Last satellite in the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System launched - <AUTHOR> http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2018/apr/13/india-now-proud-owner-of-indigenous-navigation-satellite-system-1800948.html <comment><USER2> Reason to start working on the system as per the article :

"It is a culmination of 17 years of rigorous work by Indian space scientists. India took a firm decision on IRNSS in 1999 after the US government refused to share GPS data that would provide vital information on Pakistani troops position during Kargil war. As in the previous launches of the IRNSS satellites, PSLV-C41 has also used 'XL' version of PSLV equipped with six strap-ons, each carrying 12 tonnes of propellant."

<comment><USER3> I didn't understand this. How would the GPS system allow the US to know the location of Pakistani soldiers? GPS satellites only transmit and GPS receivers only receive - there is no return path that would disclose the location. What am I missing?

<comment><USER4> As far as I can tell, all the online reports have been written 15+ years after the fact, and they all just quote one another; I suspect the journalists may be mistaken.

It's worth bearing in mind the Kargil War took place in 1999, and GPS Selective Availability wasn't turned off until May 2000. It might be that India asked for the SA seed key so their own forces/missiles could navigate more accurately, but were denied?

<comment><USER5> IIRC, with SA on, accuracy was to within 100 meters. And that's enough for troop movements but not accurate enough for missiles and artillery. So using it for land navigation would have been fine. It's sounding like it was a case of "We want it because we want it"

<comment><USER6> Kargil is one of the highest battlefields on Earth. I don't think I'd compare Himalayan warfare to "land navigation".

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_warfare#Kashmir_confl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_warfare#Kashmir_conflicts)

> The most dangerous and volatile of all mountain conflicts involves the > ongoing one between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region.

<comment><USER5> It's a generic term meaning "How do I get my troops from here to there" either by vehicle or marching, such that they don't get lost and arrive when needed.

This is the classic way with map + compass. GPS just makes it easier. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSNohNPqWlU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSNohNPqWlU)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So my phone can use these satellite navigation systems: U.S. GPS, Russian GLONASS, European Galileo, Chinese BeiDou and Japanese QZSS.

I guess one more doesn't hurt, huh?

It's curious how major powers all want to have their own satellite navigation systems.

Edit: QZSS is a regional system, and not due to start until November 2018, yet my phone detected one of those satellites earlier about 2-3 weeks ago. Interesting, especially considering I'm nowhere near Japan. Unless, of course, it was a bug or some weird error case. Or maybe QZSS was doing some early testing?

<comment><USER8> These are essential national security assets, used for military purposes, and which a hostile (or even neutral) owner could turn off in case of war. The civilian use-case is a handy side benefit.

<comment><USER9> _Was_ a handy side-benefit, then GPS got so cheap and ubiquitous people tag their dogs and hire bikes. Now, location services are an essential civilian service.

<comment><USER10> A number of devices are theorized to use GPS for cryptographic randomness, such as ATMs. In 2007 the US navy accidentally jammed San Diego's GPS signal, but the effect wasn't too huge.

[https://fieldlogix.com/news/navy-accidentally-jammed-gps- sys...](https://fieldlogix.com/news/navy-accidentally-jammed-gps-system-in- san-diego/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Curious. Do missile systems also lose track of their position midway through a flight like our phones? Are the receivers radically better than the ones in our phones? What happens if a missile loses its coordinates because of a bad signal? Does it just continue and keep track of its position based on the last known position or does it abort? If it cannot lock on to a GPS signal at the start of its flight, does it fail to take off?

<comment><USER12> Missile have their own very complex on-board guidance systems that don't require GPS at all. Newer missiles might use GPS as an extra layer of calibration, but I doubt they rely on it and most likely discard it if it's way off (otherwise GPS interference could potentially jam a missile).

<comment><USER13> There's a wiki on the various ways to guide a missile: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_guidance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_guidance)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is both amazing and sad. Amazing because its the emergence of (yet another) a space power, and amazing because it gives the world more and presumably healthy competition for a globally useful technology.

Sad because "we built, planned, funded and launched this awesome technology because ... war"

Humans. What a species.

<comment><USER15> Technology tends to be value-neutral. The application of technology could be for evil or for good. To claim that the primary purpose of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (NAVIC) is for belligerent activities is to claim knowledge of the intentions of the Indian government at the time of the system's creation.

Couldn't it be just as likely or more likely that multiple positive and negative rationales were in play at the time?

      - reduced dependency on the US
      - chance to learn something for oneself
      - give boost to the Indian aerospace fields
      - home-grown navigational abilities for war but also for civilian use
      - pride, wanting to be seen as a global tech leader
      - any other number of things?

I think it is amazing that we now have not one (US) but five (US, EU, CN, IN, RU) navigational satellite systems, two of which (US, RU) are globally operational and two more will be (EU, CN) by 2020. What interesting times we live in.

<comment><USER16> > To claim that the primary purpose of the Indian Regional Navigation > Satellite System (NAVIC) is for belligerent activities is to claim knowledge > of the intentions of the Indian government at the time of the system's > creation.

Sounds like you didn't read the article:

> It is a culmination of 17 years of rigorous work by Indian space scientists. > India took a firm decision on IRNSS in 1999 after the US government refused > to share GPS data that would provide vital information on Pakistani troops > position during Kargil war.

<comment><USER15> I did read the article. I'm not disagreeing that military matters motivated India's decision. I'm merely arguing against the claim that it was their _primary_ motivation. I'm certain it was a large/significant factor, I doubt it was the only factor. There are so many other beneficial reasons to pursue this tech, some of which I enumerated. Consider Galileo.

<comment><USER14> It is of course hard to determine what is primary motivation for any large decision. But imagine a scenario where the US GPS system was somehow banned from military use. would it have been funded? I don't think so. And the same can be said for India and China and Europe's versions. Somewhere in the decision making is a desire to have this in case the bullets start flying - and that motivation is (IMO) sufficiently large that without it, it's dubious the decades long investments would have occurred.

No we cannot be certain, yes the peaceful benefits are many (cf US GPS) and it is of course right and proper that India takes steps she sees as necessary for her own defence.

But it is still a mixed emotion - optimism and sadness, joy and regret.

It's not an attack on the plans of nations to raise themselves up. It's just sad that humans are so brilliant and so dumb at the same time

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How does this compare to the Americans GPS? Is it as good or was it designed with different constraints in mind?

<comment><USER18> As good but works only in the Indian subcontinent and its neighbourhood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Now I'm just waiting for GPS chip manufacturers to add support. Should increase resolution for those in the subcontinent :)

</comment><comment><USER20> yet China has Beidou navigation system

</comment><comment><USER21> IMHO, it's pretty useless compared to the current government and country's scenario. They better electrify the villages and provide better sanitation to the people rather then spending millions on mars, moon missions to prove their superiority! What a waste!

It may stop working in a year or two like any of their indigenous inventions!!

I'm not undermining any Indians, nor the way they work but as they are governed is by far the worst considering the current and past situations.

No quality, no nothing.</comment>


Please don't write "efficient" CSS - <AUTHOR> http://clipperhouse.com/blog/post/Please-dont-write-efficient-CSS.aspx

<comment><USER2> It sounds like the author is discussing a classic case of premature optimization to me. Just out of dumb curiosity, is there any way to profile your CSS code to see how efficient it is (and if there are any hotspots that _do_ need to be optimized)?

<comment><USER3> Additionally, aren't there tools available that can convert your CSS to an optimized form? If so you can always write it for readability, but "compile" it for release to a more performant arrangement.</comment></comment>


The Forgotten Sidekick - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/forgottensidekick <comment><USER3> I carried and developed for the Sidekick since the SK1 days.

Most people really don't realize just how capable those devices were for their time, and still to this day how they had some super neat features. It is no coincidence that the same team members were involved with Android and WebOS.

Some of the things that were amazing: \- totally proxied IM support, across AIM, MSN and Yahoo chat. (they never got to Google) It having a proxy in the middle meant you never lost a message in a tunnel and weren't constantly bouncing on and off. Battery life was great despite it being on constantly.

\- first true push email for the consumer market. Send an email to a @tmail address and it would be delivered in a second or two.

