China issues demolition order on world's largest religious town in Tibet - <AUTHOR> http://www.tchrd.org/china-issues-demolition-order-on-worlds-largest-religious-town-in-tibet/ <comment><USER2> I was there literally three days ago. The place is nothing short of breathtaking. Nestled at 4200km, it was a three day motorbike ride from Chengdu. Even at its foothills, you have no concept of the scale of the town hiding in the hills.

This will truly be a tragic loss - the town is much more than the 'slum' it is represented as - it's arguably the most important Buddhist learning institution in the world..

Photos for the interested from my visit: [http://travel.ninjito.com/dump/2016-06-15-Larung- Gar/index.h...](http://travel.ninjito.com/dump/2016-06-15-Larung- Gar/index.html)

Edit: Got a good internet connection, uploaded decent photos.

<comment><USER3> Assuming most of those little structures are inhabited, how does this city sustain itself? The land around it does not appear to be cultivated, and there does not appear to be much of a commercial area. That's a lot of people to feed.

<comment><USER4> It's seldom known to westerners but many knowledgeable Chinese know that there are financial aid programs for minorities. Similar to that of financial support from Canadian government to the natives in northern Canada.

In other words, the money from tax payers of developed areas in China feeds the people. The purpose of the programs is also quite similar to the Canadian government, (at least in the beginning): the people in those area need support.

Unbelievable? I choose some source which can not be some propaganda from Chinese government to partially collaborate my claim (the source of income): [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB868829960463522500](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB868829960463522500) (BTW, the subjective speculation by the author about the motivation of the financial aid can satisfied the western readers but is far from the truth. These false claims happen all the time in almost all western media. The lies fuels anger and nationalism inside China which is not healthy in my personal view. Nobody in western world are aware of that)

Another policy that is favorable to the minorities is the notorious "One Child Policy": All the Han Chinese can have only one child while the minorities include Tibetans are not restricted by the rule.

Those information were never told by western journalist and Free Tibet Movement because they are opposite to the common belief that Chinese government is oppressive regime. The sprite of "Truth, nothing but truth" exist in science/technology/engineering. In politics and religion lies spread.

"Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions." \--Paul Graham [http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html)

<comment><USER5> Why should an entire nation of people be satisfied with 'minority' status? There's a much simpler solution: 'self determination'. Furthermore, in this instance, it has a compelling precedent: Tibet, which China _invaded_ in 1950.

<comment><USER6> > Why should an entire nation of people be satisfied with 'minority' status?

Because they are not an independent nation, and actually are a minority in the bigger nation they are part of ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I visited Yaqing/Yachen mentioned at the bottom of the article about a month ago. The experience was surreal. In the middle of nowhere, 4 hours from the nearest city, the monastery is a sprawling complex of huts around the bend in a river in the tibetan tundra.

Here are some pictures: [http://imgur.com/a/v4gYI](http://imgur.com/a/v4gYI)

The hygienic conditions are very poor - people doing their business squatting on the streets, no toilets, rubbish everywhere. I am surprised that was not an argument being made by the government for the demolition.

There is some concern about foreign - especially American and British - influence on Tibetan Buddhists in the government. I am not sure this move will serve to diminish this influence.

Ps: on another note, a surprising number of these ascetic monks had an iPhone 6s+ or Samsung S7 in their pockets!

<comment><USER8> I visited the region (eastern Sichuan, Tibetan plateau) in 2006, and played counterstrike and diablo 2 against monks at the local internet cafe. Very surreal, getting shot in the head by a monk.

<comment><USER9> Heh I used to play CS 1.6 with my Catholic priest. He was very very good too, though his favourite game was Wolfenstein. Apparently shooting Nazis and their monsters was cathartic

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I do not understand the cowardice and fear the Chinese government seem to have of a small buddhist settlement in the middle of nowhere high up in the mountains of Tibet... It looks like they feel the opposite of a superpower and that a few buddhist monks might threaten them so much they have to destroy them. It's very easy to forget how free we are by comparison to those persecuted in occupied territories.

<comment><USER11> >It's very easy to forget how free we are by comparison to those persecuted in occupied territories.

Pretty insulated thinking there.. Try traveling to Indian reservations or gentrified urban areas.. Or perhaps research Japanese internment camps in WW2. Or hell even look up Guantanamo Bay today. Superpowers flexing their muscle on a "threatening few" is extremely common.

<comment><USER12> Ah, the old 'Tu quoque' fallacy. Even so, let's examine some of these claims a bit:

> Indian reservations

Yes, the state of the modern Indian reservation is tragic, but doesn't that have to more to do with too much government assistance[1][2] rather than government stepping in to destroy?

> gentrified urban areas

You're not trying to suggest that living in a neighborhood that's getting nicer and more expensive is somehow akin to the government coming in and demolishing the whole city block are you?

> Japanese internment camps in WW2

Well taken point, and a black mark on the history of the US government to be sure. But there's much to be said about the state of exception in wartime[3] and it seems unfair to compare measures taken during unprecedented war with China's actions during unprecedented peace.

> Guantanamo Bay

Yeah, this is a shame. But hardly seems comparable, considering the Chinese are literally putting thousands of families out of homes and seeking to destroy an entire religious minority, and at best Guantanamo Bay is an infringement on the civil liberties of a relative handful of individuals. Not that it's right, but it certainly is at the top of a long slippery slope on which China is currently racing to the bottom.

andy_ppp's comment is apt...we have problems, but we still are far more free than almost anywhere else. And it isn't insulated thinking at all; Americans are objectively freer than the Chinese by almost any metric.[4]

[1][http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/03/13/5-ways- the-g...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/03/13/5-ways-the- government-keeps-native-americans-in-poverty/#2f3107356cc6) [2][https://mises.org/library/native-american- reservations-%E2%8...](https://mises.org/library/native-american- reservations-%E2%80%9Csocialist-archipelago%E2%80%9D) [3][http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23630](http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23630) [4][http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking](http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking)

<comment><USER13> Re: governments stepping in to destroy, how do you think American Indians ended up where they are today? It was hardly voluntary. And on top of that, the treaty rights they nominally have are often not enforced. Mineral rights are held "in trust" by the government and are not managed for the Indians' benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Allow me to share some of my perspectives.

I grow up in Seda County in the late 70 and early 80s, and am intimately familiar with culture there. Tibetan Buddhism is not what people in the west think what it is. It is actually quite repressive and brutal. After 1950s, many regular Tibetans were glad to worship the new religion of Chairman Mao instead. Yes, it was true. Chairman Mao was worshiped as one of major Gods at Tibet when I grow up there. Then Deng Xiaoping took power and demolished Chairman Mao worshiping (one of his major blunders, on the same scale as that of 89 Tienanmen massacre), now we got this huge slum town of "religious learning" at a hot basin of Buddhist rebellions. Yes, going unchecked, that town would surely become such a terrorists base, because Buddhist monks in that area had always been very militant and had launched numerous rebellions in 60 and 70s. As a child, I heard all kinds of horrific stories Tibetan monks and their rebellious army inflicted on the Chinese soldiers and civilians alike. For that reason, many Han Chinese families kept firearms at home in that area, a rare thing in China.

On the other hand, Tibetan people in general are good people. One of my cousins married a Tibetan man and we are good drinking buddies. However, Tibetan religious upper class are representatives of a theocracy at worst: greedy, deceptive and brutal.

I am surprised that this town was tolerated for so long. I guess Deng's power was still strong even after his death.

<comment><USER15> >As a child, I heard all kinds of horrific stories Tibetan monks and their rebellious army inflicted on the Chinese soldiers and civilians alike. For that reason, many Han Chinese families kept firearms at home in that area, a rare thing in China.

I'm guessing they didn't tell you about the horrific treatment many Tibetans suffered in the years after the PRC invasion. During the Cultural Revolution, the conservative estimates put the number of extra-judicial executions in Tibet at around 22,000.

Plus, over 6,000 monasteries, the vast majority that have ever existed, were ransacked during that time, which was only a few decades ago. It's rather one- sided to call the Tibetan religious leaders "brutal", and not acknowledge that they have been the recipients of far more brutality in the last few decades.

<comment><USER14> Of course we were told how those rebellions were subdued in the end, because the evidence was in plain sight. There was a ruin on the mountain across the river where we lived. I was told that it used to be a monastery. Some rebellious monks held up there for a long time and the army wasn't able to take it after suffered heavy losses, so they used heavy artillery to bombard it to the ground. When we played in the hills, it's not uncommon to pick up spent shells, etc.

As to cultural revolution, there's nothing special in Tibet. Fired up populace did all the damages. At that time, Tibetan common people were equally zealous about Chairman Mao, if not more so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow! It is amazing that we do not consider this a human rights violation. Oh well, gotta keep them prices low at Walmart!

<comment><USER17> What are you proposing we do? Cut off trade with China? Intervene militarily? Write a strongly worded letter?

<comment><USER18> What about Diplomacy? Increased recognition of Tibetan leaders and activists, sending diplomatic missions to problematic spots, etc.

It would also not hurt to stop with the constant demonization of "China" as a whole, which just serves to downplay criticism as bigotry.

<comment><USER19> Obama just this week met with the Dalai Lama in direct contravention of China's wishes.

