After Multiple Denials, CIA Admits to Snooping on Noam Chomsky - <AUTHOR> http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/08/13/after_multiple_denials_cia_admits_to_snooping_on_noam_chomsky <comment><USER2> After killing that annoying overlay in the web inspector, I got to read a terrible, shallow article.

As a layman reader, the assumptions made by the author and Athan Theoharis seem pretty big, unless they have something else to back it up.

The arguments seem to go like this:

1\. CIA denies having a file on Chomsky

2\. Someone find a memo that _mentions_ Chomsky

3\. Assumption 1: Therefore the CIA had a file on him

4\. Assumption 2: Since the CIA had a file at some point, the denial is a lie, but we'll also take it as truth and conclude that they destroyed the file

5\. Assumption 3: Destroying CIA files clearly falls under the Federal Records Act.

I mean, at least give me a little more reason to believe those conclusions. Historically or by policy does it really follow that mentioning Chomsky means he has a file? I find it hard to believe that, like Wikipedia, just mentioning someone (in the 70's at least) creates their file. Have CIA files already been determined to have "historical value", is there a case? Otherwise I just have to trust this guys opinion.

<comment><USER3> As a lay reader who has worked in Government, this isn't about assumptions, it's about how bureaucracies work.

Theoharis is interviewed because he is a lifelong expert on FBI-CIA cooperation. Presumably this is worth _something_. His argument is that if a letter goes from CIA to FBI or vice versa regarding "NOAM CHOMSKY" then this means that at minimum there is a file labelled "NOAM CHOMSKY" containing this memo at both the CIA and the FBI. Therefore when the CIA said nothing was found under FOIA requests for a file on Noam Chomsky either (a) this was a lie or (b) the file was illegally destroyed.

Based on my own experience working in government offices, this is a pretty sound argument. If a letter is sent from X to Y about Z, then there has to be a file on Z to put the letter into (both at the sender's and receiver's ends). If the file doesn't exist, it will be created just to hold that letter.

<comment><USER2> Even if what you claim is true, it still backs my point that some more explanation is needed on why those conclusions can be drawn.

Regarding the argument itself, was the memo really "regarding" Noam Chomsky? It reads to me like it's about some other people traveling to Vietnam, and the "with the endorsement of Noam Chomsky and Cora Weiss" is the only mention of him. Is it your claim that the mere mentioning of a person by name in a CIA memo means that there's a file on that person? Is there a copy of that memo in the files of all 8 people mentioned by name? If so, this expert should say that because it's relevant and interesting.

<comment><USER3> This is "large bureaucracy 101" and shouldn't need explaining:

1) The letter means the files existed. 2) The government said the files didn't exist. 3) The government lied (illegal) OR destroyed the files (illegal).

QED.

<comment><USER2> (1) is the part that I don't just assume is always true.

The "there's are names in a memo" => "there's a file on every person named" logic is something that, if true, would be nice to back up just a little, at least state why that's true for the CIA beyond saying it's true of all bureaucracies. (And I too have I've worked in large bureaucracies, including the government/military and with classified material)

Your argument seems to be that since the CIA is a large bureaucracy, that they have this hypertext-like system of filing copies of all documents in every file associated with terms in the document. I don't doubt that they _now_ have a system like this - they'd be silly not to. But in the 70's? That's, like I said, interesting and relevant if true. And it'd be nice to at least have the expert say "Yes, this is how the CIA managed documents in the 70's based on (CIA statements | my investigations | interviews | etc)."

I'm not saying that the CIA didn't have a file on Chomsky, it would surprise me if they didn't, but that jump from mention to file deserves a little more treatment.

<comment><USER3> My experience of bureaucracies dates back to the mid 80s when nothing much was (in Australia) computerized. I'm not talking about a "hypertext-like system of filing" but a physical room full of hanging folders with unique numbers and index cards. (You've seen images of the -- newly added! -- file compactuses* at the Department of Veterans' Affairs -- like that.)

* Not a typo: compactus is a specific piece of furniture.

If a letter primarily concerning X gets sent, a copy of it is retained in the file on X, and the receiver puts the item in another file on X. If necessary, multiple copies are retained and placed in multiple files (e.g. the letter also concerns Y so photocopy it and insert it in files on Y).

Each page in a file is numbered (this is called a "folio number") and the file's folder is amended to show the new inserts and increased folio count. It's hard in such a system to lose a page and very hard to erase evidence of its prior existence.

Typically, multiple index cards (e.g. "Chomsky, Noam -- file 12345") will get created for each file, and inventory will be taken of all files, folios, and index cards on a regular basis. Destroying a file or folio creates visible gaps and broken references, so it's actually a pretty robust system. Yes indeed, this is how this crap worked before computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think everyone interested in American politics needs to read some of Chomsky's work. I don't agree with everything he says. It is important to hear and consider all sides of every argument. In general terms, yes, I believe we've made a mess out of foreign relations for a long time. Not sure I'd go as far as calling us terrorists. I can absolutely see how big brother would want to keep him and other under watch.

EDII: My problem with such figures is that universities put them up on pedestals and don't necessarily go out of their way to present contrasting viewpoints on the same stage, at the same time and to the same audience. The young and the impressionable swallow this stuff up without much thought and observation because they are led to idolize such figures. This results in intransigence and extreme positions without thought later in life. In other words, they are handing people fish rather than teaching them to fish.

<comment><USER5> I don't see how America isn't a terrorist state at this point - they are murdering people in cold blood in Pakistan without trial because Obama/NSA/CIA/etc. say it's a good thing. This is the definition of a terrorist in my book - thinking you operate outside the law and taking actions into your own hands like some mad vigilante, as opposed to working with the Pakistani government to resolve issues you have by handing over evidence.

<comment><USER6> There is no Pakistani government control over those regions. Osama was hiding under their nose for how long?

<comment><USER7> > There is no Pakistani government control over those regions. Osama was > hiding under their nose for how long?

I find it somewhat implausible that at least some people in the Pakistani power structure (intelligence or military) were unaware of his presence. He'd been at the mansion for about 5 years and was located under a mile from the Pakistani military academy in a town lousy with retired military officers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The CIA gave up snooping on him because they couldn't understand a damned thing he said... his works are also the reason Watson learned to cry.

But seriously, it's no surprise that titling books like "Hegemony or Survival" (I recommend the audiobook, great commute-musing material) and talking about the US being on borrowed time if it keeps acting like 18th century England, will get you examined a little closer by the spooks.

<comment><USER9> > _The CIA gave up snooping on him because they couldn 't understand a damned > thing he said..._

Hmm, the joke reflects poorly on your reading comprehension skills, since Chomsky's writing is as dry as they come, and very simplistic and analytic. It's the classic analytic american style, no more complicated than reading the newspaper.

If you have issues with Chomsky what would you say if you tried to read, say, Steven Pinker, Hofstadter, or, god forbid, french theorists...

<comment><USER10> I believe the jibe was more to say that the CIA is dumb rather than Chomsky being unintelligible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That has to be the most invasive modal I've ever seen.

Here's the text of the article:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

For years, the Central Intelligence Agency denied it had a secret file on MIT professor and famed dissident Noam Chomsky. But a new government disclosure obtained by The Cable reveals for the first time that the agency did in fact gather records on the anti-war iconoclast during his heyday in the 1970s.

The disclosure also reveals that Chomsky's entire CIA file was scrubbed from Langley's archives, raising questions as to when the file was destroyed and under what authority.

The breakthrough in the search for Chomsky's CIA file comes in the form of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For years, FOIA requests to the CIA garnered the same denial: "We did not locate any records responsive to your request." The denials were never entirely credible, given Chomsky's brazen anti-war activism in the 60s and 70s -- and the CIA's well-documented track record of domestic espionage in the Vietnam era. But the CIA kept denying, and many took the agency at its word.

Now, a public records request by FOIA attorney Kel McClanahan reveals a memo between the CIA and the FBI that confirms the existence of a CIA file on Chomsky.

Dated June 8, 1970, the memo discusses Chomsky's anti-war activities and asks the FBI for more information about an upcoming trip by anti-war activists to North Vietnam. The memo's author, a CIA official, says the trip has the "ENDORSEMENT OF NOAM CHOMSKY" and requests "ANY INFORMATION" about the people associated with the trip.

After receiving the document, The Cable sent it to Athan Theoharis, a professor emeritus at Marquette University and an expert on FBI-CIA cooperation and information-gathering.

"The June 1970 CIA communication confirms that the CIA created a file on Chomsky," said Theoharis. "That file, at a minimum, contained a copy of their communication to the FBI and the report on Chomsky that the FBI prepared in response to this request."

The evidence also substantiates the fact that Chomsky's file was tampered with, says Theoharis. "The CIA's response to the FOIA requests that it has no file on Chomsky confirms that its Chomsky file was destroyed at an unknown time," he said.

It's worth noting that the destruction of records is a legally treacherous activity. Under the Federal Records Act of 1950, all federal agencies are required to obtain advance approval from the national Archives for any proposed record disposition plans. The Archives is tasked with preserving records with "historical value."

"Clearly, the CIA's file, or files, on Chomsky fall within these provisions," said Theoharis.

It's unclear if the agency complied with protocols in the deletion of Chomsky's file. The CIA declined to comment for this story.

