Wireshark on Ubuntu [Wikileaks on CIA] - <AUTHOR> https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_15728950.html <comment><USER2> Should we guess there that CIA find a way to do stuff when wireshark is run as root? This post title is very confusing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure why this is being upvoted? The CIA uses wireshark?

<comment><USER4> TBH, it's actually just a neat set of commands for configuring wireshark on Ubuntu to run without requiring root - which is potentially useful for anyone. (Most people don't like running apps as root)</comment></comment>


Langcraft: Compile LLVM IR to Minecraft data packs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SuperTails/langcraft <comment><USER2> I think the description is not sufficient to disambiguate data packs using mcfunctions (there are multiple compilers targeting this, e.g. [1]) from data packs just using command blocks. Langcraft turns out to be the latter. LLVM IR to mcfunction compiler would be also interesting :-)

[1] [https://github.com/Stevertus/mcscript](https://github.com/Stevertus/mcscript)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if I'd call the latter much of a "datapack" in the first place ;p because while yes, technically it is, I don't think it's that much of an improvement over the "x in only one command (which summons lots of other command blocks)" maybe someday specific terms will emerge for the types...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Picolisp doing raw LLVM-IR implementation. Works.

</comment><comment><USER5> tbh I firslty thought it will be emitting red stone

<comment><USER6> There is a Minecraft HDL project but it's a fairly limited flow IIRC</comment></comment>


The Turducken model of why programming is hard to learn - <AUTHOR> http://imprompt.us/2007/turducken/

<comment><USER2> if the person you are teaching has a more mathematical background, then you will not have that much problem getting them used to functions calling self, and loops inside other loops, etc. The trick would be to reduce functions into smaller more elegant segments. And if they are not, have them take some math classes or teach them about project management :)</comment>


Update:  Migration of Slicehost to Rackspace cloud servers - <AUTHOR> http://forum.slicehost.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=5210

<comment><USER2> Good to see that they quickly recognized just how poorly this was initially communicated. I'm not sure I'll ever understand how companies keep making these blunders though.

[Almost] a year ago, Linode significantly increased the memory on all plans without increasing prices. I think most people would have agreed Linode was a better value/choice before the increase, and just extended their lead after it. Customers unhappy with this move, or possibly interested in better value (YMMV) might want to consider a switch.

<comment><USER3> I'm really surprised by the way they communicated things yesterday.

Slicehost has been marketed toward hackers and geeks for years, so you'd have to expect that those people are going to demand technical information up front and are going to be pretty bristled about a mail heavy on marketing and nil on details.

It was also totally out of line with the amazing customer service I've otherwise gotten from Rackspace over the last 5 years (with their dedicated product) and Slicehost over the last 2+.

In the end I migrated my apps to Linode last night and at this point all I have to do is flip over DNS and pull the plug on Slicehost. I know I "might" pay less with Rackspace Cloud depending on bandwidth usage but I want the predictable fixed pricing model I've been subscribing to for a couple years. And since that product is no longer an option with Slicehost, to Linode I go, where I get more server for less money than I've been paying as is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is definitely a much better communique about how the transition will work. Wish they'd said it in the first place.

As a current Slicehost customer, I also appreciate their candidacy about how the transition itself will work, even if it's not the most seamless transition (i.e IP address change).

</comment><comment><USER5> Damm they are incredibly expensive - prgmr has servers 4 times the size for the same price.

Add a very bad customer service (migrating paying customers is just not acceptable) and I can't see any reason to stay with them.

</comment><comment><USER6> I predict Linode is going to make a mint off this.</comment>


Don't use Firefox for privacy - <AUTHOR> https://dendory.net/?b=53ceb16c

<comment><USER2> Safe Browsing (except for downloads) is handled by downloading a list of blacklisted sites (that's what the 15MB urlclassifier database in your profile is for). Unlike some other browsers, Firefox doesn't send every pageview to Google for analysis.

Edit: Since I last read the API documentation, a lookup API has also been added; Firefox does use this API, but only to avoid false positives: [https://developers.google.com/safe- browsing/](https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/) [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing- and-m...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-malware- protection-work#w_what-information-is-sent-to-mozilla-or-its-partners-when- phishing-and-malware-protection-are-enabled)

And if Firefox is really sending everything I type in my address bar to Google, why am I not seeing any of the benefits (i.e. autocomplete)?

</comment><comment><USER3> The URL bar's keypresses are not sent via network. That's the whole point behind keeping URL and Search Bar separate. Search bar has online suggestions, URL bar doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER4> The eye opener here is not Firefox, but the state of today's browsers.

I checked Safari, and it's search suggestions get sent off to Google, or whatever your default search engine is, the surprising fact is that it's sent over HTTP.

Good call reminding us that anything we type in the location bar is public.

</comment><comment><USER5> I only see traffic when typing in the search bar, not when using the location bar as stated in the article. And only when I set my search engine to Google instead of DuckDuckGo.</comment>


Silk Road forfeits Bitcoins worth $28m - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25772431 <comment><AUTHOR> If the authorities liquidate the $158m of bitcoins all at once, that might trigger a big fall in the price of bitcoin on the exchanges. Does anyone have any idea how long it takes the FBI to liquidate seized assets? That might give people a good idea of when would be a good time to take some profits.

<comment><USER2> Really, right before everyone else decides to do that is the best time to liquidate some profits...</comment></comment>


Bitfinex and Tether Hold 3B USD - <AUTHOR> http://news.8btc.com/zhaodong-bitfinex-and-tether-hold-3-billion-usd-usdt-soon-listed-on-bigone <comment><USER2> My problem with this is why doesn't Tether/Bitfinex just at regular intervals publish a list of the banks, their accounts, and the amount they have in each account, with an official statement from the banks in question. I can go down to my local bank and get such a statement verifying my account and it's balance easily enough. Why can't they?</comment>


The Shrinking World of Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shrinking-World-of-Ideas/150141/ <comment><USER2> Meh. There have never been more ideas than there are today. The inability of the tweed-jacketed offspring of the wealthy, living their noblesse oblige in the self-imposed poverty of humanities, are struggling with the reflections in the mirror:

-their theories aren't changing the world as fast as they want

-they didn't study the hard sciences that would allow them to understand the theories that are changing the world.

The older I get, the more I see this: outside of the young men whom the society annoints "whiz kids", the entire culture seems paralyzed by fear of math and science.

That's surely a generalization. I know at least one old classmate who's a quantitative historian and quite gainfully employed. But how many people are going into history for the quantitative angle?

Don't get me wrong, I think the humanities are important. But those who choose this route have got to level up if they want to play.

<comment><USER3> And yet, isn't one of the premiere goals of science, at least of the sort aiming at ontology, i.e. physics, to formulate a "Theory of Everything"? In other words, one idea to rule them all? Of course such an idea probably won't explain "higher level" structures in the Universe without some additional "subroutines"—just like understanding the periodic table does not result in instantaneous explanation of biochemistry, the brain, or human society (funny, maybe natural selection does something of the sort...). Though I do not fully agree with everything here, and I'm not sure that the author is wholly maligning the state of affairs in his thesis, we should remember there is a degree of immunity to ultra-logical semiotics in literature and (continental) philosophy that imparts subjective states that reinforce one's humanity (and maybe even intangibly touches holy-grail-ontology), and that is by no means an endorsement of at best childish, at worst deleterious, obfuscation.

<comment><USER4> > we should remember there is a degree of immunity to ultra-logical semiotics > in literature and (continental) philosophy that imparts subjective states > that reinforce one's humanity (and maybe even intangibly touches holy-grail- > ontology), and that is by no means an endorsement of at best childish, at > worst deleterious, obfuscation.

Can you honestly say that you wrote this sentence in order to be understood widely?

<comment><USER3> > Can you honestly say that you wrote this sentence in order to be understood > widely?

I can't say I didn't. But perhaps my subconscious finally prodded me to go beyond lurking and post my first comment so as to ensure I engage with the masses and thereby improve the clarity of my hermetically sealed self expression. So let me rephrase that: Stuff like great novels and the writings of Nietzsche can make you feel as alive as when you consider the findings from the LHC or read the "Selfish Gene". That being said, I think we should use the ideas of science, and philosophy of science, to improve our art and make it more meaningful and fecund for ideas. Since the results of science have no intrinsic meaning at this point in time (nor do they say anything utterly conclusive about what really exists at the lowest level of ontology), we still need something else. Obfuscation is one way to encourage the reader to really understand the context and layers of some piece of writing by making them dig deeper (there was an interesting link about this a few weeks back).