<comment><USER20> And Obama criticizes Israel sometimes by stating that the murder of thousands of civilians or the expansion of illegal settlements are "unneccesary" or "not helpful to peace" too, but it's just window dressing and not to be taken seriously. Certainly it makes no difference to the outcome whatsoever, and never will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here are a bunch of photos from the place: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2349761/Little- boxes...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2349761/Little-boxes- hillside--home-40-000-Buddhist-monks-The-stunning-makeshift-town-sprung- Tibetan-monastery.html#ixzz2YTJn15X1)

</comment><comment><USER21> "In 2001, Chinese authorities implemented similar crackdown on Larung Gar by destroying thousands of monastic dwellings and expulsion of monastic and lay practitioners, some of whom died of shock or resorted to suicide, while some were rendered mentally unsound."

</comment><comment><USER22> This will bring the Free Tibet movement to the front again for the next POTUS.

I am sure China will put the 'safety' issue forward, and deflect the independence movement. Remember the earthquake of May 12, 2008 in Sichuan province, China, where over 68,000 people died, and more went missing. The focus in the media was on the houses not being up to standard building codes.

The earthquake in Nepal in 2015 surely affected Tibet too, but information was controlled by China, so the numbers are questionable. Larung Gar is a sprawl of houses for monks, worshipers, students and visitors that could be seen as a potential earthquake hazard area as spun by Chinese media.

</comment><comment><USER23> China's obsession with the destruction of Tibet and its culture is truly troubling.

If China has its way, hundreds of years from now, Tibet will be gone, no record of it will exist, etc.

<comment><USER24> Who remembers the Tibetians?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Of all people the residents of the town will be the least unhappy about it. Because they truly know everything is impermanent. Its their practice and will see it as part of nature. Today I shall not buy anything Chinese. I wish there was a supermarket that sold things not made in China.

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems to be retaliation for this: [http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp- international/obamad...](http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp- international/obamadalai-lama-meet-will-hurt-mutual-trust-says- beijing/article8738775.ece)

</comment><comment><USER27> Remember when free trade was going to democratize and open China? What happened? This is terrible

<comment><USER28> THe free trade was never intended to do anything other than make a class of connected people richer.

<comment><USER29> The GP is referring to how it was sold to the public, not what its real intended effects were.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I didn't notice in the article any mention of _why_ there is a population limit set for this town.

Is it explicitly a measure taken to limit solidarity in a religious/ethnic minority? Is there a concern about the food supply?

<comment><USER30> Why does any genocide happen?

<comment><USER3> Normally the people instigating it give a reason. I'm asking what reason has been given by the PRC in this case.

Also, it's not clear to me that this qualifies as _genocide_.

<comment><USER30> Genocide is the systematic eradication of an ethnic or religious group. You can't look at China's actions over the last fifty odd years and come to any other conclusion.

The reason given by the instigator (either for the top level or individual actions) is of interest but probably doesn't have much truth to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So what? This is a normal procedure. Authorities set ceiling of no more than 5000 dwellers there. That was ignored. Face the concequences.

For those curious - China is colonising Tibet, nothing wrong in industrial nation wiping out the weakling. When the British colonised Americas they did the same with more than 600 First Nations. They just did it earlier.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is ass. It's time for a regime change.

</comment><comment><USER33> Any way of getting the UN involved?

<comment><USER34> The UN is useless anytime the interests of the US, China, Russia or other veto wielding countries are involved.

<comment><USER35> Or friends of any of those. Which in essence renders the whole UN useless.

<comment><USER36> The UN isn't useless when dealing with countries that do not have many friends, like Iran or Somalia, etc. But yeah, the UN is useless when it comes to major powers and those protected by the major powers.

<comment><USER37> The UN is not stopping nuclear proliferation in friendless countries, which really undermines the entire purpose of the UN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Not saying this is right, but it sounds like the city exceeded their legal cap of 5k people? So it doesn't sound like it's a total surprise to them. Am I reading it wrong?

<comment><USER29> That's just rationalization. Had the city population been 4200, the cap would have been set at 4k.

<comment><USER38> You're right, I guess it isn't clear when the cap was set. I assumed it was defined more than a few years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> And yet people are more concerned about ancient statues blown up by muslim extremists. This seems like it shall be a greater tragedy by at least an order of magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER40> What great sadness and folly. Oh may the future be free of such mindless pursuit of conquest.

</comment><comment><USER41> China has some seriously evil leaders.

<comment><USER31> No mate, they are just practical people with pragmatic agendas.

<comment><USER41> If how to harvest more organs from prisoners is practical and pragmatic then they are experts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Chinese are bullies. And bullies pee in their pants when faced with real resistance. That's the best way to describe it.

<comment><USER43> You can't post comments like this to HN. Thoughtful critique is fine, but putting things provocatively and offensively on purpose is not fine, and doing that to slur an entire people (whether or not their government did a bad thing) is a bannable offense. Please don't do it again.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11929011](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11929011) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Upvote, a Hacker News Clone Built with Wordpress - <AUTHOR> http://upvotetheme.com/

<comment><USER2> Very cool. Props to you.

I've a question that's not specific to this app but related to Web apps in general: When I think about installing a PHP (or Rails, for that matter) Web app I get a bit antsy abut security.

I keep thinking that a near-ideal solution might be to have these things encapsulated in a Docker container.

How hard would it be to craft a Docker script that would spin up an instance of Upvote (for example) so that it is isolated from the rest of the server?

It also seems like it would make for a nice way to try something without having to do a "real" installation. If you like it, keep it and change the settings. If not, delete the docker container.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Since Upvote is just a theme and some Buddypress files that sit on top of Wordpress, I think you can use something like this: [https://github.com/jbfink/docker-wordpress](https://github.com/jbfink/docker- wordpress)

<comment><USER2> Oh, very cool. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty sweet! A plugin that would only allow registration based on user invite code would be a neat addition, to me at least.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know if anyone has created a hacker news clone joomla extension?

</comment><comment><USER5> Does it support playing youtube videos like reddit does?</comment>


[solved] Ask HN: Is HN silently deleting/blocking too long comments? - <AUTHOR> Wrt. the recent article about DST I posted a comment with two links to useful (but sadly German) youtube videos as well as something between a subscript/summery of this videos.
Only to notice that this comment never appears at all, it organically was there for a moment and then it was permanent gone and any try to post is just silently does nothing...
Well the comment was pretty long, so I guess HN might silently remove to long comments to prevent spam or similar?
EDIT: The solution was I'm stupid and there is a easy to overlook More button at the bottom of the page. Supper embarrassing. Thanks for the answers. <comment><USER2> You mean this one?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24316299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24316299)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, how does it come that I can see that link but not if I visit the comments section?

Edit: Oh, see edit in title.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just to be clear the comment was _insanely_ long, like 68 lines and a total of >4000 characters.

So HN silently eating such a comment as a form of spam protections seems reasonable, I just wonder if that really is the case or some unlucky network error or similar got in the way.

<comment><USER3> I still see the comment, are you sure you didn't just get confused because it wasn't on the first page of the discussion?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, how embarrassing.

Due to some non-hackernews related reasons the More button was basically non visible to me.

<comment><USER3> easy mistake to make :) I'd be curious how many people aren't even aware that threads can span multiple pages - dang even sometimes pins a comment to remind people at the top.

<comment><USER4> I think this is one of those areas where the desire for minimalism in the UI works against the site. This is the only forum I've been to where people have to be reminded that pagination exists because making it obvious would violate the site's design ethos.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


White House Moves to Deport Vietnam War Refugees - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/12/donald-trump-deport-vietnam-war-refugees/577993/ <comment><USER2> The (IMO poorly written) article implies that not only are Vietnamese origin criminals who got here before 1995 eligible for deportation, but ALL Vietnamese immigrants who got here before 1995 are as well.

Other sources like [https://qz.com/1493761/trump-is-preparing-to-deport- thousand...](https://qz.com/1493761/trump-is-preparing-to-deport-thousands-of- vietnamese-refugees/) indicate that the stated reasoning seems to allow that, but Trump's administration hasn't made itself available to confirm.

If this isn't a simple misunderstanding of what Trump is saying, then this is going to be a huge issue. There are a _lot_ of people affected.

<comment><USER3> Older Vietnamese-Americans have always staunchly voted Republican, at least where I grew up (Orange County, California). I wonder how many people have warned the administration that they're targeting a loyal voting bloc.

<comment><USER4> This action doesn't affect US citizens who remain US citizens. If affected people are _voting_ at all, they do so illegally.

<comment><USER3> If your relatives and members of your community are affected by this, it will affect how you vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Flagged. Article title is complete clickbait.

That said, this is a hard problem. These people are not technically citizens of the US, but of course Vietnam doesn't want them back. Trump seems to be following the letter of the law, but maybe not the spirit (I don't have enough context here). The article isn't in-depth about the breakdown of the demographic, nor does it really cite any valuable sources. The reader is left to their own biases, mostly, to draw a conclusion.

<comment><USER6> Do you really think the spirit of american law is that we have to keep unwanted criminal aliens?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This to me seems like a good thing for Vietnam. There will be alot of people now who having lived in America will be able to bring their skills and expertise back to Vietnam.

I'm sure there are plenty of hospitals and doctors offices that could really use some extra professionals.

<comment><USER8> The war ended in 1975, 43 years ago. So if you fled the war then and were an adult you're quite old now. If you're still of working age (like the people you reference here) that means you were likely a child when you left the country. I'm not sure that being forced to go back to a place you have been to in over four decades is a great deal for you. This move by the White House makes no sense and seems like it's intended to stick it to immigrants for no reason at all.

<comment><USER9> > This move by the White House makes no sense and seems like it's intended to > stick it to immigrants for no reason at all.

