Music Sales Are Just 6% of Average Musician's Income - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/music-sales-are-just-6-of-average-musicians-income-130114/

<comment><USER2> so..this means you can just take music as you please?

Music is only 6% because they can't make a living by selling it. We might actually have better music (and a dependence from the music industry) out there if independent artists could make a living (even if it was small)..almost like a startup selling software/services.</comment>


Alex Jones' Infowars supplements are overpriced, mundane vitamins–watered down - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/alex-jones-infowars-supplements-are-overpriced-mundane-vitamins-watered-down/ <comment><USER2> Alex Jones is a very interesting performance artist. You really don't know what you are going to get with him.

Politics aside, his method acting is extremely interesting.

He has tried to monetize his audience by selling items they might be interested in. For some reason, I guess they sell relatively ok.

But I disagree with his approach on this, because they are of dodgy quality and utility.

I think he originally tried to sell books and t shirts, but his audience isn't loyal/interested enough to buy those types of things.

So, it's now turned into this weird, ultra-conspiracy theorist site that attempts to sell snake oil.

He's like the Dr. Oz of conspiracy theorists!!</comment>


Google Gadget Ventures: $5k grant with up to $100k seed funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/gadgetventures/ <comment><USER2> No purchase necessary. Many will play, few will win. Void where prohibited.

But seriously, although this sounds great, nearly all of the Gadgets I see are content, not technology. Are they going to give someone $5,000 to take even cuter pictures of kittens for Cute Kitten of the Day? Or are they trying to go after the market Facebook is courting and get people to make more mini-apps?

<comment><USER3> Define "apps". Arent' majority "apps" online are nothing more than HTMLsed SQL queries? (i.e. "content")

<comment><USER2> Good question. I'm kind of wondering what gadgets they have in mind and I guess it's gadgets with a feature set. If you have features, they'll front you some cash to improve or add features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It doesn't say what percent of the business that $100K would take.

</comment><comment><USER5> On a related note, which "Widget" platform is most popular? I want to create a widget for my content eventually. I guess one should just support them all, but perhaps some make more sense than others? Guessing: OS X users are the most avid widget users?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is really cool. Google is going into Venture funding in their own unique way...

</comment><comment><USER7> Finally a company that wants to encourage people to build products on their platform. Why didn't MS or Apple do this 15 years ago?

<comment><USER7> More ranting! Why on earth must you pay for a copy of Visual Studio? Microsoft should be giving it away free with all copies of Windows. Or at least making it free to download.

<comment><USER8> "Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as "basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator") for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime... also free. The C++ compiler is now free. Anything to encourage developers to build for the .NET platform, and holding just short of wiping out companies like Borland."

\- Joel (<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html)>

<comment><USER7> Just trying to figure out how to get onto the Empower ISV program (plus the $875 per year for us in Australia!) is just proving my point about how hard it is to start developing for MS compared to Google now: https://partner.microsoft.com/

Get a Microsoft Live ID, sign up for the partner program, then what do you do? (Not supported in Firefox either)

How is this going to compete with the ease and speed of Google's offering or even Ubuntu+Lamp/ROR etc. and el cheapo shared hosting?

<comment><USER8> Joel's point was that they _have_ to put at least some hurdle, otherwise, they would crush Borland and co, which would be a bad thing, since they provide devs useful tools.

I don't really know whether that's true or not, but it makes some sense.

Plus, MS has 99% control over the desktop, so it doesn't really make sense for them to give the tools away. Or else what, Linux will steal market share from them?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does PRISM make you more or less interested in working for the NSA? - <AUTHOR>

After 9/11, I thought if 2 planes could hit the towers, the government obviously doesn't have the sort of super-secret technology I thought they did. Then, we learn about PRISM; so maybe we do. And more importantly, given the nature of big data and technology, maybe I could help...but should I. Since I couldn't answer the question for myself, I thought I'd put it out to you all.<p>What do you think? <comment><USER2> I have zero interest in assisting the government spy on people. Some spying, e.g. during wartime such as the work done at Bletchley Park, may be legitimate, but given our current ongoing state of emergency and war against a non-state enemy, it is far more prone to abuse—as we've been seeing lately.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, the nature of classication is one where you need training data from both groups, those who are and are not people of interest. However, if you could use your skills to make sure we have less false positives, would you?

Spying is contentious and that's part of the reason I asked this question. The other part is, whether we choose to believe it or not, we might be able to keep the country better than randomly safe if someone statistically attempts to classify those who intend to do us harm vs. those who don't. And, like it or not, the amount of info that's required to attempt to do this well is large, personal and intrusive.

I don't disagree that someone could potentially SELECT * FROM DB WHERE NAME='CANDIDATE JOHN SMITH' AND MESSAGE_TO=(FEMALE != WIFE) AND COUNT >= 5

But, on the other hand, it could also find sleeper cells.

What say you?

<comment><USER2> The ends do not justify the means. One price of living in a free society that does not spy on its citizens is the greater risk of attack, and I find that an acceptable tradeoff. Total security is an impossible goal, even if you destroy the right to privacy in its pursuit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a student of both mathematics and computer science, I was seriously considering starting my career at the NSA. (I actually interviewed at a conference once and applied to their summer program. My academic advisor even connected me with an old student of his who worked at the agency.) Now, I am really glad that I decided against pursuing that track; heading to SF next week to work in industry. (In the past year, my primary interests fell away from academia, and I was mostly interested in the federal loan-forgiveness program, since I have a lot of those.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you mean, working for the NSA with the intention of getting access to secrets and then leaking them?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't mean in that sense. And, though I sense your question is somewhat sarcastic, I'll pose this to you. In the same way that a person joins the military to do a job, protect our interests both domestically and abroad, to the best of their ability, without the luxury of being able to question the mission; does anyone in the hacker news community feel the same way?

For example, do any data scientists feel like they could make a meaningful contribution toward increasing the performance of PRISM's algorithms, thereby reducing the number of false positives and helping keep the country safer.

The hacker ethos is one of distrust of big corp / government and a greater responsibility to the people and their rights. But, despite what we might like to think, people will die and maybe, just maybe, some of us might be able to help.

Granted, our values are only meaningful if we adhere to them during trying times. And, poorly paraphrased, those who seek to tradeoff their freedoms for security, get neither.

And thus, hopefully, you can see why I asked this question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is not published, and never will be, is how many real terrorist threats or sleeper cells have been taken out because of PRISM intelligence gathering? All the public are wanting to see is "USA IS SPYING ON ME" however I will say I think the public would be outraged if there was no PRISM and if terrorists kept attacking the country.

You either spy on your own country (because sleeper cells live in your country) and defend it better or you don't and you get attacked... people want the best of both worlds, life doesn't work that way!

<comment><USER6> I don't really care how many real terrorist plots have been foiled by my PRISM, because the main reason they exist in the first place is America's hyper-aggressive foreign policy.

Thanks a lot NSA/CIA for saving me from the threat you created! Real great work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It makes me want to develop applications that spread the use of encryption.

</comment><comment><USER8> Certainly if you're good at math, or languages, or computers, or analysis, or some bits of electronic engineering, then working at GCHQ / CESG is interesting work with skilled people. And Cheltenham is a nice enough place to live.

They do have a _lot_ of computer stuff.</comment>


Most Americans don't realize what companies can predict from their data - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/most-americans-dont-realize-what-companies-can-predict-from-their-data-110760 <comment><USER3> I'm increasingly thinking that targeted ads are eerily similar to Isaac Asimov psychohistory[0]. E.g. you cannot reliably predict individual behavior, but with right|enough data you can reliably predict how a large enough population will act.

This is why individually we often feel that they're off the mark, or we're thrifty enough to ignore the ads or political or other targeting. But like others have pointed out, data is out there, and 'they' have infinite tries to get it right. And more importantly, it works already today. And it's impacting everyone, so as an individuals, we also get impacted in indirect and subtle ways when e.g. friend of ours raves about new toy she bought without even realizing that she chose this product over the other because of all the ads that she never clicked.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_\(fictional\))

<comment><USER4> Great analogy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not thrilled about the amount of information being hoovered up, but....the predictions being made with it aren't terribly impressive.

Facebook should know a great deal about me, but the advertising categories it puts me in are either completely obvious (based on locations and group memberships that I've explicitly told it), or bonkers. It currently thinks I'm part of multiple wildly incompatible religions and political groups and am interested in a weird collection of abstract concepts ("decay"?)

Amazon thinks that my interests are dominated by textbooks and vacuum cleaners (if only!)

Twitter has correctly sussed out that someone who mostly follows scientists might be interested in science....or dogs.

<comment><USER6> > I'm not thrilled about the amount of information being hoovered up, > but....the predictions being made with it aren't terribly impressive.

