The US Government has no credibility to compel anybody to weaken security - <AUTHOR> http://blog.easydns.org/2016/02/22/the-us-government-has-no-credibility-to-compel-anybody-to-weaken-security/ <comment><USER2> This is exactly how I feel about this. There would be an actual interesting debate to be had about the powers of the state versus corporations versus the rights of individuals to perfect end-to-end encryption if the state hadn't been using warrantless wiretaps and National Security Letters for the last 15 years. As it is, the state has shown it can't be trusted with that power.

<comment><USER3> It's an old debate, and I think it can be summed up in a single sentence:

 _Government would be awesome if it worked right_

I would give the FBI everything if I trusted them. A monarchy/dictatorship would be most efficient if there were a way to guarantee a good monarch/benevolent dictator.

<comment><USER4> Madison said it best:

> If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to > govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be > necessary.

<comment><USER5> People are bad, therefore we need a government made up of people are bad...

<comment><USER6> Well, yes. If you are bad, you want what's best for yourself. But if you know that the other guy is bad, then you know he wants what's best for himself. So you set up the rules of the game to ensure that he can't get what he wants without you also getting what you want.

See the prisoner's dilemma. If both people are bad, they will have the worst outcome. If either of them thinks the other is bad, then they will also be bad in order to protect themselves. So the best outcome (you are bad, and they are good) is impossible, because they know you're bad and will be bad themselves.

So two bad people have a good reason to write a law preventing them both from being bad, because that's the best outcome they can get for themselves.

<comment><USER5> That is assuming rational self interested actors and equal cost/benefit. We don't need to look very hard to find examples of irrationality and imbalanced incentives. Also, how many times have you been exhorted to act against your own interests and think of the children? The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

<comment><USER6> If these objections that you are raising were wrong, then we would live in a utopia. You're right that people fall short, but I think the point still stands that checks and balances can help overcome human unreliability, even if every human involved is unreliable. Just look at democratic institutions without checks and balances.

<comment><USER5> I'm actually a big fan of the competing interests concept, it is a very eloquent solution. Where it goes off the rails though is the combination of that concept and the involuntary surrender of individual sovereignty to the very same people with whom your interests compete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the key issue in this entire debate:

        [T]he Government has ... violated the trust of the American people [and] broken
        the law themselves by already conducting wholesale surveillance of the citizenry
        ...
        Thus, the number one issue, the issue that should preempt all other issues,
        is how the government regains it's credibility and re-establishes trust.

Far too many people - even here on HN - are taking about the government's order to Apple in isolation. The common arguments by the government and its supporters are based on the assumption that any action taken would be limited to the current situation.

Except this isn't an isolated situation. The government has been fighting against the free use of encryption for decades. Saying the order given to Apple is limited to this single case is practically admitting ignorance (willful or not) about:

* The investigation of Phil Zimmermann and the export of PGP as a a "munition"

* Bernstein v. United States

* The Clipper Chip (Skipjack) and other key escrow systems of the fist crypto war

* "Total Information Awareness" (w/ John Poindexter of the Iran–Contra affair)

* The beam splitter in room 641A of AT&T's facility at 611 Folsom St.

* The illegalities brought to light by Daniel Ellsberg, William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden, and other patriots that kept their oath to defend the constitution.

* How many public security standards were ruined as part of BULLRUN and related programs.

* The recently-discovered use of "Stingray" devices ("IMSI-catchers") by the FBI.

* (I'll just stop the here - there are many other examples that should be included)

These actions clearly show a pattern of trying to gain backdoor access or other surveillance capabilities. Yet some people suggest - usually without any evidence - that the government should be _trusted_. What, specifically, has the government been doing in the area of communication security that has justified _any_ amount of trust? Actions are more important than promises.

It would be nice if this wasn't such an adversarial relationship. Unfortunately, this _cold civil war_ we are in where the government treating everyone as a potential criminal by default doesn't leave us with a lot of options. Until we see real actions that regain some amount of the public's trust, the _rational_ approach has to be to not trust the government at all. To do otherwise is either ignorance of history or blind faith that the government never lies.

<comment><USER8> The government absolutely should not be trusted. That's why Apple shouldn't give them a skeleton key to get into any phone, just the legally compelled access for this specific phone. Apple can make that happen trivially. If the government was telling Apple to make an actual backdoor for any phone, this would be different.

Nobody (except the most unreasonable) has any problem with the FBI searching property when they have a legal warrant. That's what is happening here. It's the equivalent of asking a manager to open a storage unit. This specific case is not anything like any of the examples you gave.

<comment><USER9> >The government absolutely should not be trusted. That's why Apple shouldn't give them a skeleton key to get into any phone, just the legally compelled access for this specific phone.

You are still trusting that the legally compelled access is all good and valid, ignoring rubber stamping by courts. Allowing access to this phone due to a court order, when combined with a history of abuse by the courts, is as good as any other skeleton key.

<comment><USER8> Not at all. If they had a real skeleton key, they wouldn't need to get a warrant.

Rubber stamping is a separate issue. If that's what people were worried about, why would it be this case in particular getting everyones hackles raised? Every warrant to search a house or a car should be questioned, but this case isn't special.

<comment><USER10> The government does not need a warrant to gain access to your information, easily evidenced by mass surveillance of the world for the past 15 years. If they really want something you have, they will just take it mobster style and tell you to go fuck yourself. They don't have to charge you with a crime, they can charge your property with a crime and force you to deal with a kafkaesque process where your property is guilty until proven innocent by the people who issued the very order to seize it. Information + Encryption is one of the only things regular people have that is resistant to this process.

They do need a warrant for any information to not get laughed out a US court though. This is the main reason they are going after the data this way, because they want what they found and know wouldn't survive discovery to eventually be admissible as legally obtained evidence. That and it will set a nice precedent for them to deputize private persons and corporation into being law enforcement when they just can't be asked to not fuck up one simple thing.

This is also not-coincidently a case likely to polarize people against Apple with the old faithful _terrorists are coming to get you_ rhetoric. A most slippery slope indeed, nearly guaranteeing that everyone who is supposed to be checking the executive branch for overreach will just go along with them wholesale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> To me, the more important aspect is the U.S.'s failures to maintain their own data integrity.

* The OPM breach is a big part of this.

* Government domains without SPF or requiring TLS (for instance email)

* Social Security Numbers significantly insecure

* Secretary of State (GA) losing identities

<comment><USER7> * Storing NSA documents without proper (air-gaped) compartmentalization such that it was even possible for one person to access them in bulk.

<comment><USER12> In the future, add the proper number of p's into "gapped." The term "air- gaped" activates the neurons that cannot unsee goatse guy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe Apple should have just stated that its impossible to create a backdoor (the way actual encryption should be). But since we all know that its possible to create one, the fact that there is an option will always spur debate.

The most important thing that the author mentions though is "How can the government regain the trust of the people?".

<comment><USER14> >The most important thing that the author mentions though is "How can the government regain the trust of the people?".

Why should it? And do the people even distrust the government?

Just look at the Presidential candidates. All the Republicans left are totally in favor of mass surveillance, and Hillary, the choice of mainstream Democrats, of course is a big fan of ubiquitous surveillance. Face it, most of the American public, except maybe the Millenials and Gen-Z, love the idea of having the government spy on them all the time "for their safety".

<comment><USER9> > Face it, most of the American public, except maybe the Millenials and Gen-Z, > love the idea of having the government spy on them all the time "for their > safety".

John Oliver did a show on this. It isn't that they are in favor of it, it is that they don't understand the implications. They think the spying is limited to just terrorist, not realizing that everything they do is being spied on.

<comment><USER15> That was a great episode - no one cared about Snowden or privacy until he explained to them that it meant government officials could see every dick picture they had sent or received.

<comment><USER12> Does anyone have a link to that episode?

<comment><USER16> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M)

I assume this is the same episode everyone was talking about but it's the Snowden one and the street interviews are pretty sad (as they always are).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know there is incredible dislike for Rush by many in this community, however his transcript today concerned the issue at hand and was very good. The reason its important is because his audience is large and he actually did a good job with the issue. Normally at the noon hour I simply turn off the radio but when I heard the discussion that came up it was so engrossing that I listened to the whole show.

tl;dr no matter what is claimed, if Apple writes this for this one phone it will get out.