The white house is moving to disenfranchise people. Starting with the most powerless groups, children and refugees, and then moving upwards.</comment></comment></comment>


Why does gigabit internet via coax cable not offer symmetrical speed like fiber? - <AUTHOR> https://superuser.com/q/1519893/529428 <comment><USER2> I do quite a bit of DOCSIS consulting.

There are both technical and business reasons for the gap between upstream and downstream speeds

There are a few technical reasons. There is less upstream frequency available in the upstream. 42 MHz is the standard upstream/downstream split, 85 MHz is a midsplit, 200 MHz is a high split, and the downstream goes up to 1Ghz or even 1.2Ghz. The upstream modulation runs at 64 QAM (~27Mbs) and downstream modulation runs at 256 QAM (~38 Mbps). The upstream is also more sustainable to interference and impairments. So the technology is inherently imbalanced.

From a business prospective it is very difficult to cost justify. Moving the upstream/downstream split and/or upgrading to DOCSIS 3.1 is very expensive. The reality is that the typical customer use very little upstream bandwidth. It isn't uncommon for me to see a node with 24 or 32 downstream channels at 80% usage and 4 upstream channels are at 25% utilization or less. We see a downstream to upstream usage ratio of about 15:1. If you move the US/DS split that means you are taking away from available downstream frequency which means less DS data bandwidth or fewer video channels. It's hard to make a business case to invest in increasing upstream bandwidth when the data says people aren't going to use it.

Newer technology like DOCSIS 3.1, Docsis FDX, Remote PHY and modern plant designs like N+0 or N+1 (which means fewer customers per node) will bring higher upstream bandwidth, but it will be awhile before we see anything close to symmetrical speeds.

<comment><USER3> You should take a look at Australia, where we try to shove hundreds of customers onto a single node (Up to 900 per node, up to 250 per segment).

Edit: Although it wouldn't be fair to leave out that it's a EuroDOCSIS 3.0 setup with 16/4 downstream/upstream, with very limited 3.1 being used on a small scale.

<comment><USER4> Isn't telstra just riddled with stories of corruption over time?

[https://www.channelnews.com.au/key-telstra-5g-partner- admits...](https://www.channelnews.com.au/key-telstra-5g-partner-admits-to- bribery-corruption/)

<comment><USER5> Telstra is the equivalent of Comcast here. They're monipolies in large parts of the country so they can get away with a lot

<comment><USER6> And NBN's wholesale charges are comparable to what a retail ISP in a competitive market (e.g. Stockholm) charges for symmetric 10Gb/s FTTP.

[https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nbn-co-puts-future- residentia...](https://www.itnews.com.au/news/nbn-co-puts-future-residential- arpu-at-49-a-user-530383)

<comment><USER7> You could run a lot of websites on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I stewed after the dotcom crash during early 2000s, I had a short 2-year gig working as a headend tech for a small cable company.

It's not about demand, it's about climbing poles and rolling bucket-truck crews to replace filters and other expensive equipment on a massive scale.

The top comment in the link there is spot-on. [https://superuser.com/a/1519918](https://superuser.com/a/1519918)

I was involved with the "digital switchover", moving the traditional analog channels over to the digital QAM channels, potentially freeing those now duplicated analog channels for upload channels. Maybe more upload is technically possible but the work on the poles is going to be expensive.

[edit] oops, pasted duplicate.

<comment><USER9> Priorities, right? I wonder what their business would be like if they had the foresight to not make the split so lopsided.

<comment><USER10> I still don't understand why DSL connections have the same issue

<comment><USER11> DSL is dedicated all the way back to the central office, so it doesn't have the same problem as cable has. That said, what others posted is correct, home users download far more than they upload, so it makes sense from a marketing perspective to give far more downstream bandwidth than upstream. Home users tend to appreciate having a high download speed much more than having equal, but much lower upload and download speeds.

Other interesting info: ADSL is dreadfully slow by today's standards, but VDSL can actually hit some decent speeds. The big problem with both is attenuation of copper wire is fairly significant over the distance the lines generally travel, much more so with VDSL, due to it's higher frequency range. That's why companies like AT&T, with their U-Verse brand, bring fiber to the neighborhood, to lop of a significant distance of copper. They can increase the distance they service by making use of two lines paired together. AT&T takes a portion of legacy ADSL service now and puts VoIP over it, with the VDSL service having more than half it's capacity generally devoted to IPTV bandwidth. One single good condition line could generally carry 118 Mbps, but they would split that up for TV, leaving only 45 Mbps. Now they are mostly pushing FTTH/FTTP though, leaving no option for POTS/copper. That is all good though, because most the copper run is such garbage that it absolutely sucks being a technician. You would be gigged for the line runs getting water in them and making service drop out, even if everything tested great when you installed, or even if you turned a ticket in the line techs might kick it back and say everything is fine.

<comment><USER12> I'd also like to mention something that was tried in Serbia (but ultimately failed, though in a good way):

Our national telecom operator, Telekom Srbija, had a monopoly on internet access in most areas due to the fact they own all the phone lines. In cooperation with Huawei and the Chinese and Serbian governments, they made a plan to kill POTS service per line and use ALL of the bandwidth for VDSL, as well as building DSLAMs on street level, to provide very high speeds (100/10 Mbps was the max they achieved before stopping) with short copper lengths. Phones would work over VoIP, so all new modems were VDSL compliant with IAD (integrated access device) "certification" (a SIP client and 2 POTS ports).

In the end the Chinese lost interest and it was all forgotten and covered with ash. The new idea, which is why I say it failed in a good way, is to skip the street DSLAM buildout and just do FTTH. And they did, though not with symmetric gigabit speeds, because reasons (bla bla customer demand, costs, etc..) The highest speed is 1000/400 Mbps for $120/mo. (which is super expensive compared to what was promised by the Chinese and also compared to general purchasing power in the country).

<comment><USER13> ive got 1000/1000 unmetered in the US for ~$110/month

<comment><USER12> Well.... yes, you do, and some people in the US have 4/0.5 Mbps for the same price. It really depends.

For example, in Niš, which is the most developed city when considering internet infrastructure and the number of ISPs, you could have 600/400 Mbps for $10/mo with ~300 TV channels on unlimited* TVs. You'd even get a [VoIP] landline.

* all the TVs in your home, basically up to 5 for 99% of users

Then Telekom Srbija got the Chinese money and bought 10 largest ISPs other than them and SBB (the other side of the duopoly), and now there's 200/20 Mbps on FTTH for $30/mo on up to 3 TVs with 260 channels and a landline that has call routing problems. Users which sign new contracts are downgraded and pay more, those that don't sign new contracts suffer with TV and Internet dying, and are told to "sign or sue us".

Ironically, I chose the second option, and won ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21733553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21733553)) but the thing I "won" is free contract termination and being repaid fees that were charged but are not mentioned or required under the TOS and Contract at the date of signing (given I have not signed anything else giving permission or agreeing to anything new, and they didn't officially force new contracts on people so that people can't cancel to run away)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fiber can also have asymmetrical speeds (see GPON, NGPON2 etc.). The issue is not the media per se but the concept of shared media. Take any media, wireless, coax, fiber, even copper (ADSL) you have X amount of spectrum to work with so you have to decide how allocate said BW. Since most users demand is higher for downstream than upstream (typically you are downloading a lot more than uploading) it makes sense to allocate more to downstream. Of course it is possible to have full duplex symmetrical speeds. Say you want to allocate 2 fibers, on for upstream and one for downstream, then you can have symmetrical speeds. But typically due to costs, you want to have one fiber shared between a large number of users (e.g. GPON or NGPON, aka FiOS) or one coax shared amongst many users, or some set amount of RF spectrum, in any case you need to make the same type of trade off choice that the cable provider makes or that the DSL provider makes or wireless providers. In the case of wireless the reason that uplink is so much weaker is due to the limited power of the user equipment, also smaller antenna etc. refer to Shannon's law, uplink will be weaker. But generally speaking, it makes sense to have asymmetrical speeds unless you have the luxury of having the same spectrum and power available for both directions.

<comment><USER7> Directional couplers are a thing. Thomas Edison patented multiplexing techniques for telegraph wires that didn't even need them.

<comment><USER15> I think the fiber industry prefers wavelength division multiplexing over simple directional couplers. You can certainly have multiple 10Gbps customers on a single strand of fiber with passive equipment, and many ISPs will happily sell you such a circuit.

(Gpon, mentioned above, is mostly time division multiplexing. I have worked for 2 ISPs that use gpon, and we've never sold anyone an asymmetric plan, except for the "free plan" that Google Fiber had. Gpon is perfectly happy to be symmetric, but it does have a limited bandwidth shared between multiple subscribers.)

The biggest problem I've found is that the Internet isn't really ready for customers that can download at 10Gbps. When I set up a 10Gbps connection for myself, I had a lot of trouble finding anything on the Internet that would send me data that quickly. Even my own servers were AWS instance types that only supported 5Gbps burst. So that is probably the reason why you aren't seeing consumer ISPs selling you 10Gbps circuits... even the servers don't have 10Gbps! A new wave of upgrades are needed for this to become viable; 100Gbps networking equipment is still pretty expensive.

<comment><USER16> > The biggest problem I've found is that the Internet isn't really ready for > customers that can download at 10Gbps.

TCP is dumb and if it can saturate your connection it will increase your latency. I feel like being unable to saturate a connection is a _good_ thing.

There are other measures you can take to avoid saturation, but simply having an oversized pipe is hard to beat.

<comment><USER15> This may be relevant to your interests: [https://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201808](https://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201808)

<comment><USER16> But to really get best results, you need that management on both sides of a chokepoint, and you still want every other link in the system to be oversized.