What does Chomsky think? When The Cable presented him with evidence of his CIA file, the famous linguist responded with his trademark cynicism.

"Some day it will be realized that systems of power typically try to extend their power in any way they can think of," he said. When asked if he was more disturbed by intelligence overreach today (given the latest NSA leaks) or intelligence overreach in the 70s, he dismissed the question as an apples-to- oranges comparison.

"What was frightening in the '60s into early '70s was not so much spying as the domestic terror operations, COINTELPRO," he said, referring to the FBI's program to discredit and infiltrate domestic political organizations. "And also the lack of interest when they were exposed."

Regardless,, the destruction of Chomsky's CIA file raises an even more disturbing question: Who else's file has evaporated from Langley's archives? What other chapters of CIA history will go untold?

"It is important to learn when the CIA decided to destroy the Chomsky file and why they decided that it should be destroyed,'" said Theoharis. "Undeniably, Chomsky's was not the sole CIA file destroyed. How many other files were destroyed?"

<comment><USER12> Would it be more ethical to not read the article, warn others of the modal and refuse the site further traffic instead of copy-pasting copyrighted fruit of someone's labour?

<comment><USER9> Only if freeing information is less ethical than respecting copyright.

Considering this site is called "Hacker News" I doubt how many feel similarly, though it does have a huge business bend too.

<comment><USER13> > _Only if freeing information is less ethical than respecting copyright_

More reductionist arguments and false dichotomies.

This is not work funded by the public. It was created through the time and effort an author put into creating the work, presumably as his livelihood. He choose the channel of distribution, as is his right. To circumvent the chosen distribution model and circulate the work for free is not an ethical imperative. And it doesn't simply boil down to "copyright vs. free information, choose your side, go!"

That said, after putting their content (which by its nature is extremely easy to reproduce and redistribute) behind a very annoying modal, they should probably expect this sort of thing. Maybe that factored it in, and decided it was still worth it.

<comment><USER9> > _To circumvent the chosen distribution model and circulate the work for free > is not an ethical imperative._

Not an ethical imperative for you, because, as you justify it, somebody put effort into creating this and it's his livelihood.

But that's not a justification in itself. Earning your livelihood from something does not automatically translate that it's not an ethical imperative some someone else to stomp on your business.

Notions of legality aside, it depends on how people value the way you're making your livelihood, and if they consider the counter action more ethical.

To give an extreme example, very few would say: "Hey, why did you closed this guy's meth dealing business, he made his livelihood that way" (even if said business was legal).

So, it boils down to if someone believes spreading information is more important than the creator of the information making his livelihood off of it.

Here's another example of this: is it more ethical to disclose the ingredients of a drug so that millions in Africa can have it made cheaply and be treated, or to respect the copyright of the company that created it and sells it for a huge amount?

<comment><USER13> > _it depends on how people value the way you 're making your livelihood_

So if someone doesn't value how you make your livelihood, he's free to stomp on you?

You do realize, writing/music/film/art and other such forms of information do not spontaneously spring into existence? This article didn't just fall into the author's lap.

Here is an alternative: you go and do all the legwork that the author did, arrange the interviews, spend days or weeks writing the piece, and then release it for free to the world. That's a perfectly viable option.

But you don't work for free, do you? No, you prefer to let other people do the work, and then you shit on them from behind your computer screen.

 _" Here's another example of this: is it more ethical to disclose the ingredients of a drug so that millions in Africa can have it made cheaply and be treated"_

That's definitely not an example of "this", it's an example of something that's very different in a lot of ways.

Again, do you think clinically-tested drug formulas just fall out of the sky? On average, it costs between $500M - $2B to develop a new drug. Whether you choose to ignore this or not, these are huge costs that companies need to recoup in order to stay in business and _develop new drugs_. If the formulas were given away, the companies would have to eat the costs of development and this would not be sustainable.

That doesn't mean we should be happy with the way things are. Our medical system is a mess. We should look for new ways to reduce the costs of drug development. Perhaps we should restrict drug developers from charging exorbitant amounts far in excess of the development costs. But, in my opinion, subverting the people who put in the effort to create is not the answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> After the second hurdle between me and the article, I gave up.

<comment><USER15> Another benefit of blocking scripts by default.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scriptsafe/oiigbmn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scriptsafe/oiigbmnaadbkfbmpbfijlflahbdbdgdf)

[http://noscript.net/](http://noscript.net/)

Shame that they're necessary, but they work well if you can handle the inconvenience of selectively unblocking scripts.

<comment><USER16> Did you try: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/script- blocker/edk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/script- blocker/edkpojcedjaijmpkagegbjikonnceidm)

How do you compare them?

<comment><USER15> I have not tried it, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Use Readability to easily bypass these popups.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/readability/](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/readability/)

<comment><USER18> Thank you for mentioning that. It gave me the idea of trying Safari's Reader button, which also circumvented the modal div.

<comment><USER19> Safari even uses Readability's codebase for that feature. [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/08/safari_reader_based_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/08/safari_reader_based_on_open_source_project/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here is a link to the actual CIA document that was released:

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/159950486/CIA-FBI-Referred- Doc](http://www.scribd.com/doc/159950486/CIA-FBI-Referred-Doc)

</comment><comment><USER21> > For years, FOIA requests to the CIA garnered the same denial: "We did not > locate any records responsive to your request."

...because we thought life would be easier for us if we didn't even try.

<comment><USER22> _Jim: What 's an official reply?

Bernard: Well it just says the Minister has asked me to thank you for your letter and we say something like, the matter is under consideration, or even if we feel so inclined, under active consideration.

Jim: What's the difference?

Bernard: Well under consideration means we've lost the file, under active consideration means we're trying to find it._

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Press ESC after the page loads, but before the ad/banner loads, that will stop the ad from loading and you can read the article.

</comment><comment><USER24> Even though there are ways to get around the popups on this article it would still be a lot easier to just post a link to another site without an obtrusive modal window.

</comment><comment><USER25> "CIA fails to understand a damn thing professor talks about"

<comment><USER26> "CIA wishes he'd just stick to math."

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> $('#TB_window, #TB_overlay').hide()

</comment><comment><USER28> You can run this to get rid of the annoying overlay:

       $('#TB_window,#TB_overlay').remove()

</comment><comment><USER29> If you have firebug installed, setting display:none on the modal divs works a treat.

</comment><comment><USER30> I highly recommend the readability plugin ([http://www.readability.com/addons](http://www.readability.com/addons)) for dealing with these terrible overlays.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow just wow. Why do you even submit an article from a site like that?

They clearly don't want people to read it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Just hit "escape" when the page loads. This is "hacker news", right?

</comment><comment><USER33> If I were the CIA, I'd snoop on Noam Chomsky. The guy has never had a pleasant word ever to say about the US Govt. And if he were more of a man of action, than man of letters, I'd suspect him of actual subversive acts.

</comment><comment><USER34> set TB_overlay and TB_window to display: none

</comment><comment><USER35> Chomsky is one of the most important persons in this day in age when it comes to political thought. He's the only one that seems to think.

</comment><comment><USER35> cache for no signup: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?output=search&s...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?output=search&sclient=psy- ab&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fthecable.foreignpolicy.com%2Fposts%2F2013%2F08%2F13%2Fafter_multiple_denials_cia_admits_to_snooping_on_noam_chomsky&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fthecable.foreignpolicy.com%2Fposts%2F2013%2F08%2F13%2Fafter_multiple_denials_cia_admits_to_snooping_on_noam_chomsky&gs_l=hp.3..0l4.326.1387.0.15126.96.36.199.0.0.0.161.656.1j4.5.0....2...1c.1.24.psy- ab..2.5.637.bhdgQ-Z-oZU&pbx=1)</comment>


Meet Clippy – A minimalistic clipboard manager built using Python and Tkinter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/prashantgupta24/clipboard-manager <comment><USER2> Why did you have to call it Clippy?!?

Of all things you could have called it....</comment>


What is SPDY? - <AUTHOR> http://openprobe.blogspot.in/2012/05/spdy-lets-make-web-faster.html

<comment><USER2> rshetty: posting links to your own blog - which you do often - gets old.</comment>


Chicago cops use social media to track grieving families of gunshot victims - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/chicago-cops-use-social-media-to-track-grieving-families-of-gunshot-victims-e68e5a6dc40c <comment><USER2> Worth noting that the issue isn't just/necessarily about the use of OSINT. But the fact that government agencies often misclassify data gathered in a public dragnet, with no accountability to how that data impacts public citizens "social scores". We see this in China, of course, but this is also the case in the U.S.

From Chicago's Office of Inspector General:

[https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/4/11/18355005/unverified-o...](https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/4/11/18355005/unverified- outdated-police-gang-database-lists-134-000-names-watchdog-says)

> The Chicago Police Department's "gang database" isn't so much an effective > crime-fighting tool as it is a disorganized hodgepodge of outdated and often > unverified information, according to a blistering report released Thursday > by the Office of the Inspector General.

> In fact, according to the OIG, the "database" label is something of a > misnomer as the CPD has collected and stored gang data in more than a dozen > places in just the last decade.

