Apple Hires Google's A.I. Chief - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-googles-ai-chief.html <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that Apple does a lot more with AI than just Siri. See the latest updates to Core ML: [https://developer.apple.com/machine- learning/](https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/)

Machine learning comes up atleast once-a-keynote, so it's not surprising to see a high-profile hire in the area.

<comment><USER3> Heck, they've been doing machine learning since at least 2004, when they added Latent Semantic Analysis for junk mail filtering to the Mail app. And does anybody remember iTunes Genius (collaborative filtering on your playlists in the cloud)?

I think Apple has traditionally done a really good job of keeping the technology used under wraps, for better or worse.

<comment><USER4> Did Genius use AI? I thought it was more of a collaborative filtering feature where it used other people's playlists to build relationships between songs.

<comment><USER5> Congrats, you just described all of modern AI!

<comment><USER6> Do Bayes/Kalman filters count as (super simplistic) A.I. somehow?

<comment><USER7> Yes.

The only reason why machine learning was not called AI, is because funding for research into AI dried up in the AI winter.

Recently Google decided to revive the AI term, and here we are.

<comment><USER8> It always bugs me when people throw AI buzzword around when they are talking about machine learning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Add to mix the news about Jeff Dean:

Jeff Dean takes over as Google's AI chief (theverge.com) - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744353)

<comment><USER10> That makes a lot of sense. He's been doing crazy AI stuff for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know who is in a worse position. Apple has the problem of a possible trade war. Google on the other hand is going to be regulated with GDPR and whatever the current administration will have to pass due to Facebook. I think I am leaning toward Google having a worse situation due to this move.

<comment><USER12> I think Apple is so many years behind Google in AI that they have little hope of catching up. Their bet will be that consumers are privacy-focused enough to not mind the fact that their products have less AI-focused advancements (e.g. Google Photos).

At the end of the day, the only way AI systems currently train themselves is if a lot of users share their data, like Google-users do. Apple provides more of a firewall, but handicaps potential AI systems from using training data in doing so.

Also Google has massive mindshare in the AI community with TensorFlow.

<comment><USER13> I use both Google Photos and Apple Photos and honestly, most of the "suggestions" from Google Photos are uncompelling. When I switched back to iOS a few months ago, I didn't find anything keeping me from moving primarily to Apple's solution. The most impressive automatic-photos-adjustment thing I've seen is in Lightroom now - and Adobe wouldn't be my first guess for AI leader.

I find this to be a general trend with Google: they may have more advanced AI, but haven't yet figured out super-useful ways to apply it.

They also are perfectly willing to undercut their own AI to serve business goals: the Assistant on my Pixel wouldn't even let me do "hey google set a timer for five minutes" if I didn't give Google my full location history. Because you need that to set timers...

<comment><USER14> For me, the killer ML use case in Google Photos is object recognition.

For example, I took a picture of my driver's license a year or so ago, and needed the number on a form recently. I just went to Google Photos and searched for "driver's license." Sure enough, the old picture showed up, even though I never manually tagged it.

<comment><USER15> The same is done in the photos app on iOS and macOS, all locally on device. I don't have a picture of a drivers license, but I just tried "license plate" and "receipt" and both brought back all relevant results.

<comment><USER16> Which is mostly useless when you have only 20GB of storage.

OTOH, if I ask Google Photos to show me pictures of me on the beach with my friends X and Y, it shows me a picture from 2005, of exactly what I asked. (literally "me on the beach with X and Y").

And if I ask for pictures of me and my friend Z in a party, it shows me pictures of me at Z's wedding 4 years ago. (literally "me with Z in a party").

<comment><USER17> Luckily iPhones 7 and up have up to 256GB of storage

<comment><USER18> Which photos seems to think is full whatever I do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone share the A.I. background of John Giannandrea? I read his LinkedIn profile and couldn't quite see his strength in the field.

<comment><USER20> He doesn't have an AI background, although I'm sure he's picked up some stuff over the last few years. Google made him head of a bunch of different things because of his project management skills. (I used to work in his department.)

<comment><USER21> Huh? He founded metaweb out of his PhD, which became the knowledge graph at Google, and is one of the most successful symbolic AI projects in history.

<comment><USER22> Symbolic AI is 20th Century AI.

<comment><USER21> Publish some papers in major conferences / journals, ship a few projects to more than 100M people, and get back to me, ok?

<comment><USER23> Nonsense, I trained a deep neural network on MNIST.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Given this story [1], it will be interesting to see how the differences in culture and openness will allow to perform well inside the company, especially if it requires deprioritizing a walled-garden ecosystem to succeed in AI.

1: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-siri-once-an-original- no...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-siri-once-an-original-now- struggles-to-be-heard-above-the-crowd-1496849095)

</comment><comment><USER24> All the AI movements... Yet they still can't get basic full text search right in Apple Music.

</comment><comment><USER25> About time! Apple's got a whole lot of catching up to do if they want Siri to be in competition with Google Asst and Alexa

<comment><USER26> It could be more feature rich but I'll take Siri's massive lead in privacy over either of the other two tbh.

<comment><USER27> Siri has a massive lead for you and the 5 people who use PGP for their day-to- day email correspondences. That's not enough to build a business on.

<comment><USER28> Most people just don't care about the voice assistant on their phones, despite the efforts of Google, Apple and Samsung to make them care. Using a voice assistant in a public place still marks you out as some kind of weirdo. Siri is great for setting timers, that's all that matters really.

<comment><USER26> Things I regularly use Siri for:

\- timers

\- sending text messages hands free

\- controlling homekit stuff

\- playing music requests (usually in the car)

I'm honestly not sure what else I'd use a voice assistant for and Siri works _great_ for all of those tasks. Usually when I have an issue it's due to background noise, so hardly Siri's fault.

Quite frankly the "siri is crap" meme seems to be just that: a meme, with very little basis in reality. She's not quite as feature rich as the others but... who cares?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I heard rumors from Apple people that Carlos Guestrin in Seattle and Russ Salakhutdinov in Pittsburgh were both trying to be Apple's head ML/AI person. I wonder how Giannandrea's hiring will effect this.

<comment><USER30> Those other guys are definitely not getting the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm surprised he was able to move straight to Apple. Would Google not have a strict non-compete clause?

<comment><USER32> Non-compete agreements are banned in California:

[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/understanding- californi...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/understanding-californias- ban-on-non-compete-agreements_us_58af1626e4b0e5fdf6196f04)

<comment><USER33> Man, he just walked right into that one, huh?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is going to be interesting to watch over the next few years, given that Android had a huge setback in the Oracle v Google case [1]. The huge sell of Android over iOS, besides the customization features, was the Google AI superiority over Siri.

My hypothesis is that this move, if executed well, should help narrow the AI perception gap. I think customers know that Google will probably always be superior in AI, but if the gap on mobile is marginal, and combined with the added security that Apple is famous for building into their phones during a time when the Facebook scandal and other data breaches are causing users to be more sensitive to their data, could result in a very interesting market share shift over the next few years.

[1] [http://www.zdnet.com/article/android-p-is-for-poisoned- platf...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/android-p-is-for-poisoned-platform/)

<comment><USER35> My hypothesis is that most customers doesn't care about AI and that it wont affect phone sales numbers at all.

<comment><USER34> I'd agree with you, but almost every Youtube video I watch comparing iPhones vs. Pixels, or HomePod vs. Google Home, always tend to get to focusing on what Google queries can accomplish vs. Siri queries. It might not be called "AI" concretely, but the sentiment is probably there to some extent for some users.

<comment><USER35> Some users, sure. Maybe 10% of all people that look at Youtube videos about new phones will care enough to make it part of their decision. But they're a small minority of everyone that buys phones.

Homepod vs Google Home is a bit different though, since that's their only reason to exist.

<comment><USER36> AI kind of sucks now though. As it gets better and more people use it, it will be more of a selling feature. That's what they are betting on anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is Giannandrea an "AI guy"? His background, albeit impressive, suggests he's more of a search guy who got AI added to his plate of responsibilities. Maybe that matters, maybe it doesn't.

Anyone know? I'm just wondering if Apple hired a fine executive, just maybe not the best person to run AI.

</comment><comment><USER38> Apple has a 600 GFLOPS NPU in the iPhone X. Nvidia's $3000 Titan V has a 110 TFLOPS TPU. After a couple of decades of researchers using GPU's for compute, dedicated hardware is available, with a better FLOPS/$ ratio. Looks like the future of compute.

We'll see Apple releasing more uses of their NPU for AI.

<comment><USER39> Flops is a useless metric in general, there are benchmarks for machine learning that make valid comparisons between CPU/GPU/NPU/etc.

<comment><USER38> I wasn't confining it to machine learning, but compute in general. (I'm interested in simulation.) Are machine learning benchmarks applicable to non- machine learning computation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What happened to their no poaching agreements?

<comment><USER41> The biggest proponent/driver of the agreement died a few years back (pancreatic cancer).

<comment><USER42> That was only one sided though.

<comment><USER41> > That was only one sided though.

Extensively quoting The Verge[1] on the subject:

 _And yet, Intel actually had a written document describing a non-poach agreement with Pixar, where Intel 's policy was to not hire any Pixar employee without the Pixar CEO's express approval.

