll ask: Since when is a revolution measured by quantity? I mean, Twitter is arguably more _cutting-edge_ than television. So in one sense it's more revolutionary. But television is spreading faster, so that's a revolution that's hitting more people. It doesn't need to be a competition between the two. I for one don't expect to pay television much mind in the coming years, no matter how quickly it's spreading everywhere else.

<comment><USER4> Ok I don't see how Twitter is more cutting edge than television, but even if you don't watch TV, it will undeniably affect you more than Twitter once it's hype dies down, if Twitter even affects you more than TV right now.

<comment><USER2> _Ok I don't see how Twitter is more cutting edge than television_

Let's see. Television is a form of communication in which there are a hundred channels and I am forced to pick one to consume. Twitter is a form of communication in which there are two million channels and I can create my own. That's cutting edge.

 _but even if you don't watch TV, it will undeniably affect you more than Twitter once it's hype dies down, if Twitter even affects you more than TV right now_

I don't understand this. Not like I don't understand your mindset: I don't understand what you're saying. This is incredibly convoluted.

<comment><USER4> Way more people watch tv than use Twitter, facebook, or even all of the Internet. Heck more people use facebook than twitter. If anything, facebook is more cutting edge than tv, but no, it's not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 150 Million new users expected by 2013. Not bad for something invented in the 20's.

<comment><USER6> Does the user adoption chart look like a hockey stick? If not no VC is going to touch this slow-and-steady technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article claims that (a) television prevents war and other bad things by exposing people to role models (e.g. women with few children) and other cultures (e.g. Kobe Bryant in China); (b) as access to TV, particularly digital TV, increases, people will have more choices about what they watch.

I wonder if these two influences will end up working against one another; if Network A, whose soap operas model a multi-cultural community where women control their fertility and control their own businesses, is in competition with Network B, whose soap operas model pious, nationalistic, and dutiful women with eight children each, who will end up having the most influence on the culture?

<comment><USER8> _... soap characters are typically well-educated and have few children. And they prove to be extraordinarily powerful role models: Simply giving a village access to cable TV [...] has the same effect on fertility rates as increasing by five years the length of time girls stay in school._

Oscar Wilde claimed "life follows art". I guess he wasn't thinking of the transformative power it could have over millions of lives, and might have debated whether soaps are "Art".

Who wants to watch soaps about pious mothers-of-8? Our choice of role-models is about who we want to become, and perhaps one of the success factors for TV is that it offers poor people a vision of The American Lifestyle ... something to aspire to (at least from their perspective). On the other hand, I've never figured out why anybody watches Coronation Street, a half-hour banging my head on the wall would be better spent.

A soap character who's beautiful, charming, popular, wealthy, witty, racist, xenophobic, homophibic, antisemitic could be a very dangerous thing indeed. If TV becomes a tool for manipulating culture, it could get nasty in the wrong hands.

<comment><USER9> _Who wants to watch soaps about pious mothers-of-8?_

You obviously don't live in the US! While it's 'reality' rather than soap, two popular cable shows here include (until very recently) 'Jon & Kate plus 8', about a couple who had twins and then unexpectedly ended up with an additional set of sextuplets after a fertility treatment - they have just divorced, but the Kate character is indeed pious; and '18 and counting' about an extremely pious Christian family who rejoice in 18 their 18 children, with #19 on the way. I wish I were kidding, but I'm not.

I'd worry less about soaps-as-propaganda than you, if only because any kind of drama requires at least some ambiguity of characters and a balance of oppositional characters in order to gain emotional participation on the part of viewers. Of course, episodic dramas like police and hospital shows make it easier to exploit stereotypes if programming directors see fit to do that. Another context that has been the subject of some controversy is in Palestine, where TV channels operated by Hamas, a militant group, have been host to children's shows featuring violently anti-Israel content. Israelis have naturally been deeply offended, while some Palestinians argue they were forced to address the issue by the fact of real-world political conflict.

<comment><USER10> People like to watch train wrecks too, but that doesn't mean they want to be in one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a bunch of BS. They did not show any evidence of the supposed benefits of TV. Obviously as poor people get slightly less poor they will get a TV and will also do less of the other things associated with very poor people, like have too much children, etc. But there is no reason to think one thing causes the other.

TV is merely a mass broadcasting machine. It can be good if the people doing the broadcasting use it for positive purposes (e.g., education, etc.) Or it can be evil. You can just as easily use TV to start racial hatred or a war as you can to educate people about different cultures. Or it can be just a mind- numbing waste of time, which is the usual case.

But either way it is almost always used by a small group of elites (either government or business elites) to cram information into a large group of people, without the recipients being able to say anything or contribute anything. So regardless how it is used it usually ends up creating rather boring and homogeneous culture.

As such the Internet is endlessly preferable to TV. It is nice that all those poor people are getting TV but they will be so much better off when they finally get the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER12> You can argue that people who use Facebook and Twitter are more likely to revolutionize the world than the people who are watching TV.

In that case although the number of people watching TV is greater their "weighted productivity" is less.

<comment><USER13> That's a pretty smug attitude to sport without data to back up your claims.

What can be said, with strong data, is that _right now_ the people who produce and create TV shows around the world have more influence and capability to revolutionize global culture than all of silicon valley put together (including our precious Google...) The best chance Facebook and Twitter have to play a role in this game is as a tool to inform and influence key members of this infotainment community.

<comment><USER4> You're comparing TV, the technology, to companies. I think the internet is much more revolutionary than TV. I mean a country like China goes as far as censoring the internet (and it takes much more effort to do this than to control the TV stations) because it knows it is not only revolutionary, but capable of inciting revolutions.

Perhaps TV, when it was first invented, was comparably revolutionary, but in terms of today, the internet is the _big, new_ thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Classic game theory: it's (supposedly) a net benefit for everyone to watch TV, but for any given person it's a net loss.

<comment><USER15> Why is it a net loss? I agree that a lot of programs on prime time are trashy and sensationalistic, but there are a lot of great programs on television as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Think how much money invested in content alone - billions and billions. When a fraction of that amount would be poured into a mobile content - it will be completely different picture. Financial and market news channels for mobile devices is a simplest idea. Time-wasting (passing) reality shows and sports translations are another winners.</comment>


The Power of Ten – Rules for Writing Safety Critical Code - <AUTHOR> http://spinroot.com/p10/ <comment><USER2> Several of these are good rules of thumb for all code in many languages; especially 4, 5, and 10.</comment>


Show HN: Newsit 1.0 – Find Discussions (Chrome and Firefox Extension) - <AUTHOR> https://newsit.benwinding.com/ <comment><USER2> A few days back when I saw the extension, I was glad to see someone made it, but I was concerned with your privacy policy. However the code of the extension at the time was quite simple, after a quick scan, I didn't find anything I need to concern with. There's no third parties (not even Google,) no malicious behaviors, so I didn't bring the privacy issue up.