[http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/02/22/how_the_governm...](http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/02/22/how_the_government_bungled_the_handling_of_the_san_bernardino_iphone)

<comment><USER18> Pretty good read. I wish more people in the media would learn a bit about this stuff. He did a great job of keeping the callers in check when they through BS elementary arguments at him like "well why don't they just hack it!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If I was the NSA, the Chinese Government or a hacker group, I would be working really hard right now to get a foothold on the internal Apple network. To be able to grab any and all data (code, emails, files, etc) from anywhere on the network to try and capture the work that would be required to fulfill the request of this court order.

Even if we could trust the US government, we shouldn't be forcing Apple to create this 'master key' anyway. The problem is that anything that has been created digitally cannot be destroyed after it is used. Once the tool is created, we cannot put that genie back in the bottle.

<comment><USER20> It's been covered a couple of times, but Apple is being asked to make a tool that would check that the device ID is the same as the warranted device. That's the essential part.

By having a device ID check (combined with digital signage), Apple _could_ publicly release the tool without fear of anything happening on any other phone. Plus people couldn't modify it because that would break the signature.

<comment><USER21> Did you miss the bit where the DoJ has already declared it has hundreds of other phones it will want cracked if Apple is willing to comply to this?

Also, if you think having a device ID check is going to do anything, you might want to have a look at the cracks scene and what they do with your pitiful attempts at DRM...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If Apple can do something that will unencrypt the phone, then obviously the vulnerability is already present. How about Apple hacks the phone, then fixes the vulnerability so they can't do it again in the future?

<comment><USER23> The analysis I have read from those that understand the technicalities behind it better than I do is that it is because the phone in question is a 5C.

e.g. Apple has already fixed the holes in the 6/6S; the concern here is the use of all writs to compel them to unlock the 5C, and the Pandora's box that doing so would open up.

<comment><USER24> No, the devices with secure enclave (like 6/6S) are just as exploitable by the phonemaker.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160218/10371233643/yes-b...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160218/10371233643/yes- backdoor-that-fbi-is-requesting-can-work-modern-iphones-too.shtml)

<comment><USER23> Ugh, if Rob Graham and Bruce Schnier can't be used as a good source...

Sounds like Apple needs to update Secure Enclave so that updating wipes the keys.

<comment><USER8> Yep, exactly. If they did that, and the government was trying to somehow make that illegal, or demand a real backdoor, then it would be time to get up in arms. But that time is not yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The debate is fairly pointless, govt will do whatever they want anyway.

The vast majority of people just vote down predestined party lines, and swing voters aren't all the bright educated people we like to think they are. It's just a fact that half of all people are of below average intelligence.

Politicians should be a better than average cohort for intelligence, but judging by the incomprehensible jabber they espouse on tech matters I doubt it'll change anytime soon. They seem to spend most of their time trying to dick each other over and make themselves look good rather than actually get shit done.

<comment><USER26> How do you figure the government has the ability to "do what they want" in this case?

<comment><USER27> I don't think it's a surprise that it has often been the case that some Elements in the gvmt are able to rationalize some objectives they have can trump the 'laws' and other rules ordinary citizens would be held accountable to. For example, The Patriot Act and other measures can be broad enough in scope to allow interpretation which would have some elements think they are invested with the power of spying on their own citizens living within the borders of their country. That's just one example. Iran Contra is also another one, and the list goes on ... The impetus for this type of rogue action will always be present in the circles of power, to allow them to keep their positions.

<comment><USER26> I don't understand. If the government could do the programming to do it, they would. That's what I'm asking: can the government really be doing "whatever it wants" in this case? They seem a bit stymied by the whole PIN wipe thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I totally agree the US government shouldn't compel anyone to weaken security generally. So Apple shouldn't be forced to build in a backdoor into products that are released for sale.

But this apple request is just exploiting a weakness that already exists. And it would only be doing it on a single phone. And it would be do it pursuant to a legal order by a US court.

Also, the US government only has zero credibility in the minds of hardcore activists or extremists. The bulk of the America public trust the FBI to investigate ISIS.

<comment><USER29> I agree - this is the type of vulnerability that, assuming Apple is extremely careful about protecting their signing key, is only exploitable by court order or similar state request. This crypto implementation on iPhones and the like isn't really designed to protect against that, it's really more to prevent the common criminal from accessing your personal data. Apple already comply with law enforcement requests to access iCloud backups and other such data, so assisting with this passcode crack isn't really much of a stretch.

<comment><USER30> > I agree - this is the type of vulnerability that, assuming Apple is > extremely careful about protecting their signing key, is only exploitable by > court order or similar state request.

Apple has been trying to prevent jailbreaking for years - they've always failed, so I'm skeptical about this "only exploitable by court order" bit. Determined people will find ways around the protections. Heck, it is even possible that someone (think nation-states) has already found a way to circumvent the passcode lock. This will only lower the barrier of entry.

<comment><USER29> Jailbreaks address a different type of vulnerability - that of incorrectly written code or poorly designed systems, that can lead to a privilege escalation.

The vulnerability that the FBI are using is the ability of Apple to update the iPhone with arbitrary code, provided it has been signed with their secret key. It's an important feature, of course, but still a security vulnerability - albeit an irrelevant one for the vast majority of iPhone users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _Ben Franklin 's observation that "those who would trade liberty for > security deserve neither"_

It is an _opinion_ , not an _observation_ ('deserve' in particular is not an observation). Just because someone famous said a thing doesn't make it true, or even true-ish. If you want to be such a purist about Franklin's comment, then abolish the police altogether; you'll rapidly see that Franklin's comment is not meant to be read in such a purist way. Or to put it another way: where do you draw the line with Franklin's comment?

The article then goes on to talk about gun rights for some reason, with the usual canards thrown in, plus a bit of good ol' selective reporting: "gun deaths are down by half in the past 25 years!", neatly ignoring that they're measuring from the peak, not from the previous baseline. And the US homicide rate is still nearly four times higher than most other western democracies...

<comment><USER32> > > Ben Franklin's observation that "those who would trade liberty for > security deserve neither"

> It is an opinion, not an observation* ('deserve' in particular is not an > observation).

And the quote is both butchered here (the original is: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety") and -- as it usually is -- applied poorly considering its original context. [0]

[0] [http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins- famous...](http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous- liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century)

<comment><USER31> Ah, thanks for that. I've seen the shortened version so often I'd come to believe that was the actual quote. The longer version makes much more sense and is far less absolutist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't like this line of reasoning because it allows for a pro-surveillance outcome if you change the statistics. At what threshold do you switch sides? Ben Franklin is pretty clear and so is the constitution. We don't need to argue on the government agency's terms because we win this argument hands down on principal alone. Please don't weaken the argument.

</comment><comment><USER34> Here's the thing. Governmental credibility should not be a factor. Particularly in light of how things have and will continue to shift over time.

Clinton tried to push the Clippet chip through and failed. We can't just say thing got better and now we should help weaken crypto because bad guys and now the government has more credibility. Obviously, things swung back in the opposite direction.

So the only safe solution is to build strong crypto always.

<comment><USER35> The government having credibility _now_ wouldn't guarantee that this would be a good idea forever going into the future.

But the fact that the government _already_ doesn't have any credibility on privacy and data protection _is_ a factor. It means that this is already a bad idea as of right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> No governments around the world have any credibility defending the liberty of its people.

</comment><comment><USER37> Who's Tim Cooke?

<comment><USER38> CEO of apple.

<comment><USER37> That would be Tim Cook...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think what's being lost in the shuffle is Apple has no credibility in claiming its protecting your privacy and security.

[http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/18/technology/security/apple- pr...](http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/18/technology/security/apple-privacy/)

<comment><USER40> That doesn't really seem to be related here.

One of the reasons I gave up on Slashdot was how people used any story as a tangent to flog their unrelated hatred of some company. Please don't turn HN into Slashdot.