"If a Pixar employee applies to Intel without being recruited by Intel, contact Pat Gelsinger and explain to him a Pixar employee (provide the candidates name) has applied to Intel without being recruited and he will contact the CEO of Pixar for approval to hire," read the Intel document.

...

"Mr. Jobs wrote: "I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this." Mr. Schmidt forwarded Mr. Jobs's email to undisclosed recipients, writing: "I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can."

Mr. Geshuri told Mr. Schmidt that the employee "who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour." Mr. Geshuri further wrote: "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs. This was an isolated incident and we will be very careful to make sure this does not happen again."

Three days later, Shona Brown, Google's Senior Vice President for Business Operations, replied to Mr. Geshuri, writing: "Appropriate response, thank you. Please make a public example of this termination with the group."_

1\. [https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach- scandal-...](https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach-scandal- unredacted-steve-jobs-eric-schmidt-paul-otellini)

<comment><USER43> Still waiting on the public example of sending these execs to prison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This guy is an exec and like all execs he is good for shallow view from 35,000 ft. He isn't in the field and no one I know who is in the field seem to know even his name. I have zero clue on what is his contribution to the field let alone what kind of actual technical details he knows. As far as I have known these sort of people, they wear suits, memorize buzz words that their reports talk about and take credit of work done by their reports. Such "AI exec" hire is no-op in my book and it isn't a surprise that Apple has to run PR articles to justify their purchase of a suit.

<comment><USER45> Some people on HN seem to constantly despise any manager in a company that is not a technical person. Whether it's a majority or not is hard to tell, but it's a conspicuous group of people for sure looking at upvoted comments of the sort.

The theory seems to be that all these companies work only because of their engineers. Management is just useless. They are just "people with suits, that memorize buzz words take credit for the work of others".

With all such incompetent people in high position, one has to wonder how these companies seem to survive for so long.

Maybe, just maybe, they are not so incompetent and raise to those positions because of merits. Maybe engineering skils are not the only needed ones.

It seems to me that this culture is just based on resentment for the people that are higher in a hierarchy. From this point of view, the only way to feel good is to disparage them and assume they are there only because of the "corruption of the system".

<comment><USER44> No, my friend. I have lived under and interacted with enough suits at big 5 that I can tell you that if 80% of those people disappear you will see absolutely no change in the bits shipped by that group. How do I know this? Well, I have seen one suit getting replaced by another random suit all the time. There have been suits who never actually tried out the product they supposedly owned and preached to outside world. I am not kidding you. They literally had no account in the system. Most suits had no clue where source code existed for their product and even never had read documentation that their customers had to suffer through.

Their known contribution included setting up exec retreats were people are supposed to tell them about what needs to be done and then they go away with "blessing" the plan that got surfaced after their reports fought it out. Another of their contribution was to do meetings with other suits at customers/partners. Another was to do budgets and when things go red (or pressured to show profits), do hard decisions, aka, throwing 10% of team under the bus in form of layoffs. Their next contribution was to present works of their teams when it got done and credit it to their leadership and vision. I am talking about CVP+ levels, BTW.

It's easy to identify these suits. Go to the leaf level employees in their group and ask them about actual contributions of their CVPs in their product that made a difference. If they cannot mention anything concrete other than blanket buzz words like "leadership", "vision" etc (in case they cannot honestly answer) then you know you have a suit at the top.

These people are very different from Jobs, Musk, Zuke, Jenson Huang etc who are absolutely down and dirty at every level, knew more details then any individual employee and had real technical contributions in their product that made significant difference.

<comment><USER45> You are clearly an example of what I was talking about.

You judge the utility (or lack thereof) of these positions while never having had one yourself. Luckily, it's the top management of a company that choses who these are and not engineers.

It's clear from claims like "if 80% of those people disappeared you would see absolutely no change" that you have no idea what their role is.

When you say "most suits had no clue where source code existed" you just fail to realize that that's _good_. It's not their job to know this, it's an engineer's job.

You talk about their "known contribution" as if it's a general sentiment, but show no proof of it being other than your personal opinion.

In fact, it's clear from statements like " Another of their contribution was to do meetings with other suits at customers/partners" that you have no idea about how valuable talking to customers is for a company.

And tell me, in case you had to "make hard decisions" like "throwing 10% of team under the bus in form of layoffs" what would you do instead? That's exactly one of the cases where the skills of an engineer are the last a company needs.

<comment><USER46> DeusExMachina speaks the truth.

Bad leaders can ruin great teams and great leaders can turn around weak teams. I've seen/done it myself. Without fail, when I switch out a weak manager for a better one, the team improves. When groups have no manager they might produce, but usually not well or as well as they could.

Management isn't around because some conspiracy made by managers to perpetuate themselves, but because it works. No effective group of people is truly leaderless.

<comment><USER44> Pure managers (ie non technical managers) tend to hire other pure managers. They tend to over-amplify role of management vs technical problem solving. They often believe later is just "commodity" while projecting management skills as rare mysterious abilities. It is not an accident that pure managers at CVP+ levels are able to command more compensation than entire team of 20 people. This phenomenon is purely because pure managers keep projecting management as some sacred priesthood. In all teams I have worked I have known people who can easily do CVP job at quarter of the cost and twice the efficiency and technical chops. Despite this you see these inefficient people taking away massive funds. Why do you think there is no conspiracy?

<comment><USER46> That's bad managers hiring other bad managers. It's not a conspiracy; it's incompetence.

The problem likely goes all the way to the board of directors who should hold the CEO accountable to build a culture that doesn't let bad managers exist in the org (by coaching or removing them).

A lot of companies have this problem, and it's a major dysfunction, but make no mistake, it's :bad: managers you have a problem with, not "pure" ones. I know a ton of great non-tech leaders who do amazing work of leading technical teams because they build the team around that. You get the lead engineer(s) to run the tech leadership while empowering them with autonomy / resources / support and holding them constantly accountable to well defined goals.

Management isn't rocket science, it's just a lot of hard work and discipline. It is its own craft and a very challenging and rewarding one if it suits you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> .

<comment><USER48> Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER49> edit: original comment was "Inconsiderate timing?"

There's an ongoing emergency at the YouTube campus

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/breaking-active-shooter- re...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/breaking-active-shooter-reported- youtube-hq/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'm curious how this will impact Siri's development. My understanding is that Siri has been (maybe still is?) somewhat ahead in terms of understanding language flexibly and naturally, so if Giannandrea can help them catch up on the things that Google is good at, could they leap ahead?

<comment><USER51> My uninformed impression is that Google Assistant is exceptionally good at the things Google-the-search-engine is exceptionally good at: Type/say an awkwardly worded query and get a highlighted (and usually correct) answer.

It's not clear to me how Siri gets as good at that kind of thing without the Google search index (and all the results quality work that has been Google's bread and butter for over a decade).

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Was I the only one who read the headline as "Apple Hires Google's AI Chef"?

The Google cafeteria has gotten seriously high-tech: now they have an AI- powered chef cooking meals. It knows what you want to eat before you do! The AI Chef is so popular that Google is now selling AI Chef services to other corporate cafeterias.</comment>


Clinton would have won if the United States looked like this - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@khayeswilson/clinton-would-have-won-if-the-united-states-looked-like-this-7b9c844b76a9 <comment><USER2> I find these what-ifs a bit odd. Sure it's interesting, but if those states borders weren't where they are, surely Trump would have noticed and adjusted his strategy accordingly. It not like one thing could have been different and not affected anything else at all.

The thing I find more telling is that Clinton spent well over twice what Trump did on the election [0]. If Clinton had that much of an advantage and still lost, then I think the democrats could have run almost anyone else and had a tighter race.

[0] [https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/raised- summ](https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/raised-summ)</comment>


(Almost) going to jail for hacking the high school grading system - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kunala/juvenile-delinquent-the-official-guide-on-how-to-hack-schoolloop-8540230f6bc1?source=reading-list-published_user

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this article seven years later, and I thought you all would find it interesting :)</comment>


The road less traveled: Hacker House: Lessons learned (and how to start your own) - <AUTHOR> http://sam.bluwiki.com/blog/2009/05/hacker-house-lessons-learned-and-how-to.php <comment><USER2> Thanks for writing this up. There were good, specific bits of advice in here I hadn't thought of (and I've had lots of roommates).

(Though I do think no matter how common your interests are, the most important part of sharing living space is stuff like respecting other people's moods and stuff, etc)

So, that's it, I'm inspired. I want to start a Hacker House in Portland, OR. Though _I'm_ a computer person, other people's hacking would not be limited to code. I'd also welcome bike hackers, materials hackers, etc.

Dudes and dudettes (i'm a girl, both boys + girls welcome) in the area should hit me up to talk/wiki-ify any thoughts you have. Am thinking of starting this late summer-ish.

Email within two clicks of my profile here.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is something that's interested me ever since I heard about the first Hacker Houses here on HN, and it's great to hear some details about how it worked out. I'd love to get a bunch of folks together in one place and let the ideas flow, especially if there was some hardware involved. Kind of a modern- day mad scientists' laboratory, if you will...

EDIT: and if anyone else in Wellington NZ thinks the same way, take a look at my profile and get in touch. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Another tip: get a cleaning lady. 5+ guys in a house can get messy quick. :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you are interested in this, you may also enjoy this presentation on "hacker space design patterns": [http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2133.en.h...](http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2133.en.html)

These design patterns proved helpful when setting up Noisebridge, a hacker space in San Francisco.