Now I just found out the extension has updated, and the size of the extension increased to over 1MB comparing to the last version with only a few dozens of KBs... I had a poorly implemented userscript with similar features written by myself, I think I'll just go back to mine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, appreciate the honest feedback.

What specifically are your concerns with the privacy policy? I'm still learning and happy to change any of it.

The initial version used vanilla JavaScript not minified or transpiled. However I wanted to include some libraries; bulma, axios, vuejs. Chrome won't let you load 3rd party scripts into an extension easily.

So, the extension code is bundled using webpack. This unfortunately obfuscates it, but is much easier for development and deployment. Also made it easier to deploy to Firefox too.

The increase in size is due to the 3rd party libraries and images, though some are not required anymore.

The next release should be much smaller, I just wanted to improve the menu styling.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for your reply.

Some lines in your privacy policy:

        > The app does use third party services that may collect information used to identify you.

        > in a case of an error in the app I collect data and information (through third party products) on your phone called Log Data.

        > I want to inform users of this Service that these third parties have access to your Personal Information. The reason is to perform the tasks assigned to them on our behalf. However, they are obligated not to disclose or use the information for any other purpose.

And I'm aware the content is generated, because the "data and information on your phone" doesn't really make sense considering what you are providing is a browser extension, so I didn't think you really mean all of those.

IMO, correct me if I'm wrong, the main logic of finding related discussions is as simple as performing searches, locally. Such service doesn't really need to involve third parties to collect user data. Maybe some libraries are needed to improve usability and user experience, but that's it. I just hope people could create something they themselves would like to use, so if you personally are OK with third parties collecting your data (even that's not essential to the service), then I think it's OK for you to keep your privacy policy the way it is now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I saw it there a few days ago, great idea. Like the visual explanation on the new landing page also. Time to send in to Product Hunt!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Great idea, will try and put it up soon!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey Everyone,

Newsit is a little browser extension I created to help you find the Reddit or Hacker News discussion based on the webpage you're currently on.

The Chrome Extension was posted a few days ago, but now it's ported to Firefox too!

Check it out, and let me know if you have any feedback.

Cheers

<comment><USER4> Nice. I installed the Firefox extension, switched to some open tabs, and it worked. Very useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been waiting this application for a while. Thanks for doing this! Love it :)

</comment><comment><USER6> How does it work? Does it send the URLs I visit to some server of yours?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question, I don't use any custom api servers for this. It queries the hacker news and reddit public api's directly from your browser, no other servers are contacted or information stored.

It uses ajax to check if a post exists on one of these sites. If it does, then it finds the number of comments and link to the post. Have a try and Let me know what you think! Cheers</comment></comment>


Brain.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BrainJS/brain.js <comment><USER2> A 19-part interactive neural network course that uses brain.js was posted to HN last week: [https://scrimba.com/g/gneuralnetworks](https://scrimba.com/g/gneuralnetworks)

<comment><USER3> Even as someone who has only superficial knowledge of the topic, that course was very underwhelming.

<comment><USER4> As someone with absolutely no knowledge of the topic, I found that course to be very digestible and pleasant.

<comment><USER2> Same. It was so accessible (voiceover in an online code editor) that I just did it instead of bookmarking it for a day that never arrives.

<comment><USER5> That is really cool to hear!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The sample app (the color contrast stuff) hurt my feelings a bit. I used to work on an app that needed to do something similar and I ended up fighting with the YIQ formula (it really doesn't work for a lot of cases). Playing with the sample just a bit and I ended up replicating what had taken me weeks to do back in the days...

<comment><USER5> This was good, correct? I'd love to hear what your use case was, like which colors didn't work, etc.

<comment><USER6> Haha, sorry if it was unclear, my tone was in jest.

Yeah, basically what Im trying to say is that this is awesome. It was several years ago so I don't have my old code anymore (different job), but it was in the printing industry, where we wanted to warn customers that their choices of color were...dubious.

However, it's extremely subjective. An example is certain shades of red/orange. The formula might tell you that using white text is a bad idea, but they're really the same to read, and white looks better.

One thing I'd have to play around more than my free time allows, but I had to deal with back then, was backgrounds with multiple color. Where it got really tricky is when the text overlaps multiple colors, you have to decide if you're seeing enough of the text that one foreground color is ok, or if it's too much and you have to say "no". It was incredibly tricky to do, especially with things like antialiasing involved. Training a model with that data probably would give much better results than my tweaked formulas of old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone comment on performance -- speed vs training vs other frameworks. Most of our work is in TF/Pytorch and I have not used any JS implementations would love to hear some peoples insights into how it compares.

<comment><USER8> I just did the maths one.

1 to 10 addition, 2000 iterations took about 5 mins on repl.it

It got the maths wrong so will need more training

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the README:

        brain.js is a library of Neural Networks written in JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER10> Saw this and thought, "Huh, I wonder if harthur is back at it", but nope. Nice to see someone picked it up though!

<comment><USER11> I followed the progress back then and felt very bad for both, that such an awesome library was going down and the bad situation she found herself into. Hope she is doing well! And happy to see brain being reborn.

<comment><AUTHOR> What happened to the author? I'm not aware of the history...

<comment><USER5> What happened was essentially bullies. I think it is apparent now that the library and, more importantly, the idea of a data first neural network architecture in javascript isn't going away.

<comment><USER12> What do you mean by "data-first"? What other forms could a JS NN architecture take?

<comment><USER5> A lot of neural networks start by first constructing the neural network structure, and eventually getting around to running the data through it. Where in brain.js, line 2 in most examples (just after instantiation) is train with data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> JS nails it again even with Neuron Networks. What saddens me in latest years is the direction of library development, where people put more focus on Python instead of Javascript. Javascript is universal, you can reuse your code in both browser, native apps and server. Python ? I don't think so. My dream of "getting the job done" is a universal language, universal ecosystem/libraries. We need universal developers, no need for full-stack developers anymore.

<comment><USER14> I am a full stack developer using python for everything but what's in my HTML pages. And I'd replace that javascript with python as soon as it would be viable. Javascript is fine for what it is, but the idea of it as a universal language is gross.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great. From this source code, I can find well that the speed is optimized even simple for-loop levels in JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER16> y tho? [https://js.tensorflow.org/](https://js.tensorflow.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm aware of tensorflow.js, but what really struck me with brain.js was this snippet from the very beginning of the readme file:

how to approximate the XOR function using brain.js

      const net = new brain.NeuralNetwork(config);

      net.train([{input: [0, 0], output: [0]},
               {input: [0, 1], output: [1]},
               {input: [1, 0], output: [1]},
               {input: [1, 1], output: [0]}]);

      const output = net.run([1, 0]);  // [0.987]

This is how you win over newcomers -- quick, accessible demonstrations of the product/library's capabilities. A sample is worth a thousand words. Tensorflow may have a lot of great, detailed examples, but its documentation fails in this regard.

<comment><USER2> Great point.