\- true multitasking and background apps

\- crazy neato programming APIs that you still dont see reproduced. One of the neatest that made multiplayer gaming nice on the device was what they called "The Funnel". Everybody had a Sidekick username, and your app could send a packet of information to any other Sidekick as long as you knew their username. That was guaranteed to be delivered and guaranteed to be delivered in sequence. Made all sorts of neat social / sharing apps dead simple to write.

They did so much right, but in the end they couldn't survive the paradigm shift of touchscreen, and there is no doubt they were starting to crumble a bit under the weight of their legacy codebase and platform.

But so, so far ahead of their time. I've never been so giddy than when I first brought one home.

I have a Sidekick4G on the way to replace my Nexus. Miss the keyboard, hope I can get some of the magic back.

<comment><USER4> > Everybody had a Sidekick username, and your app could send a packet of > information to any other Sidekick as long as you knew their username. That > was guaranteed to be delivered and guaranteed to be delivered in sequence. > Made all sorts of neat social / sharing apps dead simple to write.

Telepathy offers the same API over various backends (via Tubes - <http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Tubes>). Telepathy is already heavily used in Gnome and some apps are starting to use Tubes ([http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cassidy/talks/TelepathicDeskt...](http://people.collabora.co.uk/~cassidy/talks/TelepathicDesktop.pdf)).

<comment><USER5> I am pretty sure that the vast majority of mobile phones do not support Telepathy. While your comment is interesting for people consider desktop Linux development, it is a bit off-topic in a discussion about mobile platforms.

<comment><USER4> Maemo/MeeGo does, which means that a fair few Nokia phones and tablets do. I _believe_ Sony's upcoming NGP will use Telepathy as well but I can't find a reference right now.

Regardless, my point was that the API has since been reproduced and is in wide use on non-mobile platforms, not that every mobile phone supports it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This applies just as much to the iPad.

Tablets have been out for forever, and some of them have even been well made only to be ABANDONED by the makers.

It's been blisteringly obvious for a decade that tablets are the future of mobile computing.

The real lesson here is that marketing and sales matter. Apple, as a company, rarely invents new things. Rather it executes on old ideas that other companies failed to execute on.

Apple connects the market to the innovative technology and that is what really pays. Inventing stuff is useless if the public doesn't understand.

Moral: Steal a good idea, make it really easy to use, and don't skimp on your sales pitch.

<comment><USER7> tablets with finger input? with a dedicated OS built around that UI? really?

i've worked with stuff from HP, Lenovo, all using Windows Tablet edition. NOTHING came even near the iPad in usability. fucking booting that thing? field force users HATED these crapfests.

the tablet notebook pc is dead, the industry is switching in droves to the iPad. not nerds, business people.

Android will catch up, the HP PalmOS stuff looks nice too. But the iPad was a true first.

<comment><USER6> The iPad is just a tablet that doesn't suck.

Just like the Sidekick:iPhone relationship, there were a few tablets that didn't suck too much, but the parent companies tended to hamstring them. They would stop supporting them, they wouldn't do proper marketing, and basically they would constantly trip over their own feet. Suits were calling them dead before they even had a chance to be born. It wasn't a technology failure it was a business failure. Hence, Steve Jobs to the rescue.

<comment><USER8> We've all heard/read stories of internal MS politicking that killed various projects/features that, on their own, would have been good/useful/great.

I can totally imagine that the same sorts of things happened at some of the larger manufacturers re: tablets. When you've got 6 variations of the same product line with various dept/division managers for each one, anything that might truly disrupt that is going to have a huge internal battle.

Apple probably has internal politics, but the way the product lines are developed insures there's a minimum of competition between them. That's just (imo) one of many distinctions between Apple success and the previous tablet mfg failures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who started reading the article thinking of Borland's Sidekick?

Oh my... Guess I am really old.

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

edit: but it's interesting. When the iPhone was first shown, I had a Sony Ericsson P-800 phone. I wondered what was the big deal about Apple's gizmo.

And no other phone since got voice dialing as right as the SE...

<comment><USER10> I thought the same thing when I saw the title! I _loved_ Borland's Sidekick -- especially having an ASCII table and cheat sheets handy when I was coding.

<comment><USER9> I used it extensively when porting a Clipper application to Dataflex - <USER2> able to capture the screens into an editor was an incredible timesaver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I got one of the first sidekicks when they first came out and got into mobile development through it since it was really easy to get a developer key. With SK2 they made it a lot more difficult for no real reason and myself and a number of hobbyists I knew moved away from them.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's pretty much same story with Nokia's devices, older Windows Mobiles, etc. It's not that Apple invented smartphone, they just made it so that normal people could and even wanted to use them. This of course blows the minds of us geeks as we think that smartphones have been pretty neat and usable devices for almost a decade already.

<comment><USER13> the sidekick was totally usable, unlike winmo (i don't know about nokia smartphones so much). and it wasn't so popular with geeks either, it was with teens. apple's usability is a myth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Loved my sidekick 1, but it had an unfortunate build problem -the spinny light-up button kept breaking off from the circuit board and I had to solder it back together a few times but it still gave up the ghost too soon. And it also happened on the replacement I bought after the first died. Hmf.

The keyboard however, was really, really good!

</comment><comment><USER15> [2008]

</comment><comment><USER16> And then Danger (Sidekick maker) was bought by Microsoft and the team was demoralized by the Kin debacle. Internal politics gutted that project and it was dead on arrival.

Anyone notice the Kin device that was like a small Sidekick?</comment>


Gorillas have developed humanlike social structure, controversial study suggests - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/gorillas-have-developed-humanlike-social-structure-controversial-study-suggests <comment><USER2> Why is this controversial? If you buy into evolution (which one would assume is the case with an evolutionary anthropologist), then most of what we do and are did not appear out of the blue and probably existed or exists in some form or another in species that are close to us; including all sorts of aspects of our social behavior. So, not knowing this you would expect to find stuff like this with species like gorilla's rather than being surprised by it.

<comment><USER3> Exactly, give it a few millennia, and some specie probably will end up like us in their own way.

We had to have bases for our current behaviors, and it's only logical we find it in other species.

I don't understand how people can imagine animals don't have feelings, thoughts, logic or a sense of existing. There is little in us that is so unique. It's like life on other planets, or additional dimensions we can't see. Yes we can't prove it now, but it would be disproving it that would really catch me by surprise given what we know now. The universe kinda like repeating patterns and continuity.

<comment><USER4> > Exactly, give it a few millennia, and some specie probably will end up like > us in their own way.

I'm all for evolution, and I think animals have feelings and emotions and are smarter than they are often considered. But "they will end up like us" is highly unlikely as we know of no other such development in last few billion years.

<comment><USER5> Sure we do. Neanderthals look to have been far more sophisticated than previously thought, for example.

<comment><USER6> Neanderthals not only developed along the same evolutionary path as us... they're full blown homo sapiens. There's a high likelihood you have Neanderthal DNA yourself. That's not an example of something else being able to develop like us independently in 5,000 years.

If all humans were wiped out today, _maybe_ over _100,000 years to 1,000,000 years_ the great apes would be able to evolve into creatures as intelligent as modern humans. But if all apes were wiped out today, it wouldn't be surprising if Earth never saw another species go to the moon. Don't forget lots of species thrived for hundred of millions of years without leaving any trace approaching even simple tool making.

<comment><USER5> > Don't forget lots of species thrived for hundred of millions of years > without leaving any trace approaching even simple tool making.

Apes are hardly the only tool makers, though.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/10/crow-that- be...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/10/crow-that-bent-wire-to- retrieve-food-was-acting-naturally-scientists-discover)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Kim Hill, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, rejects such parallels to humans. "[T]he extreme social brain hypothesis doesn't claim other primates don't form hierarchically increasing groupings," Hill wrote in an email to Science.

I don't see how that makes the study itself controversial. He was simply answering an unseen, possibly leading question from the person writing this story.

<comment><USER8> > rejects such parallels to humans

The author clearly misunderstands the statement she directly quotes. It's grotesque.