<comment><USER39> I'm sorry I gave you the impression I hate Apple, thats certainly not what I intended.

One of the implicit ideas underlying Apple's arguments is that they are more trustworthy than the government.

But theres a lot of evidence that they are not as strong on privacy as they should be. Casting Apple, and private industry in general as privacy heros does a disservice to those very valid concerns.

Heres an article from earlier this month:

[http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-...](http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple- iphone-software-update-handset-worthless-third-party-repair) [http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/09/16/apple- rel...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/09/16/apple-releases- ios-9/)

<comment><USER40> None of this gives me the impression that I should trust the government at all, so why bother making the argument against Apple here? It doesn't effectively rebut the article. It just comes off as axe-grinding.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dutch government encourages public services to share their software source code - <AUTHOR> https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/legal-barrier-be-removed <comment><USER2> Nice. They suggest to use the European Union Public License [0], a copyleft license compatible with GPL and CC BY-SA (and others).

[0] [https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eupl-text- eupl-1...](https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eupl/eupl-text-eupl-12)</comment>


Disqus and FriendFeed Rock Again [Good Customer Service] - <AUTHOR> http://www.inquisitr.com/2360/disqus-and-friendfeed-rock-again-good-customer-service/ <comment><USER2> Props to those guys. This reminds me of Wufoo who are also known for excellent customer service. Kevin came to talk to us yesterday about their company's focus on the customers.

I hope that our industry as a whole starts moving in this direction until we reach the point where this kind of service is the norm.</comment>


An Interview with Mark Fletcher, founder of Bloglines and ONEList - <AUTHOR> http://techdrawl.com/an-interview-with-mark-fletcher-founder-of-bloglines-and-onelist/

<comment><USER2> Great interview. Thanks, Mark. Always wanted to go to Buck's Woodside.

</comment><comment><USER3> Points well made. Great interview by RJurney.

</comment><comment><USER4> Neither ONEList nor Bloglines had any revenue. Why are they considered "successful" companies?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because they were pretty big acquisitions, built at a time when building to get acquired by bigger internet companies was a completely viable business model.

<comment><USER4> The IRS doesn't recognize that business model. If a business has no expectation of making a profit, then it's a hobby.

<http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=169490,00.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> At the time, eyeballs had a premium dollar value. Being 2 for 2, Mark is comfortably rich. Clearly in today's market one would need a more concrete revenue model than eyeballs.

Do you have a point?

<comment><USER4> Of course. The purpose of a business is to generate a profit. Anything else is a con. You might as well post an interview with the founders of Kozmo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both these businesses generated a large profit for their founders. Maybe if you learned from guys like Mark, as opposed to the IRS, you'd make a better Hacker News commenter and... I daresay, a better entrepreneur?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fletcher also had a entrepreneurs' community site called Startupping that came on the scene about the same time as News.YC (back when HN was called 'Startup News').

Compare the sites in February 2007:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20070224011950/http://www.startup...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070224011950/http://www.startupping.com/)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Startupping got off to a great start. Unfortunately spam took it over. :(</comment></comment>


Should We Focus on User Experience? - <AUTHOR> http://uxmag.com/articles/should-we-focus-on-user-experience

<comment><USER2> I'm not so sure that's a good idea. The more that projects like Firefox and GNOME focused on "user experience", the worse they got.</comment>


Gosling: Sun was "wronged" by Google re: Android. Oracle right to sue Google. - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57423754-94/java-creator-james-gosling-google-totally-slimed-sun/?tag=mncol;topStories

<comment><AUTHOR> _Just because Sun didn't have patent suits in our genetic code doesn't mean we didn't feel wronged. While I have differences with Oracle, in this case they are in the right. Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade._

 _In a March 8, 2007 e-mail to Schwartz about working with Google on licensing or partnering with Sun on Java, Sun's co-founder and chairman, Scott McNealy, characterized the relationship with Google at the time: "The Google thing is really a pain. They are immune to copyright laws, good citizenship, they dont share. They dont even call back."_

 _"It's really hard to tell what their intentions are with Android. They put this thing out there, and you've got lots of people picking it up. The big attraction seems to be the zero on the price tag. But everybody I've talked to who is building an Android phone or whatever, they're all going in and they're just hacking on it. And so all these Android phones are going to be incompatible._</comment>


Apple Settles Siri Lawsuit with RPI for $25M - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/news/2016/04/19/apple-settles-siri-lawsuit-with-rensselaer-dallas.html <comment><USER2> I would have liked to have seen what the patent is... at least a reference so I could go read it...

<comment><USER3> I think this is the patent in question:

[https://www.google.com/patents/US7177798](https://www.google.com/patents/US7177798)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if this is a strategic steps following Amazon Echo's nice overtake on speech-based assistant area. Apple is really the pioneer on bringing speech based UI to the masses. Maybe they sense a threat?

<comment><USER5> Apple is a pioneer? Hardly. I would say Google now is easily the pioneer

<comment><USER6> With speech-to-text yet struggling on my iPhone to distinguish between what I said and what it figured I said.

Let's spare the ideology, I think the two of them are very much not yet there.

I'm elated though to learn that a meaningful university research got a honorable mention. There should be more searchlight on what's going on behind the closed doors of those hardworking varsity labs.

<comment><USER7> _With speech-to-text yet struggling on my iPhone to distinguish between what I said and what it figured I said._

I have very very good success with speech-to-text. This is for everyday communication using iMessage, not for anything technical. The secret is that I have slightly modified my speech:

Just. Pretend. You. Are. William. Shatner. And. You. Simply. Speak. Staccato. (Ie, with very short pauses between words). Of course you also need good internet connectivity, because all the hard stuff is being done in the cloud.

I find that speaking into my phone is much faster than typing on the tiny keyboard.

Also, there are two parts involved with Siri:

\- first is speech to text, parsing individual words

\- second is the AI, what do those words mean?

The second part can sometimes be problematic.

<comment><USER6> _The second part can sometimes be problematic_

That's exactly where everything goes dark.

Applying AI to understand troves of persistent/temporary data archive threads in order to learn and reveal patterns and associations in complex datasets of patient encounters can help doctors prevent expensive unnecessary lab tests that need not happen again for another patient. That's conveniently doable for human-computer interaction.

The viscosity of natural language seems to be the insurmountable challenge here. Based on what I've experienced, visual perception by computers and translation between natural languages can permanently earn its success in a matter of time's length less than a decade. Not just speech-to-text because we still have to trick Siri for example by speaking slowly.

It's probably my angle, but it is not a qualifying success when we all yet have a lot of work underway to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is the "invention" or "technology" claimed? Anyone know?</comment>


Why did Churchill order the destruction of the bombes? - <AUTHOR> http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/37420/why-did-churchill-order-the-destruction-of-the-bombes <comment><USER2> You can see a Bombe at the National Cryptologic Museum (free) in Fort Meade Maryland. Right in the shadow of NSA.</comment>


120M user records including call histories compromised - <AUTHOR> http://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/internet/reliance-jio-customer-data-leaked-on-magicapk/59517467 <comment><AUTHOR> Call histories are also up for sale, apparently. In a sensitive country like India, this sort of information loss can lead to a lot of personal pain . [http://i.imgur.com/DOP0Tgf.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/DOP0Tgf.jpg)</comment>


New York's Rockland County declares measles outbreak emergency - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47715169 <comment><USER2> I know it's against the rules here to insinuate that people haven't read the article, but I don't think anyone commenting has read the article.

This isn't about the anti-vax movement as it is about the toxic relationship that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclaves in New York have with their surrounding communities. They are used to abusing religious exemptions in order to have everything "their way". Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of their ability to operate like this.

 _The outbreak in Rockland County is largely concentrated in the ultra- Orthodox Jewish community, the New York Times reported. It is believed it could have spread from other predominantly ultra-Orthodox areas around New York which have already seen outbreaks of measles._

 _Mr Day said health inspectors had encountered "resistance" from some local residents, which he branded "unacceptable and irresponsible"._

 _" They've been told 'We're not discussing this, do not come back' when visiting the homes of infected individuals as part of their investigations," he said._

<comment><USER3> I was curious what's going on here as there's nothing in Jewish teachings[0] that would justify an anti-vaccination stance. It's apparently more that as an insular community it is particularly susceptible to anti-vaccine misinformation[1].