Conspiracy theory: what if they intentionally throw random garbage in there so you don't get paranoid? The things they want to hit you with will still be there, but they'll be surrounded by misses, and you're inclined to think "wow, they sent me an ad for a new dishwasher just as soon as mine broke, but they also sent me an ad for cat toys knowing full well I'm allergic to cats"? The dishwasher is still a great hit, but less suspiciously so.

<comment><USER7> > Conspiracy theory: what if they intentionally throw random garbage in there > so you don't get paranoid?

That's not a paranoid conspiracy theory (and certainly not something that should be down-voted to oblivion). It's well documented that Target did that exact same thing to throw off its customers, so they wouldn't be weirded-out by its pregnancy-prediction algorithm.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how- targ...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target- figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/):

> "Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women > would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We'd put an ad for a lawn > mower next to diapers. We'd put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant > clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

> "And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been > spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her > block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook > her, it works."

<comment><USER5> Predicting a pregnancy sounds so creepy and personal, but it actually seems like it should be one of the easiest life events for a retailer to predict.

The story plays up changes in consumption (scented->unscented lotion) but there are also whole categories of products that are used only by pregnant women (e.g., maternity clothes, pre/perinatal vitamins). Another huge swath of the store is devoted to infants (clothes, diapers, toys, formula). There are also really strong demographic priors (women only, 18-40 or so, though you could fine-tune that age bracket much more precisely with socioeconomic status (credit score?) or zip code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The thing that makes me increasingly concerned is the possibility of an entity using this data-surveillance NOT so they can sell us more crap, but for ulterior malicious purposes.

We already got a taste of what this can mean with cambridge analytica.

But what if some hate group (or other extremist org) with deep pockets decided to buy up and use such data in more sinister ways, targeting individuals or organizations at large scale, developing "Stasi style" dossiers to use as leverage for future actions?

The information would not need to be "perfect" but it could get increasingly more accurate over time depending on how much attention they focus on their targets.

<comment><USER9> Just imagine if it's just some tech guy, maybe unemployed or something, tired of being broke, who just needs to pay rent or something? That's what's concerning, people don't even need to have a cause, they can just be desperate. The government will be tracking the people who have a cause. You can go to the government to get help against those people because those people have something to lose. What about the people with _nothing_ to lose? More and more people are out of work or underemployed, but I'm pretty sure the number of people who need to pay their bills remains constant.

All of a sudden all this data starts to make well off people look more like meal tickets. Imagine how easy it would be to get money out of that rich looking lawyer guy who's having an affair? Or maybe the well off looking doctor lady who voiced some views about blacks that her hospital, and the local naacp, might find interesting?

This economy, combined with massive data retention and security breaches, will make for some real perverse incentives in the future. We could conceivably get to the point where all you'd need to be is some guy with internet access who needs to pay rent by the end of the month.

<comment><USER10> Right, and what if you can also fabricate the evidence used for the blackmail. Image generation techniques are improving year over year and we've gotten to the point where generating a video of a person saying anything you want in their voice with their face is coming closer to the realm of home computing power. Anyone with the time could focus on hacking social media accounts or even just faking a sceenshot. The media doesn't need much inclination or evidence to start the slander.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, what I'm getting at more is the stuff that doesn't make it to the level of the media, but some guy could still use to make money. The media won't care about some random lawyer having an affair, but the lawyer's wife would. The media won't care about some random doctor who talked about how she could off the sub-human blacks if she wanted, but it'll be about 5 seconds before lawyers and, more importantly, medical review boards, start looking into statistics at her hospital.

You have to be prominent before the media cares, but there are plenty of people with money who are _NOT_ prominent, and I suspect they'd make very tempting targets. In fact, I'd bet the people at that level would actually be more likely to pay up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > General interest data | .... political leanings, magazine and catalog > subscriptions .... preferred {celebrities,movie genres,music genres} ... > {Bible,New Age/organic} lifestyle ...

If they wanted to get people's attention, this list should have included "preferred pornography" and maybe even "the other type of pornography that is viewed when your spouse's cell phone and your cell phone are in different zip codes.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wrote about this relatively recently, basically there's now enough data and enough good systems out there that companies can start predicting what you'll do next.

This has been a thing since credit scores. However, now it's to the point they can even mimick your voice and predict how you'll respond to situations.

We are walking dangerously and blindly into a nightmare right now, and no one seems to realize it.

<comment><USER13> Seems like it. I tend to watch specific type of videos at specific time of day on YouTube. Even though I watch tons of other videos on the same account, YouTube can do a pretty good prediction at that time of day and present me the videos I'm going to watch. I find it so useful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Have mentioned it before. Watch any recent videos of Yuval Noah Harari and he almost always talks about the concept of 'The Hackable Human'. Forget about what data they have. Soon they will know more about you than you do. It has far reaching effect but let's hope humans find a way to keep outsmarting technology.

</comment><comment><USER15> If data collection can be sifted to discover behavior of groups...

And groups of people can have that behavior correlated to cultural and ethnic and racial factors...

Then, technically, isn't all of Silicon Valley violating the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s? For example, let's say black males statistically swipe phones a certain length and certain time... doesn't this mean ads targeting them can be engaging in disparate impact?

<comment><USER16> Maybe. _If_ such a swipe gesture discrepancy existed, ML could pick up on it as a proxy for race, despite having no concept of race and despite no human directing it to do so. One example I've heard of is lending software learning to use zip codes as a proxy for race, then systematically denying loans to minorities.

Much more egregious than this though is for years facebook was apparently allowing realtors to target only certain ethnicities. This was a case of deliberate human-driven discrimination, and as far as I know nobody has been held accountable for it. So far the tech industry has proven itself pretty good at getting around the law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funny how the brain works.

People do realize something is happening. It's why so many think Facebook is "listening" to their conversations then showing ads for "products I've never searched for then talked to about with a friend". No, FB inferred you would buy it because your friend just did.

It's hard to comprehend the effects of data collection. Which, of course, makes it even more powerful.

<comment><USER18> Just yesterday I read a post on Reddit where the OP was wondering about an online ad being mere coincidence or some deep data-collection plot.

Per the story: They had purchased ice cream at the grocery store using a credit card "never used for online purchases", and then at home they see an online ad for that very brand//flavor of ice cream. This raised alarm bells, hence the post to sanity-check.

Sometimes it's like we shouldn't fear the Terminator but the access terminal in our pocket. Other times it seems like both, or neither.

<comment><USER19> That isn't an "access terminal" in your pocket, but a fully-fledged computer and sensor platform operated by hostile actors.

The ice cream is straightforwardly due to the full purchase data being backhauled to the surveillance companies. The real wtf here is assuming that a card not being "used on the Internet" affects anything. People want to cling to this really weird "if I don't see it, it can't be happening model", as opposed to realizing that the surveillance industry is based around operating without your involvement or consent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this the only reason the current house of cards stays up and functions? I think so.

Almost no one realises what companies predict and infer from their data, or the extent of its collection. Once they see some of the surface effects they start calling it creepy or scary.

If people ever start realising the true extent, expect a backlash, surely?

<comment><USER21> Yes it is. And I always mention it on this board and others whenever people start concluding that "people just don't care about privacy."

It's not that they don't care, they just _don 't understand_ the true implications of having someone like Google or Facebook have pixel tracking on all websites on the web tracking you, or them tracking wherever you go, and the thousand ways in which that data could be misused by them, their partners, or people stealing that data from those companies.

I've noticed from other older stories that even pro-surveillance politicians don't understand what they are pushing for, as some of them were later "shocked" to discover that those very powers could _also_ be used to gather information on them. And then they started singing a different tune about the surveillance powers spy agencies should be given.

<comment><USER13> > It's not that they don't care, they just don't understand the true > implications

Just to give you a data point since you drew that conclusion. I'm fully aware of the tons of the mechanisms website use to track you and all of it's implications. I am not concerned about it at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Everything about every person, living or dead, is known in near real-time.

Seisent (bought by LexisNexus) was being used to solve cold cases in the mid naughts. Just by using fragmentary data and sifting thru millions of demographic profiles to see who matched.

[FWIW, that "What data brokers know" table is pretty good.]

\--

If we choose to protect people's privacy, give individuals control over what is publicly known about them, we'll need to encrypt demographic data _at rest_.

Meaning translucent database strategies. Just like how password files are salted and then encrypted. You need your pass

Meaning using universal identifiers. Like implementing Real ID.

It is counter intuitive that identifying (catalog) everyone is how we protect everyone. But if there's another way, I haven't heard of it.

\--

There will be some upsides to finally having one master identifiers.

Data quality will dramatically improve.

Truly portable health records.

Nearly 100% accurate voter registration (& eligibility).

The government "census" will be just running a report.

