Zero-Volume Glass Klein Bottles: 3D Immersion of 4D Shape - <AUTHOR> http://www.kleinbottle.com/

<comment><USER2> Yikes - I'm mentioned on YCombinator! I'm honored, but a bit taken aback.

Umm - what to say? Whatever I'm accused of, it's probably true. And yes, I make those Klein bottles. A way for this physicist to tweak the noses of his mathematican friends...

Warm cheers all around, -Cliff (sunny afternoon in Oakland)

<comment><AUTHOR> Six years ago I called you to ask you to be my advisor on a high school research project. You cried out of honor, and declined, because I lived too far away (Florida.) You're my idol!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I bought one of these about 15 years ago. The packaging was great, with lots of funny cards and stickers. Apparently now you get photos of Cliff with your actual bottle, and a personalised drawing on the box.

I'm permanently on the move, so I've got it stored in my parents' attic. I told them to be careful with it, as it contains the entire universe.

</comment><comment><USER4> I love the wine bottle variant [1].

"Guaranteed to frustrate even the most dedicated wine connoisseur: it's difficult to fill, difficult to pour, and difficult to clean."

[1] [http://www.kleinbottle.com/wine_bottle_klein_bottle.html](http://www.kleinbottle.com/wine_bottle_klein_bottle.html)

<comment><USER5> Sounds like a friendlier version of the Pythagoras cup [0].

I'd take a slow pour over being drenched any day.

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

<comment><USER6> Which he also sells [https://www.kleinbottle.com/Tantalus.html](https://www.kleinbottle.com/Tantalus.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> pi-rat Clifford Stoll is awesome, definitely check out his TED talk!

I have one of these bottles made by him: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/stianeikeland/2489219187/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/stianeikeland/2489219187/)

They're pretty neat, but people often think I've a bong on display on my bookshelf. :p

<comment><USER7> As a side note, if you click that link and see Flickr's homepage, just close the tab and click it again. I think Flickr has launched a new feature...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> They seem neither one sided nor zero-volume. The spout simply is routed through the bottom instead of coming out the top. It may be more "smooth" than a wine bottle, but if this zero volume then a wine bottle also must have zero volume, putting the spout somewhere else, and making the spout concave instead of convex, doesn't change this.

<comment><USER9> They are "zero volume" because they don't have an inside. Everything that looks like it is inside can be reached from the outside without breaking the glass. The same can't be said for a (corked) wine bottle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So if these are zero-volume, can you take them as carry-on on US flights?

<comment><USER11> They hold less than 300mL of liquid, so yes.

<comment><USER12> I thought they contained the entirety of space-time?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Clifford Stoll kind of debuts the Klein bottles in this video here => [http://youtu.be/Gj8IA6xOpSk?t=4m24s](http://youtu.be/Gj8IA6xOpSk?t=4m24s)

</comment><comment><USER14> I keep meaning to buy one of his portraits of Gauss ([http://www.kleinbottle.com/gauss.htm](http://www.kleinbottle.com/gauss.htm))

</comment><comment><USER15> Fantastic writing on that site!

<comment><USER16> The author, Clifford Stoll, is quite a character. He wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg", which was (I think) one of the first hacker-thriller novels, which I hold directly responsible for getting me into UNIX as a 12-year old in the 90's. I still have a very old battered copy somewhere.

He's become something of a technology curmudgeon now, and I recall him writing a few articles in the 90's with titles like "Why the Internet is a failure". Interesting guy.

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

edit: Whoops - the book was "The Cuckoo's Egg", not "The Cuckoo's Nest".

<comment><USER17> _The Cuckoo 's Egg_ is nonfiction, based on Stoll's work as a sysadmin. It tells the other side of the story portrayed in the German cult film _23_ ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_%28film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_%28film%29)).

I have defended his curmudgeonliness here: [http://axyl.us/post/479929158/clifford-stoll-was- right](http://axyl.us/post/479929158/clifford-stoll-was-right)

<comment><USER16> I didn't know it was non-fiction! To be honest, I've not read the book for probably 15 years, but that adds a really interesting spin on it. Thanks for pointing that out!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's official. For the first time in 6 years, California is now 83% drought-free - <AUTHOR> https://thetechladder.com/story/official-first-time-6-years-california-now-83-drought-free/ <comment><USER2> The capacity for some of the reservoirs listed in the graphic is misleading. Some of them (like Oroville) cannot be completely filled because there are concerns that the dams will break in an earthquake.</comment>


SFU Prof: Why Toronto housing is becoming as unaffordable as Vancouver's - <AUTHOR> http://inroadsjournal.ca/housing-price-lunacy-moves-east/ <comment><USER2> If anyone doubts the premise of this article, and still thinks that lack of supply is the problem, I encourage them to visit Vancouver.

There is construction everywhere, with 40-story towers springing up like mushrooms, all across the metro area, creating mini-downtowns. On the edges, mountainsides are being clear-cut, and replaced with suburbs.

Almost none of the infrastructure to support it is paid for by the people who are benefiting from the housing crisis. Most provincial funds come from taxing people who contribute value, by doing useful work, instead of leeching off the system.

<comment><USER3> It's not supply. It's speculation.

>From 2000 to 2010, the population of New York increased by 2.1 percent while the US Census reported that the number of occupied housing units increased by more than twice that amount, 5.3 percent. . . . If we could build our way out of our affordability crisis, the ratio of housing costs to income should have gone down during this period. However, average rents and the share of income spent on rent both increased well above inflation over the same period. [0]

[0] [https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/new-york-housing- gentrifi...](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/new-york-housing- gentrification-affordability-de-blasio/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "With limited data, those who had their eyes open often had to rely on anecdote. But inconveniently for the real estate lobby, the inferential, and no longer just anecdotal, case was growing stronger and stronger. The report I wrote last year on Vancouver, for instance, which made the case that foreign capital was playing a major role, did not rely on a single anecdote. All the data it presented were carefully gathered, some of them by Canadian governments. But the evidence had to be pieced together to get a clearer grasp of the issue – including by eliminating other alleged, but ultimately insufficient, causal contributors.

When the B.C. government finally collected data, then, it was no surprise that the amount of "foreign citizen buying," about 13 per cent, in Vancouver was much more than the 3 to 5 per cent estimated by the real estate industry."

"Why did speculative buying and total sales suddenly pick up in 2014–15 after a few years of stability? The obvious explanation is that capital flight from China acted as a catalyst."

Josh Gordon: It's all the fault of the foreigners.

Government: But they only make up 13% of the buyers.

Josh Gordon: Ok, foreigners only make 13% of the buyers but they're a CATALYST.

Um ok, so no one else is to blame?

<comment><USER5> In 2014 the CAD was nearly at parity with USD, now it's 0.74

The average price of goods has increased accordingly. As far as I can tell the actual value of a house has stayed about the same, and the purchasing power of Canadians has gone down.

Foreigners are a convenient scapegoat, but the 15% tax in Vancouver was barely a speed bump. The chart in this article is pretty misleading as it implies that the tax worked and deflected the foreign buyers to Toronto, when in fact prices has rebounded well beyond the previous peak.

<comment><AUTHOR> > when in fact prices has rebounded well beyond the previous peak.

Feb 2017: "The average resale price in Greater Vancouver was $878,242 in January, down 18.9 per cent from a year earlier, when it stood at $1.038 million, according to numbers from the Canadian Real Estate Association."

Source: [http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/02/15/vancouver-average- ho...](http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/02/15/vancouver-average-house-price- january-2017_n_14775268.html)

<comment><USER5> The problem with talking about housing prices in Vancouver is that it's a heavily politicized issue with all sides pushing an agenda.

this article specifically compares jan 2016 to jan 2017 in order to push the narrative the tax worked, but you could easily find a more recent article that says the opposite: [http://www.news1130.com/2017/04/18/despite-price-drop- housin...](http://www.news1130.com/2017/04/18/despite-price-drop-housing- market-royal-lepage/)

which better matches my anecdotal experience in house shopping in the last month.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure if you've read Gordon's work, but he actually advocates a surtax based on whether an owner's worldwide income is filed in Canada rather than an n% tax on foreign owners at purchase.

There are more effective ways to cool the market and he's well aware of them. I suspect if you sat him down for coffee he'd tell you that the BC Liberals wanted to be able to point to a measure to say they were doing something to slow the market, while being fairly confident the market wouldn't slow down that much at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I bought my condo less than 2 years ago. The same unit, 11 floors lower, is now for sale for 80% more than I paid. Same condition, just worse view from the balcony.

Toronto maaaybe has a bubble going on.

(If I can sell for $1m more than my mortgage, I'm going to retire in my 30s and move somewhere cheaper. So far, that looks like it could actually happen).

<comment> 52-6F-62 Good luck with that. It appears hard to know when the getting is good.

I'm stuck in the rental loop. Looking outward and seeing rents have increased by at least 200-300 dollars a month for similar sized units is disheartening. It's hard enough to save as it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a couple of issues that this article misses : a) Why is the rent in Toronto going through the roof ? If people were merely flipping houses, why would they bother with renters ? In Vancouver, the rents in condos were very low. In Toronto, the rents are high and increasing . b) The author mentions Brampton as relatively unaffected due to south asian diaspora concentration. However, Mississauga has similar concentration of South Asians and the housing market has seen a similar appreciation in prices.

Is it possible that people find Toronto to be a great city and want to move here ? I know of several families that moved out of mcmansions in Brampton because schools in Toronto are so much better ? Ordinary citizens may be parking their money in Toronto real estate because they may be unsure of the future value of their stock investments.

<comment><USER8> Vancouver is taxing foreign (i.e. Chinese) money pouring into real estate there, so demand shifted to Toronto (which doesn't have the same tax on foreign purchasers levied yet).

