Conversocial is looking for Python Developers - <AUTHOR> http://roundabout.io/london/92-developer-python

<comment><USER2> One interesting fact: even though they are explicitly looking for Python devs, no actual Python experience is required. This is the second instance I see of something like this in London (the first being the company I work for, <http://new-bamboo.co.uk>).

It looks like there's a lack of experienced developers in London, or at least in some technologies. Therefore companies needs must resort to finding "generic" good programmers who can be trained.

Of course I don't have any statistically significant data, only anecdotal experience. However it does resonate with the difficulty that we have had finding Ruby devs at New Bamboo in the last few months.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? I wonder if there's the same lack of supply of PHP devs.

<comment><USER3> _> It looks like there's a lack of experienced developers in London_

Because anyone with half a brain has left the UK and come to SF/NYC, where they pay ~3 times as much. If I was in the UK, I'd be on some measly 26K salary and living above a chop shop in Tooting.</comment></comment>


Tesla Prices IPO At $17 Per Share - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/28/tesla-prices-ipo-at-17-per-share/ <comment><USER2> The market cap is much more instructive to have in the title - price per share by itself carries no information.

<comment><USER3> It does if you're trying to figure out how many shares you can buy. It's also of note because $17 is higher than the planned $14-16 range.

<comment><USER4> Number of shares I can buy carries no information. Percentage of the company that I can own for x dollars carries some information.

Although if you already knew about the earlier plans you mention, than the new 17$ per share is news. (I was not that informed.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Much as I like the Roadster, I'm extremely pessimistic about Tesla's chances. Established auto companies with much deeper pockets would have trouble bringing the Model S to market. Tesla hasn't been very successful selling the Roadster, a car whose $100k price tag ensures it's selling to a demographic that doesn't care about service, warranty, or battery-replacement costs. The Model S will be an order of magnitude more difficult to sell, even assuming they meet their own overly-optimistic development schedule.

<comment><USER6> Seems like a good time to try their luck though. Demand for non-petroleum powered cars is building, nobody is established as a manufacturer and it seems the technology is now up to the job. It's still a gamble, but the odds seem a bit better than usual.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> $1.5 Billion Market Cap. Will be interesting to see where it is in a week.

<comment><USER4> I don't really get why anybody plans any IPO prices. Shouldn't auctions be the best tool for the current owners to get as much money as they can?

<comment><USER8> They actually are auctions, just not public ones. Silent auctions, where the bidders communicate privately with the seller.

The buyers set a price they will pay, possibly a price x number of shares matrix.

Then the company picks a price to maximize the amount brought in.

<comment><USER4> But why did the share price then go up on the first day after the IPO? (And why does it tend to do this for a lot of companies?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Massive competition from many established companies, $300M+ tooling costs to roll out a new car, low profit margins, high marketing costs, long sales cycles, etc... Auto manufactuing is a bad business to be in, maybe second only to operating airlines. And Tesla owns no special ip on their battery tech, they will likely have to do a lot of dilution in the future to stay alive. That said, I wish them luck, and if anyone can do it, it's Elon Musk.

</comment><comment><USER10> I really like Tesla (the company) but I would avoid Tesla (the stock). You're buying an awful lot of risk for that price. In fact I would be surprised if there weren't already significant amount of short sellers interested in this.</comment>


What factors led to the development of C# in spite of Java - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/q/3979679/399268 <comment><USER2> Fundamentally, Java and C# are _extremely_ similar. What's interesting is how different their philosophies are: Java really values backwards compatibility, does not evolve very fast and tries to hide and features that could cause a programmer to shoot himself in the foot. C#, on the other hand, has had some compatibility breaking changes, has evolved quickly with fancy research features (e.g. Linq is actually much like a monad with SelectMany as bind) and has a bunch of "dangerous" features like operator overloading and unsafe regions.

EDIT: Maybe there weren't actually any language changes breaking backwards compatibility. I'm not sure.

I personally like C#'s philosophy better: PL research exists for a reason and newer features make coding easier; moreover, I can avoid doing really stupid things and so can be trusted with operator overloading! Others maintain the opposite and believe Java's more conservative approach is best.

It would be nice to compare how the two philosophies fare in getting their respective languages adapted, but I fear such a comparison would be flawed: C# is much too tied to Microsoft, so most people not keen on heavy coupling with any particular vendor or OS tend to avoid it for that reason. The opposite is also true: heavy MS shops are much more likely to choose C# just because it's part of .NET, and not because of the language characteristics.

Still, it is very interesting to see what has happened given two virtually identical languages with different backers and philosophies.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious: What are the breakages in backwards compatibility that C# introduced?