<comment><USER5> _Since the results of science have no intrinsic meaning at this point in time (nor do they say anything utterly conclusive about what really exists at the lowest level of ontology), we still need something else._

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "intrinsic" in this context? Also, does there have to be an absolute lowest level of anything?

<comment><USER3> The answer to the first question is related to an interpretation of David Hume known as Hume's Law, paraphrased as, "you can't derive an ought from an is". In other words, the results of science cannot tell us anything _conclusive_ about ethics/morality or what we should do day to day. The submission contained the following quote regarding neuroscience from a well-regarded paper: "it 'can help us see that all behavior is mechanical, that all behavior is produced by chains of physical events that ultimately reach back to forces beyond the agent's control.'" Some pretty drastic changes to the rule of law could result from equating such results with "there is no free will". How do we decide what _ought_ to comprise such changes? Secondly, as exhilarating and awe inspiring as learning the results of science can be (for me at least), how do we take knowledge and do anything with it? We can use it for technology, sure. But what if tomorrow we conclusively determine there are extraterrestrial beings through the results of one of our scientific instruments? How does society respond in relation to what the discovery means to each person despite the fact the experiment says nothing about such meaning? You could also think of it all this way: what _ought_ we to do once we know every possible provable (or Popperian falsifiable) statement about existence?

As for the second question, to me, it makes sense that there has to be a lowest level of ontology, unless the lowest level is some sort of recursive structure (which in a sense would still be a "lowest level thing"). I believe most of us expect that there is some sort of monadic entity that is equivalent to Democritus's atom. In the standard model the quark is that sort of thing (if I'm not mistaken), but the string theorists hypothesize that a lower level (think more complete, i.e. not assuming zero dimensional entities in reality) object is the basis for a quark. Or say, if we can somehow determine our universe is a simulation, then it would be nice to know what the "basement universe" that is running this universe is. Of course, it's possible such knowledge will remain forever inaccessible, in which case, we'll probably need novels and philosophy to deal with the voids left in our hungering minds.

<comment><USER6> >the results of science cannot tell us anything conclusive about ethics/morality or what we should do day to day.

It depends on how you define "science". If construed broadly, to mean using reason and evidence-based approaches to evaluating claims, then science tells us a lot. Is it better for the nations of Europe to strive to live in mutual cooperation with each other? Or should they instead perpetually wage war against each other, at any cost? Imagine posing that question to both pre- and post-enlightenment peoples and contrasting the responses.

>Or say, if we can somehow determine our universe is a simulation, then it would be nice to know what the "basement universe" that is running this universe is. Of course, it's possible such knowledge will remain forever inaccessible, in which case, we'll probably need novels and philosophy to deal with the voids left in our hungering minds.

Science is presently the best cure for the voids that exist today. You'll need a really good argument for switching to novels and philosophy for the voids of the future.

<comment><USER3> >using reason and evidence-based approaches to evaluating claims

It takes some philosophy to decide how to do science. I prefer Popper's approach for the methodology.

>Or should they instead perpetually wage war against each other, at any cost?

I think we answer this question via the realization that every human is a subjective being and has a right to pursue happiness, a realization which comes from the humanities (a-hem) as much as it does from the theory of natural selection or quantum mechanics (and actually, we have no way of looking at a brain and saying it assuredly causes consciousness, so we can't even say who's a subjective being with science). Heck, the universe's "way of doing" might be a nearby gamma ray burst far harsher than any human war ;)

>You'll need a really good argument for switching to novels and philosophy for the voids of the future.

I wholeheartedly concur, but there are already concerns that if something like the multiverse is the "explanation" for the constant values in our universe, then there might be aspects of existence inaccessible to our experiments. I will need much consolation if such a thing is true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Philosophy is the precursor to science. It is relatively primitive, unfocused, untestable. Maybe still interesting though in terms of its ability to tie together ideas different scientific fields without so much "rigour". That is really more a weakness of science though.

You need to separate literature from philosophy. There certainly are today and have been recently some excellent novels with interesting ideas in them. But for someone to pay large amounts of money to study novels or poetry or even history -- even the most privileged groups are expected to have practical skills and knowledge in a consulting position or running a company.

The relative lack of interest in politics, morality, better social organization, etc. I believe you can attribute to a few things. First, there is less hardship than in previous eras, which means fewer critics of social structure. There is also a relatively strong control over public (and private, to a degree) education that is reinforced by a powerful propaganda machine.

But the critics and ideas are out there. They are harder to find.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is fundamentally a "biological sciences are eating everything" piece - that we can explain all of the human experience through a bunch of biochemical reactions in our grey matter, and thus working on philosophy in other ways (making models and assertions experientially) is no longer a valid way to get to truth.

I'd argue that doing a biochemical reverse engineering of even one person's brains is impractical, and more likely to tell you about their food or companionship preferences than anything profound.

Just like newtonian mechanics is still useful in the age of quantum mechanics, classical philosophy and religion is still valuable, well tested, and empirically useful, even if it isn't verifiably true, as making a verifiable answer is far beyond (and likely will remain far beyond) our current capabilities.

<comment><USER9> What do you mean by - religion is well tested?

<comment><USER10> I think we have pretty good test-coverage, even if all the tests are still failing instead of ever passing once.

<comment><USER11> Trouble is, sometimes coincidences occur. Humans are born to fasten onto faulty cause-and-effect relationships; its what kept us from being eaten by tigers a million years ago - "Og saw a stripey cat; today we found him dead. Stripey cats are bad news". And today its responsible for witchcraft, voodoo, the lottery, you name it.

<comment><USER10> Indeed, I have no religious faith but I find its emergence in the human psyche endlessly interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author proposes that the humanities are no longer the fertile source of important ideas they once were, and attributes this, somewhat vaguely (the vagueness appropriately matches available information sources on the subject, though), to the humanities fumbling somewhat in the past 40 years or so with certain trends they pushed; to the progress of their analysis perhaps inevitably leading to a direct study of the human mind, which is more expertly carried out by cognitive scientists; and to the general, unaccounted for, contemporary success of science.

It seems more likely to me that differences in society's communication structure and regular inability to determine who intellectual leaders are except retrospectively, are the main causes for the changes described by the author. Aside from that, there's probably more of a shift in what the author now considers an important idea than anything: the humanities and sciences address different subject matters. Scientific discoveries often serve to restrict the realm of viable philosophies (e.g. cognitive science's impact on the any theory of innate knowledge a la Plato), but if it ever says something positive on a philosophical subject, that subject is no longer philosophy proper—and there's plenty of room for philosophy still.

The rest of the humanities, from my understanding, is about communicating ideas about human life—often times about the experience of living it—using a different set of techniques than the sciences, and the utility of those techniques has not diminished.

</comment><comment><USER13> I want to add, that many great ideas are identified as such years after they have been formulated. Sometimes only the historical context makes an idea great. Kafka died in 1924, years before the NS regime took over, which bureaucracy he illustrated so brilliantly. All his writings were published after his death. So the ideas clearly were present before, they just stayed unnoticed and only in hindsight became famous for the fact, that there were indeed people who knew better before and the catastrophe could have been avoided.

The past is always glorified or at least seen as more significant, because only these parts stick. Its harder to spot a significant piece in real time, because the signal to noise is much worse.

<comment><USER14> Minor correction: you meant to say all his _novels_ were published after his death. Kafka published quite a few short stories while still alive (including short stories which would later become parts of his three novels).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it ironic that an article that has obviously been painstakingly crafted by someone who by accounts is a highly capable writer should be so poor at communicating ideas. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, my experience has generally been that philosophers and literary theorists tend to more interested in demonstrating their adroitness through linguistic gymnastics and obscure references than creating end-products with intrinsic value.

<comment><USER16> It's strange, I found it very clear and readable. Maybe it has to do with one's level of familiarity with the topic, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The source on "7.6 percent of bachelor's degrees were granted in the humanities in 2010" seems flimsy. The Chronicle links to the NYT, and the NYT links to a blog (and not even a specific post). The numbers here[1] I think are trustworthy. For those who can't be bothered, it says 16.8% of all Bachelors' conferred in 2010 -- more than double 7.6% (and according to the same source, around the same as that in the 70s). So I don't know if the liberal arts "are not where the action is these days". There's certainly still a lot of people going into them.