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-22/foreign-b...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-22/foreign- buying-plummets-in-vancouver-after-new-property-tax)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author successfully demolishes a strawman. He's right, the problem was not caused by supply side limitations, but a demand side surged. But the people he's demonizing aren't arguing that. They're saying that the problem can be _solved_ supply side. Build enough housing and prices will stabilize. Easier said than done, but that's the only true long term solution.

</comment><comment><USER10> Vancouver, San Francisco, London, New York, Toronto, Seattle, etc. all have the same issue with foreign investments in real estate. Maybe they should consider not selling residential real estate to people who are not permanent residents and won't reside in it in regions where this is a problem.

</comment><comment><USER11> Let's face facts, housing is a plaything for the ultra-rich.</comment>


Is it possible to search GitHub for developers based on repos? - <AUTHOR> I have a project where I need to integrate a few specific products, all with repos on github. And I wanted to search for developers who have experience (commits) on all ~3 products.<p>Is there any way to do that, official or 3rd party? <comment><USER2> If you go in "history" you an see who made each commit. For example:

[https://github.com/Hjertesvikt/peptide_PoC/commits/master/in...](https://github.com/Hjertesvikt/peptide_PoC/commits/master/index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, or you can go directly to Contributors ([https://github.com/Hjertesvikt/peptide_PoC/graphs/contributo...](https://github.com/Hjertesvikt/peptide_PoC/graphs/contributors)).

But I'm looking for a way to cross-reference a few projects and see the contributors to both/all projects.</comment></comment>


Stanford's 'Stickybot,' a Gecko-like Robot, Climbs Vertical Surfaces - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5lMJtQOKSY

<comment><USER2> When I read the title, I first thought about a webrobot based on the Gecko engine and thought about an own project where I want to implement something similar (but based on WebKit). :)

Well, still very interesting. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why the tail is helpful (not explained in the video): [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080317171030.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080317171030.htm)</comment>


Year 1 of GDPR: Over 200k cases reported, firms fined €56M, mostly Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/14/more_than_200000_gdpr_cases_in_the_first_year_55m_in_fines/ <comment><USER2> And even more cookie warnings

<comment><USER3> Yes, a case of lets annoy you to death with overlays so you give up and click accept every time.

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends, there are some overlay where it's just 'I accept' and 'I refuse'. Those are cool.</comment></comment></comment>


Blazor 0.2.0 release now available - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/webdev/2018/04/17/blazor-0-2-0-release-now-available/ <comment><USER2> What I need is a redux equivalent for Blazor. Architecting larger applications without a good unidirectional flow can get messy (and repeat ASP.NET webforms mistakes)</comment>


Expect Some Unicorns to Lose Their Horns, and It Won't Be Pretty - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/business/dealbook/expect-some-unicorns-to-lose-their-horns-and-it-wont-be-pretty.html <comment><USER2> I hope the unicorns lose their horns and then a genocide is performed to kill all the unicorns just so that I do not have to listen to anymore talks about is going to happen to the damn unicorns.

Could we talks about something else, like how to cure cancer ? rather than endlessly speculating about the future that no one can predict.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why the public is so concerned with these valuations. Where was all the media coverage of over valuations of shale drillers that are now bankrupt?

<comment><USER2> Technology is a threat. Oil is status quo.

(tinfoil hat mode)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any tips for using Python Interactively? - <AUTHOR>

I'm SSH'ing into a Ubuntu box using Putty.
I need to run Python in interactive mode and am finding it pretty frustrating.
How do I get the last command? (like using the up arrow at the command line, or in IDLE on Windows Alt-P)
Any other tips?
I'm trying to get IPython going right now but am having some difficulties.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Up should work. If you want it to persist across sessions you'll have to enable readline history.

You might find my pythonrc useful: <http://bitbucket.org/brodie/dotfiles/src/tip/.pythonrc.py> \- be sure to run export PYTHONSTARTUP=~/.pythonrc.py.

My script does the following:

1\. Enables readline tab completion. 2\. Makes tab insert four spaces. 3\. Persists command history (~/.pyhistory). You can disable it by running NOHIST= python. 4\. Changes the print hook on functions to include their signature, as well as their documentation. 5\. Changes the print hook to use pprint for everything else, also taking into account the terminal width. 6\. Colorizes exceptions if Pygments is available. 7\. Adds a source() function that shows you the source code of a function, class, or module in your pager. Code is syntax highlighted if Pygments is available. This function works on zipped eggs as well.

Also, enabling readline means all your ~/.inputrc bindings will work. So for example you can hit ^R to search back in history for a snippet you wrote.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops. As it turns out this box is running FC. I'm going to try things on a different box. Thanks for pythonrc! (doesn't quite work on this box because readline isn't working for some reason)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you are going to use it interactively, I strongly suggest you insist in using IPython. Try to read the nice manual first in order to get yourself familiar. It offers autocompletion via the tab key, you can easily execute shell commands, change directories etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> hmmm... up arrow gets the last command for me on ubuntu with putty and python 2.5.1

what other frustrating things are you finding?

<comment><AUTHOR> When I hit up I get: ^[[A

Some other frustrations: reload() seems to not work on occasion(haven't figured out the pattern yet)

Tab completion would be nice (I'm going to try the script above)

<comment><USER5> I think because of the way import works, that a reload wouldn't update anything that the module you're reloading imports.

      $echo -e "def foo():\n\tprint 'bar'" > a.py
      $echo -e "import a\ndef bar():\n\ta.foo()" > b.py
      $python
      Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Jul 31 2008, 17:28:52)
      >>>import b
      >>>b.bar()
      bar
      >>>f = open('a.py', 'w')
      >>>f.write("def foo():\n\tprint 'changed'")
      >>>f.close()
      >>>reload(b)
      <module 'b' from 'b.pyc'>
      >>> # Notice that it imported from 'b.pyc' not 'b.py'
      ... b.bar()
      bar
      >>>reload(a)
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
      NameError: name 'a' is not defined
      >>>#But I need to update a
      ...reload(b.a)
      <module 'a' from 'a.py'>
      >>>#That loaded from 'a.py'
      ...b.bar()
      changed
      >>>exit()

_edit_

      #You could have done it like this too
      >>>import a
      >>>import b
      >>>b.bar()
      bar
      >>>###Something changes a.py
      >>>reload(a)
      >>>b.bar()
      changed</comment></comment></comment>


Welcome to Zucktown - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/technology/facebook-zucktown-willow-village.html <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what happened between a month ago and today but it seems like all of a sudden it started raining lightning bolt of fury against Facebook.

I'm definitely not a fan of the company and could care less if they died but this seems too orchestrated to be pure coincidence. Who's interest is this serving?

</comment><comment><USER3> this is getting savage</comment>


SaaS: how we went from 5 to 100k MRR in 24 months - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2016/06/09/build-scalable-sales-machine-saas/ <comment><USER2> mmh, by upvoting yourself on HN? ;)</comment>


Facing federal investigation, YouTube considering broad changes to kid's content - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/ <comment><USER2> This isn't the correct link for this story.

Maybe this: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/19/facing-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/19/facing- federal-investigation-youtube-is-considering-broad-changes-childrens-content/)</comment>


LinkedIn Visual Resume - <AUTHOR> http://visual-resume.herokuapp.com

<comment><USER2> Bookmarklet doesn't work on Safari (OS X). I tried with Login and I think this project is not useful at the moment. It just slows down browsing experience. It could be put in a way that it presents the profile info in a better manner but it is currently useless.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are working to make the bookmarklet work on all browsers. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm wary of logging into an app without knowing what the benefit is. Could you show an example first?

<comment><AUTHOR> It takes the data from your LinkedIn profile and creates a visual resume out of it. Try it out. We are not storing any data. The resume is built on the fly.</comment></comment>


8 Rejected Papers That Won the Nobel Prize - <AUTHOR> https://www.authorea.com/users/8850/articles/117724-nope-8-rejected-papers-that-won-the-nobel-prize <comment><USER2> 1\. Paul Boyer, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1997, Identifying mechanism for adenosine triphosphate (ATP) synthesis

2\. Richard Ernst, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1991, High resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy

3\. Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1969, classification of elementary particles and their interactions

4\. Hans Krebs, Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1953, discovery of the citric acid cycle (aka the Krebs cycle)

5\. Herbert Kroemer, Nobel Prize in Physics, 2000, semiconductor heterostructures in high-speed and opto-electronics

6\. John Polanyi, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1986, elucidating the dynamics of chemical elementary processes

7\. Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1993, invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method

8\. Rosalind Yalow, Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1977, invention of the radioimmunoassay (RIA)

<comment><USER3> Half were in Chemistry; anybody know what the Chemists are doing wrong? Or right???

<comment><USER4> What kind of person goes into Chemistry? The really serious sciencey people I knew would go into physics, math or maybe something like AI.

And the softer sciencey people would more likely tend towards engineering or biology.

Maybe chemists are just not open to taking big risks. And hence they reject papers which violate "known" laws.

<comment><USER5> Chemistry as a field seems stuck in the last century. I did an undergrad in Chemistry with some part time lab work. I ultimately left for a few reasons.

1\. Research is largely based on guess and check. Computational chemistry (modeling) is not very reliable. It seems stuck between two layers. Its above modeling particles in physics, but below modeling materials in engineering.

2\. Ridiculous work hours/times. 80 hours / 6 days a week is barely scratching the surface. I had a few grad students that I worked with that had 0 time outside the lab that was not spent eating or sleeping (which they also did in the breakroom).

3\. Confirmation bias plagues the industry. This does affect the larger community, but seems stronger in Chemistry due to how finicky old spectroscopy machines can be. Run a sample 10 times and get 10 results. Good luck when all your samples in the microgram range.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, that's really a valuable insight into the field. The closest thing I know about is the physics field and I'm not into it enough to be confident about my observations.