> "OIG found that CPD has captured, reported, and visualized gang-related data > in at least 18 different forms, records, and systems of records in the past > 10 years, although CPD was not able to definitively account for all such > information in its possession and control," the 160-page audit reads.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Some documents indicate the OSINT officers take what appears to be a broad > and overly-permissive attitude when collecting logs, sometimes scooping up > content from individuals who may have no clear relationship to the violence > at all.

This is _public_ information, and very useful to figure out who to interview after a shooting to learn more about the crime and victim. Saving more data instead of less, just in case, seems sensible, and not overly-permissive at all.

<comment><USER2> > Saving more data instead of less, just in case, seems sensible, and not > overly-permissive at all.

Sloppy cache-invalidation of data has led to huge problems for public life, even when it comes to actual criminal records and arrest records [0]. You have no issue with someone's non-criminal social data being gathered under broad search terms, stored for an indefinite amount of time, and associated with your identity without your knowledge by a law enforcement agency?

[0] [https://bangordailynews.com/2011/12/16/news/nation/when- your...](https://bangordailynews.com/2011/12/16/news/nation/when-your- criminal-past-isnt-yours-background-check-errors-have-devastating- consequences/)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/haunted...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/haunted- by-the-past-a-criminal-record-shouldnt-ruin-a-career/388138/)

<comment><USER3> Sure I have issues - but these are murder investigations. Keeping track of who might be associated with the victim is the _bare minimum_ of investigating.

Giving this data to others as part of a background check is a whole different matter. That involves the police making an official statement about you. Of course that should ideally involve a lot more due diligence to make sure the information is correct, and limits on what they can share.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Interest in a new open source, fast, in-memory, data analysis system? - <AUTHOR>

Over the past few months I have been experimenting with building a fast, distributed, in-memory, append-only database designed for analytics.  The idea being that many No-SQL databases are pretty terrible at ad-hoc querying, and while ordinary relational databases provide good support for ad-hoc queries, their performance leaves a lot to be desired for large data sets.  Basically an open source Vertica / KDB.
The system will accept data over HTTP (as JSON / CSV) and can be queried in either SQL, or an SQL like language, with full support for joins, sub-queries and aggregations, with output as CSV or JSON over HTTP.
The idea being that you can fire of a JSON request to your analytics database whenever something happens (be it a signup, purchase, click, etc) and have that data captured, ready for use in your dashboards or for ad-hoc querying.  The system will also be able to integrate with R for statistical fanciness.
If such a system existed, would you use it?
I will probably continue working on it regardless of any feedback (because its fun!), but I'll spend more time on it if its something people feel they might use.
If you would like to develop it too (using a combination of C for data manipulation and go-lang for everythign else), send me an email. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I understand how your design overcomes the issues of either type of database. You'll have unstructured data like a NoSQL database by virtue of your insertion mechanism, and there is no mention of how you plan to optimize for record size the orders of magnitude that would be required to keep all data in memory. As a thought exercise, say my average record takes up 1Kb. After only a few million records, with zero overhead for the database structures themselves (not to mention unrelated processes also runnin on the system) you've already exceeded the amount of memory typically used to run these types of processes.

</comment><comment><USER3> You didn't include an email.

I've been having success with Go for backend work, and easy C integration in this kind of database like this would be useful for what I do. I'm not sure if R integration should be a priority though, since most R users I know are ambivalent about it (whatever, small sample size), and because Julia development continues to improve.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. My email is terence (at) siganakis [dot] com if you would like to chat.

The R integration stuff is more for the data science crowd. I feel it would be useful to have a streamlined way of writing a query to return a subset of a large database and then be able to manipulate it in R as if it were a data frame / matrix. I am interested in seeing how Julia plays out too.</comment></comment>


3 Ways to Fix Your Startup's Cash Crunch - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/3-ways-to-fix-your-startups-cash-crunch-a1ffdd8a1b26#.9kap2cf3d <comment><USER2> Reminds me of a tweet I saw yesterday:

 _The one true American contrarian strategy is to live beneath your means and sock money away every single month._

[https://twitter.com/ppearlman/status/775844635981803520](https://twitter.com/ppearlman/status/775844635981803520)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure that applies to startups in growth mode, but as a general savings principal - I like it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Love the metaphor of firing your worst customer.</comment>


Perfectionists Despair: Digital World "Always in Beta" - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.bnet.com/intercom/?p=1020&tag=nl.e713

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to always remember this; _Put speed over perfection: "Get something out there. Do it, even if it isn't perfect."_

</comment><comment><USER2> This is not a problem contained to the digital world. Anyone care to ask a follower of Charles Darwin which organism are perfect and have no use for further upgrading?</comment>


Would you mind taking a look at my Project and sharing your feedback? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gmbhnews.net/ <comment><USER2> If you made your title: "Ask HN: Review ..." <http://searchyc.com/Ask+HN%3A+Review> it would show on <http://news.ycombinator.com/ask></comment>


Ask HN: Who do you use to sell your ad space? - <AUTHOR>

I'm considering buysellads.com but would like some other recommendations (as 25% seems expensive). I don't need an agent, as I have interested advertisers, I just want a hosted SaaS solution that can supply the code and handle the merchant processing, CPC/I and inventory etc. <comment><USER2> @dawson I can't speak to isocket, as I've never used or talked to anyone who has used the software. What i can offer you about BSA are a few things:

\- You're not locked in to fixed 30-day rate pricing; publishers at BSA can also sell ads on a CPM basis.

\- I'm not sure what type of site you have, but if you look around our directory (<http://buysellads.com/buy>) you will see many sites that have sold a ton of ads.

\- It's true; we charge a 25% commission (includes payment fees, BTW). As such, we're incentivized to actually sell ads for you.

\- For many people, the commission comes down to either a) selling ads commission free and keeping 100% (minus payment fees), or b) selling more ads, and likely making more money, with someone whose goals are aligned with yours… it's one of those 100% of a pie that's worth $100 or 75% of a pie that's worth $200 scenarios.

\- If you were looking for a commission free ad-selling tool, I'd recommend using something free like OIO Publisher.

\- There are dozens of publishers at BSA who would likely sell plenty of ads directly to advertisers without us; however, with BSA in the mix managing their sales they sell a ton more.

There's also a bunch of non-biased reviews of what BSA has done for other publishers here: <http://www.google.com/search?q=buysellads>

(Disclosure: I founded BSA and my blood, sweat, and tears are in the BSA software… so I might be a little biased)

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't had a great experience with your service or support so far. I registered two days ago and logged in, came back a few hours later and couldn't login anymore. On contacting your support (which took over 3 hours to respond), I was told no such account existed and was asked to register again. I did, and received an email this time saying it was a success and all was fine. I added my website and waited for approval, two days later and this afternoon I'm still waiting for approval, I emailed you saying can you approve it and suddenly it's now disappeared from my dashboard completely, not waiting for approval nor is it approved! I emailed support just over an hour ago and am now waiting for this to be resolved.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was my fault and not BSAs, I didn't enter the URL correctly on submission, apologies.

<comment><USER2> no worries, glad we could help get this sorted out for you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Going to give <https://www.isocket.com/> a try.

<comment><USER3> It's tough for many publishers to find the right ad solution because their traffic, audience, and level of involvement in the business differ.

I work at isocket and want to point out that BuySellAds is great for some people. If you're looking to sell month-long tenancy campaigns on a subscription (pay-until-they-cancel) basis, BSA is the best tool for the job. And for that service, they'll assess a 25% commission on all the ad revenue you generate.

If you're looking more flexibility in your ad packages - CPM, daily/weekly/monthly campaigns, grids, takeovers and a flat fee pricing, you might want to look at isocket. See <http://www.isocket.com/group/techcrunch> for an example. We're about to release a "free-until-your-first-sale" program so there's essentially no risk in trying us out.

If you've got more questions, feel free to reach out to me at firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER4> Amazing how recommending one of your competitors (even for only certain use cases) makes my impression of your brand that much higher. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The percentage a network takes is irrelevant. What really matters is your total net revenue. Fill rate and eCPM are the biggest weaknesses of most networks/agencies.

<comment><USER2> +1 for you, 100% correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You should try Adclays (<http://www.adclays.com>). It helps publishers sell their ad space directly to advertisers. You can choose between monthly ad spaces or per CPM. You can also add backfill code so you still earn if your ad space is not sold. We take 15% of the sale.

Contact me and i can work out a better deal for you.

Disclaimer: I own Adclays.

<comment><USER4> Some constructive criticism:

Without logging in, there is hardly any information (beyond marketing language).

The latest blog post appears to have been November 18, 2010. Just below the title there's the default "Your Awesome Tagline" as a subtitle.

The FAQ only says, "A complete support page is been put together based on popular questions."

In short, these are some big red flags for any business interested in your product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Buysellads.com looks great as a self service option. However does anyone have a recommendation for a company that will actively try and seek out advertisers for you?

<comment><USER2> BuySellAds does actively seek out advertisers for you - ping me with your site info at email@example.com if you would like me to take a look and give you an idea of what we can do for you.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the reply Todd. We aren't serving ads quite yet (no ads served during beta) but I will be in touch when the site goes live!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you already have advertisers then you should look at using a solution such as OpenX or OIOPubisher etc.</comment>


Processing Style Graphics with Python - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/pyprocessing/

<comment><USER2> There is also NodeBox <http://nodebox.net>

<comment><USER3> NodeBox also has the tremendously useful "clip to path" which Processing does not.</comment></comment>


Malaysia Airlines flight crashes in Ukraine - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10974050/Malaysian-plane-crashes-on-Ukraine-Russia-border-live.html

<comment><USER2> Supposedly shot down by a Buk missile system

<comment><USER3> I don't know, something seems fishy here. The official is claiming that separatists shot down the plane from 30,000 feet? Do the separatists own the technology to do that? What do they have to gain from shooting down a passenger plane?

