Is There a Smarter Path to Artificial Intelligence? Some Experts Hope So - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/technology/deep-learning-artificial-intelligence.html <comment><USER2> Maybe good AI requires a combination of symbolic approaches for the knowledge representation, deep parsing for NLP and semantics/discourse models, and machine learning for pattern recognition tasks of any kind.

The currently trendy "AI" looks more like massive data mining with powerful ML to me, that's very good for certain tasks but brings us nowhere near real AI. The knowledge representation problem has not yet been solved. In order to get even just a convincing simulation of AI, let alone real AI, we need a large common sense knowledge base / computational ontology.

One perhaps promising approach are geometric meaning theories/concept representations that allow for logical combinations. For example, Diederik Aerts works in this area. However, to be honest, I don't have the math skills to evaluate his approach. Generally speaking, logical modelling is too limited for good concept representations - especially classical 90s AI like in default reasoning and other nonmonotonic logics -, whereas traditionally geometric representations suffer from problems with representing logical inference and quantification. IMHO, that's a problem worth looking at. (Admittedly, I'm a bit biased towards symbolic AI like the people in this article.)

<comment><USER3> >> Generally speaking, logical modelling is too limited for good concept representations

In principle, First Order Logic and equivalent languages can represent anything that can be represented in natural language. The problem is that in practice it is very hard to transfer into a logic language all the knowledge you might need for a useful system.

In fact, this was one motivation for at least one branch of machine learning- the work from Ryszard Michalski, Claude Sammut, Ranan Banerji, Steven Vere, Brian Cohen and later rule-learners like Quinlan's decision tree learners and of course all the later work in Inductive Logic Programming by Plotkin, Shapiro, Muggleton etc. These are all rule-learning systems, that can avoid the knowledge acquisition bottleneck that probably did in for purely rule- based expert systems in the '90s (i.e. getting experts to transfer their knowledge into rules).

I rather agree that further progress in AI will require a, let's say, synchretistic approach- like I say in another comment, the obvious thing for me is to use deep learning for perception, logic for inference and probabilistic modelling to deal with the noisy world. There are some people working in that sort of direction, with different amounts of emphasis on each of the three approaches. For instance, Josh Tenenbaum at MIT, Evans and Grefenstette at DeepMind, Luc De Raedt at KU Leuven, Kristian Kersting at Dortmund, Lise Getoor also at MIT, Pedro Domingos at Washington, and many others.

Apologies for all the name-dropping without links. Let me know and I can provide them if required.

<comment><USER4> > In principle, First Order Logic and equivalent languages can represent > anything that can be represented in natural language.

Is there any proof about an existing non-leaky abstraction between natural language and First Order Logic (or logic in general)? Afaik there is none, but I might me wrong. For example (one amongst thousands): "I don't like you" can actually mean (and it often does) the exact opposite, and the same can be said of a simple statement like "I am ok" which also can mean the exact opposite. Natural language is a very hard problem.

<comment><USER3> Well, going by formal language theory, FOL is equivalent to a universal Turing machine, which is probably also the full expressive power of human language. Therefore, everything that can be said in human language should _in principle_ be possible to say in FOL. I don't think this is controversial.

Notice again that I don't think this is feasible in practice. At least not with hand-crafted FOL expressions and certainly not with existing technology.

I'm not sure what "non-leaky abstraction" means. Would formal language theory fit the bill?

<comment><USER5> Yeah but humans don't have a single consistent logical model for all reasoning - i believe that all my models can be in fol, but i don't believe that they can be unified in fol

<comment><USER6> Dennett aims to solve this using heterophenemenology:

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

In this framework, utterances can be studied without taking their truth value at face value.

<comment><USER5> Very interesting, I'll have to think _a lot_ about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lets rename "Deep learning" to "Statistical Compression". Its essentially distilled data from a dataset, limited by size of the neural network. There isn't anything "deep" there, the goal of NN is always towards overfitting the data.

<comment><USER8> _Lets rename "Deep learning" to "Statistical Compression"_

The previous name for what is now called "machine learning" was predictive statistics. But a better name for deep learning is "machine intuition" since it seems to work pretty well but can't be readily explained

<comment><USER7> > can't be readily explained

It works "pretty well" in well-defined complete-information domains like Go.

The training in that case is actually about improving the next dataset from which higher-quality patterns are extracted.

1.We have a NN that doesn't know how to play and makes random moves.

2.Blank slate dataset filled from random games.

3.NN learns to produce better games by weighting wins vs losses, making losing moves less likely and winning moves more likely.

4.NN produces slightly better dataset.

5.Repeat #3 until you have covered a large chunk of go openings and have pretty good estimation for move quality.

6.NN becomes the condensed statistic pattern data extracted from billions of games, able to estimate value of a move more accurately than humans.

Still in some rare cases it "condensed pattern database" will make mistakes due gaps in data or wrong correlation that NN hallucinated from its connections.

<comment><USER8> _works "pretty well" in well-defined complete-information domains like Go_

But no one can definitively say "my AI credit scoring system didn't decline his mortgage because he is black" and that's the explainability bar that needs to be passed.

Right now the state of it is "gut feel" with an unknown amount of unconscious bias.

<comment><USER9> Same as humans really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This discussion reminds me of NASA's CLIPS [1], particularly FuzzyCLIPS. I know that is basically a rule engine/expert system basis at its core, but FuzzyCLIPS was an interesting variant that try to do inference off of CLIPS rules and facts.

I always wondered if rules and facts can be seen as high-order abstractions that represent the low-level data that is encoded into neural nets. Would that mean that a system of symbolic logic, or rules and facts can in fact accomplish the same thing, just in a different, higher order way?

Then when you get into combining fuzzy with known, it's like different organs in the brain combining to serve different functions. When I know a rule and recall it, I believe it to be true and act immediately on it. When I'm not sure, I get fuzzy and try to deduce it. The more data and inputs I have about a given environmental condition, problem, subject, input, fact, etc., the easier it becomes to "reason" using fuzzy links to try to work out the answer. Unless I get information overload or the complexity exceeds one human brain's capability.

I've always felt that techniques are complementary and probably we employ multiple subsystems in our brains together to act like humans.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> One problem with ai (or general ai) is ai lives in a box, it experiences what we tell it to experience, unlike a child who learns organically with what it's exposed to randomly while trying to survive and thrive.

Perhaps the answer is to figure out all the things that make people tick via deep learning and other techniques, build one huge open api/db for vision/audio/movement in 3d planes/ethics/morality/understanding/discernment/language and then a more general ai could simply send out calls to api's of data already trained on specific foundations and create a 'whole' brain from multiple 'sub' brains (pre-learned open knowledge).

Unless we literally learn to clone the human brain technologically, in it's entirety.

I think another issue is not all working in AI are neuroscientists, and it may take understanding every mapped out facet of the human brain to come close to re-creating that in humans, it all can't be deep learning unfortunately, because that's not how we learn and we're the best guess solution to 'intelligence' as the only intelligent race (we know of) in the universe.

<comment><USER12> > it all can't be deep learning unfortunately, because that's not how we learn

If you could humor me, why can't it all be deep learning? It seems like a robust model for how we learn: we start with some priors (random weights), experience something that either confirms or negates those priors (sampling), and then adjust our priors based on that experience.

Of course there are a wide variety of architectures and the human brain is more sophisticated than one conv net. Our brains have on the order of 100 billion neurons and I believe the largest neural networks are on the order of 10's of millions. I would argue that a combination of better architectures and scale could simulate human intelligence.

<comment><USER13> > we start with some priors (random weights)

i dont think we start with random priors. We start with a set of priors that are geared for certain things - facial recognition, language etc. The environment then fine tunes them.

<comment><USER14> There is no way that the genome encodes synaptic layouts to such a detail as to specify an algorithmic prior. At best it specifies, loosely, the generic architecture of how many neurons, how many layers, how tightly folded, and where the inputs (senses) connect. We develop the same algorithms because we all start with the same priors in largely the same gestational and early infant environments.

<comment><USER15> Right, watch this genius horse learn to walk and navigate a 3d environments just hours after birth: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXKdYThau7c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXKdYThau7c)

No, we don't "learn" how to balance, how to identify objects and navigate 3d environments. All of that is highly codified in our DNA from hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Human babies, similar to kangaroos, are just born too early for those systems to have developed.

