Don't Panic, but the Universe Is Slowly Dying - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/dont-panic-but-the-universe-is-slowly-dying-45779

<comment><USER2> Yeah, articles like this sure attract a lot of instant experts.

Of course, they have absolutely no idea of what the evidence looks like -- such as, say, the near-perfect blackbody spectrum of the cosmic microwave background, the helium abundance, the isotropy of the CMB, the angular correlation function of the CMB fluctuations, the concordance of the ages of the oldest stars and the Hubble tme, the agreement of the baryon acoustic oscillation peak with the sonic horizon at decoupling --- you know, stuff like that.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's because we emit so much carbon to our atmosphere! Let's ban fossil fuels and save the universe!</comment>


EduSense: Practical Classroom Sensing at Scale - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/edusense/edusense <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.edusense.io](https://www.edusense.io)

In this paper, we present the culmination of two years of research and development on EduSense, a comprehensive sensing system that produces a plethora of theoretically-motivated visual and audio features correlated with effective instruction, which could feed professional development tools in much the same way as a Fitbit sensor reports step count to an end user app.</comment>


FindTheBest destroys "matchmaking" patent, pushes RICO case against troll - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/findthebest-destroys-matchmaking-patent-pushes-rico-case-against-troll/ <comment><USER2> I'm repeating myself, but in every single one of these patent trolling cases:

Name. And. Shame.

Eileen Shapiro. The headline should be: "FindTheBest destroys 'matchmaking' patent, pushes RICO case against patent troll Eileen Shapiro." (I'm assuming she's not the only one involved, but they've got her name in there.)

Don't let these people hide behind the names of their patent companies. Let them become famous for their malicious greediness.

<comment><USER3> _Name. And. Shame._

I wish some enterprising young kids in the tech community could work out a technical or collective solution to the problem of patent trolls. They would be asking for punishment, to be sure. But I bet there are some really cool things that can be done here.

* One naive idea: a subscription-based nonprofit that pools legal expenses and member patent portfolios and fights defensive cases on behalf of startups and small businesses. The more such companies that join, the more formidable its portfolio would become.

* Another naive idea: publish information about patent cases underway in areas of the world that fall outside of the jurisdiction of a court imposing an injunction. I'm guessing this would need to be done by a third party so as not to prejudice the case of the business being sued by the troll, but I'm not a lawyer.

<comment><USER4> > One naive idea: a subscription-based nonprofit that pools legal expenses and > member patent portfolios and fights defensive cases on behalf of startups > and small businesses. The more such companies that join, the more formidable > its portfolio would become.

Patent portfolios don't work against trolls that don't have any business other than patent extortion.

> Another naive idea: publish information about patent cases underway in areas > of the world that fall outside of the jurisdiction of a court imposing an > injunction.

The court records are already public. It's the cases that _settle_ that you never hear about, because the trolls demand that you sign an NDA. I don't know that publishing in a different country gets you out of the NDA.

What we really need is to start a PAC to abolish software patents and have everyone contribute money to it, and provide them with lots of "ammunition" (i.e. thousands of testimonials from startup founders explaining how the patent system is ruining everything) to bring to Congress to get this fixed. Note that this _isn 't_ the EFF -- they do good work, but they're litigators, not lobbyists. This is a situation where what we really need are lobbyists to push to get the law changed, and grass roots lobbying by individuals to the same end.

<comment><USER5> How would you legally define "software patent"? If you figure it out, please let the Supreme Court, the CAFC and the USPTO know, because currently nobody really knows.

As for "ammunition", look up the Berkeley Patent Survey [1]. The only damning thing you'll find in there, though, is that entrepreneurs in software on average don't think they present a competitive advantage, so "only" 60% of software startups file for patents. And it's typically because investors ask for them.

Edit: I misremembered... It's actually only 25% of all software startups in the survey, but 67% of VC-backed startups.

1\. [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1429049](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1429049)

<comment><USER4> > How would you legally define "software patent"?

Software patent: A patent that can be infringed by executing a software program on a general purpose computer.

> It's actually only 25% of all software startups in the survey, but 67% of > VC-backed startups.

Which does tell you something, doesn't it? Unless VC-backed startups are an incredibly small percentage of startups, the patents filed by non-VC-backed startups would have to be significantly _smaller_ than 24% (I assume 25% was a typo, see table on page 1277 of the report). Moreover, given the stark contrast in the numbers, query whether the VCs are interested in patents as patents vs. interested in them as a method for weeding out uncommitted startup founders.

But I'm less concerned about the number of patents software startups are applying for. If nobody was applying for software patents at all, obviously the patent system wouldn't be doing any good there, but it wouldn't really be the strongest call for abolishing them -- no harm no foul, right? The problem isn't (just) the lack of usefulness or cost effectiveness of patents to innovators, it's the harm created by mass producing land mines. Because if software startups aren't getting many software patents, but the number of software patents being issued keeps going up, guess who is.

<comment><USER5> _> Software patent: A patent that can be infringed by executing a software program on a general purpose computer._

Ever wonder why all the jurists all over the world have not stumbled upon such a simple and elegant definition? Herein lies just one problem: your definition of software patents may also include:

\- Control systems for automotive, industrial and robotic systems.

\- Signal processing methods for digital communications, audio processing, speech processing, image processing, video processing, automated control systems, and so on.

\- Microcode in processors

\- Embedded firmware in appliances and devices.

\- Mechanical watch designs. They are simply mechanical implementations of algorithms.

\- Digital circuits, chips and hardware that implements any of the above.

The software / hardware equivalence makes simple definitions impossible.

 _> Which does tell you something, doesn't it?_

It could tell me many things, depending on what assumptions I may apply. Let's see how many you disagree with.

\- The majority of software startups are not doing anything particularly technically innovative.

\- The (vast) majority of the _software industry_ as a whole is not doing anything particularly technically innovative.

\- Patents are expensive to apply for and get, something a startup can't often afford.

\- Patents don't provide enough protection for software products anyway.

(The last two are actually borne out by the study.)

 _> query whether the VCs are interested in patents vs. interested in them as a method for weeding out uncommitted startup founders._

Why wonder when there are studies on the subject? It's called "signaling". Of course VCs have no interest in IP itself, only what it means for their ROI. But if there's no funding, there's no startup, let alone innovation, so for many founders it's a necessary evil.

 _> Because if software startups aren't getting many software patents, but the number of software patents being issued keeps going up, guess who is._

Again, why guess when there are studies :-) If you believe James Bessen it's actually manufacturing, industrial and semiconductor firms. (See his "A generation of software patents" paper. Flawed study, IMO, but a useful starting point.) If the answer surprises you, maybe you should consider that "software patents" are not easy to define.

<comment><USER4> > The software / hardware equivalence makes simple definitions impossible.

The software / hardware equivalence is overstated. You can implement everything in hardware that you can implement in software, but you can't implement everything in software that you can implement in hardware. There is no software alone that you can run on a general purpose computer to cause it to generate thrust, or convert raw steel into an automobile chassis, or help the immune system to fight cancer.

So your argument seems to be that we can't define "software patent" as "patent that software executing on a general purpose computer infringes" because that would include patents over software hard-coded into hardware. But why is that a problem? Firmware is code. Microcode is code. They're supposed to fall into the same category as "software" \-- the fact that you can't disambiguate them is a result of them being the same thing. And they are all things that, like other software, can be protected by copyright.

On the other hand, the watch isn't the same thing. The formula that describes the timing of a watch mechanism is not a watch mechanism. A watch simulator is not a watch. Executing a software simulator of a watch mechanism on a general purpose computer without a clock doesn't imbue it with the ability to keep time. You can patent a physical watch without patenting its "algorithm" in much the same way as you can patent a specific nuclear reactor design without patenting E=MC^2, or patent a drug without causing a research paper describing the drug to infringe.

>\- The majority of software startups are not doing anything particularly technically innovative.

>\- The (vast) majority of the software industry as a whole is not doing anything particularly technically innovative.

The second is a refutation of the first. If you take Microsoft, IBM et al as not doing anything particularly technically innovative, even though they are applying for a large number of patents, "innovation" (in the sense of interesting rather than merely something you can lawyer through the patent office) is clearly not a requirement for obtaining a patent. Which means that a lack of innovation can't adequately explain why startups should be less inclined to file for patents than larger firms which are innovating even less.

>\- Patents are expensive to apply for and get, something a startup can't often afford.

>\- Patents don't provide enough protection for software products anyway.

It doesn't surprise me that the study found both of these. This is evidence that software patents are ineffective to promote innovation. But again, uselessness without harm is irritating but mostly benign. The real trouble is that software patents are _harmful_ , because they entrench incumbents by creating patent thickets and facilitate the trolling of successful innovators by lawyers and failures.

> But if there's no funding, there's no startup, let alone innovation, so for > many founders it's a necessary evil.

That's the point. If we get rid of software patents then VCs would need to find some other signaling mechanism to distinguish between startups, but founders would no longer need to spend scarce resources and time on patent prosecution that could better be spent somewhere more productive.

<comment><USER5> _> There is no software alone that you can run on a general purpose computer to cause it to generate thrust, or convert raw steel into an automobile chassis, or help the immune system to fight cancer._

And what about the algorithms that measure and control the thrust and the robots that make the chassis and compute the folding that leads to drug design? Much more often than you'd think, that is the crucial point of novelty and competitive advantage, and what many patents cover. Software eating the world and all that.

 _> ... And they are all things that, like other software, can be protected by copyright._

Functional things cannot be covered by copyright. If it's the functionality itself that is novel, no amount of copyright can protect it.