We'll daylight all the bad data broking actors.

<comment><USER23> Setting aside the ethical/political implications of a universal identifier for everyone, your description makes me wonder about the technical implementation of the ID itself.

My first thought was whether it's possible to design the syntax of the IDs, so that they're not just sequential or random, but have some inherent properties that make them easier to organize, i.e., for sorting/categorizing. Kind of like Open Location Code [0], but for people. Since they should be immutable (same ID for lifetime), I suppose it could encode birth date/location, or maybe genetic "markers".. (Edit: On the other hand, that would by itself be a leak of private data..)

Once that's globally practiced (easier said than done!), there could be a searchable database of all registered individuals on the planet. I could see the practical advantages of having such a system, but it sure does have a hint of dystopian future.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Layer in the fact that on Facebook--and other ad platforms--advertisers can import lists of people by name/contact info to target specifically using data from brokers, it gets creepier. I'm less bothered by a algorithm that tracks me and serves ads as long as I'm aggregated in the result tracking, but when they're tracking/analyzing me as a specific person is super creepy.

Edit: If you check out your Facebook > Ad Preferences you can see which companies have added you specifically to their ads by email/phone number. My list has a ton of car dealerships and real estate brokers.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the primary problem is glossed over a bit in the article. Even though most people are unaware of the kinds of information gathered about them, 36% are "Somewhat comfortable" or "Very comfortable" with the kinds of profiles being built. This seems (to me) a depressingly high number, one that indicates that there will be no grassroots rebellion against the surveillance economy.

</comment><comment><USER26> > For example, data about a mobile phone's past location and movement patterns > can be used to predict where a person lives, who their employer is, where > they attend religious services and the age range of their children based on > where they drop them off for school.

Is it me? I don't consider any of these to be particularly sensitive information.

Where you live: We used to have these things called "phone books" where they listed the name, address, and phone number of everyone in town. The world didn't collapse.

Who their employer is: My name and picture are listed on my employer's public website. Not exactly hard to find.

where they attend religious services: I don't, but of the people I know who do, nobody has ever considered it something they need to hide. Many would want to tell you and ask you to join them.

age range of their children: So? If somebody knows you have a kid aged 5-10, then they can...what?

I mean, I still try to limit how much information I expose online, but if anything this makes me less worried rather than more.

<comment><USER27> That's a rehash of a number of silly 'nothing to hide' pseudo arguments.

Phone books were not instantly searchable in bulk all across the globe. Who your employer is is not important, but in bulk to know who your employer employs and to be able to access that information in bulk and within a couple of milliseconds gives a lot of power to outsiders. I should know because I use that power regularly for my work, and trust me, lots of people we read up on would do better to keep a much lower profile online. It does not benefit their employers either.

Whether you attend religious services or not has been used to target (and kill) people in the past, and if you are willing to extrapolate a bit, was used for mass murder.

The age range of your children may not be so important, the fact that you have children may be, depending on your station in life.

The fact that you personally have not been inconvenienced by any of this - <USER2> - is not a datapoint worth recording.

<comment><USER26> > Whether you attend religious services or not has been used to target (and > kill) people in the past, and if you are willing to extrapolate a bit, was > used for mass murder.

Right, it was, long before the ability to aggregate this information en masse existed. The fundamental problem there is that there are people who want to kill other people because of their religion. Taking away information from them doesn't solve the problem, it just delays it a little. It's a form of security by obscurity.

If anything, they can still go and target the actual place of worship itself, which is not hidden. If all they care about is killing people of a certain religion, they don't need to know who they are particularly, just go to the place of worship for that religion.

The larger point here, is that if we can't trust the authority figures, the government, the corporations, etc. It doesn't matter how well we hide. The problem of a fascist government can't be solved by hiding. It has to be solved by enacting a government that's not fascist.

Edit: This is not a "nothing to hide" argument. The information listed is not the sort that is private information. Your address is not a special secret that only you can know. There are numerous legitimate reasons that the government or a corporation might need to know your address. The government needs to collect taxes and keep property records. Companies need to deliver products that you order. All of that is going to require sharing your address.

<comment><USER28> That went well for all the dutch jews in WW2 where the government also held detailed records about religious affiliation.. sometimes it is not about what is now, but what will or might be later.

<comment><USER29> Exactly. People forget the role of IT ("data processing") at all of our peril.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm curious, who do data brokers sell this data to, and how is it eventually used?

For instance, if they know where I live and who my family is, do real estate companies buy data of people that died recently to contact my family and get a deal on my house?

</comment><comment><USER31> Question if google asks you explicitly if you are OK with using such info would that be OK with most people?

</comment><comment><USER32> They don't because it doesn't provide them any value in their day-to-day lives.

</comment><comment><USER33> thats one reason why most people dont care about privacy</comment>


Big Easy Button: App Fights Crime in New Orleans - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/big-easy-button-app-fights-crime-new-orleans-n456536 <comment><AUTHOR> Writing the app is the easy part. Finding the private funds to pay for police overtime is the hard part.

This would work so well in Detroit but people would quickly get discouraged with the app if the police never show.</comment>


Ask HN: How long have you been on HN? - <AUTHOR> How has the quality of discussion and posting changed from your point of view? <comment><AUTHOR> Personally I discovered this website around 2014. I saw it mentioned in an article about a serial swatter from las Vegas who was said to visit this website frequently. Intrigued by the name, I visited for the first time. Recently I have noticed a huge drop in the quality of comments.

</comment><comment> knight-errantry just signed up last week! I have heard plenty about HN previously but my experience has been 3rd-degree connection at best. So far I am loving the quality of content being shared. Regarding the discussions, I don't know that they've changed my mind quite yet (only been a week, though) but each i learn something new and do take some time to critically explore a topic or idea, so in my book what this community offers is laudable.</comment>


How Did They Make TV Graphics in the 80s and 90s? Meet the Quantel Paintbox - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcifHi2SE-0 <comment><USER2> I grew up in the town where Quantel was headquartered. They brought one of their workstations in for kids to use, this was probably around 92/93\. I remember being blown away by how fast and responsive it was.</comment>


Freelance Software Reviewers Needed - <AUTHOR> http://www.ArgusQ.com/invitation

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, Lisa here again! I've just published my first ArgusQ blog... (www.argusq.com/blog) and I was hoping that you may want to read about how we got this all started. Yes, I wrote it, and yes this is totally self- aggrandizement, but I'm really excited that we've come this far, so I hope you'll forgive me! Btw, if you haven't already checked out our freelance software requirements reviewer opportunities, please do! We need your eyes!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just to be clear, what we're doing is helping our customers uncover issues in their vision for a feature or product before any code is written. This means that our Reviewers actually assess requirements. By finding the weaknesses in the requirements early in the process, we can enable Product Owners, Business Analysts and Product Managers to craft more complete, more accurate requirements. We've been working so hard on our platform! We hope you'll join us as we work to free the world from poor quality software!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm new to Hacker News and wanted to tell you all a little more about our opportunity. See, the ArgusQ platform enables software development organizations to hypothetically test their requirements before coding even begins. We're looking for experienced software reviewers to review functional requirements and develop What If scenarios to help product owners/business analysts think more deeply about their products. Our goal is to help rid the world of poor quality software and catch errors/contradictions/omissions/ambiguities before they get baked into a feature or product. Cool, right?</comment>


Show HN: SpeakingJpg – Hide encrypted text messages inside jpeg images - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/WolframHempel/speaking-jpg <comment><USER2> I think they are sticking the encrypted message into a jpeg metadata field?

I've been thinking for a while that a subtler version of this -- where the encrypted message is overlayed into the picture data -- would be very hard to detect.

I'm thinking down a path where using strong encryption would be illegal and all communications are monitored, so hiding the fact that an encrypted message even exists is important.

The idea is that the encrypted signal would be essentially indistinguishable from random noise so as long as the message isn't very dense relative to the picture it would be hard to determine it was even there. Also, people naturally and normally send all kinds of inane pictures back and forth so it seems like it would be hard to even infer the existence of an encrypted conversation from data sharing patterns.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, though that would require a lossless format (e.g. png) and would limit exchanges to sources that don't change the image (e.g.as email attachment) but not social networks that resize or otherwise reprocess the image

<comment><USER3> You don't have to use a lossless format for steganography, for example:

'Statistically Undetectable JPEG Steganography: Dead Ends, Challenges, and Opportunities'

[http://dde.binghamton.edu/tomas/pdfs/Pev07-ACM.pdf](http://dde.binghamton.edu/tomas/pdfs/Pev07-ACM.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography)

I remember being told that Al-Qaeda used this mechanism to exchange messages pre-9/11\. Surely there are longer established tools for this?