<comment><USER14> Is this sarcasm? You do know that babies (human or animal) exercise their muscles and gain body awareness during gestation, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why prolog? Why not PRISM or problog?

<comment><USER3> This is a valid question, I don't know why you (originally) got downvoted.

The answer I think, for the applications in industry at least, is that PRISM and other probabilistic programming langauges are not as developed as Prolog, a language that has been around for a good four decades now. Swi-Prolog in particular, is a free and open-source Prolog interpreter with an IDE, a graphical package and a veritable somrgasbord of libraries, including an http server, json and xml processing, encryption, interfaces to SQL and other databases etc etc etc. Swi is in active development, compatible with YAP- Prolog (currently the fastest implementation) very well supported and documented and has an active community.

It's a lot easier to setup a production environment in Prolog, especially using Swi, than in pretty much any other logic programming language, including the probabilistic logic programming ones.

Btw, I noticed that Kyndi list experience with Logtalk as a "plus" for one of their career opportunities (of course I looked :) which means that they're probably using Swi-Prolog.

<comment><USER16> But its not clear to me that encoding productions in source code adds any value over encoding them in the various other forms used by expert systems of old. Prolog also compels binary constraint satisfaction, recursive descent parsing, backtracking, and depth-first resolution — all undesirable constraints that are easily avoided using other fact representations or resolution engines.

Until the startup in question can make a compelling case for using prolog, much less avoiding the brittleness inherent in expert systems' resolution model, count me a disbeliever that their 'better way' really is.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't say that backtracking and depth first search (not resolution) are undesirable. Far as I'm concerned they're pragmatic choices that minimise the amount of resources necessary to perform resolution theorem-proving.

<comment><USER16> I would hate for my logic engine to be _required_ to backtrack every time a candidate interpretation was evaluated. AFAIK, prolog allows no alternative. Nor can it support the many powerful probabilistic extensions for rule-based reasoning that arose 25(?) years ago, nor the many improvements and variations on impasse resolution.

IMHO, the choice of prolog unnecessarily straitjackets a modern production system, making the engineering approach of this startup that much less powerful, flexible, or viable than it should be.

<comment><USER17> The SWI-Prolog ecosystem supports some probabilistic extensions such as [http://www.swi-prolog.org/pack/list?p=ccprism](http://www.swi- prolog.org/pack/list?p=ccprism), and [http://www.swi- prolog.org/pack/list?p=cplint](http://www.swi-prolog.org/pack/list?p=cplint).

Also, the (!/0) operator allows you to prune choice-points and control backtracking so that it is not unconditional. Many Prolog implementations support (->/2) operator, as well as ((*->)/2) -- the soft cut, for more fine- grained control. SWI has a nice library for even further control over backtracking as well: [http://www.swi- prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=solutionsequence...](http://www.swi- prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=solutionsequences).

Also good Prolog programmers usually are not overly concerned with backtracking, as they usually have strong knowledge of modes and determinism. See: [http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=modes](http://www.swi- prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=modes). This is mostly second-nature to a skilled Prolog developer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think it's obvious to anyone with experience in the field that Deep Learning etc. isn't a path to AGI nor an emulation of biological intelligence.

But it is one thing to know that the current path isn't leading us there and another thing entirely to know which path will.

After all it isn't even clear that emulating biological intelligence would be a wise approach - we didn't build the jumbo jet by copying the birds.

</comment><comment><USER19> Somehow the main article link is behind a paywall for me, but the mobile one is not: [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/technology/deep- learni...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/technology/deep-learning- artificial-intelligence.html)

(YMMV)

<comment><USER20> The New York Times and Washington Post both use a "fingerprint" method to identify unique users using things like your browser version and IP address. I like using Firefox nightly because a quick update to Nightly will make it appear that I'm a new user and will reset my free "monthly" article limit. That's also why switching browsers will work for some people, but not others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> >> If the reach of deep learning is limited, too much money and too many fine minds may now be devoted to it, said Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. "We run the risk of missing other important concepts and paths to advancing A.I.," he said.

I was very pleasantly surprised this year to see the Symbolic Machine Learning course at Imperial College London well-attended by about 30 students each session. The course basically teaches the principles and practice of Inductive Logic Programming, a set of algorithms and techniques that learn logic programs from relational data [1]. It is an optional course at Master's level so I was originally expecting to see maybe half a dozen people attending (I assisted with a couple of the sessions and followed the rest to brush up on my background).

I discussed my surprise with my supervisor who is one of the tutors on the course. His opinion was that logic-based AI is much closer to the material that most Computer Science students are familiar with, than statistical and probabilistic AI. It's true that, although many CS courses have started to include statistics and probabilities in their curriculum (the one at Imperial sure does) the mainstay of computer science are logic-based, discrete maths, complexity and computation theory and language theory. The jump from there to GOFAI is just a short hop; in many ways, the two fields are really one subject.

My intuition is that the boom in deep learning is partially being fed by disciples of fields well outside CS -maths, physics, bio-sciences etc- jumping on to the, well, bandwagon, motivated by the deep learning frenzy in industry and not so much by any interest in AI or even computers. At the same time, there is plenty of traditional CS talent waiting in the wings. It may be that a revisiting of the good old ways of knowledge representation and inference may not be completely out of the question [2].

Of course, there's always the chance that the students only came to the course because it had "machine learning" in its name :)

__________________

[1] More the point, both of the outputs and inputs of ILP are logic programs, i.e. binary relations. Most of the work uses Prolog but there also exist techniques to learn Answer Set Progarmming, Constraint Logic Progarmming and of course Probabilistic Logic Programming programs. In any case, the homoiconicity of logic programming languages allows a newly learned hypothesis to be immediately reused as data to learn a new concept, in a way that is probably impossible with statistical techniques. And of course, learning is extremly sample efficient and the resulting programs generalise vey well.

I bet you had never heard of any of this before now :)

[2] To be honest, my guess is that the way forward is a combination of the two approaches- perhaps, some monster combo of deep learning for sensory perception, logic for inference and probabilities for final decision making.

One way or another, I expect the AI researcher of the future will have to be a jack of all trades - and master of all of them at once. Learn to juggle.

</comment><comment><USER21> Deep learning has produced a lot of interesting results over the past few years, but we're still miles away from anything that even approximates human intelligence. When I hear someone like Elon Musk say something like "Autonomous vehicles can drive without Lidar because humans can drive without Lidar" it makes me cringe.

The human brain is unimaginably complex. Even if we created a neural network on the order of the 100 trillion or so connections in the central nervous system we would still not even be close. Each one of those synapse is a complex, constantly adapting chemical computer which is sensitive to the interaction of dozens of neurotransmitters. Gradient descent is to neural adaptation as minecraft is to photorealism.

The idea that artificial intelligence will be achieved by adding a few layers to a "deep" neural network, or by throwing more data at it is laughable.

<comment><USER22> >"Autonomous vehicles can drive without Lidar because humans can drive without Lidar"

I have another reason to hate this. If we could give humans lidar to make their driving even better why shouldn't we?

Why should we deny an AI extra senses that can help it do its job better than we can?

<comment><USER23> There is such a thing as being crippled by information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hardware enables software

<comment><USER18> Yeah - I remember reading about memristor based technology that aimed to better emulate neurons in the hardware back when I was in Uni.

That was almost 10 years ago though and I haven't heard much of it since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> We need a field of AI that makes sure all other fields of AI behave nicely.</comment>


A Survey of C and C++ Software Tools for Computational Science (2009) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.softeng.rl.ac.uk/media/uploads/publications/2010/03/c-c_tools_report.pdf

<comment><USER2> A reasonable, if a bit outdated list.

In an updated list, I would add the Eigen matrix library [1]. Eigen is a delight to work with, which is hard to say of many numerical codes. It simple to install (header only), has Matlab like functionality that is incredibly expressive, supports sparse matrices and solvers without external dependencies (although you can call out to MKL, SuperLU, etc if you have them installed), is vectorized (AVX support recently added), efficient through the intelligent use of template meta programming... I could go on for hours. Check it out!