<comment><USER6> This was actually what first inspired us to make the hacker house in Charlottesville. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Your formula for sharing rooms doesn't seem to scale well to many room- sharers. How about:

P = (houserent * 0.5)/numpeople + (houserent * 0.5 * a)/numrooms

Where a=0.5 if you're sharing a room, else a=1. This basically assumes that half your rent is going towards the common areas & utilities and the other half is going towards the room.

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone interested in starting a HH in the Cambridge/ Boston area? If so, ping me!

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone else besides me pass the first two tests? Pretty awesome way to attract a group of nerds, if you ask me. (going to work on the third at home).

</comment><comment><USER10> What counts as a commitment? Just a verbal agreement or contract / down payment? Seems like people backing out would be an early concern.

<comment><USER11> I imagine the standard leasing procedures would apply - that is, safety deposit + contract.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> check out the current pa hh rates ;)

<comment><USER13> Perhaps, but we have women here.</comment></comment>


Amazon, Woot, and You: But Mostly Woot - <AUTHOR> http://www.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=13390 <comment><USER2> Or, if you'd prefer to get your business news from the less-conventional rapping monkey puppet, see their video press release:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnCHCcveteA>

</comment><comment><USER3> haha - the entire letter is hilarious. Woot sounds like another good company with a strong culture.

The big question is why did they sell? Tony Hsieh and Zappos had investor pressure+needed the cash, what was Woot's reason? Maybe the carrot (cash?) Amazon dangled was a really big amount?

<comment><USER4> Come on - a Hyundai full of twenties! Read the letter!

<comment><USER5> I thought it was the two free downloads... I guess I'm just no good at this corporate mumbo-jumbo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, that blog post is so heartwarming and fun that it makes me like Woot a lot more than I ever did before! (I didn't dislike it, but had no particular feelings). Respect.

</comment><comment><USER7> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476029>

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm looking forward to One Click + Amazon Prime shipping on Woot items. Or actually... maybe not :)</comment>


Show HN: GitHub Actions I built for automating Terraform workflows - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dflook/terraform-github-actions <comment><AUTHOR> I've been using Terraform in automation for a few years now for doing things like approving and applying changes through PRs, linting, and creating isolated test environments for each PR.

I decided to create these actions as a way to get familiar with GitHub Actions, and they've turned out to be quite useful.</comment>


Ask HN: Masters or Bachelors degree, which is better? - <AUTHOR> For someone like myself who has a bachelors degree in a subject unrelated to computer science (business in my case), would I be better pursuing a bachelors or a masters in computer science? <comment><USER2> I honestly doubt you could handle MS coursework in CS at a good school without a BS. I've been writing software since I was 9, and I've gone through my brother's CS textbooks, but I looked into MS courses and they were _way_ over my head.

It depends a lot on what you want to do, though. If you want to work as a software developer, don't get your MS. People even seem to frown upon those in industry.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you can meet the prerequisites for a master's program then I think it's a no-brainer in every respect: faster, probably cheaper, and more impressive on a resume.</comment>


Show HN: My network connection monitor for Mac - <AUTHOR> http://radiosilenceapp.com/private-eye

<comment><USER2> Bandwidth.

Bandwidth usage would be nice. This is something that little-snitch doesn't already do and you can't see it in activity monitor as far as I know.

Any chance of right-clik "record traffic to file for X seconds"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Bandwitdh measurement isn't trivial, but it's something I'd very much love to add. Thanks for the input.

<comment><USER3> nettop in the command line does it (added in Lion), maybe you can scrape it out of there or find the source to it to see how it's done.

<comment><USER4> Fantastic. Thank you for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the minimalism of this, just a connection monitor, nothing else. Great work!

1 feature request tough: I've installed RadioSilence also, and it would be very handy to be able to drag&drop apps from PrivateEye to RadioSilence to be silenced. Lack of this doesn't stop me from using this, but would make life a bit easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Clever, thanks!

Radio Silence already supports drag & drop. Hadn't thought about the option to drag apps out of Private Eye. This just landed on my todo list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how it works, i.e. what APIs it is using, etc. Any details?

Question on SO: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7696890/macosx-how-to- cap...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7696890/macosx-how-to-capture- network-events-or-how-does-private-eye- works?utm_source=Stackoverflow&utm_medium=twitter)

<comment><AUTHOR> Answered directly on SO.

<comment><USER7> It seems like you check for SYN packets, so there is no way to just see the connection _currently active_. This in my opinion limits the usefulness of the application, it would be cool to see an update that can have a tab for "live" connections and one for the "history". Thanks for the app anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Java network traffic isn't listed. I tried both Minecraft and the Clojure REPL. Nothing.

It would also be useful to see the type of connection, TCP/UDP, port number, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info. I'll look into the Java issue. Wonder if they do something unorthodox with their traffic.

The connection details is something I've pondered about. Port numbers, at least, might be useful. At some point, the user is better served by wireshark anyway. Drawing the line isn't a trivial problem. Any suggestions are appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice looking app! But why distributing it as PKG when it only creates Private Eye.app and com.radiosilenceapp.nke.PrivateEye.plist?

<comment><AUTHOR> It has to install the plist to /Library and launch the kext after installation. I'm not sure if that can be done just by sharing an .app bundle.

<comment><USER9> How did VMware Fusion 4 do it though? They just distributed the whole VM as a single .app, with all kexts loads/unload dynamically on launch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. I honestly have no idea. The kext has to be owned by root:wheel for the system to accept it. Making a pkg installer was the simplest solution I knew of.

Out of curiosity: is there a downside to pkg's?

<comment><USER10> I believe smcfancontrol installs its kext by demand from inside the Cocoa App. I don't know how it's done (I only do UNIX stuff on my Mac =/) but I believe it changes the .kext owner and invokes kextload. You can 'sudo' from inside a Cocoa App by using AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges:

[http://michaelobrien.info/blog/2009/07/authorizationexecutew...](http://michaelobrien.info/blog/2009/07/authorizationexecutewithprivileges- a-simple-example/)

About PKGs: I think that they're okay, but, historically, they're maligned for being "black boxes" that install files all over your system. App files, OTOH, are (99% of the time) clean, live on /Applications, and sometimes use ~/Library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On Lion there is also a new useful shell command called nettop.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very nice looking program - can certainly see myself using it to keep track of what's going on on my Mac.

One thing I've noticed though, is that it doesn't seem to be catching network activity that's taking place from the command line. I'm running an SSH session, and just tried pinging a server from the terminal and it didn't see either of those. If you can add that as well, then it would be even more useful.

<comment><USER13> It's probably using some high-level Cocoa network framework, and not kernel- level functionality like netstat does. So my guess is only apps using the same high-level net framework are listed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, it does use kernel-level connection tracking.

<comment><USER14> why Lion-only then?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because of the user interface. It's a dumb issue, but Lion changed the way table views work. Getting from 0 to MVP was about twice as fast with the new Lion features.

It's something I consider improving, though. Fundamentally, the same app should work on 10.6 too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Too bad it doesn't want to work on my Snow Leopard system

<comment><USER16> I agree... Any reason why you don't want to support Snow Leopard?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would love to support Snow Leopard, and it's something I'll work on next. Lion simply brought some much-needed upgrades to table based UI development, which I wanted to use. It cut down the development time by a significant amount.

Supporting Snow Leopard requires a rewrite for most of the UI logic. I wanted to get the first version out before crossing that bog.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for explaining, that makes a lot of sense.

BTW: If your firewall works on Snow Leopard and allows me to disable the P2P part of Spotify, I will buy it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It works on SL, and I've heard people use it to block Spotify. There's a free trial, let me know if it doesn't work for you!

<comment><USER16> but does it just block the p2p part of spotify, and still permit the login and direct streaming?

If so that's a selling point right there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The bandwidth suggestions are good, but rather than suggest more, I'll just say I really like the way you've laid things out. The UI lets me see data via the angles I'd want to see it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I spent a decent chunk of notebook pages and pen ink to get it the way it currently is. It feels really good to hear someone appreciates the design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Thanks for sharing! Any chance you share the source on Github?

<comment><AUTHOR> My plan is to give the software away for free, but keep the distribution somewhat centralized and the source closed. The app is, on a business level, a marketing tool for my Radio Silence firewall. I hope it will drive traffic and links to the site by giving away a complementary product for free.

Sharing the source through github might work against that goal.

<comment><USER19> Or it might help you reach that goal. Opening up some of your source will give your more advanced customers more confidence in your coding abilities.

<comment><AUTHOR> The open source approach surely has its benefits. However, I think/guess/believe the free closed-source app has more direct effects on my visitor traffic. Open sourcing the software would probably help me build some kind of personal branding, but it's not a goal I'm actively working for right now. Currently, my priority is to get radiosilenceapp.com more visibility and authority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ok what's 'helpd' and why does it call Akamai servers?

<http://imgur.com/IDc5f>

<comment><USER21> It's probably checking for updated help files. Apple regularly uses Akamai's CDN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks awesome - exactly what I've been after to be honest. I'd love you if you could make it work on 10.6 as well...