Edit: [https://www.openstego.com/](https://www.openstego.com/)

<comment><USER5> > I remember being told that Al-Qaeda used this mechanism to exchange messages

I don't think that was ever confirmed. Niels Provos and Peter Honeyman went looking for stego content "in the wild", examining over 2 million images, which was a lot at the time. Their search came up empty.

[http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/detecting.pdf](http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/detecting.pdf)

Edit: Apparently they did find one image, created as a demonstration for the ABC News story. [http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/stego/abc.html](http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/stego/abc.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool, but it appears to embed in a jpeg comment section with a predictable constant that marks what it is. So fun to play with, but not terribly covert.

<comment><AUTHOR> true - would make sense to make the identifier configurable and/or just iterate trough all comments in the jpg

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really cool! I actually read about this idea years ago in a book _(Dean Koontz, The Husband iirc)_. Ever since then I've wondered why it isn't more common to try to obscure messages through normal means.

I guess the data formats are too inefficient in most scenarios. Eg, encoding bytes as words is insanely inefficient, but somehow encoding them in such a way that they make grammatical sense as to not seem "off" \- I imagine would be nearly impossible and/or crazy inefficient.

Double that with trying to encrypt your encoded bytes, such that if they _were_ discovered, the encoded bytes wouldn't be blatantly obvious. That's... a lot of damn data haha.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice, I haven't looked at the code yet, but I'm curious what the 65k limit is due to?

I was just thinking though, if you're using the meta data field, couldn't that make it obvious data is hidden?

I wrote a little program a while ago to send data, by changing the intervals between packets:

[https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/timeshifter/](https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/timeshifter/)

<comment><USER6> The data is going in an APPn jpeg metadata block (jpg "comment"), max size of 65k. You could use multiple comment blocks, but this doesn't implement that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having text in the comment section does not seem very useful as most online services will resize the image and very likely strip comments (as mentioned in the readme).

A suggestion: would svg not be better ? That is a lossless format in xml format. An image could have lots of details in a very small section, actually composed of readable text that is (in some way) turned into xml. The svg in total has to be valid though.

</comment><comment><USER9> An interesting experiment would be to sent pictures of airports to eachother using this tool to send meaningless messages to different parties and see how good the authorities actually is in detecting it.

Anyone?

</comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of DesuDesuTalk used for embedding text into images posted to imageboards.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are techniques in Chinese articles supported by CPC on the topic of detecting steganography and decrypting it. Tampering a file will leave prints that aren't normal, and that could be found. So steganography maybe isn't a good idea at all.

<comment><USER12> Surely you're no worse off sending any content steganographically compared to in the clear?

Worst case, they find it, and you're in the same position as you would be if you sent it without steganography.</comment></comment>


The story behind football's innovative yellow first down line - <AUTHOR> http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/nfl/news/20130718/nfl-birth-of-the-yellow-line/ <comment><USER2> In the Eagles vs. Lions game earlier this year there was about 6" of snow on the field and tons more coming down. The field barely showed any hints of being green underneath. The photographers couldn't even use autofocus because of the size and frequency of the snowflakes.

Due to the yellow line technology, or some other augmentation they were doing live on the feed, all of the players would appear translucent for brief periods. It was really weird, but it made me stop and think about how many impressive live-processing algorithms get their hands on the video before it gets to me. It was the first time I appreciated how tough it is to do the "yellow line". This article is a very interesting insight to how it came about.

<comment><USER3> I remember that game. They were using the overlay to project all the yard markers (numbers, lines were dug out). Detroit was wearing their whites, and were sometimes mistaken as snow by the computer, causing them to appear as apparitions beneath the markings.

That was my favorite game of the year.

<comment><USER4> Does anyone have a video of that?

<comment><USER5> I never watched the this sport, but I think it could be this one? [1]

When it fails, it makes people look life frosted glass [2], but actually it's extraordinary that it's still working almost perfectly.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9qYZCl_F8I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9qYZCl_F8I) [2]: [http://i.imgur.com/FExuLmY.png](http://i.imgur.com/FExuLmY.png)

<comment><USER4> Oh hum, that looks interesting, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have dabbled in a little bit of video production, and on the (rare) occasion that I catch a few minutes of televised football, that yellow line always blows me away. Mentioning how difficult it must be to whoever is actually watching the game results in weird stares as if it's the most natural thing in the world, but I'm glad to read that I'm not going crazy. And I had no idea how extensive the setup actually was.

<comment><USER7> Yeah totally, having some experience with 3D motion tracking and green screens, I was thinking: wow, it's so smooth and so perfectly tracked, AND cuts between player/grass so well. I know how finicky it can be to key out elements, so it is quite amazing that whatever algorithm they have in play can do it so well (is there a jersey color that's close to grass color lol? Wonder what the edge cases are).

<comment><USER8> It's alluded to in the article that outdoor fields and green jerseys are the hardest. For outdoor fields the lighting is affected by the time of day, cloud coverage, players moving along the field, and plenty of other things I'm sure. It says they spent a lot of time creating a unique palette for the fields and that domed stadiums were preferred by the engineers on site. Indoor lighting probably reduced the shadows a lot.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if they use any tracking technology that looks at large groups of pixels over time. If you could track a player as a closed shape moving through space, you could mask out that player from the background even if pixels on the player's uniform were identical in color to the field's palette.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had a cousin who worked with Sportvision at the time. I recall he had mentioned that early on, the support team for the line was comprised of classic nerd engineers who couldn't care less about football. And ironically, they had somebody's dream job of being sent to every single football game being covered by the line tech.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Hill liked the concept, of course, but Fox thought that the price, $25,000 > per game, was too steep. [...] Our last stop was ESPN and the reception was > decidedly different.

So interesting to see that FOX balked at the seemingly low $25k but ESPN didn't flinch and insisted on exclusivity for games they didn't even have rights to. Telling of how the networks viewed themselves and each other, but also how important it is to find the customers that are the true believers.

<comment><USER12> Reminds me of those Excite and Yahoo idiots who refused to buy Google for a cheap $1 million. Some people just don't deserve to be at the top.

<comment><USER13> But would google have ended up as google if they were bought at that price?

<comment><USER14> Cliche but, at least his, hindsight is 20/20

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When this first debuted, my grandfather (born in 1917) thought that they had a piece of nylon material that was connected between the first down markers on the sidelines. That's when you know a technology is good. It's so seamless that it never occurs to a layman that it might even be possible.

</comment><comment><USER16> I love this. I've spent a lot of time between plays imagining just what kind of engineering is behind that magic first down line. Of course, I should have known it came down to this: "Our engineering team... worked around the clock through the summer..." Sometimes I wonder if there is any such thing as a correctly scoped project that can be completed during daylight hours on weekdays.

<comment><USER17> Sometimes there are just hard deadlines you can't do a whole lot about. In this case, it was pretty much hunker down and get it done in 4 months, or wait another year. For a fledgling company, that extra 12 months was probably the difference between success and failure.

<comment><USER18> Yes, oddly enough they don't reschedule the Super Bowl for us if a job is going to take a few extra days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> His mention of the glowing hockey puck made me realize that I haven't seen a glowing puck for awhile. Granted, it may be that I haven't watched hockey as much as I did when I was a kid, but I certainly didn't see it last year when I watched some games.

When I did see the glowing puck it made me feel like I was watching NBA Jam on Ice.

<comment><USER20> Not only was it a (blue) glowing puck, but it would also make a red-orange streak on screen when there was a slapshot (er... "one-timer").

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

<comment><USER21> I remember how unpopular it was when it came out. It made a lot of sense to try; not being able to follow the puck around really was a common complaint about hockey, and the NHL, as ever, was trying to expand its base. But if you watch even a fair amount of the sport, following the puck (even when it's out of sight against the boards) is really easy, so for the majority of the actual audience, it was distracting and unhelpful. To add to it, the implementation itself was corny and overstated. So part of it was problem was that it traded power users' comfort for new user friendliness, and part of it was execution. Compare to the yellow line in football, which is both helpful to everyone regardless of football watching experience, as well as simple and clean.

<comment><USER22> The thing is that most of the time the exact position of the puck isn't really the most important thing. Where the players are and where they're going to/from seems more important. Emphasizing the puck just distracts from the actual game. I don't think it even helps newbies very much for that reason.

In terms of helping novices understand the game better, maybe visual indications of the zone the puck is in could be interesting, or direction of play so it's easier to understand off side and icing calls would be more helpful.

<comment><USER21> > Where the players are and where they're going to/from seems more important.

Another way to put that is that you can tell where the puck is based on the behavior of the players, and that's what you're actually watching. I'm only a casual fan, but I think I'd know where the puck is even if it was actually invisible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The latest sport where Sportvision used this technology is sailing, called LiveLine there. During the last America's Cup [1] they used it to show the starting, finish and boundary lines, distance between the boats,...