0\. _In numerous states parents wishing not to vaccinate their children are permitted to sign a document stating that their religious convictions do not allow them to; based on this signature the child will then be permitted to attend school under the law. It is reported that small numbers of parents in Jewish schools have signed such documents. For a parent of a yeshiva student to sign such a statement in the name of Judaism is not just inappropriate, it is false. Whether a posek will rule that childhood immunizations are obligatory in halakhah or are discretionary (but highly advisable), there is no position in halakhah that says there is any prohibition or compelling reason to refrain from such vaccinations._

[http://www.hakirah.org/Vol13Bush.pdf](http://www.hakirah.org/Vol13Bush.pdf)

1\. "How Orthodox Jewish Nurses Are Fighting 'Anti-Vaccination Propaganda' Targeting Their Community"

[http://gothamist.com/2019/03/26/orthodox_jewish_nurses_vacci...](http://gothamist.com/2019/03/26/orthodox_jewish_nurses_vaccines.php)

<comment><USER4> _This American Life_ has a very in-depth broadcast from 2014 about the many, many, issues involved. Well worth a listen:

"A Not-So-Simple Majority:

Before the war in the East Ramapo, New York school district, there was a truce. Local school officials made a deal with their Hasidic and ultra- Orthodox Jewish neighbors: we'll leave you alone to teach your children in private yeshivas as you see fit as long as you allow our public school budget to pass. But the budget is funded by local property taxes, which everyone, including the local Hasidim, have to pay — even though their kids don't attend the schools that their money is paying for. What followed was one of the most volatile local political battles we've ever encountered."

[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/534/a-not-so-simple- majorit...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/534/a-not-so-simple-majority)

<comment><USER3> I've listened to that episode but I don't recall vaccinations being part of it, and I don't see anything in the transcript re:vaccinations, so I'm not sure how it's directly relevant.

The point of my comment is that Judaism itself is not the reason these orthodox communities are rejecting vaccines, unlike some other communities/religions that have specific cultural or religious objections to medical care.

<comment><USER2> I didn't mean to imply that it was, but that's a good point.

I was meaning to highlight their resistance to intervention by the local governments whose jurisdiction they do their best to ignore.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. I'm Jewish and part of my extended family is Orthodox (though my direct family is not), so I' probably being overly sensitive.

BTW, you should look at this horrible anti-vax booklet (linked to from the Gothamist piece) that's been circulated among these communities:

[https://issuu.com/peachmoms/docs/the_vaccine_safety_handbook...](https://issuu.com/peachmoms/docs/the_vaccine_safety_handbook_a4)

Ugh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How are we still getting measles outbreak in a developed country in current year.

This is a solved problem.

FFS.

<comment><USER6> Because a "large enough to cause problems" minority of people think they know what's best, science and statistics be damned.

It's the same reason people are still clinging to the war on drugs, pushing gun control, fighting densification (yes I know that's not a word) of cities and denying climate change.

<comment><USER7> I feel that scientists have also long played around with an ethic of anti- journalism or anti-marketing as a pride, like it shows you're a true person of science. There aren't enough Richard Feynman's in the modern age.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Measles even for normal adults can leave ugly scars afterwards. It is definitely not harmless.

<comment><USER9> And for guys can make you infertile and have horrific consequences if your a Woman and are pregnant when you get it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Facebook has a lot to answer for. The internet was supposed to be a new human enlightenment by enabling professionals to remotely connect. We didn't bank on the ability of idiots to connect too...

<comment> maze-le Its a structural problem, not necessary facebooks -- if it werent for facebook, the idiots would congregate somewhere else to spread their lies. What is missing is an education in epistemology for a broad audience regardless of education level -- the ability to categorize and weight the value of knowledge and sources.

<comment><USER11> More/better education is always good. But there will always be _idiots_. Look at flat earth believers (although i have hard time believing they are not just trolls).

They used to be small groups of them all over the world, and they didn't do too much damage. What social media has done is amplified their voice, giving them look of legitimacy.

<comment><USER12> Flat earthers are trolls, but they are very useful trolls.

They give kids great examples of things like falsifiability and scientific method.

<comment><USER13> It may be difficult to believe but while there may be a lot of FE trolls, there are also a significant number of true believers.

<comment><USER14> It's trolling taken to its logical extreme: you literally cannot tell whether someone posting flat-earth 'facts' is a troll or not online. The behaviour of the acolyte and the troll is identical.

Only when you meet these people in real life is there a fair chance of sounding them out to discover if they are just playing along or are actually convinced of whatever conspiracy is being peddled. I would expect most trolls keep their flat-earth proselytizing strictly as an online activity.

But they do seem to exist (the true believers that is).

<comment><USER12> Ah, ye goode olde Poe's law:

 _without a clear indicator of the author 's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views... that cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Same problem in germany, recently. Parents think they know better and refuse to have their kids vaccinated. Now the vaccination rate is low enough for measles to start spreading in schools etc.

Currently there is a discussion about making vaccination mandatory:

[https://www.dw.com/en/germany-measles-vaccine-could-be- compu...](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-measles-vaccine-could-be-compulsory- for-kids/a-48050623)

<comment><USER16> While I'm not sure on the legal side of things if this is enforceable, I think not allowing them to participate in school as a matter of public health would be easier to put into law than forcing them to get vaccinated. Obviously, state and private companies could require vaccinations for employment as well, so unless you have a medical reason to not be vaccinated you won't be able to be part of civilized society.

<comment><USER15> Yes, for kindergarden I would imagine such kind of approach to be very effective. However, school is obligatory (at least where I come from) and people even get into trouble for taking kinds on vacation outside of school holidays, so denying kids to participate in school may not be an option (and would also not be in the kids' interest).

<comment><USER17> In my country too, I think cbg0 is referring to homeschooling these kids instead.

<comment><USER18> Homeschooling is not allowed in Germany

<comment><USER17> Not at all? It is in my country (the Netherlands) in some circumstances, for example if you are of a certain religion and there is no school within x kilometers that satisfies your religious requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How come such vaccines are not mandatory? Shouldn't the parents be held responsible for endangering their children and potentially killing them?

<comment><USER20> I dislike the antivax movement but mandatory state injections would be a huge violation of liberties in my opinion. Just because most vaccines are safe and worth while getting don't mean they all are, or always will be.

<comment><USER21> >I dislike the antivax movement but mandatory state injections would be a huge violation of liberties in my opinion.

That's true, but if we consider any violation of personal liberty to be harmful, then we're left with primitivist anarchy.

We've decided, collectively (albeit not individually and not always voluntarily) that it is beneficial in some cases to abridge the rights of the individual for the sake of society. We invented systems of laws and courts because we consider a fixed set of common laws and a controlled system to adjudicate them to be more just and fair on average than retributory violence and clan based tribalism, despite the existence of the state and its monopoly on violence being an abridgement of personal liberty.

We've also decided that, while scientific inquiry has its faults, it is preferable to assume that the premises of science (specifically, epidemiology and the utility of vaccines) hold sound, given the evidence, despite this amounting to an appeal to authority for most people, who aren't likely to be willing or able to do the work of personally validating all of the claims ever made by a particular scientific field.

In the case of vaccines, we have ample historical evidence of the effect of epidemics and a lack of preventative measures on human populations, and of the improvements made to society as a result of vaccination and preventative measures. The choice here is not between potentially harmful vaccines versus a healthy life in their absence, rather, between between an abstract threat (vaccines) and a concrete threat (disease.)

So, yes. Mandatory vaccines are a violation of liberty. We didn't spend the last several millennia laying a foundation of civilization and scientific progress just to subject ourselves to the blind malice of nature for the sake of a few people who don't like the government telling them they're not allowed to catch polio if they want to.

<comment><USER22> But we reached vaccination quotas above 95% without being mandatory, so that argument evidently does not apply.