[1] [http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/](http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/)

<comment><USER2> The Ninja [1] build system has also been a godsend for my recent projects. I measure significant speedups with Ninja vs. make -j# on my multicore machines. CMake is also able to spit out Ninja build systems, so transitioning to Ninja is essentially free if you are already using CMake, which is quite common for scientific and numerical codebases.

[1] [http://martine.github.io/ninja/](http://martine.github.io/ninja/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Five years ago is a bit long for software tools.

<comment><USER4> Not in scientific computing.</comment></comment>


Chevrolet Malibu vs Chevy Bel Air 1959 - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJrXViFfMGk

<comment><USER2> OK, so different security criteria were in effect then (how the Bel Air driver gets totally obliterated is quite terrifying), but I still wish new cars would at least have a hint of that old aesthetics. I am in the market for a small SUV and its one ugly design after another, e.g. check out the Honda CR-V from the back. Why does security/mpg/utility and beauty have to be either/or?</comment>


Coinbase Incident Post Mortem: June 25–26, 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.coinbase.com/incident-post-mortem-june-25-26-2019-1d08c1657cbc <comment><USER2> Lots of architectural and cultural problems IMO. Mixing different kinds of queries on the same cluster, no auto scaling on neither cluster nor web server, they seem to be okay with customer-impacting maintenance events (seriously?!), and their "fix" for an event caused by cache misses is to add more caching, which will make their system even harder to understand and predict, increasing the likelihood of more severe and byzantine failures.

It's often an unpopular opinion around here, but this is why I prefer simple hosted databases with limited query flexibility for high volume and high availability services (Firestore, DynamoDB, etc.). It's harder to be surprised by expensive queries, and you won't have to fiddle with failovers, auto scaling, caching, etc. Design your system around their constraints and it will have predictable performance and can more easily scale under unexpected load.

</comment><comment><USER3> > We have ensured that failovers for this cluster may only be initiated during > rare, scheduled downtime, when there will be no impact on customers.

I hope all their hardware crashes are also scheduled when there will be no impact... This seems a bit backwards - unless you constantly exercise the instantaneous failover, how do you know it works?

Edit: Actually it's worse - if you don't test the instant failover under a full load, how do you know it's still instant then?

<comment><USER4> 1: Sounds like they are saying that until the changes to remove the cluster out of the request path, failover cannot be trusted so the only immediate action that can be taken is to disable the automatic failover logic and prevent any live maintenance jobs needing to take it offline from running. Not unreasonable depending on the timeline to implement the changes when comparing the risk of a cluster killing hardware failure (assuming that there is at least a one node tolerance) vs behavior inside of your buy/sell pipeline being "undetermined"; no failover is probably a great way to keep the sprint work priority at the appropriate level.

2\. Loadtesting? Accurate end-to-end loadtests are painful to bootstrap from nothing and requires an environment that can be expensive, worth their weight in gold depending on how critical downtime is or if everything in your platform is pulling from the same resource pool(ie appliance based deployment).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suppose this is a good time to ask whether Coinbase thinks they are a bank, or a brokerage, or both.

If they are a bank, this isn't the end of the world. I've had online banking outages at "normal" banks. It is still a bad thing, but there are other ways I can get my money, like going to a branch.

On the other hand, if Coinbase is like a brokerage, this is really bad. And let's face it, most use of crypto is for investment and speculation purposes. For trades to fail for half an hour is really bad. If they are running this thing like a startup on MongoDB ( _seriously?_ ) I don't see how anyone who puts their money in can have any confidence of getting it back out.

<comment><USER6> > If they are running this thing like a startup on MongoDB (seriously?)

Do you base this on recent info (latest versions w/ Jepsen tests)? If so, what specifically makes Mongo a "startup" db?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Before the incident began, a background job performed an aggregation for a > large number of accounts, causing excessive reads into cache and cache > evictions for the cluster's storage engine cache.

I thought this was interesting. I think that caches can be so dangerous in an incident - suddenly operations that are almost always constant time are executing in a much different complexity, and worst is that this tends to happen when you get backups (since old, uncached data is suddenly pushing recent data out).

I think chaos engineering may be a good solution here, in lieu of better architectures - see what happens when you clear your cache every once in a while, how much your load changes, how your systems scale to deal with it.

</comment><comment><USER8> So basically price alerts lagged the system.

<comment><USER9> Completely shut it down. It's funny they DDoS'd themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> TLDR: MongoDB

<comment><USER11> Sounds like a maintenance error and an application design error that led to a flood of traffic. Doesn't sound MongoDB specific.

<comment><USER12> I don't think there is enough information to come to a conclusion here, but I doubt your proposed failure mode.

Based on my experience with largish data in mongo, my guess would be that the database size was >> than ram and, due at least in part to mongo's design, when the master failed over the memory state of the new master didn't have the working set present in RAM. This lead to a huge inrush of disk IO resulting in all sorts of bad until the RAM state sorted itself out.

<comment><USER13> My experience with mongo is the same. Works great, in RAM. As soon as you hit disk, it falls over completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > We take uptime very seriously, and we're working hard to support the > millions of customers that choose Coinbase to manage their cryptocurrency

No you don't.

\- If you did, you'd hire a DBA team and they would be familiar with the various jobs in your environment. But first your founders would have to have respect for Operations, which will take a dozen more major outages.

The other major Coinbase outages have also been database-related, namely missing indexes.

\- If you did, you wouldn't be doing major database (or other production) changes at 3 pm in the afternoon.

So let's cut to the chase. You prioritize features over Operations, and as a result guinea-pig your users. Just like any other SF startup. So just admit that to your end-users.

<comment><USER15> >you wouldn't be doing major database (or other production) changes at 3 pm in the afternoon.

Coinbase isn't dedicated to one timezone. They fully support tons of countries and have customers all over the place.

Things like this have to happen at some point, and there are benefits to doing stuff like this during "work" hours (like having all of your staff online and available)

<comment><USER16> > Things like this have to happen at some point, and there are benefits to > doing stuff like this during "work" hours (like having all of your staff > online and available)

That sounds like a benefit to Coinbase and not to any of their customers.

<comment><USER17> Eh, if Coinbase were the stock market and only open for trading for < 8 hours a day, I'd ding them, but it's always 3pm somewhere. 3pm PDT is 6pm EDT is 10pm UTC.

<comment><USER18> One can only hope that they know when their peak trading patterns generally are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great post mortem. Well detailed, good work ethic there.</comment>


U.S. Army And Lockheed Martin Complete Advanced Autonomous Convoy Demonstration - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20140130-912507.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe this is a video of the demonstration [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HseUNLP6q24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HseUNLP6q24)</comment>


Show HN: Evolve – Feel How Places Change - <AUTHOR> https://evolveapp.carrd.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here is a link to our product hunt page: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/evolve-4](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/evolve-4)</comment>


What drives writers to drink? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/28/what-drives-writers-to-drink-echo-spring-extract

<comment><USER2> I think what drives me to drink (and I don't drink nearly as much as I used to) is dreams of a better reality, in my case of a more considerate society, contrasted with my own inabilities to take part in realizing them. Alcohol (and drugs) make it easier to think uncritically, but with potentially terrible drawbacks. I'd speculate a successful pragmatist (or someone with level aspirations) will be much less likely to abuse themselves this way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty much the same thing that drives them to write, I imagine. Pain -> Art</comment>


GATTACA fears real: You can be denied life insurance based on a genetic test - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3055710/if-you-want-life-insurance-think-twice-before-getting-genetic-testing?utm_source=HN <comment><USER2> Please do not editorialize the titles of stories you submit here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment>


DNA Found to Have "Impossible" Telepathic Properties - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/02/dna-found-to-ha.html <comment><USER2> How to write a science article for the popular press:

\- Use lots of fantasy-novel words like "telepathic" or "teleportation".

\- In the first two paragraphs, put in lots of cheeseball phrases like "bizarre" and "Explanation: none" and "amazing" and "unrecognized by science" and "chemically impossible". Meanwhile, provide such a vague and fuzzy description of the actual phenomenon that the reader can barely tell what you're talking about.

\- Drop the name of the journal in paragraph three. Just the journal title, of course, not a citation or a hyperlink -- the whole thing is probably behind an incredibly expensive paywall, anyway. And it's not as if anyone cares about the data, or the methods, or the references, or the authors' motivation, or their interpretation, or their source of funding. We're just here to see a clueless journalist hyperventilate about how amazingly amazing it all is!