</comment><comment><USER23> Related: <https://github.com/antirez/iconping>

</comment><comment><USER24> We do something similar in one of our app, although we also permit the user to block connections it doesn't want to.

<http://www.metakine.com/products/handsoff/>

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm on Lion. Installed the app, launched, window comes up but connections are not listed.

Restarted the computer. Connections are still not listed.

Reinstalled as per FAQ. Still not working.

Am I doing something wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> No connections come up even if you let the window stay open for a while?

Could you run "kextstat" on the terminal and see if "com.radiosilenceapp.nke.PrivateEye" is listed?

<comment><USER26> It works for me. Thanks for making this, keep up the good work!

Now if you introduce the option of blocking applications, I'd uninstall LittleSnitch for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

You can use Radio Silence to block apps. It's on the same domain, and linked in the sidebar and header.

<comment><USER26> Great, I just bought it. Any chance of incorporating Private Eye into Radio Silence, at least for the purpose of selecting the apps I want to block? Or being able to drag and drop an app from Private Eye into Radio Silence would be enough. It's just that selecting those apps is really painful from the file dialog, especially if they're obnoxious system services like helpd.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're the second person to suggest that today. It's a great idea, and I'll implement it as soon as I can.

Radio Silence already supports drag & drop. You can drag apps into its window, if you don't like the file dialog.

Private Eye doesn't yet support dragging stuff out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Great app.

One feature request though, it would be very useful to be able to view the complete URL of HTTP connections. God knows how many times I had to setup a local proxy to find out that information.

<comment><USER28> I think this app works at a lower level though, by intercepting TCP connections. To show you the URL it would have to proxy all the traffic and understand the HTTP protocol.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right. Of course, parsing the http requests isn't a monumental task, and it could be done. I'm just not sure whether it's worth it. Wireshark already exists, and I see no reason to compete with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> this looks useful, so i had a look for the linux equivalent. turns out there's a command line utility called nethogs that does something similar (it shows bandwidth per process, but not addresses). for opensuse you can get it here - [http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=nethogs&baseprojec...](http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=nethogs&baseproject=openSUSE%3A11.4&lang=en&exclude_debug=true)

another command, iftop, shows connections, but not processes (that's in the standard opensuse repos).

</comment><comment><USER30> Great work! I really like the nice clean interface.

It would be great if there would be an option to put it in the menu bar and hide it in the dock.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is there something like this for Windows ? (Especially with ip resolution feature )

</comment><comment><USER32> Private-Eye sounds like a good entry for Tractup: <http://www.tractup.com> a site for early product traction. :s

<comment><AUTHOR> Tractup doesn't support dashes in the url :).

<comment><USER32> I've just fixed it =) please retry.

<comment><AUTHOR> I already submitted the base domain, so no worries.

<comment><USER32> erf I really don't understand why your entry is in the beginning of my table.. I will fix this.

<comment><USER32> fixed</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Yet another "my first open-source project" thread. Feedback, please? - <AUTHOR>

I must say I was encouraged to post my project here when I saw the positive response to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780731
Before you make any comments, please keep in mind that the project is written for fun. I'm not forcing anyone to use it. In fact, nobody should use the current unstable version in a serious project.
Here is the link: http://github.com/bsg/libserv
Please share your thoughts. All criticisms are welcome, even the harsh ones.
p.s. The project is still a work-in-progress. <comment><USER2> Note for those who do not know, Tcl already provides the ability to do cross platform non-blocking TCP servers.

Look at the Tcl "socket" command.

Very basic file server in 8 lines: <http://wiki.tcl.tk/23621>

Simple HTTP server in a page of code: <http://wiki.tcl.tk/4333>

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow - I will use this so much. Thanks for writing this. I suspect you won't get as many responses to this as it's C, not Node.JS or Ruby, but I will find this very useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for commenting. I really appreciate your interest. Please keep in mind that the project has not been tested thoroughly yet and may fail badly in an unexpected way.

<comment><USER3> That's cool. I won't use it straight away anyway, but will definitely be useful in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://github.com/bsg/libserv>

</comment><comment><USER4> Good work. Have you seen libevent, perhaps you can borrow some ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Yes, I have already seen libevent. In fact, it was of great help to me when I was trying to learn about select/epoll/kqueue etc.</comment></comment>


Superpedestrian Raises $20M for Its Fleet of Self-Maintaining E-Scooters - <AUTHOR> https://www.americaninno.com/boston/funding-boston/superpedestrian-raises-20-million-for-its-fleet-of-self-maintaining-e-scooters/ <comment><USER2> Their one problem is people absolutely hated when Bird launched in Cambridge Ma.</comment>


Parsing Jacob Applebaum's response to allegations of sexual assault - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@frabyn/decoding-jake-appelbaum-9fa75d060310#.vjdc4in1p <comment><USER2> > Read this whole thing again; I never directly said that any of the > allegations are not true.

 _You_ should read again:

> I want to be clear: the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct against me > are entirely false.</comment>


New Stack Overflow Code of Conduct - <AUTHOR> https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334900/official-faq-on-gender-pronouns-and-code-of-conduct-changes?cb=1 <comment> m-p-3 I miss the simpler time, where everyone was just an anonymous nickname behind a keyboard, and genders weren't relevant in most discussions.

</comment><comment><USER2> OK, cool.

But what's the universe of gender pronouns?

Whatever anyone requests be used?

And will mods get in trouble for questioning strange ones?

Or is it just "anything goes"?

Edit: This is a decent list: [https://lgbtqexperiment.com/2019/05/13/what-are- alternative-...](https://lgbtqexperiment.com/2019/05/13/what-are-alternative- gender-pronouns-to-she-he-and-they/)

Some I know are gender neutral, but it's not clear what the others communicate. Or maybe that's not the point. Which is just to use whatever someone requests.

Edit: Now _this_ is good: [https://gender.wikia.org/wiki/Gender_Wiki](https://gender.wikia.org/wiki/Gender_Wiki)

So you can see which are (at least by this wiki) accepted, and which are still iffy.

And for those (like me) who love scatter plots, this: [https://gender.wikia.org/wiki/2D_graph_theory(gender_Theory)](https://gender.wikia.org/wiki/2D_graph_theory\(gender_Theory\))

Probably needs at least a third dimension, though ;)</comment>


Ask HN: What's a good tool for private group communication? - <AUTHOR>

I want something that I can use to communicate with just the friends I usually hang out with, for project groups, for dorms and even with my own family.<p>Email is the current solution but email's really disorganized and not fun. Google Wave is too complicated although I feel that it's close to the right solution. If you could build your own solution, what would it be? Do you know any existing solutions that are great for something like this? <comment><USER2> I started using Ventrilo while playing mmorpg's and ended up using it in my business for realtime voice collaboration among team members. More personal and more efficient than IM, it's like a group walkie talkie through your computer. Or a VOIP conference call that's always on. [ventrilo.com]

</comment><comment><USER3> We use email, IM, google wave and yammer for work. None of them are perfect. I probably use IM most of all, we don't have a culture of instant response so it is not as disruptive as it sounds.

But you are right, I don't feel any of the above is completely perfect.</comment>


Ask HN: What sort of side-projects are useful for getting jobs? - <AUTHOR> Most of mine are more of demo's I built for blog posts and teaching rather than SaaS products people are actually using. Some of my projects are rather complex and (at least I believe) do well to show knowledge and understanding, but I feel like the fact that they are demos rather than products make them rather useless. <comment><USER2> Here's a piece of advice from actual experience (from both sides):

Invest your time studying for interviews than wasting time building side projects if you're doing this purely for getting a job, period.

In my experience, companies don't care about your little side project when hiring--that is, unless your "little side project" had some huge impact or is something they have been aware of--the best you could get is "huh that's cool", and that's it, unless you created something really unique.

This whole process of job interview is broken because it's extremely easy to study for them and give the right answers if you invest a couple of weeks to a few months. But since we're talking about getting a job, I think you should take full advantage of this. If I were you, I would be doing this instead of doing side projects for the sake of getting a job.

Also, "side projects" should be something that you build because you think they're cool, not because you want to get a job. That's another reason why I say study for the interview instead of bothering to do side projects if the purpose is to get a job. It's neither meaningful for the employer nor for yourself.

If you still really want to do a side project, just pick a problem you want to solve, and apply some new technology you want to learn to build it. That's the best side project for yourself and the potential employer.

<comment><USER3> This 100%. When I'm involved in the interview process I make a point to check out all candidates side projects but over 90% of people don't care.

In getting my last job I thought I would have a slam dunk because I have a bunch of cool stuff I work on but nobody cared at all.

I failed multiple on site interviews until I gave in and read a couple CSCI 101 books cover to cover. I had too much specialized knowledge and not enough fizzbuzz. On my second round of interviews I got offers from all three companies because I could regurgitate their stupid toy problems in minutes.

<comment><USER4> > stupid toy problems in minutes.

What sort of toy problems are you talking about?

<comment><USER5> I'm going to be snarky but I'll say it anyway: you know, stupid stuff like balanced binary trees and shit like that, when nothing's going to fall apart if the user's browser shows a spinning wait animation for 7 seconds (45 seconds at peak times but that happens for just a few hours per week at most) while you iterate through the data sequentially. honestly, who ever _needed_ an algorithm or data structure. /s

(I'm sorry. I thought about using less snark but I can't.)