[1] [http://youtu.be/r0LH5cCuc_4](http://youtu.be/r0LH5cCuc_4)

<comment><USER24> That was an incredible use of the technology. I'd watched sailing on TV before, but for the first time I could actually see and understand the scope of the race and the strategies of the skippers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have always thought that it was a complex computer vision problem that made this work, very interesting that it was more than just software and makes sense.

I am tempted to think that this was the first widely adopted (and accepted) instance of augmented reality. Very cool in that context!

<comment><USER18> A lot of this has changed since then, of course. No grass swatches anymore! We have a lot more computer horsepower to throw at the problem now, plus a lot of gained experience.

We have a bay in our lab with a to-scale football field where we can run indoor tests, but on the field it is computer vision that is doing it all. The cameras are instrumented to get attitude, zoom, and so on (we have to modify the lens to get the accuracy we need), and then of course you have to compensate for lens distortion. If you look closely, the "line" is not a line, but a curve. If we drew a line it would look stupid, and not reg well in most parts of the image.

<comment><USER25> Very cool. Are you guys doing statistical filtering at all or is it strictly palette matching? Seems like your data inputs are specific enough that you are trying to get where you don't need much buffer on either side of the wavelength.

<comment><USER18> I will have to ask. I don't work with this technology, and haven't touched the code. I work in computer vision for baseball, with a completely different set of challenges.

<comment><USER26> Is an automated "yellow box" to show the strike zone ever going to happen? I feel like that would have a huge impact on the viewing experience!

<comment><USER27> I dunno. I kind of like trying to judge it visually and waiting for the ump's call.

I can also imagine MLB having similar concerns as the NFL when, for instance, they insisted on removing the line as the ball is being spotted. That is, if they are showing the strike zone and the ump's call seems inconsistent, then it wouldn't be a "good look" for the sport.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I work here, if you have any questions...

<comment><USER28> I don't actually know what this yellow line is, probably because I am from Australia. Have you got a sample video for it?

<comment><USER29> The yellow line in the 3 to 5 seconds mark in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxoYaMebF0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxoYaMebF0)

<comment><USER30> Why is it so hard to find a single HD video with this line? I searched for 'football "yellow line"' and filtered only HD videos, and none in the first page actually showed some game footage with the line. The same for 'football "first down line"'.

Is there no HD footage for these events? Or do even short extracts get removed due to copyright issues?

<comment><USER24> You won't find it with those search strings because the American viewer (presumably who is posting those videos to YouTube) takes it totally for granted.

Try searching for just "first down" with football, or viewing some game highlights on NFL.com.

<comment><USER31> I was about to say the same thing. You wouldn't even need to search first down, just watch any football footage from the last decade. The first down line is going to be in pretty much every shot. Note that it isn't always yellow. Sometimes it's orange, and there are also other lines, namely the line of scrimmage, that are marked as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here's a decent youtube video that basically shows the tech in action. [http://youtu.be/Vh9af_gXxlM](http://youtu.be/Vh9af_gXxlM)

</comment><comment><USER33> The yellow line really is amazing from a "user interface" perspective. It's so natural that I had forgotten there was a time when it didn't exist. And, as mentioned elsewhere in the comments, it seems everybody has an old uncle that swears it's just nylon between the down markers (or paint, or something else that isn't "magic").

</comment><comment><USER34> "Gepner, a TV production expert, engineering guru Stan Honey and I (the business person) -- had been inspired by Stan's invention of the glowing hockey puck technology the previous year for Fox, technology which we licensed upon leaving the company in exchange for an equity interest for News Corp."

This article opens in May of 1998, just one month before the final use of the glowing puck in June of 1998. By this point everybody in that meeting must have known how hockey fans had reacted to the glowing puck. The interesting thing is that they bravely forged ahead anyways!

Execution may have been the key difference in fan acceptance. Fox made the puck into a giant glowing and color-shifting comet that practically screamed, "PEW PEW PEW!!!". These guys made a simple line that was meant to look, as much as the technology would allow, like a simple chalk line on the turf that some poor slob had to create (while erasing another) after every down. Would we still have puck-following tech in the NHL if Fox had been run by people with even the tiniest amount of taste or restraint?

<comment><USER35> I think the glowing puck would have still died when high-definition TV came along. I think HDTV saved the hockey viewing experience, because it made it a whole bunch easier actually watch the game. The problems solved by the glowing puck then stopped being problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Impressive technology, but perhaps someone with more football knowledge could explain why they don't just paint lines on the field?

<comment><USER37> It represents the "line of scrimmage", which is where the ball starts at the beginning of each play.

<comment><USER38> The yellow lines marks the line to gain for a first down, not the line of scrimmage. Some broadcasts are showing the line of scrimmage now usually as red or blue IIRC, but yellow is used across the board for the line to gain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Preceding his accomplishments at Sportvision, Stan Honey created, in 1985, an automobile navigation system showing your car's position on a moving map.

This was before Google Maps, before GPS, and before digital maps of cities. You couldn't just go out and buy them in 1983; Stan's company, Etak, had to create them itself [1].

Per [2], here's a description of the the hardware platform:

      The original Etak Navigator was a specially-packaged Intel 8088-based
      system with 256K RAM, 32K EPROM, 2K SRAM, and a cassette tape drive
      on which digital maps and some of the operating system were stored.

The 8088 has a 16-bit address bus, thus can directly address only 64 K. Must have been some bank switching to get to the full 256 K RAM. This for all the code and geodata.

edits for formatting

\</comment><comment>---

[1] Source: Personal conversation

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

<comment><USER40> The 8088 can address 1 MiB with a somewhat wonky segment:offset addressing scheme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The few times I've watched football, I've been fascinated by this technology. I imagine football fans take it for granted at this point, but I just want to say "wow, are you SEEING this!?" For a live broadcast to be augmented in that way is damn impressive.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'd seen an interview[1] elsewhere with, I believe, the founder of SportVision where they indicated that their primary source of revenue now is selling the vast amounts of telemetry data they collect during events.

His example was of the MLB, SportVision has high-resolution data on every single pitch, the MLB teams are paying through the nose for that data to run through their analytics. SportVision indicated that, based on ball trajectory, they often know more about the state of a given pitcher's health than the team or the pitcher themselves.

[1] [http://www.sportvision.com/media/hank-adams- presshere](http://www.sportvision.com/media/hank-adams-presshere)

</comment><comment><USER43> American Football.

<comment><USER44> Exactly. Across the world, "football" usually refers to soccer; please have some consideration for the non-USA audience.

<comment><USER45> Strictly speaking that should be association football, although everyone calls it football outside the US of course.

"Football" existed before, but simplifying somewhat, just about all the modern games of football derive from rules codified at British private-education schools in the 19th century. So for example, rugby football originated at Rugby private-education school, which then developed into American football. Off the top of my head I can think of association football, American football, Canadian football, rugby football, Australian rules football and Gaelic football.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I was hoping they'd get into the later patent struggle and competitive technology. (But I guess it's really a piece about a single interview someone manager to score.)

Another company in the field (PVI) at about the same time used vision-based technology to similar effect. They got into a mutual patent infringement battle and ended up settling by cross-license.

I'm still trying to figure out why NBC (maddeningly) doesn't show the line of scrimmage. At one point I saw some vague report that NBC uses the third company in this space (SportsMEDIA) and that company has a license to the patent for the first down line but not the patent for the line of scrimmage. Which sounds silly and plausible at the same time. However, they advertise line of scrimmage as available: [http://www.smt.com/products/smart/line- visual-insert-publish...](http://www.smt.com/products/smart/line-visual- insert-publisher)

It is probably a policy decision based on a 2008 in-game controversy where the line of scrimmage was a yard off and one of the broadcasters (Madden) was using it as a basis for evaluating the call, and didn't know that the officials can't see the line.

In either case, they need to deal with it and get the line of scrimmage back in. It's a very annoying omission.

</comment><comment><USER47> i'm not a huge football fan but i've always really loved the new technology they bring to the show. the yellow line has always impressed me, and the fly- by cameras they introduced are really cool too.

i think i've seen something similar, but it would be cool to have full on video-game style indications. player markers, etc.

</comment><comment><USER48> Interesting from a startup perspective is that they raised a lot of money _first_ and then tried to figure out if they could implement the idea. This definitely is an idea where if it isn't being developed in a lab at a large corp or by government grant you would need to raise money for.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is amazing. I only had read about it but this one gives a first hand perspective. Hats off to the team! Can someone point to the algorithm/exact technology used in this? Would love to read more about the technology.