But I do suspect it has different problems, yet just as serious and of a similar nature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not at the same level, but my paper about stealing RSA private keys via the use of cache collisions as a side channel -- the first such paper, which has since spawned hundreds of others -- was rejected by the Journal of Cryptology on the basis that it was about CPU architecture and did not involve a cryptanalytic attack.

<comment><USER7> For reference: [http://www.daemonology.net/papers/cachemissing.pdf](http://www.daemonology.net/papers/cachemissing.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a bit embarrassing that Nature accepted Kary Mullis' letter [1] which he later described by saying:

> I had read a lot about astrophysics and had taken some psychoactive drugs, > which enhanced my perceived understanding of the cosmos. [2]

but didn't accept the one where he discovered PCR.

[1] [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v218/n5142/abs/218663b0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v218/n5142/abs/218663b0.html)

[2] Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, by Kary Mullis

</comment><comment><USER9> Really an unbeatable headline. I enjoy that many of the authors proudly touted their rejection letters around for a long time after, suggesting that they were probably "too far ahead in their field" for a no-brainer acceptance from the traditional outlets, and still knew the magnitude of their discovery.

<comment><USER4> Um, I agree with your explanation, but why is the headline unbearable?

<comment><USER10> Unbeatable.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: software for project documentation? - <AUTHOR>

I've taken over a legacy project that has no documentation, and no documentation infrastructure.
I need to start creating documentation and set up best practices. This isn't about per-class, per-method documentation, but covering the architecture of the web app, its style guide, where Redis is used etc.
Setting up Confluence would have too much overhead (as they don't see the need, they don't want to use my time for that). They're not using GitHub, so GitHub wikis are out (though not my preferred choice either).
Last time I looked for solutions was c. 2008 when dokuwiki was popular; what's appeared since? I am aware I could use virtually any CMS or Wiki, but I'd like to know what's worked for other teams.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I like Sphinx [0]. For example, I used it for this D tutorial [1]. I do not like wikis or cms, because I like my documentation in a version control system.

[0] [http://sphinx-doc.org/](http://sphinx-doc.org/) [1] [http://qznc.github.io/d-tut/](http://qznc.github.io/d-tut/)

<comment><USER3> +1 for Sphinx. For me, it's crucial that code and documentation are kept closely together. As in, changes to the code and the related documentation go in the same commit. In my experience, that's the only way to keep them in sync. Sphinx works great in this scenario, can output the docs in many different formats, default HTML output has search built-in etc. It's cross- platform (although I've used it on Windows and Linux only, I'm pretty sure it works on Macs as well).

This is good stuff, too: [http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/)</comment></comment>


Poorly Secured Mongodb Databases Dropping Like Flies - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2017/01/more-than-10000-online-databases-taken-hostage-by-ransomware-attackers/ <comment><AUTHOR> _" In all, the attackers have compromised about 10,500 databases. Promises to restore the databases in return for a ransom payment are dubious, since there's no evidence the attackers copied the data before deleting it."_

Setting up a mongodb honeypot [0] would make for an interesting study for security researchers.

[0] something similar to honeynet ~ [https://honeynet.org/about](https://honeynet.org/about)</comment>


What are the limits of deep learning? - <AUTHOR> https://www.pnas.org/content/116/4/1074 <comment><USER2> I think the current critique of Deep Learning as a technique is a dead end. Now I'm only a semi-professional in a sea of recent development and research, but if you ask me, the technique itself can take us all the way to General Intelligence and more.

What's missing from this discussion is how we humans don't just use a single, vision based "deep net" in order to identify the banana, we use lots of very different deep nets that run in parallel and cross-validate each other.

We have a vision net like computers that can be fooled with the same tricks (just google "optical illusion").

But a second net does three-dimensional inference of the banana shape from stereo vision and cross-validates that with a toaster. If in doubt, unnoticed parallax movement will be commanded to our body in order to get a better shape estimation.

Another net parses the content. A banana in a jungle or on a table would be highly plausible. A banana in an operating room or on a roller coaster would be implausible.

Another net parses context and timeline. If no banana was there and no banana has been incoming through our continuous estimated 3d space, there is probably no banana there.

There's smell, taste, all kinds of things running in parallel that continuously cross-validate our perception of this being a banana, probably a lot of different models just from vision alone that feed back into the main classification thread.

We'll even happily do looped cross validation if our eyes rest on a scene. Our memory will fetch reference data for all first order predictions and start subconciously processing this into the main prediction. It will predict how a banana feels, how soft it is, how warm. If we see a banana on lava that is not burning, our logic and reasoning will challenge the prediction. All of this happens subconciously, and there's no magic behind.

If you ask me, there are no limits of deep learning. There's just still a limit of imagination in feature extraction and processing.

<comment><USER3> >> We have a vision net like computers that can be fooled with the same tricks (just google "optical illusion").

I don't know of any optical illusions where a bus turned upside down is perceived as a plowshare, or an image of an elephant superimposed on the image of a room causes the other objects in the room to be misidentified.

Human optical illusions reveal the structural bias in the way we see, but that has nothing to do with adversarial examples and overfitting to a few pixels.

<comment><USER2> > I don't know of any optical illusions where a bus turned upside down is > perceived as a plowshare, or an image of an elephant superimposed on the > image of a room causes the other objects in the room to be misidentified.

I wouldn't be so sure about that actually. Observing my daughters, I'm sometimes extremely surprised about how they identify objects. As you grow, your concious mind probably simply does not notice the continuous cross- validation happening.

Also, at the severe augmentation levels of years of ~50 fps "live video" training data, I can imagine there's another compensation algorithm at work in humans that tries to logically orient any picture into a most common, "upright" fashion before even trying to identify anything.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand what you mean by cross-validation. I'm guessing you don't mean actual cross-validation, where you test a model learned on a training partition against a testing partition, etc?

<comment><USER4> Maybe it's about context. One wouldn't expect to see a (realistic) elephant in a living room. For humans, if something seems "out of place", we tend to focus on it more to make sure we are interpreting it correctly. NN's have no sense of "out of place" other than "knowing" X and Y are not normally seen together in the training set.

Humans give oddities "more CPU" (or run like heck to avoid being trampled and worry later about being right). We apply life experience and logic to explore it deeper. In the elephant case, the shadows look wrong also, which should trigger the "Maybe it's a cheap Photoshop job" module in our brain. But NN's don't understand the concept of cheap Photoshop jobs because they don't browse the web for cute kitten videos and fun but fake news like humans do. Maybe NN's can be trained for fake photo detection, but solving every identification hurdle of the human world by adding yet another dimension to the training step probably won't scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yet another piece that cherrypicks AI failures in order to make vague thesis that "deep learning is not enough". I can't decide if it makes the article more or less honest that the "Beyond Deep Learning" section is essentially a catalog of... recent developments in Deep Learning. The need to (selectively) pidgeonhole and then judge (on impossible to operationalize criteria) a fast- evolving field is purely rhetorical and, worse, aimed at folks who don't understand the way the field is progressing.

I've got nothing against raising platforms for alternative lines of AI research, especially including highlighting the ways they complement current deep learning But this article format is so transparent and tired.

<comment><USER6> The criteria certainly are impossible to judge currently. Which makes your assertion that the field is 'progressing' strange.

I think there's a lot of merit to remembering the last time we got this excited about a given model for AI. And the time before that. And the time before that.

Go back further, to the time that we were all so excited that we could model the entire world with a little bit of beautiful logic. And the subsequent disappointment.

There is so much nonsense out there, so much hand-waving, mixed signals, false promises, downright naivety, and both malicious and completely inadvertent miscommunication. A little rigor in a field _this_ excitable would be nice, I say.

<comment><USER5> The progress is well defined. Both academic and industrial deep learning groups aggressively define challenge tasks in vision, NLP, relational learning and more, then document progress on them. There is even an unprecedented release of code and datasets to let others replicate and extend work.

Detractions like your "so much nonsense out there" pick straw man goalposts - whether it's AGI (whatever that really means) or "the craziest thing I heard from IBM marketing". The fact that some people are talking about crazy milestones doesn't mean that there aren't real ones being met.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not an IA expert in any way; I just merely started learning some basic stuff, but so far the only thing I see from all the algorithms I have covered so far is that IA, deep learning, ML and so on are just statistical databases or sets, so to call them. They don't learn anything, they just repeat. From that I can say that IA is limited only to the data you can label and then feed it.

</comment><comment><USER3> >> And it could make the networks far less vulnerable to adversarial attacks simply because a system that represents things as objects, as opposed to patterns of pixels, isn't going to be so easily thrown off by a little noise or an extraneous sticker.

But, representing objects and their relations is how Good, Old-Fashioned AI works and the inability to deal with noisy input was, exactly, where GOFAI systems stumbled. How are relational representations going to suddendly help neural nets (famously robust to noise already) better handle noise?

In any case, if we really want to learn relations there are symbolic learning techniques that can do that very cheaply from very few examples. Are we reinventing the wheel, only with more artificial neurons, now? And what's the point of that?

<comment><USER8> The problem is that neither AI can differentiate between something new and noise. Even probabilistic models have this problem to a lesser degree. So the idea is indeed to have an ANN learn a kind of a semantic network - then the problem is still pruning it and clustering reliably as well as detecting the new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "NNs that rely on backprop only really work on continuous functions and many interesting things like language[0] are not products of those" is real high on my list of limits.

[0]: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-hyping-why-deep- learni...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-hyping-why-deep-learning- cannot-applied-easily-berkan-ph-d)

<comment><USER10> That argument seems to be based on the idea that because written language uses a discrete encoding, it's impossible to use continuous functions. But as soon as you replace deterministic discrete values by continuous probabilities of those values, you're back in the space of continuous functions. Even non-NN approaches to NLP use that representation, because optimizing continuous parameters is something we can do very well. Discrete optimization is much harder.

<comment><USER3> And how well do all those techniques work when it comes to representing meaning, rather than structure?