 _> On the other hand, the watch isn't the same thing. The formula that describes the timing of a watch mechanism is not a watch mechanism. A watch simulator is not a watch. _

That wasn't my point. Simulation is not what I mean. A watch mechanism is essentially a series of cascaded counters. X "ticks" of one gear = Y "ticks" of another gear. It's an algorithm: if (m++ == 60) h++; You'll find such physical implementations of algorithms all over the place if you know where to look, especially in automation, from factories to toasters.

 _> You can patent a physical watch without patenting its "algorithm" ..._

And that applies to most "software patents" too. Most software patents don't cover the abstract algorithm, they cover the application of that algorithm. Case in point, the patent in TFA: it didn't cover comparing a bunch of numbers to find another number, it covered comparing a bunch of numbers representing preferences to find a match between business entities associated with those preferences. You could very well use the exact same algorithm to find a match between a vacationer and a list of vacation spots and not infringe the patent. I'd say the judge's analysis in rejecting was a bit off: this patent is invalid because it's non-novel, not because it's abstract.

 _> The second is a refutation of the first._

No, but do you mean to say that the majority of software startups are doing technically innovative work? Heck, look at the much vaunted YC companies. How many are doing something beyond some variation of CRUD?

 _> If you take Microsoft, IBM et al as not doing anything particularly technically innovative..._

I'm sorry, I live outside the HN bubble, so I completely disagree that Microsoft and IBM don't do innovative work. (Well, OK, these days it's mostly IBM Research, in case of IBM. In case of Microsoft, both MSR and MS products introduce inventions and innovations at a pretty fast pace.) Just because _you_ don't see them doesn't mean they aren't there.

Sadly, the vast majority of the software industry is _not_ like Microsoft and IBM. The vast, vast majority involves translating pre-existing business logic into code. And most software startups are not much different.

I agree, though, that most patents (not just "software patents"), are not really "interesting", but historically this has always been so. And all the hand-wringing you see here is not new either.

 _> It doesn't surprise me that the study found both of these. This is evidence that software patents are ineffective to promote innovation. _

Well, then maybe we need to make it cheaper to file "software" patents _and_ make them more powerful so they afford some real protection? :-)

 _> The real trouble is that software patents areharmful, because they entrench incumbents by creating patent thickets and facilitate the trolling of successful innovators by lawyers and failures._

There is no undisputed, convincing empirical evidence that software patents are harmful on average, other than tech media fishing for rage-views. For every paper saying software patents harm entrants, there's one saying the opposite (see "Software Patents, Incumbents and Entry" as an example). There are even studies suggesting that thickets _helped_ innovation by centralizing licensing efforts.

Also: "Innovators". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you etc. etc.

 _> If we get rid of software patents then VCs would need to find some other signaling mechanism to distinguish between startups, ..._

1\. It's not just in software that VCs look for patents. If you read that survey or other studies, or heck, watch Shark Tank, you'll see it's common in most industries.

2\. If you drop the empirically unfounded assumption that all patents are bogus, a patent is a proxy for a multitude of signals that VCs find useful.

3\. Studies show that startups with patents are _more_ likely to have a successful exit. I don't know what better signal a VC would want to find.

<comment><USER4> > And what about the algorithms that measure and control the thrust and the > robots that make the chassis and compute the folding that leads to drug > design?

What about them? They're software. Get a copyright or keep it as a trade secret.

> Functional things cannot be covered by copyright. If it's the functionality > itself that is novel, no amount of copyright can protect it.

Which is kind of the point -- it's really the whole problem with software patents. In software there are enormously many widely differing but still sensible ways, i.e. different functions, that all accomplish the same result. Such that in order to have a valuable patent you have to try to patent the idea itself or any computation of the relevant law of mathematics or physics or the intended outcome rather than any particular way to do it, otherwise anyone competent could easily come up with a thousand other ways to do the same thing just as well. So software patents end up being either so abstract that they're abstract ideas or sufficiently specific that anyone can easily avoid them. And companies don't even attempt to get the second kind because it's a waste of money, so instead they spend all their efforts convincing the patent office to improperly issue the first kind.

Function is effectively irrelevant here, only outcome is relevant. If you have code to take input from set X and map to output from set X' then that code is fungible with any other piece of code that produces the same mapping from X to X', regardless of _how_ it does it. The only practical consideration is whether the performance of some particular implementation is inadequate, which is clearly not a significant point of contention in the majority of software patent cases. So instead of patenting the software equivalent of "brake pad compressed against rotating disc by caliper with hydraulic actuator" they patent the software equivalent of "car slows down" and now they want to sue anybody with a vehicle capable of decelerating.

Because in a car it matters whether you have disc brakes or drum brakes because disc brakes stop better and fade slower and they cost a different amount of money and wear at different rates etc. etc., which are very important characteristics when choosing what kind of brakes to design a car with. In a computer it doesn't really matter most of the time whether you use a linked list or an array or a red black tree or a hash table. Some choices will be faster than others or use more or less memory, but that's about it, and for the most part that isn't what the patent system is concerned about. But that's the nature of function in computer science: Different functions can _easily_ produce the same outcome, just with different efficiency. So in order to patent something others can't easily avoid, you have to patent the result rather than the function. Which isn't supposed to be allowed.

> A watch mechanism is essentially a series of cascaded counters. X "ticks" of > one gear = Y "ticks" of another gear. It's an algorithm: if (m++ == 60) h++; > You'll find such physical implementations of algorithms all over the place > if you know where to look, especially in automation, from factories to > toasters.

But you aren't patenting the algorithm, you're patenting the mechanism. This is made clear by the fact that no software or arrangement of transistors or equivalent logic gates can possibly be made that would infringe the patent claims on the watch mechanism. Because you aren't patenting the outcome ("keeps time"), you're patenting the mechanism. Every watch since the beginning of time (so to speak) has operated with the algorithm "if (m++ == 60) h++;" and yet novel watch mechanisms continue to be patented on a regular basis, because they patent something _other than_ the algorithm.

> Most software patents don't cover the abstract algorithm, they cover the > application of that algorithm.

I don't think that's right in this case. Unless by "application" you mean some artificial and irrelevant limitation like the one you're pointing out with business entities vs. vacationers. Allowing that to make something unpatentable into something patentable is how we get into this mess. It's like the classic "that thing we all know about, but on the internet" patent. It would be like allowing Jules Verne to patent "rocket for traveling to the moon" the day after Sputnik launched and proved rockets could make it into orbit, providing no additional utility or novelty other than the arbitrary limitation that it must be used to travel to the moon. How is that worthy of a patent?

What you should need for a patent is some actual implementation of the abstract idea. An "application" of "rocket for traveling to the moon" is the Lunar Module, not a claim of launching any unspecified rocket in the general direction of the moon. Which is all adding some frivolous field of use limitation to a mathematical algorithm is doing.

> No, but do you mean to say that the majority of software startups are doing > technically innovative work? Heck, look at the much vaunted YC companies. > How many are doing something beyond some variation of CRUD?

I think some of them are. Most of them probably aren't. The obvious problem is that VCs are throwing money around and it attracts people who are more interested in getting rich so they can retire rather than building something epic. But you can identify small companies that are doing good creative work, e.g. Whisper Systems.

> I'm sorry, I live outside the HN bubble, so I completely disagree that > Microsoft and IBM don't do innovative work.

Oh sure, if you measure the amount of research they do in absolute terms then it's a lot because they're such large entities. But in terms of a percentage of their revenue? Or their ratio of engineer hours spent doing actual research vs. engineer and lawyer hours spent on patent prosecution?

> The vast, vast majority involves translating pre-existing business logic > into code. And most software startups are not much different.

We get all the rage against "do X on a computer" patents, but as it turns out, even if "do X on a computer" is bleeding obvious and shouldn't be patentable, it can also be highly profitable because the pre-computer solution was "do X manually."

But I'm not sure this is much different from other industries. Drug companies regularly announce minor (but newly patented) improvements to their previous drugs just as the previous versions fall out of patent. Medical device companies spend an enormous amount of time and money to get very conservative designs approved by the FDA. The ability of Tesla to combine a Lotus with a thousand laptop batteries and produce an electric car is not nothing, but it's more a testament to the massive failure of their predecessors to do it first. And why is it that I have the same speed ethernet interface in my PC today as a 400MHz PowerMac G4 had in 2000?

> Well, then maybe we need to make it cheaper to file "software" patents and > make them more powerful so they afford some real protection? :-)

You're going to make the trolling problem a lot worse then, what about that?

> For every paper saying software patents harm entrants, there's one saying > the opposite

Then clearly half of them are wrong.

>There are even studies suggesting that thickets helped innovation by centralizing licensing efforts.

If there were no software patents then there would be no need or benefit in centralized licensing. Moreover, centralized licensing is very similar to a lack of patents (i.e. results in more competition than a single incumbent with a concrete patent monopoly), but notably differs by creating a wealth transfer from newcomers to incumbents, which would tend to result in less innovation by discouraging challengers and protecting incumbents, leading to less competition and consequently less competitive pressure to innovate.

> It's not just in software that VCs look for patents. [etc.]

The point is, maintaining the existence of software patents in order to retain them as a signal to VCs is the tail wagging the dog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love the judge's comment here:

      > "There is no inventive idea here," she wrote in her order.
      > "Having two or more parties input preference data is not inventive.
      > Matchmakers have been doing this for millennia... It is merely a
      > mathematical manifestation of the underlying process behind matchmaking:
      > determining good matches."

A judge that uses the "computer algorithms == maths", and uses it to shut down a shitty patent? Awesome! I wish there were more judges like Judge Denise Colt. Well done.