<comment><USER4> > The official is claiming that separatists shot down the plane from 30,000 > feet? Do the separatists own the technology to do that?

Well, "own" is a legal question, but they are reported to at least _posess_ such equipment -- specifically, they claim to have captured Buk missiles [0], which could easily engage at this range.

> What do they have to gain from shooting down a passenger plane?

Making civilian traffic air traffic through (and thus, both to and from) Ukraine unsafe would increase economic pressure on the regime to reach a satisfactory accommodation with the separatists. Alternatively, the separatists could have mistaken the flight for a military one, and they have shot down military flights recently (also at altitudes that MANPAD systems wouldn't reach) [1].

Of course, "separatists" aren't the only people who may be shooting down planes in Ukrainian territory these days. [2]

[0] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/17/malaysia- airlin...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/17/malaysia-airlines- plane-crashes-ukraine-live) "But the Donetsk People's Republic said in June its forces had captured Buk missiles from a Ukrainian military base, Itar-Tass news agency reported. The Buk missile has a range of 18,000 metres, according to some accounts."

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/world/europe/ukrainian- mil...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/world/europe/ukrainian-military- plane-is-shot-down-as-russia-adds-to-presence-at-border.html?_r=0)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/europe/ukraine- says-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/europe/ukraine-says-russian- plane-shot-down-its-fighter-jet.html)</comment></comment></comment>


New Image Shows Antarctica's Melting Iceberg Broken Into Pieces - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/nasa-antarctica-melting-iceberg-pieces-766862 <comment><USER2> So what's going on with the edges? They don't match. Are the fragments stacking because of the upflow?

[https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/under-the-midnight- sun](https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/under-the-midnight-sun)

<comment><USER3> I'm not positive but wouldn't the edges be most likely to melt and lose their "matching" features given the rapidness with which the ice itself is melting?

<comment><USER2> Maybe. But looking more closely, I'm pretty sure that fragments have shifted, rotated, and stacked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm looking forward to the future value of my oceanfront property in Pittsburgh.

<comment><USER5> Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

<comment><USER6> I for one thought it was worthy of a chuckle...</comment></comment></comment>


BBC Twitter Accounts Hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21879230

<comment><USER2> "The attacks began in the early afternoon on Thursday. At the same time, BBC staff were alerted to a phishing email that had been sent to some BBC email accounts. It is not yet clear if the two are related.

The email contained a link that if clicked on could expose password details."

So, social engineering is still alive and well.</comment>


Bill Gates: Only Government R&D Can Save the Climate, Private Sector Is Inept - <AUTHOR> http://usuncut.com/climate/bill-gates-only-socialism-can-save-us-from-climate-change/ <comment><AUTHOR> I editorialized the title because, even if I like the original one a lot, it is mostly a clickbait and does not reflect what Bill Gates technically said.

(The change is "Socialism" → "Government R&D".)

<comment><USER2> That's a good title change—the HN guidelines explicitly ask you to edit linkbait out of originals, and if you replace it with something neutral, as you did, it isn't editorializing.

However, the article is a copy of an Atlantic piece, which was posted here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10382383](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10382383)</comment></comment>


NASA's Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/09/plutonium-238-problem/all/

<comment><USER2> > NASA's Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration

> By 2005, according a Department of Energy report (.pdf), the U.S. government > owned 87 pounds, of which roughly two-thirds was designated for national > security projects, likely to power deep-sea espionage hardware...

how about the U.S. government does less deep-sea espionage-- in the name of deep-space science?

<comment><USER3> Heck, there's Google ([https://www.google.com/maps/views/streetview/oceans?gl=us&hl...](https://www.google.com/maps/views/streetview/oceans?gl=us&hl=en- us)), Virgin Oceanic ([http://www.virginoceanic.com/](http://www.virginoceanic.com/)), etc. exploring down there. Nothing wrong with a little deep sea action- even the military contribute.

It's much cheaper to explore the ocean than it is to explore space, and many benefits like: OTEC ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversion) [http://cleantechnica.com/2013/05/05/lockheed-martin-to- build...](http://cleantechnica.com/2013/05/05/lockheed-martin-to-build-worlds- first-ocean-thermal-power-plant-off-china-coast/)), mining ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining)), etc.

Others agree:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/01/31/why-dont-we- spe...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/01/31/why-dont-we-spend-more- on-exploring-the-oceans-rather-than-on-space-exploration/)

[http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/09/opinion/etzioni-space- oceans/i...](http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/09/opinion/etzioni-space- oceans/index.html)

But, I personally think we should be exploring space and our oceans. We need to make it a top priority of all countries to fund energy and propulsion research to help make exploration cheaper. That means allocating adequate budget and raising taxes for something that the mass media and our government doesn't seem to give much of a shit about, because they don't understand the part of the world we currently are utilizing is running out of resources quickly and that we are constantly a stone's throw from mass extinction.

<comment><USER4> You don't need Pu238 for deep sea _exploration_.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't rule that out. Why wouldn't it make a great undersea battery?

Also, if we found Apollo 13 we could recover some Pu238:

[http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/28/1637231/will- nasa...](http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/28/1637231/will-nasa-ever- recover-apollo-13s-plutonium-from-the-ocean)

[http://unexplainedthings.tumblr.com/post/13563685365/will- na...](http://unexplainedthings.tumblr.com/post/13563685365/will-nasa-ever- recover-apollo-13s-plutonium-from-the)

<comment><USER4> It would, but you don't _need_ it because you don't _need_ years or decades of power at high depths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Directly related ("U.S. Starts Making Plutonium"): [http://news.discovery.com/space/nasa-plutonium-production- sp...](http://news.discovery.com/space/nasa-plutonium-production-space- fuel-130314.htm)

<comment><USER6> I was going to supply that link as well. We have been working on a restart for a while. Basically the Wired article is just silly.

<comment><USER7> It's easy to read between the lines: The NASA guys think it's likely there will be problems, and that Congress will fail to act quickly when more money is needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> $10 million vs $20 million a year? It probably cost congress more to argue about this than the cut has saved.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thorium reactors produce PU-238 as a "free" byproduct. One more reason we should be pursuing LFTR reactor research.

<comment><USER10> Erm, sort of. It doesn't actually help that much.

As a short, but helpful, side discussion consider the breeding of Pu-239 in a reactor for use in nuclear weapons. Pu-239 works great in a nuclear bomb but other isotopes of Plutonium cause problems, specifically the high spontaneous fission rate of Pu-240 can create so many background neutrons that having a significant amount of it in a bomb can vastly increase the "pre-detonation" (fizzle) risk, which causes the bomb to have very low yield (on the same scale as the chemical explosives in the bomb). As Plutonium remains in a reactor subject to neutron flux it will naturally breed other isotopes, which is why there is a difference between weapons grade and reactor grade Plutonium. Reactor grade Plutonium can contain any variation of isotopes, essentially all of them are suitable for use in a reactor, but weapons grade Plutonium can only have a very small amount of Pu-240. And for this reason the way that weapons grade Plutonium is made is by removing fuel rods from a reactor on very short time scales and reprocessing it to remove the Plutonium then forming it back into new fuel rods and so forth. This is a very costly and complex endeavor which is why you can't just use ordinary power reactors for generating weapons grade Plutonium.

Interestingly, Pu-238 also exists in reactor grade Plutonium in substantial amounts (1% or more of the Plutonium, so nearly an entire tonne per year worldwide). However, because it's mixed up with all of the other Plutonium it would require extremely costly isotopic separation.

So, how is this relevant to Thorium reactors? Well, let's go back and look at what actually happens when Pu-238 is produced in a Thorium reactor. You start with Th-232, and under neutron flux you'll breed U-233, which is the reactor's main fission fuel. If U-233 is hit by a neutron and absorbs it instead of fissioning then you can end up with U-234, U-235, U-236, Np-237 (through a decay), and Pu-238 (through another decay). However, it's not as though things don't stop there. Pu-238 will breed into Pu-239, Pu-240, and so on, just as in a conventional Uranium power reactor.

So here you have the same problem as producing weapons grade Plutonium, you have a process that you need to stop before it goes too far, and in order to do that you need to pull the Plutonium out of the reactor at regular, short intervals. Otherwise you'll just get a buildup of ordinary reactor grade Plutonium. However, the problem is worse here because instead of being the product of just one neutron reaction (natural U-238 becoming Pu-239) the breeding of RTG grade Plutonium is the product of a long chain of reactions (taking 6 steps between the isotopes in the reactor fuel at the start and the production of Pu-238). This means the amount of production and the time scales of production are very much not helpful from the perspective of pure Pu-238 production, especially if you want to also operate a power reactor cost- effectively at the same time.