<comment><USER10> I think meaning isn't really separable from structure. But assuming you're talking about semantics vs. syntax, then continuous representations can certainly do a lot more than just syntax.

They can model how words change in meaning over time [1], they can identify words that mean the same in different languages [2] and use that to translate whole sentences [3] without ever seeing a direct translation.

Of course none of those tasks are solved to perfection yet, but _some_ kind of meaning is definitely being captured.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00607](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00607)

[2] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04087](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04087)

[3] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.11041](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.11041)

<comment><USER3> I disagree. If I tell you that argoubr + vliugo - viyt = plqtv, do you now understand what any of those words mean? If I say that "gye" must always precede "turo", do you know what "gye turo" means, or why it doesn't make sense to say "turo" without "gye"? What kind of meaning is captured by the relations between these words that these rules I just described, define? Would it help if I gave you all the possible ways that every word in the language those words are drawn from are to be articulated together, without telling you what any of those wors mean? And how would I explain those words' meaning without recourse to words whose meaning you already know?

Also, that's what I mean by "structure" \- the context in which tokens are found in text. I don't want to say "syntax" or "semantics" because it seems to me those are loaded terms that have very specific, er, meaning and I am not a linguist to be able to unpick it.

<comment><USER10> > Would it help if I gave you all the possible ways that every word in the > language those words are drawn from are to be articulated together, without > telling you what any of those wors mean? And how would I explain those > words' meaning without recourse to words whose meaning you already know?

That's why I linked the two papers on unsupervised machine translation. Given enough text in an unknown language, it is already possible to turn those unknown words into words which humans understand.

<comment><USER3> But that's humans. Humans already understand language.

I don't disagree that humans can extract meaning from language models. But that only speaks to the ability of humans to extract meaning from even very badly formed language. Not to the ability of those models to represent meaning.

Edit: OK, I don't think I understand what you, er, mean. I think you're saying that language models essentially have a kind of understanding of language, and not just the ability to reproduce it without understanding it. Is that what you are saying?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The limit of deep learning is the quantity and accuracy of training data. For some problems, you can't run 10^x trials: you can synthesize training data but it may be of questionable real-world relevance and lead to overfitting of the generation algorithm.

<comment><USER12> The other big limit to DL is its inability to learn a new concept from a _single_ training example, AKA one-shot learning.

Given that humans _do_ most of their supervised learning this way underscores that, even though DL nets intriguingly resemble the architecture of the brain, in fact, DL's current learning process clearly departs from the one used by the brain. (Unless the way a baby fiddles with each new object is in fact a form of data augmentation, increasing the visual sample space by changing the object's angles. But I digress...)

Better to drop the "Neural Net as Brain" metaphor before we Procrustes it to death.

<comment><USER13> It also has no imagination, unless I've missed something (I admit I really need to catch up in this area).

Humans are experts at imagining 'what if' scenarios and learning from things that never even happened. "If this was bright red, is it still a cat? Or do all cats have a limited range of colours on a fixed cat-colour-spectrum?" I'm not sure if any DL systems do that?

<comment><USER12> Proposing what-if scenarios and asking questions of your own and using your imagination generally falls under the name 'counterfactuals' \-- a big area of AI research. But to date, the priorities of deep learning have focused elsewhere (mostly in perception of images and speech via discrete classification).

Likewise, 99% of the computing strategy used by DL practitioners and researchers continues to use large scale supervised learning -- because it continues to make advances in many problem spaces just as it is.

Is it possible to escape DL's apparent limits and use it differently to solve problems that lie in the counterfactual domain? Perhaps. But so far, there's been relatively little work or modest results along those lines.

Given the architectural model used by DL (large matrix multiplications and iterations using SIMD operations on GPUs), the prospect of applying it to alternative AI objectives that are more conventionally symbolic and whose methods are typically algebraic (and unnatural to share the same computational model as DL) do not seem to be especially promising places for DL to thrive. Not so far anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Then there's the opacity problem. Once a deep-learning system has been > trained, it's not always clear how it's making its decisions.

This is no less true of human decision making.

</comment><comment><USER15> What do you mean 'limits'?? There are no limits to deep learning! Singularity here we come!

(That was sarcasm. Sad that a disclaimer is needed nowadays.)</comment>


Pentagon testing mass surveillance balloons across the US - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/02/pentagon-balloons-surveillance-midwest <comment><USER2> _"While improving efficiency, we still only successfully interdicted about six percent of known drug movements [in 2018]."_

Huh, could it be that criminalisation of a market where a very significant proportion of the population want to buy the product and there are sophisticated, now multi-national businesses willing to sell that product doesn't work?

Even after 30-40 years of trying, was the reason the war on drugs hasn't worked _not enough balloons_?

Are the population sufficiently comfortable with their cognitive dissonance to agree that despite their own behaviour in their youth, they're happy to lump "Drugs!" alongside "Terrorists!" and "Pedophiles!" in their personal list of reasons why they gave up their privacy so willingly?

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Obviously, there are laws to protect people's privacy and we are respectful > of all those laws," Hartman said. "We also understand the importance of > operating in an ethical way as it relates to further protecting people's > privacy."

They are tracking my car and thus my movement. If this is deployed 24/7, they can recreate every location I visit.

How is this respecting my privacy?

<comment><USER4> You're interpreting a reference to legal matters as colloquial speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >Ryan Hartman said that World View had also completed a dozen surveillance test missions for a customer it would not name, capturing data he would not specify

Customer=FBI, NSA, CIA

</comment><comment><USER6> "Pentagon conducting mass surveillance across the US using balloons"

FTFY. I'm sure they're not going to purge the data they collect.</comment>


NetBox – DigitalOcean's IPAM and DCIM tool – open sourced - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/digitalocean/netbox <comment><USER2> I have never understood how open sourcing a core component of your business makes sense.

<comment><USER3> It may be a case of "Commoditizing Your Complements".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250958](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250958)

<comment><USER2> Interesting article! Thanks for sharing. I fail to see what is their "complement" that benefits by commoditizing netbox. In fact it could be used to create a competitor. Are digitalocean not selling just VPS anymore? I am curious what DO has up their sleeve, because they were really ahead of their time with 5$ VPSs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> awesome ! thanks digital ocean team</comment>


CadenceX promises a powerful alternative to classic dynamo generators - <AUTHOR> https://www.bicycleretailer.com/industry-news/2019/12/04/cadencex-powerful-alternative-classic-dynamo-generator <comment><USER2> This is advertising, not news.

So, they put a supercapacitor between the rectifier and the output to stabilize the voltage. This is old technology. The reason why so few cyclists use a dynamo nowadays is not because of the voltage instability, it's because a dynamo slows you down, and because good, long-lasting and rechargeable batteries are ubiquitous.

<comment><USER3> The reason people don't use dynamos often is that good ones cost $300 + another hundred + for the lights, and if you're spending that much money, you're serious about wanting to ride all night without worrying about batteries dying.

If you're out for a couple of hours, batteries are grand.

<comment><USER4> I wanted to buy a dynamo because I was driving long-distances with smartphone navigation and listening to audiobooks, and my smartphone was dying after about 6 hours.

I looked at the options and bought a $50 20000 mAh powerbank instead. Enough to charge the smartphone 4 times and the lights basically forever.

Dynamo is much more likely to break than the batteries, less convenient, and more expansive. It's obsolete technology IMHO.

<comment><USER5> I've put about 7,000 commuting miles on my SON hub in all weather conditions. The previous owner put another few thousand on in maintenance conditions I don't know the particulars of.

I expect I'll need to service it in another few years.

In the meantime, I've gone through at least three reasonably priced battery packs; two because they crapped out, and the last because i wanted USB-C.

I'll take the dynamo hub any day for my bike lighting and power needs.

oh, and as an added benefit it's way less of a hit on the environment!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't recommend a SON hub enough. Thousands of miles of flawless service and always-on lights, no stupid tire wear. [https://www.renehersecycles.com/product- category/components/...](https://www.renehersecycles.com/product- category/components/hubs/)

If you want to charge your phone, support a small shop and get you a sinewave: [https://www.sinewavecycles.com/](https://www.sinewavecycles.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Apparently, the avg cyclist in the city pedals at 50W to move forward. Now, imagine you'd have to power your USB charger at 20W at an 80% efficiency factor (which is what current high-end hub dynamos manage regarding efficiency):

Your avg city biker will only have left half of his pedal power to move his bike across town.

I recently came across a quite new rim dynamo [1] which seems to have bearings that last for ~15.000km which might be a real alternative to hub dynamos regarding efficiency. Never had the chance to try one so far since my hub dynamo is still going strong.

[1] [http://www.velogical-engineering.com/velogical- felgendynamo-...](http://www.velogical-engineering.com/velogical-felgendynamo ---standard-fahrrad-dynamo---leichtlauf-gewicht-effizienz)

<comment><USER7> I would doubt this number. Do not as k why but I have an actual power meter (Powertap) on my bike and being average Joe Schmoe I do about 150 Watts when doing semi leisure ride of 50 km (31 miles) on a flat. On such ride I pass some and many pass me. My best ever result on the same ride when I was going like mad all the way was 250W.

I would assume that I am pretty average so 100-200W would be more likely number rather then 50W.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" When Adam Hokin and Vishaal Mali began designing a bicycle generator, they started from scratch and followed the Apple game plan"_

$299 for basic off the shelf circuit, supercapacitor and dynamo? LOL. Does it come with rounded corners?

</comment><comment><USER8> I can't tell if they are claiming 4x efficiency over the other rim generators. Seems unlikely. The alternative is they make 3-4x more drag, which would be ok if you need that much power. Google Maps does burn quite a lot.

Four years in development? Maybe they got an engineering degree in the meantime?