<comment><USER7> Judge Denise Cote* (not Cole)

<comment><USER6> I actually had Colt, not Cole ;) Cheers! I _knew_ I was going to misspell it for some reason...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
        FindTheBest destroys patent troll (arstechnica.com)
        18 points by sieva 2 hours ago | flag | cached | share | 1 comment

Actual article title:

        FindTheBest destroys "matchmaking" patent, pushes RICO case against troll

<comment><USER9> How does this comment further the discussion?

<comment><USER8>
        alextingle 29 minutes ago | link
        How does this comment further the discussion?

I'm pointing out the title doesn't match reality. The patent is "destroyed", not the company. There's nothing to suggest the company is in trouble. How significant is this patent being smacked down in court? How many patents does the company have? Is this the only one? Do they have 50?

Maybe you could contribute some answers and further the discussion?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From US District Judge Denise Cote: "Taking basic practices in human commerce and culture and adding "do it on a computer" language ... would lead to the absurd result of allowing the patenting [of] the computerized use of even the most basic abstract ideas."

Indeed.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am so cheering on FTB and salivating for a sweet, sweet verdict against the patent troll. Seeing someone like Eileen Shapiro named and shamed plus forced to pay $200k court costs would be the most wonderful Christmas gift ever!

</comment><comment><USER12> So what? Right now the USPTO is approving hundreds of other useless patents of marginal value and expects the courts to figure out their validity. Without reform these wins are just morale boosters and nothing else.

<comment><USER13> Morale boosters are potentially helpful, though. If the perception shifts from "hopeless" to "fighting chance", and we start seeing more trolls defeated in court, the story can be framed much more usefully. Right now it's "businesses are being shaken down for violating frivolous patents". That's not great because it's too easy to argue against superficially. All the trolls have to say is "If these patents are so frivolous, why do so many businesses agree to settle out of court?" There's a good answer to that question, but now you're having a debate, so you've already lost.

But if the story is "the courts are clogged with frivolous patent suits because the USPTO isn't doing its damned job", there is no debate.

People don't like to think. They want someone else to do the thinking for them. If a debate has no tribal affiliation, the two sides both seem to have an argument, and there's no authoritative answer, people throw up their hands and say "well, it's complicated". Change the story so that the courts can be that authority, and people will just take their answer as read.

So the issue stops being "are patent trolls a problem?" and becomes "how do we fix patent trolling?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Makes me wonder if said troll slipped up when targeting FindTheBest. I'm assuming a troll wants to go after someone who is _big enough to pay some money_ but not _so big that they can afford to fight_.

FindTheBest's founder was formerly founder/CEO of DoubleClick. I'm not sure going after someone with a VC background and a 10-figure exit to Google was very wise.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Even this "efficient" win cost FTB about $200,000 in legal fees, said > Seigle; that's four times more than the $50,000 payout that Lumen View was > asking for.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's important to see the long-term strategy behind software-patents.

Currently we are in phase 1, the "Wild West". Anyone is free to grab some land and claim ownership. Gradually more civilized procedures will be developed to acquire (intellectual) property. But make no mistake. Software patents are in the interest of the dominating classes in the US and will be established. Two convincing arguments: Software patents

1\. create revenue for the patent holders.

2\. can be used to deter foreign competitors or at least to 'tax' them with patent fees.

tl;dr: unfortunately poor prospects for the anti-patent league.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not that it's relevant to anything but it appears that Eileen Shapiro has written a book

[http://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Own-Luck-Practical- ebook/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Own-Luck-Practical- ebook/dp/B000OI1ABQ/)

EDIT: *books [http://www.amazon.com/Fad-Surfing-In-The- Boardroom/dp/020144...](http://www.amazon.com/Fad-Surfing-In-The- Boardroom/dp/0201441950/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't see any indication the troll is destroyed.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't see how a RICO case can possibly work, unless perhaps the plaintiff can show that the defendant committed fraud on the patent office.

</comment><comment><USER20> Unfortunately they still paid a big price in legal fees. Can anyone tell me what the downsides are to a loser-pays-the-fees system? I heard it's used in the UK but not in the US. What gives?

<comment><USER21> There's a downside to the UK system.

You have to pay the costs, even if you win, if:

i) You're offered an out of court settlement and

ii) You reject it and

iii) the settlement is more than the damages you are awarded by the court

This is to make sure that people try to settle things before going to court.

And I'm not sure how it would work for a non-practising entity. A company that has no assets apart from the patent that they're suing for would have no money to pay fees if they lose.

<comment><USER22> Undercapitalization in the absence of liability insurance could be grounds for piercing the corporate veil.

<comment><USER23> It can? Has that actually happened (in the UK or US), or been argued, ever? Can you cite a source?

<comment><USER22> Vuylsteke v. Broan, Minton v. Cavaney, State v. Weinschenk, Anderson v. Abbott.

<comment><USER23> Sorry, I was imprecise. I understand that it is possible to collect damages from controlling shareholders of corporations; for instance, in any tort case; in several states, unpaid wages also incur liability on company owners, as they did in Vuylsteke. I was asking specifically about your liability insurance argument.

<comment><USER22> You mean that insurance can count in determining adequate capitalization?

The cases I can find that are most on point is Walkovszky v. Carlton, where a claim of underinsurance was directly at issue (unsuccessful because the insurance that was carried met an explicit statutory requirement) and Autrey v. 22 Texas Services Inc. (on a summary judgement motion finding there are facts in dispute, so not squarely ruled on).

A couple of relevant papers that discuss insurance throughout:

[http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...](http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2470&context=cklawreview)

[http://www.law.emory.edu/fileadmin/journals/elj/56/5/Millon....](http://www.law.emory.edu/fileadmin/journals/elj/56/5/Millon.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> _" Merely directing a computer to perform a function does not transform the computer into a specialized computer. Such a principle would lead to the absurd result of allowing the patenting [of] the computerized use of even the most basic abstract ideas."_

What a sensible judge they had. Perhaps noting that the rest of the world most certainly does _not_ allow patents of quite this type might focus a few minds. This parasitic business opportunity (trolling) might be costing US its innovation lead...

</comment><comment><USER25> It may be naiive optimism, but I hope the RICO suit has some success. A thin veneer of legalism in an obviously bogus patent shouldn't be enough to make one immune entirely from racketeering charges.

By way of comparison, if I threatened to file bogus nuisance suits hoping for quick settlements for anything other than patent infringement, I very well could be held liable (and disbarred) under all manner of existing precedents.

</comment><comment><USER26> > From the judges order: _Nothing in the '073 patent evinces an inventive idea > beyond the idea of the patent holder to be the first to patent the > computerization of a fundamental process that has occurred all through human > history. "_

It strikes me that a large number of patents would evaporate if this standard were more universally applied.</comment>


Show HN: Python AST explorer - <AUTHOR> https://python-ast-explorer.com <comment><USER2> Would be nice to have an option to display the AST as a formatted S-expression IMO.

</comment><comment><USER3> nice user interface - how do you wrap pyhton's grammar in the browser ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks! There's actually a lot of the stock react-create-app CSS in there.

As for the parsing, it's done on the back-end, front simply fetches an AST every time input changes.

<comment><USER3> ok, thanks, i was asking since i was playing with simple ASTs myself here [http://embeddednodejs.com/compiler/](http://embeddednodejs.com/compiler/)</comment></comment></comment>


Why I believe GraphQL will come to replace REST - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/reactiveconf/why-i-believe-graphql-will-come-to-replace-rest <comment><USER2> Meh, everything in GraphQL can be defined as JSON. I fail to see the benefit (over just using JSON).

I definitely agree with the author's assertions as to how and why REST sucks. I'd also add that a big reason why REST sucks is that it is completely orthogonal to streaming. You're supposed to GET or POST never both at the same time.

Your web app has grown astronomically and the number of GET and POST calls are creating a _massive_ overhead ("maybe we _shouldn 't_ have put so much state data in cookies."). So everyone gets together and decides WebSockets are a good solution... Because all your stuff was made with REST in mind you are now tasked with basically writing _an entirely new API_ from scratch whereas if you used something like JSON-RPC you could just send the _same exact API calls_ over the WebSocket and call it a day.

<comment><USER3> > You're supposed to GET or POST never both at the same time.

The standard says you can. The simplest way to add pagination is to POST your data with GET values overriding. I see no reason to use PUT or DELETE at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The pendulum swings back the other way. One of the advantages of (proper) REST is precisely that the returning payload is a server-defined, well-specced mediatype, so you know that responses always look the same way. GraphQL -- and literally any other client-driven query language, including SQL -- instead you ask for specific data items and have to case-by-case write the handling logic right after your request completes.

It's a trade-off, like any other. As another commenter said, this battle was fought many years ago with SQL, where it began to be considered good practice to formalize the APIs with stored procedures or abstract away from the backend tables by restricted-column views, instead of just accepting arbitrary queries against the raw table.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm in the process of re-writing an API and was looking at GraphQL just yesterday.

I'm trying to figure out if there is any environment/situation where GraphQL is not a good solution?

I'm moving everything to a lambda/microservice architecture, and it seems now I would have a single service managing all the api calls rather than using something like API Gateway to route to the correct lambda.

Any thoughts on this?

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't think of one (other than FB) where this is preferable over some form of REST (just go back to calling it HTTP actions or HTTP). Tying services together makes for more problems (as coupling often does), not less.

The very first point is either disingenuous or outright ignorant. "Gone is the mess of relying on an ever expanding set of predefined REST endpoints", moving that to the server logic is not "better". The number of code paths hasn't been reduced, just placed deeper in the execution path. How many months does it take the average developer to learn deep paths are worse than shallow ones?

Next, your result caching needs to be inserted in other places. As result caching is no longer at a predictable location AND mixed with other cached values (if you just keep caching everything at the request level) which makes splitting work more difficult.