[1] [http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.as...](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_318.20.asp)

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't agree. There's no constraint, no limit in 'ideas to come up with'. Not like, say music. There are only 10 octaves in the audible spectrum, but that doesn't stop people from coming up with new songs and melodies for the last couple of centuries.

Because executing an idea has never been cheaper and more accessible, it might seem that we're running out of fresh ideas. But as technology evolves, so are the ideas that go with it. I'm betting on an intergalactic ridesharing app for space monkeys somewhere in the next decade...

</comment><comment><USER19> Technology is the response to a perceived need.

Science is that which explains and predicts.

See also Kuhn's paradigm shift, etc...</comment>


Computers Can Now Replicate Handwriting - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomshardware.com/news/computer-handwriting-synthesis-now-possible,29654.html

<comment><AUTHOR> And here's the actual site where you can try it out: [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.cgi?text=](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.cgi?text=)</comment>


The world is catching up on AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/us-share-artificial-intelligence-investment-cdf9bf0f-d036-4b21-b96b-7ab2e2d8332a.html <comment><USER2> I am skeptical of the premise in this article that primary driver of AI innovation is start up funding. If anything, most of the big recent AI developments are only unlockable/accessible to players with huge amounts of scale, ie. big institutional technology players.</comment>


Get Dropbox OAuth Token Real Quick - <AUTHOR> https://dbxoauth2.site44.com/

<comment><USER2> Dropbox itself makes this even easier now. See [https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/94/generate-an- acces...](https://www.dropbox.com/developers/blog/94/generate-an-access-token- for-your-own-account).</comment>


Dark Matter detector directly observes rare decay of Xe-124 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1124-4 <comment><USER2> > predicted half-life that surpasses the age of the Universe by many orders of > magnitude

Wow.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there any chance that the half-life of Xenon-124 is lower than previously thought?

<comment><USER4> There is always 'some' chance, but the article quotes 1.8 +- 0.5 so the error bars are already quite big.</comment></comment>


Swift – Under the Hood - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/swift-llvm

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my presentation, given at QCon London 2015, on a little history about Objective-C and where Swift came from, and how it works under the covers.

Happy to answer any questions here if you have them.</comment>


New Yorkers Are Publicly Shaming Cars in Bike Lanes - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/09/new-york-city-cars-blocking-bike-lanes-map/501953/ <comment><USER2> There are a few twitter accounts I follow who post some egregious infractions throughout SF. There have been some wins [1], but unfortunately I see the same types of violations by commercial vehicles posted over and over again and I think those drivers just don't care (and as far as I can tell they face little to no enforcement).

And for those on the high horse about cyclists breaking laws, just remember that nearly 100% of drivers break the law every time they drive --- speeding. Drivers think that going 30mph in a 25mph zone or 40mph in a 35mph zone isn't a big deal, but those small differences in speed mean a lot to people outside of vehicles if they get hit [2].

Also I haven't seen any data that shows that the most common cyclist infraction that everybody complains about, yielding at stop signs, actually is more dangerous. Yet it is very easy to show that speeding by vehicles is incredibly dangerous and costs many lives every year.

1: [http://www.sfexaminer.com/uber-drivers-sf-receive-cyclist- sa...](http://www.sfexaminer.com/uber-drivers-sf-receive-cyclist-safety- training/)

2: [http://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_f...](http://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_fatal_injury_pedestrians_and_car_occupants_richards.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Speed limits are decided under the assumption that people will exceed them under normal driving conditions.

In other words, speed limits are usually intentionally too slow. It would be insane to follow them in many situations.

<comment><USER4> Wtf? Is this a US phenomenon?

In Australia people do stick to limits, more or less. At least, speeders are judged by other drivers fairly harshly.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, in the US, it's pretty much acceptable to go 5 or 10 mph over the limit on any non-residential road. Cops generally don't ticket unless you are going 10+ mph over.

<comment><USER6> That's fascinating. In Holland we use a similar rule of thumb, but in Km/h, which is significantly less of a speed increase. Fascinating how the choice of unit of measurement affects behavior like this.

Going 8-20 Km/h too fast (the US equivalent) would definitely not be okay here. It happens, but if the police notices you're likely to get a ticket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's really needed is to segregate cars from pedestrians. Tunnels for self driving electric cars, cars otherwise banned. Part of why Venice is so beautiful.

Yes I know, tunnels are expensive. Surely there's a way to bring technological deflation to tunneling. For starters, self driving electric cars would emit no noxious gasses and could have narrower tunnels with higher capacity.

Just for city centers, make up for all that wasted automotive space (parking, roads) with higher density and more life.

<comment><USER8> If you're going to build tunnels for vehicles, you might as well put tracks in.

<comment><USER7> But then you need transfers if the destination is out in the burbs, and that's terrible for door to door transit times.

Underground uber with no stoplights and no pedestrians clogging the intersections, with nice onramps to regular highways and your door to door times will be dramatically lower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are they also publicly shaming bikers who blatantly break traffic laws?

EDIT: I say this as both a cyclist and a driver. I can't believe how often I see cyclists do dangerous things. But for sure, I see a lot of drivers do mean, dangerous and stupid things, too. I just get tired of cyclists thinking that traffic laws don't apply to us.

<comment><USER10> Before I get all the hate I have to say of course cyclists should obey the laws. As a cyclist I can tell you it doesn't matter either way to many certifiably deranged motorists.

Caveat aside, I'm constantly amazed that this argument gets brought up over and over again.

Traffic laws exist to ensure public safety. So let's cut the bike/car bullshit about the laws being equal for both.

Let's take a simple offense like running a stop sign at 15 km/hr and suppose that a pedestrian gets hit. What's the difference between a car doing this and a bicycle? Both the bike and the car are going 4 m/s. But there's a huge difference between getting hit by a car that's 1500 kg plus passengers versus an 80 kg person plus a 9 kg bike. Simple thought experiment, you've just been hit by something. What outcome would be more favorable? Would you rather have a Honda Civic on your spleen or some asshat bike courier named Jack? Two tonnes versus nine kilograms?

The crime may be the same, but the outcome is far different. I've seen a van run a red light and the cyclist traveling orthogonally ride right into the side of it going 45 km/hour. Not pretty.

<comment><USER11> I'd rather not be hit by either of them, period. Cars should not be running stop signs or lights, but neither should bicyclists, period. Full stop. Also, having a bike run the stop sign and fly into an intersection out of nowhere can easily cause cars to swerve, causing accidents, or even strike the bicyclist.

It's not difficult to drive, ride, or walk safely. Just do it and stop whining.

<comment><USER12> There is a compromise, the Idaho stop[0].

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cities are funny places. Off topic mildly but still vehicles using bike lanes...

I often wonder about armored delivery vehicles - ATM/cash movement firms like Brinks. Do they have some sort of deal with cities to not receive tickets for blocking lanes, standing in bus lanes, bike lanes, not paying for parking, etc... or do they actually get tickets, paying them as they come in? Or are they some sort of specialized vehicle?

<comment><USER14> That is an interesting point. Someone probably figured it out they could buy what looks like an armored verhicle. Setup an LLC with some security sounding name. Then probably park it around the city whenever they want. Not sure if it would be worth the trouble with all the cost in fuel, but who knows.

Heard about someone before buying a Crown Vic and getting a taxi package (or whatever the search comes with) and driving that around. They weren't impersonating an officer, but cars would regularly slow down around or get out of his way when he was behind them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a step in the right direction. A more positively impactful step would be to stigmatize the ownership and operation of a motor vehicle. No one actually _needs_ a car in NYC; those who _want_ a car must be treated the same as smokers: pushed to the fringes by making their behavior socially unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I lived in Palo Alto, every single day I saw delivery vehicles parked in the middle of a lane in a 2-lane street. The police never seemed to do anything about it. I think we should encourage a culture of vigilante traffic enforcement. If someone leaves a car parked in the middle of the road because they were too lazy to park elsewhere nearby, they deserve to get their vehicle dinged up a little bit. Hopefully that might actually dissuade them from parking in the middle of the road.