<comment><USER6> the last time i had to implement a datastructure was in class. on the job i use the standard library. i hope you do the same.

<comment><USER5> But rolling a standard datastructure (and what's the "standard library" for a red-black tree anyway - in Python, or in Java? - or C++ for that matter) proves that you can do something "tricky" and hopefully get it right. You can understand and reason about what you're doing. If they don't let you Google while doing a "CS" type problem, of course, then they're insane.

When it comes time to do something novel, that understanding will be very useful.

People pooh-pooh Google's hiring interviews, but when was the last time Gmail's search results on your email were as bad as Bing's (I use this example because it's not their general index, I'm asking about _your_ mail.)

There are a lot of good reasons to bone up on CS 101 (and 201, 301, 401, and 501).... I disagree that it's just "studying for the test".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From my own experience dealing with all kinds of companies. If you aim for C-level companies (IBM, Banks, Oracle, Walmart, etc.) then you don't need to spend time building side projects. They simply don't care. For B-level companies like Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox and everything in between low and high skilled engineers, it's crucial to have a product of your own out there. They hire mostly young engineers with no professional experience, fresh out of college, so need something to look at. Your app(s) or website(s) will lead you to an interview if you apply. Now, for A-level companies like Google, Apple, FB, etc. it's actually better to do what you do! They prefer a nice github profile rather than an actual app. They're looking for very technical people who teach, mentor, etc.

So I'd say, do what you do, update your github profile and apply at google, etc.

<comment><USER8> How are you categorizing these companies? What's makes one A, B, or C-level?

<comment><USER7> This is how recruiters and companies classify engineers in Silicon Valley (and beyond I believe). I'm not a fan of that classification personally, but it makes it easy to trim a pile of 5000 Resumes. What happens is that Google, FB, etc. will most likely attract 'A' engineers, while other companies will have to deal with B's and C's (sometimes A's as well).

So to answer your question, an A engineer is someone who can potentially crack a Google interview, or someone who worked for one of the big-5 in the past (FB, amazon, google, apple, microsoft). I let you guess for B and C... same concept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a junior web developer (1.5 years of experience) and I don't have a degree in the field, so references are all I have to proof my worthiness. And similarly I have a lot of small (mostly useless too) projects that nobody uses. But I still put them online. I have my own domain for development purposes only and whenever I finish a project to a satisfiable degree I put it on some subdomain amd add it to my list of references. Purely as a quick way for people to check what the code they were looking at actually does.

My references vary from simple image-upload site to a (more complex) link- hosting site that does a lot of magic behind the scenes. And a lot in between.

Even projects from hackathons. [Here's]([http://helpmehelp.herokuapp.com/](http://helpmehelp.herokuapp.com/)) a perfect example. The code is opensource (terrible though :D). The project is old, irrelevent and unused. But still no reason not to have it hosted somewhere.

<comment><USER10> How did you get a job?

<comment><USER11> Lol.

There is definitively a barrier of entry in software and it helps if you do a bunch of things that are discussed here in this thread.

On the other hand, if you just need a _job_ as a programmer and have skills like OP seems to have, and apply for junior positions, possibly through a contractor, then you will get a job.

This is for anyone who reads these threads and wonders "am I good enough?" "can I be a programmer?"

Yes.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of my problems is finding junior jobs. It seems whenever I go searching I see only mid-senior level jobs

<comment><USER12> >One of my problems is finding junior jobs. It seems whenever I go searching I see only mid-senior level jobs

Stop applying to junior jobs and thinking of yourself as a junior. "junior" is just code word for "pay me less". Get yourself to where you need to be and just apply for regular roles.

<comment><USER13> Difficult when non-junior jobs require 3+ years of work experience and you have none. A majority of companies will filter out your resume before you even get an interview.

And then there's the practical issue of living without a job while you get education, build experience, etc.

In my opinion, "junior" is code word for entry-level, and it's the easiest search query to find those jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Finished ones.

This sounds trite, but honestly, finishing things is hard. If you can show off a couple of finished side projects, that reflects much better than a half- dozen abandoned halfway through.

<comment><USER15> There is no such thing as a finished project. Just one you no longer work on.

<comment> T-hawk I think the parent really meant _publishable_ where he said finished. Some kind of minimum viable product. That's what shows you can cut through the BS and wishlist and fun-to-code stuff in favor of the details and grind of getting something out the door and functioning to serve an audience.

<comment><USER16> `publish` vs `finish` I think is a good clarification of what I think the commenter meant.

Going further though, I do think I prefer `published` to `publishable`. Fighting through the last (sometimes most difficult steps) to get something in the public means a lot to me.

Additionally, it's also easier to demo something that's available on the public web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting to see many comments here claiming that side projects don't matter when looking for a job. I've been actively applying for a full-time dev position for the past 3 months and the most common feedback I receive is "We need to see side projects, OSS contributions so we know how you code."

I have about 4+ years in DevOps and in support. I consider myself a programming generalist, which I thought would be enough to at least get a technical interview. Instead of working on a project that will most likely be left incomplete due to fatigue or loss of interest, I rather spend that time learning ways to improve my skills to make myself the best programmer I possibly can be.

I've been considering starting my own blog and write articles about lessons learned or an e-book to express my credibility. Does anyone have any opinions with developers who write blogs/publications in lieu of side projects or OSS contributions?

<comment><USER18> No hard data, but would just add I find quality writing of prose just as hard (or harder) than the creation of quality software.

<comment><USER19> I agree. I think it is partly because the quality of prose is more subjective than that of software. Not thought a lot about this point though. It is an interesting topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It depends where you want to work. Here in NYC my experience, the plural of which is not data:

Enterprise-style jobs at non-tech-focused places (banks, pharma) don't care.

Big Consulting companies _really_ don't care, they just want warm bodies.

Startups and small companies care a lot. I've been on both sides of the table and it's been a big differentiator. When I was screening potential candidates at another company, if you didn't have anything at all we were less likely to bring them in for an interview.

And it wasn't always tech stuff. One person did multiple research projects on bird species and submitted them to science journals. One person made a book of notes passed to tellers during bank heists. At a small company people spend more time with their colleagues than their SOs, and you need to like each other. Side projects are like cover letters, they let me know what you're interested in and that you're an actual human being.

Currently on lunch at a job acquired through a side project. I built it because I saw a problem, got upset enough about it to do something, and made it happen. I think that's the key - it's a combination of being interested in something and design/build/execute ability. Do it because you care, not because you want a job.

<comment><USER21>
        > Big Consulting companies really don't care, they just want warm bodies.

Could you please elaborate on this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I made a video game and I have had two jobs thanks to that code base.

The thing which is valuable is to show you can get things done. That's it. Nothing special, just do what you want to be doing then show it to be who need engineers to do that thing.

<comment><USER23> If you don't mind me asking, in what field were the jobs? Does making a game give you much credit out of the game industry?

I hear some say game development is the hardest field in software, but I'm not sure recruiters in say web development sees much of a bridge between the two!

<comment><USER22> If you want to be a web programmer then do not make games. Yes I got interest in other fields thanks to my game but the idea is to work in games. Both my jobs have been in the Japanese video game industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Side projects can be amazing for building skillsets in areas that aren't a direct part of your current role but will be in a desired next role. 95% of domain knowledge for non-engineering interview purposes is lingo and plausible applications from your past.

Anecdote warning: Some years ago (pre big data) I wanted to move into analytics from more general strategy consulting because I found it more intellectually challenging, but didn't have much on my resume to support it. I started building database-backed sportsbetting algorithms (first horses, then hockey) and trying to find profitable strategies. I never did find one, but a year later when I found myself a part of the inevitable downsizing that happens in the industry and applied for analytics jobs, the statistics, probability and analytics strategies I learned betting on sports definitely got me the job.

</comment><comment><USER25> For typical full-time jobs, whiteboard cording questions are all that matter. Whether or not you have interesting side projects or experience does not matter all that much.

For other type of work, such as freelancing or consulting, your previous experience may matter slightly more.

<comment><USER26> Maybe it's just my experiences (iOS development interviews), but whiteboard interviews are actually quite rare. Most of the time it's either questions about iOS, pair programming iOS or discussing your implementation of some coding test.

I wonder if this is just a result of it being a more niche skill set than a general software developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> _I feel like the fact that they are demos rather than products make them rather useless._

Why would you think that? Anything that shows off your skills has value. Well, it would to me anyway. I mean, if I were evaluating your candidacy for a job, I wouldn't care if your projects were demos or "actual products".

</comment><comment><USER28> It depends on what your definition of "getting jobs" is.

I haven't looked for a job for years but I get freelance / consulting gig opportunities presented to me on a pretty regular basis.

Most of those opportunities come from a combination of side projects, open source contributions, having a blog and teaching online courses.

Now, I'm not sure if that's what you meant but in the above life style you don't need a resume or know how to take interviews. You don't even need a formal education.

People just come to you, already knowing beforehand that they want to work with you. You already have the job before you even know what it's about.

<comment><USER29> Congratulations, you're in a nice spot but your situation is extremely unusual. Most people do not have jobs just being offered to them out of the blue, so not sure if the advice is really that usable.

<comment><USER28> Anyone can do it right now.