Fast links are a simple solution to a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't buy the 'no demand for it' line. It has never been offered by the big players. They don't want consumers uploading large amounts of data. I suspect this was originally done due to piracy concerns. But with so many homes having Nest products (and the like) that constantly upload, we need higher uplink speeds.

<comment><USER18> Seems more likely they want price discrimination for their business offerings. I don't know how well that would explain things in competitive market areas though, but in monopoly areas it would make sense.

<comment><USER19> I always assumed this was part of it. ISPs want you to have to pay more if you're going to be hosting a server (and possibly making money). also explains why port 80 is usually blocked.

<comment><USER20> You cannot block port 80 like you imagined. The web would not function normally. HTTP uses port 80 both for data and control.

<comment><USER21> It's extremely common for ISPs to block inbound packets with a destination port of 80, 443, 25, etc. Of course they don't block them outgoing (with the exception of port 25 commonly). He didn't "imagine" anything and it's quite out of form on HN to claim something like that.

<comment><USER20> Port 25 is SMTP, it needs to be allowed in outgoing direction. Otherwise you will be locked to proprietary web mail.

<comment><USER22> There's a dedicated SMTP submission port. Try dialing e.g. gmail's MX record on 25. It might/should probably block.

<comment><USER20> If you mean port 465, it is the port for SMTPS, not a dedicated submission port.

I received timeout, not block, when I queried gmail on port 25. If it were blocked, I would get a TCP reset.

<comment><USER23> Port 587.

Not nearly all consumer isps block port 25, but a lot do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Besides this, coax is 'half duplex' until you apply Frequency division. Hence every bit of upload costs you bandwidth on the download side.

At the same time, fiber is full duplex so this is much less of an issue.

The difference is that applying a voltage at the transmission side in coax will be noticed by the receiver, (cause electricity goes both ways) whereas shining a light into fiber doesn't get to the detector (because light only goes one way). At least, this is my limited understanding. Would love if anyone more knowledgeable could correct me.

<comment><USER25> Both cable and FTTH(single-strand fiber to the home, such as Fios) are full- duplex via frequency division.

Cable operates in RF bands, and frequencies are denoted in MHZ and sometimes GHZ(included in the linked answer)

Fiber operates in optical bands and frequencies are denoted in nanometers(wavelength) -- downstream data, downstream video, and upstream data are all operated on different wavelengths on the same piece of glass, and they are received at both the transmitting end and the receiving end.

They are typically separated and filtered by optical prisms to ensure the correct wavelength hits the correct receiver(most receivers are wide-band and will receive a wide range of optical wavelengths)

The medium is typically shared at a neighborhood level, in that a single optical strand may be split 16 or more times to serve multiple houses. Bandwidth is shared on that strand by the houses served by it, typically via TDM(time division multiplexing)

End users don't typically notice this because the line rates are higher than the maximum bandwidth package sold. IE downstream rate 2.5Gb/s, upstream 1.5Gb/s, max package available is 1Gb/s.

Edit: removed incorrect statement regarding gepon/csma

<comment><USER26> Full duplex DOCSIS 3.1 has theoretical maximums of 10Gbps down and up. It relies on precise timing and echo cancellation to allow the cable modem and CMTS to transmit simultaneously on the same frequency bands. Kind of like how gigabit Ethernet allows both ends to transmit simultaneously on the same four pairs.

<comment><USER27> The question is how practical that mode of operation is on real network, or in other words whether it actually makes sense to run DOCSIS on network that can reliably support that mode (think various xDSL technologies that can push >1Gbps over <100m of what essentially is Cat5 cable)

DOCSIS is somewhat inherently asymmetric due to nature of the CaTV network. Even if the upstream and downstream channels would have same bandwidth, the upstream direction tends to have significantly worse SNR. Historically this was caused by splitters along the way, but also the cable modem is relatively cheap device installed on customer premises and thus has inherently lower transmit power and worse SNR than CMTS. This is the main reason why CMTS tend(ed) to have more upstream receivers than downstream transmitters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> That information is quite outdated. It's more than possible to get symmetric speed on (EURO)DOCSIS 3.1. The main reason it does not happen is because there is no consumer demand for it.

<comment><USER29> The reply was actually pretty spot on. It's not a demand issue. It's true that there is not overwhelming demand for higher upload, but that's pretty far down the list of what prevents it from being offered.

DOCSIS 3.1 allows it on paper, yes. But in the real world, bandwidth is a huge constraint, especially if you're also serving digital cable. No cable ISP in North America today on D3.1 has a network that can support it even if they wanted to.

For example, Comcast has 4 upstream 6mhz sc-qam channels (which is basically using none of the advantages offered by 3.1) and 32 downstream, and their video service is 720p across the board and overly compressed. They are constantly trying to free up data channels and migrate to newer codecs, and eventually go to IPTV, but that requires changing hardware both in their network in the customer's home, or the customer's TV goes black and their internet goes out and you get to hear their rage when you tell them they have to spend a few hundred dollars on new cable boxes/modems so that Comcast can build out their network. It's a massive infrastructure upgrade to use DOCSIS 3.1 to its full potential that is further complicated by a need to support all of the legacy hardware during a transition.

Add to the mix that upstream channels are far more susceptible to unwanted ingress, most homes are full of amateur RG59 coax cable, and it becomes a support/troubleshooting nightmare as well. When you get into higher upstream speeds, these deficiencies become a much bigger problem.

I have observed speed tests on an uncapped docsis 3.1 modem on the comcast network getting full bandwidth on all channels, and it was still way below 100mbps upstream (around 80mbps).

<comment><USER30> in Germany Vodafone deployed DOCSIS 3.1 partially and while still not symmetric i get 100Mbit/s down and 50Mbit/s up more or less consistently with DOCSIS 3.0 where i live unless something goes wrong (it does sometimes interfere with LTE here). DOCSIS 3.1 is also available with lots of [0]channels using the newer 1024QAM. they offer up to 1Gbit downstream and 50Mbit upstream for about 70€ a month. i also made a [1]screenshot of the channel usage and stats page of the modems web interface.

[0] [https://helpdesk.vodafonekabelforum.de/sendb/belegung-11.htm...](https://helpdesk.vodafonekabelforum.de/sendb/belegung-11.html)

[1] [https://gist.github.com/mercora/ef66f5bcd95b060ac25269b17cc6...](https://gist.github.com/mercora/ef66f5bcd95b060ac25269b17cc66b75)

<comment><USER31> It's not required to have DOCSIS 3.1 to have 100Mbit/s symmetry, 3.0 can provide that. Vodafone in Spain has a mixture of HFC footprint (the widest), its own small FTTH footprint, and Telefonica (Spain's DTAG) wholesale FTTH. Prices and speeds for the three of them are the same, but if you are on an FTTH zone you get symmetric upload speeds, while on HFC zones they provide 100Mbit/s upload with all their plans (min download is also 100MBit/s).

They argue they will be able to have symmetry on 1Gbit on HFC when they complete their DOCSIS 3.1 rollout, but that has been going on for years with no news. Ironically their own FTTH footprint is pretty small so they end up, in most cases, providing better upload speeds when reselling Telefonica infrastructure than with their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > _Cable TV, before DOCSIS cable modem internet service became a thing, didn > 't need much upstream bandwidth. All the upstream was needed for was to > authenticate the cable descrambler set-top boxes, authorize occasional pay- > per-view transactions, and maybe do a few minor "interactive TV" things, > like letting you check your cable bill from your descrambler box._

Cable TV didn't have _any_ upstream signaling once upon a time; it was a purely a system of repeating and replicating an analog signal in the downstream direction.

Early scrambling methods for "pay TV" channels could be undone using circuits that were published in electronics magazines.

<comment><USER33> Mostly true.

But upstream signalling predates cable modems by a certain period; originally the upstream was intended for things such as city 'public access' stations to feed back to the headend (to then be transmitted back out to customers). It's existence was certainly handy for the use of cable modems.

<comment><USER32> > _Mostly true._

Where lies the falsehood?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Because simply US (upstream) frequencies are limited to 42 MHz or 85 MHz. They start at 5 MHz.

While in most cases downstream frequencies start from 54 MHz to 1 GHz

</comment><comment><USER35> 1 gbit non-fiber is all but marketing. For starters they have a small bandwidth caps, which keeps you from doing anything interesting. Another thing like the article mentions is that it's a meager upload ability.

I have symmetrical gigabit fiber at my house. When a new Ubuntu torrent drops I'm able to seed a TB relatively quickly. Bandwidth caps would make it so much less useful and interesting.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't think we need symmetrical, but could we get 4:1 ratio instead of 20:1 please? PIN fiber that Verizon FiOS uses is 4:1 at the physical layer, or it was with BPON and GPON standards. I did not follow. I imagine they can sell symmetrical since most people don't use much upstream. Oversubscription is standard and works great in almost all cases.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think it's a conspiracy/scam, so they can milk every dollar out of every company that wants to peer with them.

The only way to peer for free is if your traffic profile is 50% send and 50% receive. Cable companies offer these asymmetric pipes to their customers to make this balanced traffic profile impossible to achieve, so everyone ends up paying the cable companies big bucks for transit on their network.

</comment><comment><USER38> Because ISPs are cheapskates and don't want to upgrade their networks and hardware.

There are better exceptions, like Altice who are in the process of replacing their coaxial network footprint with fiber optics. Interestingly, according to them it will actually cause them to save money in the long run due to lower maintenance costs for fiber optics.

I guess other coaxial ISPs are too greedy for short term profits to look ahead.