<comment><USER13> Or an app for that, being the valley and all... you report a violation, city enforces via third-party contractors (Uber drivers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminded me of this :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE- IMaegzQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ)

</comment><comment><USER17> Looks quite similar to the site one of my coworkers at Meetup had going for a while (hi Greg!): [http://mybikelane.com/](http://mybikelane.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> In India (Bangalore), motorcycle runs on footpaths when there is traffic. What a contrast.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's quite a lot of police cars on that map.</comment>


Attention and sex - <AUTHOR> http://ignitenight.blip.tv/file/199623/ Awesome video talk of Scott Berkun at Ignite Seattle 3 <comment><USER2> Good talk. Although by about 3 minutes into it, I was kind of expecting the punchline to be that sex wasn't mentioned at all in the talk, but yet we were still paying attention to him simply because he titled his talk "Attention and Sex". :-O

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Scott Berkun's a great public speaker. Has anyone read his new book "Myths of Innovation"? I'd be interested to see what you guys think of it before buying it myself.</comment>


Launch HN: Enchanted Security, the virtual content security policy for websites - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I'm excited to show you Enchanted Security (enchantedsecurity.com),  a virtual content security policy for protecting websites!
There are various ways an attacker can get malicious JavaScript onto a website. Most everyone knows about XSS, but increasingly common is by compromising trusted scripts, either libraries you're using in your own code, code hosted on S3 without proper permissions, or third party scripts hosted by partner companies. You may be surprised by how easy this to a dedicated attacker - for example, many open source libraries on Github are not very well maintained. Once the attacker has JavaScript on your site, they can steal sensitive data like credit card numbers, passwords, crypto wallet keys, etc, sending it from the user's browser out to someplace they can access.
One popular type of malware, called Magecart, recently led to British Airways being hit with a record £183m fine for losing credit card numbers right off their checkout page.
There's something called a content security policy (CSP) header which websites are supposed to use to protect from various threats like these. However, it's really hard to set up and use properly. Companies are inadvertently breaking their site with it. And it can take many months or over a year to set up. Also, there are subtle holes in CSPs that a hacker can work around (e.g. if you whitelist Google Analytics, which most sites do, an attacker can create their own Google Analytics account, then use that for data exfiltration by sending data as custom events. This has actually been done in the wild by attackers. Enchanted Security can inspect payloads, so if you specify your site's Google Analytics tracking id, we can block all Google Analytics events to other tracking ids you don't control).
Enchanted Security adds some inline JavaScript to the <head> of your page that uses secure function interposition to interpose itself between the page code and browser functions (fetch, XMLHttpRequest, Image, etc). It then tracks these calls for backend processing and analysis. It also can block them if they appear malicious. Right now, we have a blacklist of known malicious domains, and we monitor for anomalies. We plan to use machine learning as well.
Is this something your company could use? If interested, get in touch through the contact form at https://enchantedsecurity.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here's a clickable link to the site: [https://enchantedsecurity.com/](https://enchantedsecurity.com/)</comment>


Why Perforce is more scalable than Git - <AUTHOR> http://gandolf.homelinux.org/~smhanov/blog/?id=50

<comment><USER2> Centralized systems scale up.

Decentralized systems scale out.

There is a very big difference that must be understood.

I've used Perforce and Team Foundation Server (which is a re-write of Source Depot which is based on Perforce). Each of these systems handle gigantic source trees with ease, but at what cost? No, it's not the local history or branching (as the author points out). The problem has much more to do with the cultural implications.

Most open source projects can be downloaded, configured, built, and installed with a series of commands resembling `wget`, `configure`, `make`, and `make install`. Giant proprietary trees usually grow crazy custom processes with makeshift tools and lots of domain specific hacks. Giant open source trees instead develop package managers and powerful overlord processes.

Google provides some excellent tree-wide tools in this vein (`gcheckout`, `blaze build`, etc). However, acquisitions and constant growth are assaulting the integrity of their beautiful master tree. Oh, and Google's entire company- wide tree is only a fraction of the size of Windows, or Office, or DevDiv (Visual Studio, .NET Platform, Etc). My understanding is that many individual developers and teams at Google are using Git on their directories until they need to feed back in to the rest of the company.

What we need is MORE decentralized tools that work better together. We need to develop tools which, by virtue of their nature, encourage componentization and separation of concerns. Bug trackers, code review tools, build servers, test servers, deployment processes, etc. need to support decentralization. GitHub is a PERFECT example of how to do this: it's a centralized tool but that tool really is just a giant powerful overlord for a decentralized tool. It gets the best of both worlds while encouraging a culture of scaling out. Decentralized tools typically cater to the open source folks, but you need to cater to enterprise needs (which implies a minimal level of central control) to earn mass appeal.

Git forces you to have a small tree, so you are forced to build things in pieces. I think that's a good thing, but people who have big trees now can never ever get out. It's pretty much impossible because they, by definition, have too much code.

<comment><USER3> The use of git at Google is (AFAIK, IANAG) limited to checking out the revisions of a limited portion of the tree. Kind of like using git-svn to track just part of a repository and managing most of the checkout using bare svn.

<comment><USER2> That sounds about like what I remember from the 20% project fair I attended. I think it was `git4` which called `g4` (Google's version of `p4`) in much the same manner as a `git-p4`. The goal was to help out distributed teams, who were often affected more directly by scheduled Perforce maintenance and network latency.

<comment><USER4> git p4 is okay, but uh... how far along is git4? Is it open? Couldn't find a project page with a quick google.

<comment><USER2> I don't think the project is public. I think it was highly dependent on internal infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Git does not like the use cases the author writes about. Git does not like gigantic sprawling repositories (Linus mentioned in his Google talk that this was a problem with importing the KDE tree). Git does not like large binaries (there is some chatter on the mailing list about somewhat improving the situation), which makes it tricky to use for, e.g., games. Yes, Git is not perfect for every group and every use case. News at 11.

Beyond that, the author's snarky comments fall flat until they simply begin to contradict themselves: "The distributed stuff isn't really asked for, or needed... Just give me a version control system that [lets me] merge changes into my coworker's repos, without having to check them in first."

</comment><comment> brown9-2 The "Perforce at Google" case study that this article links to seems to discount some of the ideas that Perforce is super-scalable. Things like:

\- "Every command, from any client (e.g., p4v), appears to the server as if it came from the p4 command line." \- "Each command starts a process on the server."

Of course, this is probably a use case in the extreme (and it was 2006), but I think it just goes to show that it doesn't make much sense to make such absolute statements ("X is more ___ than Y").

</comment><comment><USER6> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516276>

</comment><comment><USER7> I would argue that having every project ever in the same repo isn't a good thing to have even if Perforce can handle it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like they're both optimized for very different use cases and very different definitions of scalability. Good to know.</comment>


I don't get it.Isn't Microsoft accepting Bitcoins pretty much *bad* for Bitcoin? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2p328o/i_dont_get_it_isnt_microsoft_accepting_bitcoins/

<comment><USER2> I think convenience of spending bitcoins is nice when looking at them as a payment system. I use these payments whenever possible because I don't like sharing CC info, and with phone wallet, you it's just easier to get phone run app scan code and done rather than entering all my CC info while convulsively checking my https icon.

But it has nothing to do with Bitcoin used as a storage of value which is another story.

And of course the link is from buttcoin, "forget it, no serious company accepts them", "some serious company accepts them, that's bad". I still kinda like them though since from time to time there is same valid criticism present (unlike /r/bitcoin where it just doesn't happen)

<comment><AUTHOR> The setting is that the Microsoft announcement happened, /r/bitcoin posters were crowing in /r/buttcoin, then they stopped shortly after, because this is what the price actually did: [http://growlersoftware.com/users/tetondon/moonshot_canceled....](http://growlersoftware.com/users/tetondon/moonshot_canceled.png) [http://i.imgur.com/2aa9Lho.png](http://i.imgur.com/2aa9Lho.png) But even the crowing doesn't make sense.</comment></comment>


Google plans to bootstrap Go 1.5 (with short interview to Google's Russ Cox) - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/01/golang-15-bootstrapped

<comment><USER2> > If the Go compiler had been the first big Go program, that use case would > have had undue influence on the language design and distracted us from the > real target.</comment>


Xamarin - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/xamarin <comment> jon-wood While it does comply with title rules, I feel this could use a better title - have they just moved to Github, or did someone just find Xamarin interesting and decide to post their Github page?

<comment><USER2> I agree, don't understand what this post is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wrote a PoC (Proof of Concept) a few years ago of recompiling Xamarin iOS apps to Android without code changes and we released a few apps using that. It is especially handy for LoB (Line of Business) / internal apps which actually are very usable like this. Clients loved it as they only had to pay once. It has parts of the Core Graphics and Core Animation implemented as the last app I ported with it was heavy on those.

This was before Forms came along. No clue if anyone would be interested in it, but i'm cleaning up the code to put it on github as open source.