Most of the sentences are restatements or vague assertions, until you get to the "type system". This part is where the "idea" stops seeming all that original, since webservices (in aggregate) define an application query system. You can always define what your APIs return so the "asking for the results you want" as if it's new, is a just a misunderstanding of how webservices work NOW.

Finally we get to the actual selling point. Ad-hoc results. Typically, if your using services, you know the common operations that need to be combined and probably, so do the vendors (sometimes that's yourself). Popping out a new endpoint for combined data (see: [https://client.cdn77.com/support/api/version/2.0/data#Purge](https://client.cdn77.com/support/api/version/2.0/data#Purge) All vs Purge) or adding a GraphQL-esque query param is not all that unusual, except in edge cases where you have a giant graph database. This is not the common case.

<comment><USER6> The GitHub post about GraphQL indicates it's more efficient (on the server) when people use GraphQL instead of REST.

To me - looking to provide API access from a new project soon - that sounds like a good potential win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> On the one hand, when I read the open sourcing announcement, I found it enticing, too.

On the other hand, we have had this kind of thing for decades in the form of SQL. There, it is considered best practice to restrict the API by requiring callers to exclusively use stored procedures. Reasons are that they make it easier for the engine to optimize query evaluation, for the DBA to optimize the storage format to the queries to be run, for the security guys to enforce security, etc.

You can make the front-end API more flexible, but that doesn't remove the need to do that kind of back-end stuff.

Yes, I still like it, but I'm not sure it really simplifies stuff as much as it seems at first sight; to get performance you still have to tune the backed to the kind of queries that are run.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm in the process of rewriting our external api using GraphQL, It's kind of amazing, I do find my self tripping on "best practices" e.g. pertaining to a User view model

query {user {name}} query {users(someQualifier: $qualifier){name}} mutation {createUser(name: $name) {name}} mutation {updateUser(id: $id, name: $name){name}} mutation {destroyUser(id: $id) {name}}

It ends up looking like CRUD. But so much easier to reason about :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Same here.

REST was a nice idea, but still too undefined.

Even attempts like JSON-API never really catched on.

The tree structure with the whole auto-discovery alone is a killer feature.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well it has a Q in it. What's not cool about that?? Of course it's next!

(DNR)</comment>


A Head Start on Google's Chrome OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/09ping.html?hpw <comment><USER2> Can somebody explain the point of Chrome OS and why it's allegedly revolutionary? If I want to run everything in the browser, why can't I do that today?

<comment><USER3> Three words: Less is more.

No bloat, so it should run on low-end hardware, and blaze on modern hardware.

How many processes do you currently have running as you browse this? And, how many of them are necessary to your being able to do so?

<comment><USER2> _How many processes do you currently have running as you browse this?_

Lots, but my CPU is over 95% idle so I don't quite see where the huge performance increase is going to come from. It just seems like you could get almost all the alleged benefits of Chrome OS with a simple shell for Windows or Linux that runs the browser and nothing else on login.

<comment><USER4> _It just seems like you could get almost all the alleged benefits of Chrome OS with a simple shell for Windows or Linux that runs the browser and nothing else on login._

It does seem so. And indeed, that's what Chromium OS is. Essentially a new distro with their own browser-based desktop manager.

[http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design- docs/s...](http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design- docs/software-architecture)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does ChromeOS handle swapping?

To me, swapping to disk (virtual memory) is the bane of operating systems.

<comment><USER6> Virtual memory is not a synonym for swapping: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory></comment></comment>


Show HN: Rock, paper, scissors with Font Awesome - <AUTHOR> https://www.rockpaperaweso.me/ <comment><USER2> Fun toy, complete with Big Bang Theory mode. ^_^</comment>


Show HN: Wired Logic – a pixel-based logic simulator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/martinkirsche/wired-logic <comment><USER2> If you like this, you will love: [http://www.zachtronics.com/kohctpyktop- engineer-of-the-peopl...](http://www.zachtronics.com/kohctpyktop-engineer-of- the-people/)

an IC design game set in Soviet Russia.

<comment><USER3> That was interesting. I'd love to see a CMOS version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome! have a gif of a working calculator? Reminds me of the way that people would build digital electronics in the 'powder-toy' genre of games. Was that an inspiration for this project?

<comment><USER5> Looks similar to Wireworld[1], although the rules are different

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, this was indeed inspired by Wireworld and its frustrating timing constraints.

<comment><USER6> why did you choose the number 6 for maxCharge?

<comment><AUTHOR> The larger the number the slower the simulation will run. But a numer that is too low will force you to include repeaters everywhere. So 6 seamed to be reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now all we need is a Verilog to GIF compiler.

</comment><comment><USER3> The part about crossing wires creating a transistor is actually conceptually very similar to what real IC layouts look like, although in the latter there are multiple layers and only the bottom two - polysilicon and diffusion - interact to create transistors:

[http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Visual_circuit_tutorial](http://wiki.nesdev.com/w/index.php/Visual_circuit_tutorial)

</comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of John von Neumann's 29 state cellular automata [1], which he used to build a universal constructor [2], but that historic rule made it much harder to cross signals. (You could easily modify the rule to make that easier, but then it wouldn't be historically accurate, which is what makes it so interesting: he designed the rule and the universal constructor in his extremely powerful mind and on ordinary paper!) It's able to create and destroy wires, to the extent that it can actually build other machines and even replicate itself.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER9> This is fantastic! Would be great to get it running in canvas.

<comment><AUTHOR> you can now draw your own circuit at [http://martinkirsche.github.com/wired- logic/](http://martinkirsche.github.com/wired-logic/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me a bit of this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireworld)

</comment><comment><USER11> Very cool. It reminds redstone circuits from Minecraft.

</comment><comment><USER12> building simulations is the strength of computation assisted intuition</comment>


Paid maternity leave has high cost and little benefit - <AUTHOR> http://www.mitpressjournals.org.sci-hub.cc/doi/abs/10.1162/REST_a_00602#.V-z7SZMrKEI <comment><USER2> > Abstract—We assess the case for generous government-funded maternity leave, > focusing on a series of policy reforms in Norway that expanded paid leave > from 18 to 35 weeks. We find the reforms do not crowd out unpaid leave and > that mothers spend more time at home without a reduction in family income. > The increased maternity leave has little effect on children's schooling, > parental earnings and labor force participation, completed fertility, > marriage, or divorce. The expansions, whose net costs amounted to 0.25% of > GDP, have negative redistribution properties and imply a considerable > increases in taxes at a cost to economic efficiency.

Some points of my own:

* It doesn't explore the effects of _no_ paid leave. We can expect that going from 18 to 35 weeks will have a smaller effect than going from 0 to 18.

* There is a note of paid leave being regressive since the program replaced 100% of income; higher-income mothers received more benefits. This ignores the benefit of not penalizing having children, several of which are noted in the wiki[1]

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

<comment><USER3> Following on your first point, the paper (grudgingly, IMO) says:

> Whether the initial eighteen weeks is worth the roughly $419 million in > annual costs can be debated, since Carneiro et al. (2015) find some benefits > associated with the initial reform.

The citation is: Carneiro, P., K. V. Løken, and K. Salvanes, "A Flying Start? Maternity Leave Benefits and Long Run Outcomes of Children," Journal of Political Economy 123 (2015), 365–412. - [http://harris.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/Salvanes%20af...](http://harris.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/Salvanes%20aflyingstart_22feb2013.pdf) . Its abstract is:

> We study the impact on children of increasing maternity leave benefits using > a reform that increased paid and unpaid maternity leave in Norway in July > 1977. Mothers giving birth before this date were eligible only for 12 weeks > of unpaid leave, while those giving birth after were entitled to 4 months of > paid leave and 12 months of unpaid leave. This increased time with the child > led to a 2 percentage points decline in high school dropout and a 5 % > increase in wages at age 30. The effect is especially large for children of > those mothers who, prior to the reform, would take very low levels of unpaid > leave.</comment></comment>


A Clojure learning journey - <AUTHOR> https://www.stuttaford.me/2018/02/18/a-clojure-learning-journey/ <comment><USER2> Not sure why the excitement around ditching Lein when it looks like there is little or nothing to be gained at this time? The author describes a handful of other tools that are necessary to do things Lein does out of the box (uberjar)

The Clojure ecosystem (specifically through the lens of this post) reminds me of the Linux desktop ecosystem. Lots and lots of tweaks and knobs and dials for the sake of having tweaks and knobs and dials.

That's my biggest gripe with Clj... there is hardly ever a "right way" to do things and usually a dozen esoteric approaches to organizing your application. It's a blessing and a curse. All the rope to hang yourself with.

That being said I really like _writing_ Clojure in the pure sense but have yet to see a really pleasant 1. App architecture and 2. Web application and routing layer. Ring/compojure don't do it for me.

<comment><USER3> > Lots and lots of tweaks and knobs and dials

This is the case with all big-tent, "community-driven" PLs that have a high expressiveness, and attract contributors that have a multitude of preferences: Ruby, Javascript, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Racket

Alternatively, are the 'prescriptive' cultures, that tend to select for predictability and high cohesion: C#, Elm, Go, Python (circa-2007).

<comment><USER4> It would be interesting to study the MBTI psyche types in each of the major language communities.

<comment><USER5> Would it be fair to say phrenological study of the same groups might be similarly interesting?

<comment><USER3> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just got rejected in a hiring process at Nubank (a sexy fintec from Brazil that uses clojure a lot) because I used a database for the take-home code challenge they sent me (writing a REST API). Since I'm a Python developer who knows little about concurrency in clojure and I would not like to use locks, I thought it would be better to delegate these things to the database.

Apparently I was supposed to use a global shared collection instead of a proper database because they want to see if I'm able to map/filter/reduce.