(Edit: also, there's an additional problem, because Thorium reactor fuel contains U-232, which has a short half-life and has decay products that are prodigious gamma ray sources, making reprocessing and handling even more difficult than ordinary reactor fuel. You can handle Plutonium in a glove box, but with used Thorium fuel containing U-232 you'd need to handle it via robotic manipulators in a heavily shielded area distant from humans, except that gamma radiation kills electronics like nobody's business, which is a bit of a catch-22. This is one of the key technical hurdles of Thorium reactor designs in general.)

In short, the fact that Thorium reactors produce Pu-238 isn't helpful, because existing reactors do too, but in either case it's hard to get at.

<comment><USER11> Contamination with plutonium-240 was a big problem during the Manhattan Project. They'd done the preliminary calculations based on cyclotron-produced plutonium-239, which was pure enough that a gun design with a long tube was feasible. ("Thin Man")

The plutonium-239 that came out of the Hanford reactor had a much higher contamination rate. This required a much faster assembly of the critical mass in order to avoid a fizzle. The gun design would have to be so long that it couldn't fit on a plane. Whereas implosion could provide the required rapid assembly in a limited space. Thus, "Thin Man" was out, and "Fat Man" was in. Implosion was no longer a secondary option -- it was the only option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> According to Wikipedia [0] it isn't all sorrows. There are other fuels available in large quantities at a low price, like Strontium-90 used in many Russian radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Other fuels like Americium-241 are also showing big promise, and are available commercially in large quantities. Americium-241 also has a much longer half-life, and can hypothetically power a device for centuries.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Fuels)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's actually really interesting what a relatively tiny amount of Pu-238 is needed to power deep space missions for decades, 36lb (16.3kg) of Pu-238 amounts to a sphere with a radius of 5.82cm according to wolfram alpha.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Every so often an atom of neptunium-237 absorbs a neutron emitted by the > core's decaying uranium, later shedding an electron to become plutonium-238.

Doesn't it shed a proton to become plutonium 238 and, as a consequence, loses an electron?

<comment><USER14> Proper description of what's going on:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_decay](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_decay)

<comment><USER13> Thank you very much, I was under the impression that the electron was lost from the orbital cloud, not the nucleus!

Edit: Looking back at my math it was an off-by-one error in the wrong direction. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> France has the resources to make Pu-238, though I am not sure if they currently have the facilities/equipment. If the situation really is politically impossible in the US and Russia keeps on flaking out, we could always try buying more from the French again and let them deal with the politics.

If we are shitcanning missions because we don't have Pu-238, then why doesn't NASA just take the money they _would_ have spent on those programs and spend it on more Pu-238 instead? Surely that should buy us enough Pu-238 for at least remaining uncancelled missions.

<comment><USER16> > If we are shitcanning missions because we don't have Pu-238, then why > doesn't NASA just take the money they would have spent on those programs and > spend it on more Pu-238 instead? Surely that should buy us enough Pu-238 for > at least remaining uncancelled missions.

Requires an act of congress. Need I say more?

<comment><USER17> To elaborate on maaku's answer, as the article points out, "the Atomic Energy Act forbids NASA to manufacture plutonium-238."

<comment><USER15> The idea is for NASA to _buy_ Pu-238, not make it. I am not sure how much Congress micromanages their budget though, it may very well be the case that money meant for probes cannot be redirected to buy Pu-238.

<comment><USER17> Buy it from ... whom? As the article points out, Russia "reneged on a deal to sell 22 pounds to the U.S." and might not have any left for sale.

There are no other producers of 238Pu. (And for that matter, Russia stopped producing it years ago.)

Edit: Here's a link for you. [http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/636900main_Howe_Presentation.pdf](http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/636900main_Howe_Presentation.pdf) .

> In the past, the United States had an adequate supply of 238Pu, which was > produced in facilities that existed to support the U.S. nuclear weapons > program. The problem is that no 238Pu has been produced in the United States > since the Department of Energy (DOE) shut down those facilities in the late > 1980s. Since then, the U.S. space program has had to rely on the inventory > of 238Pu that existed at that time, supplemented by the purchase of 238Pu > from Russia. However, Russian facilities to produce 238Pu were also shut > down many years ago, and the DOE will soon take delivery of its last > shipment of 238Pu from Russia. The committee does not believe that there is > any additional 238Pu (or any operational 238Pu production facilities) > available anywhere in the world.

Full details are in "Radioisotope Power Systems: An Imperative for Maintaining U.S. Leadership in Space Exploration", National Research Council committee report. ISBN: 0-309-13858-2, 74 pages, (2009)

<comment><USER11> > _Buy it from ... whom? As the article points out, Russia "reneged on a deal > to sell 22 pounds to the U.S." and might not have any left for sale._

Now, that's interesting.

The Chinese are planning to land an RTG-powered spacecraft on the moon in December 2013. That's just 3 months away. Evidently they managed to get hold of some Pu-238 to power their spacecraft with.

Either they manufactured the isotope themselves, or they outbid us for the 22 pounds that Russia was planning to sell.

<comment><USER17> Interesting indeed!

There's talk about it at [http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=a4sdshu...](http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=a4sdshu2jb19cmbhm4qj3uggq7&topic=26848.0;all) . The best they found is this quote:

> "The nuclear power system will make China the third country apart from the > United States and Russia to be able to apply nuclear technology to space > exploration," Ouyang said.

Various newspaper article use that quote to say it was domestic production.

Parsed carefully, that doesn't say that they created the RTG, only that they applied it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Political ignorance and shortsighted squabbling, along with false promises > from Russia, and penny-wise management of NASA's ever-thinning budget still > stand in the way of a robust plutonium-238 production system.

Biased much?

</comment><comment><USER19> Probably a non-issue, because more Plutonium-238 can be easily created using existing infrastructure. As demand of this stuff goes up and supplies dwindle, someone is gonna make more of it sooner or later.

<comment><USER16> There are legal constraints on Pu-238. Market forces do not apply, unfortunately...

<comment><USER20> Maybe they can use a box full of old pinball parts.

<comment><USER11> > _Maybe they can use a box full of old pinball parts._

That would be Pu-239, not Pu-238. Remember, the Libyans wanted him to build a bomb -- not a spaceship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Actually DOE has started a production program using $10mil appropriated through NASA, [http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1303/20pu238/#.UjuOO6x3O4B](http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1303/20pu238/#.UjuOO6x3O4B)

The original plan was to fund $10mil through NASA and $10mil through DOE for a total of $20mil per year, but DOE lost their half of the funding due to Solyndra-related politics.

<comment><USER17> You sound like you didn't read the linked-to article, which details all of that except for the Solyndra politics.

<comment><USER22> There's no ambiguity here. He didn't.</comment></comment></comment>


How to install LibreOffice 5.3 from snap on Ubuntu 16.04 (and others) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.simos.info/how-to-install-libreoffice-5-3-on-ubuntu-16-04-from-snap/ <comment><USER2> Snap looks like the way forward by bring some of the isolation from things like Android to desktop, but at the same time the way it handles app distribution makes it tempting to use instead of docker especially if your machine is a single purpose machine (runs 1 application only).

Can anyone comment on using snap vs something like flatpak and docker for deploy your own applications to servers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the docker question in askubuntu.com: [https://askubuntu.com/questions/808524/whats-the-main- differ...](https://askubuntu.com/questions/808524/whats-the-main-difference- between-docker-and-snap)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wish there was a better divide between "system" and "other" software in Linux distributions.

The BSDs, for example, keep all of the system stuff in /usr, /etc, /bin, etc, and any extra stuff you install from ports or packages ends up in /usr/local.

It looks like Snaps are a way of accomplishing much the same thing (and more) in the Linux world.

<comment><USER4> > The BSDs, for example, keep all of the system stuff in /usr, /etc, /bin, > etc, and any extra stuff you install from ports or packages ends up in > /usr/local.

Which is awful, because it means stuff you install from ports ends up in the same place as hand-compiled programs and there's no way to tell them apart. A distinction between "system" and "ports" is maybe sort of useful I guess (though I'm not sure exactly what I'm supposed to be gaining from it), but the distinction between automatically-managed-at-all and not is far far more important.

<comment><USER3> The problem I have with Linux distributions in general is that applications are too infrequently updated. Of course, you can add extra repos to get these updated applications but then you end up with a horrible mix of base-system stuff plus 3rd-party stuff.

BSD sidesteps this problem, but introduces the one you mention.

It sounds like snaps will potentially solve both problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's the benefit to me as a user to installing it via snap, instead of via the traditional methods of apt-get/the Ubuntu software app?

<comment><USER6> Generally the snap will be much more up to date.

Installing from the Ubuntu Archive with apt-get means you get the version that was released with that version of the OS, say Ubuntu 16.10, sometimes with minor updates. With Snaps you get the version that the software developer pushes to you which could be their latest stable software released just yesterday (there is a concept of Snap channels that open up things like beta/candidate/daily builds e.t.c. but that is another topic).

Snaps can also update themselves, allow dependency bundling, are confined in sandboxes e.t.c. but for a user, it means you get very fresh software on your device. You can read more about them at [https://snapcraft.io/](https://snapcraft.io/)

<comment><USER7> This is a solved problem with ppa's.

<comment><USER8> Not if the ppa depends on a system library not available on your release. Then you need to go hunting for more ppas, until you eventually need to up/downgrade your entire system.