<comment><USER4> This would be interesting. I'm looking to create a MVP for a game like app and am researching ways to make it cross-platform compatible without sacrificing performance.

<comment><USER3> Check my profile and drop me a mail with stuff you would need for that I can tell you if it would work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I started experimenting with Xamarin after they made it free with the open source announcement and I'm cautiously optimistic now. I can work around the works of Xamarin Studio (or the VS plugin) and I like C# and Swift about equally, but app startup time specifically seems subpar with Xamarin.

Edit: more on topic, the open source move is fantastic! I felt the money might be worth it for not only the tooling but also the top notch documentation, but I've never been able to convince any of my bosses on this.

Apps built with Xamarin (or a similar system where you bind to platform API's) or so much better to build and use than these cross platform platforms.

</comment><comment> jon-wood Since I'm just starting to learn it, does anyone have opinions or tips around Xamarin? Specifically I'm building a toy Android app to learn the stack, but I'm curious as to just how much reusability there really is between Android/iOS and other platforms.

<comment><USER6> You must know how the UI work in both oses if you want to be capable of using xamarin efficently. Yeah, there is XamarinForms that tries to solve that problem, but it is very... bad, right now.

<comment><USER7> Anyone who is serious about cross platform mobile development, whether it be Xamarin or React, needs to be well versed in Cocoa and the Android SDK.

<comment><USER8> > Anyone who is serious about cross platform mobile development, whether it be > Xamarin or React, needs to be well versed in Cocoa and the Android SDK.

Then why would I go the Xamarin route in the first place? The whole point is to avoid having to learn both platforms. Personally, I'd rather struggle with two _native_ codebases than to struggle learning an imperfect abstraction that still requires me to learn both platforms.

<comment> jon-wood For me the point is being able to reuse the core code, in this case the logic of a small game, but it could be API integration just as easily.

So far the C# abstraction of Android has if anything been easier to use than the official Java API, or at the very least less verbose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How does Xamarin compare with other ways to get platform native across all platforms ? There's haxe (actionscript-like, but typed), which has lots of libraries. There's QT. I haven't even followed that well which others exist.

<comment><USER10> There's also react native.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there an EC2 Spot Instance shortage? - <AUTHOR> I'm new to dealing with spot instances, so maybe i'm just missing something, but why am I unable to get a single c1.xlarge spot instance in us-east-1b activated? I put in an absurdly high max price or $10/hr yesterday for 1 instance and it has still not been started.<p>How can the going rate be $0.23/hr and my $10 bid not get honored? Isn't the idea that if there's an extra capacity of X machines, it goes to the X highest bids? Shouldn't the rate be much higher than $0.23/hr if there are very few spot instances available? <comment><USER2> Speaking only as an EC2 user, I have not seen any evidence that there's any kind of "king of the hill" bidding going on w/ spot instances. You get machines if your "bid" exceeds the current spot price AND there is available capacity. What controls the current spot price? I don't know.

I get the feeling that Amazon is experimenting with really trying to create a market here, but that there are still some very strong controls and limits with respect to how the pricing is computed. For example, most spot prices tend to max out at the reserved instance rate. I highly doubt that's a market effect. It's certainly worth bidding over the reserved, but under the normal, instance rate. I'm guessing that it's going to be difficult to create a market that is unrestricted but still preserves the quality of the user experience, in terms of rapid oscillations around different support points of bid prices, preventing anyone from keeping a server up for a coherent amount of time. You could bid-bomb DOS the market too, for example, if you were willing to spend a little money. You only need to hold the machines for an hour...

</comment><comment><USER3> maybe $10 is so high they rejected it? similar to adding a zero on a stock purchase at etrade - they'll call you and tell you you overbid...

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting indeed. I hadn't considered this. If this is the case, it's unfortunate they don't reject bids saying they're too high.

I just submitted several more otherwise identical bids at different prices to see what happens...

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI, the price doesn't seem to matter. A bid for $.50 isn't being fulfilled either. I still don't understand why a bid higher than the going rate isn't being fulfilled. :-/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 3 words: christmas shopping season</comment>


Amazon is going to kill more American jobs than China did - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-going-to-kill-more-american-jobs-than-china-did-2017-01-19 <comment><USER2> The Economic Policy Institute, estimates that America. lost 2.7 million jobs as a result of the U.S.-China trade deficit between 2001 and 2011, 2.1 million of them in manufacturing.

[https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/08/24/report- ameri...](https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/08/24/report-america- lost-27-million-jobs-to-china-in-10-years)

Current, Walmart has 2.3M employees to do 485B. Assuming 124B(substarted 12B for cloud services) for amazon with 341k employees that means about 1.3M employees to do 485B.

wikipedia.org (my calculation for 1.3M jobs)

</comment><comment><USER3> There will be losses, as you may expect, in the retail trade, but there will also be growth in the industries that will be required to support the growth of Amazon. Couriers, the vehicles they use, fuel, tyres, servicing, the drivers need to eat etc. The list, I imagine (without much thought) could be very large in terms of support of said growth. The drones that are mentioned, well, someone needs to make them, and make the parts that make them...and so on..</comment>


A 'prescient' warning to Boeing on 787 trouble - <AUTHOR> http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/sundaybuzz/2014125414_sundaybuzz06.html

<comment><AUTHOR> fly by metrics, die by metrics. it seems that mgmt programs don't include game-theory or heisenberg for that matter. and finally denial/delusion kicks in to help 'leaders' cope with and distance themselves from smoldering crater of final cost...</comment>


Facebook maps out support for gay marriage as profile photo campaign takes off - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/29/4161510/facebook-marriage-equality-movement-pink-equal-sign

<comment><USER2> Original link at [0], with a very nice illustration why it is helpful to distinguish between percentages and percentage points.

[https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data- science/showing...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data- science/showing-support-for-marriage-equality-on-facebook/10151430548593859)</comment>


The collapse of Dyson's electric car dream - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dyson-electric-car-cancelled-inside-story <comment><USER2> I really enjoy AvE's teardowns of the Dyson tech [0]. NSFW because the guy swears like it's going out of style, but highly entertaining, blunt, and informative.

It gives a nice glimpse into the tradoffs of engineering, cost, and serviceability in the face of an enormously well marketed product.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ave+dyson](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ave+dyson)

<comment><USER3> His Juicero teardown is also gold: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp- BGQfpHQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ)

<comment><USER2> Indeed, shame we'll never get to see him teardown the Dyson EV!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wired's cheerleading style is beyond tedious at this point. They take it as a given that Dyson had designed a 'revolutionary electric vehicle,' a safe ploy as nobody has seen it. Yet, it would indeed take a LOT to be a 'revolutionary' vehicle at this point, and more likely the result was just a 'me too' electric car with some stylized Dyson plastic bits around it.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I think probably the issue was that it _wasn 't_ revolutionary. Dyson really likes unique inventions that he can patent because it allows a healthy profit margin. I think the unique thing for the car was probably supposed to be the batteries, but last I heard they're made by chemical vapour deposition, which doesn't exactly scale to car batteries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This Dyson car idea always did sound weird. I like his reasons for trying. But its very hard to make a decent AND affordable electric car. I have no doubt Dyson could have made a decent one, but to make it affordable they would have needed huge economies of scale, or huge risk-taking balls a la Tesla. And as the article said, there was no point betting their stable existing business on a new moon shot.

Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, before Tesla had kicked the electric car segment up the arse, and the options around were all still pretty crappy, then an expensive Dyson electric car might have made sense. But in todays market it would have to compete with the Tesla Model 3, the Hyundai Kona EV and the Kia Niro EV and there's no way Dyson would have been able to make anything with similar specs at a similar price.

<comment><USER7> > I have no doubt Dyson could have made a decent one,

I have nothing but doubt Dyson could have made one, let alone a decent one.

<comment><USER8> They already know electric motors and batteries. That gives them at least an edge.

And marketing bs aside, the motors themselves are an impressive technical feat. Although they're high rpm & low torque, so maybe not applicable.

<comment><USER9> > They already know electric motors and batteries. That gives them at least an > edge.

I'd like to argue batteries and mass production are the issue and genuinely hard to solve. Not async motors and inverter circuits.

To my knowledge they use 3rd party batteries for applications where it is not a limiting factor that need to be pushed over but I could be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If only he could have waited until the 31st he'd have been able to sell his electric cars reaping all the benefits of the Brexit he's so in favour of (prior to leaving the country he shafted). Couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy.