It's maybe a little unfair to say it's just a regular generator with a supercapacitor. They must have a $.50 power converter in there, and a microcontroller to negotiate USB charging voltage, maybe $1.

But tooling for plastic molding is super expensive for low volumes.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have no reason to doubt their claims, but I do not remember fondly dynamos that ran on the rim—especially in icy conditions. Hub mounted dynamos were a considerable step forward.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can't wait to test out the new Nova lights from Reelight ([https://www.reelight.com/collections/bike- lights/products/no...](https://www.reelight.com/collections/bike- lights/products/nova)) Hope they are as "light" on your pedaling as their flashing hub lights

</comment><comment><USER3> Putting the dynamo on the rim does nothing to make it any easier to pedal when it's producing 15-20 watts.

</comment><comment><USER11> Dynamo lights are required in Germany. I wonder if these guys will see business there.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_lighting#Legal_require...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_lighting#Legal_requirements)

<comment><USER12> This is out of date. Battery powered lights are now also allowed in Germany. But most bikes have hub generators instead of dynamos these days. The most fameous one is the Son ([https://nabendynamo.de/en/products/hub- dynamos/](https://nabendynamo.de/en/products/hub-dynamos/))</comment></comment>


Vinod Khosla is willing to litigate California's coast for the rest of his life - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/technology/vinod-khosla-beach.html <comment><USER3> Just so we're clear since I see a lot of comments here about stealing and "blatant" criminality.

He was ordered to private access at $2 per car, with no adjustment for inflation, across his property to a beach, by a government entity. This despite some reasonable case law on the idea that if you charge people to access something, you can change that price or go out of that business if you want.

In addition, he WON this case in CALIFORNIA at the beginning, though I thought on a bit of a ridiculous approach

To catch folks up, he's now been on a super long losing streak, and the US Supreme Court did not take up the case. It's a bit hard to see the state getting the road they want for $300K they claim it's worth, and they are passing law after law to try and get it. My guess is it ends up more in the 1.5M range?

Now if the government REALLY wanted to give the public access to nature - they'd ban all the STUPID parking restrictions near natural resources. Every rich area in California has some kind of state park or regional park maintained by all our government dollars, but the rich people living near it do this totally wild weekend only parking restriction on these major roads all around the entrance to the park, so no one but the rich folks living right there can access the park. It's kind of genius. You literally have a huge wide road, with parking on the sides NORMALLY during the week, but during weekends to keep poor folks from parking on the road and using the park, they ban weekend parking on this main road and all side streets for a few miles from park entrance.

<comment><USER4> If the government REALLY wanted to give public access to the beach, they could have negotiated a footpath across this guy's property and build a parking nearby.

<comment><USER5> The government doesn't have to negotiate for anything: the law is that access must be provided. The law doesn't specify anything about amenities, just access.

<comment><USER6> Really? And where would be the road, and how wide? No compensation? Access 24/7?

Who builds, maintains the road? If a person dies there or a car is stolen who is responsible etc etc...

It's not as simple, that is HIS property.

<comment><USER5> Access doesn't mean a road is required. He simply cannot prevent people from accessing the beach, whether by foot, bicycle or other means typically employed.

If Vinod supplies a road he'd be responsible for maintenance. The other questions are handled already: he'd do the same thing as if someone died in his house or a car was stolen from his driveway. Any member of the public who observes crimes like this can also report them

<comment><USER6> >> _Access doesn 't mean a road is required. He simply cannot prevent people from accessing the beach, whether by foot, bicycle or other means typically employed._

So _you_ can use all his property to access the beach, including unnecessarily zig-zags and passing right by his front door, 100 (or whatever) feet away from the beach? Why not require him to give people 80% of the rooms in his house too?

If people have to use his property it has to be done with a delicate balance between public and PRIVATE property rights. That's what courts are for. Judging by some of the comments here, I'm kinda glad he sued.

<comment><USER5> The law is not a dumb computer that executes code. It doesn't have to specify the means and constraints on access to the level of detail you are arguing for, nor should it be required to: the law when written could not account for all possible scenarios and it is not rational to have that expectation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article may have been on here yesterday and seems relevant [1]. For this guy it's probably not about fighting for what he believes is "right", it's all about winning. He bought land, a fight ensued, and now he relishes the opportunity to crush his opponent (average people).

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/rich- peop...](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/rich-people-happy- money/577231/)

<comment><USER8> > now he relishes the opportunity to crush his opponent (average people).

It seems to me that _he 's_ the underdog here: his opponents not only _also_ have the resources to drag this fight on for a decade, they also have the state legislature and the governor on their side. At this point, the state is prepared to use armed force (which is what eminent domain ultimately is) to take his property, and if he tries to physically resist its agents will use violence to subdue him. Ignoring the accountable government, it's remarkable that an unaccountable non-profit has the resources to fight one of the richest men in the world for years, and it's sobering to think of how little chance you or I would have if a similar nonprofit attacked us.

I have no idea if he's legally in the right or wrong, although given that the state has had to change the law, it sounds like he was originally in the right. And I wonder at what point laws aimed at a single person's situation become too akin to bills of attainder to pass constitutional muster.

<comment><USER9> The state doesn't have to change the law. The lawsuits which he lost were based on the existing law.

As for violence, the only ones who were manhandled by the state have been surfers, not Khosla.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > He frames the struggle in the Silicon Valley patois of contrarianism. "I'd > rather do the right hard things now that I'm in," he says, "than the wrong > easy things."

Based on his fallacious belief that he knows what is the right thing in a societal domain outside of his subject matter expertise.

Silicon Valley hubris in a nutshell.

<comment><USER11> But that hubris is where progress originates from. You can't separate one from the other, unfortunately. You have to be that stubborn about things you believe you are right about, in order to prove the world wrong. (Even if it is him that is wrong in this instance.)

<comment><USER12> Respectfully disagree. Yes, naiveté (which disruptive thinking is operationalizing in a sometimes-good way) is a positive characteristic to cultivate in society (ie. systems), to enter domains with a little bit of incredulity.

But if it exists perpetually in one person on one topic in one set of observations and conditions, then they are simply a stubborn asshole.

<comment><USER11> I'm not talking about naiveté. I'm talking about the scientific and philosophical arrogance of following your own models regardless of societal or cultural conventions. This is quite difference from naiveté which is a sort of ignorance from inexperience. People who consistently make revolutionary progress, rather than just get lucky once, are the sorts that "know better" but don't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> '"A billionaire is a bad word in this country now," he says, as his tea cools. "And that pains me."'

Maybe if fewer of them thought of themselves as being better than everyone else and, more importantly, stopped acting like they thought that way, their reputation would improve.

But I don't believe that pains him. This isn't new. We've seen this kind of attitude in the wealthy time and again here in the US and every other society where a wealth gap as big as ours has existed. The results tend to not favor anyone, but the very wealthy tend to lose the most.

<comment><USER13> > "And that pains me."

 _wipes tear with $100_

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >created Java, the programming language that formed the

>foundation for much of today's internet

How did Java help the enable the Internet?

There's a discussion to be had about it's significance to programming languages, but I don't see how the Internet would have flourished any less without it.

Seems it could be argued Java was an obstacle to the Internet w.r.t. it's role in the history of various fat tech ideas that tried and failed to become a defacto browser standard.

With all due respect to his successes, I'm not quite sure which of those is the source of getting credit for creating the foundation of the Internet.

Sun didn't invent HTTP and didn't sell the only computers that could run a web server.

<comment><USER15> _Sun didn't invent HTTP and didn't sell the only computers that could run a web server._

If the web had been built on NFS they might have a case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If there is anything you should learn from this article, it's that you should hire a PR team if you're a billionaire.

Why would anyone want to be a business partner with him after reading this?

</comment><comment><USER17> > is willing to _use his giant pile of money to pay other people_ to litigate

FTFY.

It's easy to be an asshole for an extended period of time when you can outsource all of the assholery to professional assholes.

<comment><USER18> It's a good time to be a lawyer. These days there are lots of highly paid shareholders and investors with massive egos, unlimited free time and 0 concern for society.

With increased automation, we will all become lawyers.

We will make a living litigating against the minions of other rich people to seek damages from whoever it was that spilled their drink on the billionaire's carpet... It will not be about the money; it will be a matter of principle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The ridiculous part is that the law existed prior to his acquiring the property. He could have (and arguably he should have) known his obligations ahead of time. Even if he didn't understand the California law, at the very least he could have questioned the existence of easements for coastal access and/or the possibility of some kind of "squatter's rights" on the grounds that surfers and beachgoers have been using that path for decades.

No, I'm not buying that this is an unfortunate surprise for him. He picked this fight intentionally.

</comment><comment><USER20> Shouldn't the legal system eventually reach a final unappealable verdict? At some point it just becomes a massive waste of state resources.

<comment><USER9> It will when the SCOTUS either decides to hear it and rules it themselves, or if they refuse to take it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> His hypocrisy is beyond baffling. "A billionaire is a bad word in this country now" \- and you are doing exactly what to mitigate this? Become a professional Mister Beach Asshole (tm)? Just a lucky billionaire with a giant ego.

"Here's the thing about Vinod," Mr. Kaul said. "He just doesn't care."

Yes, we see it clearly.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what's frightening. A person with billion dollars have enormous leverage to wield his will, beliefs, principles - whether wrong or right - <USER2> public. They can buy large properties on whims, put up walls, close roads, setup perma-construction zones and make them disappear from the map for all intent and purposes. They can buy up political system to put in place laws that can hurt thousands for generations, hurt environment, empty out valuable resources. Even if they are mistaken in their beliefs, they can outspend opponents in litigation driving them to bankruptcy. All the while any losses in these fights is not even noticeable to their fortunes.

I'm not against capitalism but I think there is a fundamental bug in our system that gives rise to these symptoms. Perhaps in hundred years this "bug" will get fixed and our future generations will look back on us marvelling that billionaires existed in our world just like we marvel Pharaohs existed in the previous age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why does California not expropriate one of the houses and tear it down for easy public access?