<comment><USER23> It totally applies because (a) the threshold needs to be 98% according to the math that governs such things, (b) we're not _sure_ to stay at 98% (or even 95%) in the face of disinformation campaigns such as the one you're a part of, and (c) it really is important to be sure because the consequences of allowing outbreaks to continue are actually severe. Making other people suffer the burdens of illness could be seen as a violation of _their_ rights, and is impossible to address via litigation after the fact, so prevention is necessary.

You've already claimed that measles doesn't cause serious harm, and been proven wrong. Multiple times. You've claimed that this outbreak isn't serious, despite the facts that are known about how disease spreads and how infectious measles in particular is. Why do you persist in pushing this anti-vax narrative?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> And on the other side of the globe, "Australian Teens Ignore Anti-Vaxxer Parents by Getting Secret Vaccinations":

[https://www.thedailybeast.com/australian-teens-ignore- anti-v...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/australian-teens-ignore-anti-vaxxer- parents-by-getting-secret-vaccinations)

<comment><USER25> Unfortunately, minors in the US have few actual rights. I don't think they have the right to get vaccines without their parent's permission and it isn't considered medical abuse.

<comment><USER26> It depends on the state and age of the minor:

[https://vaxopedia.org/2018/09/25/how-can-i-get-vaccinated- if...](https://vaxopedia.org/2018/09/25/how-can-i-get-vaccinated-if-my- parents-are-anti-vaccine/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Rockland County, a county in New York State, not New York County, which is congruent with the borough of Manhattan [1].

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

<comment><USER28> I parsed it as "(a) New York County ..."

Not "The county named 'New York County' ..."

<comment><USER29> If you're not super familiar with the existence of New York County, that definitely makes sense as a default reading. For those of us who are, the headline was double-take worthy. And yes, I skimmed the comments for the answer instead of opening the article.

That said, New York County as an entity rarely if ever does anything. It's the borough of Manhattan that actually has a governmental structure. I'm not aware of any belonging to the county except maybe a court. And an emergency like this would always be declared on a city-wide basis (and has been in the past), just based on the amount of travel within and between the boroughs.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Colormind – Color schemes via Generative Adversarial Networks - <AUTHOR> http://colormind.io <comment><USER2> Looks cool! I recently posted HuulaTypesetter ([https://huu.la/ai/typesetter](https://huu.la/ai/typesetter)) which infers font sizes for web pages based on DOM context and CSSRooster which infers CSS class names based on the context. I'm really happy to see that there are more intelligence happening in the design world! The dream of replacing Web UI design with AI will one day come true!

All (deep) learning models suffers the issue of 'garbage in garbage out', so one way that could make the palettes more related to real world web designs is to learn the colors used in web designs directly instead of from photographs and movies since those data will has much more noise than good web designs (with video and images stripped out of course).

<comment><USER3> I'm not 100% fond of the layout suggestions, but I have to admit there's a peaceful balance in them.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, statistical models just give you the most probable result (in terms of the data we train it on), so if you are a creative person, you probably won't find it useful.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like it would be ideal for situations where you want the layout itself to be as neutral and out-of-the-way as possible, since these are judgement biased by normalisation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> sorry for the stupid question, but how do you "apply" color palettes? i mean, sure they look great as colorful columns, but how do you put them into UI?

let say Bootstrap. i tried using 1st color for button, 2nd color for "success" label, etc. it ended up ugly.

<comment><USER6> This is what I'd want as well. Bootstrap is a good example of color application as they define SASS variables to action states:

By default:

primary == dark blue success == green warning == orange info == light blue danger == red

Then the rest of the styling for the theme is calculated from that, so you have other elements defined as: whatever the primary color is but 40% darker.

What I'd love is a color palette picker that let me put in a particular color orange and then would spit out:

"Hey, here's the green, dark blue, light blue, and red that match that orange you chose."

<comment><USER7> Warning danger info success each carry some specific meaning. I would keep the colors standard (yellow red blue green) but match the saturation to the of the pallette.

Primary and secondary are usually for backgrounds of major elements, detail elements to draw attention to. The other 3 colors should be boring but pleasant. For subtle variation without drawing attention to the elements

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I personally love color palettes generated by Coolors [https://coolors.co/](https://coolors.co/).

<comment><USER9> I just tested coolors out using a screen capture of Spotify desktop on MacOS and it didn't pickup the green color. I guess it's only picking out dominant colors

Colormind picked the green color on all attempts

Edit: after several more attempts coolors started picking up the green color

Test Image: [http://i.imgur.com/6pMMV4W.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/6pMMV4W.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I do love these color scheme generators, and perhaps this is a suggestion for improvement, the color vs. dominance of the color seems very important as well. That is, proportionally showing the palette based on how dominant that color should be in an overall end design

<comment><AUTHOR> the issue I see is that most sites have a white/beige background, which could get repetitive for the purposes of design inspiration. Maybe train a separate model for bootstrap/direct insertion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you take into account various forms of colourblindness, could this be used to create colourblind friendly palettes that are still easy on the eye for everyone?

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah definitely, it would just have to train on a (relatively large) sample of such palettes. I'll look into it!

<comment><USER4> I have protanomaly myself, so you'd definitely be making my day!

Look up "cubehelix" if you haven't heard of it already, it might give some inspirations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Damn, this has become my new tool for palette generation. Good work!

Have you considered using fine art as training data, perhaps broken down into movements/motifs? In your blog posts you mentioned that not all photographs make for well chosen palettes, this could get around that as artists should have a great understanding of theory.

As far as the pixel-level errors in your palette training, would downscaling+blur solve this?

</comment><comment><USER12> Really good results! Is there a quick way to copy and paste the hex values for the palette?

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a very naive question, but considering the artifacts you have on the GAN-generated images, you are trying to generate the whole "palette image" at a certain resolution.

For which reasons did you not use a 5x1 pixel RGB image as the target, that would have been orders of magnitude faster to train?

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a great question! The main reason is that pix2pix works at a set resolution by default, and changing it is non-trivial. I'm actually not sure how to structure the Unet for a 5x1 image - if you have any ideas let me know (I'm a beginner at this)

Speed improvement also doesn't scale linearly with input size. Eg. there's only a 5x improvement going from 256x256 to 256x1

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can you get a suggested color palette by API call?

<comment><AUTHOR> sure, you could just use the same API the main website does, it's unauthenticated:

      curl 'http://colormind.io/api/' --data-binary '{"model":"default"}'

      curl 'http://colormind.io/api/' --data-binary '{"input":[[44,43,44],[90,83,82],"N","N","N"],"model":"default"}'

keep in mind this is hosted on a single Linode 4096, and there's no SLA or anything :] It's handling the HN spike pretty well so far though.

also the models are rotated daily (ie. different ones are available each day), with the exception of "default"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why GANs for this?

<comment><USER16> My question as well. There are several other great implementations of a color pallet generator which use color theory rules. My bet is that the GAN, in this instance, boils down to little more than a pseudorandom number generator.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think color theory alone isn't enough to produce good color palettes. eg. try going to [https://color.adobe.com](https://color.adobe.com) and choose one of the color rules, then go to [https://color.adobe.com/explore](https://color.adobe.com/explore) and compare with user-contributed palettes. There's a huge difference imo.

As for why a GAN specifically, I talk a bit about that in one of the blog posts. Neural nets trained with L1/L2 loss tend to produce "averaged" colors, dull greys and browns. The learned loss from a GAN allows the output to take on more extreme values.

<comment><USER15> Why neural nets though? It seems like total overkill compared to simpler statistics.

<comment><AUTHOR> GANs are good at generating plausible images given a set of examples, which is exactly what we're doing here.

A statistical approach might work, but you'd be essentially interpolating your existing samples. A GAN is capable of generating novel solutions.

The crux of the issue is that despite just having 5 colors, the solution space is huge (256^15), and most of the search space is junk. The difficult part is identifying what looks good, and classically this is just called color theory. The problem is that color theory is a leaky abstraction that doesn't capture what intuitively "looks good" and is largely used as a starting point for ideas rather than something that gives useable palettes. Hence the popularity of user-submitted and curated sites like coolors and the old kuler site.