<comment><USER11> Why are all these rich people for Brexit I wonder? Do they think they'll pay less taxes or something? That's sad that he is for it.

<comment><USER12> > Why are all these rich people for Brexit I wonder?

They have cash.

They assume that with Brexit, a whole lot of punters will go broke and they can vacuum up the assets for pennies on the dollar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Someone was telling me yesterday - well after the news came out - that Tesla was going to collapse before WeWork did, because after all - Tesla can't compete with all of the new players coming into the space, in particular Dyson. They looked a bit crestfallen when I broke it to them that there would be no car.

I've regretted every Dyson I have purchased. I have two very expensive plastic vacuum cleaners in my garage.

It's hard building cars... it's hard surviving building cars ... it's hard surviving building cars while scaling.

<comment><USER11> There's just something about Tesla's continually promising incredible things, and delivering most of it a little late that really irritates people. Yet no one else is doing anything remotely like it. My 2012 tesla model s85 has better range than a 180k first gen porsche taycan. It's beyond tedious now how people keep thinking they are doomed because of some reason...

<comment><USER13> People with a lot to loose if SpaceX and Tesla are long-term successful are opening up with both barrels. Elon tacks close to the wind with what he does - probably to avoid situations like the above. Hence the hope/despair cycles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Elon's 'Masterplan' was probably the better way for Dyson as well. Don't start off mass producing the vehicle for everybody. Make a few for the very rich. Reinvest to make a slightly cheaper car for more people. Take that money and repeat. Would love to see more diverse players enter the arena. Competition in this particular field would be great to see unfold.

</comment><comment><USER15> Honestly, I think if someone has an innovative idea regarding some part of an electric vehicle, in most cases they should just manufacture that component and push for standardization so that the component can be easily integrated into other designs. Building a whole car is something that few companies have the experience and engineering budget to pull off.

I'm hoping that over time electric car parts become more standardized. There's only so many ways to make an electric motor, and there's no particular reason why every motor should have a different bolt pattern on its faceplate or a shaft with a different number of splines.

</comment><comment><USER16> Instead of intertwining the electric car project with the other Dyson core businesses, couldn't he have spun up a separate entity and raised funding? Seems like it would be a very attractive investment considering his track record.

<comment><USER17> The problem is the scale, as the article pointed out VW is putting $50bn into it, and still needs to partner with another manufacturer because that's not enough.

He went after the wrong end of the market. Tesla did it right. Start with a premium, high margin low volume sports car. Everything about that strategy plays to the advantage of a new entrant. Starting at the low price end means you have to go to massive scale from day one. Getting everything about that right, the first time, at huge scale is just not viable for a new entrant.

<comment><USER18> "no price except an acknowledgement it would be more expensive than most"

So they were starting at the premium end.

<comment><USER17> I think that's more an acknowledgement of their inability to control costs.

<comment><USER18> You could say that about any expensive thing. The question is whether people would have been willing to pay more for a Dyson car. The fact that they got people to pay more for vacuums, fans, heaters and hair dryers suggests they would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> m-i-l Has anybody seen any articles which actually have pictures of the car or car parts? According to this article they "had finally produced a driveable prototype", and e.g. the BBC article[0] says "The first cars had already been developed and were being tested". Seems like nearly £200m had already been spent ("The company also planned to invest £200m ... Much of that money has already been spent"[0]) so you would hope there was something to show for it.

[0] [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50004184](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50004184)

</comment><comment><USER19> Kind of interesting that Dyson intends to continue with electric motors and batteries just not with the cars. I wonder if they have a plan b vehicle up their sleeve. Going electric allows for a lot of things that a heavy ICE would preclude.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yeah, this has been so predictable. There are a lot of people who seem to feel like Tesla's accomplishments are trivial, but the reality is that building cars is hard. Building them at any kind of scale (even tens of thousands a year) is incredibly hard for a business that has never done it before.

The great surprise isn't so much the failures as that Tesla has succeeded at getting to the volumes that they have.

<comment><USER21> And more.

Tesla didn't just make "The" electric car, they made a charging network better than pretty much anything else out there.

At this point other contenders are simply to late to the game. Tesla fundamentally changed the market and they have established themselves in a way that will be hard for competitors to topple.

After all, when Tesla pushed out the X/S, what was the competition doing? Mostly just retrofitting batteries and engines as cheap as possible on current frames. Tesla made a car that could be a universal car while everyone else was focused on short range secondary commuters.

Now, competition not only has to compete with the fact that Tesla is what people think of when they think "Next green car" they also have to find some way they can be better with a public charging network that is 10 years behind what Tesla currently has.

It isn't enough to push out a car that can go 200 miles on batteries alone anymore. You have to be better than Tesla, and that is a really high bar.

So, the real question is "What's next for tesla" can they continue to be the best in class? Will they be upstaged by the current old guard? Who knows?

One thing is for sure, car companies are going to need to evolve to compete with Tesla's offerings.

<comment><USER22> > _they also have to find some way they can be better with a public charging > network that is 10 years behind what Tesla currently has._

Ionity's chargers are better than what Tesla has. Ionity's chargers can deliver 350kw and can charge any EV. Similarly for Electrify America's chargers. Repsol is delivering 400 kw chargers in Spain:

[https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1125436_the-most- powerf...](https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1125436_the-most-powerful-dc- charging-station-in-europe-for-cars-can-deliver-400-kw)

You need to get out of the mindset of a propriety charging network. Ionity, FastNed, Repsol, Allego, etc. are building chargers based on the CCS standard and any EV that can use CCS can charge at them. You can fuel your ICE car at any fuel station and you should be able to charge your EV at any charging station, regardless of the brand of the charger or the car.

<comment><USER21> So, honestly, I really REALLY wish tesla would switch everything over to CCS (or at least provide CCS adapters).

That being said, it has far less to do with charge rate and far more to do with charger coverage.

[https://www.plugshare.com/](https://www.plugshare.com/)

If you compare CCS to Tesla supercharger, You'll see big empty spaces where there are no CCS chargers

That's what I mean when I say "It's better" not that they have faster charge rates, but rather their coverage is more complete. You'll often find supercharger locations will have 10 stalls for charging whereas the CCS charge stations will have 2 or 3.

As more electric cars become more prevalent, that's going to be a big problem for these public networks.

But, as a side note, even supporting up to 400kW doesn't really mean anything if the car can only accept 100kW. AFAIK, most cars (tesla included) are basically limited to a 1C charge rate. But, as far as capacity goes, no car (AFAIK) has surpassed tesla. Which means that 400kW is basically something you won't see until cars with 200 or 300 kWh batteries exist.

This is similar to how Tesla's 250 kW charger will only charge at that rate for about 10 to 15 minutes when the battery is at around 10->15% full.

<comment><USER20> To be fair, Tesla has some pretty nasty holes that are actually well covered by CCS. In South Carolina, I26 is completely uncovered by Tesla between Asheville and the coast. There are multiple CCS chargers along the same route.

I sometimes get the feeling that the people deciding locations in the southeast have never actually traveled between destinations there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't believe a word of this story.

<comment><USER24> care to explain why?

<comment><USER25> The outrageous distance required to make the leap from consumer vacuum cleaners to cars.

It's not unlike Parrot or DJI saying they're going to start making private jets. A certain skepticism was inevitable.

Brightly coloured plastic is not a sufficient USP for a car. And don't forget Apple failed in this space, with much bigger resources.

It's not even the product design, which was non-trivial, but not impossibly unlikely.

It's the logistics and operations - raw materials, parts sourcing and supply chain design, manufacturing and assembly, delivery, servicing, maintenance, spares, certification, dealer relationships, charging... And the testing required to get 200k miles out of the product.

My guess is the timescale didn't work. The car was probably at least a couple of years from production, and would have been overtaken by smarter and more interesting products from the established players.</comment></comment></comment>


Comprehensive look at how to apply for section 8 - <AUTHOR> http://www.section8programs.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> How to apply for section 8: Applications are always free at your local housing authority. Anyone that is low income and over 18 that meets HUD's median low income level, can apply. Most housing authorities post their section 8 application on their website.</comment>


What Makes a PDP-11/35 Tick? - <AUTHOR> https://loomcom.com/blog/0044_what_makes_a_pdp_11_35_tick.html <comment><USER3> Somewhat related, here's a 6502 compatible CPU made from a bunch of ttl logic chips: [https://c74project.com/](https://c74project.com/)

It even boots up in a VIC20, and can run at 20x the clock speed of the real 6502.