\- But do give the scientists a one-sentence quote, just to remind the readers that they exist.

\- No matter what the first ten paragraphs are about, the last paragraph is always about the impending cure for cancer.</comment>


Travelex being held to ransom by hackers - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51017852 <comment><USER2> This is probably a good reminder for everyone to ask how their customer data is backed up. Obvious your code is checked in to many git repos. Is your customer data on a server that automation can tamper with? If so, is a copy periodically written to a write-only destination that only a small number of people can manage, and then backed up to another location that a different group of people can manage? It probably also would not hurt to have a signed copy of a manifest that has checksums of all the files.

<comment><USER3> And a good reminder to get cash for your destination country before you get there where possible.

The hole in the wall forex place near me has wayyyyyy better rates than an airport's currency desk.

Practically anyone does.

<comment><USER4> I've found that typically the easiest and very close to the cheapest way to get foreign cash is to simply withdraw it from an ATM in the destination country. Always make sure that they're charging your bank in the local currency to avoid poor exchange rates. You'll usually pay a couple bucks at the ATM and a couple more at your bank (unless you use somebody like Charles Schwab), but even with a $5 surcharge, the market rate used usually beats out the rate you can get at a money changer or from your bank before you travel.

<comment><USER5> That's been my experience as well. Using credit cards when possible and withdrawing cash from ATMs are the two best ways to get a good exchange rate.

<comment><USER3> And then there are the American banks that charge foreign transaction fees on all foreign transactions, even those in US$.

Fuck you PNC.

<comment><USER5> Yeah. That's pretty frustrating. I always try to make sure that I have at least one card that doesn't have foreign transaction fees and I stick to that card I'm out of the country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Travelex website said it was down due to "planned maintenance". Is that not an outright lie, since it was obviously down for other reasons? Is there anything preventing a company from lying about something like this?

<comment><USER7> Travelex operates in Europe and is bound by GDPR regulations.

Travelex should have notified their supervisory authority within 72 hours of the breach, and are also required to notify end users in a timely manner.

[https://gdpr-info.eu/art-34-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-34-gdpr/)

According to the article, end users still have not been notified.

The lack of timely and proper notification as well as the misleading website information can be taken into account by the data protection authority in determining if the company should be fined, and the fines in question can be quite substantial.

<comment><USER8> > Travelex operates in Europe and is bound by GDPR regulations.

To clarify, it's not that Travelex is _located_ in or _operates_ in Europe, it's that they hold data of EU residents. If they operated in Zimbabwe yet held data on EU residents, they would still be bound by GDPR.

<comment><USER9> How could they enforce that? By barring EU residents from dealing with Travelex?

<comment><USER8> Well Travelex is a gigantic company, well-run (business-wise if not infosec- wise :P) and would comply with any imposed fines etc.

But your question is interesting. Imagine an onion service, theoretically perfectly shielded, that took Personal Data from it users and then sold it. Or even a normal Internet service, based in North Korea. GDPR would be unenforceable.

Ultimately we depend on the norms of international agreements, the desire and need to interoperate with global banking systems, etc.

<comment><USER10> Maybe someone should organize a campaign to flood the European GDPR Regulators with "our data _might_ have been compromised already or maybe in the future, and _might_ have contained data on EU residents, that _might_ be considered 'sensitive' We are - (or will be) - working on it, but just wanted to let you know _immediately_ so that you can't say we didn't warn you and slap us with a ga( _)-illion dollar /euro fine.." (_) "Ga" subject to change at any moment based on ECB forecasts, or how much we don't like you.

All kinds of companies, from all over the world (eu or not) flooding the GDPR headquarters in Brussels with "pre-emptory warnings". The purpose of course being to let them know how ridiculous (and possibly/probably arbitrary) their regulatory framework

And is anyone else annoyed that since GDPR started, _every single website_ that even so much as stores your username now has a "this website uses cookies" thing you have to click on to get rid of it? And if you _turn off cookies_ , you see this damn intrusive thing _every single time_. How is this making the web "safer"?! Can "we" (whatever that means) petition them to enact a standard where people can set a preference in their web browsers that says "I don't care unless it's financial/medical/physical-address data" It's a $#%$5# pain in the collective derriere.

I wouldn't be surprised if some websites are doing it as a matter of course, "just in case" \- like the "this product contains things that are known to cause cancer cause cancer to the state of California" \- applied to _everything_ \- in a catalog that sells _drill bits_ (okay, I suppose the couple of nano-grams of drill-bit-dust coming off it). Just to be safe (pun unintended).

<comment><USER11> > And is anyone else annoyed that since GDPR started, every single website > that even so much as stores your username now has a "this website uses > cookies" thing you have to click on to get rid of it? And if you turn off > cookies, you see this damn intrusive thing every single time.

I am indeed very annoyed that so many companies are throwing an online tantrum over the very reasonable requirements of GDPR. Most of those cookie banners aren't even GDPR-compliant because they don't let you opt-out of tracking and don't actually tell you what data they are tracking or who they are giving it to.

Just tell people what you are actually fucking doing with their data and let them opt-out of having their data collected. It's not that fucking hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most of the substantive reporting seems to point back to here: [https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252476283/Cyber- gangster...](https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252476283/Cyber-gangsters- demand-payment-from-Travelex-after-Sodinokibi-attack)

</comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/sodinokibi- ra...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/sodinokibi-ransomware- hits-travelex-demands-3-million/)

has information about this being specific ransomware.

One possible vector for the attack, from that article, is that apparently they had an unsecured pulse Secure VPN which has a known and quite nasty vulnerability, which is being actively exploited.

</comment><comment><USER14> Devastating for them I imagine. Website offline since 31st December, purposefully timed attack for maximum disruption I would imagine.

Looks like they had aspiration to IPO earlier in 2019, imagine this would now not be on the cards for a long time.

I wonder how much the ransom is for. It appears to be an enormously damaging attack - I wonder if paying it is the best option for their business at this stage, then follow the money.

<comment><USER15> The problem with paying it is that even if it works, and all the machines decrypt in a timely fashion, you have no idea if the attackers have left anything else in the network that they could use to enter again.

You might not even find out the original entry point, and stop others following. Also it will be expensive.

<comment><USER16> You still may never find the entry point if you don't recover the machines. Saudi Aramco and Maersk fell victim to similar ransomware attacks and practically had to start from scratch buying storage devices straight from manufacturers to get back online. NotPetya was so destructive it didn't leave behind much in the way of meaningful evidence. If you don't recover the encrypted data you probably won't recover evidence that points to patient zero anyway.

<comment><USER17> Episodes 53 and 54 of [https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/](https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/) are a good listen on this subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mini Ask HN: assuming you were designing a similar system, how would you design to prevent this happening? What would make your system "immune" from this sort of ransom attack so you could redeploy an be up and running again quickly?

Sure there are the basic security hygiene steps etc, but what architectural steps can you take to combat this risk?

I have some thoughts (e.g. append-only logs replicated in multiple places, everything 12-factor'd and containerised and ready to re-deploy at a moment's notice etc), but curious what prevailing wisdom is?

<comment><USER19> It's perhaps worth discussing the possibility that append-only logs replicated to multiple places may be likely to make the mishandling and theft of private data more likely, rather than less.

The only real form of true immunity to private information theft is to have no private information. It's impossible to lose what you do not have. Everything else is layered controls and policies to detect, alarm, contain, deter, and otherwise enable you to deal with attacks as they come. That's what good defenses looks like for most companies - defense in depth.

In practice, it often looks like aggressive patching policies and administrative controls coupled with careful monitoring, limited access to production, and regular audits. Security is a whole-enterprise problem, rather than a purely technical one that can be entirely addressed by code fixes.

<comment><USER15> Append-only logs replicated to multiple places is probably illegal under the GDPR. People have the right to demand all data about them is deleted, e.g. once they are no longer Travelex customers.

An interesting question is would you rather your bank leaked some personal information about you, or would you rather they lost all your information, and therefore all of your money?

<comment><USER19> Travelex, as a financial services company, is probably obligated to retain records. GDPR defers to these obligations.

A company outside finance might definitely have these problems!