<comment><USER29> OK, I'll bite. What's the secret? Because nobody yet has E-mailed me out of the blue with my next job offer.

<comment><USER28> There's no secret. Just determination and a willingness to work hard under the assumption that no one owes you anything.

You could start open sourcing some of your work right now and build your self up on GitHub. Maybe start a blog too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The difference between a demo or prototype and an actual SaaS with paying users is significant. The former can land you a technical job if it's well done. The latter will getyou a C-level job for an upstart if it's well executed (read: shows important growth). But you haven't explained what kind of job you're applying for.

<comment><USER31> > The latter will getyou a C-level job for an upstart if it's well executed

Could you expand on this? Are you referring to an acquisition?

<comment><USER30> Not an acquisition. If you can show you've built a XaaS from scratch, were able to acquire a good number of paying users, and were able to keep them happy, then chances are you're well worth the hire. You're high-end startup material. Do this a few times in a row and you can be certain investors will like you. Taking it up a notch each time.

People who can do this serially are never out of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If you are just studying for a test interview, then might as well show them your grades from college or your SAT score. Solving the interview test isn't real life.

I agree with what is generally said bout side projects, nobody really cares. I mean not even a little bit, it kinda of amazes me. But oh well, I do my side projects for two reason, 1. to make money 2. to increase my knowledge in a language.

I wonder if Bill Gates, Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey would be around if they had to go thru intensive code interviews?

</comment><comment><USER33> I think it is more interesting for companies if you contribute in open source projects relevant for your future jobs rather to single-person side projects. It means several things: you can join a team working in a project, you know how tools like git work and how make a pull request, you have experience with something you might use in your future job and you can collaborate with others.

If it has to be a single-person project, then it only has some value if you released it and people is using it.

</comment><comment><USER34> A lot of responses I've seen seem to bag on side-projects. My experience has been a little different, but I see the wisdom in 'Don't pursue side projects if its purely for getting a job'.

Here's my story: I was a Junior in College, and had just learned Java. I was bored with the class, so decided to do something with Java, since I'd just picked it up. I decided to write a small mod for Minecraft, back before like 1.5 or something. It was a simple terrain modification, involving some basic 3D geometry. And after a few weeks, I was able to post it and had some success. I was very pleased with my Floating Islands.

That summer, when I was applying for _Internships_, They asked about my work with Java, and I mentioned the mod I had made, and explained the process as well as the logic I had used to get it done. They later extended an offer to me, and thus I started my first Internship.

As I got to know some of my interviewers, by working with them, I was given the chance to ask what I had done which made them think to offer me the spot. You see, I wasn't the strongest in CompSci, since I was actually studying as an Electrical Engineer. The interviewer mentioned a small handful of things involving problem solving, and the way I could handle changes in requirements ( they enjoyed throwing a wrench in the works during the interview questions). And then he mentioned that my work outside of school had put me over the edge because it wasn't just academic, it was personal.

So in summary, perhaps at the Professional Level side-projects of low-impact have a low rate of return, but at the college level, I believe it is worth investing your time in a side-project, to grow your skills and to show you are interested in it beyond mere academia.

</comment><comment><USER35> When I interview someone, I always ask about side projects. Some have been huge, and some small (and maybe half haven't done any). However, the passion that the interviewee shows when talking about their project is very revealing. Also, do they really understand the problem, do they have a realistic view of what can be achieved.

</comment><comment><USER36> Most of my side project are spread on many months (years sometime). I try to ship something valuable and meaningful, but the main idea remains to practice, learn and get my hands dirty.

Small demos, most of time time, keep you on the main, easy, default road while a bigger project let you see a lots of side scenarios which are more representative of what you will hit in job.

However, I would recommend, from my experience to always scope down features since at some point you may fell in the trap of adding feature and not learning the technologies, hence moving away of the primary goal. I am wrapping a 30 months project and will definitely not do any project that would take that long. I aim project between 4 to 12 months for the future (at about 40 hours per month).

</comment><comment><USER37> For me, it's having a successful blog that is on topic to the position. When I started my current job 7 years ago, I started a blog then which was simply a repository of lessons learned, scripts I can reuse in the future, cheat sheets, and videos. I still use it today to look up how I did something years ago, but apparently a lot of other people use the site too. The blog demonstrates the following to any potential people willing to hire me:

* A sample of my writing skills * A sample of my design skills * A sample of my engineering skills (shown in scripts and codes) * A sample of my documentation skills * Additional proof that I am passionate/skilled/interested about this type of work.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't spend a ton of time mastering algorithms for interviews. Maybe I should. But studying a canned set of specific formulas is about as fun as memorizing a Math textbook. I've found that I become a better programmer by focusing on what's interesting to me. Often times one can guess at a pretty good solution in an interview by simply having tried to make enough things fast enough, modular enough, DRY enough, etc. My basic hypothesis is that most interviewers wanna know you can think how to make things easier to reason about, faster, can ship something, and the you have enough depth to help them in a meaningful way.

</comment><comment><USER39> For me, my open source work has been a great way to establish credibility for finding jobs, full time or freelancing. In addition, it is a way of giving back to the software I use, and improve my skills by dipping outside my sphere.

</comment><comment><USER40> The kind that you are/were passionate about and can speak knowingly about the techs you used in the project.

In rare cases, your side project is addressing one of the businesses needs directly, giving you domain knowledge. More likely is that it does not. At this point, the value-add of that project is that is improves your understanding of the techs you used. Can you talk about the pros and cons of using Go/React/Angular 2/techBuzzwordDuJour? That speaks to your passion and creativity, and stands to improves the knowledgeable of the team that hires you.

tl;dr: Do something fun that you enjoy. The rest takes care of itself.

</comment><comment><USER41> Leading a side project up to release is already a plus : it means that you can build a product by yourself, which is actually quite rare among developers (few even try, many of those who try never get it done).

On top of that, having a side project which actually has users is better : this gives you street cred and also demonstrates you can communicate with stackholders.

If you have a side project in the same field than the business you're trying to get in, obviously, this is almost an instant hire. Developers often think business domain is a detail, business people don't.

</comment><comment><USER42> Find a company that works with open source projects, and contribute to them on your own time. Bonus points if you actually use them for your own projects so you are able to provide real-world use cases and feedback to them.

This especially helps if the company is a startup, in which case they most likely are understaffed to keep everything up to date and bug-free. They will also be more likely to respond to your feedback in an actionable way besides a "thank you" from a maintainer.

</comment><comment><USER43> Beyond just showing potential employers you have skills and can apply/talk through them (and demos work fine for this purpose; I would't worry), if you want a specific job then it's helpful to have side projects in the target domain. e.g if you want to do data science for a civic minded nonprofit, maybe have a side project doing analytics on one of the census data sets, etc.

</comment><comment><USER44> Side projects are great to get recruiters' attention and also a great filler if you want to show what you can outside of your previous job. But even if you have an awesome side project you may still get rejected. So in the end if you want a job I will focus on getting really good at solving interview questions. It is broken. You can optimize for it.

</comment><comment><USER45> IMO anything you like. Could be library, jquer/react plugin, theoretical work.

Just released my side project: [http://libretaxi.org](http://libretaxi.org) \- it is open source, useful for some users, code is kinda clean, plenty of tests.

Just show how you can take an idea and implement it. So your employer will know what to expect.

</comment><comment><USER46> I get a few leads from my github account here and there and because I have been working more on closed-source side projects, my activity on github has been low for the past year, generally open-source projects that will be good to show for a job would probably have software that shows you're up on the latest tools and have some testing

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm going to second the library idea. If you have a library released and get a few users, you'll start getting bug reports, feature requests, etc. You'll be able to show companies that you were able to manage work effectively (prioritization), write good code, write good tests, etc.

</comment><comment><USER48> What you need to get through the door is experiences at real companies, on real projects, serving real users.

No one cares about side projects, outside of juniors who got nothing to sell. It's very likely that noone even ask about it during the interviews.

Put a link to a random github just to have a link and you're good.

</comment><comment><USER31> A side project may help you land a meeting, but it won't matter during a technical interview.

</comment><comment><USER49> Think of a web application. Anything, Trello, Twitter, Harvest, Facebook.

Re-build said web application in your own image. Pretend you are going to release it to the public even if you aren't. Develop everything a public app would need.

As long as you learn a lot, that should be sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER50> For me, coding simple games was extremely valuable.

First, you can publish them as apps, which is fantastic for resume building. But also its the best way I've found to practice all the algorithms you'll eventually be asked to implement in coding interviews.

</comment><comment><USER51> The only thing that would peek my interest when interviewing someone would be something that is actually finished and does something useful. Having dealt with a project long term and stuck to it is also a plus.

</comment><comment><USER52> Open source work impresses me the most.