<comment><USER7> Yes, you're right, the originator of the package actually has to release PPAs that work on your release.

That's a perfectly manageable issue.

But don't claim snap's are the only solution to the problem of getting up-to- date software. That's not at all true. We've been solving this problem for far longer than Ubuntu has been around, and their approach is hardly a panacea. For example, it can and will result in additional memory and on-disk bloat as a consequence of duplicated dependencies across packages until de-duplication is implemented.

<comment><USER8> You only get a single duplicate of the library no matter how many things depend on it. That is the whole point of snaps over just statically linking.

Well, that and the sandbox features, so that they can't interfere with the rest of the system.

<comment><USER7> _You only get a single duplicate of the library no matter how many things depend on it._

Huh?

If a snap includes version 1.0.0 of libxyz, and another does the same, you have two copies. If a third snap comes along and uses version 1.0.0 libxyz, you now have three.

Snaps do not automatically de-duplicate today.

That means two copies of the library living on disk and in memory at run-time.

<comment><USER6> That would be the same with any platform that does not use some kind of explicit linking/sharing of resources. Snaps have a sharing mechanism called interfaces but yes, the software author has to declare they want to use it, no magic there.

<comment><USER7> _Snaps have a sharing mechanism called interfaces but yes, the software author has to declare they want to use it, no magic there._

So, they've reinvented dependencies (though, to their credit, they gave them a different name), one of the very things snaps were intended to alleviate?

Look, don't get me wrong, snaps have some interesting advantages (sandboxing being the one major selling point, IMO). But, again, they're no panacea.

<comment><USER9> Snaps are apps in a container. Why bother with docker containers to run services while you can install everything together on a single computer? Each docker replicates the same rooted again and again.

Just like docker, snaps make sense even if there is some duplication of the libraries. Other benefits outweigh the extra size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "snap run libreoffice" gives me this error [http://i.imgur.com/tTKkpZe.png](http://i.imgur.com/tTKkpZe.png)

<comment><USER6> You should be using just 'libreoffice' on the command line or to be 100% sure, /snap/bin/libreoffice or running it from the dash (second icon per the blog post if you have both deb and snap installed). Why snap run? Also, knowing which version of snapd and which Ubuntu version would be interesting but if you feel this is a bug then it would be great to see more information at [https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd](https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/snapd).

<comment><USER10> /snap/bin/ is not on my path after installation of snapd and libreoffice, so just 'libreoffice' results in 'command not found'

        [1] $ snap version

        snap    2.21+16.10
        snapd   2.21+16.10
        series  16
        ubuntu  16.10

        $ /snap/bin/libreoffice
        datahome: /home/jon/snap/libreoffice/17/.local-184.108.40.206/share

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
    	    Using the fallback 'C' locale.

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Could not find the icon 'dialog-warning-symbolic-ltr'. The 'hicolor' theme
        was not found either, perhaps you need to install it.
        You can get a copy from:
    	    http://icon-theme.freedesktop.org/releases

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
        Gtk-Message: GtkDialog mapped without a transient parent. This is discouraged.

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'image-missing' for stock: Icon 'image-missing' not present in theme ubuntu-mono-dark

        (soffice:13608): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_ref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed

<comment><USER11> /snap/bin will likely be added to your PATH from now on, but if your current shell session was already running when you installed snapd it wouldn't be updated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm wondering how Snap deals with shared libraries? Are they downloaded with the release and placed in a sandbox? Or are binaries "statified" somehow?

<comment><USER13> They're bundled into the snap at build time. The tooling to create snaps makes this process fairly automatic. In this respect it works like Docker. App developers shipping snaps don't have to worry about how their users are going to get dependencies, or if the dependency versions will make a difference to the behavior of the app.

<comment><USER12> So a snap runs inside some sort of chroot jail?

(By the way, shared libraries were invented to reduce memory usage. Not sure what will happen to that goal now.)

<comment><USER11> Kind of, they run in a restricted AppArmor profile that limits what they can see and do, but the filesystem the do see is the same as any other process.

KSM should prevent duplicate libraries from taking up extra memory on your machine.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Former IT salesman: 'In part I blame the American mindset that took hold' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/joris-luyendijk-banking-blog/2012/may/30/former-it-salesman-voices-of-finance

<comment><USER2> This whole series is a very, very good read. Real voices from the finance world.</comment>


Human-friendly estimate of completion time for long data transfers - <AUTHOR> https://bvckup2.com/wip/14012020 <comment> java-man very clever!</comment>


Waiting for Chiplet Interfaces - <AUTHOR> https://semiengineering.com/waiting-for-chiplet-interfaces/ <comment><USER2> Would Wishbone be appropriate?</comment>


The (Not-So) Secret Society …Of those who refuse to be average. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/6f1d887b7e7d

<comment><USER2> _Web Smith 4 min read_

One good thing about Medium is that CMO-posted selfsucks like this one come with a disclaimer about how much of your life you will never get back after reading it.

 _The three-time champion responded, "It's all me (with Jesus)." I left it at that. It's that type of humility, self-awareness, and poise that helps define the CrossFit Games athlete and fan._

Truly gripping stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> This post is a monument to an all-american phenomenon: the culture of excess.

Americans are always after the fastest, deadliest, most gruesome, most muscular, richest, more, more and more. Objective reporting is not enough, the public wants to see decapitated corpses. It doesn't matter if some girl has been raped, they want the details, or it didn't happen.

A bank has been robbed, the news doesn't suffice, they want to see the police chase from the live cable TV. There's food, they want fast food. They got fast food, they have to supersize it, so they can be the fattest nation too. It's not enough to go to gym, to workout, to leave a healthy life. No, you have to push your body to the limit, get sick if need be.

It's time to recognize that this mindset is toxic. The winner-takes-all system is the bane of modern society. Capitalism is based on the notion that the purchasing power of the middle class is superior than that of any given individual or group, but now everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, the winner, erode the middle class until there'll be the reigning elite on one side and the unemployed, unwashed masses on the other.

And do you know what middle class equals to? average. You work 9 to 5, you have kids, a car and maybe a home. You're average. But nobody wants to be average right? No, everyone wants more, and in the end, there's no equilibrium. A world where everyone wants to be the best, the winner, where nobody is happy with what already has, it's a sad, sick world.

I hope is not too late to turn the tide.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Foresight: In 2009, folks in attendance were saying, "One day, this sport will be on ESPN and the athletes will be world class. There were folks that far ahead of the prediction curve, even while sitting on a dirt hill, staring at a ranch garage in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Consider the astonishing unlikelihood of today for just one moment."

Since I assume every single new "sport" would have people constantly saying that type of thing this is a given isn't it? Every failed sport and every successful sport would have people who had said something along those lines at the beginning.

That particularly annoyed me but because it did it was also the only thing I still remember from the article - it was very pretty vacuous.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wait what was the point of this article? Life is 100% subjective?

</comment><comment><USER6> CrossFit Games?? What a load of...</comment>


Restoration of defocused and blurred images (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://yuzhikov.com/articles/BlurredImagesRestoration1.htm <comment><USER2> Many aspects of CV and signal processing in general produce almost magical results. It's a little less magical when you think back to stats examples of fitting a curve to some signal + (known) noise process. For linear models, the noise term can get really bad before simple regression won't persevere. Least squares in one form or another finds lots of use in image processing.

Images are just functions, and almost all of the mathematical techniques that you would use to analyze one domain hold for the other. Certain perturbations such as camera jitter are easier to deal with as "undoing" them is tantamount to assuming some underlying regularity/structure on the signal and filtering accordingly. Others, such as removing an occlusion, are harder. Humans do it well thanks to our power of inference, learned from the litany of visual examples that we take in over the course of a lifetime. It's not trivial getting an algorithm to visualize what should have been behind the person who photobombed your insta, but we do it somewhat naturally.

For occlusions and finding relationships between partially overlapping scenes, really interesting things are happening with deep learning. For noisy images, techniques continue to improve. Compressed sensing and signal recovery is an active area of research that's already paid huge dividends in many fields, especially medical imaging. I can't wait to see what becomes possible in the next five years. And, as has been noted - this article is dated. There are already more powerful techniques using deep learning for image super resolution and deblurring.

</comment><comment><USER3> How does an upscaler in your TV work? How does it create information out of nothing?

Imagine that you are learning a deep neural network on a huge amount of movies. You have access to all of the lovely Hollywood movies. You downscale them to a 480p resolution, and then try to learn a deep neural network to upscale the thing, maybe upscaling only 16x16 blocks of the image.

It works amazingly well, and looks like magic.

Maybe there was no visibility of pores on the face in the 480p downscale, but your model can learn to reproduce them faithfully.

Sony has access to billions of movie frames in extremely large resolutions. Their engineers are definitely using this large amount of information to create statistical filters which upscale your non-hd, or maybe your HD to 4k HD. These filters work better than deterministic methods in this article. Why? Because the filters know much more about the distribution of the source (distribution of values of each individual pixel). They have exact information that one instead tries to assume (author in the article assumed that something in the source - be it noise or something else - behaves according the to Gaussian). If you know how to find the proper distribution, instead of assuming it, you can move closer to the information theoretical limits.

Just imagine how fast these filters can be if you put them on an FPGA, it also explains why TV sometimes cost more than $2k.