</comment><comment><USER50> I can't see how exclusivity into the playoffs was a mistake. ESPN believed in the technology and they wanted to punish their competitors. I think the creators of the yellow line should be proud to reward ESPN for their foresight and take part in enjoying the Emmy together as opposed to sharing the limelight with another TV network who never believed in the company. Financially, I would think you're in better bargaining position too: well, this year the line is $30K/game since it's proven to work and you don't need to do R&D work like ESPN did with us.

</comment><comment><USER12> I always thought it a neon lights in the actual football field.

</comment><comment><USER51> That is not football. It is Egg Shaped Handball.</comment>


The Healthy and Fit Algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://zenhabits.net/2009/07/the-healthy-and-fit-algorithm/ <comment><USER2> Eat every 3-4 hours? why? When I was at a yoga training camp (month long), we were given only 2 meals a day, at 10 am and 6 pm, with a snack (tea + one fruit, usually pineapple) at 1 pm. I felt _much_ better there, than when I was eating the _regular_ thrice a day, plus some snacks inbetween.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources for tech and regulations behind card processing - <AUTHOR> Any pointers to good resources to learn more about card processing industry? I've been interested in the idea of charging consumers their card fee, to not make high fee cards prohibitively expensive to small businesses. I assume this will be against credit card terms of service, but am interested in learning more. <comment><USER2> I like the idea. I don't have any tech resources, but from a regulatory front, look up "Regulation Z." [https://www.federalreserve.gov/bankinforeg/regzcg.htm](https://www.federalreserve.gov/bankinforeg/regzcg.htm)

It's pretty comprehensive, and dense. But don't let it discourage you</comment>


History of T (2001) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html <comment><USER3> Being an extremely young programmer (I'm 35), I had never quite understood what "dynamic scoping" is - the whole idea that scoping can somehow be done differently than "like in all the languages" was foreign to me until a few minutes ago. If you're an ignorant youth like me, here's some clarification.

Wikipedia's description is horrid, but C2's[0] is a gem:

"In _dynamic_ scoping, by contrast, you search in the local function first, then you search in the function that _called_ the local function, then you search in the function that called _that_ function, and so on, up the call stack. "Dynamic" refers to _change_ , in that the call stack can be different every time a given function is called, and so the function might hit different variables depending on where it is called from."

Sounds totally insane to me and I wonder how people made working software at all in the '80s. That said, I get happy when I remember that people often complain about how horrible it is that $OBSCURE_AWESOME_TECHNOLOGY never made it and how $TRENDY_FAD solves the same problem so much less elegantly. I mean, apparently an $AWESOME_TECHONOLOGY sometimes does win, against all odds - <USER2> this case lexical scoping. Yay Guy Steele!

[http://wiki.c2.com/?DynamicScoping](http://wiki.c2.com/?DynamicScoping)

EDIT: I just realized that shells copying all environment variables into child processes is basically a present-day example of dynamic scoping (although, fortunately, without mutation - we'd have entire data centers _on fire_ if you could mutate parent process envs). It gives me a slightly better idea how this stuff could be used to make working software.

<comment><USER4> I don't think dynamic scoping is a good idea, but I wanted to point out that it does have some advantages:

\- Sometimes you actually do want to change one of a large number of parameters for the dynamic extent of a single function call without having to make all of them parameters to that function. Classic examples are turning logging on for a single function call, changing the pen color or clipping region for a call to a subroutine that draws some kind of graphic, and running a function with the output redirected to a memory buffer instead of stdout. Dynamic scoping works great for this. My .emacs.d/init.el has an example where I temporarily set the "deactivate-mark" variable to a true value while I invoke some search and replace functions which would normally deactivate the mark, and another example where I temporarily set the "case-fold-search" variable to a false value so that the searches invoked from there will be case-sensitive.

That said, PostScript solves this problem differently, using a graphics context stack and gsave/grestore operators to enable you to make local changes to that context. Languages that support exceptions for normal control flow (as opposed to aborting the job or whatever) need some kind of defer/RAII/context- manager approach to making sure you don't forget to call grestore during the exception unwinding.

\- As the article explains, dynamic scoping can be more efficient, but it doesn't explain why. We usually read variables more frequently than we supply them with values as parameters. In a single-threaded environment, dynamic scoping allows you to compile a read of a variable as a load from the fixed memory location of that variable, even if it's a local variable, even if your functions are recursive. Static scoping, by contrast, requires you to compile reads of your local variables as indexed loads from a frame pointer which points at your function's activation record, again unless you forbid recursion. The indexed load involves an addition of a constant to a register to compute the address to fetch from, and until the 1980s this actually made your program run slower. (Nowadays it just makes your program toggle more transistors, since the addition can nearly always be computed in parallel with other operations, and it probably isn't a significant contribution to total power consumption.)

Carrying this logic to the extreme, Multics Emacs (and I think GNU Emacs as a spiritual descendant) would swap in the values of not only function-local variables in this way but all the buffer-local variables whenever you switched buffers. The logic was that Lisp code would read the variables considerably more often than you switched buffers, so it was worth making a buffer switch slower to make the Lisp code run faster.

(There's another way to implement dynamic scoping called "deep binding", but I don't know of real systems that used it.)

Dynamic binding originated as a bug in the Lisp interpreter — you'll note that it's in both McCarthy's original paper and the Lisp 1.5 metacircular interpreter — but the divergence of its semantics from the static-scoping semantics of the λ-calculus weren't appreciated until later.

Also, as a side note, it's pretty fucking sad that it's 2018 and we're still dealing with language implementations on a daily basis that do things like box all their fucking fixnums, incurring not only unnecessary inefficiency but also unnecessary memory allocation and nondeterminism, so that adding two small integers can throw an out-of-memory error or produce a timing information leak that reveals secret information to an attacker. CPython, I'm looking at you, you fucking piece of shit.

<comment><USER5> Dynamic scoping is useful for things that resemble shell I/O redirection, where you want to be able to refer to some resource in an indirect / implicit manner such that an actual resource can be injected at any time. For everything else it's just no good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Another implementation feat of T's was that it allowed interrupts between > _any_ two instructions of user code.

That was the goal, but the T3 compiler actually turned out to have a very subtle bug that manifested itself as the single hardest bug I have ever dealt with in my career. We used T to write research code for rovers and robotic arms at JPL. This code ran on two different machines: Sun3's running Solaris, and brandless embedded systems running vxWorks, but both running the same T compiler targeting the 68020 processor.

On the embedded systems we would get random crashes, but the same code running on Solaris ran flawlessly. Post-mortems revealed massive and random heap corruption, so the crash was manifesting itself long after the root cause. Because the problem was random an could not be reliably reproduced, it was impossible to find the root cause. And that is how matters stood for nearly a year until someone (I don't remember who, but it wasn't me) finally figured out how to reproduce the problem reliably. Then I spent a couple of days single-stepping through machine code until I finally found the problem: the stack pointer was being decremented while a live value was still on the stack. That value was accessed by the very next instruction. Those two instructions were simply out of order.

On Solaris this didn't matter because all the code ran in user space and was single-threaded. But vxWorks does not have a protected kernel address space. When an interrupt happens, that interrupt is processed on whatever process stack is currently active. So if you got an interrupt exactly between the stack pointer decrement and the subsequence load, the value was corrupted, and a few thousand instructions later everything would go kablooey.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious - what was the solution to the problem?

<comment><USER6> The solution was trivial: just reverse the two instructions in the code generator part of the compiler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A couple of recent related discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17716056](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17716056)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15054404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15054404)

</comment><comment><USER9> Stanford has/had a strong AI group, SAIL, that got passed around and now resides affiliated with GSB. When I was at SMI/BMIR, they had an old SAIL sign over in MSOB.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone have more detail on Douglas W. Clark's GC? Ideally the cited article or a description of the algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER11> Poor title.</comment>


ChromeBot: Slash Commands for Google Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromebot/ejdaeiahdnabjhceoobekpekohcileep <comment><AUTHOR> Playing around with Chrome extensions inspired from Slack. Would you use it? What are other useful features to add on it? Open to all suggestions and critiques.</comment>


Unraveling a Tesla Mystery: Lots of Parked Cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/business/tesla-cars-questions.html <comment><USER2> > "Groups of new vehicles are being detected in unexplained locations across > the country. Evidence being posted online has raised questions about > production, logistics, quality and even demand."

This is only news because it's Tesla.

Ford F150's are made near my hometown (Not even the only city making them). So are many versions of the Transit vans. But we're talking like 24/7 droves of trucks and vans logistically being organized and shipped out within a 10 mile area.

Sometimes it requires a staging area.

Sometimes that staging area is a parking lot in a theme park. Sometimes that staging area is an abandoned field near train tracks. Sometimes that staging area is an overflow lot for a major casino. Either way you look at it, it's weird (Like 400 white identical trucks in the middle of nowhere). Right now, they like to line the trucks up bumper-to-bumper in a weaving-in-and-out fashion with no real rhyme or reason (I think they're bored). I drove by the other day around dusk and a few Ford employees had most of the flashers on in the trucks and were randomly honking the horns.