Here's a SMBC Comic that illustrates the conversation that will follow with that scientist: [https://smbc-comics.com/comic/2009-08-30](https://smbc- comics.com/comic/2009-08-30)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure what to take from this. It would be surprising if animals' internal lives were simpler than we thought, right? So further study should generally suggest that it is more complex than previously known, but not as complex as human social behavior, which seems pretty obvious. Does this say anything else?

<comment> xkcd-sucks I don't necessarily disbelieve that human social behavior is more complicated than gorilla behavior; but should we compare gorilla social behavior to e.g. 21st century American social behavior, or "uncontacted tribe" social behavior?

And, if there is a difference in the relative (perceived!) complexity of social behavior between "modern" and "undeveloped" humans -- Does that imply undeveloped humans are to modern humans what gorillas are to humans? The notion isn't necessarily incorrect, but historically it's been interpreted in service of the ugliest human social behaviors

<comment><USER10> > but should we compare gorilla social behavior to e.g. 21st century American > social behavior, or "uncontacted tribe" social behavior?

The differences between the social behavior of these types of human societies only look big in a vacuum. For example, all human societies use complex verbal language. No other ape society we know of uses anything like it. There is still a huge gulf between human and other apes' individual and social behavior.

> if there is a difference in the relative (perceived!) complexity of social > behavior between "modern" and "undeveloped" humans

The fact that over a few short centuries, many "undeveloped" humans have become "21st century humans" suggests that those groups aren't fundamentally different in their inherent ability to operate within a given social context, whether it is described as "simple" or "complex". A key human trait is social adaptability, especially earlier in life.

> Does that imply undeveloped humans are to modern humans what gorillas are to > humans

Absolutely not, for all the aforementioned reasons. What would motivate one to believe such an analogy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Surely that should be "Humans have developed gorilla-like social structure."

</comment><comment><USER12> I guess that the people considering this controversial, must consider the book "Mama's Last Hug" by Frans de Waal highly controversial.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand why the article does not link to the paper it discusses. Here is the paper: [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.068...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.0681)

<comment><USER7> They do in the second paragraph

<comment><USER13> True, my bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder why despite bonobos being closer to us genetically than gorillas, gorillas seem to be the more human like. Maybe its just a a false-bias of mine since these type of news seem to always be about gorillas.

<comment><USER15> There are more gorillas out there and they are easier to access and study

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it entertaining to learn about things that distinguish humans from other mammals, other primates, or birds.

Humans can throw good.

Humans can run long.

Humans can pen themselves up in masses without killing each other.

<comment><USER17> Humans can run long, but birds can fly far and fish can swim far, so human running doesn't look especially special.

<comment><USER18> Except we can out run nearly every animal on earth at distance. I'd consider the species of bird that can fly the farthest special. Why not humans?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Every once in a while I'll ask people this question: assuming evolution is true, which species do you think will evolve next?

<comment><USER20> All species are evolving at the same time, so this question doesn't make sense as written. I assume you mean to ask which species will be the next to attain humanlike self-awareness.

I find it an interesting thought experiment. [Weasel words ahead!] I think our behavior (damaging the ecosystem, causing habitat loss and so forth) might be putting evolutionary pressure on other species in a way that could lead to an increase in intelligence and self-awareness. But I also fear that we're doing it too much, too quickly, and that extinction is easily as likely.

<comment><USER21> I think this sounds reasonable until you really consider Earth's history. We've gone through far more radical changes in environment - not only in terms of temperature shifts from ice ages to worldwide saunas but also in terms of geographic change as what was presumably one land mass gradually divided into many, land bridges between the newformed continents disappearing, even things such as the oxidation of our planet which resulted in the extinction of nearly all life. Yet, through it all - only one species managed to evolve anything like our cognitive and developmental ability. Quite peculiar in many ways.

<comment><USER22> There were lots of cognitive human like species. I.e. neanderthals etc. They're just dead now.

<comment><USER21> The Neanderthals lived hundreds of thousands of years longer than the entire existence of _homo sapien_. Their peak technological development was stone age, which sounds even nicer than what it is. Pound two rocks together, notice sharp pieces fall off, use them -> you're now in the stone age. And, contrary to misinformation driven by mass media - there is no clear evidence they engaged in any form of art, adornment, or generally symbolic behavior. [1] Extremely high rates of traumatic injury among the discovered remains also implies that in their hundreds of thousands of years of existence they failed to even refine their hunting technique.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Culture)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tiny Cortex-A8 COM runs Linux and Android, goes for $27 - <AUTHOR> http://linuxgizmos.com/tiny-sodimm-style-cortex-a8-board-runs-linux-and-android/

<comment><USER2> The SODIMM factor is useless without a carrier board. And I can't see the pricing on the carrier board except for the combo which is being sold for "$59 in volume".

The $27 price is also for the 275 MHz part in 1000s quantity, not the 600 MHz part. That's $34 (in 1000s?). Good luck running any kind of desktop on 275 MHz, much less Android.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's $27 in volume, which is a bit of a disappointment after getting used to Raspberry Pis in single unit volume of $25. However, unlike the RPi, this is likely more suitable for commercial use, once you figure out how to buy one. BTW, single unit price is $67.50, prior to buying an eval board to attach the COM to.

</comment><comment><USER4> SODIMM is a rather interesting packaging method for this kind of thing. Not hacker friendly, but great for OEMs that want to be able to replace this part.</comment>


The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers - <AUTHOR> http://www.vitavonni.de/blog/201503/2015031201-the-sad-state-of-sysadmin-in-the-age-of-containers.html

<comment><USER2> Yes, we live in the generation of containerised "apps" and especially "curl blah | sh". Add to the mix a hip and clueless web developer and there's your secret sauce for disaster.

Indeed it is a sad, sad state and there is no cure in sight. Perhaps a whip...

<comment><USER3> This really do seem to echo my feeling as of late with recent Linux related debacle.

sysadmins and "power users" are being sidelined by developers that don't want them interfering with their precious creations. Oh, and users are "children" best locked in padded cells.

Writing that i find myself thinking of the Greek pantheon, and their supposed attitudes towards humanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Nobody seems to know how to build hadoop from scratch

That's not true. It's fairly well documented in FreeBSD ports.

[https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/devel/hadoop2/Makefile...](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/devel/hadoop2/Makefile?view=markup)

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems the core of this argument comes down to the diversity/complexity of today's software environment. That's understandable, but there are clear reasons why it is this way, and equally apparent upsides. Without elaborating too much on it, few people build software like they did in the 80s anymore, most software glues together libraries others have written. This leads to more complicated build processes.

While this is true, I think on balance the author's case is unjustified. First of all, it's not like you could just type 'make' to build something back in the day either, unless you were compiling a simple library that was only supported on one platform. Secondly, sysadmins should not be in the business of building source code from scratch. What is the security upside of that, are sysadmins expected to audit the code?

I believe containerization is an incredibly exciting technology to have hit ops, and old school sysadmins should emerge from their nostalgic depression and embrace it, and adapt to change. I have been using everything from CFEngine, to Puppet, to Ansible over the past decade. Containers are an amazing breakthrough, because they standardize the build process. We have our own container repository that essentially act as a private package repository. The contract of what the container is allowed to do to the outside world and host environment is clear. As a result, the hosts are spartan, simple and secure. This is miles from the old world of large servers where dozens of services shared the same file system.

I am so happy that we finally live in the age of containerization. I would never wish to go back to that old world the author describes.

<comment><USER6> Containers are in Solaris and FreeBSD forever.. before containers you could use virtual machines. Nobody has a problem with containers...

The problem is that you run and download arbitrary unverified binary code in your system by design. E.g. in the docker registry or when installing a major "bigdata" related project...

It's opaque and a lot of work to check the integrity and updating becomes a nightmare when you have randomly downloaded 150 jars - of which 1 or 2 have an serious security flaw. I'm not even talking about attacks from secret services or good attackers.

I've read it as a rant in favor of establishing something like signed apt- repositories with public-key encryption for the world of java/maven and containers. And this is a very valid point that is just not there.

<comment><USER5> > Containers are in Solaris

Yes.

> and FreeBSD forever..

Sort of...

> before containers you could use virtual machines.

You could if you were sufficiently masochistic. Container layers improves the situation so much that it makes a qualitative difference over VMs.

> The problem is that you run and download arbitrary unverified binary code in > your system by design. E.g. in the docker registry or when installing a > major "bigdata" related project...