</comment><comment><USER19> I would say any project that is non-trivial and is of some use. Does not have to be large. In fact it could even be of no practical use, if it shows some of your programming skills and knowledge (preferably on aspects that also happen to be useful in jobs). But the projects with no practical use will likely have less chance of getting you what you want - though some chance still. As with many things, it depends - on the company / job / etc.</comment>


What Can AI Really Do? - <AUTHOR> https://alexkolchinski.com/2020/06/09/what-can-ai-really-do/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks, author here! I've spent the last couple of years working on a combination of AI research and startups, and I've had quite a few conversations about what AI can really do. This is my attempt to summarize my thoughts and separate the fluff from the reality. I'd appreciate any comments from you about what you agree and disagree with, and anything that I missed!</comment>


Ask HN: What's a reasonable affiliate marketer charge? - <AUTHOR>

We will shortly be launching a b2b service, basically a subscription webapp.
We plan initially to market via a) our investor's high traffic website, and  b) with various affiliate networks.
So we can begin negotiating I'm trying to get a feel of what a typical cut (revenue share) might be. For the investor's site we'll do CPA, and I guess the same/equivalent for the affiliates.
The complicating aspect here is that we do not intend to have fixed length subscription contracts. It'll be recurring billing monthly until the customer cancels. At this point we have no idea what the typical length of subscription might be.
Any thoughts on both appropriate deal structures and rev shares much appreciated.
Thanks <comment><USER2> The revenue share model is going to be your best bet until you are capable of determining your lifetime value for a user.

It is rather impossible to speculate without knowing the niche and the price point for someone to subscribe. Even then things such as conversion rates, landing page sign up process, and website copy all have influence on whether a campaign is going to be profitable (read: worth the time) of a proper affiliate marketer.

It can be somewhat tenuous going down this route before ever even doing in house testing so my advice would be to start there first before approaching affiliates/networks if you are serious about going down this route and succeeding.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm guessing the problem is that since you dont know how long users will stay on the monthly contract for, you dont know how much each user , on avg, will make you ergo don't know what to pay affiliates for commission?

Easy solution. Have your commission be a recurring commissions. Basically they get X% of each recurring payment. That way the marketers are trying to target users who will stay on board for a long time (ie. make them more commission).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I think we'll have to do something like this. We can certainly do this for our investor's website, but not sure how things are set up with third-party affiliates and whether this is even possible.

Any idea what a typical cut might be? Or is this like the length of string?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, its definitely possible (I own an affiliate network). Depending on how robust the tracking software your using is, you should have that option available.

Typical cut is a tougher question. What price are you thinking for as monthly subscription?

<comment><AUTHOR> probably around £50 - £100 / month

<comment><USER3> I'd say do something like this.

Flat rate on initial signup + % of every recurring payment after (this way you can get away with giving them a smaller percent than if you just did straight %)

$20 on Initial signup and payment + 15% of recurring payments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Egypt arrests scuba divers accused of cutting Internet cable - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.france24.com/en/20130328-egypt-arrests-scuba-divers-accused-cutting-internet-cable

<comment><USER2> This may not be related to the cable damage. Other reports have a dragging boat anchor damaging the cable, and the cable damage point is said to be too deep for SCUBA diving:

[http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/03/28/2213222/ship- anchor-...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/03/28/2213222/ship-anchor-not- sabotaging-divers-possibly-responsible-for-outage)</comment>


Conditional instructions in the ARM1 processor, reverse engineered - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2016/01/conditional-instructions-in-arm1.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> It's interesting to note that, in the new 64-bit ARM ISA, they moved away from this "every instruction is conditional" design. In the new ISA, only a few branch instructions execute or not based on a condition.

At the same time, the 64-bit ISA doubled the number of registers, which probably was made possible by the instruction encoding bits freed by removing this conditional instructions feature.

<comment><USER3> Conditional instructions had been removed for one reason, not related to the register encoding: they were at odds with the OoO execution.

<comment><USER2> Yes, as the designers of the RISC-V ISA (an unrelated recently-designed ISA) explain ([http://riscv.org/spec/riscv- spec-v2.0.pdf](http://riscv.org/spec/riscv-spec-v2.0.pdf) page 17):

"Both conditional move and predicated instructions add complexity to out-of- order microarchitectures, adding an implicit third source operand due to the need to copy the original value of the destination architectural register into the renamed destination physical register if the predicate is false."

But removing predicated instructions on 64-bit ARM freed four bits on the encoding of every instruction. What's the obvious use for four extra instruction bits? Adding one bit to each register field, thus doubling the number of registers. That is, my guess is that having twice the number of ISA- visible registers was a consequence of removing the predication bits, not its cause.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't program the ARM1, but I programmed the ARM2 extensively in assembler. The ARM2 was very similar to the ARM1 (it had a multiply instruction and a co- processor interface).

The conditional instructions were one of the things that made the ARM really fun to program in assembler. The others being that lovely array of 15 general purpose registers, and knowing that each instruction took 1 cycle (4 for memory accesses) meant that you could optimize the code by looking at it instead of having to run it!

Unfortunately conditional instructions and superscalar / out of order execution don't mix, so they can actually slow your code down now-a-days if you are running on a modern ARM processor.

<comment><USER5> IIRC, that's why they were removed in ARMv8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The more you know, the more you know you don't know. Interesting article, even if I only really understood the title.</comment>


About My Switch From Mac To Windows - <AUTHOR> http://photofocus.com/2013/06/10/about-my-switch-from-mac-to-windows/

<comment><USER2> This guy is verbose...

He should have made the switch during apple2->g3... Everything he's complaining now happened then. Cpu changes because of cost. Dreadful performance. Photoshop not optimized anymore. Etc

Also, I'd eat my hat if the performance change in photo preview rendering came from faster gpu. It's 99% IO</comment>


Days of the Dolphin: Cetaceans in Cold War Science and Science Fiction (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://wearethemutants.com/2018/07/18/days-of-the-dolphin-cetaceans-in-cold-war-science-and-science-fiction-part-two/ <comment><USER2> I find any conversation about dolphins and science fiction that neglects David Brin's "Startide Rising" [1] to be criminally negligent. It was even published in the Cold War (1983). Such a wonderful book if you haven't read it.

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

<comment><USER3> Ditto Larry Niven's "World of Ptavvs". Written in our Cold War, set within a future Cold War between Earth and Belt and a final act that is actually described as pure Dolphin.

And completely agree on Startide Rising. The first time I saw Dolphins in the wild I was could not help but think of ST's beautiful haiku-like Dolphin poetry

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the 2nd of a series of 3 articles:

Part 1: [https://wearethemutants.com/2018/07/03/days-of-the- dolphin-c...](https://wearethemutants.com/2018/07/03/days-of-the-dolphin- cetaceans-in-cold-war-science-and-science-fiction-part-one/)

Part 2: [https://wearethemutants.com/2018/07/18/days-of-the- dolphin-c...](https://wearethemutants.com/2018/07/18/days-of-the-dolphin- cetaceans-in-cold-war-science-and-science-fiction-part-two/)

Part 3: [https://wearethemutants.com/2018/07/19/days-of-the- dolphin-c...](https://wearethemutants.com/2018/07/19/days-of-the-dolphin- cetaceans-in-cold-war-science-and-science-fiction-part-three/)</comment>


The Most Successful workplaces of the Future… - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/08/mba-mondays-guest-post-from-dr-dana-ardi.html

<comment><USER2> Most of this advice can already be seen in the "top" software employers, except this one:

> _"Don't buy resume or credentials. Buy competence, track record, character > and culture fit."_

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and other "tier-1" companies are notorious for this. Early-stage Google was even notorious for being a strict Stanford-only shop.

And this is IMO a large part of the talent shortage - the shortage is real, but is not anywhere as acute as we've made it out to be, though I am a beneficiary of this, having gone to a reasonably prestigious school. Software engineering salaries are climbing through the roof while competent programmers get passed over all the time for not having the right credentials. Employers complain constantly about the difficulty of hiring, while giving only cursory glances (if that!) at resumes from non-top schools.

This annoys me to no end - many of the best coders I know never went to MIT, Stanford, CMU, or Berkeley, and many of them never got their "break" until much later. _Eventually_ , after years of treading water, a name brand company will give them a shot, and once they've covered themselves in magical recognized-employer pixie dust, the offers start flying in.

It's all incredibly inefficient and awful.

<comment><USER3> I know this sounds true, but I somewhat doubt that it is. Google, for instance, has a reputation for preferring candidates from top schools. But it is also hiring out of many of the subfields where the talent shortage is most acute. I'm pretty familiar with one of those (appsec), and my perspective is that Google is (a) absolutely not passing on people because of credentials, and (b) having as hard a time as anyone staffing.

Similarly: it is very hard for us to hire (in particular, it's very hard to fill the top of the recruiting funnel) --- and we could obviously give a shit where anyone went to school. Again: same prickly subfield. But I've got reason to believe this is true of mobile development, Rails, customer acquisition/marketing, and high-end UI as well.

I'm sure there are people who know Java and C++ and went to SIU instead of UIUC who are having a hard time, and that they'd have had an easier time if they went to a different school. But they'd also have an easier time if they watched the market and made sure to cultivate aptitude in the subfields with the most demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Hire competencies but remember: hire with your heart. Make sure new workers fit into the preexisting culture, while also importing their expertise. Become their sponsor – onboarding is essential. Spend time listening. Give them what they need to succeed._

Absolutely fantastic advice. Too many employers bring in someone new, help them get up to speed and then abandon them to assimilate themselves into the workplace.