Most of these vans and trucks have various marks on them and removed beds (Or cabin-only vans). Some already have wraps and stickers for the corporations they're waiting to be delivered to.

This is all very normal car manufacturing. Sorry.

<comment><USER3> I would say the absence of car stockpiles would be more worrying then their presence, because it shows the manufactor is unable to build up buffers for logisitcal difficulties and factory retooling. In other words this is decent news for Tesla because they have the productive capacity to build these stockpiles in the first place

<comment><USER2> > other words this is decent news for Tesla

No news is good news, then. Kinda the point I was making. No one's talking about Ford in the papers and their weird inventory methods. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's no mystery as to why Tesla is having delivery problems. It has been working on producing cars at a far more rapid rate than before. This is a very complicated problem with many parts, and Tesla is not able to focus on them all at once.

So it has wisely decided to set priorities, and worked on production before it got to deliveries, and as a consequence undelivered cars have piled up. Now production is going pretty well, and so Musk and his crew are turing their attention to the delivery problem.

You know, the more Tesla succeeds in producing the Model 3, it seems the more negative the mainstream media gets in its coverage.

</comment><comment><USER5> How about sales. The online forums are full of people who have just receive their cars.

What about all the deliveries done on the weekend?

I think someone is leaving out some facts.

<comment><USER6> The point of the article is that, despite all the talk of great demand for M3, there is a large (potentially unsold) inventory. The article documents an interesting observation and then provides probable explanations sourced from many people.

<comment><USER7> >M3

Please do not refer to the Tesla model 3 this way, call it the TM3 or just Model 3 instead. The M3 is a BMW.

<comment><USER8> >M3

Please do not refer to the BMW M3 this way, call it the BMW M3 instead. The M3 is a sub-machine gun. Also BWM Drivers get arsey about these things.

;-)

While I understand your point, in the context of this conversation I don't see many people getting confused between the Model 3 or the BWM M3.

If the topic was talking about the shortcomings of BMW's anti-theft system and I referred to the M3 I doubt you would get it confused with the M3 sub machine gun.

Can't we all just get along and not dictate how others abv stuff?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would venture to guess they are problem cars. It is more expensive in many cases to diag a new car than just to roll another off the line and reuse the known good parts when convenient. This is not ususual for any carmaker. While I harbor major moral issues with Tsla for their buisness practices, this seems like nit picking by shorts.

</comment><comment><USER10> Musk should've probably asked Bezos for Amazon's logistic expertise.</comment>


50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497/ <comment><USER2> The author's obsession with panning S&W reminds me of crazy Joe Davolla in an old Seinfeld episode ("Jerry, I've got a hair on my lip and you put it there" or something to that effect).

For me, S&W was helpful in some ways but also led me to feel that I was in a straight-jacket as I tried years ago to follow its prescriptions.

It is good to be simple, direct, brief, and clear. But simple, short, and active can become simplistic, monotonic, and rigidly unnatural. A bad writer may ignore good-writing rules, but an equally bad one will apply them one- dimensionally in arty or mechanical fashion. A good writer will do neither. Thus, while ill use of passive voice can lead to stylistic pomposity, a categorical exclusion of passive voice can lead to a staccato and unnatural style. The same can be said of any arbitrary attempt to use exclusively short words or sentences. Attempting to follow S&W without thought can lead a writer into this trap.

In my view, the best was to master English grammar is to master a highly stylized (inflected) language such as Latin and to work backward from that to the "analytic" rules that govern English. Anyone who does this will have a much greater grasp of technical points of grammar than one gets through memorizing a few prescriptive rules such as those found in S&W. Once the deeper technical points are well-understood, one can "let them go" in developing a natural writing style that nonetheless reflects a high degree of excellence for having the technical mastery underlie it. This is akin to learning to do algorithms after having mastered deep principles of mathematics. With the deeper technical understanding, your work will be far more robust than otherwise. All this is another way of saying that, to achieve excellence in grammar as in anything else, there is no substitute for plain hard work and perseverance.

If S&W has one primary fault, it lies in stating or implying (incorrectly) that mastery of a few rules can provide a good shortcut to this goal.

<comment><USER3> > _The best was to master English grammar is to master a highly inflected > language such as Latin and to work backward from that to the "analytic" > rules that govern English._

I agree with everything you said until you got to here. There are reasons to learn Latin, and it will certainly help for writing English, but putting the time in to _master_ Latin is hardly the "best" way to _master_ English grammar, which differs from Latin grammar in as many ways as it agrees. My guess is that learning to read 3 or 4 other languages moderately fluently, or just putting that time into careful analytic reading and writing in English would be just as useful. (Of course, without evidence, both of our comments here are speculative. I'd like to see some comparative studies – though to do them properly would be difficult, so I'm not sure any have been done that would really settle the matter.)

Personally, I think grammar is one of those subjects whose formal study should be delayed as long as possible, assuming that students are spending time reading and writing and carefully analyzing rhetoric and logic of what they read and hear. The emphasis on tools over content, in language just as much as in mathematics, has the potential to devalue creativity and engagement, and lends itself to the kind of rote instruction that leaves humans bored out of their skulls.

> _This is akin to learning to do algorithms after having mastered deep > principles of mathematics._

Weak analogy. The particularities of Latin grammar are not of the same kind as the "deep principles of mathematics." Maybe studying syntax in a linguistics course or two could be compared, but I still think it's a stretch.

> _no substitute for plain hard work and perseverance._

With the rest of this paragraph out of the way, you're right again with this final statement, though it's a bit of a platitude.

<comment><USER2> I think I did overstate the case for Latin in this context. It is _a_ good way to help with English grammar, mainly because (in my view) it forces you to think about and apply important grammatical principles in ways that a rules- based approach to teaching English grammar often does not. But, point well taken, it likely is not the best way to make use of one's limited time for this purpose.

I like your other points about grammar as well - very thoughtful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557618>

</comment><comment><USER5> Some advice in S&W really confused me; like, on the word prestigious: "just because it's in the dictionary doesn't mean you should use it."

Oh, okay. What? There are a lot of words in the dictionary. Is the advice that the word is used _too_ much? If so, not very clear.

<comment><USER6> I haven't read S&W, but I have three main reasons for avoiding that word:

1) If it's really prestigious, I shouldn't have to mention that fact.

2) If I want you to think it's prestigious, I should show, not tell. It was given 3 michelin stars and won best film at cannes, or whatever the case may be.

3) It's possible that many from the target markets in Asia/Europe/etc won't know what it means anyway. As such, I try not to use complex language unless it's crucial to the message.

edit: not to mention, prestige is subjective. Some people think a glowing writeup in a particular publication is prestigious. Others think it's noise. It's hard to claim either group is wrong.

<comment><USER7> _> 1) If it's really prestigious, I shouldn't have to mention that fact._

If the context for prestige is obvious but unfamiliar, for example if you are telling a fictional story and establishing background, then we don't have to assume prestige should be evident. Also, if the proper name of the subject is unknown then it would be impossible for the prestige to be evident.

 _> 2) If I want you to think it's prestigious, I should show, not tell. It was given 3 michelin stars and won best film at cannes, or whatever the case may be._

The subject may not be so important that it deserves so much attention. If the use of the word 'prestige' and its subject are secondary to the point of the sentence or paragraph, elaborating may distract from the main point. Such is the case with many abstract words that people interpret differently. If it's the main point then I agree.

 _> edit: not to mention, prestige is subjective. Some people think a glowing writeup in a particular publication is prestigious. Others think it's noise. It's hard to claim either group is wrong._

Many abstract words are subjective. I think that finding the balance between detail and abstraction is a core writing skill. Too much detail can be tedious, condescending, unnecessary and can obscure or confuse the main point. Too much abstraction and people will misunderstand the message without realizing they've misunderstood the message.

<comment><USER6> I was answering solely for myself. I'm not an author.

The only time I really choose my words super-carefully is when I'm working on promotional copy. So that's the angle that I approached it from.

<comment><USER7> Sure, I just found your comments interesting and wanted to respond.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recommend reading it anyway. It may not be the authority on grammar, but it can teach you a lot about (surprise!) style.

</comment><comment><USER9> Boy, that post sure could've used some headings or something to liven up what is otherwise a monotonous, self-indulgent rant.

One thing one has to remember with grammar is that people can't even agree on whether it's prescriptive or descriptive.