Recruiting is such a gamble - I have this former colleague that I've introduced to functional programming and he passed with flying colors at Nubank's recruiting hoops. I would not say I'm smarter than him but he would agree that I know more about our trade.

<comment><USER7> Having 5 years professional experience with Clojure, I applied a few months ago to a remote Clojure job, and the coding test was none other than recursion via zippers, literally my weakest point. I could have done the job just fine since they said they didn't use zippers on the job, but failed the test and they passed on me. Coding tests are the real problem. I've had some great ones where you can tell someone put effort into it and will review it fairly, and I've had some that were hacked together like this one where it's clear they weren't given enough time to put it together by their superiors.

<comment><USER8> Coding tests aren't always the problem, but coding tests that evaluate skills the company doesn't even use? That's just disrespectful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everytime I use clojure for some new project because I think it will help, I end up spending too much time on tooling and setup, and in the end change it to something easier to setup, which strangely that's javascript sometimes. I want to go work in a team where they have it ready for me and I can learn the tooling on the way, without needing to do that up front..

<comment><USER10> I don't know how long it's been since you tried but I'd suggest giving it another go. The tooling today is what makes it one of the best experiences out there. The front-end tooling especially!

<comment><USER11> Can you speak to the front end tooling a bit more? I know Cursive makes for a nice coding experience in general, but I haven't really done any Clojurescript work to speak of.

<comment><USER12> [posting on an alt because noprocrast just kicked in on my main account]

The second half of this blog post talks a lot about what cljs dev is like: [http://blog.jrheard.com/quinto-resurrecting-an-abandoned- boa...](http://blog.jrheard.com/quinto-resurrecting-an-abandoned-board-game)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always read about those nice functional languages, but when I try to learn them myself I struggle pretty hard.

Can anybody point me to some small (5k LOC maybe) project on github that solves some "real world" problem?

I'd like to get some overview. As opposed to the usual tutorials that start with the very basics and don't seem to get anywhere...

<comment><USER14> It's not Clojure, but the practical chapters in the book Practical Common Lisp might be a good way to get a feel for the way a Lisp works in a practical application.

<comment><USER15> >book Practical Common Lisp

It is a wonderful book and Common Lisp is powerful to the max, but note that CL is a multi-paradigm language and examples won't necessarily be in the "functional" style. Quite the opposite, Common Lisp makes imperative programming very comfortable (and OOP as well.)

<comment><USER14> While Common Lisp definitely allows for imperative constructs, I'd argue that its flavor of OOP is part of the functional paradigm: i.e. generic functions aren't part of the classes, they are protocols that can be implemented in different ways by different classes. They are closer to typeclasses than to java-style OOP

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is amazing. More people should get to know clojure as it's a wonderful language that has almost all concurrency models on this planet. Also now with core.typed it retains most of the benefits of the statically typed ones while being as productive as other dynamic ones or more.

<comment><USER16> > More people should get to know clojure as it's a wonderful language that has > almost all concurrency models on this planet.

Clojure is great. But Rust is a Must, so I hear, and you will need some Python for ML. And then of course JavaScript if your stuff touches the web, and it all does. And there is Go and Erlang or is that Elixir for systems and transactions. Ruby or PHP for RAD and Java for the large stuff can not be ignored.

And before you know it you'll be bad at 25 languages, instead of good in one or two that allow you to do what needs to be done.

All these languages are great in the sense that they exist and show what is possible but they make it super hard for a professional programmer with ~8 hours in a productive day to choose which eco system (which is far larger than just the language by itself) they want to invest their time in leading to some variation on the paralysis of choice theme.

I'm super happy I don't have to earn my bread by coding today, I sincerely would not know what to choose to maximize longer term value of my investment in time. It's like building a house on quicksand.

<comment><USER17> I use Clojure (or Clojurescript) for all of the things you listed. When I need something other than Clojure, that thing is typically C which is either a device driver or something I'm going to call into from Clojure. In the past I used mostly Python/Javascript/C instead of Clojure/C to get where I wanted to be.

Just to be clear, I use clj/cljs (day to day) for:

* Mobile Applications on Android/iOS

* Analytics and Data Wrangling off queues

* Data Analysis

* Admin Dashboard stuff (CRUD, Charts/Graphs, misc)

* Business Rules

* User Messaging (Push / Email / Webhooks)

* Database ETL

* Web Services

* Background jobs

* Build System and Deployments

The only thing I don't use that is Clojure-based, on a regular basis for my job, is SaltStack for configuration management (and this is largely because we have a working SaltStack system that I don't have a need to mess with).

I'm super happy when I can spend most of my day with a monitor dedicated to Spacemacs while jacked into a clojure repl.

<comment><USER18> But does Clojure/C really makes you more productive than Python/Javascript/C? which I guess is the point the GP was referring to, although, you mentioned it makes you happy (which is a good of enough reason as any).

Don't get me wrong, I think learning Clojure is helpful for lots of developers, even if they won't use it for work/side projects, and I think that's exactly what happens in the Clojure ecosystem and the reason for so many libs being half finished and abandoned, devs learn Clojure, grab all the ideas and concepts, scratch an itch but ultimate terminate going back to their mainstream langs.

<comment> james-mcelwain It sounds like you're suggesting that Python/Node have better libraries, which couldn't be further from the truth. Most "abandoned" Clojure libraries either (a). aren't abandoned and "just work" due to their limited scope or (b). are wrappers to Java libraries that are trivial or unnecessary. Most people would rather to interop directly.

<comment><USER19> To offer one small piece of anecdote to the contrary: We use Clojure for most of our server-side code and picked Lacinia from Walmart Labs [0] to implement our new GraphQL API. It does most of the basics just fine, but its pace of development lags extremely, painfully far behind GraphQL server implementations in more popular languages such as the ones in Node and Python. To this day it still doesn't have support for custom directives [1], not to mention any of the other more bleeding edge developments in the GraphQL community such as schema stitching and live queries, all of which we would really have liked to experiment with along with the rest of the GraphQL community. We ran into similar issues initially when trying to use gRPC with Clojure.

We love writing Clojure and still use it everywhere where appropriate, but the size of its community and ecosystem is definitely holding back its ability to compete for adoption with other languages on the bleeding edge of new technological trends.

[0] [http://lacinia.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](http://lacinia.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

[1] [http://lacinia.readthedocs.io/en/latest/directives.html](http://lacinia.readthedocs.io/en/latest/directives.html)

<comment> james-mcelwain Fair -- GraphQL seems like something that is particularly well suited to having a Clojure API so that's disappointing to hear it lags behind other implementations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really like Clojure and am using it for a web project now. Datomic is awesome too, but not appropriate for my current project unfortunately (gis stuff)

</comment><comment><USER21> Fascinating how large it is.. it's more than a learning.. or at least it's deep learning (sic).</comment>


Sony PlayStation Network and other game services attacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28925052 <comment><USER2> So Clarification that BBC isn't offering.

@Famedgod is the psn botnet ddoser

@Lizardsquad tried to take credit for attacks.

@Famedgod tried to dox them

@Lizardsquad calls in bomb threat (in attempt to validity their claim)

Anonymous doxxes @lizardsquad

Twitter user doxxes @famedgod

Yup. Also Lizardsquad is currently claiming its a member of ISIS. And has taken down a few papal web pages since the attack posting with Islamic hash tags. But they only just started (this weekend) using Islamic hash tags, so who knows. The media really seems to be playing this up, likely because ISIS is in the news.

Famedgod and Lizardsquad are on twitter so you can go read their drama unfold.

<comment><USER3> Another recap of yesterday's events from Money-not_you_again: [http://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/2egpbd/psn_issues_megat...](http://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/2egpbd/psn_issues_megathread_20140824/)

" A PROPER RECAP OF EVENTS SO FAR (sorry for the caps, but just so people see and we don't have a thousand different news reports of random shit):

So a guy by the name of FamedGod ([https://twitter.com/FamedGod](https://twitter.com/FamedGod)) DDOS's PSN in the name of proving that Sony has shite security still. Then a group of fools named the Lizard Squad (Edit: Twitter link removed as the account is carrying doxxed info) decide to take credit and take it a step further by threatening that there's a bomb on the American Airlines flight of SOE CEO John Smedley. As a result his flight is rerouted and now sits on the tarmac being inspected ([https://twitter.com/j_smedley](https://twitter.com/j_smedley)) Edit: Added Smed's Twitter.

Well Anonymous ([https://twitter.com/W0rIdPeace](https://twitter.com/W0rIdPeace)) comes to the aid of PSN and AA, telling people that they're working to get PSN up and assuring AA that there is no bomb on the plane. In the mean time FamedGod finds out that LizardSquad has taken credit for his attack and proceeds to release the IPs of all of Lizard Squads members. Anon then tracks the IP of the Twitter account to Washington, DC and now everyone's just waiting to see what the hell is going to happen. Edit: The update so far is that LS is still tweeting out ISIS flags and Jihad hashtags while the FBI is, ostensibly, monitoring the plane inspection in Phoenix.

I should add that Federal Authorities are now involved because of the bomb threat and the ISIS flag being flown. So there's a group of morons out there who are probably going to be enjoying a steaming hot cup of FBI pretty soon.

UPDATE (before I head off to work): LS's Twitter is replying to people, still taunting Smeds and the FBI, acting as though they're ISIS soldiers doing all this from Iraq. No updates from Smed, Anon or FG. But we do know that the FBI is involved and at some point a lot of people are going to be tracking down LS in connection with what's happened with the AA flight. I'll try and update from work if I can, but I'm sure there's going to be a lot more coming.

Sidenote: So despite media reports to the contrary, Blizzard and Riot appear unaffected.