This is why I used p2.js for javascript game physics over franken-emscripten Box2d ports.

The readme and source code are extremely accessible ([https://github.com/schteppe/p2.js#sample- code](https://github.com/schteppe/p2.js#sample-code)).

When I was trying to optimize my collision detection, I stepped in to p2.js source to read narrowphase vs broadphase implementations. Last I used Box2d, I was reading c++ pdf documentation.

<comment><USER5> Really cool example!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wikipedia over SMS: Getting Wikipedia to the people who need it most - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/22/getting-wikipedia-to-the-people-who-need-it-most/

<comment><USER2> This is hinting at the on-demand knowledge service to mobile handsets worldwide that Robert Steele proposed in this (very interesting) talk at Amazon: <http://goo.gl/LKlcr>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome! I'd heard about it from a previous HN submission when it was still quite small, but it looks like it is really taking off.

Interestingly, this is actually inspired by "Facebook Zero"[1], which may be the best thing Facebook will do for humanity: inspiring free information access for all.

[1]: [http://qz.com/5180/facebooks-plan-to-find-its-next- billion-u...](http://qz.com/5180/facebooks-plan-to-find-its-next-billion- users-convince-them-the-internet-and-facebook-are-the-same/)

<comment><USER4> Wait. Facebook is inspiring "free information access"? Isn't that what Wikipedia and even Google have been doing for a decade?

I think you're talking about free Internet access, which I think only works if the content provider is paying for it himself. Are these Wikipedia SMS's even free to the user?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Generally won't sms kind of services are limited to 160 chars. by operators? How are large articles etc. going to be handled

<comment><USER6> Concatenated SMS. A thing.

The standard allows 255 segments of 134 bytes, for ~39000 7-bit characters (GSM 7-bit alphabet) or ~17000 UCS-2 code units.

<comment><USER7> fwiw, it's built on Vumi which is Open Source <http://github.com/praekelt/vumi>. Feel free to join us in #vumi on Free for any questions.

<comment><USER7> s/Free/Freenode/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring." - Clay Shirky

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> does anyone have some insight how that would work? the best rate i could find for sending sms in europe is around 0.015€/sms at a large volume - still that would probably be way too expensive for such a project. will Wikipedia Zero have to rely on the cooperation of the mobile carriers for that distribution channel as well?

<comment><USER3> There's more specific information in the main info page[1], but the answer is yes: "In 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation signed Wikipedia Zero partnerships with three mobile operators [...]. In January of 2013, we signed a fourth partnership [...]" (from TFA).

[1]: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm extremely skeptical when I read an article that discusses growth percentages without mentioning a single raw number.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well I was going to concentrate on getting fresh water to them but I guess knowing the history of the Hapsburg dynasty is just as good.

<comment><USER11> Yes I'm sure <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_well> would be of no use at all in that situation.

More seriously – once basic survival needs are met, the next most important thing is education. Life expectancy, living standards, family size and income all correlate highly to education level.

Want to stop HIV/AIDs? You can't do it just by handing out condoms. You need the users to understand why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given more time the market will develop a solution if there is demand for it. Just like mobile phones are actually being bought in developing countries, something not really foreseen 15 years ago. Forcing something like this on telecom providers will result in the a delay in providing internet access to everyone, it will result in government interference with subsidies and cripple the evolution of the internet not only in developing countries but world wide. Patience is the keyword.

<comment><USER13> Woo, a TTL (time to libertarian) of 10 minutes!

This is being done by the carriers themselves, not the government. And by the way, what makes you think the carriers don't understand their own business? Here's a Wikipedia page to review: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader> .</comment></comment>


Now I know how you Unix guys must have felt like... - <AUTHOR> http://iworkintechnology.blogspot.com/2013/11/now-i-know-how-you-unix-command-line.html

<comment><USER2> i still haven't recovered the power which the command-prompt gave me 3 decades ago.

but i've become a very good button-pusher.

-bowerbird

</comment><comment><USER3> And yet, today command line skills are alive and well and will continue to be that way for thr foreseeable future. I don't see tablets as ever replacing a computer. It's like this article suggests: They are great from the consumer stand point but you aren't going to get programmers and server administrators using them to do their daily tasks.</comment>


Doctor: An Open Source Documentation Server - <AUTHOR> https://blog.minio.io/doctor-an-open-source-documentation-server-41d86d756f15#.14m0ykb3e <comment><USER2> Neat! How do you handle versioning? If you want to have docs for release 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 but also "master" \- how would that work in Doctor?

<comment><USER3> From the description it sounds like it just downloads raw markdown files, so I don't think it knows about the versions.</comment></comment>


Hacker known as Guccifer sentenced to 52 months in prison - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/guccifer-hacker-who-revealed-clintons-use-of-a-private-email-address-sentenced-to-52-months/2016/09/01/4f42dc62-6f91-11e6-8365-b19e428a975e_story.html <comment><USER2> > U.S. District Judge James C. Cacheris of Alexandria imposed a 52 month > sentence, saying a tough penalty was needed to deter future hacking.

> "This epidemic must stop," Cacheris said.

Will tough sentencing in US courts really dissuade future Romanian/foreign hackers? I mean the US is _always_ giving out tough sentences for everything, you'd basically factor that in already if were to get caught and they put all that effort into extraditing you to the US. Seems like par for the course.

If it wasn't tough sentencing it would be superfluous charges getting tagged on, so any length is justifiable if you have a motivated prosecutor/judge or a politicized case.

Although I may be reading too much into the judges rationalization.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention that this "tough penalty" is LESS than what some poor schmuck who was caught with 1 gram of LSD, for the first time, would get as a _minimum_ sentence.

<comment><USER4> One gram of LSD is a lot of LSD, since a single dose is about 100 ug. One gram would be around 10,000 doses.

I think the drug war is fucking stupid, but still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Plebs just aren't entitled to "no charges are appropriate in this case".

It's odd how people will contemplate past failed societies and file them as some sort of barbaric "other". But this is what lawful corruption actually looks like, right in front of our faces.

Even _disregarding_ the public service aspect, what exactly did he do that warrants even four months in jail? But when "the law" really just serves as a justifier for the powerful, actions that poke holes in the abstractions of power are punished the harshest.

<comment><USER6> Can you explain that further? Although I see Snowden as a whistleblower who deserves legal protection, I'm not sure that I feel that way about Guccifer. Though he may have exposed misdeeds, this information was not something naturally in his possession as it was with Snowden; he had to force his way in to private networks and accounts to retrieve it. Given also the Russian interest in the upcoming US presidential election and in gaining access to this sensitive data to influence the outcome towards the candidate they prefer, I also see material harm done as a result (unlike Snowden, where the nebulous "because Terrorism" was deployed to explain the damage done).

If you were referring to the fact that only his crime was punished while the crimes of those he exposed were ignored, then I understand your point.