It still bugs the hell out of me when (North) Americans say "Will you write me?" WRONG WRONG WRONG, at least in a prescriptive sense. In actual English it is "Will you write TO me?". Note the difference:

\- Will you write me a letter? (indirect then direct object) \- Will you write a letter to me (direct then indirect; uses the preposition "to"); \- Will you write a letter to me? (indirect object only)

Only Americans (and possibly Canadians) do it.

The point is than in a purely prescriptive sense, that's wrong and most people tend to argue that what they use is correct. Language and grammar evolves giving far more credence to the descriptive view.

But I digress...

</comment><comment><USER10> The author of this essay is also the co-author of _The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language_

<http://www.cambridge.org/uk/linguistics/cgel/>

Unfortunately, the author doesn't recommend a good alternative to Strunk & White's _Elements of Style_.

<comment><USER11> I think the last paragraph of the article demonstrates that he believes such a thing does not exist.

<comment><USER12> Elsewhere (on the excellent "Language Log" blog) he recommends two books: for grammar/usage, the Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage; for style, Joseph Williams's "Style: toward clarity and grace".

The first recommendation I ever saw for Williams's book, FWIW, was from Richard Gabriel (founder of Lucid Inc., author of the paper commonly but misleadingly known as "worse is better" and of "Patterns of Software", and these days concentrating on poetry rather than software).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One grammar question that I don't know the answer to. When you have a statement using "than" (eg. A cow is bigger than an ant) using pronouns, what case is the word after "than" supposed to go into.

Is it always: I am bigger than him. I see him better than her. He does it better than me.

Or is it: I am bigger than he. I see _him_ better than _her_ _He_ does it better than _I_

The first one is way more common colloquially, but I see the second one used in some formal styles. And it makes more sense too - it resolves the ambiguity between "I see him better than her" [I see him better than she does] and "I see him better than her" [he is more visible to me than she is].

<comment><USER14> Pay no mind to the people who commented before me.

The phrase that follows the comparative preposition "than" is not necessarily a reduced clause. It's actually almost always a simple noun phrase, taking the default accusative case.

"I am taller than him" is Standard American. If you were to say "I am taller than he" you'll sound like a twat.

Doesn't make sense? So what. Language isn't about making sense, it's about getting points across. There's plenty more in English that's even more confusing (exceptional case marking? oh yeah, baby, figure that one out).

Hell, even if it WERE a reduced relative clause there are plausible reasons why it could still be "him", namely, "nominative" and "accusative" are structural case, not semantic case, so they get assigned depending on the assignee's position in the sentence structure, and you could easily reduce a clause and, in doing so, put its subject into precisely the structure necessary for accusative case.

<comment><USER15> As an alternative to poor grammar _and_ sounding like a twat, one might simply say, "I am taller than he is." Sure, it's an extra word, but it's both correct _and_ sounds natural.

I struggle with that occasionally. Using "him" in that sentence would make me die a little inside, but I also don't want to sound like a prick.

<comment><USER14> Speaking of comparatives, a fellow grad student here at the University of Maryland is working on a phenomena called the comparative illusion, which involve sentences like the following:

More people have been to Russia than I have.

Think about that one for a bit. LL did a post on it, btw: [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000860.h...](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000860.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> is it just me, or is the author of that article trying too hard? there's the conspicuously correct use of a semicolon; long but perfectly structured sentence with many subclauses (followed by a short sentence for contrast); etc.

i agree with the author's general comments (although I haven't read "that book"), and i am sure there's nothing incorrect in what he's written. but it's not a comfortable, relaxed piece of writing, is it?

(edit: rereading that i realised i never made my point. which is that this happens a lot. it seems to be very hard for people to write well about grammar - they always end up writing something that feels "overworked".)

<comment><USER17> This is because if you make the slightest deviation from 'correct grammar' in a piece about grammar, you'll be attacked mercilessly. Every word, every m-dash, requires an unshakable argument for its correctness in that context.

Pity really, but as long as it's cheap and easy to attack anything with a whiff of hypocrisy...

<comment><USER18> Well, when you're _making_ that sort of accusation of hypocrisy, you're best off trying to avoid it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If we're asking questions here... If a group was going into a restaurant, but saw it was dirty would it be "they changed their mind" or "they changed their minds"?

<comment><USER20> It would be: they changed their minds.

Why? "they" refers to the group members, because "they" is a plural pronoun.

"It changed its mind" would be how you could write the first phrase. In this phrase, "it", a singular pronoun, would refer to the group.

<comment><USER19> Got it, thanks. What about if it read "but everybody changed their mind" or would it be minds?

<comment><USER20> Technically, everybody takes a singular verb. Try replacing it with "every single body" or "every person".

The main ambiquity in the phrase is that 'their' isn't -technically- correct as a gender neutral third person possessive pronoun, despite its common usage in that form. (Say -that- five times fast!) If you replace 'their' with 'his or her', the agreement makes much more sense:

        Everybody changed his or her mind.

Personally, I would just rewrite it completely:

        They all changed their minds.

English is fun!

<comment><USER21> And you can get wonderfully creative with something like

"The group changed its mind"

and

"The group changed their minds"

depending on the meaning you want the statement to have. Are you emphasizing the concept of "group-think" or the independent conclusions of the individuals?

It's more poetic than

"The members of the group changed their minds".

or

"Each group member changed his or her mind".

But at least you get a ridiculous bag of options for a single sentence.

<comment><USER19> I see, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Do not explain too much."

</comment><comment><USER23> what i've always wondered is how to handle apostrophes, parentheses and punctuation. it's not what is Right, it's what will look right to the audience.

i love "hello world." ??

i love programs (especially hello world). ??

<comment><USER5> If you're serious, which is likely since the internet is worldwide, I have some advice that can help you get started. Also, I'm going to believe that your lack of capitals is a conscious choice. A method of saving time... over time.

Besides apostrophes, commas, and question marks, I have always considered special punctuation as a kind of cheat. If you're using special punctuation, there is almost always a more eloquent way of articulating your sentence/thought.

One exercise I have employed, when organizing my writing, has been to write without punctuation and in lines, every thought on a new line. Like a poem. Punctuation is essentially there to separate these thoughts, so you can start by adding the periods, then arranging your thoughts into a paragraph.

Use of special punctuation, in my opinion, is mostly a means of controlling rhythm. And the ability to ease into the rhythm of writing is largely dependent on a reader's, or writer's, familiarity with the language.

So, I would focus on periods and commas first, until you have a good familiarity with the language. That is my advice to you.

<comment><USER24> "If you're using special punctuation, there is almost always a more eloquent way of articulating your sentence/thought."

Thank you. You've just fixed my writing style. I owe you a large drink.

(No, seriously. I use semi-colons, colons and em-dashes -- pretentious and pedantic though they be; fun though it be to be better educated than my audience -- entirely too often: see? With the above quotation in my arsenal, I shall cease forthwith. Consider me indebted to you for any clarity I may thus gain.)

<comment><USER12> Some time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, and adopted a rule that every time I notice myself writing parentheses I stop and consider (1) whether I can just delete them or replace them with commas and (2) whether I can get rid of them in some other way. I find that maybe 90% of the time this leads to an improvement. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the same applies to other relatively unusual kinds of punctuation.

Remark 1: "sentence/thought" contains "special punctuation" and is indeed improved by substituting "sentence or thought".

Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-).

<comment><USER25> "Some time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, ... (1) ... (2) ..."

When I try to eliminate parentheses and similar parentheticals, I write separate sentences if possible.

<comment><USER12> Ho ho. Entirely different sort of parentheses, of course. But yes, the sentence might have been improved by splitting it up so that it didn't need numbering. [EDITED after looking again at what I wrote before, to add:] Or just by removing the numbers.

<comment><USER25> Oh ... Sorry, but I was absolutely _not_ critiquing your sentence. I specifically was not objecting to your use of parenthesized numbering.

I was trying to jump off from your solution to reducing parentheses, to say how I handle the same problem.

In an informal setting like this, I see no problem at all with casual or bumpy grammar.

My apologies, I should have included the text of your points in the quote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've long thought that this book was a subtle attempt at humor.

</comment><comment><USER26> Good article but he digs too deep. I would be happier if students just learned to use "should have", not "should of", and related constructs. This seems prevalent even among the college-educated these days.

Does a programmer's spelling and grammar correlate with the quality of his[/her] code?

<comment><USER27> I've found that it doesn't correlate with their analytical ability or ability to architect a clean system. But it does affect the readability of their code.

<comment><USER28> I would imagine that vocabulary would have a greater effect than their spelling or grammar.

<comment><USER27> It's more general English Language writing ability. This tends to be correlated with spelling and grammar.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blivand Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/10/21/blivand-design.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Posted because it discusses flat design and minimalism.

I could quote much of the article to explain why I don't tend to like flat design. It looks great, but often at the expense of functionality.

>remove all the elements you can without hurting functionality, then remove some more</comment>