<comment><USER16> You are right that 256^15 is a large search space. This number implies a 24bit color scheme.

        (2^24)^5 = 256^15

Many of the colors in the 2^24 range are similar which is why most of the _linear_ search space is boring. Our eyes don't care much about #f67368 vs #f67468 but we do care about #f67368 vs #f6e668. Why?

      0x73 x 2 = 0xe6

Instead of blindly incrementing RGB color values, look at colors which differ by powers of 2. For example, choose 15 random values between 0 and 8. Let's call them c0 to c14. Then assign those numbers to your color pallet as 8-bit RGB values as follows.

        Color0: R=2^c0, G=2^c1, B=2^c2
        . . .
        Color5: R=2^c12, G=2^c13, B=2^c14

Rounding 2^8 down to 255. You will find non-boring color schemes because the search space better fits how our eyes see color. This new search space is only 9^15 which is just less than 2^48, far less than 2^120 and a lot more interesting.

You could also search the HSV color space in this way and you don't have to only look at powers of two. Consider for, example powers of 1.25. The point is that by organizing your search, you will find interesting colors pallets easily.

I'm betting that your GANs already encode some sort of exponential search based on how you trained them vs your initial attempt using L1/L2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I can see a lot of utility in this. Great job!

Is this limited to generating palettes of 5 colors? Sometimes all 5 won't be needed, wouldn't that make the output a little less useful since the algorithm considers how each of the five interacts with the others.

If I only needed two colors, I wouldn't need those two colors to work against three other colors.

</comment><comment><USER18> This looks great!

Did you have any thoughts with regards to releasing it as open source so that we could run our own instances with the various training sets? I note that you appear not to be monetizing it at all, so I figured I'd pop the question :)

<comment><AUTHOR> the GAN is actually just pix2pix: [https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix](https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix) I just resized the convolutional layers to 1px height since the vertical dimension isn't that relevant in this case.

I do have a few bash scripts for color extraction that I could upload to github, although they're pretty quick and dirty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Would be super cool if you could pick your own ground truth data. Or predefined sets.

<comment><AUTHOR> The torch7 models need to be loaded in memory, which is the main bottle neck. I've got about 30 or so trained models on disk and they take turns on the homepage.

Maybe there's a better way to do this that I'm not aware of though (Floydhub?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> These look cool! Is there a way to get.. more colors? Eg, i'd like to use this for some themes editor themes, but i need a couple backgrounds, foregrounds, etcetc. Maybe 10 colors would do, hard to say.

Thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> it's possible, but the main challenge would be to make a sufficient sample of 10-color palettes to train on.

I am making something that disambiguates between foreground and background, but still 5 colors for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd be nice if I could use the color locking thing on an uploaded image. I'd like to start with some base colors from a movie/game/etc and start exploring the color range with the AI.

</comment><comment><USER22> Really great idea, and very practically useful! Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Very cool! One thing I noticed is that if you lock all colors except one and press 'generate' repeatedly, each call produces a different color. Why is that?

<comment><AUTHOR> the model isn't totally deterministic, but aside from that the main palette is actually an ensemble of 12 separate models trained on slightly different hyper-parameters.

Colors are kind of subjective, and this is just meant to add some variety. eg. If you make a gradient out of 4 shades of the same color most of the models will complete the gradient, but a few of them would give you a contrasting shade.

<comment><USER16> > an ensemble of 12 separate models trained on slightly different hyper- > parameters

Sounds like a PRNG to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Using deepmind for generating color palettes is somewhat of an overkill. It is really not that hard a problem.

It is very easy to programatically generate several color palettes from a main color.

It is also wasy to select one or more main colors from a picture.

<comment><USER2> Good point, just blindly select several "harmonious" colors are not hard at all. But as some folks pointed out, if we want to also consider the context (where the colors will be used, is it a button? or background? or text?), deep learning is definitely a good fit.

<comment><USER16> Do you have any evidence that ML is a good fit? You seem so sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> the choice of a CNN makes more sense if you think of a color palette as an extremely low-resolution image rather than a basket of colors.

positioning in a palette matters because colors are perceived relatively.

<comment><USER16> But all of this can be easily modeled statically and has been. If you desire randomized results, consult a PRNG. This is more, "ML is really cool, what can we apply it to," than "ML provides a better solution to this problem." IMHO.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


High-reproducibility and high-accuracy method for automated topic classification - <AUTHOR> http://amaral-lab.org/publications/high-reproducibility-and-high-accuracy-method-automated-topic-classification/#.VMzwjSiN1WU <comment><USER2> I had some sort of violent dopamine release just reading the headline.

I'm working on a project to make (EU-) law more accessible. So if anybody here knows good methods to visualise/summarise long legal texts (30-300 pages) you could do something for humanity by posting a reply.

(Word clouds just don't cut it in these cases.)

<comment><USER3> A classic summarization method is:

1\. Split your text into sentences

2\. Remove stopwords (keeping a copy of the original sentence)

3\. For the remaining words, calculate the synthetic TF-IDF score of all the words in the sentence (tf-idf each word then sum them).

4\. Keep the n-highest scoring sentences (in the order they appear), or all the sentences with synthetic TF-IDF scores above some threshold.

There's your summary.

<comment><USER4> I find it works better with additional step 2.5) Lemmatize remaining words, using for example Python's NLTK library.

<comment><USER5> When you lemmatize, what are you doing exactly? Are you merely reducing words to a more common form, thereby reducing IDF? For example, are you reducing "walking" or "walked" to "walk", and then using the IDF of walk?

<comment><USER3> Yes, exactly.

related is the idea of "stemming" which uses an algorithm to try to reduce inflection, to find a common form of a word that various versions come from. Porters algorithm is a well known stemming algorithm. However, sometimes you end up with weird "non-inflected" tokens at the end. (e.g. 'enhancement' might become 'enhanc')

However, lemmatization is considered "better" in that it uses a dictionary of inflected forms that map back to the non-inflected form. So in theory, if the dictionary is comprehensive, you can properly replace inflected forms with their correct non-inflected forms. (e.g. 'enhancement' -> 'enhance')

If your dictionary isn't comprehensive and comes across a token it doesn't recognize, you can try falling back onto a stemming algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it interesting that this appears to be written by a group of physicists rather than NLP or ML researchers, and I think you can kind of see that in the way they approach the problem. I think a bunch of the work done after LDA among ML and NLP people tended towards (a) using Hierarchical Dirichlet Process models as a platform from which to explore Bayesian nonparametrics more generally (b) better inference algorithms for topic models and (c) somewhat richer models (i.e. author topic models, syntax aware topic models, etc).

And it's not like the people in this field haven't been aware of network- oriented methods. But rather than using community-detection as a mechanism for topic discovery, instead people either focused on networks among topics to see how topics are related, networks among authors such that social network information informed topic discovery, or networks among documents where link/reference information was explicitly part of the model.

These authors seem to get solid results in part by having totally different values/aesthetics. Unlike the Bayesian nonparametrics people, they clearly don't care about picking arbitrary, inflexible parameters (e.g. the 5% threshold), nor do they want their model to have a clear, generative form, nor are they particularly concerned about having a new algorithmic insight (since they throw their hard work to InfoMap, and discuss none of its details), nor do they attempt to advance the expressiveness of their topic model (they proceed with the most basic bag-of-words model available). But it does seem like they get good results on the basic task with a very pragmatic, pipeline approach.

<comment><USER7> Two of the authors (Kording and Acuna) are definitely not physicists; much of their previous work you might describe as psychology with a strong math modeling background. Interesting that the pub is in a physics journal though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It was interesting to see a take on the problem from the researchers outside of NLP or ML fields, but the authors only considered classic LDA and PLSA for comparison. I am not currently involved in topic modeling, but I know there exist techniques and modifications to classic models that improve topic discovery (like tf-idf weighting). Can you suggest any modern methods from NLP and ML communities that address the same issues and can rival the authors' findings?

</comment><comment><USER9> Modeling words co-occurrence graph and then pruning "weak" edges (or achieving similar pruning by using community detection to find clusters) works kind of like a "feature selection" based on something that resembles a bare mutual information or tf*idf.