Is this a bigger problem with containers than with packages from e.g. an apt repository? Not sure if docker supports image signing at the moment, but I find it hard to believe this being a problem with containers in general.

> It's opaque and a lot of work to check the integrity and updating becomes a > nightmare when you have randomly downloaded 150 jars - of which 1 or 2 have > an serious security flaw.

I think the author mixes two separate points: (1) The complex state of modern software development, which is valid but is like complaining about the existence of violence, and (2) How this prevents him from compiling from source, which is plainly bogus.

Reading the piece favorably, I can sympathize with the plight of sysadmins tasked with ensuring security in modern software development, with many small libraries and diversity in tools. Frankly, this should not be on sysadmins shoulders, it should be the responsibility of developers. Rather, sysadmins should be responsible for ensuring the security of the environment around what developers build. But this is made easier with deploying containers, because they provide a better shrink wrap on the code delivered from dev. In fact, Dockerfiles in particular offer a much more reasonable contract between dev/ops than the ambiguous one that existed previously, where hosts had to be polluted with all these maven packages.

So while I can understand the author's frustrations, I think the diagnosis is flawed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >To build Apache Bigtop, you apparently first have to install puppet3. Let it download magic data from the internet. Then it tries to run sudo puppet to enable the NSA backdoors (for example, it will download and install an outdated precompiled JDK, because it considers you too stupid to install Java.)

[https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-O0Ztn2Fhj4A/AAAAAAAAAAI/A...](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-O0Ztn2Fhj4A/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAAAA/daaJiey703M/photo.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER8> Spending a decade as a sysadmin then another 6 as a developer:

\- cmake, autoconf etc provide consistency for the admin building OS packages. That said in this case Hadoop should already come as an rpm/deb package (a real one that owns its own files and that can be verified, rather than pulling things in from the internet).

\- build tools and language specific package managers provide full fidelity access to the packages for that ecosystem for the developer

Neither is right or wrong. The main thing is to delineate who's responsible for managing what - something containers help with.

<comment><USER9> "cmake, autoconf etc provide consistency for the admin building OS packages."

I have to laugh any time I see the words cmake and consistency in the same sentence.

<comment><USER10> A hollow, bitter, laugh. Followed by tears.

<comment><USER11> and blood.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Human Curation Is Back - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/07/05/human-curation-is-back/ <comment><USER2> Curation is my entire business and this article only casually mentions what I think is the most important point about why human curation works so well: trust. And, in particular, trust when things get _weird_.

When there's a clearly identified brand or person standing behind curation, it has a major effect on the audience and their response, versus a "blameless" automated job. Humans explicitly trust or distrust other humans, whereas trust in software or algorithms is either implicit or of dubious nature.

If I subscribe to a magazine, listen to a radio station, or attend a festival curated by a known figurehead, group of people, or a brand like "The New York Times", that I trust, I know things that I experience that are out of my comfort zone were likely designed to be there. If a news recommendation algorithm throws up something weird (and they always do, alas), I have no idea if it was being smart or just making a mistake.

<comment><USER3> _I have no idea if it was being smart or just making a mistake._

When does a bold recommendation become a mistake? Can human recommendations be mistakes? (Both algorithmic and human recommendations are based on models, assumptions, and partial information.)

<comment><USER4> I would think, by strict definition, a bold recommendation would be one you doubt you'll like but that turns out well, and a mistaken recommendation would be one that turns out poorly. In other words, the value of a recommendation is not something you can evaluate at the time, before following the recommendation; instead, it's a measure of regret. (And by that vein, yes, human recommendations can totally be mistakes, too.)

On the other hand, people _do_ tend to try to filter on the recommendations themselves before knowing their regret-value. People will subconsciously multiply the likelihood that something was a "bold recommendation made by design" by the relative status of the recommender.

Celebrities, leaders in your industry, people you're attracted to, etc. can get away with recommending all sorts of crazy things. Just because of their source, these things seem much less crazy. And this doesn't seem to correlate at all with how well they would know you or your tastes as an individual. Kind of a mysterious behavior, though it reeks of evo-psych tribal status dynamics stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think human curation is "back" per se. There's just a difference in expectations.

When I listen to a radio show or a new playlist from a friend, I have a general understanding of their tastes and the taste of the audience that has elected to receive these recommendations. Arguably, the biggest thing here is that decision - you've subscribed to this person's taste and you are predisposed towards justifying that decision.

With a recommendation algorithm, it is reaching much higher, trying to give you personal recommendations. The relationship is more confrontational. I'm much more inclined to think "why this" when given an algorithmic recommendation, trying to reverse engineer it, instead of trusting a person's taste in curating a selection based on much broader criteria.

</comment><comment><USER6> > If it's a good idea to use human curators to navigate 30 million "songs", > how about applying human curation to help the customer find his or her way > through the 1.5M apps in the Apple App Store?

Isn't the App Store already heavily curated? First there's the human curation step of reviewing apps for acceptance into the store, which weeds out the total junk.

Then there are dozens of hand-picked lists of apps such as "Summer Road Trip" or "Stargazing."

In fact, finding favor with the App Store Editors is one of the few well-known paths to indie app development success.

</comment><comment><USER7> Algorithmic curation is in fact very good at analyzing things you like or habitually listen to, watch, read, or buy, and present you with other things you may like.

In the case of Apple Music, the curation is there primarily to take advantage of the trust factor to push product for business partners. It's not about exposing exemplary art, or presenting you music to your particular taste.

<comment><USER8> Everyone's experience will vary, but what has been suggested to me so far from Apple Music has been very relevant to my tastes. I definitely don't feel like I'm being pushed content to satisfy their business partners -- to the extent that every label and artist on the service is a "business partner."

Of course, Beats One is going to be more mainstream -- it aims to be a radio station in very much the traditional model, complete with top twenty segments -- but I've even found that station interesting at times, discovering some Nigerian music, for instance.

Yesterday I was suggested a mix of Autechre and Squarepusher to help me get through my afternoon's work -- which it actually did. The other day I was suggested the Beach Boys Smile sessions and over a hundred Smashing Pumpkins B-sides -- so, there's a lot of variety and it all feels relevant to me. I'm not getting Taylor Swift thrust on me, and so far I don't get the sense that corporate partners have some quota that I'm there to fill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1) app search is so broken that I would pay[1] money to access a decently curated list. I'd love for something like GNKSA to exist but for apps that have demo / lite versions; are sold for a price; have limited sensible iaps; etc. or maybe there exists a subreddit for this?

2) I buy many books for my child. Amazon is pretty hopeless at recommending books to me, even though I've seeded it with knowledge of the books I've bought. So I turn to human curation: the Kate Greenaway medal focuses on excellent illustration in books for children. That list is an excellent source for books. Then one or two degrees of separation (eg, other books the illustrator has worked on, or other books the author of the winning book has written) get you hundreds of excellent books. Someone scraping this list and using affiliate links could probably make a bit of passive income.

<comment><USER10> I find amazon excellent. Either by just looking at books I like and seeing what other people have purchased, or creating a wishlist and it suggesting new books.

Apps are indeed terrible. The algorithms are shit because people buy shit, so they suggest shit. Curated apps stores have been tried (on Android) and there are blogs about apps. The problem is that most money is made from these terrible freemium games that are no better than slot machines. So the curators get paid off, or end up promoting the stuff people want (slot machine-like shit)

<comment><USER11> On the same note, jinni.com before it closed was excellent at recommending movies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This makes me think about the YC company Dating Ring, which just participated in a podcast season about their business. The denouement turned out to be that their curated dating did not scale, so they pivoted to being a lifestyle business. It makes me wonder whether curation is best when many canonical "good enough" solutions exist, but not when people try to seek the "best" from a set.

[http://gimletmedia.com/show/startup/](http://gimletmedia.com/show/startup/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Note that one of the authors (Jean-Louis Gassée) was in charge of Macintosh development at Apple in the 1980s, then left to head up Be Inc., the developers of the BeOS operating system.

<comment><USER14> Also note what Steve Jobs thought of Gassée

"Jean-Louis Gassée is evil," [Steve Jobs] snapped. "I don't say that about many people, but he is evil."