UPDATE2: Smeds plane was cleared and the planes back on its way after a 3hr bomb check.

UPDATE3: (Thanks to u/PickleSlice) Looks like LS has doxxed FameGod- so the person responsible for today PSN outtage has been revealed, though he seems unconcerned. Edit: Removed link to Doxx, because commonsense and site rules. My bad on that- still posting from work and slipped.

UPDATE4: FameGod is now stating that he didn't do it- which may or may not be true, in the face of Federal Authorities being involved and his personal information being released. (Thanks to u/Kill_Me_For_Money) [https://twitter.com/FamedGod/status/503697915999961088](https://twitter.com/FamedGod/status/503697915999961088)

Sidenote: (Thanks to u/Ganoobed) Mainstream media are now picking up on the story: [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-airlines-flight-to- san-...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-airlines-flight-to-san-diego- diverted-to-phoenix/)

UPDATE5: (Shoutout to u/PickleSlice again) So now Unknownsec, a different group, have doxxed Lizard Squad. Mainstream media are paying more attention to the bomb threat (rightfully so, as it's the most severe aspect of todays events) and this all adds up to a lot of Federal Investigators coming down on a lot of "hackers" at the end of this. Some very severe consequences for all involved at Kotaku confirmed earlier in the day by way of SOE that the FBI was involved with all of Sony's problems too.

Sidenote: Apparently looks like Battle.Net is now being hit by Lizard Squad. ([https://twitter.com/BlizzardCS](https://twitter.com/BlizzardCS)) "

<comment><USER4>
      > Sidenote: So despite media reports to the contrary, Blizzard and Riot appear unaffected.

Battle.net was hit all weekend; the effects were obvious for anyone trying to authenticate. It was not a hardcore DDoS; it just took a long line to get auth'd, at which point other Blizzard services seemed mostly OK -- some games were still affected, regardless of the auth services.

It seemed to get better by Sunday, where I can only recall one or two times having timeouts.

<comment><USER5> Still a DDoS, just one of the auth servers and not the game/chat servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From /u/legauge on reddit - [http://imgur.com/a/eVR6h](http://imgur.com/a/eVR6h) . The intensity of attack has gone down a bit but it was pretty cool to see this in realtime from - [http://map.ipviking.com/](http://map.ipviking.com/)

<comment><USER7> Wow, that ipviking site is somewhat entrancing to watch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like LizardSquad also called in a bomb threat on a flight carrying Sony's Online exec [http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/08/25/0530248/lizard- squad-...](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/08/25/0530248/lizard-squad-bomb- threat-diverts-sony-execs-plane-to-phoenix)

</comment><comment><USER9> Downtime graph: [http://downdetector.com/status/playstation- network](http://downdetector.com/status/playstation-network).

For Xbox Live: [http://downdetector.com/status/xbox- live](http://downdetector.com/status/xbox-live).

</comment><comment><USER10> This also seems to be the thing affecting Steam's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive servers.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, but how is this related to the PSN?

<comment><USER12> Both are being DDoSed by the same people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> did sony crypt their user datas this time ?

<comment><USER14> It was a DDoS.

<comment><USER15> FamedGod is claiming it is a little bit more than that, but I doubt he had access to any data [https://twitter.com/FamedGod/status/503656489224257537](https://twitter.com/FamedGod/status/503656489224257537)</comment></comment></comment>


Indigenous Cultures Have Archaeology Too - <AUTHOR> https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/archaeology-oral-tradition/ <comment><USER2> The sad little title really doesn't do this justice. This is a piece (primarily) about Papua New Guinea. In the west, we tend to hear bad things about the place, like about high rates of poverty and violence.

But:

 _Papua New Guinea is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world. As of 2019, it is also the most rural, as only 13.25% of its people live in urban centres. There are 851 known languages in the country... Most of the population of more than 8,000,000 people lives in customary communities, which are as diverse as the languages. The country is one of the world 's least explored, culturally and geographically. It is known to have numerous groups of uncontacted peoples, and researchers believe there are many undiscovered species of plants and animals in the interior._

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

It is also a place where 97 percent of the land is held in traditional tribal or communal commons arrangements. This creates challenges for modernizing and developing because you can't sell the land, which means you can't mortgage it.

[https://thediplomat.com/2016/03/papua-new-guinea-where- prope...](https://thediplomat.com/2016/03/papua-new-guinea-where-property-is- more-expensive-than-manhattan/)

I'm not done reading the piece under discussion here, but it's a really fascinating piece. Please don't be put off by the lame and vague title. They are probably trying to be respectful. My general understanding is that "Indigenous" is a preferred term, but it's really vague and doesn't seem to mean much to most Westerners (which is another problematic term, but I don't know a better one and I think most people will know what I am trying to say, never mind the inaccuracies).

PNG is just really fascinating stuff and I would love to see more pieces like this one exploring this interesting place and the peoples who live there, their culture and history and so forth. I think we have just so much to learn and haven't yet scratched the surface.

Edit: The latter part of the article also talks about other places. This is not "just" about PNG, but a part of it is about PNG and it's really interesting.

<comment><USER3> I think the title might be inspired by the recent discussions about ethnomathematics. The idea is that indigenous cultures don't just have their own art and (vernacular) architecture, but also their own valid analogues of science, history, philosophy etc. _however basic these activities might seem to western eyes_.

Is 'indigenous' really a vague and obscure term?

<comment><USER2> Indigenous is sort of like European or African or Asian. Stories about Asian Peoples aren't that interesting. If you want to hook someone, put China or Japan or Korea in the title.

It's extremely broad and covers a great many peoples and tells you next to nothing about who you are talking about. So, yeah, I think it is pretty vague, personally.

/2 cents

<comment><USER4> I've always taken it to mean in relation pre-colonial ethnic groups or cultures.

It's specific in its vagueness. It's not meant to describe a specific culture or population, but a class.

<comment><USER2> I know what the word means and what it is intended to describe.

I also write for pay and titles are hard and words like that don't tend to do well in titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not really "indigenous" but one of my favorite stories of history within history is the unearthing of the classical Greek/Roman statue of Laocön in Rome in 1506. It was witnessed by Michelangelo and immediately recognized as a lost masterpiece from Latin texts that were known and still studied. So in a sense, the scholars at the time (can't really call them scientists, but essentially the experts of the time) knew they were looking at a significant masterpiece that they knew of only through the historical record.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laoco%C3%B6n_and_His_Sons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laoco%C3%B6n_and_His_Sons)

</comment><comment><USER6> While it's interesting to learn how indigenous cultures interpret archaeological sites, this article blurs the distinction between scientific and pre-scientific understanding of archaeology. It presents "Western science" (which should be referred to as "science," an international pursuit that happens to have begun in the West) as just another means of interpreting archaeological sites, alongside myths, folk beliefs, etc.

Reading this article (and looking at some of the other articles on the site) reminds me of what I've heard elsewhere about the deep rift in anthropology between the physical and the cultural anthropologists. It appears to me to be a conflict between a scientific worldview and an increasingly subjective, politically influenced worldview. One manifestation of this is the decision by the American Anthropological Association to remove the word "science" from its mission statement.[1-2]

1\. [http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/11/hold_the_science_says_a...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/11/hold_the_science_says_anthropo.html)

2\. [https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/science/10anthropology.ht...](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/science/10anthropology.html)

<comment><USER7> Although archaeology is certainly informed by scientific theory and uses the work of scientific fields like geology, it's not truly a science. Crucially, archaeological excavations are not reproducible, and archaeological theories are not experimentally falsifiable. The same is true of cultural anthropology.

<comment><USER6> Many sciences are not reproducible, in that they don't have reproducible experiments. The key is the integrity of the data and clear explanation of the analysis methods.

But archaeology most definitely does have experimentally falsifiable theories, and it is undoubtedly a science.

<comment><USER7> What's a scientific field with non-reproducible experiments? I'm hard-pressed to think of any field with the kind of no-do-overs issues that archaeological excavations have.

<comment><USER8> I don't think the term "science" has ever had a single unified definition. When people say "Physics is a science" and "Archaeology is a science", I'm not convinced those two sentences are using the word "science" in exactly the same sense (although of course they are using it in somewhat related senses).

Wittgenstein famously argued that there is nothing that all "games" have in common – there is no single common element to board games, card games, ball games – there is a "family resemblance" ( _Familienähnlichkeit_ ) in which every "game" has some things in common with other "games", but there is no one thing that all games have in common.

Maybe something similar is true for sciences as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Almost all random matrices are nonsingular - <AUTHOR> https://keplerlounge.com/applied-math/2020/02/03/all-random-matrices.html <comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr

1\. Here I present an elementary proof for a classical result in random matrix theory that applies to any random matrix sampled from a continuous distribution.

One of its many important consequences is that almost all linear models with square Jacobian matrices are invertible.

2\. This is also relevant to scientists that want stable internal models for deep neural networks since a deep network is an exponentially large ensemble of linear models with compact support.</comment>


Google, Not the Government, Is Building the Future - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/technology/personaltech/google-not-the-government-is-building-the-future.html?pagewanted=all&hpw&rref=business&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well <comment><USER2> And it's OK.

Only Soviets think the government should be all things to all people.</comment>


Fast exact summation using small and large superaccumulators - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.05571 <comment><USER2> Related blog post : [https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/exact- computati...](https://radfordneal.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/exact-computation- of-sums-and-means/)

As someone who has worked with building, testing, and numerical software, this seems like a great thing. Generally floating point computations are effectively non-deterministic: you (or the compiler) change something that doesn't seem like it matters and all of a sudden your result changes. Having more methods available that give you the deterministically best right thing at little additional expense is great!