</comment><comment><USER39> I can about triple my internet bill to double my uplaod speeds and still be about 50% off what I need for things I run at home. Media streaming from my own server is possible for 1-2 people at 720p/mbps and I want that pushed to 1080p minimum. A business class connection might get me there.

</comment><comment><USER40> My ISP will not sell me anything better than 1G/100M on fiber. Maybe if I looked into business plans maybe.

</comment><comment><USER41> A fiber network Hotwire offers max 1 Gbps download and 50 Mbps upload in South Florida. Oh and it's a 2-year contract if you want those speeds.

</comment><comment><USER42> Not mentioned, they don't want to support residential customers serving web sites (or anything else)

</comment><comment><USER43> That was an interesting article thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER44> Is bandwidth speed?</comment>


Ask HN: Longest Google Downtimes - <AUTHOR> In spite of the recent Google downtimes - how long was the longest outage you experienced? For me, Google (Gmail, Search, Youtube, Calendar, Cloud, ...) is now down for more than five hours. North Rhine-Westphalia (17m inhabitants) in Germany seems to be the center of the outage. <comment><USER2> I don't know about full outage, but the current "disruption" of Kubernetes Engine lasts for more than a week.

[https://status.cloud.google.com/](https://status.cloud.google.com/)</comment>


The Most Important Start Up Lesson I Have Learned From Fred Wilson - <AUTHOR> http://www.perryblacher.com/2011/03/10/the-most-important-start-up-lesson-i-have-learned-from-fred-wilson/ <comment><USER2> "Tenacity is about holding on to the goal, not to the path." Great insight. I've met Perry and have to hand it to them for sticking it out and fighting in a very tough space. <http://covestor.com> (Perry's startup)</comment>


Adaptive Preference Formation - <AUTHOR> https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27069 <comment><USER2> "In the 1980s, the social and political philosopher Jon Elster brilliantly generalized the idea of adaptive preference in terms of the complementary phenomena of "sour grapes" and "sweet lemons": We tend to downgrade the value of previously desired outcomes as their realization becomes less likely and upgrade the value of previously undesired outcomes as their realization becomes more likely."

Its like the shifting baseline effect. Each generation thinks there's a lot of fish in the harbor because they never saw how mush there used to be.</comment>


Ask HN: Can my employer install a 'key logger' on my Android phone? - <AUTHOR> I don't know much about what can and can't be done with policies on Android phones.
I've applied my employer's security policy on my personal Android phone in order to access work email from my home.
Is it possible for them to intercept input across the OS? <comment><USER2> In general, it is best to keep work and personal devices separate. Is it possible they could install a key-logger, absolutely yes if they supplied you the phone. The likelihood that they have is probably small but it depends on how much your company respects your personal privacy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not input per se, but they can see what sites you visit and apps installed. Getting every keypress is a bit harder to my knowledge. Depending on mobile device management (MDM) software used, they can have granular access to running and installed apps, web traffic logs, and access to memory in an aim to control corporate data. Also, most MDMs running on non-corporate (BYOD) devices run corporate data in a sandbox that is managed by the MDM separately. If you have a corporate phone, than this is usually not true and the MDM can see much more data.

Now, the question of will anyone look at what you wrote is a bit harder to answer and it depends on the size of your organization. My firm will not really look unless there is a HR or legal request or you pop up in some reporting of malicious site visits.

</comment><comment><USER4> >> I've applied my employer's security policy on my personal Android phone in order to access work email

Do we wanna play the "spot both mistakes" game?</comment>


First year of startup: radical experiment with micropayments in journalism - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-with-micropayments-in-journalism-365-days-later-f3b799022edc?recommendNoteId=158e032871da&source=top-stories

<comment><USER2> Great stuff at Blendle.</comment>


Templating in C - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pkh.me/p/20-templating-in-c.html <comment> dan-olivier "Nevertheless, this is still a few order of magnitude better than C++ templating."

Uh... no. On a personal level, I have always found that almost any type of preprocessor magic, especially re-#including with a different set of parameters in effect is a recipe for disaster.

Any use of the pre-processor seems to have a serious impact on the build- system (tracking parallel variants), the IDE (color, intellisense or auto- completion), the debugger, and apparently any tool that operates at the meta- level.

On the other hand, IDEs and debuggers often also have problems with C++ templates as well. Am I crazy to think that the result has generally been better with templates?

I think we would better off without any of this. We should: - discard the preprocessor, \- expanding and tightening control on templating), and \- migrating towards more conventional module import methods, such as [http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Modules.html](http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Modules.html) (instead of #include, unless you can fix IWYU).

<comment><USER2> In extreme cases, I combine templates and macros to achieve the desired conciseness of code. Templates are powerful, but often a lot of verbosity/boilerplate is still needed, where macros may come in. That is usually in a basic form as described in this article (one can do much more advanced stuff with macros e.g. google X macros).

Just to annoy you I'll show some code of mine. It's a compile-time expression wrapper. Code: [https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/blob/master/aprinter/me...](https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/blob/master/aprinter/meta/Expr.h) Test: [https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/blob/master/tests/expr_...](https://github.com/ambrop72/aprinter/blob/master/tests/expr_test.cpp)

<comment> dan-olivier Before becoming suitably annoyed at your preprocessor magic, which I will examine shortly, I would like to point out one example I had in the back of my mind when I wrote my comment: just google lttng/tracepoint.h. It just seems to me like a terrible hack.

Of course, if you want to criticize templates and meta-programming (as an alternative to pre-processor), there are many jaw-dropping examples in Boost, V8, etc. I can remember several late-night sessions wrangling with (Boost) serialization code, and the cryptic multi-level warnings that ensue. Those were bad times.

I always figured that the answer would be a language/tool simple enough that a serious programmer could, without heroic effort, manage to customize to his needs over a weekend.

Sadly, it appears that the language lawyers have gone insane, and the trend appears to be entirely opposite (with the recent developments in C++0x/C++11/C++14).

For background: I was a big fan of Visual Studio (when working in games and finance), but my most recent posting precludes developing in Windows, and then porting to Linux for deployment. Looks like most people (at this posting) are doing printf-programming, relying on logs to see what happened (in debug builds). It's hard (within our current heterogeneous environment) to setup gdbserver + Eclipse or some other gdb client on a Windows front-end (which we need for administrativia).

The point is I miss being able to just set breakpoints, launch the program and inspect program state on the fly, as a means of learning the behaviour.

I have cared enough about all this, and used to eagerly await the day that MS would open-source the C++ AST/Intellisense engine, opening the door for programmers being able to perform complexe refactorings with relative ease. Maybe I should just but the whole-tomato software, or some other tool. These days, I am following Clang developments with interest and hope.

FYI, I think the ultimate annoyance is some Linux fanboy who doesn't "believe" in C++ or IDEs, but who is too young to remember when GUIs were not even an option, that text mode was all you had. I am surprised at the resurgence in TUIs (and the longevity of some CLIs). Sure, C++ has its warts, but RAII is better than gotos (here, I am conflating the kernel developer's aversion to C++ with the likelyhood that he/she uses vi, or some other console-based editor).

Sorry for the confused monologue. I'll check out the code later.

<comment><USER3> Inspecting program behaviour via the debugger has always been an uphill battle in C/C++. Sometimes you're working on something where the bug only surfaces in release builds (because the debug build isn't optimised enough and the program runs too slowly to trigger it). Good luck debugging when half the function arguments read "optimised out" and program execution jumps around randomly because the compiler reordered your code for efficiency.

One thing I've always dreamed of is having the compiler emit source for the assembly it generated. So you can attach the debugger and see the code as it actually is, rather than as it was when you wrote it. I love how in Java my code gets optimised by the JIT, but once I start debugging all the optimisations come off (but only once I need to see the source) and what I see is what is running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Curious it doesn't mention C11's __Generic macro. A very nice way to achieve a lot of useful "overloading" behavior.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C11_%28C_standard_revision%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C11_%28C_standard_revision%29)

<comment><AUTHOR> I was simply not aware of it as I never really looked deeply at the features of anything posterior to C99 (I only vaguely remember the thread features that look appealing). That's interesting, I might end up mentioning it in the conclusion later.

Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just use C++. The lack of semantically aware, _type safe_ templates is one of the deficiencies of C that motivated the development of C++.

C++ is a _strictly more powerful language_ than C. Play to its strengths rather than abusing C's weaker constructs.

<comment><USER6> > C++ is a strictly more powerful language than

Not true. C99 has variable length arrays. Those are nice for quick temporary buffers, and I have use them pretty often.

> Play to its strengths rather than abusing C's weaker constructs.

How do I play to its ABI compatiblity strengths? Because I have to keep wrapping all of it in extern "C" declaration in a large enough system.

<comment><USER7> >C99 has variable length arrays

But they don't give C any power C++ doesn't have. In terms of expressive power, you have things like std::vector, and in terms of performance, everyone except MSVC supports VLAs in C++ anyway, and MSVC doesn't even support them in C.

>How do I play to its ABI compatiblity strengths? Because I have to keep wrapping all of it in extern "C" declaration in a large enough system.

That is playing to its ABI compatibility strengths. In how many other languages is binary compatibility so simple?

Regardless, no one said anything about ABI compatibility being one of C++'s strengths. The point was about using C++'s template system for, of all things, exactly what it was designed to do.

<comment><USER6> > , you have things like std::vector, and in terms of performance, everyone > except MSVC supports VLAs in C++ anyway, and MSVC doesn't even support them > in C.

They are not the same. VLA in C are on the stack vectors are allocated from dynamic memory (heap).