<comment><USER7> Why is there any particular Russian interest in this specific election? And not the previous? (Obama ridiculed Romney for 1980s style thinking for calling Russia our greatest geopolitical foe)

Could it be that you believe the narratives you find in major newspapers?

<comment><USER8> Most reporting on this I've seen suggests that the DNC hack originated in Russia, and that it had the trademarks of a Russian Intelligence action:

[http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/article/2016/jul/31/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/article/2016/jul/31/what-we-know-about-russias-role-dnc-email-leak/)

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/07/russian_hack_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/07/russian_hack_of.html)

Is there any evidence that points to the contrary?

<comment><USER7> I don't know.

I do know that your (well-reasoned) point does not actually address my question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Lazar stored megabytes of victims' stolen private documents and turned them > over to media outlets._

Megabytes? As in just a couple of pictures? That can't be right.

<comment><USER10> 999 megs is a lot of text.

<comment><USER11> *1023

<comment><USER12> Actually 999 MB is correct. Mega is an SI prefix meaning 10^6.

What you described is a binary prefix mebi, which means 2^20.

<comment><USER13> The use of the term "megabyte" to refer to the other measure predates the coining of "mebibytes," which is used by rather few people. And as you can see on that page, at least one standards body still uses "megabytes" for the power-of-two units.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _A maximum punishment "would also help address any false perception that > unauthorized access of a computer is ever justified or rationalized as the > cost of living in a wired society — or even worse, a crime to be > celebrated," Assistant U.S. Attorney Maya D. Song wrote._

Unless you're the FBI.

</comment><comment><USER15> > A maximum punishment "would also help address any false perception that > unauthorized access of a computer is ever justified or rationalized as the > cost of living in a wired society — or even worse, a crime to be > celebrated," Assistant U.S. Attorney Maya D. Song wrote.

If the US judicial system is serious about that statement they should be addressing the blatant violations of the law perpetrated by the NSA and FBI. As long as our own elite groups engage in hacking crimes, "unauthorized access of a computer" will remain "justified" in the minds of hackers.

<comment><USER16> I don't agree with this logic. The government engages in all sorts of activities that are illegal for citizens. Use of lethal force, for instance.

<comment><USER15> The problem is that the US government is engaging in activities that are illegal for the US government. The government is not above the law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really don't understand the comments here. My first response was "only 52 months?"

This guy broke into people's accounts by guessing passwords and then used the identities of his victims to victimize others. How are people rationalizing this as OK?

He's certainly not a white-hat hacker. He didn't publish work for the public interest (Snowden). He didn't responsibly report a security vulnerability, as there was no vulnerability beyond public figures using question-answer authentication.

Think about if your accounts were hacked for the "crime" of being a public figure's relative? Friend? I know you think "public figure" only means politician, but to make this thought exercise more real, remember that Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak, celebrity startup CEOs (the types of people many of you want to someday become), etc. are public figures as well.

Finally, ask yourself if you can honestly say you've never broken a law; never had a moment that affected others negatively; never did anything that the public could judge you for. If you don't pass all those tests, consider whether anyone could pass those tests, and then consider whether Hillary or anyone else should be expected to. (Unlike you, Hillary and many others probably didn't grow up with internet, or email, or the concept of basic things like legal equality for African Americans - will you find it easy to pass the test of public perception for your past actions 20 years from now? 30 years from now? 40?)

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is he being sentenced? Clinton and FBI said she had nothing to hide.

</comment><comment><USER19> 'A maximum punishment "would also help address any false perception that unauthorized access of a computer is ever justified or rationalized as the cost of living in a wired society — or even worse, a crime to be celebrated," Assistant U.S. Attorney Maya D. Song wrote.'

Perhaps someone should pass this on to the NSA?

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm not US citizen but what could be done (by me or other people) to support this guy? To reduce and expose this abuse of power and corruption by the US government so that things would get better? Are there organisations for that?

</comment><comment><USER21> _> U.S. District Judge James C. Cacheris of Alexandria imposed a 52 month sentence, saying a tough penalty was needed to deter future hacking.

"This epidemic must stop," Cacheris said._

Funniest thing I've read all day.

<comment><USER22> >A high school graduate, Lazar had no formal training or computer expertise. He told the New York Times that he obtained access to high-profile people's email and social-media accounts by reading their Wikipedia pages and guessing passwords based on their personal information.

If true, this is even more concerning.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, if you break into my house, I don't care if you've spent years learning how to pick complicated locks without leaving a trace, or whether you just batter the door down with a big hammer.

Although to call this a symptom of a "hacking epidemic" is ludicrous.

<comment><USER23> Dunno. Less like a hammer, more like picking up the spare key taped to the wall with a big sign taped to the door that says "key taped to wall".

<comment><USER24> If there's one thing I have learned in my time on Hacker News, it's that likening software compromises to physical B&E or unlawful entry goes nowhere that's useful to anyone.

<comment><USER25> Then why do security experts do it all the time? My first few security courses in my college computer science curriculum was filled with them, one of them was a book co-authored by Schneier.

<comment><USER24> Because they aren't interacting with an audience composed in significant part of querulous pedants who will promptly proceed to poke every imaginable hole into the metaphor, resulting in a vast and ultimately unproductive digression.

(As a querulous pedant myself, I can hardly condemn such behavior! But I do try not to indulge that habit when doing so offers no benefit to anyone.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems like an inherent conflict of interest when he hacked the head of State Department, and they're the ones that would be dealing with his extradition.

</comment><comment><USER26> So such a long sentence probably means he wasn't cooperating with other investigations, right?

<comment><USER27> Is there any evidence that he'd have any means of cooperating with other investigations? He seems like a garden-variety social engineer, like the person who "hacked" their way to all those celebrity nudes a few years back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is that a hard or soft G?

<comment><USER29> It's meant to be pronounced like the brand "Gucci."

The name is a portmanteau of Gucci and Lucifer, using the Italian cc- pronunciation of Gucci and not the soft-c of Lucifer. The G is hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> While Hillary's crimes get a pass.

<comment><USER25> Love the fact these are getting down-voted, but it's the clear truth. Doesn't matter if you folks want to hear it or not.

<comment><USER31> True but off-topic is still off-topic. You want to talk about it here? Post a story where it's on-topic, and we'll talk about it there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> When asked if he hacked Hillary's email servers he replied "What, like with an axe?"</comment>


Unlimited data is dead, so let's fight a smarter fight - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/20/2718375/unlimited-data-is-dead-so-lets-fight-a-smarter-fight

<comment><USER2> paid opinion-mongers still thrive !! let's attack that !!

</comment><comment><USER3> Thread seems dead but I'll toss our some relevant truth. A carrier in Europe saw the trend of increased data usage 10 years ago and invested in infrastructure to satisfy that usage. Today that carrier has unlimited data. Some US carriers didn't want to see the writing on the wall. Bandwidth technically being a finite resource is a non issue if we never built the infrastructure to keep up with demand.</comment>


Remembering CyanogenMod - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidcentral.com/remembering-cyanogenmod <comment><AUTHOR> Before anyone just shunts this aside as "some random blogger", or says "I've already heard CyanogenMod shut down", let me give you some context: first off, this article is long (this is not the blogspam you might randomly assume: click the link and give it a chance) and is not just telling you the conclusion, but showing you a retrospective on them, talking about how things got to where they eventually did.