If you knew that your images would only contain car registration plates, you could definitely learn a filter that would be very precise in reconstructing the image when zoomed, you'd now find CSI zooming a little bit more realistic :D

<comment><USER4> > you could definitely learn a filter that would be very precise in > reconstructing the image when zoomed

Yes, your result would be a very clear image of one _possible_ license plate. An algorithm may be able to do slightly better than a squinting human, but ultimately you can't retrieve destroyed information.

<comment><USER3> Of course you can't retrieve destroyed information.

But information is not destroyed by perfectly unpredictable (uniform) distributions of noise.

> Yes, your result would be a very clear image of one possible license plate.

Fortunately there are methods of evaluating how well your statistical filter works, if it's precise enough you'd be fine with indeterministic nature of your filter. Or even better, you could generate all of the highly probable licence plates, instead of having only one - given by your deterministic algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note that this works for out of focus photos, __not __for enlarging tiny details of in focus photos.

They may look similarly blurry, but are mathematically very different.

<comment><USER6> How's that? Can't you think of a pixel as the average value of it's subpixels (=blur)?

<comment><USER7> In focus-blurred images, the blur spreads the information about certain pixels throughout a region of the image. (Objects appear larger and fainter because of this when they are blurred. It's why you can shoot through a mesh-wire fence with a wide lens aperture, for example, and not see the fence.) This 'spread out' information is being used to reconstruct an approximation of the original image.

However, when images are downscaled, all the information from 'subpixels' is kept within the reduced-resolution-image-pixel, and all replaced with a single RGB value. There is no 'spread out' information from those pixels. The 'blur' only applies to a region with sharp edges that exactly coincide with the unit of information. So, none of the data from the sub-pixels remain. To reconstruct the pixels that were within you have to essentially guess based on the context of the surrounding pixels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm author of this article (and SmartDeblur [http://smartdeblur.net/](http://smartdeblur.net/)), thank you for posting!

Also, you can look at the second part that describes practical issues and their solutions: [http://yuzhikov.com/articles/BlurredImagesRestoration2.htm](http://yuzhikov.com/articles/BlurredImagesRestoration2.htm) And if you have any qustions, feel free to ask me.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, that's very impressive, and very un-intuitive (to me) that it's possible at all.

So, who is the first to dig out some pictures that were 'redacted before publication' and can be de-obfuscated this way?

<comment><USER10> Law enforcement have large libraries of images of child sexual abuse. Sometimes the abusers appear in the photo but blur their faces. There's probably some work happening to identify those abusers.

Here's one famous example [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Paul_Neil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Paul_Neil)

There's a bunch of other image processing stuff that can be done. Identifying location from sparse clues is important. Identifying wall paper patterns, or coca-cola bottle labels gives clues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> These really de-focused images are interesting for the article but if you can take a slightly out of focus image and make is laser-sharp then it is extremely useful for all kinds of photo and video applications. It's really tough to fix a shot that was slightly off when you're going for professional quality where you can't tell it was sharpened.

<comment><USER12> Highly agreed! I would be really curious to see if someone could take a slightly defocused picture and run it through this to see what it would produce / if it would introduce a bunch of undesirable effects or not.

<comment><USER13> I have tried the referenced implementation (SmartDeblur) on a few (similar) slightly de-focused images. From memory, I had the artefacts without any noticeable improvement. I don't think I even saved the results. YMMV and I would almost certainly try it on photographs with a larger blur than mine (approximately a disc kernel with radius of 0.8px). Since then I've been working on other methods with mixed results.

I've found a few things out: Firstly, many articles mention some form of Richardson Lucy with regularization as if de-convolution with a known Point Spread Function is a solved problem. The regularization can indeed produce better results, but usually introduces new parameters. I've found, with real photographs, I have had far better results using less statistically sound methods. This is especially true as I've found that RL, more often than not, begins to diverge quite early.

The reality is that there are papers surrounding deconvolution and blind deconvolution that get apparently good results and work poorly in practice. It is only once implemented that the flaws of the algorithms proposed are exposed. This is compounded by the fact that we have a wonderful error metric with this inverse problem: the euclidean distance between 1\. the solution convolved with the point-spread function used for deconvolution; and 2\. the original (blurred) image. With many algorithms, lowering the euclidean distance decreases the perceived quality by introducing more artefacts. Nonetheless, I have only seen a handful of papers that include this metric when considering a proposed regularisation scheme, and this is one of the only times when this particular metric makes any sense in computer vision -- if your deconvolution is working, and your PSF is correct (which it is in many cases as the blur is synthetic) then the euclidean distance is the measure you want.

I have since switched to least squares using L-BFGS-B for fitting which has lowered again the Euclidean distance and produced the best, most natural- looking results by far on real photographic images. Unfortunately, estimating the PSF is difficult for small out-of-focus blurs. Optics applied to an ideal lens would suggest a disc kernel, but at this scale other factors are playing a part.

I'll probably do a writeup of this when I'm done -- though I don't know when that will be. I'll also be putting any code on Github in due course. In the meantime if anybody has any pointers or is interested in further details or source code please grab my email address from my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's neat that this is possible. It was demonstrated in the 1960s, but nobody could afford the CPU time back then.

The intensity range of the image limits how much deblurring you can do. If the range of intensities is small, after blurring, round-off error will lose information. Also, if the sensor is nonlinear or the image is from photographic film, gamma correction needs to be performed before deblurring.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've used Marziliano's[1] blur metric to reject images with motion blur recently. It is very fast and quite accurate in distinguishing blurred and non-blurred images.

[1] [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.7.9...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.7.9921&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

<comment><USER16> That looks really useful. Could you provide a link to your/an implementation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Note: 2012.

As some people have mentioned in the comments already, there's been great work since on blur estimation at siggraph (particularly for motion).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wondering what would happen if you apply this after enhancing (upsampling) something like what's shown in here as magic kernel thrice:

[http://www.johncostella.com/magic/](http://www.johncostella.com/magic/)

<comment><USER18> FYI: The magic kernel isn't taken nearly as seriously by people in the field of signal processing (almost my field). I'm always surprised as to why it keeps popping up.

One of the many articles on the internet explaining why the magic kernel isn't really that magic:

[http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2011/03/03-24-11-image- filte...](http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2011/03/03-24-11-image-filters-and- gradients.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679801).

</comment><comment><USER20> Strangely enough, the author only mentions total variation denoising in passing as a feature of SmartBlur. I would say this method is one of the most common, especially when your image has sharp transitions and lots of solid regions of color (e.g. pictures of buildings). I wrote what is effectively one of two of the fastest TV denoising algorithms and implementations out there: [https://github.com/tansey/gfl](https://github.com/tansey/gfl)

The way to use it in image processing is to basically think of each pixel as a point on a graph, with edges between its adjacent pixels. Then you apply a least squares penalty with an additional regularization penalty on the absolute value of the difference between neighboring pixels. The result is regions of constant pixel color.

<comment><USER13> It wasn't too clear but I wonder if the author was referring to deconvolution under a Total Variation prior -- this is a little different to deconvolving and then applying TV denoising or just applying TV denoising.

Either way, the results of overdoing it with TV are the same: cartoony images with large regions of constant colour. The difference is that incorporating TV within iterative deconvolution reduces some compression artefacts and removes some of the ripples around large discontinuities shown in the author's pictures.

<comment><USER21> I agree that the staircasing effect is definitely the biggest drawback of Total Variation. In the "Smoothed" picture the noise is removed but the results are blocky.

The first way to deal with it is to take into account higher powers of the differences, e.g. using a linear combination p-norms or a Huber function.

The second way is to take into account second order differences. This promotes piecewise affine instead of piecewise constant functions. You can go further and look at third order differences, but the improvement is minimal.

Other than being more complex, the biggest downside is that all of these methods have some new parameter(s) to tune.

<comment><USER20> > Other than being more complex, the biggest downside is that all of these > methods have some new parameter(s) to tune.

They're so fast to run though, that just doing warm-starts and a huge solution path (or grid in the case of additional penalties) with a BIC selection criteria is a pretty decent way to auto-tune the parameters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a very old link. Same feature has since landed in Photoshop

<comment><USER23> And Photoshop is expensive and is now rent-ware, which means Photoshop is a non-starter, so the feature might as well not exist for me.

I've been looking for this article ever since I saw the link the first time it was posted, so I am glad to see it! Plus, it's interesting, and you get source code (unlike Photoshop)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of MaxEnt, which could be mentioned, too. [http://www.maxent.co.uk/example_1.htm](http://www.maxent.co.uk/example_1.htm)

</comment><comment><USER25> Deconvolution is a very cool subject! A sizable portion of my dissertation was dedicated to applications of linear algebra tricks to deconvolution and denoising procedures for image restoration.

[https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:ke...](https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:kent1333415470)

</comment><comment><USER26> So all those tv shows where someone just clicks "enhance" we're accurate after all?

<comment><USER27> Well, yes and no. I had exactly the same thought as I was reading the article, but the bit about noise is important: in the presence of even a _tiny_ bit of noise, the de-blur algorithm collapses pretty rapidly. And the "enhance!" scenes in TV and movies are of images that are likely to be noisy.