> Regardless, no one said anything about ABI compatibility being one of C++'s > strengths.

Right but that is why in practice C++ it is not a strict superset of C. When having to interface with other parts of the systems (loading .so, .dlls) or integrating with scripting langauges, the interface still has to be wrapped in a C interface.

<comment><USER7> >They are not the same

I didn't say that they were. I said that they were equally expressive, because the claim was that C++ is more _powerful_ than C.

>VLA in C are on the stack vectors are allocated from dynamic memory (heap)

That is not necessarily true. It's an implementation detail, and as far as it's relevant, so is the fact that everyone supports VLAs in C++.

>Right but that is why in practice C++ it is not a strict superset of C

Nobody said that C++ was a strict superset of C. The claim was that C++ is more _powerful_ than C, and the fact that you have to specifically request ABI compatibility is not evidence to the contrary. Rather, the fact that you can do this at all (and that you can't use C++ linkage in C) is evidence in support of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another solution, which seems to be missing is to use function pointers; process_image could receive a pointer to given function instead of n. My experiences with gcc show, that functions passed by pointer are often inlined, which is not really a surprise, since they are constant arguments of the function.

Here is an example [0], although the wrapper functions seem to be redundant in this case.

[0] [http://pastebin.com/BAgm61S8](http://pastebin.com/BAgm61S8)

<comment><USER4> How is this for "performance portability?" I use this solution in C when the function is very expensive, therefore a little extra indirection really won't make any difference - but can potentially improve the reusability a lot. Is inlining calls to function via a pointer a very basic optimization that any self respecting compiler should be able to do, or is it a very advanced optimization that I can't count on working across platforms? Given the possibility of dynamic libraries I don't see how it could be inlined in all cases, therefore at least some kind of analysis must be done before trying it.

<comment><USER8> Of course, my statement if far from being complete and definitive answer, it's a mere suggestion of another method to add to OP's list.

If the functions are defined in different binaries which are dynamically linked, the chances of inlining are approaching zero [0], although this method may work across binaries in contrast to all techniques from the article. To enable compiler to inline the argument-function, the compiler must have definitions of both functions. To enable this in library/library-consumer scenario the higher level function [1] can be placed in header file and marked as static, this will guarantee that they are in the same module.

Inlining function pointers doesn't seem to be advanced optimization technique (it is not that different from constants propagation). GCC 4.5 does this for same module functions even in -O1 [2].

Personally, I prefer to emphasize modularity in my code and move to other solutions when something is identified as a bottle-neck (which seems to be nice rule of the thumb for all optimizations).

[0] I would love to be proven wrong, by some kind of JIT-ing dynamic linker.

[1] ie. function accepting other functions as arguments.

[2] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2959535/c-function- pointe...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2959535/c-function-pointer- inlining)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why complicate with multiple files, functions, defines and includes; here it is in one file with a single define:

[http://pastebin.com/uWSs7ca7](http://pastebin.com/uWSs7ca7)

We can improve the macro further by removing the unnecessary if statement and the index number:

[http://pastebin.com/vPTTYPpe](http://pastebin.com/vPTTYPpe)

<comment><AUTHOR> These solutions are what is presented at the beginning of the article, basically. They suffer from a maintenance and readability issue (most editors will disable syntax in the macro scope, you have to mess with the '\', ...).

In this particular case it's not exactly a problem, but when you reach a 100+ lines macro, it becomes one.

It's a bit like maintaining pixel shaders in strings, it pretty quickly becomes a huge PITA.

Now if you read carefully the post, you will notice that I'm not encouraging the latest multiple files method, it is just presented because it's a common pattern and has its use cases.

I think what is described in "Mixing full functions mechanism and macros" would be more appropriate for the example you picked. Again, you have to assume that the function is going to grow, and it needs to be editable.

<comment><USER9> [http://pastebin.com/Wesjzs1A](http://pastebin.com/Wesjzs1A)

...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's what I presented. Sometimes though you need a function because you have a function pointer tab for each feature (foo, bar, baz), that's why I wrapped them to show the mechanism of inlining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I did something similar in a personal project[0], but to avoid reimplementing things like lists and resizable buffers and such over and over again but maintain a sort of "type safety.*" It's a step down from C++ templates but it works.

[0] [https://github.com/noobermin/ch](https://github.com/noobermin/ch)

<comment><USER11> You may or may not have been aware, but most Unixes provide `sys/queue.h`[0] which contains many macros for type safe collections.

0 - [http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD- current/src/sys/sys/...](http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD- current/src/sys/sys/queue.h)

<comment><USER10> Thanks! I actually did not know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am looking for a book or web page which describes well programming patterns in C (might be focused on OOP in C). I mostly design for embedded systems. Any recomendations?

<comment><USER13> More of a general (i.e., not embedded systems specific) book on C is "Deep C Secrets", by Peter Van Der Linden.

Amazon link: [http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Programming-Peter-van- Linden/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Programming-Peter-van- Linden/dp/0131774298)

<comment><USER14> An excellent book, and one which stands right next to K&R in my opinion, as a standard reference book on the subject of the C language. It still has much relevance today - many C projects I've seen being written by the new generation of developers could benefit from having this book become standard reference material everywhere. I can't recommend it enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> here's a similar technique I use in lthread to generate functions:

[https://github.com/halayli/lthread/blob/master/src/lthread_s...](https://github.com/halayli/lthread/blob/master/src/lthread_socket.c#L311-L365)

the arguments are complete function signature

</comment><comment><USER16> The most interesting code is dark grey text on black background.

</comment><comment><USER17> C macros are powerful.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very interesting!</comment>


Meet Google's Security Princess - <AUTHOR> http://www.elle.com/life-love/society-career/google-parisa-tabriz-profile <comment><USER2> > "Security Princess" is Parisa Tabriz's official title at Google. Seriously.

Well, sure, but at the same time my official title at Google is "Engine Ear". It just takes manager approval.

<comment><USER3> [http://chademeng.com/jgf.jpg](http://chademeng.com/jgf.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.ru/2014/07/flash- player...](http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.ru/2014/07/flash-player- update.html)

read the comments princess..

</comment><comment><USER5> The photo credit is Brandon Downey -- the Googler?

<comment><USER6> Almost certainly, since Brandon is a brilliant photographer who often does portraits of other security Googlers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not really sure that needed 5 pages, but I guess ads don't view themselves.

</comment><comment><USER8> "She has a ... sleek tomboy aesthetic: dark-wash jeans, clean-line crewnecks, and Chuck Taylors, with the occasional bomber jacket thrown on top."

""It's slimming," she says, shrugging, not that she needs to worry about that."

Why the fuck does this damn article undermine itself by talking about what kind of clothes she wears and her shape? Completely irrelevant.

<comment><USER9> It's Elle Magazine, not Wired. Clothes, style and aesthetics is what their readers are interested in and what their advertisers make money from. Relevance requires context, and in the context of a fashion magazine it is relevant.

The same line in Wired _would_ be irrelevant.

The world is a subtle and nuanced place.

<comment><USER10> I'm not so sure. The slimming line, probably, but the painting of the physical picture of the person, in a biographical article? It's pretty common for a bio. Wired probably wouldn't use 'tomboy', but I'd expect they'd play up the 'hacker'-esque appearance a little. It's not the main point of the article, just setting the scene.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's a running joke in a student organization I'm involved in, whether a situation is absurd or completely ordinary, someone might ask: "Is it sexist?"

Occasionally it leads to interesting, and difficult discussion that waxes philosophical.

So, her self-declared official title is "Security Princess".

Is it sexist?

Edit: I encourage readers to read my reply to _jamesaguilar_ , here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8013723](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8013723), to elucidate why we _still_ ask the question, "Is it sexist?", and not just to be funny.

<comment><USER11> I'm replying to myself to keep the above short and sweet.

I'm inclined to think it is. I'm worried that someone could see that title, not understand her position or its importance, and disregard her. Or assume Google has disregarded her. Or assume that you have to have adhere to "Princess-like" gender norms.

All of which bother me. If I didn't read the article, I might think:

* Google doesn't take security seriously. (A topic for another topic, but I digress.)

* Google doesn't take women in senior positions seriously.

* If I'm a woman, I can expect to have a title like that at Google.

Etc.

Is it sexist? Knowing more facts makes it less-so, but can we rely on the general public knowing all the facts?

Edit: I encourage readers to read my reply to _jamesaguilar_ , here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8013723](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8013723), to elucidate why we _still_ ask the question, "Is it sexist?", and not just to be funny.

<comment><USER12> You're confusing sexist interpretation with sexist action.

If Person A chooses to wear a pink t-shirt, this is not sexist. If Person B chooses to interpret such a t-shirt as feminine, that _is_ sexist.

I'm deliberately avoiding giving Person A a gender, you'll notice.

<comment><USER11> I think you're confusing your interpratation of the question "Is it sexist?" with its actual effect :)

Google, and even the employee herself, are sending signals, just like startups send signals to investors and people signal their gender with what they wear. Is it sexist to interpret pink t-shirts as feminine? (I think that's more a question of gender construction, but I digress again.)

I think there's a big problem with the way that tech giants send signals towards women who want to approach technology. Having a senior-level highly technical role in your company with the title "Security Princess" sends a lot of signals, and I don't think most of them are good for fighting sexism.