Brent Schlender. "Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader."

<comment><USER15> Why would you accept this statement without any context, even if it comes from Steve Jobs? What makes this person evil?

<comment><USER14> Lol. Do I look like I'm Steve Jobs? So what makes you think that __I __personally think Gassée is evil. I have no opinion on Gassée, thought it was interesting to report the Jobs ' quote since the original comment talked about Gassée's role at Apple.

<comment><USER15> I stated my point badly. I never assumed you that you were Steve Jobs but I shouldn't have assumed belief. The original commenter I felt gave people context on Gassée's background while your comment, in my opinion, contained a negative assertion with no context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can get behind the corporate curation of apps, which are essentially just tools. However, the idea that a corporation can curate something like _music_ seems very arrogant to me. Music is art. Even if you cut out the crappy 90% as per Sturgeon's law, the remaining 10% has so much variation that you couldn't possibly pick out "the best" to any measurable degree — especially when you consider the fact that, historically speaking, most of the best (read: most influential) art pushed the boundary of the medium in some way. _Maybe_ it's possible to find the slice of music that most people would enjoy listening to, but that's so music business-y it makes me sick.

<comment><USER17> Corporations have been arrogantly curating music for a century now. Didn't stop jazz, hip-hop, punk, or electronica developing, thriving, being sucked into the corporate curation machine, and then spawning a dozen rebellious reactions outside it.

Curation doesn't mean 'have someone pick out the top ten best'. Curation means things like 'have someone knowledgeable pick out fifty underappreciated forgotten masterpieces'.

Also, 'apps' includes 'games', not just tools, and you could replace the word 'music' in your rant with 'videogame' pretty easily.

<comment><USER18> > Curation means things like 'have someone knowledgeable pick out fifty > underappreciated forgotten masterpieces'

Ideally, this is how it should be, and can be. Tastemakers have been effective for a long time and will continue to be, it's a fuzzy thing they do.

I recently started listening to an internet radio service curated by humans (after spending years exclusively on one with selections done by algorithm)-- it could be my imagination, but so far the overall quality seems better.

<comment><USER19> I've been listening to streaming radio for over 15 years now and to this day, none of the algorithm-based services can compare to my list of Shoutcast bookmarks.

I always wonder how things would've played out if anyone did a better job of promoting such things (although I guess there's not much money to be made in promoting tens of thousands of small-time DJs and music enthusiasts who are doing the streaming).

The whole Apple music streaming thing made me do a double take because they're basically offering a much smaller set of the kinds of stations that have been freely streaming for years.

Streaming mp3 like shoutcast/icecast streams will play in just about any mobile or desktop media player. They can be bookmarked, creating your own custom "radio dial" of stations you personally like. And the variety of music is astounding. I've got maybe 15 or 20 stations that are programmed by people that consistently expose me to new and interesting music along with stuff I already like. I get to enjoy those simple pleasures like realizing the common thread between the last 3 or 4 songs played since there's a real human DJ behind the playlist. And I can access them anywhere I could access Pandora or Spotify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When someone says they are changing the algorithm of a news feed or search engine page it's never to benefit the reader, it's always to benefit the advertiser. It's a lazy way of fitting the advertiser to the feed rather than letting the user decide what they want, and then fitting the advertiser to the users' preferences.

I spend a lot of time curating news (see bio). It's not enough to go out and just aggregate information on a topic. I see so many products that scan the web for news and then present them in a list. Even Google does this, presenting a list of blue links with no context. There's a news article, then a tweet, then a YouTube video. but what does it mean? The reader is required to make some mental sense of it all. The reader is required to build the story. The challenge IMHO is to build an intermediate stage of human curators who can compile data that can then be built up into a story that is meaningful to humans.

<comment><USER21> Completely agree. Algos have limits and in almost every _practical_ application that they touch my life, require a human to make sense of with _understanding_.</comment></comment>


Facebook apologises for removing breast cancer awareness video - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37721193 <comment><USER2> Just imagine the harm seeing a breast can do to a vulnerable young child. /s

Facebook needs to literally grow up, removing porn is one thing but clinical images, mothers feeding their children and such should not even be up for discussion.

It's a fine line between protecting your users from seeing offensive content and outright censorship, good to see them doing the right thing in this case, pity it is still on a 'case-by-case' basis instead of a healthy review of their policies.

The main criterion seems to be 'is the internet raising a large enough stink'? If yes then restore the image.

<comment><USER3> Why can't Facebook filter out whatever they want to filter out? I mean, you wouldn't want to see penises all over your feed, and not everyone necessarily agrees with you about the appearance of breasts(except me, I want more breasts on my Facebook), so I can understand why Facebook would make such a decision without necessarily deeming it as wrong. Nobody has to use Facebook. And their main criterion, "is the internet raising a large enough stink", seems perfectly reasonable to me. But what a weird world we live in that a short- lived incident about womens' breasts ending with an apology from Facebook gets a news story. Then again, it's the BBC, so I shouldn't be surprised.

<comment><USER4> > Why can't Facebook filter out whatever they want to filter out?

Why can't people let Facebook know what should and shouldn't be filtered?

Facebook already have policy that breasts are ok when they're raising awareness of breast cancer or being used to feed children, so facebook is ignoring their own existing policy.

<comment><USER5> The naked female body is only acceptible in a medical or child-rearing countext.

No. We need to reject this ideology. It is wrong wrong wrong.

We need to stop perpetuating this lie.

Naked human bodies are wholey unremarkable in the strongest sense.

<comment><USER6> I'm not even close to a prude about nudity, but I utterly reject that you may have any say about my attitude toward it.

<comment><USER5> That's fine, so long as your attitude toward it doesn't perpetuate female body shaming nor prevent my retina from being exposed to the female anatomy because of some misguided belief that the naked female breast constitutes pornography outside the scope of medicine and breast-feeding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> alex- I find it surprising that this is newsworthy.

It appears that Facebook never argued that the image was in breach of its policies. Just that some software it runs had a bug that miss classified this image.

Then when challenged they apologized and approved the add.

So to me the summary appears to be "Software company has bug that effected one customer, apologies and fixes the issue" which must happen every hour of every day...

Am I missing something?....

<comment><USER7> Well, it's Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Breast cancer awareness" is a thing only because it is a form of signaling that privileges female bodies. That's why it has such tremendous buy-in despite already saturated "awareness" going back 20 years, or the fact that there are a half-dozen causes of death with greater preventibility and lethality even just considering women.

I'm really tired of people engaging in pointless signaling campaigns and expecting to get points for being So Brave in the face of ~ universal consensus that they are correct, or taking minor bureaucratic snafus like this as evidence that they are somehow not in a position of complete victory.

</comment><comment><USER9> Every time I see these I think the same thing: this shouldn't be an issue. If we weren't allowing so few players to define so much of our experience of the internet, it wouldn't matter that much what any single one of them decides to censor. Hopefully it will be that way again someday.

<comment><USER10> I think part of the problem is that companies need to censor these sorts of images or run into regulatory trouble because being an "adult" site has some regulatory implications they don't want to run afoul of

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of the incident with the Norwegian newspaper posting the "Napalm Girl" photo.

Facebook is trying to automate the detection of illegal/unwanted images, and it seems extremely difficult to detect the context of the image to the extent that you can differentiate between acceptable images of human bodies, and unacceptable images (which would be, I assume, the vast, vast majority of such images posted).

I wonder how they could proceed with this- maybe with some sort of anomaly detection, where you do a first pass to detect all images containing the unwanted features (e.g. naked bodies), and then a second pass to try and detect the activity that's going on, or to detect if the image is famous (e.g. a picture of David, the famous Italian statue, would be acceptable, while a photo of a naked man in the same position would presumably not be).

[1] [http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/09/12/sheryl-sandberg- respon...](http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/09/12/sheryl-sandberg-responds-to- norway-pm-over-facebook-photo-censorship/)

</comment><comment><USER12> As long as they remove breast pictures instead of pictures of beheadings (I complained several times as they appeared in my newsfeed, but they were always deemed as "ok"), our world is not going anywhere in terms of peace.

<comment><USER13> They do censor pictures of beheadings, even in "private" messages between consenting adults. Or at least they did several years ago.