Second, the author here is important. I'm struggling to come up with the right analogy for people who might not realize who Russell Holly is, but maybe something akin to Android's John Gruber or John Siracusa. At major Android events, such as the Big Android BBQ, Russell was not just "there", but "central": everyone knew who he was and everyone had extreme respect for his position in the community.</comment>


Show HN: Slack integration to manage Azure DevOps tasks - <AUTHOR> https://www.slado.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> As a team of software developers we are constantly interacting with two things - our Slack chat and our task manager. For us it's Azure DevOps.

After internal usage and some polish - we decided to share it with the community. Main features so far:

\- Creating, updating and managing work items like tasks, bugs and other. Done with /board command

\- Tracking only the builds needed, not having integration spam all over the channel. Done with /pipeline command

\- Discussing tasks, builds and pull requests in slack - with all relevant context, using [show] optional attribute.

Please tell me what are your thoughts and how we can do better.</comment>


Tim Cook to white supremacists: 'You have no place on our platforms' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/3/18124416/tim-cook-apple-infowars-white-supremacy-podcasts-platform-adl <comment><USER2> Hey cool, Silicon Valley is dictating what people can think globally again.

I'm sure this will only apply to actual white supremacists, and won't just be used by outrage-mobs to deplatform people who don't agree with the Silicon Valley left-leaning conforming views.

</comment><comment><USER3> This sounds good--who could object to silencing white supremacists? But recent history suggests that this will morph in very short order into simply suppressing unpopular ideas, science even.

The telephone seems like a better model. Yes, people can do bad things with it, and law enforcement has significant resources for policing it. But we don't just turn off people's phones because we don't like them.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is proof - forensic evidence - that he is a _good_ white man.</comment>


We are looking for Puerto Rico's startups - <AUTHOR> http://hectorramos.com/startups-of-puerto-rico/

<comment><USER2> I'm Puerto Rican and me and my family moved to Las Vegas when i was 16. I'm 35 now and i am trying to start up an online game company, www.LUTOPiA.Co, and i would like to move back to the island with a secure income from my games. I haven't been able to release a game yet and i've been in development for 2 years. Do you know anyone in PR that would like to invest in online games?

<comment><USER3> The Angel/VC world in Puerto Rico for software technology is virtually non- existent (we're in the process of building it!). You are way closer to where the action is! Why not take a trip to SV once you are closer to knowing exactly what you need or reach out to the community through Angel.co or the like? Looking forward to seeing how your startup turns out - feel free to let me know if there is anyway I can help.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will everyone but Docker make money off of Docker? - <AUTHOR> There is a lot going on in the docker landscape and especially around container management, monitoring etc. I seem to see more innovation around docker coming out of companies other than Docker.<p>Will Docker be another JVM where everyone but Sun made money on Java? <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that Docker's current revenue models are a) hosting Docker images and b) orchestrating deployments and providing a dashboard/infrastructure to do so...both of which Google and Mesos are _also_ doing and spending a considerable amount of resources on improving the container model.

It's also worth noting that unlike the JVM kerfuffle, Docker is open source (Apache license) and they won't be able to file multibillion lawsuits against Google over their use of Docker, which in this case may put Docker at a disadvantage.

<comment><USER3> Considering how much Google put into the development of linux's container tech that Docker uses, that'd be an odd lawsuit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As other mentioned before. Docker the core product is open source and free but in order to use Docker in production you need many supporting products/features.

Beyond the support which is an obvious path, they have the paid private hosting, the cloud hosting and more.

If you look at the ecosystem of orchestration and deployment of docker you see that there's still HUGE room for improvement and people WILL pay for a good product in this area.

</comment><comment><USER5> I talked about this a little bit in [https://danielcompton.net/2014/12/02/modular-integrated- dock...](https://danielcompton.net/2014/12/02/modular-integrated-docker- coreos). The incentives for open source infrastructure are difficult (but not impossible) to make a business out of.

</comment><comment><USER6> I highly doubt that. They've already made significant in roads to monetizing the product:

[https://www.docker.com/pricing](https://www.docker.com/pricing)

For a small/startup kind of shop that might not be overly appealing, but there are definitely classes of business who see support as a requirement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, they certainly have...but they don't seem to be moving nearly as fast as RedHat on OpenShift, the Kubernetes project itself and now even HP.

All the established enterprise companies seem to be eating Docker's lunch by signing huge enterprise deals off of a technology Docker invented and SHOULD have first mover advantage.

<comment><USER7> Kubernetes is still the elephant in the room, but Docker Swarm definitely seems to be gaining a lot of traction as well despite being a much younger project.

I certainly wouldn't count them out just yet.

<comment><USER8> In what universe is Swarm gaining traction?! I am honestly curious; I'm deep in the ecosystem and I don't know of a single shop that uses Swarm for anything other than a POC, maybe.

<comment><USER7> Personally, I can only provide the anecdata of noticing many more DevOps jobs postings mention Swarm lately, albeit often in the same breath as Kubernetes. This doesn't mean any of them are running Swarm in production, of course, but it certainly does mean Swarm is beginning to gain mindshare as a potential alternative.

The results of Docker's recent survey also seems to align with my observations [1], but of course we should probably take their findings with a grain of salt.

[1] [https://blog.docker.com/2016/03/swarmweek-docker-swarm- excee...](https://blog.docker.com/2016/03/swarmweek-docker-swarm-exceeds- kubernetes-scale/)

<comment><USER8> That survey compiled results from those who replied to a Docker marketing email. The numbers are, near as makes no difference, pure fiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They managed to make Docker Hub an integral part of a lot of people workflow, and Docker Hub is not free for private repo so I'm sure they'll be alright.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think all the money that is to be made by docker is by hosting private docker images and deploying them. Rancher has beat docker-cloud in its own game.

</comment><comment><USER11> no. Support isn't free.

Also, Sun did make money on Java with certifications and some licensing.

<comment><USER12> Support isn't free but anybody can also sell support.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but if I'm an enterprise support customer - I'd much rather buy support from the people who build the product.

<comment><USER14> But from an enterprise perspective "the product" likely means the GUI (e.g. DC/OS or DUCP), not some daemon buried layers deep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Welcome to OSS, where the only viable financial model is to sell a product so bad people will have to pay you for support or to run it for them. (Example: Automattic with WordPress)</comment>


Alfred App - <AUTHOR> http://www.alfredapp.com/ <comment><USER2> This app's icon and feature set bear an uncanny resemblance to Sherlock

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)>

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure that was exactly what they were trying to do...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not bad at all, but I still find Google Quick Search Box[1] more complete. Navigating the filesystem directly is what I miss the most in Alfred.