Does that make sense?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bumbla claat princess riddems. Control your space lady.</comment>


Google Ultron – A browser light years ahead - <AUTHOR> http://ultronbrowser.io/ <comment><USER2> This has to do with a series of 4chan posts under "anon works IT"

[https://imgur.com/gallery/B9wqU](https://imgur.com/gallery/B9wqU)

</comment><comment><USER3> I can understand that this is a joke website, but I think I missed the point of the satire here. Can you explain?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really, best I got is this[0] explanation. Apparently it started as a 4chan meme in 2014. I was talking about Mozilla's work on FF Quantum and someone brought this to my attention. It made me laugh so I thought I'd share it.

[0] [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/google- ultron](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/google-ultron)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it April already? Looking outside, it just started getting cold, not the other way round.</comment>


Show HN: GitSpo – Monitoring and Analytics for Open-Source Projects - <AUTHOR> http://gitspo.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have published it on ProductHunt this morning where I shared more background about the project:

This is my favourite side project. I have built it so that I would know when people are talking about my projects and in what contexts my projects are being mentioned. The goal is to measure what impact social mentions have to product adoption and to create opportunities for developers to engage their communities outside of GitHub.

Currently GitSpo aggregates data from 10 different websites, including dev.to, GitHub, Gitter, Hacker News, Hashnode, Medium, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow and Twitter. In total I caught 800k+ project mentions. This excludes bot activity (I detect and filter our CI and similar bots) and repeat/ near duplicate mentions.

I am yet to figure out how to monetize GitSpo. In theory, the underlying tech would allow a pivot to a Medium.com-like company. I thought of creating a tool for recruiters to identify the rising talent. Maybe even automatically suggesting improvements to developer LinkedIn profiles based on their activity. Perhaps generating impact reports for companies that invest into Open-Source. With a bit of luck and time a problem worth solving will come to me. :-)

Viewing my own project mentions is great. Though my favourite feature has become the trending project list, [https://gitspo.com/trending](https://gitspo.com/trending). I have stumbled upon some very cool tech this way in the past couple of months, and seeing the comments on social media about those projects allowed me to form an informed opinion about the potential use cases.

[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/gitspo-3#comment-976111](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/gitspo-3#comment-976111)

</comment><comment><USER2> I think your product is a good idea, but I received an email from you (to my personal email) without having signed up for your service. I do not know where you found my email, but I would like to be in control who I share my email address to.

Can you please take me off your list and if in the future I decide to use your service, I would happily sign up to.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems pretty cool. I logged in and it immediately showed some of the personal mentions. Is there any way to link it to one of my github orgs instead of my personal?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to try this and give you more feedback but I'm getting 404 trying to install the GitHub app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please give a try again. Some users reported the same issue. It has been fixed since.</comment></comment>


With no trademark, Sriracha name is showing up everywhere - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-sriracha-trademark-20150211-story.html <comment><USER2> « It may be too late for Tran to successfully argue that the trademark belongs to him.

Two dozen applications to use the word have been filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. None has been granted for Sriracha alone. The word is now too generic, the agency determined. »

That was going to be my concern -- that someone _else_ would get the trademark. But maybe he's safe from that now.</comment>


Mobile sites. Not just mini versions of websites. Javascript in Freckle. - <AUTHOR> http://mir.aculo.us/2010/10/15/how-we-use-mobile-javascript-in-freckle/

<comment><USER2> I noticed a lot of Raphael love lately. What about jquery.svg?

      http://plugins.jquery.com/project/svg

I do not know if it is still true, but jquery.svg offers over Raphael the ability to import SVGs, and your twines are all the events that jquery already offers.

<comment><USER3> it requires a plugin to view on IE. That is a negative that is hard to overlook.

<comment><USER2> it = jquery.svg or Raphael?

<comment><USER3> Sorry jquery.svg

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting article, thank you! One small note according SVG: Android still lacks svg support(<http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1376>) so you need to have workarounds.

<comment><USER5> For this reason (and others), we don't show the iPhone version to Android users. Sadly, the Android browser (especially before Android 2.2) is really lacking—it doesn't even do animated GIFs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's looking great in iPhone! How does it look in a Blackberry or Nokia or Android or Windows Mobile? These market share are just as large as the iPhone(i could be wrong about the market shares).

<comment><USER7> I don't know about the BlackBerry, but as Android basically uses the same rendering engine it should be roughly equivalent, and now that iPhone developers can't simply hard-code resolutions anymore, everyone wins.

<comment><USER5> That is not entirely true. The various versions of WebKit and the capabilities of the phones vary widely.

You can't just make one version and throw in flexible CSS. That doesn't even work within the iOS platform (between iPhones and iPads).

These are very different, from the point of view of the user. For example, on the iPad it's easy to use multiple fingers at the same time, while on a phone, two or three fingers are the upper limit (and it's really hard to exactly hit a target then).

Next to that, people also have different expectations on various platforms (like buttons being in different locations), etc. etc.

My point is that you can't make one app that works great everywhere. You need to know your audience and provide really great custom-made, hand-optimized solutions. Anything that promises automatic multi-platform compatibility is an exercise in mediocrity.

Who's using Java applications on their desktop? Right, nobody. It just sucks and doesn't work; and that's why platform-specific desktop apps are still alive and well. The same thing is true for mobile web apps.</comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk's most infamous venture, where only 1 character remains - <AUTHOR> http://x.com <comment><USER2> The most interesting thing about the site, is that if you go to anything off of it (example: x.com/helloworld or x.com/login) you will instead see "y" show up instead of the "x" on the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, it gets even better

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wonder, what has happened to all his video game businesses?</comment>


HR Tools to Check Your Team Is Engaged - <AUTHOR> http://cactushr.com/blog/2016/10/12/10-hr-tools-to-check-your-team-is-engaged/ <comment><USER2> Hmmm. I have an idea for a startup...

[https://www.amazon.com/Petrainer-PET998DBB2-Waterproof- Recha...](https://www.amazon.com/Petrainer-PET998DBB2-Waterproof-Rechargeable- Training/dp/B00W6ZHZMI/ref=sr_1_3?s=pet- supplies&ie=UTF8&qid=1476296776&sr=1-3)

Pitch video:

[https://youtu.be/GtmYDESEwXs?t=14](https://youtu.be/GtmYDESEwXs?t=14)

</comment><comment><USER3> Instead of a focus on motivating employees, it seems like there should be a focus on not _demotivating_ them. I don't think an employer can or should try to be a therapist for employees by trying to help them find purpose. Throwing a bunch of HR tools at a team of developers is a sure-fire way of getting eye rolling and complaints about upper management wasting developers' time.

Pay your developers well, don't treat them like children, give the technology leaders the respect to make technology decisions, and don't put them in a toxic environment. Be active in getting constant face-to-face feedback and actually listen and be willing to admit faults as an employer.

</comment><comment><USER4> As an employee, I am always extremely cautious when I'm surveyed about my employment. At the end of the day, the only thing these surveys do is tell the employer if I'm worth keeping around or not. If I indicate anything other than 10/10 on these surveys, I will get put on a performance improvement plan, which is the first step to getting fired.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. My cynicism tells me that more often than not, this is just used to find disgruntled employees and get rid of them rather than actually fixing problems.</comment></comment>


MIT Researcher Exposing Bias in Facial Recognition Tech Triggers Amazon's Wrath - <AUTHOR> https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2019/04/08/523153.htm/ <comment><USER2> Models that are used for anything important should be explainable. That is, you should be able to get a definitive answer as to why a particular result was achieved _in any particular case_. If a model does not have this property, it should not be used for anything critical.

Also, people should have the right to know when machine-learned models are used to make decisions about their lives. They should be able to ask why a particular decisions was made and get that information.

This is _real_ AI ethics.

<comment><USER3> Can you explain how you, as a human being, understand handwriting? Can you explain it in detail without handwaving some stuff away as "now I detect the pattern"? Because I'm pretty sure you can't, but you use it for basically everything in life. So, should a person's eyes not be trusted when it comes to "something important"?

<comment><USER2> _> Can you explain how you, as a human being, understand handwriting?_

We explain how to understand handwriting to every single child that goes to school. It's not the answer you want, but it's the answer that actually matters here.

Trying to equivocate AI and human cognition in this way is completely disingenuous.

Human reasoning is not 100% reliable, but we know very well in which ways it's unreliable and how to deal with it. We have shared biology and millennia of experience trying to empathize and communicate with others.

<comment><USER4> We do not explain how to read handwriting, we teach by example - and that is exactly how ML works.

And your last point is wrong. ML models are studied and understood much better than human reasoning.

<comment><USER2> _> We do not explain how to read handwriting, we teach by example - and that is exactly how ML works._

Teaching children to read is an interactive process that has pretty much _nothing_ in common with data steamrolling in modern machine learning.

 _> And your last point is wrong. ML models are studied and understood much better than human reasoning._

Is that why new ANN architectures are almost universally constructed by trial and error?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> Chris Adzima, senior information systems analyst for the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon, said the agency uses Amazon's Rekognition to identify the most likely matches among its collection of roughly 350,000 mug shots. But because a human makes the final decision, "the bias of that computer system is not transferred over into any results or any action taken," Adzima said.

The gentleman is saying that the system selects a small subset of the 350,000 mugshots, but because a human selects one mugshot from this small subset, there is no bias.

That just makes no sense.

[edited to remove stronger language]

<comment><USER3> It does make some sense. Yes, technically, the bias is still there, but it's lower. Getting some accuracy on image detection isn't that difficult, but making it more and more accurate is. Going from 50% accuracy to 51% is much easier than 98% to 99%.

Of course, with the error rates reported on certain groups a human making the final decision is not enough.

<comment><USER6> The problem is a human would at best reduce but not eliminate the bias.