<comment><USER4> Neat. Makes me wonder if in 25 years, hobbyists will build a 64 bit Intel x86 CPU entirely in ttl logic, at 20x the clock speed.

<comment><USER5> A modern x86 CPU built out of TTL logic would be huge, slow and use lots of power. Comparing number of transistors:

\- 6502: 3500 transistors[1]

\- Intel Core i3: 382 million transistors,[2] or roughly 191 million transistors per core.

So a single core of a modern x86 processor built with TTL would have 55,000 times the number of chips of a TTL 6502. Most people wouldn't have the space, power or cooling capacity to run that.

Also, it would be much slower than a single chip x86 CPU, since it takes time for signals to travel between discrete chips, due to having to drive the capacitative loads of the I/O pins (and traverse a much larger distance). There's no way that TTL could run at gigahertz clock rates.

The only reason why a 6502 made of TTL can be faster than a real 6502 is that the 6502 was a very slow processor. Its clock speed was only 1 - <USER2> megahertz.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i3_micropro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i3_microprocessors)

<comment><USER6> Aren't most of the transistors in a modern CPU used for cache, not to mention additional processing units?

<comment><USER5> I accounted for the additional processing units by dividing the number of transistors by the number of processor cores on the i3 chip (there are two).

Since the question was asking about getting performance that's comparable to the original processor, we'd need to keep the cache.

<comment><USER7> I don't think you need to keep all the cache.The cpu will be much slower due to the slower chips and propagation delays so it will be much better matched to memory speeds. Which would make cache misses much less important.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why don't more languages use Structural Subtyping? - <AUTHOR> http://whiley.org/2010/12/13/why-not-use-structural-subtyping/ <comment><USER2> I wrote a language that did structural sub typing, and I found it kind of encouraged stupid errors. For instance,

function ZeroOut(Point2D p) { p.x = 0; p.y = 0; }

Now, Point3D p3d = { x = 1, y = 2, z = 3 };

ZeroOut(p3d) is poorly defined. It does what I ask, but not what I want it to do.

My intent and implementation did not match up.

This is one of the reasons I just gave up on static types and object orientated programming; it requires too much damn boiler plate code.</comment>


Down With Social - <AUTHOR> http://spencerfry.com/down-with-social

<comment><USER2> There needs to be a Godwin-esque term for "takes one data point and extrapolates it to the entire world".

So, for his 5-person company the social media role "just isn't" a full-time job. I doubt if marketing or HR are full-time jobs there, either.

But at a 1000-person company, they very much are. Tweeters demand and expect instant responses: look how out of the control the Amazon-hates-gays thing got because they took a day or two (fast by corp standards) to respond. You want an instant response from a big company you need a person or team constantly watching and able to get in touch with the people with the answers very quickly. (This fantasy of "everyone in the company can tweet!" doesn't work any more than "everyone in the company will blog on the world wide web!" did)

Similarly, he begs the question hugely with his shade-of-blue instance on analytics and metrics. Not everything that can't be quantified is valueless. It's hard to put a figure on how well-written an article is, for example, or how interesting a story is.

What you can do is measure them by their effects -- see how many readers a story gets, for instance. But even this is a bad path to take: it leads to celebrity gossip and link whoring.

Social media is similar. You might not provide the analytics Spencer wants, but equally you might not _want_ what analytics you do get.

<comment><USER3> > There needs to be a Godwin-esque term for "takes one data point and > extrapolates it to the entire world".

"Cum hoc ergo propter hoc" is not very Godwin-esque, but I think it'll work here.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure you can get away with any term on the internet where Cum is the first word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd be really interested in tales of how social media is working for people in real, measurable ways, _particularly_ for folks who do not sell to the usual suspects.

I'm of the impression that my market is on Facebook these days, or I would not have to spend so much time squashing cow requests from great-aunts, but all my attempts to use this to the benefit of my business have been crashing failures. I'm not sure if that is because my customers just aren't there yet, my implementation(s) of these campaigns has just universally sucked, or there is too much of a mental disconnect between Facebook and my problem domain for my users.

The success stories I read about are generally techy-focused or, ahem, perhaps more enthusiastic than is warranted by measured results.

<comment><USER6> My impression, after watching my brother who runs a chiropractic office in San Francisco which has had a heavy internet presence for years, spend thousands of dollars hiring kBuzz to create a Facebook site/campaign, is that Facebook users simply aren't in the mood to be marketed to in the traditional sense.

The mindsets that you have when you're checking up on your friends versus when you're searching for a product to buy, are almost mutually exclusive.

That's just my two cents. I also felt that his Facebook campaign relied heavily on give-a-way's which don't jibe with what people are looking for in a doctor, namely authority, trustworthiness, and warmth.

<comment><USER7> That's a pretty good description of the mindset and the focus on the user's intentions also explains why adwords does so well. You _intend_ to find something when you're searching and are receptive to ads that help you do that, whereas you _intend_ to check up on friends and have fun when you're on a social network. It's why ads that tap into the same intentions do well, like games, shopping, conferences, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This post is just wrong. He says that their site does not have social features - and he says it in a strangely proud manner. Have you TRIED social features and after comparing the two, discovered that the version without social features was better? The site in question looks like it would benefit from social features - if you are not motivated to add features, then don't retro- explain them as if it were a tested and proven hypothesis. You guys just don't WANT to add social features - done proper, it could male the site better.

Now, regarding the statement that social media is not useful - that's just not true. Used wrongly (follower chasing), it's wrong. If you treat social as a metric, then you are doing it wrong. Social is about people and relationships - an you don't need many followers to have great and profitable relationships using social media. It's really all about using these tools right, and Spencer does not seem to be doing so.

</comment><comment><USER9> This "social" thing is similar to so many societal changes occuring over time. It's introduced, picked up, overdone, there is an anti-movement and over time, it finds its way into regular life in an amount and a way that fits with people's lifestyle.

In internet speak, let's wait and see how social 2.0 comes about.

<comment><USER10> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic>

thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis

<comment><USER11> (In particular, that formulation fits with what most people would call the "Hegelian dialectic.")

<comment><USER10> Yep. I get the impression from chatting with people more up on philosophy that this model has fallen into disfavor but I seem to bump into real-world examples of it all the time.

<comment><USER12> It moved over to the other humanities domains. Every philosophical "criticism" (art, literary, feminist, media, cultural, etc) stems from Hegel. The latest trend is Zizek.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> People look at successful companies, see that they have a Facebook page and are posting on Twitter, and assume these things will make them successful too. It doesn't quite work that way round.

<comment><USER14> Cargo cult startups?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> He's right in that some sites should be 'social' and some shouldn't...

But for the life of me, I can't think of any sites that shouldn't be and are. That portfolio site that he says shouldn't be, isn't, and that's correct. It's not to talk about the art, it's to display it. The site correctly knows it's niche and it's acting appropriately.

However, if that site had been DeviantArt and tried to avoid having 'social' features, it would be devastatingly wrong.

</comment><comment><USER16> Contacting a person over social media is obviously of limited value. If you get a Tweet from a random business, you're going to ignore it. You know they're selling you something, and you have no idea who they are. You're not even sure they're not a spammer. At best, you'll "Like" it or Retweet with the message "this looks cool!". Whatever that's worth. But the message will never leave Twitter, and it will be gone within minutes.

This is bad. As Seth Godin points out in "Purple Cow," you want other people to remark about your product. A good blog post might spawn a dozen tweets, but a great Tweet that spawns a dozen blog posts is exceedingly rare. You want to communicate in mediums that encourage others to remark: conferences, tech talks, blog posts, and even aggregators like HN or Reddit. If you see a business mentioned by several of your friends, and on HN, and know company X uses their stuff, you're going to check them out because of your natural curiosity. If you provide good source material, people will go out of their way to mention you elsewhere. After all, there are Karma points at stake! But if you try to form a conversation in a social medium, its as awkward as walking up to the person in real life and announcing, "I'm great! Don't you think so?"

<comment><USER17> Agreed. It seems to me that a lot of people assume that they can just reach their customers. For example, I deliberately try to make it hard to get in touch with me. I don't click on most ads (since they are almost never what I'm looking for) and I never answer promotional e-mail (unless it is personally addressed to me at which point I reply with a no-thank-you). If a company tried to reach me with their product they'd have to infiltrate places like HN and that is hard to do. So maybe the approach should be the opposite. Companies should focus on building a product they can market to people who will buy it and who they can convince to buy it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Whenever I hear someone label social as "echo chambers in which nobody is listening", all I can think is that they must be doing it wrong. Seems to be a "tell" for when someone's awkwardly _using_ the medium as a write-only marketing channel, which explains why they aren't getting traction.