<comment><USER11> They're obligated to retain some information for a certain period of time, but certainly not all information that they have and not forever.

<comment><USER19> You're absolutely right.

In this case, it means that an append-only data store with a fixed retention time might be a perfectly reasonable way to store certain kinds of records. This means that an append-only data store is not guaranteed to run up against deletion requirements in all cases.

In my opinion, this is particularly salient and worth being aware of when the conversation centers around a financial company, data storage, GDPR, and deletion requirements. It is possibly not always likely to be as simple as "use append-only" or "append-only likely to be illegal".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale I find it interesting that the article makes no mention of why the hack was possible in the first place and how good or bad the security practices of Travelex were.

Don't get me wrong, the criminals who conducted this should be tracked and brought to justice, but - to use an analogy - if your bank kept your hard- earned cash in a big pile next to the entrance door, wouldn't you feel a tad unhappy with the bank if it got stolen?

And shoudldn't proper reporting paint a slightly more rounded picture of what actually happened (as in: how easy was it for the hackers to circumvent security measures at Travelex?)

</comment><comment><USER20> We need to make paying ransoms to hackers illegal. If that results in the victimized companies going bankrupt then that is an acceptable consequence _pour encourager les autres_.

<comment><USER21> I think it has to come down to insurance-mandated security requirements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What are the odds that they've exposed the personal information of thousands of airport travellers who have exchanged foreign currencies with them?

<comment><USER8> Low in this case (read the CW article [https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252476283/Cyber- gangster...](https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252476283/Cyber-gangsters- demand-payment-from-Travelex-after-Sodinokibi-attack)). The "ransom note" seems generic and it implies they aren't sophisticated data thieves, just disruptors.

That said, there has been news of late that these kinds of attacks are indeed stepping up the value chain of stealing, selling, mining the data itself. But I would tend to think not, in this case, as the ransom note would have been much more severe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There is a very interesting wrinkle to this attack that I haven't heard of before, although I imagine this isn't the first attempt at it.

Unlike typical ransomware, the threat isn't "we will delete all this data," but "we will sell all this data, and you will amass crippling fines under the GDPR regulations."

<comment><USER24> Yeah, this is a relatively recent evolution of ransomware schemes: [https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/ransomware-gangs-now- out...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/12/ransomware-gangs-now-outing- victim-businesses-that-dont-pay-up/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> So the "camp out in airports and rip off naive travelers" company has bad tech? Shocking.

<comment><USER26> That's a minor portion of their business, mostly to keep the name out there. The current business is in large B2B F/X transactions - friends of mine worked at a boutique firm in the midwest and both coasts (HIGHLY profitable) that was acquired by them in the 2000s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> No they are not "weaponising GDPR", they are simply making it more obvious which companies aren't protecting your data.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have no sympathy for them. They've charged extortionate exchange rates to travellers for decades, so now they get themselves extorted by hackers? Karmic justice.</comment>


Indian government drops plan to censor the internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.indianexpress.com/news/No-question-of-Internet-censorship--assures-govt/888443/

<comment><USER2> "How does social media use its own platform to ensure that the voice of the _marginalized_ is heard by government, which otherwise sometimes is not heard"

marginalized? Those are the millions who _don't_ have access to the internet, let alone social networks (let alone English proficiency...). I don't know what they are upto, but usually what they (Indian Politicians) say can never be taken at face value.

</comment><comment><USER3> One less country MPAA can't use as an example to pass SOPA.

</comment><comment> johnx123-up [http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.indianexpress.com...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.indianexpress.com/news/no- question-of-internet-censorship-assures-govt/888443/0) for clutter-free reading

<comment> mike-cardwell Hmm. It seems ViewText can't handle simple character set conversion.

It also doesn't decode html entities in anchor tag href's before fixing them up and uri escaping them for it's redirector, breaking every single external link on my website. That's ok though, I blocked that site from accessing mine ages ago for this reason, and because they didn't fix it when I reported it, and because they fake their robots UA to be Internet Explorer, and because they ignore robots.txt.

EDIT: Regarding the charset conversion issue. This doesn't really show up on IE and Chrome. Basically, there are numerous places where there are double quotes in the original article. When viewing the viewtext version with Firefox, the characters are mangled. In Chrome and IE, they are simply not displayed. The original page is ISO-8859-1 and is described as such by both the HTTP response header, and the Content-type meta tag in the head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's pretty quick. I'm willing to bet, the future of Indian lies in the online growth, the Internet and digital is the way to way.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but that's not a tough thing to guess, it holds true for any developing country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Their plans are dropped? So can someone in India confirm that Savita Bhabi and other censored sites are back online?

<comment><USER7> I can confirm that atleast the restriction on Undernet IRC (us.undernet.org:6667) is _still active_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> China could learn a lot from India</comment>


Prison phones are a predatory monopoly – One family fought back and won - some-guy http://www.theverge.com/a/prison-phone-call-cost-martha-wright-v-corrections-corporation-america <comment><AUTHOR> While I find the conversations in here interesting from an economics perspective they are not solutions to the real problem. This is not a function of cost between inmate, provider, and family alone. These phone systems have a real and tangible cost on society as a whole. An enormous body of research [1] showing that offenders with better/more familial contact while incarcerated have vastly lower recidivism rates.

This is literally companies causing harm (and not just economic) harm to societies citizens at large. I respect jlafon's point of view but I can't agree. The fact that a system you create is difficult to adminster should not mean that the cost of dealing with it should be passed along to your 'customers' (gagging as I use that word). When a group of people chooses to put others in a position of limited power they have a responsibility to protect them from harm. Treating prisoners as a revenue stream at all is immoral and I believe unconstitutional. The argument that they should pay or do anything to contribute to their imprisonment is vapid and ugly. If we aren't willing to shoulder the burden of imprisoning them then we shouldn't do it. We absolutely should not be charging them or their families usury amounts of money to satisfy rules and situations we created.

Letting prisoners use the phone is labor intensive? Why? because you created rules and a system where it is. To spin it as more complicated or containing 'reasons' is post hoc justification nonsense and should be treated as such.

[1] Summarized here: [https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/apr/15/lowering- re...](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/apr/15/lowering-recidivism- through-family-communication/)

<comment><USER2> > Treating prisoners as a revenue stream at all is immoral and I believe > unconstitutional.

Doubtful. The Constitution makes it clear that slavery is illegal... Except in the case of prisoners.

If you can subject prisoners to forced labor, gouging them on phone calls seems a small step.

<comment><USER3> I'm certainly not a constitutional lawyer, so I ask out of curiosity: has the 13th amendment been interpreted this way?

I feel that there's a difference between slavery as punishment (i.e. being explicitly sentenced to slavery) vs. slavery incidental to punishment (i.e. being explicitly sentenced to imprisonment, and then the private prison deciding to enslave you during your sentence).

<comment><USER2> Incidental, but morally, there is no difference. Public prisons also take advantage of this clause.

And yes, this has absolutely been interpreted in this way. Unpaid, or grossly underpaid prison labour is extremely common in the US.

<comment><USER4> That is true about unpaid labour, but my understanding was that this isn't forced on to the prisoners. I understand that prisoners are given the option to work, and reap various benefits in return (modest pay, extra hours outdoors in the case of road crews, and potentially leniancy for "good behavior" at parole hearings).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why have we decided that the way to treat criminals is to systematically destroy their social support system for profit? This sounds like a terrible idea, and a direction that doesn't seem to be improving the American prison system in the least.

<comment><USER6> Because American voters--collectively, not individually--are bad people. Our criminal justice system, moreso than other parts of our government, is responsive to the will of the people. And the current state of it is a product of the profound moral failure on the part of the populace.

If you'd rather blame for-profit prisons, think about this. How far removed are we from lynchings, throwing black people into jail on zero evidence, etc? There were no for-profit prisons when states were systematically abusing the rights of the accused--particularly minorities, just 40-50 years ago.

<comment><USER7> We've been ready to end the War On Drugs for a decade - coincidentally the very thing responsible for a majority of our prison ills.

<comment><USER6> Who is "we?" The vast majority of the population thinks everything except marijuana should be illegal. Also, the drug war is not responsible for the majority of our prison ills. The most egregious stuff (three strikes laws) has nothing to do with the drug war.

<comment><USER7> Not true, by a wide margin.