I'm not entirely familiar with LDA, but from what I was able to understand from their intro, it feels like their LDA application could have used some feature selection.

</comment><comment><USER10> You can see the source code of a previous iteration of the algorithm here: [https://bitbucket.org/andrealanci/topicmapping/src](https://bitbucket.org/andrealanci/topicmapping/src)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm confused by the discussion of multi-lingual corpora. Is it common in topic modeling to consider documents drawn from disjoint vocabularies, or is it just a kind of thought experiment?

<comment><USER12> Pretty common when you don't control the data source or for multi language goverment agencies (for example in Canada you may have your court case in French if you desire).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I haven't dug into the details of the paper yet, but I want to commend the authors for 1.) making it possible to actually download the PDF and 2.) giving some indication, within the actual document, when the paper was published. I'm being a little bit snarky, but I'm very sincere in thanking them.

<comment><USER14> >making it possible to actually download the PDF

The journal they published in, Physical Review X, is a newer open-access journal from APS (along the same lines as PLOS ONE or Nature Scientific Reports). I think it's great but not everyone agrees. To read more on the debate around the open-access phenomenon look at [http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/10/04/open-access-is-not- the-...](http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/10/04/open-access-is-not-the-problem/) and [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> is there an open source implementation I can use?

What about that sentiment analysis NLP tool that someone posted on HN last year? That was also very good.</comment>


Kits Make Tinkerers' Home-Automation Dreams Come True - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/kits-make-tinkerers-home-automation-dreams-come-true-1444870383 <comment><USER2> I am pretty sure that people actually want network connected hardware instead of Internet-connected hardware.

And perhaps they also want a way to access their hardware in their home network in a secure and private way.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I have rejected most major commercial offerings out of hand because they usually have/require some connection to an internet server. I have no desire to include that sort of vulnerability/weak link.

<comment><USER4> To me, it's just as big a deal that you're now at the whim of the provider. Your equipment can suddenly stop working if:

* They go out of business or decide to drop the product line * Their servers go down (do you know if they're running a HA config, or merely a single server?) * They decide to make v2 of the product and stop updating/supporting v1

On top of this, your home internet connection can and will go down. Depending on what exactly you're doing this may or may not be a big deal: for example, not being able to remotely see your garage door status probably isn't important. Not having your motion sensing lights or timed schedules work, however, would be a pain.

There are many products from startups that are hurting themselves because of this. I, like many geeks, love this kind of stuff, but like you, I won't purchase or make my house rely on anything that has these risks, and I steer friends and family away from these products as well.

Developers: At least make your internet connection optional and allow the gear work without it. Even better, open source your server software: we can see how secure it is, plus if you go out of business, I can at least run it myself.

<comment><USER5> This is why I've been working with rpi/arduino stuff: I can build it myself. Sure, it's more work, but the pre-built options all suck, as far as I've seen.

I used to always follow the newest automation releases, but I gave up, because they were all closed-source, internet-required devices. Screw that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's definitely the case. However, these things are remarkably hard to explain to journalists. Our open source power outlet, the Crownstone, has nice conversion rates when people find us on Kickstarter. It is a problem though that journalists don't want to hear a story about all the things you can do with kits like that. They want single use cases. They want simple stories to tell. The end user does not want that! They like to get more product for their money. I think the app market concept could only be invented by business savvy tech people... It's our task to encourage kits and kit makers to keep doing what they are doing! Back them up! :-)

</comment><comment><USER7> Companies mentioned in the article: [http://littlebits.cc/](http://littlebits.cc/) [https://www.particle.io/](https://www.particle.io/)

</comment><comment><USER8> "Jeremy Blum's home-automation system, which he calls Jarvis, can control lights, curtains and music and can answer questions about anything using a phone, voice commands or this command center."

Implementations like this kind of scare me. It is certainly cool to be 'able' to automate these things, but should we? Are we going to use technology to make our lives lazier, or better? No, they aren't mutually-exclusive, but I can't help but think that making it so you don't have to leave your couch in order to turn off the lights is a movement toward a worse lifestyle. Your health has a much larger contribution to your standard of living than convenience, and to me, this seems like trading off one for the other (in a subtle way). However, maybe I will eventually be convinced of the net benefits. Am I approaching this wrong?

<comment><USER9> I don't see how this affect one's exercise regimen in any way. The use case probably isn't not getting off the couch to turn off the light, but voicing the command as you leave the room. In case of light, it's just (aiming at) more seamless experience.

For some reason many people have this picture of technology bringing forth the Wall-E world. Consider however the following points:

\- People hate that vision with passion, which pretty much guarantees it won't come to pass any time soon.

\- "Normals" today are absolutely _obsessed_ with fitness. Between spamming everyone with Endomondo updates on Facebook and testing a new toy-pedometer- watch, the primary use of Javris-like system in general population will probably be dieting and exercise.

\- Convenience doesn't have to lead to laziness. It can enable one to do more, faster and better. In a way, one could argue 200 years ago that the invention of electric washing machine will turn people lazy and fat.

Ultimately, it will be up to us how much we eat and move. As our civilization goes forward, those things will be more and more disconnected from the limitations of reality. We can either learn to stay fit with computers, or give up on future entirely right now and go back to building things by hand.

EDIT:

I'll also share a short anecdote. 8 years ago, I built myself a voice- controlled system for changing music (Star Trek: TNG style, with computer voice reacting to commands). Basically a microphone soldered together from parts and hung on a wardrobe, + some Microsoft Speech API based software I wrote for off-line command recognition and control over a WinAMP instance. It wasn't that hard to get it working even though the music was on the loudspeakers, with quite high a volume setting.

I could use it to change the music from my bed, or chair, or anywhere in the room. Did it made me exercise less? No. I actually did it to stop myself turning the computer screen on to change music while doing math exercises for maturity exam. It helped me to keep focused, because the task suddenly didn't require to do a context switch. Since that experience, it's how I see home automation - as a way to reduce context switching and to streamline some chores, not to rob you of meaningful activities.</comment></comment>


We may have spotted a parallel universe going backwards in time - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24532770-400-we-may-have-spotted-a-parallel-universe-going-backwards-in-time/ <comment><USER2> Perfect example of how the idiot media don't do their fact checking before dashing off an article!

This article below debunks it: [https://www.independent.co.uk/life- style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life- style/gadgets-and-tech/news/parallel-universe-time-backwards-reverse-nasa- physics-antarctica-a9526226.html)</comment>


NLRB Looking into Claims Amazon Violated Employees' Rights During Covid Pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/federal-labor-regulators-are-looking-into-claims-that <comment><AUTHOR> Original title was too long. It was:

The NLRB Is Looking Into Claims That Amazon Violated Employees' Rights During The Coronavirus Pandemic

[https://www.nlrb.gov/case/13-CA-256021](https://www.nlrb.gov/case/13-CA-256021)

Case Number: 13-CA-256021

Date Filed: 02/07/2020

Status: Open

Location: Chicago, IL

Region Assigned: Region 13, Chi

Allegations

8(a)(1) Coercive Actions (Surveillance, etc)

8(a)(1) Interrogation (including Polling)

via DCH1 Amazonians United Facebook page

[https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=894793817609060&id...](https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=894793817609060&id=667682033653574)

I hesitated to post that last link. I don't have any stake in this. Please don't start flamewars on Facebook. I only post for the sake of transparency of my own original reporting. What is it with sites these days not linking to their sources?</comment>


Cringely on the Mac Book Air - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080118_003967.html

<comment><USER2> It's amazing that Cringely can be so consistently off the mark about everything to such a wild degree and still have a column that people link to.

<comment><USER3> cringely gets a lot of things wrong, but i always enjoy his vision. he's not so good at ferreting out what's going on in the tech world right now, but i think he'd be much better at inventing new parts of it.

my attitude when reading his columns: "this might not be true, but wouldn't it be cool if it was?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As someone with a different opinion on the events he covered in his nerds book, I thought Cringely's own story of his failed attempt to build a working airplane in a month is his best work.