<comment><USER4> Because then California will have to pay for the road from its budget?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There is obviously a lot government could do to make the majority happy, and a lot billionaires could do to actually help the community around them.

But lobbying and narcissism only go so far...

</comment><comment><USER24> This stuff has been dealt with thousands of times before. Take what he paid for the access, add for inflation, cut him a check and move on.

</comment><comment><USER6> IIRC, people want to use a road on his private property to access the public beach part. So Khosla is saying, come to the beach all you want, but not by using the road on my private property. Cute.

Maybe the state should just launch eminent domain like proceedings and let courts decide on the price. He's not saying (that all) the beach is his, just don't come through my land to go to the public part. It has the same effect but it's different.

<comment><USER25> People are _legally entitled_ to use the road on his property to access the beach, which is slightly different.

I can see this being weird if the access rights were addded after you bought the land, but if the easement long predates your ownership, as it allegedly does in this case, I don't really see why "property rights" should be allow you to wiggle out of it. That easement is part and parcel of the property you bought—-it may have cost even more if it weren't included!

<comment><USER6> >> _People are legally entitled to use the road on his property to access the beach, which is slightly different._

To be fair, the courts are deciding this as we speak and maybe in the next 20 years :). The person has the right to argue this in courts, until the doors are slammed in his face.

Before or after they are ways to do this--legally, price is the only issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the article I assume the issue is going around Martins Beach Road in Half Moon Bay, CA. This road is roughly half a mile long. Paving it would be around 100k. Add the lane marking, gutters, sidewalks, ADA-friendly ramps, brail plates on each crossing and the bill can easily get up to half a million.

Is it fair to slap someone with a half a million bill just because "he's rich anyway"?

<comment><USER25> Is anyone actually requiring that _he_ do this?

My impression was that the law requires access. Upgraded infrastructure can be part of a quid-pro-quo for other development in the area, but the coastal comission can't, as far as I know, insist on improvements out of the blue.

<comment><USER4> I'm afraid if the article mentioned all these issues, that would be proper journalism.

But no. This guy's tea getting cold is much more important topic to concentrate on.

<comment><USER9> There's no reason to think that issue even exists - Khosla certainly doesn't mention it, nor do the court fillings - so why do you assume there's anything for the journalist to investigate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> what an awful person

<comment><USER27> Disappointing this comment was flagged. It's all that really needs to be said, and sums him and the article's thesis on him quite nicely. The world would be a terrible place if it were filled only with Vinod Khoslas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I won't judge if it's wrong or right.

The thing i notice here is that the belief system which got him that money, now he's using his money to support that belief system.

Don't see anything wrong with this.

His is the public case, many people might be acting like this behind the public scrutiny.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hopefully the newer generation can jettison the decades of systemic libertarian propaganda and fabricated individualism that justifies self obsession and sociopathy to instead build a society that is more humane and connected like most human societies are supposed to be. And we can see very early signs on it.

No one is threatening your individualism, if you don't like other people and the concept of cooperative society you can always go and live in the forest alone. This is possible for every single human being on the planet but no one takes it.

Because this fake individualism generates its identity not on the rugged individualism of standing alone but taking advantage of all the resources, benefits and skills of millions in societal human cooperation and then stand apart merely to legitimize petty self interest and exploiting others without remorse. In essence all the benefits of cooperation but none of the responsibilities.

This is people like Vinod Khosla in a nutshell and if your society is full of such 'individuals' and legitimizes their ideology you have to consider whether you have a 'society' worth fighting for. What is the motivation? Because these kind of individuals do not believe in the larger good, only self interest.

<comment><USER30> At the end of the day, everyone's only in it for themselves one way or another. People at the top want to secure their spot, people at the bottom want everyone to share, and there's some people who are up but can't sleep at night if someone think poorly of them.

But in all cases, it's all different sides of the same coin.</comment></comment>


First-time author unwittingly exposed house of cards beneath "bestseller" books - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1062280/a-first-time-author-unwittingly-exposed-the-house-of-cards-beneath-bestseller-books/ <comment><USER2> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Libertine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Libertine)</comment>


Google to hire thousands in 9 states - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/01/technology/google-expansion/index.html <comment><USER2> I was hoping that it would mention _which_ 9 states they are looking to hire in. It gave a few hints, but do we know for certain which 9 they are talking about?

<comment><USER3> It's like a reverse Haiti and Certain African Countries. I'm sure Larry Page personally randomly picked 9 states and there is no predefined context. ANY state can relate! Jobs jobs jobs!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What kind of jobs?</comment>


Ask HN: How likely is it to get seed funding from US for a non-US company? - <AUTHOR> We are a team of two programmers who are graduating from a top 3 engineering university in US (PhD in CS) and we are working on a prototype for our AI startup (no product yet).
However, due to visa related issues we have to go back to our home country for 2 years (country is in Middle East).
We are investigating how likely is it to search for seed funding from US investors before we go back to our country.
We talked to one investor today, and he said our situation is pretty hopeless and it is very tough to get funding from US if we are going back to our country. Is it really the case? Should we give up and stop looking for fundings in US?
We were thinking that it shouldn't change anything from investors' perspective as long as we develop the product like we promise, and we can hire 5 good engineers in our country in the price of 1 engineer in US, so we were thinking that it might even be better for investors. But our dreams are a bit crushed today. We were planning to stay for a few months before returning back in order to search for funding, but right now we are just thinking to go back asap if we are kidding ourselves.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> It depends how promising your company is. That's the high bit of whether you can get funding, not your immigration status.

On the other hand, when investors think your company is unpromising, it's easier to say that the problem is your immigration status.

But don't kid yourselves that being in your home country will help your company either. Look at the startups that have succeeded so far. The empirical evidence says there's no advantage to being in a cheap labor market.</comment>


Is anyone else worried about Apple's focus with maps? - <AUTHOR>

FlyOver is a distraction from the flaws in their product.
Crying about it being in "beta" doesn't mean anything. Do we really think Apple can make a far better map solution in basically three months?
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ios-6-maps-screwup-2012-6
www.gizmodo.com/5918176/google-maps-vs-apple-maps-a-side-by-side-comparison
The Maps are bad.
Really bad.
Beta isn't used to LABEL OCEANS.
Is the app randomly crashing? Yes, lets fix that.
But a map that shows 1/2 of a massive body of water like a local bay? Just unacceptable.
Who tested this thing?
Google has had 10 years to get this right and Apple knows that they should have something CLOSE to that before they really try to supplement their own option. Having turn-by-turn means nothing if the maps lack readability or clarity.
This makes me also think...has Apple really ever given the sort of care and attention to something that maps require?
Google has shown the work what it takes to make premier mapping services and has gone through great lengths to preserve that sort of leverage. I also think having a desktop browser version helps since it offers a vast array of customizations and configurations.
Consider even the search logic used. Google's resources and ability to interpret even vague queries really makes you appreciate their map product even more.
Maps are a CORE part of smart phone experiences. Apple better not give us more FlyOver demos and thinks that this cuts it.
I really think they're making a graven error here.
I'm an iPhone user but I would greatly consider paying for a Google turn-by-turn option if they made one. <comment><USER2> 1\. Don't worry. Google's pre-WWDC event has made it clear they are developing their own iOS app. I don't know if they'll charge for it (that would be an interesting angle, even if they just charged for turn-by-turn), but there will be something.

2\. There is a theory going around that these aren't the real maps Apple intends on launching in the fall - this is just the test data they're willing to show at this point (perhaps to lull competitors like Google into a false sense of security). I don't know if I buy that, but it would be consistent with their culture of secrecy.

3\. I think the biggest problem for Apple is actually the missing mass transit directions. So far they've talked about third party apps taking care of that, but I suspect that won't cut it "for real". Perhaps they have something up their sleeve, or perhaps they just plan to buy the best third-party app, but if not... it will be a big win for Google in cities, especially outside the US (where mass transit is much, much bigger). I don't think Apple is likely to make that mistake, though I wouldn't be shocked if they ended up correcting the problem in response to feedback. On the other hand, it is just barely possible that the key decisionmakers might be that little bit too US-centric. If so...

</comment><comment><USER3> Google Maps is one of my most used applications. Especially, in Tokyo, it is a lifesaver for finding routes or train times using the train system or by foot. The maps are excellent.

If it disappears, I will definitely get the Google maps application and if that is not available, an Android phone to supplement my iPhone.</comment>


Audion - The Story behind Panic's 2nd product - <AUTHOR> http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

<comment><USER2> Great story, and my favorite part was the link to the Slashdot iPod release story: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

</comment><comment><USER3> My response "back in the day:"

[http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in- orchard...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Aaah! Audion... fond memories. I quite dislike iTunes and I'm sure many share this sentiment, I wish they had attempted to keep up and go head to head with iTunes instead of retiring the product.

If, today, they brought it up to 2009 standards, and added iPod support, I'd bet they could take a good chunk of iTunes' marketshare on the Mac!

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I'd love to use a nice modern MP3 player on my Mac, but I guess no one will be making one again.

<comment><USER6> There's also Songbird <http://getsongbird.com/> which though early and a bit bloaty has a interesting featureset over iTunes.

<comment><USER7> Last I checked it was also rather buggy. As in, it messed up almost any time I attempted to add song to my library, couldn't handle songs or artists special characters, and the iPod support was iffy. I like the UI and addons, but it has a long way to go before being usable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This story truly must be one of the great Mac stories of all time, but it's ancient when judged against the "News" in Hacker News.