<comment><USER3> Was the software you worked on a general numerics platform, or something more specialised? I'm trying to learn more about the topic myself, from a finance perspective.

<comment><USER4> This technique seems like overkill for most finance applications - you can fit nearly any sensible currency amount into a 64-bit fixed-point number (or a 128-bit if you're doing whole-economy calculations).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny coincidence. I happened to point to some papers and code for superaccumulators in a StackOverflow answer yesterday: [http://stackoverflow.com/a/41741276/392585](http://stackoverflow.com/a/41741276/392585)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. That's where I saw this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sort/bucket the abosute value within some epsilon then merge pairwise in a binary tree.

Or split FloatMax into 32-2048 bins. Start all at zero. Add incoming numbers to the corresponding bin. If a bin goes out of range zero it and add the sum where it needs to go. When you are done keep adding the lowest magnitude bin to the next highest.</comment>


Instantly view a page's history by prepending wayback.co/ to the url - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/soheil/wayback.co <comment><USER2> Discussion from 2 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809523](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809523) and [https://github.com/soheil/wayback.co](https://github.com/soheil/wayback.co)

All 3 were submitted by the author.</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for feedback on our application. - <AUTHOR>

Two weeks ago we launched officially our new project brix.io and we're looking for any kind of feedback, because we want to improve our app.
Our application is dedicated to frontend developers, web developers and web designers.
Our main questions:
1. How do you rate the way you can add elements to the project? Is this procedure easy enough?
2. How would you rate the user interface?
3. How would you rate scope of features?
4. How much are you able to pay monthly for using our application?
5. How does brix.io help you?
Can you help us? Thank you for your help in advance?
Link to our app: http://brix.io
Regards
Lukasz <comment><USER2> Honestly, I found the UX to be very confusing. Some basic things --

The highlight to select an element is inconsistent. Sometimes it is a padded highlight, other times it isn't. The instructions to "right click" don't make sense on a mac and the usual cmd+click doesn't appear to do anything. Other times, there is no selected element, I'm scrolling through the left bar to pick something to add, yet the UI remains with the appearance of something selected (blue outline). In short, the selection/action/deselect was not intuitive for me.

The first thing I tried to do was drag a button into a column section -- nothing happened.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cannot answer your questions as I did not sign up. Maybe you could allow a user to try it without having to sign up, and then ask for a signup when he wants to save his work. (less friction in usage)

Quite liked the video though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here you can try brix.io without login: [https://app.brix.io/brix/preview.html?p=2052](https://app.brix.io/brix/preview.html?p=2052) \- Read Only

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Allow OpenID login. When playing the video and then clicking outside to close the video the music continues playing.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will add this soon</comment></comment>


The Decade the Internet Lost Its Joy - <AUTHOR> https://gen.medium.com/the-decade-the-internet-lost-its-joy-4898c2c44cb4 <comment><USER2> There are still a lot of joyful things and great communities on the net. Haven't spend too much time there, but I wouldn't count tiktok among those places though. Proportional to user counts these are still relatively bland places.

That people are able to monetize attention today has advantages and disadvantages. Before the content was filtered by being provided by enthusiasts that didn't get compensation besides feedback. Today it enables some people to spend time together while getting payed to do so, which is also pretty great.

But there is a profound dark side to the huge amounts of money coming in. Advertising always had a bad reputation, but it seems they perfected their animosity to anything human in the 21st century. At least they pay for some content that I like.

But I don't really want a net that "takes care of me". Although such a thing did indeed exist once. At least 10 years ago someone would have helped you with emphasized profanity to underline the silliness of that thought.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I also think that there is a huge amount of side effects that we are only recently discovering.

After reading this I have to wonder where the line between useful and entertaining vs. creepy stalker is for the internet.</comment></comment>


Radarmatic: a weather radar visualizer and API - <AUTHOR> http://radarmatic.com/

<comment><USER2> Interesting, but it seems to duplicate Weather Underground's wundermap that's been available for a few years now: <http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/>

Wundermap also displays data from personal weather stations, storm tracks, sattelite imagery, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ok, but inferior to weather.com. I don't care what radar the information is coming from, and I don't want to see ground clutter. Weather.com merges all sites, removes ground clutter, and adds satellite overlays. Also, when I see a loop, I usually want to see a longer timescale, like the last few hours, instead of a few minutes. Most people are interested in seeing a few hours because you can tell whether cells are building, what direction the cells are going, and what direction the system is going. This is all very hard to tell with individual sites and short timescales.

<comment><AUTHOR> the animation shows the last 36 images, which should amount to a few hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's awesome, but it doesn't seem to work for me. Maybe it's just getting hit.. or it's the clearest day in recent history for the whole USA

<comment><USER4> Actually, now that I zoomed close enough to a station I am getting some information.

Not sure what '10' precipitation in the air actually means, but it's right over my head!

<comment><AUTHOR> wikipedia has a nice explanation: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBZ_(meteorology)></comment></comment></comment>


The Sound of Two Black Holes Colliding - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/QyDcTbR-kEA <comment><USER2> Used by William Basinski in this piece:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKuJSU_ANss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKuJSU_ANss)

"On Time Out of Time is a suite of works originally commissioned for the 2017 installations 'ER=EPR' and 'Orbihedron' by artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand (in collaboration with Jean-Marc Chomaz and LIGO) for the exhibition, 'Limits of Knowing' at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin by curator, Isabel de Sena.

These works utilize, among other things, exclusive source recordings from the interferometers of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) capturing the sounds of the merging of two distant massive black holes, 1.3 billion years ago." \-- [http://www.mmlxii.com/products/638576-on-time-out-of- time](http://www.mmlxii.com/products/638576-on-time-out-of-time)</comment>


20 Changes When You Quit the Corporate World for a Startup - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tech-london/20-changes-when-you-quit-the-corporate-world-for-a-startup-9a8c2a4165ab

<comment><USER2> This post could be funny if the gifs weren't so annoying.

<comment><USER3> YOU'RE annoying.

 _SNAP_ You've been served

<comment><USER4> Oh daymnn son. He got burrrned</comment></comment></comment>


JPMorgan's Blockchain Chief Is Setting Out on Her Own - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2018/04/02/chase-blockchain-jpmorgan-amber-baldet/ <comment><USER2> One datapoint: I've started seeing small dev shops who offer to their clients that they can do things "on the blockchain". "Bitcoin is hype, but blockchain is the underlying technology."

Seems like MySQL could solve the problem just as well.

<comment><USER3> One can't "Roll back" in mysql. Mysql also can't easily create N master-master replication nodes.

<comment><USER4> I am not sure it would be practically feasible for a "rollback" in a blockchain based system.

Miners would lose a lot of their reward if you suddenly say that this chain is invalid and all data has to be entered again.

It would use a lot of computing resources as well.

<comment><USER5> Rollback is typically only discussed with regard to private or closed blockchain implementations. Which just highlights the root "why blockchain?" question even further when discussing private implementations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had the pleasure of meeting Amber at a conference recently and am not surprised she is going out on her own. With her knowledge and contact list, I'd expect her next venture to be a success.

This has been a common occurrence across many of the large classic players of the financial space. Keeping talent is difficult when a startup can be substantially more agile and effective. I know this isn't unique to the blockchain space, but it is certainly very prevalent. Potentially due to the fact that many leaders in the space were early investors in the technology too and a stable salary isn't top of mind compared to freedom and a challenge.

<comment><USER7> This comment is so generic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Probably like most people on HN, I have no idea how effective permissioned blockchain will end up being.

I took the edX Blockchain for Business class last year, and was sipping the coolaid, but now I am not as optimistic. For small groups of people and organizations, a permissioned blockchain might be over engineering when a distributed and secure shared database would be fine. For very large scale applications like health care records or smart contracts involving many thousands of individuals it makes more sense, but good luck getting off the ground.

I am still experimenting with two frameworks, one written in Rust and the other Haskell, but I am starting to think I am investing too much time.

<comment><USER9> Is one of them Juno? [https://github.com/kadena- io/juno](https://github.com/kadena-io/juno). If so, I was lead eng on it so let me know if you have any questions.

FYI we're hiring haskell devs to work on our private consensus layer (based off of Juno), our public consensus protocol ([http://kadena.io/docs/chainweb-v15.pdf](http://kadena.io/docs/chainweb-v15.pdf)) and our smart contract language [https://github.com/kadena- io/pact](https://github.com/kadena-io/pact) \+ formal verification system. firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER8> Indeed, it is the Pact language I have been playing with. Good stuff. I have also been watching your company Kadena.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One has to wonder if it's related to: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us- blockchain-jpmorgan/jpmor...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockchain- jpmorgan/jpmorgan-mulls-spin-off-of-blockchain-project-quorum-sources- idUSKBN1GY36O)

(In that maybe the bank decided not to, or will but wants someone else to lead it, or the spinoff will prove worthless, or...)

<comment><USER11> Banks are very political places too. Not the ideal home for a hacker.

<comment><USER12> And if you print all the policies and procedures, you can easily build a decent wall with all that paper.

<comment><USER11> Not just policies, but a lot of backstabbing too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> She's a very interesting speaker. Gave a talk at Def Con [0] on ways of talking to friends who are feeling very depressed and suicidal.

[0]: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bfYJE- qCVaM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bfYJE-qCVaM)

</comment><comment><USER14> Most of the so called "emerging tech" projects at JPM are being phased out due to not delivering the promised returns on investment (lots of money for expensive developers to build out moonshot projects with little concrete deliverables).