EDIT: It also doesn't seem to have a built-in calculator. :(

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/>

<comment><USER5> It's a brand new app with 1 - 1.5 developers; give them a chance ;-)

The design is great. It's a bummer that Quicksilver development has ceased. Google QSB is cool, but it's also nice to see a free/ISV competitor pop up with a genuinely capable product.

<comment><USER4> I didn't mean to be too evil in my comment. I actually like the design and how fast it feels (not that QSB is slow). :)

I'll keep tuned for updates. It does seems promising, although it isn't yet complete enough for me (or for people who tend to use Quicksilver as more than just an application launcher).

EDIT: I just noticed Alfred uses very little memory (12.5MB after launching an app). <http://grab.by/2V19>

<comment><USER6> I remember the days when the entire BeOS operating system could run in 4 megs of ram. An application launcher running in 12.5 megs will never count as 'very little memory' to me.

<comment><USER4> I used to use dmenu in Linux, which used just a few kilobytes of memory, wasn't running all the time in the background and was fast...

My point was how little memory Alfred uses when compared the Quicksilver or Google QSB (the latter currently taking up 39MB at the moment).

[I just noticed this reply was an example of this: <http://xkcd.com/386/>]

<comment><USER6> I didn't say you were wrong. I said that 12.5 megs will never count as 'very little memory' to me.

It is a matter of perspective, not correctness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bit of a tangent: awful usability on the screenshots on the homepage. It's really hard to get to the middle two since mousing over the outer pictures cause them to inflate over the top.

I currently use LaunchBar on the Mac (excellent) and Launchy on the PC (good but not brilliant). LaunchBar fits my needs perfectly so I can't see any reason to move away from it (kind of like how I wouldn't buy any other MP3 player apart from an iPod).

<comment><USER8> I'm in the same position with Butler; I'm not sure what Alfred offers over LaunchBar or Butler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been using this as a Quicksilver replacement for a few days now. I love its simplicity, and how it always seems to stay up-to-date with every app I have installed, whereas Quicksilver would only scan every few minutes for new applications.

</comment><comment><USER10> I mainly use spotlight, .. other than web searches are there any other main differences.

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks like something I could finally move to from Quicksilver. I love quicksilver, but to be honest, it's simply too complex for me to feel good about. That, and the fact that it's mostly dead have me itching to switch to something.

Wondering why this isn't open source thought. The FAQ doesn't really say, but it does indicate they don't plan on selling it at any point.

<comment><USER12> I bought a new Macbook with Snow Leopard on it for the family and decided Spotlight was usable enough. My kids didn't agree, and begged me to install Quicksilver. It's easy to use, totally functional, and has even been updated to work on Snow Leopard. How is it "mostly dead"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It appears to be using the spotlight index. I wish it would also allow opening directories. I often have common filenames in each project directory (i.e. website1/index.html, website2/index.html). Would be nice to say "open website1" and have Finder pop up.

Also Large Type, which I think is really useful to people who need to project something quickly and without record. :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Visually, it's quite appealing, and it feels snappier than Quicksilver or Google QSB. I think its grammar is more limited than Quicksilver's though. I prefer the "direct object, verb, indirect object" structure that Quicksilver uses over Alfred's "verb, object".

</comment><comment><USER6> having type open and then the name of files/directories is pretty much a non starter for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just installed, great so far. I love the shortcuts to the results beside the first one

</comment><comment><USER15> Launchy is a similar app for Windows and Linux. It's not super great for finding and opening files, but it's a great timesaver for opening websites and applications, especially if you use your keyboard more than your muse (as I presume most hackers do).

<http://www.launchy.net/>

<comment><USER16> Interesting thing is that the latest version of Launchy works on OSX as well.</comment></comment>


Twitter Got Hacked, Is Mastodon Immune? - <AUTHOR> https://mikestone.me/twitter-got-hacked-is-mastodon-immune <comment><USER2> I'd argue that Mastodon is less immune, at least if their vision of true distributed comes to fruition.

In Twitter's case, it came down to some pretty poor opsec and could have been avoided. Ultimately you're going to have at most N points of failure. With security keys, the number of points of failure in Twitter could have been reduced to one (and that one user could be proactively educated).

In Mastodon, every user is potentially in control of their instance. Every user is a potential point of failure. Users routinely fall victim to social engineering each day, possibly someone is this very second.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're making an argument for why Mastodon is more immune here and not less. Since there are many different servers administered in different ways by many different users, you have to infiltrate each server on case by case basis. This is orders of magnitude more effort than compromising a single administrator and getting access to the entire network.

<comment><USER3> I think the point is that good security takes effort and that is something that economies of scale help with. When each instance is run by a single administrator, it is much harder for anyone to have high quality security,

<comment><AUTHOR> Counterpoint is that a distributed system doesn't have a central point of failure, so the effort to subvert the entire network is significantly more involved. So, as everything it's trade offs, but a distributed system will be more robust overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Even though federation is big thing, saturation of users in single instance and poor moderation are problems.

So,if users are very huge in single instance(mastodon main instance is the example) and the moderation is not likeable,there will be problems.

Also federation like this is new to people.

Will it work out? Currently, not likely.

Also,it can't be claimed immune. Bugs might be present.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, Mastodon is a federation with millions of users on it, and it's been working for many years now. So, it's very clear that it's already worked out.

<comment><USER5> I think that the point being made was that there's nothing in Mastodon to counteract the natural tendency of people to concentrate in a relatively small number of individual online spaces.

A quick eyeball of the English-language instances listed on instances.social, sorted by # of users, would suggest that this is true. There are a couple very large general-purpose instances, but after that it's largely much smaller topical communities.

My hypothesis would be that, if one tracked these numbers over time, it would turn out that the larger ones aren't just bigger, they also grow at a faster rate. So, if Mastodon were to grow to the scale of one of the major social networks, we'd also find that the users were mostly all clumped into a single instance that's roughly the size (and level of nastiness) of one of the major social networks.

At which point, from a social impact perspective, the fact that Mastodon is, from a technical standpoint, open and federated, would be beside the point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Clearly there are already multiple large instances in existence, so the situation is already fundamentally better than Twitter where there is only a single instance.

Furthermore, I think that small instances are just as important as the big ones. If a small group of people has a shared interest and they want to run an instance in a specific way that's possible to do with Mastodon.

There are tons of small Mastodon communities for all kinds of niche interests right now, and their users can make up their own rules for how they interact, what they allow, and so on. This is an incredibly important aspect of the federated model. There isn't one set of rules that applies to everybody the way there is with a centralized platform.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I guess it's like email. Sure, it's not great that in practice there's only a small number of providers and that it's _really_ hard/scary to run your own, but it's still lightyears better than it being a single company's proprietary messaging system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Worth noting that running a Mastodon instance is vastly easier than setting up your own mail server. Digital Ocean even has it provisioned nowadays, so if you wanted to set one up for yourself and friends for example, it's mostly point and click.