<comment><USER9> Reposted many times but it's one of the best stories that has been linked to on HN (has everything: Apple, Jobs, boot-strapping, cutthroat competition, highs/lows, enterpreneurial journeys)

Note: Click on the images. They're worth it.</comment></comment>


Wi-Fi Alliance introduces Wi-Fi 6 - <AUTHOR> https://www.wi-fi.org/news-events/newsroom/wi-fi-alliance-introduces-wi-fi-6 <comment><USER2> Really good whitepaper on WiFi 6 (802.11ax): [https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/wirele...](https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/wireless/white- paper-c11-740788.pdf) Also: [http://www.ni.com/white- paper/53150/en/](http://www.ni.com/white-paper/53150/en/)

Main differences with 802.11ac:

\- denser subcarriers (or "tones") spacing; they are spaced by 78.125 kHz instead of 312.5 kHz, for example a 80 MHz channel now allows 980 data subcarriers, up from 234. That's a 4.19× improvement (4× higher density doesn't translate in exactly a 4× improvement because 11ac had a bit more "pilot" or "null" subcarriers not used for data.)

\- new 1024QAM mode (encodes 10 bits per symbol, up from 8 bits with 256QAM). That's a 1.25× improvement.

\- downside is that the symbol length had to be increased from 3.2 µs to 12.8 µs, and the symbol interval too from 0.4 µs to 0.8 µs. That's a 3.78× reduction in efficiency.

So the maximum data rate for a single stream on a 80 MHz channel increased by 4.19×1.25/3.78 = 1.39× between WiFi 5 and WiFi 6 (you can confirm it with published max data rate: 802.11ac = 433 Mbit/s, 802.11ax = 600 Mbit/s; and 600/433 = 1.39).

But the best feature of WiFi 6 is that different subcarriers can be concurrently used by different users, what they dubbed OFDMA ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency- division_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency- division_multiple_access)). This means that during the same 12.8 µs timeslot, even on a small channel like 20 MHz, you can have 9 concurrent users each assigned 26 subcarriers and each transmitting 26 different symbols (total of 234 symbols transmitted concurrently.) Whereas with WiFi 5, all subcarriers of the 20 MHz channel have to be used by the same user.

<comment><USER3> Due to the increased efficiency, the speed increase is supposed to be much higher. At CES they showed up to 11Gbits: [https://www.zdnet.com/article/d-link-asus-tout-802-11ax- wi-f...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/d-link-asus-tout-802-11ax-wi-fi- routers-but-youll-have-to-wait-until-later-in-2018/)

<comment><USER4> That's just the marketing, AC would have been 7 gbit/s if measured in the same ludicrous 8x8 160 MHz setup (though technically AC only specifies up to 4x4 it doesn't matter, clients are almost exclusively 2x2, even high end laptops). Even in a full greenfield ax deployment it'll be a rare sight to see your phy rate pop above 1 gbit/s half duplex as a client.

Like the parent comment said the actual felt speed gains in a real world situation are going to be from OFDMA allowing concurrent use at slower speeds.

<comment><USER5> MacBook Pros have had 3x3 for a while now (except for the non-touchbar 13" post-2016, which is really more of a MacBook Air internally anyway).

<comment><USER4> Yep, it's about the one client I ever see be 3x3. They use a specially customized version of the 2014 BCM943602 to do it. Don't think I've ever seen a 4x4 client pop into our logs that wasn't an AP to AP bridge but I know there are a handful of adapters made which support it.

Interestingly Intel gave up on making 3x3 cards a couple of years ago but will sell you a 160 MHz 2x2 ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wi-Fi Alliance is naming the not-yet-complete IEEE 802.11ax standard as Wi-Fi 6, with ac being 5, and n being 4. One can guess then a is supposed to 1, b as 2, and g as 3, but this isn't mentioned anywhere I can see.

As far as I can tell, all of these numbers are new. At least this naming is a good deal clearer than HDMI's confusing version and feature mix or USB's Speed names.

What isn't clear is how much control the Wi-Fi Alliance has over the tech industry and how their branding is used, but it looks like they might be able to compel a lot of companies to adopt this new naming. They've got standards for logos on things like your computer or phone, so we'll see if these start getting adopted by major manufacturers.

<comment><USER7> Hm, I would expect 802.11-1997 to be 1. Is that 0? Or does it share a number with b, because they're the same technology? Or is it 1, and a and g share a number because they're the same technology? Or do a and b share a number because they were released simultaneously?

(This is, of course, a Very Important Question.)

<comment><USER8> I think 802.11-1997 works as 0 in this case. The implication from the Wi-Fi Alliance seems to be they are counting consumer hardware generations, and there doesn't seem to have been much consumer hardware that was directly 802.11-1997 (it took b to get consumer adoption). Which is why the order I've heard that makes the most sense is 1 (b), 2 (a), 3 (g), because that was roughly the consumer hardwave waves, with the brief (a) hardware wave the fun out-of-order one.

<comment><USER9> a and b were specced at the same time though, so it's really weird to look at a+b+g as anything other than two generations.

<comment><USER8> That's certainly a fair viewpoint (and reflected together in the spec version 802.11-1999), but the interesting thing about this rebrand is the Wi-Fi Alliance taking a step back, realizing that the individual specs don't matter to consumers and as a consumer brand trying to break away from just using the spec names/versions.

From that perspective A, B, and G were all sold as three separate things to consumers, so it makes sense to count all three.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> FINALLY. Confusing version numbering always annoys me, and wifi's "n", "ac", "g", etc version names (combined with the easy to get wrong "802.11") have been one of the biggest offenders for a while. When a version number is a marketable metric, it should not be confusing.

Others notable offenders that jump to mind: the Xbox range (Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One X), iPhone SE and XR (since they break the pattern all the rest fit in).

<comment><USER11> Maybe there's someone with a sense of humor there and Wifi 9 will be skipped as a dig at both Microsoft and Apple.

Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10

iPhone 7, iPhone 8, iPhone X

Wifi 6, Wifi 7, Wifi 8, Wifi Ten

<comment><USER12> Well, I think they have already skipped 802.11ad which initially looked like a next version. Personally, I know only one router available to casual consumer made by Netgear [1].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#Standards_and_amen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#Standards_and_amendments)

[1]: [http://www.za.netgear.com/landings/ad7200/default.aspx](http://www.za.netgear.com/landings/ad7200/default.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good decision on their part. As laughable as some technical branding sometimes seems, it usually serves a decent purpose in helping people upgrade infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER14> From Wikipedi:

> _Though the nominal data rate is just 37% higher than IEEE 802.11ac, the new > amendment is expected to achieve a 4× increase to user throughput due to > more efficient spectrum utilization.

>IEEE 802.11ax is due to be publicly released sometime in 2019.[2] Devices were presented at CES 2018 that showed a top speed of 11 Gbit/s.[3]_

Sounds good but with limited practical value while broadband speeds stay so limited in home. For businesses this would make a big difference (for example editing HD video over WiFi).

<comment><USER15> I suspect for most WiFi users, the overwhelming need is more reliable and fast establishment of connection. I waste vastly more time trying to deal with flaky connections, reconnection after wake from sleep, and network priority issues than I do waiting in the rare cases the WiFi is limiting thd data transfer rate (rather than the wired connection).

The timescales involved in making Wifi connections should be ms or less, not human-noticeable (order 10 sec).

<comment><USER16> I've found Macs to be vastly better at this than my Linux/windows laptops, for some reason, to the point where I almost never wait for them to connect. Might just be some aggressive workarounds they've implemented, though.

<comment><USER11> IME, Macs connect faster when the signal is strong. But on a weaker link, it takes just as long as my Windows and Linux machines.

<comment><USER16> True, this is mostly at home. In cafes and hotels it can definitely take just as long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is just such a sensible change, it's amazing it took everyone this long to come up with it. Figuring out whether something is b, g, n, ac, etc. and then trying to remember which one comes next (ax) is just not going to filter down to the regular consumer like... ever.

I can definitely see perks both in "hey, that's the newer network, it's got a higher version number", and "oh, I guess I do need to buy a new Wi-Fi device, it only supports version 4", etc.

<comment><USER18> At the same time, _some_ version numbers are meaningless (because Chrome), so I'm ambivalent about the change. Still, this should make it easier for mere mortals to understand.

<comment><USER19> I don't know about "meaningless" as much as "not something normal people need to care about."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 802.11ax is 802.11n's true successor and I hope it will be adopted quickly by everyone. 802.11ac for the 5GHz band was a faux successor, in my opinion, as you couldn't use it in the same scenarios. It came with some higher performance, but with major compromises in reach for a typical home.

Wi-Fi 6/802.11ax should last for a while, so I hope the Wi-Fi Alliance starts focusing on an actual long-range standard that's more of a competitor to LTE but that works in the unlicensed spectrum and for distances of 1km or longer. Then it needs to incentivize smartphone makers or smartphone modem makers to adopt it so that everyone will have it.

This would remove the biggest obstacle towards having a real meshnet.

<comment><USER21> WiMax?

<comment><USER22> WiMax is an LTE alternative designed by an IEEE 802 committee. It is designed for last mile delivery and also meets the requirements to be considered a 4G and 5G protocol.

Although technically superior to LTE, phone companies (outside of Sprint, in the US at least) chose not to deploy it as it was not based on existing protocols (GSM and CDMA), even though that isn't an actual legitimate reason, as "true" LTE requires VoLTE deployment, which phone companies refused to do until forced to; VoLTE-enabled handsets perform a lot better than their pre- VoLTE or VoLTE-disabled siblings purely because of not needing to waste valuable spectrum on 3G connections, allowing that band to be reassigned to a 4G radio on the tower.

On top of the VoLTE debacle, companies invested in the GSM and CDMA monopoly tried to claim WiMax did not perform well at long distances, the same distances that LTE does not work well with today (found frequently in rural areas in the US, or similarly in areas heavily shadowed by hills or tall buildings); however the adoption of 600/700mhz to fill in those gaps (plus the forced adoption of VoLTE to improve spectrum usage) has proven that to be false.