\- <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0164814></comment>


Engineers find neat way to turn waste carbon dioxide into useful material - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/engineers-find-neat-way-turn-waste-carbon-dioxide-useful-material <comment><USER2> Every time there's a discussion about synthetic carbon fuels, there's the same frustrating replies. I want to reply to those with one statement: the whole point is to use excess power from solar/wind. There's always the same replies pointing out how it's more efficient to use the power directly in EV batteries, laws of thermodynamics, and other similar things. Those completely miss the point. Solar/wind is going exponential and we have a big problem of storing excess power. Massive really massive amounts of batteries is one option. But converting that into carbon fuels that work directly in existing infrastructure and is effectively carbon neutral is a good option too. That's where the discussion should be, not pointless arguments about efficiency of EVs.

<comment><USER3> A problem with processes based on using excess power is that they use equipment inefficiently. If cheap power is only available for a quarter of the time then it would take 4x as long to pay for the investment in the equipment. Whatever scheme you set up to use excess power needs to be pretty cheap to make it worth running only a small part of the time, or it needs to be doing something especially valuable.

Compare to the strategy of locating somewhere that electricity is always cheap and running all the time.

<comment><USER2> Solar produces only during the day, but wind is at any hour. And these days, the idea of massive over-provisioning is being discussed to overcome the intermittent problem since solar/wind keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. The idea is simple, how to overcome the cloudy winter day issue? Simply overbuild a lot of solar/wind so it can still provide enough on a winter day. Then during summer, shutoff the excess power generation.

But what a waste of potential to do that! All that overbuilt power generation, simply turned off during summer. Batteries don't help here, it would store it, but then the question of what to do with it is still here.

If society goes the route of massive overbuilding solar/wind, then there's an opportunity to do something with effectively free power during summer. But it's ONLY during summer, so it needs to be something valuable that can also act as a energy storage.

Carbon fuel is perfect for this. Millions of ICE cars exist and are still being produced. Long distance airplanes will be carbon fuel based for a long time. And so many other uses. I think another option is water. Water can also be seen as a valuable resource that acts as energy storage. Use the excess summer power to fill up a near empty dam with desalinated water? Sounds like a perfect fit for regions like southern California or Arizona.

<comment><USER4> >Use the excess summer power to fill up a near empty dam with desalinated water?

Pumped storage hydroelectricity is the biggest form of power storage at the moment, and has efficiencies around 70-80%. The losses for desalinization (pumping through media) are ruinous compared to just pumping uphill, and storing desalinized water means you can't use it without spending potential power. There might be good reasons not to mix desalinization and energy storage.

<comment><USER5> As I understand it, the main challenge with pumped storage is that you can't do it everywhere. You need fairly specific geography for it, and it's a big civil engineering project. Here's a good video on by Practical Engineering:

[https://youtu.be/66YRCjkxIcg](https://youtu.be/66YRCjkxIcg)

<comment><USER6> Good video, thanks. It briefly mentions the idea of pumped seawater storage. Is that really any different from using freshwater, other than location?

<comment><USER4> seawater is saline, you have to be careful what you do with it because you dont want to literally salt the earth where you are (soil remediation friggin sucks).

seawater is also not valuable. You don't care about the water quality in the reservoir, you just let it fall back into the sea. If it evaporates you're losing energy but you aren't losing potable water that you sell, and it doesn't require a connection to a water distribution main.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The application doesn't really make sense the way they explain it: use CO2 from a power plant to produce syngas. If the power plant burns methane, you might as well produce syngas straight out of methane, and short-circuit the step where you produce CO2. From the net energy usage point of view, you are better off (otherwise, you just found a recipe for perpetual motion).

Where this could make sense is energy storage. Say you are next to a large solar power plant, and you want to store the excess energy produced during the day and release it at night. Batteries are too expensive, pumped water requires some mountains, etc. With this, you store a quantity of CO2 in some tanks. At day you generate syngas and consume electricity, and store it in some other tanks. At night, you burn the syngas, get some of the initial electricity back, and store the CO2 back in its tanks.

<comment><USER8> This makes complete sense if you replace a power plant that produces electricity with an industrial process that produces heat, e.g. a blast furnace.

Then you can grab the waste CO₂ and turn it into something useful (ultimately liquid fuel, plastics, etc) by using the cheap solar energy, of which we often have a surplus at daytime.

This has the downside of only operating efficiently during sunshine, or needing a power transmission line from somewhere under sunshine currently (e.g. during local night).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _"We used an open flame, which burns at 2000 degrees, to create nanoparticles of zinc oxide that can then be used to convert CO2, using electricity, into syngas."_

Is this a real catalyst? (That is, it doesn't get used up in the process.) Or do they have to keep making more zinc oxide clouds to keep the process going? The paper summary is unclear about the energy inputs to this process.

Costs $10 to read the paper.

<comment><USER10> It's a real catalyst. Full paper here:

[https://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/aenm.202001381](https://sci- hub.tw/10.1002/aenm.202001381)

I don't think it will have industrial significance any time soon, though. Catalysts and processes for the reverse water-gas shift reaction are better developed. The hope is that electrochemical catalysts like this can combine the electrolysis process for making H2 and the syngas production step into one, with lower equipment costs. It's hard for me to believe that it will overtake better established industrial processes. It's very hard to take a maybe-better process from lab scale to industry when there's already an established pair of processes that get to the same outcome.

My prediction: electrolyzers and catalytic processes will continue to be optimized separately, and combining those modules will continue to be more predictable and affordable than all-in-one electrocatalytic approaches like this.

<comment><USER11> Do you have more resources regarding the current state of art for the separate processes?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Synfuels are very important for saving the climate. Yes, we need to eventually move all transportation to batteries, and we now have the technology to do that with cars and increasingly with trucking.

But for ocean ships and long-range airplanes we are nowhere near ready for that. And hydrogen fuel cells are not nearly good enough. So at least for many years the only way to make some important forms of transportation carbon- neutral will be synfuels

</comment><comment><USER13> This looks like the same story: [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200610152016.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200610152016.htm)

</comment><comment><USER14> How are they converting CO2 into H2+CO? Where is the hydrogen coming from?

<comment><USER15> Water. In a conventional CO2 electrolyzer (electricity + CO2 -> CO + O2) where CO2 is dissolved in water (plus salt) H2 is the standard byproduct per H2O + electricity -> H2 + O2. The concept of CO2+H2O directly into H2 + CO is neither novel nor useful, as dedicated green-H2 production is more efficient.

This is an example of 'meh' level work being puffed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Slightly offtopic, what's the easiest way to scrub CO2 from air (e.g. in a house) without using up consumable materials? Some form of pressure swing absorption?

<comment><USER17> Probably a bunch of plants.

<comment><USER16> Just in terms of numbers, you breathe out a kg of CO2 per day, you need to be growing more than a kg of plants per day to keep up with that.

That's a _lot_ of plants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Doesn't the net CO2 in the air increase?

So you harvest CO2 to into fuel. That fuel is burned and the CO2 is released back into the air. So net difference is zero.

But to harvest the CO2 you needed to generate a high amount of heat. That's extra CO2. So net CO2 is more.

It depends on the cost of harvesting that CO2.

<comment><USER19> You can use Solar and other renewable energy to power the conversion process. Progress is still progress.

I would much rather to pay more for net zero carbon fuel, then not do anything.

<comment><USER20> I do not understand the concept that a property of a _sum_ of a bunch of numbers somehow applies to those components.

Whether something is net zero depends on what you are adding it to; it's not inherent in that thing.

It's like, if you have a pile of blue things, then the pile is also blue. But other characteristics do not work that way. If you have a pile of things that each weigh 1 lb, then the pile does not weigh 1 lb.

<comment><USER21> If you make a hydrocarbon by taking CO2 from the air, and you use a carbon free energy source to do it, then burning that hydrocarbon is net zero carbon. That is, if all your hydrocarbons that you burn were made this way, then the atmospheric carbon doesn't increase because of your activity.

It acts just like a battery.

<comment><USER20> You're not telling me anything I don't know.

Look at it this way, do you believe CO2 is basically fungible in the context of global climate change?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>