<comment><USER6> It currently is, but I can imagine that changing if it were to be as widespread as email, and anti-spam measures are going to take the instance toots are coming from into account.

<comment><AUTHOR> On the other hand, there might not be a similar incentive to create spam in the first place. I guess we'll see how that develops going forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mastodon is immune because it doesn't have any influential users.

<comment><USER8> Security by obscurity:D

<comment><USER9> More like deterrence by "poverty" \- if you don't have anything remotely valuable to them to exploit you don't need any security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a mostly trivial article with a terrible clickbaity title. "Hacked"? "Immune"? No, and no.

Could a Mastodon server be compromised? Of course. Would it affect all of Mastodon? Of course not, because it's distributed. Duh.

<comment> im3w1l-alt If mastodon had a security hole they could all be owned at the same time. Fediverse servers on different software would be unaffected unless the hole is in a library used by both.

<comment><USER10> The Twitter account takeover was an inside job.

To be fair, the article is just part of a challenge to write 100 blog posts in 100 days. Nothing wrong with writing whatever you want, although the title of the post is still terrible. The question is, why did anyone think this article was worth submitting to HN?

<comment> im3w1l-alt Yes I'm aware. An inside job against mastodon would be harder. A few people may be able to deliberately insert malicious code but that goes for any open source project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My website didn't get hacked either. Of course it only gets a few dozen hits a day from a sophisticated audience so it is not really a target.

Mastodon at the moment is basically a cozy little community. If a bunch of celebrities joined you can be sure they would all be on a professionally managed server - a tempting single-point of attack in the same way that the Twitter admin console was.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mastodon has millions of users now, and it's a part of a bigger fediverse community. Let's not belittle open source alternatives to commercial social media. The point that the article makes is that while obviously nothing can be immune, the same kind of hack would not be possible because Mastodon is decentralized. If you trick a single Twitter employee into giving you credentials, then you can get access to the entire Twitter network as recently happened. However, with Mastodon you'd have to convince the maintainer of each individual instance to give you access which is a much trickier proposition. Distributed nature of the network removes single points of failure.

<comment><USER12> But what could happen is that your instance get destroyed.

I can trust Twitter to have backups. I know almost nothing about the community-served Mastodon instance on which I created an account, and I'm kinda locked there.

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on the instance. Larger instances do have backups, and they have operational funding. There is also a history of these instances operating for years without issues. Mastodon also makes it very easy to extract your data. Finally, you can always run your own instance if you wanted to and have full control over it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Obviously Mastodon has it's own internal tools, but those tools on > mastodon.social have absolutely no effect on Fosstodon, and vise versa.

Mastodon has "post as user" in its internal tools? Why?

<comment> 0-O-0 AFAIK Twitter's internal tools allowed to reset emails and circumvent 2FA, not post as users.

<comment><USER13> Do Mastodon's internal tools allow administrators to circumvent 2FA?

<comment><USER14> Not directly. You can do it with access to the instance's Postgres database, but I'd expect relatively few instance admins (as opposed to instance _owners_ ) to have that; the admin tools don't include a database console, and you can't use a credential for the admin tools to authenticate to the database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just for interest's sake I looked at joining a Mastodon instance. There was an application form to fill out which expected comprehensive answers to four questions about myself, my motivation for joining and my interests. I found it surprising but maybe it works for them.

<comment><USER16> The thing about federation is that every instance can have their own criteria for joining. I haven't seen one that requires an application like that, but it doesn't surprise me. But surely if you just want to spin the wheels there are instances that are easier to join.

<comment><USER15> Yes thank you. I might do that, that one was the most interesting sounding one see the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would think it would depend on specific instances, the age of the server in use and any bugs that may exist, or the motivations and access to administrative tools.

It could be easier and harder to target celebrity accounts, but would again depend on the specific hosts.

</comment><comment><USER18> The attacker gained access to the admin interface, I'm pretty sure this is also possible with Mastodon. Just you have to gain access to the right server. If someone attacks server A and the actual target is on server B, they are out of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> The difference is that you can't compromise the whole federation by compromising a single server the way you can with Twitter.

<comment><USER18> That was kinda my point. Mastadon has sadly other issues which let me stick with Twitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use both, and I find that I generally prefer Mastodon nowadays. I find it's strictly better, and a lot snappier as well. Meanwhile, the community is now large enough that there's no lack of interesting content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Security through obscurity, not a valid security plan. Regarding things like hacking into prominent accounts, DDOS/DOS attacks obscurity means it isn't worth the effort, like the author points out.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article isn't talking about security through obscurity at all. What it says is that Mastodon doesn't have a single point of failure like Twitter because it's a distributed network. With Twitter you can hack the entire network by compromising a single employee into giving you their credentials. With Mastodon you'd have to exploit each individual instance independently. This is orders of magnitude more effort.

<comment><USER20> This is what suggests that: "For the time being, Mastodon remains a small enough presence in the social media sphere that this kind of attack hasn't been worth the time."

<comment><USER19> Yes, this is what I was referencing from the author.

Git is decentralized version control. I would bet a site like Github protects itself from mass attacks because of its popularity. It has nothing to do with decentralized software.

If a specific Mastodon node becomes super popular then it should have a plan to protect itself from these types of attacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's "immune" to the extent that it is impossible to have a coherent identity across instances.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is akin to saying you can't have a coherent identity across instances for email. It's a nonsensical statement because the whole point of having a federation is that you have identity on one instance and you can interact with people from other instances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Unless you've been hiding under a rock the last week or so

What's the purpose of starting a blog post like that? The phrase is a cliché, and not a polite one. Whatever follows that introduction is either something the reader already knows and has fresh in memory (thus useless to mention) or you're calling them oblivious.

A sentence that's irrelevant or mocking the reader seems like a poor way to start an essay.

Most of us would do well to "hide under a rock" for a while. News and the way they are presented to us are stressful and largely irrelevant. Chances are you could live the rest of your life without knowing Twitter was hacked.

<comment><USER23> I suppose that if you start with an obvious fact without any disclaimer of that then it gives the impression that everything else will be obvious too, and so the article isn't worth reading. They could perhaps have phrased it a bit differently e.g. "you're no doubt aware that ...". Personally, I wasn't offended.

It reminds of something a little different but on a similar theme: the advice to never say "clearly, ..." in lectures, because it serves no purpose except to intimidate people that don't already know what follows. Actually, it does serve a purpose: so that people who _do_ find it trivially obvious aren't thrown off wondering if there's something deeper there than they had realised.

<comment><USER24> This. Those phrases are useful for distinguishing between "I'm giving new information" vs "I'm starting from what I expect to be common knowledge".

And yes, it's possible to abuse such phrases but that doesn't mean they don't have their place.