<comment><USER15> The same is true for startups :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder at what point blockchain will hit a make or break moment in finance companies. At some point, it will have to provide direct, tangible value-add or it might get funding pulled from non-tech companies</comment>


Startup options are much better than they look - <AUTHOR> https://www.benkuhn.net/optopt <comment><USER2> Which employees get hired with an offer of 1% equity that is still 1% at the time of an IPO or (non-acquihire) acquisition? Snap, a prominent IPO from this year, had 6-8 rounds after the $10M valuation this article simulates.</comment>


Ask HN: Which APIs flirttape is using for song search? - <AUTHOR>

I want to know about the webservice they are using. Thanks <comment><USER2> Hi, I'm part of the team that made flirttape and I can confirm that we are using YouTube as our source of media.

<comment><USER3> Seems like a really interesting site. Why the 5 song limit? I'd actually consider using it, if that limit weren't there :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> youtube.</comment>


Mathematical mysteries: How unilluminating - <AUTHOR> https://plus.maths.org/content/mathematical-mysteries-how-unilluminating <comment><USER2> Is there a physicist in the audience who can tell us what happens at sharp corners? I would assume things happen as the distance between the two mirrors becomes comparable to the light's wavelength.

<comment><USER3> That is not the only issue, mirrors don't really work the way one naively imagines. See for example this video [1], mirrors have their appearance between about 10 and 15 minutes into the video. Reality won't match the simple mathematical model even ignoring the corners and having a door is the correct solution in practice.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NumSE2LvSmQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NumSE2LvSmQ)

<comment><USER2> That's a really cool video. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> The Feynman lectures on physics has a great explanation, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Is there a room which is so fiendishly complicated that wherever you hold > the match there are some dark spots in the room? Nobody knows the answer...

Yes, if you allow walls to be curved:

[http://blog.zacharyabel.com/tag/unilluminable- rooms/](http://blog.zacharyabel.com/tag/unilluminable-rooms/)

</comment><comment><USER6> More at [http://mathworld.wolfram.com/IlluminationProblem.html](http://mathworld.wolfram.com/IlluminationProblem.html).

(If curved mirrors are allowed the problem was solved by Roger Penrose and there are rooms that cannot be illuminated - see link.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I feel like this problem is sitting on some big important concept, kind of like how topology expanded into a rich area of mathematics.

<comment><USER8> I agree. But I have only a superficial and rough understanding of the big ideas that underpin topology. What practical applications does it have?</comment></comment>


Crowdfunded 'Star Trek' Movie Draws Lawsuit from Paramount, CBS - <AUTHOR> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/crowdfunded-star-trek-movie-draws-851474?platform=hootsuite <comment><USER2> I really hope a Streisand effect happens here. Even though I'm not a fan of TOS, I'm definitely going to be contributing to the film and / or any legal defense fund they setup.

Copyright refers to concrete expressions of ideas, not characters or similar concepts; this is an abuse.

</comment><comment><USER3> After literally decades of fan productions, in which the original cast themselves even sometimes appear, why this now?</comment>


EU lawmakers agree on life-saving technologies for new vehicles - <AUTHOR> http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/nl/press-room/20190326IPR33205/safer-roads-eu-lawmakers-agree-on-life-saving-technologies-for-new-vehicles <comment><AUTHOR> > The Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) system could reduce fatalities on EU > roads by 20%

Or they could study why some EU countries have year over year significantly more road deaths the others [0].

A quick guess indicates that a 50% reduction (!) should be possible without changing cars, but using better road signs, separation of lanes, etc.

[0] [https://etsc.eu/euroadsafetydata/](https://etsc.eu/euroadsafetydata/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I have no issue with most of these technologies being equipped on cars. My biggest issue is if they become impossible to disable in the future. Consider there are emergencies where speeding may be necessary, or where even intentionally colliding your vehicle with an object may be called for.</comment>


Tesla patent reveals secret behind its solar roof tile's camouflage capacity - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2018/05/07/tesla-patent-secret-solar-roof-tiles-camouflage/ <comment><USER2> Tesla stock must have jumped when California started requiring all new housing to have solar rooftop installations.</comment>


Twitter Launches Stories Email Digest That Mimics Look Of Discover Tab - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/05/14/twitter-launches-stories-email-digest-that-mimics-look-of-discover-tab-may-use-summify-tech

<comment><USER2> > The new feature isn't covered by the standard 'no emails please' check box.

I got this spam this morning, and duly reported it as such. No emails means no fucking emails, what is so hard about that?</comment>


Programming HNs? - <AUTHOR>

Are there are any other forums like HN but solely discuss programming/CS stuff? <comment><USER2> Lambda the Ultimate is a good programming-languages-blog aggregator, with some very good discussion in the comments, though it does tilt a bit academic: <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/>

</comment><comment><USER3> programming.reddit.com

<comment><USER4> There's also <http://www.reddit.com/r/coding/> and <http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/> (and most likely more).

<comment><USER5> Someone posted this on reddit a while back:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/java+haskell+scheme+forth+groovy+com...](http://www.reddit.com/r/java+haskell+scheme+forth+groovy+compsci+codeprojects+sysor+semanticweb+software+xmpp+socialsoftware+agile+erlang+grails+lisp+opensource+python+soa+ruby+cobol+vim+emacs+dotnet+csharp+programming+scala+clojure+javascript+css+php+mysql)

<comment><USER6> I'd say it pays a lot of dividends to remove programming from that lineup. It eats up almost a third of the links.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Logcoin – Toy crypto-currency based on a zero-knowledge protocol - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vpostman/logcoin/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> Some thoughts:

Why did you pick a modp group instead of an EC group?

Why doesn't Bob send y? Y is derivable from what Bob sends. (Your zero knowledge claim is at least a bit wrong, since Bob is sending correlated numbers and, in fact, y can be derived from them.)

Bob's sent values can be rewritten as y _2^b, y_ 2^c, and y^-1 * f_1 * f_2, which makes me wonder why f_3 is sent.

Why does Bob prove knowledge of x+b+c? Can you clarify the spoofing attack?

What prevents double spending if the tracker is malicious?

<comment><AUTHOR> So, what I mean by zero knowledge is that there is zero knowledge of the secret key x, the discrete log of y. Y itself is supposed to be derived, that's part of the protocol. But when Bob randomly offsets the x-value before sending it, he is committing to a value of x, c, and b which he must then verify. It will be impossible for him to verify the c and b if he doesn't know x, which is important (see below).

modp groups are easier to implement, I was look into EC but I may come back to it later.

Bob doesn't want to send y directly because then another man in the middle could, before the transaction times out, forward y, spoof his own b and c, forward the verification of x and then verify his own b and c. Then he cannot spend the coin but he can make it unspendable.

If one tracker is malicious, he'll be out of sync with all the other trackers to which the transaction is also broadcast to. Every single known tracker would need to be compromised (they are all public).

<comment><AUTHOR> I should also mention that the protocol to verify x is separate and is a valid ZKP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

I have no idea if I'm doing this right because I am new to HN. But here is a very early WIP of a zero-knowledge cryptocurrency. I try to keep code terse to avoid bugs. Have at it!

<comment><USER3> This looks cool!

However, if the tracker is centralized, doesn't protection against double spends basically come for free?

Or, maybe not because of the other things?

Oh, wait, ok so in this situation does the tracker have any privileged information?

It doesn't look like it, So, another party could take the place of the tracker if the tracker went down?

I don't understand the proof of stake bit in the readme. I don't see anything about staking the coin, and I generally don't understand how proof of stake applies to something like this?

<comment><AUTHOR> the tracker is public and mirrored, and the idea is to reinforce your claim of ownership you send it to as many known trackers as you can within reason.

The proof of stake is essentially for free; as described above, by verifying you know the current secret key of the coin, you verify you own that coin. There is no transaction history; the coin is secret and updated randomly on every transaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry for being harsh on a newcomer, but this did not live up to my expectations based on the title. It seems to be strictly worse than bitcoin, let alone zerocoin.

It needs a central tracker, and it needs a secure offline channel to transmit keys. The reason zerocoin uses zero-knowledge proofs is to make it impossible to trace the history of a coin. This is another property that this project does not have.

<comment><USER5> This comment does seem fairly harsh for something advertised as "a toy." Why would you expect a toy to be state of the art? When I see that phrase, I think of something that is a personal learning experience, might have an interesting idea or two but is not expected to replace anything that already exists.

<comment><USER4> I expect a toy example to be theoretically sound, but using shortcuts to get a practical realization.

For all the fancy cryptography this uses, I don't see how it provides any more security properties than a central actor having a databases of balances and requiring a cryptographic signature (like RSA, ECDSA etc) to authorize transactions. I don't see an extension path either.

Since the zero-knowledge proof is interactive, I am unsure how the central tracker could even be audited not to spoof transactions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Read the readme again. The interactive ZKP does not reveal classified information about the actual transaction to the tracker, which is required to authorize it.

In theory, yes, a tracker could be malicious. It could even simply delete its record of all the coins and then refuse all transactions. Or change every coin so it cannot be spent. Actually the one thing it couldn't do is spoof transactions, because it doesn't know the secret key of a single coin it tracks. So it would have to make up a new coin, which would be easily detectable by other trackers because there must be a public consensus on how new coins are created (i.e., their public keys must be prime). So you would, once again, have to compromise every single tracker to spoof a transaction. Then you are right that there is no way to audit, but then you have bigger problems anyway (like people stealing money from exchanges) even before you get there.

Which brings me to the /real/ problem with my implementation, the coins are not worth nearly as much as bitcoin or zerocoin yet :P.

<comment><USER4> Alice has a secret key. She wants to prove this to Tom the tracker. He issues her a number of challenges until he is convinced she has the key.

Suspicious Simon now wonders if Alice actually had they key. Maybe she didn't and Tom gave her easy challenges? How can Simon be sure Alice has the key?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>