Let's assume the photo was not a match for the database. Now a human doing the final step is essentially pick a random face from a biased sample.

Worse, people are really bad about assuming whatever option they are considering to be far more likely than the base rate. Read up on an random obscure disease and suddenly you start thinking it's a real risk. Sadly, police do the same thing with criminal suspects resulting in innocent people in prison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Her tests on software created by brand-name tech firms such as Amazon uncovered much higher error rates in classifying the gender of darker-skinned women than for lighter-skinned men."

Besides the article's obvious anti-man, anti-white bias, I'm not surprised that facial recognition software has a hard time analyzing darker skinned people.

With photography, I've always had a hard time photographing someone who had dark skin. Lots of light needs to be used, and even then it needs to be filtered correctly, etc. This goes for any subject that is dark.

Unfortunately, this is going to be a tough problem. Cameras used by law enforcement and government agencies, (which the article seems to focus on) are normally pretty shitty; software can only do what it does with whatever input it gets. So if the lighting and image quality is shitty, then your results will be as equally shitty.

The article doesnt go into what kind of equipment the MIT researcher was using, but I will assume that it is a high quality camera. If so, and if the software is still failing as the article alludes to, then yes, these companies need to make their software better.

Even so, it's a crapshoot from the get-go, due to the hardware being used.

<comment><USER8> I did not notice an anti-man or anti-white bias in the article. What stuck out to you in the article that seemed biased?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Issues are going beyond face recognition and algorithms : _photography has a long history of bias_ [1]. Besides the issue of insufficient testing, I had to ask myself : what if these algorithms are relying on a biased process thinking it was impartial ?

[1] [https://jezebel.com/the-truth-about-photography-and-brown- sk...](https://jezebel.com/the-truth-about-photography-and-brown- skin-1557656792)

<comment><USER10> Can anyone explain exactly what is missing in photography due to "bias"? I'm just an amateur photographer that developed film in high school and plays around with RAW and Lightroom. I can't think of anything in the process that isn't simply a matter of light sensitivity and dynamic range. Film and image sensors don't understand high level semantic features like skin.

The hardest thing to take a photo of is a black haired cat, and I don't think that's because Adobe is biased agains black cats.

<comment><USER9> Following the link I posted might be a good start.

<comment><USER10> Do you really think Kodak didn't want to make a film that could capture dark subjects until furniture companies asked for it?

The reason I commented is because that article makes a lot of complaints that drum up outrage. As far as I know are of the complaints all much better explained by either 1) less light is harder to photograph, or 2) photographing bright things and dark things at the same time is harder than photographing just bright things or just dark things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article doesn't mention papers so I am linking them here:

Original study [PDF]: [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a...](http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf)

New study [PDF]: [https://www.thetalkingmachines.com/sites/default/files/2019-...](https://www.thetalkingmachines.com/sites/default/files/2019-02/aies-19_paper_223.pdf)

<comment><USER12> I read the original paper. Wow, they could have tested for so many factors impacting accuracy but they only looked at mean accuracy for each cluster.

<comment><USER13> Haven't read the study myself yet, but that sentence alone makes me not want to waste my time on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Her tests on software created by brand-name tech firms such as Amazon > uncovered much higher error rates in classifying the gender of darker- > skinned women than for lighter-skinned men.

What about lighter-skinned women? This seems to be phrased on purpose to incite bias against white men.

<comment> jake-low Here's the paper [0]. The answer to your question is in Tables 4 and 5 (page 9). To summarize, darker skinned women are misclassified far more often than any other group, in all three of the tested facial recognition systems. Error rates for lighter skinned women are between 5x and 10x lower, depending on the system. Lighter skinned men have the lowest classification error rates by a wide margin in the IBM and Microsoft systems, and are tied with darker skinned men for lowest error rate in the Face++ system.

[0]: [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a...](http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Beyond the very real intersectional problems highlighted . . .

The fact that the Amazon gender classifier miss-identifies 7% of white females as male, but 0% of white males as female is very odd. That seems like a JV level bias tuning mistake. That's not systemic violence so much as it is just sloppy.

<comment><USER16> Most of the time the headline for these articles seems like it should be "Crap product also biased".

I have some suspicion they haven't focused on bringing down the error rates for minority groups because they know even their best case isn't good enough.

<comment><USER15> Check out the academic article.[0] It shows that Microsoft and IBM are way way better.

[0] [http://www.aies-conference.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/01/AI...](http://www.aies-conference.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/01/AIES-19_paper_223.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Where is the wrath? Seems like Amazon just hand waved away her criticism, they didn't really take any actions against her.

</comment><comment><USER18> I heard about different research like this about six years ago. So the algorithm wasn't tested on dark-skinned people. Is this really something new? Product developers in a wide variety of markets still neglect to take into account dark skinned peoples when developing their products. Why should it come as a shock that facial recognition product developers suffer from the same bias?

<comment><USER19> From the article:

"Those disparities can sometimes be a matter of life or death: One recent study of the computer vision systems that enable self-driving cars to "see" the road shows they have a harder time detecting pedestrians with darker skin tones."

Just think about the consequences of deploying such systems.

<comment><USER20> I wonder if that's also true for human drivers. I certainly have a harder time detecting pedestrians wearing darker clothing, at least in some circumstances.

<comment><USER21> That's why road workers, cyclists, and joggers wear brightly colored reflective vests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is this something simple like class imbalance in the training sets? Would be pathetic if that were the case. So easily fixed.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not the first article about this kind of stuff. Police departments can do whatever they want to obtain leads (as long as it is legal (Gray area)). I will be worried when they will start using technology instead of judges.

<comment><USER24> That seems like a shortsighted position because it ignores the cost of selective enforcement. Everyone breaks laws on a daily basis - jaywalking, speeding, etc. - and you could have a severely disproportionate cost by enforcing that more for one group than another, even with every trial being completely fair.

Here in DC there was an example awhile back prior to legalizing marijuana: white people apparently used at a higher rate but most of the prosecutions were of black people both due to heavier police presence and because demographics meant that white users tended to have more privacy (limited visibility from the street, more distance between houses/sidewalks to make smell harder to notice, etc.) which made it harder to get evidence clearly showing that a specific person had been the one using. The process could be fair without changing the fact that the results disproportionately impacted one group.

<comment><USER25> That's not "selective enforcement". Race is not being selected for. People committing crimes in public is being selected for. Or people committing crimes in high-crime areas.

Some races happen to correlate with some selected traits more than others, but race is not the trait selected for.

It's completely predictable that not all traits of interest for law enforcement will be distributed equally across all racial groups. To treat this fact as a sign of systemic racism is to guarantee that you will consider every society on Earth systemically rac/sex/[group] ist.

<comment><USER24> Selective enforcement isn't specific to racism — if you have a law which primarily impacts teenagers while other people break it with far lower penalty rates, that's selective enforcement even if everyone is the same race.

This does commonly fall upon racial lines in countries like the United States with a long history of racial discrimination but it's not exclusive and it's important for anyone building systems to consider pitfalls like this because we know the users are likely to assume that a computer is unbiased.

<comment><USER25> Disproportionate impact is not the same thing as "selective enforcement". Selective enforcement means consciously choosing to enforce a law more commonly when a particular racial group breaks it. It does not members of a particular racial group disproportionately having the law enforced against them because they disproportionately exhibit a particular non-racial trait that is correlated with higher enforcement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It seems like every other month, some facial recognition system is being attacked because of this.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone have a link to the paper?

</comment><comment><USER28> I love this, whether the conclusions are valid or not, using science to troll big tech where they live. ouch, right in the feels.

</comment><comment><USER29> What does this article have to do with racism and not the failing of the recognition system? It is supposed to be a facial recognition system, it doesn't work on specific people at a large percentage.. It's brought to the attention of the manufacturers and should be worked on being fixed.

<comment><USER30> And when the manufacturer says "nuh uh" like they did in this case?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Dh

</comment><comment><USER32> I sure feel privileged that Amazon's software can track and spy on me effectively.

</comment><comment><USER33> It is amazing to what length those 'activists' go in order to make sure Amazon's product does work better. Do they know that this stuff will be largely used for surveillance, military uses and other nasty stuff (like exposing adult performers on social media)?

If people plan on spending time on activism, there is plenty of real issues with Amazon.

<comment><USER34> Well, when Boston Dynamics' dog robot walks into your house with a gun on its back, it's about making sure it knows how to differentiate you from the bad guy it's looking for.

We don't want autonomous killer bots to not be able to tell black people apart just because their creators can't.

<comment><USER35> America would have to become a drastically worse place for any law enforcement agency to deploy an autonomous lethal force that had less than 100% identification accuracy.

<comment><USER36> It already deploys a manned lethal force with far less than 100% identification accuracy, so what's the fundamental difference? The arguments in courts would be the same - "an honest mistake", "incident due to unfortunate circumstances" etc, wrapped up with a claim that if such broad latitude to make "mistakes" is not given, then society will descend into lawless anarchy. But it would be applied to people who deploy the robots, instead of the people pulling the trigger.

Alternatively, and more likely, measures would be taken to make it not autonomous on paper, e.g. requiring a human operator to approve any action the robot is intending to take. In practice, this would likely be one of those "moral crumple zones" with little practical meaning.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


$4k/Month Ultra Modern Castro Studio –  Tech Employees Preferred - <AUTHOR> http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/apa/4896463536.html

<comment><USER2> Oh the satire. Where's the wifi?

Mirror for reference: [http://i.imgur.com/cIeBqm7.png](http://i.imgur.com/cIeBqm7.png)</comment>