<comment><USER12> They allow pictures that are so shocking horrific that one has to vomit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I understand why it is this way. "Perfect is the enemy of good" and all that. It's probably much cheaper to run a system that is imperfect.

But it bothers me that we leave so much of our discourse to such imperfect systems.

</comment><comment><USER15> Good for them. Next: stop the Prager University videos from being suppressed.

<comment><USER16> I think you're mistaken: it's Google/YouTube that has placed several of the excellent Prager University videos under restricted mode. Not Facebook.

I'm not aware of Facebook suppressing the Prager University videos.

And in the YouTube case, it's likely an automated response to (mis)flagging by users who politically differ.

<comment><USER15> Ow! Thank you,judah.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I do agree this is ridiculous and they should be embarrassed about this kind of stuff, but I do want to remind people that Facebook is an advertising product selling "you" to advertisers. They have to please their advertisers, not users. I am glad to see people complaining. I hope people continue to complain and news outlets like this ridicule them, but until we stop giving our information away for free to these corporations, they are going to continue to do immoral and dangerous activities. Facebook is not the problem here. We are!

</comment><comment><USER18> Facebook is eventually going to get into more systematic mess over this sort of rubbish.

Have one single clear principle and apply is consistently. Change the principle don't make exceptions if needed. "Educational videos wont be removed" could have been a good policy that Google has had for Youtube.

Or even "No Breasts"can be a good policy too. If you want to show breast cancer videos do it on you tube, shoot it with a prop or link to another page. I dont see why that does not work.</comment>


Deviancy amplification spiral - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deviancy_amplification_spiral

<comment><USER2> How come they don't give a real world example of a "Deviancy amplification spiral"?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know. I ran across the article after watching ridiculous late-night news commentary on "sexting" with the headline of "How should teens be punished for sexting?"</comment></comment>


All I Possess - <AUTHOR> https://allipossess.com/ <comment><USER2> Photographing your keys [0] is a bad idea [1].

[0] [https://allipossess.com/products/key- ring](https://allipossess.com/products/key-ring)

[0] [https://allipossess.com/products/lock](https://allipossess.com/products/lock)

[0] [https://allipossess.com/products/bend- key](https://allipossess.com/products/bend-key)

[0] [https://allipossess.com/products/old- key](https://allipossess.com/products/old-key)

[0] [https://allipossess.com/products/broken- key](https://allipossess.com/products/broken-key)

[1] [https://hackaday.com/2009/09/22/photographic-key- duplication...](https://hackaday.com/2009/09/22/photographic-key-duplication/)

[1] [https://keysduplicated.com/](https://keysduplicated.com/)

<comment><USER3> If somebody copies his keys and takes his stuff, he has less stuff to have to document, meaning a lot less work. It's secretly _brilliant!_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Before taking a look at this I would encourage anyone to look into Michael Landy's Break Down[0][1][2], where the artist first cataloged and then destroyed everything he owned (except for a pair of overalls) including his vintage saab and all of his correspondence.

That work at least has the weight of a real gesture. The linked work seems (generously) fairly banal by comparison.

[0] [https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/break- down/](https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/break-down/)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Break_Down_(Landy_artwork)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Break_Down_\(Landy_artwork\))

[2] [http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160713-michael-landy- the-...](http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160713-michael-landy-the-man-who- destroyed-all-his-belongings)

<comment><USER5> Why would he have to destroy it all? Couldn't he give it away to someone who might need it or at least be able to use it? Just seems like a bit of a dick move all in the name of "art"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was happy to see cleaning supplies, tools, and cooking gadgets. Every time someone posts one of those 'I only own 12 things' posts, that's the first thing I think about/look for.

Oh, you just spilled a drink? Better call a cleaning lady because you don't even own paper towels.

Time to a cook a meal? Nope, can't. Better just eat out instead.

Something is broken? No duct tape, can't go over my 12 item limit, throw out the broken thing and buy a new one.

It all seems so impractical while also oozing of privilege. Must be nice to not have to repair anything or ever cook for yourself.

<comment><USER2> > It all seems so impractical while also oozing of privilege. Must be nice to > not have to repair anything or ever cook for yourself.

Actually eating at cafeteria is what least wealthy people, e.g. students, do. Buying food cooked in batch and sharing instruments is cheaper than maintaining your own kitchen and possessions.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that's true at all. University cafeteria's are very expensive in my experience (at least in the U.S.).

<comment><USER2> The price there just reflects how much students are ready to pay. Cooking is actually cheaper when done en masse. Just look at how poor countries and army handles it.

<comment><USER8> How do poor countries handle it?

<comment><USER9> With multitudinous small unregulated street vendors, mostly.

<comment><USER5> Great way to squirt liquid from one or both ends of your digestive system.

<comment><USER9> I spent two months in Thailand living off street vendor food and never had any issues. Then again after a misunderstanding I spent three days drinking the tap water (which even the locals won't drink) before getting sick, so maybe I'm just robust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm interested in the four identical toques in different colors. Minimalism certainly doesn't seem to be the goal - why are there four? Is it a collection of designs that have earned their love? Are they really nice toques? Can we infer something about the owner's gender (probably bald, probably male)? Or their location (far north?)

How committed to hipsterism is this guy? The "Raw denim jeans" \- 4 pairs in varying stages of fadedness, but all of them definitely raw denim. Is it the "Little Prince" theory of how your possessions own you as much as you own them ? Is it a statement that your essence is a gestalt of all the things you own? There's a collection of wrenches and allen keys, as well as pots of fountain pen ink. "Hipster" isn't a precise enough term. How hard are you guys relating to this individual, purely through the stuff he's got? You can see that he lives in an apartment in a cool city, thinks of himself as practical as well as aesthete, probably thinks he's a rugged individualist too, but he's put a lot of effort into fitting in with a very specific demographic.

I don't know. I guess I spent enough time thinking about it that's served it's purpose as art.

<comment><USER11> > why are there four?

To coordinate with different outfits? I mean I don't care, I only have the one unadorned black one, but I can see where someone else might. (I also live in Baltimore, which is not so very far north. Anywhere temperate, a toque can be a handy thing to have - although we more often call them knit caps, down here. Nor am I bald; you don't need a shiny head to need something keeping it warm.)

I don't grasp the intent, either. Perhaps there isn't one. Not long ago I might've written it off as pure wank, but just lately I've been thinking about how to compose my own photographs with artistic value, whatever that means - which makes it a little hard to indulge in the same kind of offhand dismissal I'd rather not have aimed at me.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I wouldn't dismiss it either. It might just be an experiment in mindfulness - not getting rid of stuff, but just thinking about each thing and seeing how it influences your life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> White things on white background, supported by shopify... sublime.

</comment><comment><USER13> There was a much more extreme work along the same lines by Michael Landy where he destroyed all his possessions Over a two week period.

</comment><comment><USER14> Art... or the most meticulous documentation of possessions for renters insurance coverage?

<comment><USER15> Clearly nothing prevents it from being both. That may be how it began.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seeing this I realize I own a lot more than I thought. I also realize there are several things I would not put publicly on the web.

I don't get art I guess.

<comment> et-al The execution of this is super weak.

There's nothing about the site that really conveys the magnitude of items besides page __ of 12, and you can't even browse by category as if it were an online shopping site, or see original purchase price. He's not utilising the chosen medium of an online shopping cart, so why even use Shopify in this case? It's a minimalistic image gallery with captions.

Sometimes the message is bland or the artist does a bad job of communicating their intentions. And this is one of those situations where I wouldn't fault the viewer as much as the artist for "not getting it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't understand this style of, minimalism? Isn't the point to remove the power your possessions have over you? Not obsess over minifying the amount of possessions you own?

<comment><USER18> I think you're jumping to the conclusion that that's the point. Certainly many see removing the power possessions have over us as a positive, but art around this subject could be exploring it from different angles, and I don't see that stated anywhere in this installation. It could well be a celebration of consumerism[1], or just an exploration of obsession over possession.

[1] Worth noting, the installation is sponsored by shopify

<comment><USER17> That's a fair read of the piece, I think I'm trying to subconsciously shoehorn my dislike of minimalism into my interpretation.