[http://www.people-press.org/2014/04/02/americas-new-drug- pol...](http://www.people-press.org/2014/04/02/americas-new-drug-policy- landscape/)

As for three strikes, drug possession was one of the top offenses for which it is applied.

[http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_strikes_102005.htm](http://www.lao.ca.gov/2005/3_strikes/3_strikes_102005.htm)

"Possession of controlled substances alone made up 12 percent of the state's [CA] total three strikes population at the time — drug crimes in general accounted for 23 percent."

[http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/three-strikes-law-drug- addict...](http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/three-strikes-law-drug- addiction_n_1779154.html)

<comment><USER6> Americans don't want to give jail time for _possession_. But they still want to keep those drugs (besides pot) illegal by huge margins: [http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/drug-legalization- poll_n_5162...](http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/drug-legalization- poll_n_5162357.html). I haven't seen any polls asking about trafficking specifically, but I think it's fair to take those two data points to mean people want to target traffickers not users. But that is what the vast majority of the drug war is about. 99.8% of federal prisoners incarcerated for drug offenses were incarcerated for trafficking, not simple possession.

Your California stats are misleading. First, you said that drugs are responsible for the "majority" of our prison ills, but your chart shows that 77% of people sentenced for a second or third strike are for property or personal crimes, or gun possession.

Second, California is unusual in that the third strike can be anything (first two must be violent felonies). So people are in for drug possession, but also for other minor things like larceny. In most states, drug possession doesn't trigger the three strikes rule at all.

In any case, three strikes rules weren't created because of the drug war, even in California. It was a response to a guy who murdered a girl. And note that in several states, these rules passed by public referendum with huge margins less than 25 years ago.

<comment><USER8> > Second, California is unusual in that the third strike can be anything > (first two must be violent felonies).

No, not since the passage of Proposition 36 in 2012: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- strikes_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law) (see "California")

<comment><USER6> Right. But the data he's sourced to is from 2005.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for sharing. I'm glad this is staying on our radar lately.

There was another link discussed here recently ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11648361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11648361)) about how these exorbitant prison phone calls are being replaced with video calls- and ONLY video calls. In the linked article we have this quote: _The alternative to high rates isn't lower rates, the association has suggested — the alternative is that phone calls in jails will be done away with entirely. "Absent these commissions," association president Larry D. Amerson wrote in a comment to the FCC, "counties would need to either increase taxes for the system or jails could potentially cease to provide inmates with this service."_ So either continue to support this monopoly, or don't speak to or see your brother/cousin/mom in jail at all.

Here in New Jersey where I live, as of yesterday you can no longer visit an inmate in a couple of our prisons, in person. Instead, you can pay Securus for a video connection to the inmate you'd like to speak with. I think if more people who were not directly connected to the System via a friend, family member, or personal experience were aware of what's going on, they would be appalled. Instead we conveniently pretend this stuff isn't happening.

From the linked article: _[Securus '] Smith defended his company's profits on many of the same grounds other inmate phone companies do. The contracts, he says, are a source of funds for crucial corrections services like health care. "It's really a public policy issue," Smith says. Securus also provides security services, recording calls sent through its system and intervening to break up any illegal plots that it detects. "We really feel like we perform kind of a noble service for society," he says._

What he's not saying is that local municipalities can also get a kickback from the money paid to contact prisoners. So not only does it fund healthcare within the prison system (which of course are also increasingly privatized, so how much of that money do you think can be claimed as profit by the company running the prison), but to fix potholes etc in the local town.. on paper, at least.

What I wish these stories left me with is what to do next. Who do I call, petition, or vote for to get this changed?

<comment><USER10> Assuming your network is as socially enlightened as you, I would try to figure out if this is happening in your state and contact local government officials about your concerns. Done in a group, it could be a fun social activity to go to a town hall meeting to voice your concerns in public. Afterwards, reward yourselves with a drink for getting out of the house to show your support for good government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you give out monopolies, then this is what happens. Here's a simple idea to fix this: capitalism.

Mandate at least two providers at each prison and let them charge whatever they want. Let them race to the bottom so you get the same cheap voip rates the rest of the country has access to.

Oh and if they collude on pricing, throw the management in the same prison.

I bet they'd also start competing on the features the prison cares about too. Like tracking who's calling who, speech to text transcripts, and service levels.

Problem with this approach is that it doesn't allow for the cronyism that is ripe in this type of industry.

<comment><USER12> Two wouldn't be enough: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duopoly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duopoly)

<comment><USER13> Neither is three:

[https://i.imgur.com/NVsdNIE.png](https://i.imgur.com/NVsdNIE.png)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/4e9yjw/competition_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/4e9yjw/competition_in_canada_a_comparison_of_canadian/)

<comment><USER14> It would seem that EU Regulators agree with this sentiment:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36266924](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36266924)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Our local jail charges for personal visitation, you get 2 visits per week free but can pay a "nominal" fee to stream additional conversations over the Web. Let's just say that fee was ridiculous. I can't find the link for it was $30 for 15 minutes I think.

As a former foster parent that was just trying to connect with the birth parents while they awaited trial, yeah those prices suck.

But hey, who cares about people accused of crimes, right? That's the American way.

<comment><USER16> Some jails have tried to eliminate all in-person visitation entirely and move to a system where you'd still have to physically go to a jail, but they'd use video streaming, and naturally charge you for the "service."

Their stated reasoning is, drugs, or similar. Even though prisoners are already searched after the visitation, and guards are a common conduit for illegal drugs in jail.

The whole criminal justify industry in the US is sick. Seriously needs a top to bottom shakeup.

<comment><USER17> Honestly refusing in person visits by default should be outlawed on the grounds of being cruel and unusual punishment. But America loves to be cruel, so I doubt modern courts would establish a Constitutional right to in-person visitation.

Too bad, because imho video-only visitation is a human rights abuse.

<comment><USER18> Last year the Supreme Court affirmed a religious right to a beard:

[http://www.npr.org/2015/01/21/378774424/supreme-court- rules-...](http://www.npr.org/2015/01/21/378774424/supreme-court-rules- on-2-prisoner-rights-cases)

(I searched for "supreme court prisoner rights")

I'm not lampooning the religious right to a beard, I'm suggesting that the atmosphere in the courts may be better than you think.

<comment><USER19> A great number of Americans seem to think religion is the cure for crime, so that's not a surprise. Consider instead how well mental health, education, and social support fare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> First of all, I'm not defending what is obviously predatory. However, there is more involved then what you might think at first glance. Right or wrong, correctional facilities have reasons to discourage phone calls (context: I put myself through college working at a maximum security prison). Calls are supposed to be monitored (usually done manually) to prevent criminal business from being done on prison phones - and there are never enough people to listen to all calls. There are never enough phones either, which frequently causes tension between inmates using phones and those waiting for them. In higher security levels phones are labor intensive. An officer has to escort a (potentially dangerous) person from their cell to the phone, and stand there for the duration of the call. And to the article's point, it's such a problem that prepaid phone cards are a form of currency on the inside.

<comment><USER21> They record the phone calls. It seems that if there was an incident it is trivial to review phone calls and bring evidence to bear against the guilty parties.

<comment><USER22> Or someone like Google could be doing this as a service? Isn't GOOG411 how they captured enough voice data to train their neural nets for Google Now?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think this is a very unique article from a web design perspective. The counter on the left hand side, indicating the time you've been reading, and how much your charges would be if you spent that time on the phone is genius. It really hammers in the point of how unethical this practice is.

<comment><USER24> True, except it was distracting to the point that I couldn't finish reading the article...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What a horrible thing to do to innocent American families. Bad enough their loved ones have fucked up mightily enough to be incarcerated but now the state gouges the hell out them just to talk to each other.

This is not how a government should treat its people.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's getting worse. Prisons are now forcing inmates and families to use video visitation, eliminating all in person visits.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/video-visitation-is-ending- in...](http://www.businessinsider.com/video-visitation-is-ending-in-person- prison-visits-2016-5)

</comment><comment><USER27> Think what a thrashing, including calling out the founders and management, companies like uBeam and Theranos get here. Ghouls like prison telcos are 100X worse. Where do we get people who run these operations? Who are they and what makes them tick?