They're also often un-detailed due to pixelation/low resolution as much as from blur, which violates this algorithm's assumptions, so that would be another reason that "click enhance" wouldn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> A friend has a software product that does image deblurring. His focuses mostly on motion blur. Depending on the type of motion, it can work quite well.

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

</comment><comment><USER29> Can you measure the blur that I see when I do not wear glasses, and apply the inverse function to an image, like my computer monitor, so that I can see clearly without glasses? What sacrifices would be made -- dynamic range?

</comment><comment><USER30> Are there security implications? If the last example was a blurred out license key or address for instance, this technique might be able to restore it.

<comment><USER31> Blurring or mosaicing is not very secure at all [1]. To be more safe block out sensitive information with solid black. (Just remember to not leak any information in the metadata, like an embedded thumbnail.)

[1]: [https://dheera.net/projects/blur](https://dheera.net/projects/blur)

<comment><USER30> Woah, lesson learned. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Who takes pictures that are that crappy anymore?

<comment><USER33> Automated processes, quick snapshots that were taken under insufficient control, pictures taken from moving platforms or of moving objects... Maybe the picture was intentionally taken with other things in focus than the ones you are interested in now.

Honestly, how your comment came to be escapes me. Can you seriously not see the utility in those approaches? Do you really think blurry pictures are "not a thing anymore"?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Beautiful responsive themes for startup website? - <AUTHOR>

Because there are too many resources out there, I'm asking you where would you look for themes if you wanted a modern (responsive, pixel-perfect) website for your startup? <comment><USER2> Blacktie.co you should take a look at their site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, great recommendation. Since then I see articles about blacktie.co everywhere.</comment></comment>


Rogue employee fired for turning game into Bitcoin mining colony - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/10/esea-bitcoin-mining-lawsuit <comment><USER2> _In just a few weeks ESEA 's employee earned himself BTC30, or about $2,400 (£1,600) at today's exchange rates._

Ouch. Hardly worth it.

<comment><USER3> It's always baffling to me that people will take these sorts of risks for such small rewards. A few thousand dollars in exchange for firing, lawsuits, possible criminal charges, and a ruined reputation in your field? No thanks.

<comment><USER4> It's recurring income that requires zero effort once it's running. $2400 every few weeks is enough to live comfortably in many places in the world.

<comment><USER3> > It's recurring income that requires zero effort once it's running.

It doesn't seem to be very recurring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. I wouldn't ever have even imagined that including a bitcoin miner in a program would be illegal. Sure they never declared that they did so but loads of programs do stuff that you'd never know about (for example reporting back personal data about your computer or running complex anti-piracy related code or modifying your system).

I'm a little surprised you can sue for "damaging client's systems and spiking their electricity bills". Don't all video games do that? Hell, even javascript on websites has been known to go into infinite loops and max out my computer for a long time before I noticed. I'd never have thought I'd have a chance if I sued the person who wrote the bad javascript.

Adding something secretly to your employers program without telling anyone however is defiantly something you can be sued over. Wow, sucks to be him or the employer really. I'm a little surprised he even tried, it's not really something that would be easy to keep secret for any length of time.

<comment><USER6> There's some intent here -- this is clearly intentionally abusive of users' computers, and for his personal profit. Seems pretty clearly malicious.

<comment><USER7> This seems less malicious than, say, installing Ask toolbars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Being a part of the ESEA community since 2007, the majority of the CS players concerns are only that the person who implemented the code AkA Jaguar, was also the person responsible for bans on the network. Their have not been any bans for Cheating since the end of May (I believe).

</comment><comment><USER9> Hmm I wonder if users of "free apps" that currently show us advertisements would accept bitcoin-mining by the app instead of ad-display as a revenue stream.

I guess the issue would be that mining bitcoins takes a bunch of CPU resources and would thus actually cost "money" for the user in the form of an electricity bill

<comment><USER10> CPU and GPU mining are pretty much useless at this point. ASIC mining is where it's at.

<comment><USER11> I thought that was true for individual mining, but aren't large pools still filled with lots of CPUs tied together with BOINC or similar? I thought I read something along those lines a few months ago (a long time ago, I know), but I'm only vaguely recalling that.

<comment><USER12> No, not really.

To give you an idea, a fast i7 mining on all cores is about 15 Mhash/sec. A single ASIC miner can be 100,000-500,000Mhash. You would literally need 20,000+ CPU miners to equal a single asic miner.

<comment><USER13> or 22 x i7 cpus just to match a USB ASIC doing 335Mhash/sec - they currently retail at 1BTC so anywhere between £45 and £57 - whereas 22 x i7 will be approx £5500 (at £250 a piece).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Before CoinLab shifted gears and got sued by MtGox, what this guy got fired for was exactly CoinLab's startup: monetizing games through Bitcoin mining.

Needless to say, with Bitcoin ASICs on their way back then, this wasn't exactly a sustainable business model.

<comment><USER15> to be nitpicky, Gox was sued by CoinLab for breach of contract (handing CoinLab the US market for a comission)

<comment><USER14> Oops, I didn't see what I had typed in. Thanks for correcting me. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Apparently they dont do any code reviews, QA, etc? I always find it interesting when things like this "slip" through...

If they used SVN of GIT wouldn't other developers have noticed files changing and reviewed the changes others are making?

<comment><USER17> I thought the same thing. How much code would it take to set up this mining operation? It seems unlikely that the amount of code added is trivial enough to go undetected.

<comment><USER18> There is a conspiracy theory going around regarding this issue being orchestrated collectively by the ESEA admins. This theory comes from several really weird statements from ESEA admin ipkane, made months before the Bitcoin mining was implemented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How did this code damage computers? Overheating? Kept fans running higher?

<comment><USER20> I don't think it'd damage the computers, if it did, it'd be very minor, like you said. I'd say the biggest effect would be people's electrical bills being higher.

<comment><USER21> Bitcoin mining on Laptop GPU is known to destroy whole machines (usually by overheating several parts of the motherboard and ruining them... also ruining the GPU itself too)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For clarification, it wasn't a game that did the mining, but the ESEA client. What makes it worse is ESEA is already a paid service.

</comment><comment><USER23> am i the only one that read this as employee of rogue ales ([http://rogue.com/](http://rogue.com/))? i need a beer ...

</comment><comment><USER24>
      It's possible to earn virtual currency by lending computer processing power to the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network

Bitcoin is apparently a P2P network.

<comment><USER11> From wikipedia: _" The concept was introduced in a 2008 paper by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto, who called it a peer-to-peer, electronic cash system.[1][8][9]"_</comment></comment>


Sign Up at Irs.gov Before Crooks Do It for You - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/03/sign-up-at-irs-gov-before-crooks-do-it-for-you/

<comment><USER2> This is a good idea, so I tried it and it failed ... because I had already frozen my credit reports [1]. I guess it worked and I should sleep soundly.

[1] [http://www.clarkhoward.com/news/clark-howard/personal- financ...](http://www.clarkhoward.com/news/clark-howard/personal-finance- credit/credit-freeze-and-thaw-guide/nFbL/?__federated=1)</comment>


Upcoming Mobile Operating Systems - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologeek.net/5-upcoming-mobile-operating-systems/

<comment><USER2> IMHO relying _solely_ on the web platform (HTML5, etc) for your OS is a mistake. I don't see Firefox OS succeed in more than niche markets - it's just purely worse than stock android in every respect.

<comment><USER3> They are targeting lower cost devices selling in developing countries. I'm not sure how they think using slower software on slower hardware is good idea.

<comment><USER4> I'm using a Geeksphone Peak right now, and it's VERY fast and responsive, especially with newer software. Same with the Keon, which contains a lot of the "target-level" hardware. As long as apps are made specifically for Gecko, it should be fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Peak is a monster in terms of performance GPU and CPU. I wanted to buy it, it is very cheap. However, it is out of stock on the official website ;( Do you have any other way to get one?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Great Wave of Hokusai - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/great-wave-hokusai-180973693/ <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katsushika_%C5%8Ci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katsushika_%C5%8Ci)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you like Hokusai and are in Montreal, I cannot more highly recommend checking out this exhibition traveling the world for a few more weeks

[https://www.jpf.go.jp/e/project/culture/exhibit/traveling/ma...](https://www.jpf.go.jp/e/project/culture/exhibit/traveling/manga_hokusai.html)

TL;DR: it is about the extensive "manga" Hokusai drew which set the stage for the explosion of modern day manga and comics in general.

A fantastic exhibition. I was fortunate to see it when it visited the Portland Japanese Garden.

(November 16, 2019 - January 5, 2020 Bibliothèque de Rivière-des Prairies (Montreal, Canada))</comment>


Ask HN - Books that changed your thinking about life, business? - <AUTHOR>

If you had to pick a book or two, that changed the way you think about life, business etc, for the better, what would those be? <comment><USER2> "Wherever you go, there you are" started me on the road to the most profound changes for how I think and see the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> "How to Get Lucky," "The Luck Factor," and "The Very, Very Roch and How They Got That Way," all by Max Gunther.

</comment><comment><USER4> _The Design of Everyday Things_ by Don Norman

</comment><comment><USER5> Two classic books that you should read

1\. Think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill. 2\. Sidhhartha by Herman Hesse.

Extra read

3\. The millionaire Fast Lane by MJ Demarco.

And so many others...</comment>