<comment><USER11> Curious: Whence comes the dislike?

<comment><USER17> I'm a countercultural asshole =\

<comment><USER11> So you're antiminimalist because Jonathan Ive is pro-? That seems an odd criterion. What would you do if he changed his style?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Bold move showing all his keys like that.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am all for removing clutter from one's life.. i lived out of a backpack for more than seven years.. but honestly what I see is a lack of intellectual curiosity

I have more capacitors I salvaged from street trash than 'all this person posses'

I see a unfortunate homogeneity of subject matter

There is a wide breadth of cultures and forms of knowledge and expression in the world

I hope to involve as much of it in my life as possible

<comment><USER21> Does involving that stuff in your life require owning it? You could have a capacitor junk box at your local hacker space, for example.

<comment><USER20> fair, but if I have a storage unit do I 'possess' those things? If asked would you tell people you 'have in your life' thousands of books because you have access to a library in your community

i also think it unnecessary for someone to have access to junked capacitors

it was mentioned in response to the phrasing utilising 'all' which to me implied a preference for fewer things.. too many things would render the exercise of documenting it 'all' improbable.. and I was trying to express my own opinion of content stead numerosity when living in a comfortable yet clutter free environment

also, i failed to see a bank statement or a pile of cash or stacks of gold bullion, so this all feels editorialised anyway

<comment><USER21> I was responding primarily to this:

> what I see is a lack of intellectual curiosity

It seems ungenerous to say someone is intellectually uncurious because they don't express that curiosity by possessing stuff.

> also, i failed to see a bank statement or a pile of cash or stacks of gold > bullion, so this all feels editorialised anyway

Yes, I didn't see a credit card anywhere. A notable omission, among others.

<comment><USER20> But to say a collection is 'all I possess' and then expect your audience to come to your work with the knowledge that we all possess intangibles beyond the scope of the things the artist is saying are the only things the artist possesses muddles the piece

Perhaps some abstract objects could have been standins for abstract concepts: this apple represents the love of knowledge I possess; but in their finitude we'd still have the editorialised issue

It is a stated art installation which to me begs to be discussed and so I was discussing what thoughts the installation caused me to have through exposure

My opinions apply to this curated list of items stead some ad hominem of the artist

The items and their aesthetic homogeneity suggests to me a lack of intellectual curiosity but the artist may yet possess more than what is being displayed in this installation

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> a book, with some strikingly similar ideas: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_According_to_Larry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_According_to_Larry)

<comment><USER23> I was looking for this. I read it over a decade ago in middle school immediately thought "is this Larry?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow, I own even less stuff than this guy. When I started being a digital nomad, I was able to fit all of my worldly possessions in half a suitcase and one laptop bag...

</comment><comment><USER25> Mostly impressed by the Two Meter Long Sweater

</comment><comment><USER26> What about the bank account? I can virtually own nothing if I'm a billionaire and buy everything I need during the day. It wouldn't mean I own "nothing", and it would be an environmental nightmare!

</comment><comment><USER27> It would be much nicer if everything were on one page instead of 12. Scrolling down is easy and relaxing, moving your mouse and clicking on the next link breaks the flow.

</comment><comment><USER28> It would be nice to see the absolute minimum amount of stuff one would need to survive in the modern world (reasonably). This seems like a loose upper-bound.

<comment><USER29> It's very unlikely that such a global minimum exists if it is not zero, and it is probably zero if you consider all of the things which are free, and do not consider survival skills "stuff"

<comment><USER28> A good way to find out is to put all your stuff in storage boxes, and only take it out when you absolutely need it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I didn't see a computer anywhere. I guess he has a friend uploading the images or he uses a public computer?

<comment><USER31> You're wrong: [https://allipossess.com/products/macbook](https://allipossess.com/products/macbook)

He does, however, only seem to possess one pair of boxer shorts.

<comment><USER32> [https://allipossess.com/products/boxer-shorts- white](https://allipossess.com/products/boxer-shorts-white)

It says '1 of 10', so presumably they're all the same.

<comment><USER5> White ones, very brave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> He seems to have a lot more possessions than me.

</comment><comment><USER34> Maintenance might be a bit difficult...</comment>


All we want are the facts, ma'am. - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/fact-check.html Peter Norvig's new post on reporters, fact-checking, models and data. <comment><USER2> "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." -- Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:225 (<http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1600.htm>)

<comment><USER3> thanks for citing your quote!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love that Sussman story.

      In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

      "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
      "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe," Sussman replied.
      "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
      "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

      Minsky shut his eyes.
      "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
      "So that the room will be empty."
      At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

If you ever hear Sussman tell it, he'll claim Minsky actually told him "Randomly wired, it _will_ have preconceptions--you just won't know what they are."

<comment><USER5> I love that story too! Can anyone point me to a collection of stories like that? I have read "Hackers..." by Levy and "The Soul of a New Machine" by Kidder.

<comment><USER6> The Jargon File has three more: <http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_47.html#SEC54>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whenever I read an article in the newspaper, I have to remind myself to filter it through the lens of all the times I've been misquoted or have caught glaring mistakes in stories about which I have first-hand or subject-matter knowledge.

As much as I depend on the media for information about what's going on in the world, I rarely can point to articles about subjects I know and say they're accurate.

<comment><USER8> The day I stopped reading newspapers: there was an article on the front of the science section of La Vanguardia, a local 'respectable' newspaper of Barcelona (Spain). The headline of the article was (paraphrasing) "Organ donor headless human bodies".

I am a biologist and a geneticist by training. So I read on with naive interest.

The article was about how researchers managed to inhibit an homeobox gene essential for head development in tadpoles, and that tadpoles developed to some stage and then died, lacking a head. Then the article when on to the wild speculation that such silly experiment could one day lead to headless human bodies generated as clones and for the purpose of being organ donors, avoiding ethical issues (right, the author was sleeping when he wrote that.)

With my background, I knew the claims to be bullshit at several levels, including the ethical. Then I made the link: are all other newspaper articles as thinly grounded as that one? So I stop trusting anything from any source of redacted news such as TVs, newspapers, and radios.

<comment><USER2> The day I gave up on TV news: Driving around flipping channels on my radio, I heard that O.J. Simpson was suspected of murder and detectives were trying to find him. "Hmm, great." I thought, "Here comes another Hollywood scandal." I listened a couple minutes, then switched to music.

I got home to find my husband sitting on the carpet, leaning his face toward the TV, mere inches away, and blurting, "O.J. Simpson is getting arrested!" There on the TV was live helicopter coverage of a van surrounded by several cop cars very calmly making their way on an LA freeway devoid of traffic. The scene looked rather like a head of state with security cortège, yet this was the chasing of a suspected criminal. A very odd sight, quite the photo op, even if the van occupant were not a sports and movie celebrity.

I looked at the TV and my husband, and then it hit me: the purpose of TV news is not to inform you but to glue your eyeballs to your TV. This hit me so hard that I ran into my office and spent the next twenty minutes sobbing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I present to you Chris Anderson, as theorized about by himself:

      The way Chris Anderson has traditionally published is unsustainable in the face of new developments,
      as outlined in this misleading neon spot-color info-graphic! *(not pictured)*

      In the face of such a massive increase in critical attention towards my trite editorial, the way I
      have traditionally published cannot continue. Each new dalliance I put on the cover of Wired is now
      savaged for it's idiocy by domain experts before it even appears on newsstands!

      How am I supposed to get an advance on the book version of my pop-science pablum if I'm not showered
      with uncritical adulation? How am I going to debut on the NYT bestseller list in four months if I'm
      already discredited?

      Clearly, I need to develop a *new kind of* [1] Chris Anderson. A totally new model of exerting my
      bloviations on the world. I need to find a way to publish to smaller, more sycophantic audiences in
      private at first; gradually sowing my trite theories into the public discourse so that they are not so
      easily mocked for what they are.

      I need to explore the depths of my own *long tail* -- I need to expose my genius to my *social graph*
      first. Publishing straight to the cover of Wired exposes my ideas to public ridicule by practicing
      experts -- if I could limit my audience initially to *self-facilitating media nodes* [2] like myself,
      I might be able to ride a wave of sycophancy right over any criticism!