The best leaders listen to their employees and give them the tools to help them play to their strengths. It's also frustrating how few people realise that the simplest things can make the world of difference to an employee such as a better chair or fresh fruit deliveries.</comment>


Finding a technical co-founder - <AUTHOR>

Hi!
I would like to hear your opinion on a specific topic. I had an idea about a start up that could evolve to something pretty good, so I decided to go ahead with this idea. However, from the first moment I had a big problem. I couldn't find a technical co-founder. I have some programming experience but I just graduated from high school so I don't feel that I could take on my own shoulders the whole technical part. None of the people that I know in real life have a strong programming background so I have no other option but to search for a co-founder in the list of my "online friends", people that I have never met before and I don't know if our chemistry will work fine.
So, what do you think? Should I take the risky road and look for a partner online or should I wait a couple of months for college where I will be able to meet people with similar interests and skills?
Thanks <comment><USER2> Sounds like you have 2 months to build the first feature or two, even just a clickable demo. Where ever you look for a tech co-founder this would put you ahead of 75% of the rest of the "idea" guys!

Love to hear how you get on and feel free to hit me up once you have something(anything) to show :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I will let you know in a couple of months!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Apart from college, it may be a good idea to find out about some techie events / meetups near you.

Most technologies will have a local usergroup holding frequent meetups which you could attend to meet up with interesting people.</comment>


Single Payer Is Not a Principle- the Principle Is Universal Coverage - <AUTHOR> http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/single-payer-is-not-a-principle/ <comment><USER2> The three issues of healthcare:

1\. Who has access to it?

2\. How much does it cost?

3\. Who pays for it?

This article mostly addresses (1) and somewhat (3), but doesn't really give enough attention to (2). If pharmaceutical companies are granted a patent for a drug, then they have the sole capability to set the price, which the purchaser of the drug will be required to pay. The most obvious example is that of Martin Shkreli, who bought a patent for an _existing_ drug and hiked the price.

How do you fight someone like Martin Shkreli who raises the price?

One option: don't buy the drug until the price is lowered. Collateral: anyone who doesn't have access to the drug. Problem: it is "unethical" to not pay for a drug that could save someone's life. (That is, our emotional brains set the value of a life at infinity).

Another option: set price controls for drugs. Problem: pharmaceutical companies will inevitably lobby the government so that the "right" price control will be a very high one.

Yet another option: Remove patents altogether. Problem: This removes the incentive to produce pharmaceutical drugs with a low barrier to entry (which is practically all pharmaceutical drugs).

So, any discussion of healthcare that says we need "universal coverage" needs to balance all of these issues. So far, everyone seems to ignore (2).

<comment><USER3> > Yet another option: Remove patents altogether

Another option: free market, but create a streamlined process for removing patents in a punitive fashion so bad actors like Shkreli can lose their patent within a very short time for price gouging.

<comment><USER2> How do you determine whether a price is "price gouging"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why couldn't hospitals.. create a union... where they negotiate together for better drug prices, AND they ALSO become the insurer-- your primary hospital is your insurer--you pay them monthly to keep you healthy. They get recurring income from sick/healthy people alike, they get to control the costs...and they could set prices to be related to income...say 4% of income goes to healthcare... When someone travels to another hospital, their primary hospital picks up the bill...etc... I think costs could be a LOT lower because w/out insurance agencies there's more money for the hospital directly and being MRR the hospital can have a better idea of how much revenue they bring in on average per month.

<comment><USER5> I believe this is basically Kaiser Permanente and it exists. The main thing missing is the income-based payments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Paying for it will always be the problem, but not just who pays for it, but whom will be paid for those services. IMO the problem with today's healthcare and insurance dilemma is that everyone wants to get in on the gravy train. Doctors, specialists, and everyone in between, are eager to take a fee. Pharmaceutical companies charge just about whatever they want because they know, eventually, they'll get paid. Insurance is best left to the private market, because if it goes universal through the government, then there will never truly be any limitations on what is covered, how much is paid, and the system will collapse upon itself.

For those that want to draw parallels to other nations, please remember those nations tend to be considerably smaller than the U.S., and they've had a LOT longer to work on these problems.

For my two cents, healthcare in America could be greatly improved with the following:

1) No one gets turned down for insurance, no matter what. Even if it's just basic prescription drug coverage, some basic level. 2) The cost of insurance is tied to your income, with the price gradually increasing as your wage increases so people are not forced to keep a low paying job for low paying insurance, unless of course that's what they want. 2a) The longer you have continuous insurance the more coverage you get, and the lower your costs. Incentive people to get, maintain, and keep insurance. 3) A cap on the price of drugs that have been on the market for more than 2 years. 4) Exclusive patents on drugs no more than 4 years. 5) Insurance is available nationwide, portable, and covers you no matter where you live, work, or go. 6) Finally, if you cancel your insurance you may not reapply for insurance for six months. Stop people from dropping insurance and waiting to pick it up only when they need it.

There are a dozen holes you can poke in that, I understand, but it's a start, and it's a short law that I think many would agree with.

</comment><comment><USER7> Article points out that the important thing is that everyone has healthcare that they can access as they need to. Many ways to get there, and Single Payer isn't the only option. Rather partial to the German system myself...

</comment><comment><USER8> The real underlining principle is a question: Should healthcare be the responsibility of an individual, or a collective responsibility of a group?

Without some agreement on this principle, we will continue to spin our wheels.</comment>


Let's talk about iMessage again - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/09/lets-talk-about-imessage-again.html <comment> matt-attack From the comments:

> Apple controls iPhones. They have root access, you don't. It's the future > that Richard Stallman predicted in The Right To Read, except he thought it > would be Microsoft. In this kind of situation, why would you even mention > key substitution attacks? It's like speculating about the owners of an > Internet café implementing a TLS MITM attack in their own network's router > in order to spy on HTTPS connections originating from their own machines. > Why bother when you're root?

<comment><USER2> Google, too, actually and it has even acted on it in the past to remove some apps/malware. Same for Microsoft remotely uninstalling Tor from Windows machines.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft does not give a shit about Tor. There are, however, botnets that install Tor, and anti-malware software that will try to remove those botnets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Another perspective on iMessage -- one I 've heard from some attorney > friends -- is that key server tampering sounds like a pretty good compromise > solution to the problem of creating a 'secure golden key' (AKA giving > governments access to plaintext).... I see two problems with this view. > First, tampering with the key server fundamentally betrays user trust, and > undermines most of the guarantees offered by iMessage._

That horse has left the barn already. Services like OnStar have been repeatedly used and abused by law enforcement; once the service is created, the government gets a warrant (sometimes?) and undermines the service without any regard for the trust in company providing the service. We are not likely to be able to change that reality without a serious overhaul/oversight of the government's warrant scope and process.

</comment><comment><USER5> There is ALWAYS a weak link. It's a part of the problem. It's built in. you make choices about trust and you either stick with them or you don't. If you change, you change and it's no skin off of anyone's back.

Apple has spent ages building the trust of their users. It is not in Apple's _business interest_ to lie, cheat and steal their users' data.

There are some problems that can't magically be optimized away by computers right now...humans are humans after all. If it comes out that something untoward has occurred, then we deal with that bridge when we cross it. Until then, just keep them honest and roll on messaging as you feel comfortable...or don't, it's your decision.

</comment><comment><USER6> My understanding is that the notification on phones when a new key is added is built into the OS and can't be easily bypassed. That notification shows up when the key is added. If the key isn't added on the device then messages won't be signed for it.

Also, I thought the consensus was that Apple was 'backdooring' iMessage by giving LE access to iCloud backups which include iMessage, not compromising iMessage directly?

<comment><USER7> > Also, I thought the consensus was that Apple was 'backdooring' iMessage by > giving LE access to iCloud backups which include iMessage, not compromising > iMessage directly?

Can you please expand on this? How would access to iCloud backup _not_ compromise iMessage?

<comment><USER8> The backups store messages as plaintext within the [encrypted?] backup. This compromises the messages themselves, but not the iMessage protocol nor systems.</comment></comment></comment>


How could I track if the PS4 in my company is being used? - <AUTHOR> I work at a company that have a PS4 so that us employees play on our free time. The problem is, it is just one console and if you work on another floor, is very frustrating to take the elevator and go there just to find that somebody else is already playing.
I was wandering if there's a way to remotely track if the console is turned on/off. I've checked about the PSN API, but we don't have PSN here, its just a local account. Its a policy that when you stop playing you turn the console off.
Maybe some kind of hardware at the power plug?
I've searched a lot around the web and i'm out of ideas. Can anyone help me? :) <comment><USER2> Could check out a smart power plug if you're allowed to install one: [https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Required-Control-Anywhere- HS1...](https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Required-Control-Anywhere- HS100/dp/B0178IC734?tag=uid705600-20) and the API to control it if you don't want to use an app: [https://github.com/plasticrake/tplink-smarthome- api](https://github.com/plasticrake/tplink-smarthome-api)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's just awesome. Thanks! =D I'm going to look after it

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Web cam, optional motion detection. If no motion in X minutes assume it is free. This will avoid cases where the PS4 is drawing power but not "in use" (ie background updates, etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> it is a good idea! But I think it would not work 100% because the room of the console is very busy, so it would always have motion, people may just walk in front of the TV

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do PS4s respond to ping or otherwise respond differently to the network when they are turned on?

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent idea, its simple and doesn't involve hardware. Thanks! i'll look into it</comment></comment>