<comment><USER9> They are part of a cycle of private wealth creation that includes, but is not limited to, the following elements:

1\. Local politicians "save money" by outsourcing management of prisons in their districts to private companies

2\. Contracts awarded for services within these systems have kickbacks which direct money for services back to the municipalities

3\. States award contracts to build new prisons in towns, who are told that jobs will be created for their towns, plus the aforementioned kickbacks

4\. Now that the prisons are built, they have to be filled. So the local police departments get to work arresting people to fill them up. Judges, lawyers, sherrif's departments, etc justify their own existences by meeting arrest quotas, being "tough on crime," etc., get promoted up their respective ladders until they're in positions of power to keep the cycle going.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I shared an office with a guy who did a couple years for white collar crime. He got out and started a business that placed local voip numbers near prisons then patched the calls through to long distance numbers. He charged way less than the prisons were charging for long distance calls.

He was making a ton of money last I talked to him.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hillary (and other politicians on both sides, from local to federal) get a ton of for-profit prison money. No wonder.

EDIT: VICE did a piece in 2014 on people getting locked up because they could not pay their parole fees. Yes, debtors' prison, where parolees pay (or not) for the privilege of freedom. [https://news.vice.com/article/debtors-prisons- are-taking-the...](https://news.vice.com/article/debtors-prisons-are-taking- the-us-back-to-the-19th-century)

</comment><comment><USER30> Can't we just let them have cell phones and let law enforcement tap them by getting a warrant?

</comment><comment><USER31> [https://www.aclu.org/files/images/asset_upload_file769_25745...](https://www.aclu.org/files/images/asset_upload_file769_25745.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER32> Seems most of mankind's daily labors are inclined toward predatory monopoly these days; either creating their own or wage-slaving toward preserving another's. One laughs with today's comedians as they parody the manners of yesteryear, those musty, pinkies-out concepts of gentlemen and gentlewomen, that gullible faith in the golden rule, yet one's teeth are soon sent gnashing when those many insurances which buttress men's insolence are found to be effected by the same selfish, hard-hearted men as oneself.

Rather than Thoreau's "quiet desperation", the masses instead seem bent toward lives of "clawing desperation".

</comment><comment><USER33> Is there a good reason prisoners not to have 24/7 internet access and phones for free. Even if monitored.

Hell - give them a free WoW or LoL accounts and they may forget to come out of prison once their term is over.

</comment><comment><USER34> something about "prison" and "winning" used in the same sentence had me immediately peg this article as TLDR...</comment>


J.K. Rowling's Plot Spreadsheets - <AUTHOR> http://www.subtraction.com/2010/10/21/jk-rowlings-plot-diagrams <comment><USER2> To work on paper is a pretty standard way of working for creative people, I think.

I'm working on a digital comic project with a particular direction twist (more on this later). My friend is the creator of the comic and the director. I made a software for the creation of the content of our app and he could use it for the entire process. Still, he uses special sheets he printed for the purpose. I will modify the software to look more like those sheets he created, but they will remain his main medium to work on.

And when I'm developing something, I like to to grab a pen and to think on paper from time to time, despite all the software designed with this purpose in mind.

<comment><USER3> > To work on paper is a pretty standard way of working for creative people, I > think.

For the 180 degree opposite way of doing it, check out Stephen King's "On Writing" - he creates characters, fleshes out their personality, puts them in weird situations, and lets them figure it out. It's why he's gotten so many books out, though you do some serious deus ex machina type events in his works, as well as interesting books just petering out and dying after a strong start. But hey, he's shipped _a lot_ of books, and some of them are pretty stories. I'd definitely recommend On Writing for anyone who wants to do any serious amount of writing.

<comment><USER4> Are you suggesting that his characters write themselves?

<comment><USER5> That's kind of what King suggests. He recommends starting with life-like characters and an interesting setting, and seeing where the story takes you.

The result is that some of his characters and settings are more interesting than his plots. Example: later Dark Tower series.

<comment><USER6> "Novel geneticist" (= looking in detail how literary text/novel are produced cf. link) P.M. de Biasi distinguishes between "with Plan" literature and "au fil de la plume". 1st example is Flaubert (Many Plans and scenarii before "writing" the text) vs Stendhal eg. La Chartreuse de Parme: 3 weeks to write without detailed plan. <http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14021.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually want to do this in reverse. I want to do a careful read of the Baroque Cycle trilogy by Neal Stephenson and make a note of the location of every major character for as fine of a time period I can. Then I want to load it all into Timeline (<http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/>)

<comment><USER8> I've done this for the wheel of time.. Satisfying but a _lot_ of work. (Hoping to put it properly online in the next week or so -- having some hardware issues on my development system)

<comment><USER9> I'm upvoting you just for the crazy amount of work that you've put into that. It's hard enough just keeping things straight to a 1st approximation when reading the books, meticulously keeping track of _every_ character is pretty intense.

<comment><USER8> Oh thanks but I don't deserve it. Compared to some of the sites like enc-wot -- mine is just a hobby. It just tracks things at a Point-of-View level. I did it basically to try and keep track of what the hell was going on before Gathering Storm came out.. wotsummary.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Regarding using pen and paper, for certain tasks, I'm never fully satisfied with either working on paper or doing it on a computer.

For things like UI, mapping out the basic architecture of an app, on one hand I find that pen and paper is much faster and more convenient: you can scribble notes here and there, easily scratch out parts, draw arrows; but on the other, I wish it were more digital to reorganize things: make more room here, duplicate this, move that...

With software, if I want to add a small note, I need to select a different font or a different tool, click where I want to put it... On paper, I can just write smaller.

But on paper, if I realize that I need to add an element in between two others, the best way is often times to start all over again,

So neither are perfect, but maybe some touch interfaces will get us there.

<comment><USER11> A nice middle ground is a whiteboard + a digital camera. That sort of plot list I would draft in a whiteboard, first the global, then the specifics, and later worry about making sense of it in excel or something.

<comment><USER12> >A nice middle ground is a whiteboard + a digital camera.

Or perhaps a digital whiteboard using the Wii adaptation, a cheap projector, computer and an IR pen?

<http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/> <http://www.google.com/search?q=wii+whiteboard>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> JRR Tolkien worked this way as well. He wrote out all the days for the books and where everyone was, even down to what phase of the lunar cycle the day was. There was actually an exhibit of Tolkien's notes that toured around for a bit, and they looked not entirely unlike what Rowling created. For reference, the collection was from Marquette University. (<http://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/tolkien.shtml>)

</comment><comment><USER14> Can we please change the story link to [http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/10/08/potd-jk-rowlings-plot- sp...](http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/10/08/potd-jk-rowlings-plot-spreadsheet- for-harry-potter-and-the-order-of-the-phoenix/) subtraction.com adds nothing.</comment>


SmileNLP is open sourced as part of SmileMiner - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/haifengl/smile/tree/master/SmileNLP

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not a bloated NLP library. Instead, it focuses on basic stuffs such as sentence splitter and tokenizer, bigram statistical test, phrase extractor, keyword extractor, stemmer, POS tagging, relevance ranking. Combined with various machine learning algorithms e.g. HMM, maxent, CRF, etc., you can work out advanced applications such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, etc.</comment>


Yahoo Acquires Gaming Infrastructure Startup PlayerScale - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/23/yahoo-acquires-gaming-platform-startup-playerscale/ <comment><USER2> I'm trying to find the thread that binds all of this recent M and A activity together. There have been so many acquisitions of companies big and small, wrapping your head around Yahoo's global strategy is beginning to look like Google's.

Does Yahoo have the engineering prowess to pull off this Multi-faceted hydra strategy? Do they have the management?

It seems news will play a very prominent role in the new Yahoo, but, to my knowledge, this is the first gaming acquisition in a long time.

Whatever happens, perhaps the most interesting thing is that we're talking about Yahoo again. 3-5 years ago many of us had written them off, but at least for the time being they've caught my attention.

<comment><USER3> Only common thread is both target young audiences

<comment><USER4> CEO bonus is probably tied to "increase 16-24yr old audience by 100%" and she is doing that as every other yahoo ceo would have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Man, they are on some buying binge. Unfortunately for them, I don't think it's possible to buy innovation or relevance. Those things have to come from within and permeate the entire culture of the firm - and Yahoo just doesn't have it right now.