      I, Chris Anderson, hereby usher in a new age of post-pop-science! Jared Diamond and Malcolm Gladwell
      don't stand a chance against my cunning insights into this world of post-hype I herald!

[1] <http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1579550088>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4mpJumHU-w>

<comment><USER10> This is great, where did you get it ? Did you write it ? If yes, congrats, it's hilarious.

<comment><USER9> I wrote it as a comment on MetaFilter when the bullshit was making the rounds back in July: <http://www.metafilter.com/73484/Virtual-Thinking#2191757>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems endemic to modern journalistic media to never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Frankly this disturbs me.

<comment><USER12> Not just modern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you can get ahold of the New Yorker article Norvig cites, I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER14> To be fair, the quote isn't all _that_ wrong. If you know enough to recognize the problems, you probably aren't getting much from the article anyway.

<comment><USER15> I thoroughly agree with Herring when he said, "To be fair, the quote is wrong."

If you're not going to quote correctly, why quote at all? In this case, it's because the best support Anderson could find for his argument is Peter Norvig's name. Norvig didn't want to give it, but Anderson went and took it anyway.

The most mystifying thing was the fact-checking call. Anderson might as well have said, "Hi, I'm planning to misquote you in a future article. Please say that's OK, because then I'd have slightly more journalistic integrity than when you say no and I go ahead and print it anyway."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe people will take the hint and stop up-voting Wired articles?

Or how about a domain filter in my options?

<comment><USER15> Some people use Xichekolas' HN Greasemonkey script to filter domains:

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039>

It adds a "Toolkit" link to the HN menubar from which you can set options.</comment></comment>


An analysis of Ruby 1.8.x HTTP client performance - <AUTHOR> http://apocryph.org/analysis_ruby_18x_http_client_performance <comment><USER2> curl FTW</comment>


Listen up, wireless carriers. Here's the perfect wireless plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/06/verizon_unlimited_data_listen_up_wireless_carriers_here_s_the_perfect_wireless_plan_.single.html <comment><USER2> "it doesn't cost Verizon any more money to serve data to two devices instead of one"

That is two connections to two different devices they must create and handle. At home, your wifi router does this and they provide you with one pipe but you handle the spectrum at home.

Two devices is two pipes and they may be in different locations or just using up more bandwidth from the same location. So it makes sense to charge more if you are concurrently connecting devices.</comment>


Timing your startup - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2010/11/07/timing-your-startup/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me a Steve Jobs quote:

"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever."

from [http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/What-are-the-best-Steve- Jobs...](http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/What-are-the-best-Steve-Jobs- quotations)

<comment><USER3> This is also known as hindsight bias.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias>

<comment><USER4> I don't think Jobs is concerned about retrospectively predicting the successes he had. Rather, I think he wants to emphasize their inherent _un_ predictability, together with the assertion that such unpredictability doesn't matter. So it's not quite hindsight bias.

<comment><USER5> Actually, Jobs is paraphrasing Kierkegaard, who wrote _"Livet skal forstås baglaens, men leves forlaens"_ (Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards), and then advocated _"Springet"_ (the Leap, usually translated as "the Leap of Faith".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Being there at the right place at the right time definitely makes a difference. But - somehow I feel that there is always an element of luck involved in deciding that. You don't want to end up waiting and waiting and realize, oops you were too late!

<comment><USER7> Exactly, there were examples of startups who had a product at just the right time. But I've never heard of startups who _waited_ until the time was right and then succeeded.

Given the nature of startups and short runways, it's a gamble for a startup to depend on having the "timing right". There are much safer and proven methods for building companies, but its fun to think about.

<comment><USER8> Uhm. You should read Founder at Work. What everyone is saying is that persistence is key, not luck.

Here's another quote, not from the book:

"Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success." - Biz Stone, Co-founder, Twitter

<comment><USER9> Yes, _the harder I work, the luckier I get._ I think of a startup as a game with a 1-in-10 chance - but you can play as often as you like. The odds of failing _n_ times in a row is _.9^n_ \- so the odds improve _fast_. And of course hopefully you'll learn _something_ general along the way to improve your odds, and leverage specific money/tech/contacts/market presence too. If you're persistent, failing begins to look extremely unlikely.

What _can_ stop you (apart from giving up) is if you can't (or won't) _learn_ some key thing, or can't (or won't) _do_ some key thing. Which is why having mentors/colleagues is very helpful (for learning); and having co-founders and being able to employ/outsource/team-work is very helpful (for doing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _The Innovator's Dilemma_ is full of inspirational stories of markets discovered retrospectively. An example off the top of my head is honda motorcycles being used as off-road recreational vehicles - this market was discovered by a sales rep observing customers doing it. This could only be apparent some time after the product was created, and sold.

Another is Xerography being rejected by IBM after careful (and accurate) market assessments. The market significance only appeared after Xerography was actually in use. (from _The Billions that Nobody Wanted_.)

So when pundits (not cdixon) tell you it's impossible to discover a market retrospectively, they are simply wrong. But they're right that it's risky; and that it's much safer to launch with buyers waiting (of course!). I think the key take-home is that: a business needs customers. (Sounds obvious? Yet it's a perennial downfall of engineer-lead startups.) Finding customers (aka marketing) is at least as much work as creating the product in the first place. To put it in perspective: if creating the product takes a few prototypes over a few months or years, it's probably reasonable to put comparable effort into marketing: a few markets and 4 P's over a few months or years. The danger is when you exhaust yourself engineering it, and collapse at the finish line - just when the second marathon starts, of marketing it. (of course it's even better to run both marathons simultaneously... to torture the metaphor).

</comment><comment><USER10> I remember watching a Youtube video of a talk by Jawed Karim on Youtube. He talked about proliferation of digital videos as video cams prices were coming down, broadband was cheaper and flash was something present in most browsers. Guess most video sharing site before that used windows media player and real player.

Guess this is the link <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssfmTo7SZg>

<comment><USER11> I probably first saw the "fat guy tearing up his cubicle computer" video in RealMedia, but the simple history is that before flash was prevalent there wasn't really a such thing as a "video sharing site." Modems were still the primary means of internet access 7-8 years ago and codecs weren't yet optimized for online access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would prefer looking at it this way: "Being at the right place, at the right time".

Neither you can sit and wait for the right time nor you can try to build something for which the timing is right today.

Its more about being prepared for the future. Understand the future and build something you feel excited/passionate about. Now just be fully prepared to strike with full impact as soon as the iron is hot.

</comment><comment><USER13> Timing your startup? Do it ASAP. If it fails, do it again.

I doubt very many startups at all have timed their run intentionally. More likely, they've been inspired, run to market before their motivation fizzled, and things have fallen into place (right timing, met the right people, etc).

<comment><USER5> _Timing your startup? Do it ASAP. If it fails, do it again._

I think this is a bit too glib. If it is evident to you that the timing is not right for your startup, the prudent thing is not to launch blindly, praying for a miracle or a chance to try again after failure-- rather, to adjust your idea/product/service to fit the market conditions.

<comment><USER13> Sure, but don't sit there like you're about to jump rope waiting for the perfect timing that may never come. For those facing enough challenges already, the last thing you need is another fear or excuse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You want to be early, but not too early. Ideally, you want to be the guys who've spent enough time thinking about the space to appreciate the opportunity when it strikes.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think you just have to have a great team that knows when the iron is hot and where to strike it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems to me that you can't possibly know if your timing is correct except in hindsight.

<comment><USER17> What if you could _really_ understand why others have failed, and honestly evaluate your ability to overcome those difficulties.

He notes the higher-quality flash player, proliferation of broad-band and digital video cameras, and growth in blogs that wanted to embed video. If you were the Youtube founders, and were able to correctly asses the situation, then you COULD have foresight.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps you're right. But most people were still on dial-up in 2005 and most DV cameras were bad and expensive. Who really could have known that would have been enough? I'm sure people earlier thought that the proliferation of webcams meant they would succeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> cool-RR Maybe the early startups should just be more patient?

<comment><USER18> The problem is that when the money run out, patience won't save you.

<comment><USER19> That and, as Chris Dixon said, it's hard to know when these things will be successful at scale.</comment></comment></comment>