LTE in areas that are partly covered by existing bands, with the gaps filled in by 600/700mhz, have finally caught up to WiMax in real world testing.

Interestingly, Asia has adopted WiMax heavily but may be switching to LTE in the future for 5G deployment, even though WiMax beat LTE-A to the commercial gigabit deployment milestone, due to these continued misconceptions. Africa's few networks that were WiMAX are (or have already) switched to LTE (driving up the cost, and lowering the reliability of their networks).

The one place WiMax survived in the US was fixed broadband links (as this is what WiMax was originally designed for, until it merged with Korea's WiBro spec more than a decade ago), but that seems to be finally being replaced in favor with LTE-A's fixed profiles.

WiMax will probably beat LTE to working gigabit deployments, although you'll need to live in Asia for this to be relevant to you.

WiMax is not related to WiFi; although the actual underlying technology of all standards are rapidly converging, they are designed for different purposes.

<comment><USER23> WiMAX may have had technical potential in its standards (I am not equipped to evaluate that) but all the actual deployments of it were just worse than existing HSDPA networks. 10-20 Mbit WiMAX in the US got falsely branded by Sprint as "4G" which caused companies like T-Mobile and AT&T to also brand their faster HSDPA networks as "4G" which caused massive confusion in the the market (iPhones in the US will still show HSDPA networks as "4G"!! It's kind of insane)

I live in Asia and actually have a WiMAX plan still active (since it's grandfathered in on the only still remaining "really really unlimited" plan) but it always sucked in performance even when I got it, and since then they've refarmed half the spectrum. They sell "WiMAX 2" now, but that's just branding - it's just LTE.

<comment><USER22> 4G's sticking point is speed. Specifically, the ITU-R IMT Advanced proposal requires several things, of which, today, are easy to meet. What wasn't easy was 100mbit peak speeds for mobile users, gigabit peak speeds for fixed users.

WiMAX in a lot of markets is not 4G, but neither is LTE in a lot of markets. In other words, a lot of markets do not, and seemingly never will, have 4G as defined by IMT Advanced. I live in a market that is LTE, is sold to me as 4G, will never meet 4G requirements.

WiMAX was developed with proposals like IMT Advanced in mind: ability to have MIMO, all IP packet switching (non-VoLTE LTE networks cannot ever qualify to be called a 4G network due to this, btw), 20mhz and higher channel widths, and spectral efficiency above a certain level (which put a lower limit on how big your modem's DSP has to be due to coding techniques), forwards and backwards compatibility of future specs, and smooth handover between heterogeneous technology (ie, tower to home femtocell and back). WiMAX's original specification (802.16e-2005, which was based on the original 802.16 spec from 2001) met the IMT Advanced requirements.

LTE _was not_ developed from day one to do this, and did not really meet the requirements until LTE-Advanced. The original LTE specification (3GPP release 8 (2008); LTE-A was defined in release 10 (2011); LTE-A Pro was defined in release 13/14 (2016/2017); additions to LTE-A Pro for 5G (but does not meet 5G yet) were added to release 15 (2018)) fell short of the speed requirement.

What makes this all interesting is, WiMax could do fixed modems 10 years before LTE-A added it, was "true 4G" (as how ITU-R defines it now due to how everyone rushed to muddy the definition with HSPA+ and whatnot) 3 years before LTE was, and is currently the only protocol that has hope of deploying gigabit to fixed users currently (via 802.16m-2011/802.16-2012 aka WiMax 2 or WiMax- Advanced).

Also, they're trying to sell LTE as 5G, I've already seen ads saying 600/700mhz support is 5G (it is not, although it is welcome), just like how they tried to sell highest order (2x2 MIMO with dual cell and widest channels) HSPA+ as 4G (which would be more correctly be described as 3.5G, as newest spec LTE would be best described as 4.5G).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> WiFi 6, or 802.11ax, has been in development for sometime and faces lots of difficulties and controversies.

First it was discovered all the major companies were working behind close door forming a group called Densi-Fi, trying to super speed the spec, or more like neglecting all the issues around it and push forward the time to market. This has been discover by some other IEEE members, and the problem has since been "resolved". The Density-Fi section in 802.11ax has since be deleted from Wiki, despite many attempts to bring it back. The 802.11ax committees continue to push forward and correct me if I am wrong, are there any other IEEE spec that failed to pass in all of its Draft? Draft 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 for 802.11ax all failed to pass the vote. With Draft 4.0 being pushed and forcibly passed, while all the comments ( ~2300 of it ) being the same and unresolved as Draft 3.0. Much like 802.11ac there will be Wave 1 and Wave 2. Wave 1 does not include Uplink MU-MIMO, 80+80Mhz Channels and some other things I don't remember on top of my head.

I am not sure what to make of this. Because it reads to me as a giant pile of mess and I don't want to be the guinea pig for this new spec.

</comment><comment><USER25> This time, maybe they hire some cryptographers too instead of letting the network engineers design the security features. For crying out loud, they took their sweet 20 years to actually create a protocol with forward secrecy and resistant to offline attacks - WPA3.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's kinda a bummer to see 802.11ad being ignored. I use 802.11ad for game streaming in my house, and it's great.

It's also great for the "access point per room" story, if there was a mechanism to have cheaper APs and do hand off.

<comment><USER27> I suspect the numbering will only be used for more or less backwards compatible standards. I doubt they will break compatibility with N anytime soon.

</comment></comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi I have a quite long apartment with reception problems in some rooms, and was planning to buy a mesh system (like the TP-Link Deco M9 Plus or similar) to replace my aging range extender (which is stuck on 802.11n now that I have a 802.11ac router).

I'm more of a software guy, don't know that much about hardware and networking, so can any expert on these things give an opinion as to whether this is a bad moment to buy it? Would it be better to wait for 802.11ax/6 to arrive? When can we expect to find hardware (such as mesh kits) reliably supporting the new standard?

<comment><USER28> 802.11ax (or WiFi 6) is going to primarily benefit you at 5 GHz, which is best where you have line-of-sight between the device and the AP. If you're looking into range extenders, you probably don't have line of sight and it's not worth it.

Mesh Wifi sucks.[1] It takes Wifi unreliability and latency and compounds it by adding hopes. Just bite the bullet and put in multiple APs, all connected to a router via Ethernet.

[1] Mesh [any sort of wireless] sucks.

<comment><USER29> > Mesh Wifi sucks.

As an alternative for what doesn't suck, you want multiple hardwired access points. Obviously if you are renting that is tricky though. Ubiquti UAP-PROs are pretty good for home use, and a couple at each end of your apartment would be faster (and probably cheaper) than a prosumer mesh setup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Cunning. Why have 5G, when you can have Wi-Fi 6?

I'd posit that this renaming is part of the ongoing competition between Wi-Fi and LTE, and prompted by the advent of 5G?

</comment><comment><USER31> I like new numbering system which allows me to quickly deduce the generation of standards. No more a/b/g/n/a-something.

</comment><comment><USER32> Can someone explain what this means for consumers? Who benefits the most from this new release?

<comment><USER33> Ordinary people who go to buy a device can know what "version" a router or laptop/phone supports. It makes it much clearer when comparing two routers which supports newer technology rather than knowing the diff between .ac or .n

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Looks like penetration and range decrease with each new WiFi generation.

<comment><USER23> Not really. There's only the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz split.

And the problem with "long range" is that everyone who doesn't live in a detached suburban house now has massive noise on the 2.4 GHz band from their 20 neighbors so that everyone gets terrible speeds. The weaker penetration/range of 5 GHz solves that by right-sizing everyone's network.

edit: researching the updates in 802.11ax, it looks like Wi-Fi 6 will bring the improvements from 802.11ac to 2.4 GHz as well, so it will actually improve performance for people who need range as well. It also has guard interval improvements for outdoor environments.

<comment><USER35> The larger problem with the 2.4 GHz ISM band is the lack of non-overlapping channels along with only one station being able to transmit at a time per channel (in pre 802.11ax). There are only three non-overlapping 20 MHz channels in the 2.4 GHz unlicensed spectrum, where 5 GHz spectrum has about 21 (although some require active radar avoidance).

<comment><USER36> > The larger problem with the 2.4 GHz ISM band is ... only one station being > able to transmit at a time per channel

Is there any Wifi tech for which that isn't true, sans beam-shaping and other tech that effectively puts stations on different physical networks? How do 5 GHz technologies handle multiple simultaneous broadcasts on the same channel? How will 802.11ax do it? Signal processing?

My impression, based on only a little research, is that it's impossible with any tech. Even cell providers need CDMA, TDMA, etc. Maybe that understanding is out of date?

<comment><USER23> Maybe this?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Technical_improv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax#Technical_improvements)

> Spatial frequency reuse

> Coloring enables devices to differentiate transmissions in their own network > from transmissions in neighboring networks.

> Adaptive Power and Sensitivity Thresholds allows dynamically adjusting > transmit power and signal detection threshold to increase spatial reuse.

> Without spatial reuse capabilities devices refuse transmitting concurrently > to transmissions ongoing in other, neighboring networks. With coloring, a > wireless transmission is marked at its very beginning helping surrounding > devices to decide if a simultaneous use of the wireless medium is > permissible or not. A station is allowed to consider the wireless medium as > idle and start a new transmission even if the detected signal level from a > neighboring network exceeds legacy signal detection threshold, provided that > the transmit power for the new transmission is appropriately decreased.

<comment><USER36> That makes good sense to me, but it's still basically keeping stations on separate networks - it's managing the networks' transmission power carefully so they can run in closer proximity.

Still I don't know a solution to concurrent broadcasts on the same network, as the GGP comment seemed to imply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is so dumb, no one's even using Wi-Fi 1 through 5 yet.

<comment><USER38> > no one's even using Wi-Fi 1 through 5 yet.

Yea they are.</comment></comment>