<comment><USER22> The comment wasn't on _those types of phrases_ , but on _that phrase in particular_. There are better (more positive, don't lose significance) ways to convey that information: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897649)

<comment><USER25> Honestly, your comments so far were the most negative thing I saw in all this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Except Twitter didn't get hacked.

<comment><USER27> Semantics, no? Someone gained unauthorized access.

<comment><USER26> In most cases, I do consider gaining authorized access via social engineering to be a hack. I guess this probably qualifies, but just barely. If it turns out it was just a rogue engineer then it doesn't qualify at all. It's not clear that external "hackers" gained ongoing access. If someone leveraged an insecure remote worker's PC to gain access, that counts as hacking too. I'll wait and see if we find out what the root cause was.

<comment><USER28> The hack is exploiting weak internal security controls that twitter has. Reset of email for so many high profile users requiring only one person to click a button is weak design. No Review / no approval etc .

Also the amount of time for them to identify it, they had blocked tweeting the address and blocked all verified users from posting before they could find the rogue account indicates logging and analysis of their admin tool actions is also not robust.

Exploiting these two vulnerabilities whether by blackmail, bribe or RAT should not make a difference to consider it a hack</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Creating learning paths for something you want to learn - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone,
We have a website and an extension called "Jooseph" which is basically for saving and discovering articles, videos and more in a personal online directory. You can build your own library or discover other users collections.
For instance, you can follow a collection for learning "PHP for beginners" or create your own "Best of sales for startups" list.
Now, we're starting to create collections for our users. If you want to learn a subject on and couldn't find a time to search for, we can create a personal collection for you.
You can sign-up and we'll send you to form for requesting personal collection.
Here's the link for Jooseph: https://jooseph.com <comment><USER2> What's the tech stack for the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> We used golang, vuejs, MySQL for database and AWS for cloud an

<comment><USER2> Cool, the site looks good. It looks like you have copied the Coursera logo though, why?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep there are couple of differences but people mention that a lot ahah. So, we changed at extension and soon we'll change it in the site too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Uninhabited Pacific island is covered in 38M pieces of plastic trash - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/05/17/no-one-lives-on-this-remote-pacific-island-but-its-covered-in-38-million-pieces-of-plastic-trash.html <comment><USER2> Original article, [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/20...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/2017/05/16/no-one-lives-on-this-remote-pacific-island-but-its- covered-in-38-million-pieces-of-our-trash)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I noticed after submitting that star article is signed "By AMY B WANG The Washington Post". That is, the star posted the contributor.</comment></comment>


Technology is run by the wrong people - <AUTHOR> https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/07/18/technology-is-run-by-the-wrong-people/

<comment><USER2> I've read criticisms of silicone-valley culture before, but this one takes it much further. I think there are some very valid points in this, but I also think it's wishful thinking to hope that folks in charge will eventually become purely driven by fixing broad problems in society and not getting rich quick, or status, or being in charge, or what have you. The struggle between 2nd and 3rd "estate" (i think that was the term) people was interesting, conceptually.

I've always wanted to do a serious study of leadership in a given industry and quantify something like this. Like quantify actual individual leaders and do analysis and things.

<comment><USER3> I'd wager most "leaders" as you rise in a company are less and less about making any useful decisions and more and more about just giving a figurehead to help the underlings monkeybrains organize themselves.

One of the things I hate (hate _hate_ ) about my current company is the amount of ego-stroking and special-snowflake-celebration the founders/execs get.

The problem with this essay (good as it is) is that it neglects the fact that the only way the 2nd/3rd estates will ever succeed in purging the 1st is by refusing to work with them. Unfortunately, they can dangle some _very_ shiny things in front of engineers to convince them to defect.

<comment><USER4> If technology is going to outgrow the existing manchild oligarchy, it has to leave Silicon Valley. It's impossible (for a critical mass of people, if not necessarily the individual) to be anything but The Man's bitch in a place where starter apartments top $3,500 per month and houses cost over $1 million.

Silicon Valley's a joke at this point. So where will the technologist's positive-sum impulse reconstitute itself? I have no fucking idea. It could be in Seattle, it could be in the Upper Midwest, and it could be in another part of the world. And who will fund the new way of doing things, one which will be more profitable (in the long term) and much more socially responsible, but less controllable by the people holding the pursestrings? Again, I honestly don't know.

<comment><USER5> If Seattle implements rent control, it will be the mother of all property investment opportunities as it turns into SF 2.0 over the next decade. Long- term renters will dance in the streets alongside property owners and everyone else will be priced out forever.

[http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Rent-control-proposed- for...](http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Rent-control-proposed-for-Seattles- affordable-housing-crisis-317743161.html)

Even Paul Krugman thinks rent control is bollocks. Of course, people only listen to economists when they agree with them, but I digress.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a- rent-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent- affair.html)

Sorry for hijacking the topic a bit, but I don't think it will be Seattle. And it's already too late for it to be Boston. I'd love for it to be Portland, but Portland's politics make that impractical. You need a hard to copy magical mix of social liberalism mixed with a healthy subpopulation of corporate whoredom to recreate Silicon Valley IMO.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ruby, Scala, and Complexity - <AUTHOR> http://weblogs.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2011/03/02/ruby-scala-and-complexity The other "bootstrap yourself with Scala" links:
http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8610
http://www.tikalk.com/java/blog/simpler-parts-scala
and i think the Pragmatic, Venkat Subramaniam, mid-09 text is still a good intro, modulo the 2.8 stuff:
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Scala-Multi-Core-Complexity-Programmers/dp/193435631X/ <comment><AUTHOR> The other "bootstrap yourself with Scala" links:

<http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8610>

<http://www.tikalk.com/java/blog/simpler-parts-scala>

and i think the Pragmatic, Venkat Subramaniam, mid-09 text is still a good intro, modulo the 2.8 stuff:

[http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Scala-Multi-Core- Complexit...](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Scala-Multi-Core-Complexity- Programmers/dp/193435631X/)</comment>


Does this "humanlike" robot receptionist make you feel welcome or creeped out? - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/584727/does-this-humanlike-robot-receptionist-make-you-feel-welcome-or-creeped-out/ <comment><USER2> Can't quite remember where I saw that, but I remember a comparable robot who was meant to wear opaque sunglasses. The idea was that since these robots aren't quite capable of looking at things and faces as a human would, they look like blind people, so we may just make them wear dark glasses.

I thought this was a neat idea. That would certainly make them look less uncanny, anyway.

<comment><USER3> It also helps hide their glowing red eye.</comment></comment>


Beyond Frontal Faces: Improving Person Recognition Using Multiple Cues - <AUTHOR> https://research.facebook.com/publications/1388608378133800/beyond-frontal-faces-improving-person-recognition-using-multiple-cues/ <comment><USER2> This year's CVPR has a lot of great papers. In case anybody hasn't seen, a full list's available at [http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/cvpr2015papers/](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/cvpr2015papers/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone tell me why facial recognition is a good thing? Seems like an awful lot of effort to ensure you're correctly tagged in a photo.</comment>