You get what you give.

<comment><USER19> Something of a counterpoint: <http://leoville.com/buzz-kill>

<comment><USER18> Leo's also interacting with people on Twitter daily. His engaging with people there on a one-to-one level seems to exactly disprove the idea that it's an echo chamber that no one's paying attention to.

By the same token, it should come as no surprise that something so mechanical that it was automated through a third party wouldn't be missed.

<comment><USER19> > His engaging with people there on a one-to-one level seems to exactly > disprove the idea that it's an echo chamber that no one's paying attention > to.

Except, you know, for the part where he calls it an echo chamber that no one is paying attention to: "It makes me feel like everything I've posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves."

<comment><USER18> Look at a Twitter search for @LeoLaporte to see all the people responding to him and/or trying to engage with him, or look at his Twitter stream to see him interacting with people himself. For that matter, look at all of the people commenting on his Buzz postings directly (e.g. [http://www.google.com/buzz/laporte/iGbULnn1UMH/Its-funny- bec...](http://www.google.com/buzz/laporte/iGbULnn1UMH/Its-funny-because-its- true))

None of that squares very well with the echo chamber claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _Tweeting, Tumblring, Facebooking, blogging, etc., are all routine tasks that can be performed by any person out there with basic English skills and a friendly personality._

Precisely...and this is why so many programmers, developers, executives and any other kind of "specialist" can justify hiring someone for this position.

<comment><USER21> Still, also on Twitter some people are way more popular than others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Am I the only one who believes blogging and email are part of social media?

Other than to troll traffic with controversial post why do so many bloggers make the assumption "that my niche situation / experience applies to everyone everywhere and reveals new fundamental laws that I must loudly proclaim in absolutest terms."

<comment><USER23> I don't think they believe that assumption, I think they believe that proclaiming assumptions, rules and absolutes in a very loud voice gets people to read your blog(and guess what? It works!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm confused by the suggestion that "social media marketing can't be measured" (and equally perplexed by the suggestion that banner ad effectiveness couldn't be monitored).

Social networks are more popular with marketers not because of their novelty (they've been around in different guises since before the web...) but because they are increasingly centralised on platforms with real names and relationship networks, which offer far more quantitative data on reactions to your product whose relationship to actual sales can be analysed.

And even if you're half-hearted it's a more efficient way to spam with the good old-fashioned coupon code as a measure of how many people that saw your messages circulating on social media networks chose to buy

Just because companies sometimes look at the wrong metrics doesn't mean they aren't there to be observed, or that the benefits aren't there just because "likes" turn out to be only loosely correlated with purchases. The only real losers in the social game are people building networks for people that won't come or won't buy.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd disagree that having a dedicated person doing the social media for a company doesn't add value, nothing measurable but I would be very surprised. It depends I guess if you are directly trying to shove something down peoples throats or acting as a channel of communication between an entity or product and potential customers.

I guess many of the most effective uses of social media are very hard measure in terms of a dollar value as you aren't getting people to directly go click on something and spend money. An example would a team I support in AFL, over a period of time they have build up a following on facebook from a large group of supporters, facilitating closer contact between the club and fans and an opportunity to give supporters a convenient place to discuss the club. It's pretty much impossible to measure how this increased interest and involvement from supporters assists their main products, memberships and game attendance, but I feel it is worth the investment.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Social media marketing can't be measured, at least not effectively. Spending money on social media marketing reminds me of the early 2000s, when you couldn't measure the effectiveness of banner ads. Everyone was spending on it without knowing what the outcome was."

This is very true. While tweeting and facebooking might be very cool, how can you tell it's worth the time you spend doing it without a MEASURABLE return? And if it's not resulting in sales is it worth doing?

</comment><comment><USER27> If he really believes this, why is he blogging about it?</comment>


PurritoBin: Ultra fast, minimalistic, encrypted command line paste-bin - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/PurritoBin/PurritoBin <comment><USER2> > openssl enc blablabla

 _Don 't_ use that line for encrypting stuff. There is no authentication and the IV is static. You're just asking for your secrets to be decrypted or modified without anyone noticing

<comment><USER3> The static IV is a brown M&M but not in itself fatal because this seems to use fresh random keys each time. If your keys end up re-used (NB don't fret about somehow choosing the same random key as somebody else that's astronomically unlikely, but _do_ fret about your choices not actually being random after all) then you're screwed anyway.

There's no obvious route to decrypt these messages without the secret key, though it's up to you to not send that key anywhere (HTTP clients don't send fragment identifiers as part of the HTTP request, but of course a _Javascript- enabled_ client can be instructed with Javascript to simply inspect the whole URL...)

The lack of authentication does mean you have no reason whatsoever to be sure this is the message intended. Regardless of IV anyone with control over the encrypted data gets to selectively alter the plaintext you'll decrypt even though they can't read it.

<comment><USER2> Indeed in that particular case since key is randomly generated it's ok to have a static IV. However I feel it's important to understand why it's ok in that case; in the general case, even though it's not technically required, it's always easier to have a random IV

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is neat and has potential. But I was somewhat arrested by this feature:

" _all pastes are cleared daily at 1:30am EST, so you have 12 hrs on average for your paste_ "

So, 12 hours on average... zero seconds if you're unlucky.

<comment><USER5> > zero seconds if you're unlucky.

Predictably unlucky by putting your paste in at 1:30 EST. But yeah, why not timestamp each record and give it a 24hr TTL?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > When you visit the html webpage the key is in the hash property of the > webpage, which is never sent to the server.

So it's only safe if you trust the server, which kind of defies the purpose?

<comment><USER4> The command line version actually allows you to "not trust the server". But thinking it through I agree that the in-browser version could get served a different JS that grabs the hash and sends it to the server. This would be easily detectable, but it does seem like problem with the concept.

<comment><USER7> > This would be easily detectable, but it does seem like problem with the > concept.

I think it would be better to describe it as detectable but not practically so.

There have been many javascript "bitcoin wallet generators" that defrauded users this way. In both cases where they were backdoored from day one and cases where they changed the code later (sometimes on the fly based on useragent and referrer!) the detection has always been from users noticing their coins were stolen.

Its simply too difficult to review a javascript application given the ubiquity of deeply nested superfluous dependencies and toolkits-- and too pointless given that the code can be selectively substituted any any time, so almost no one does the review.

<comment><USER4> You're right, too late to edit but the "easily" was wrong. More like "theoretically".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author calls this "command line" pastebin. It uses curl and openssl to encrypt and submit. However it uses a Javascript-enabled web broswer to do the retrieval and decryption. Can we use the command line to do the retrieval and decryption?

This way, we are not restricted to the ciphers supported by the "Crypto-JS" NodeJS package. Not meaning to take anything away from the venerable Crypto-JS library of "standards" including RC4 and TripleDES.

<comment><USER9> You have missed the "meow" command.

<comment><USER8> No, that is an incorrect assumption. The meow command does not decrypt data. The author is suggesting that users resort to using a web browser and Crypto- JS in order to decrypt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is encryption a popular requirement? I made (and thus prefer) [https://www.pastery.net/](https://www.pastery.net/), but nobody has asked me to add encryption, I assume that privacy (not having a list of pastes anywhere and deleting them from disk when they expire) is enough, at least for me.

<comment><USER3> I can think of one very good reason to have clients encrypt pastes for you as service provider:

If the pastes are encrypted by somebody else you simply have no idea what's inside them. You can easily find an expert who will explain to a jury, or a journalist, that you had no way to know it was an assassination plot / stolen bitcoin wallet / confession of child molestation. I'm sure you don't look (other people's business is quickly boring) but it may be difficult today to prove you didn't, because you could have.

But in terms of what I've used, in some tech jobs I've used in-house HTTPS pastebin sites. If we control the machine with the data in it then we get to decide what policies to apply, and if things go bad we know who (us) needs to fix that. In the last place I worked they used GitHub gists, so in principle Microsoft could snoop those and I'd have been uncomfortable seeing anything secret in them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://ix.io/](http://ix.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Also [https://0x0.st](https://0x0.st)

which has source available here: [https://github.com/mia-0/0x0](https://github.com/mia-0/0x0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is some scary shit. Don't use this.

<comment><USER13> Why's that?</comment></comment>