<comment><USER6> Companies like Cisco seem built around buying all of their innovation:

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

They seem to be doing well.

[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/indus...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/industries/209/index.html)

<comment><USER2> The culture of Cisco M&A is unlike anything seen in Silicon Valley.

Cisco actively encourages senior engineering employees to leave the company, start new ventures and return as leaders in the M&A process. It's not fair to compare Yahoo to Cisco when Cisco invests tremendous amounts of effort, time and money into these ventures to grow and nurture them (recent example: Meraki) until they can be reabsorbed into the Mothership.

Yahoo on the other hand is buying a bunch of companies that it knows only by reputation. Yahoo might be successful, but not for the same reasons that Cisco is successful. It's just a very different culture.

<comment><USER5> Exactly - some companies can pull off this kind of acquisition. It's entirely a corporate culture thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm also curious for what Yahoo was going for here. Playerscale (which only product really so far is Player.io) is actually something I've worked with in the past. And it's a fairly strong idea - an easy to use but versatile server platform for multiplayer games (along with client libraries of course). The only problem was that it wasn't that well executed. Long downtimes for no explained reason, large-functionality gaps that had to be hacked around, overly simplified concepts that limit usability, large security holes, etc.

So it will be interesting to see where Yahoo goes with this.

<comment><USER8> Hey! I'd love to talk to you about your experience with Player.io (I'm building something similar). I couldn't find your email, but mine is in my profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I want to see where this is going and try to work out if all these acquisitions are part of the new yahoo or just some big PR stunt, though that's very unlikely yahoo has loads of money and they've caugh the attention of many. If new yahoo is going to actually do something innovative with these new products I can't wait to see what it's going to be.

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems like Yahoo has decided cash in the bank is pointless, it's an interesting gamble to take. At the very least there's a lot of conversation surrounding Yahoo, instead of people claiming their impending death.

<comment><USER11> For a company that is in decline a lot of cash in the bank is pointless. Yahoo was in decline. So you can either have nice balance sheets while others chip away at your core business or you can spend your money either rebuilding your core or extending it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I read this I tried searching for PlayerScale on the web. Didn't find much. Anyone have a link to their website or more info on this company?

<comment><USER13> they're most known for their main product: player.io. here's a link to that: <http://playerio.com/></comment></comment>


Why Professors Are Writing Crap That Nobody Reads - <AUTHOR> http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/why-professors-are-writing-crap-nobody-reads <comment><USER2> Anecdotally, this does sound about right, and it can be frustrating for the academics too. Still, the title is brash, and ten readers completely (and I don't know how that was determined) reading a 25-page journal publication is not insignificant if they are in the same highly specific area and go on to collaborate on useful research.</comment>


Jay Walker's Library - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/ff_walker?currentPage=all

<comment><USER2> Full article without pagination:

[http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/ff_walker...](http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/ff_walker?currentPage=all)

</comment><comment><USER3> My library has a Darwin bobblehead, a 4-bit relais computer, a rock from the top of Vesuvius, a small meteor, a 1kg pure tungsten cylinder and a magnesium one of the same size, some robot arms, a variety of Game&Watches, a Sterling engine and a steam engine, and a 1 cm scale cube. It all feels kind of inadequate now (on the other hand, that's enough crap already!).

<comment><USER4> Mine has books.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but then those are implied. > 2500 last time I counted.

<comment><USER5> Impressive. Have you read all of them (that would be even more impressive)? I know a lot of people with incredible libraries in their homes but they don't read any of the books the have...

<comment><USER3> It's quite an unordered mess, so it looks less impressive than it sounds! I'm just getting old and have been buying for a while.

I think it is compensation for my _awful_ memory - I read books with pencil in hand, underlining and making notes in the margins, so I like to keep the books around after I have read them. Also libraries here often don't carry the books I want to read (or they're translated), so buying makes sense for me. I don't do this with novels of course.

Lately I have been thinking I should make notes on the computer instead, like Derek Sivers does, e.g. <http://sivers.org/book/ArtOfProfitability>

To finally answer your question, I have a stack of about 250 books I haven't read yet. Some of them I'll probably never read - I once bought the 10 best poker books, but I just can't get interested in the subject anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had the great pleasure of visiting the Walker library last year. Not only is the library packed inch to inch with incredible artifacts as Wired describes, but it is truly his own as well, with items that have been great personal inspirations to him as well.

What surprised me the most, however, is how down to earth the entire family is. They are all energetic yet realistic, and some of the friendliest people I have ever met.

</comment><comment><USER7> That is a pretty sweet library. I could totally see myself doing something like that someday - mostly because I love to hoard things I find interesting.

Some of those items are extremely unique or rare though and it does make me wonder how much of those kinds of things should end up in private collections versus being more available to the public to some degree. It seems like the risks of losing some of these artifacts would increase over time if they are held privately.

That's not to say that people shouldn't be allowed to own them privately... just something to think about.

</comment><comment><USER8> In case you were wondering, Jay Walker is the founder of Princeline:

<http://www.ted.com/speakers/jay_walker.html>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_S._Walker>

[http://www.forbes.com/finance/lists/54/2000/LIR.jhtml?passLi...](http://www.forbes.com/finance/lists/54/2000/LIR.jhtml?passListId=54&passYear=2000&uniqueId=AJXH&passListType=Person&datatype=Person)

</comment><comment><USER9>
        s/library/museum

</comment><comment><USER10> If Wikipedia were to become a physical library, that would be it.

<comment><USER11> I'm a big Wikipedia fan, but I think its corporeal form would be more likely to resemble the U.S. Government Housing and Urban Development building rather than this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How do you dust all that stuff???

</comment><comment><USER5> This is very cool, it would be more cool if he made it a public museum. It would obviously cost money to move the stuff into a proper building with security and staffing but would be great for so many people...

<comment><USER13> Being a patent troll and all, I'm sure Jay Walker could care less about sharing anything with the public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ask HN: I need some motivation. Have anything for that? ;)</comment>


The most important page on Flickr - <AUTHOR> http://blog.timoni.org/post/5557930029/the-most-important-page-on-flickr <comment><USER2> It almost seems as though Yahoo are determined to make Flickr fail at the moment. I'm a paid pro member and I've been wondering why now for a while...

Photographic content publishing on the internet has moved on a huge amount in the last couple of years, yet I see Flickr have done nearly nothing during that period. They need to start looking at what the competition is doing (instagram, etc.) and seriously picking the game up, especially for paid up members.

I'm still in shock they haven't made a proper iPad application, your stuck with the crappy iPhone app which needs a major overhaul anyway. The Android version is equally awful, the web version on phones/tablets renders equally as badly as on a browser (confusing/boring layout). When I login and look through the top nav, there's over 40 choices from it. Does it really need to be that complicated?

</comment><comment><USER3> I admit I don't have much of an eye for design but that page was really, REALLY hard to read.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, also why didn't he put screenshots of the pages in instead of link to Flickr pages which you need to be logged in to view?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> On paper, designing Flickr should be one of the easiest things to do. You basically have some of the most beautiful pieces of content to work with, so all you have to do is lay it out in a clean and accessible way.

</comment><comment><USER6> The most important page on Flickr is a Yahoo login page?

<comment><USER7> No. The most important page is... [Content only viewable to HackerNews Gold Members].

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why didn't he say all of this internally? Surely he's not the only person with these thoughts.

<comment><USER9> Just an FYI: Timoni is a she, not a he.

<comment><USER8> Apologies. If I could, I would change the gender of my words, but I can't edit my post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would have been better if she posted a mockup of an improvement.

<comment><USER11> s'okay, we're posting a mocking of her improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The flickr homepage really is awful. What's worse, though, is that if I click on a photo, the sidebar is still populated with the mixed-content photostream. If I want to browse, I want to just see that user's photos, and it requires clicking on a tiny "expand" arrow that only gives me 3 tiny thumbnails. Seriously flickr, take a cue from apple and get some larger, more navigable navigation.</comment>


How My Public Records Request Triggered Waymo's Self-Driving Car Lawsuit - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/how-my-public-records-request-triggered-waymos-self-driving-car-lawsuit-1699ff35ac28 <comment><USER2> Past discussion, 30+ points:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13752001](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13752001)</comment>