The only one I can think of is the upcoming change in closure semantics for loop variables - something that is being changed to make it work like people would expect for 99% of the case and risks breaking that 1% of cases where someone actually wants the same loop variable to be closed over in all functions defined within the loop.

 _(e.g. Linq is actually much like a monad with SelectMany as bind)_

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe, with SelectMany, Linq does in fact, provide everything required to support monads.

Agree with everything else you said - especially on flawed comparisons between the two languages.

<comment><USER4> The biggest breaking change was from version 1 to 2. Generics were added, as were partial classes, private setters on properties, and delegates. Along the way a lot of little breaking changes were also taken on. Things that change the behavior of the language enough to warrant calling out the incompatibility from previous versions (if you happened to rely on a particular behavior) but which generally result in an improvement in the language.

<comment><USER3> Did generics break working code?

I didn't think that was possible.

<comment><USER4> Not easily. There are a few rare instances where they could cause an error during compilation of code that compiled fine for .net 1.1, and some problems with using tlbimp. I don't think it caused previously compiled code to break though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not relevant to the question, but:

Some of the comments in that thread illustrate a widespread misconception that C# isn't cross-platform. We're finishing up a game that runs on windows, osx, ios, and android, with a server on linux; and it's written in C#.

Microsoft's CLR and BCL implementation aren't cross-platform, but I haven't used those in quite some time.

<comment><USER2> While C# _is_ cross-platform, almost everybody using it seems to be on Windows. Also, a bunch of the libraries people normally use with C# are Windows-specific (like WPF, I guess. Does anybody still use WPF?). Also, Microsoft has some patents which put projects like Mono in a potentially poor situation, which is why it isn't entirely embraced by the free software world.

Java, on the other hand, is, for better or worse, used heavily on all the different platforms. Moreover, most Java libraries (like Swing. Does anybody still use Swing?) are cross-platform.

I find F# a much more interesting language than C#. Do you know how F# behaves on Linux? While I've heard of people using C# on Linux and Android, I haven't heard anything about F#. Then again, the Linux people might just prefer OCaml.

<comment><USER6> WPF is used extensively in enterprise. Alternatives are Windows Forms which is pretty old,and significantly less flexible, or web apps. WPF can host Windows Forms, so for legacy its a way better option then web.

<comment><USER7> I use WPF regularly. Initially it seemed quite alien compared to the windows forms world I was used to. Once I got to know how it works on the inside, I fell in love with it. In my opinion it is elegant and well thought through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From what I remember, it was one main thing: delegates

From Sun: <http://java.sun.com/docs/white/delegates.html>

<comment><USER9> Wow, they really thought that inner classes were an elegant and supreme solution. That strikes me as a really weird aesthetics attitude. Inner classes always felt like an accidental misfeature which everyone regretted about but couldn't remove it due to backwards compatibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> They deleted it, but it can still be seen in Google's cache. Someone needs to tell Wikipedia and StackOverflow that they're going a bit overboard with all this deleting. Why don't they just demote stuff to show lower down in searches or something? [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mdxfQ2k...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mdxfQ2k_- ecJ:stackoverflow.com/questions/3979679/what-factors-led-to-the-development- of-c-sharp-in-spite-of-java+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER11> Another very interesting question closed as off-topic.

</comment><comment> angry-hacker Why interesting questions are getting closed all the time on Stackoverflow? It's not THAT off-topic and everyone are interested in it, what harm does it do that it needs to be closed...

Edit: Ok, now they deleted whole thing instead... because someone pointed out that it shouldn't been closed...

</comment><comment><USER12> Mostly political reasons it seems. Java was always encumbered with patents and licensing restrictions especially for mobile usage, which came out the ugly way as we know with the latest Oracle's lawsuit. Even though Oracle didn't succeed, but nevertheless there was always a risk. I guess Microsoft didn't want to depend on that, but on the other hand wanted to leverage familiarity with Java to lure Java developers into using C#. Rather boring and uninspiring move (creating a close clone), but Sun can be partially blamed for not making Java truly free (like C++ for example).

</comment><comment><USER13> Politics between SUN and MS was the main reason. But the low quality (and by that i mean things like doing value type allocations in the heap, shitty libraries for UI (Swing), the language not having common sense features such as delegates/properties etc) implementation of the JVM was another.

<comment><USER14> There are many reason's it made sense for MS to create their own Java-like system, but the "low quality" of the JVM implementations is not one of them. The JVM implementations (HotSpot, IBM J9) are more efficient than the CLR in virtually any sensible benchmark you care to run and it's been that way since about December 1998. e.g. [http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=csharp&lang2=java)

<comment><USER15> That shootout is between the JVM and Mono. The CLR outperforms Mono.

That being said, my understanding is that JVM programs slightly outperform CLR programs in terms of speed while CLR programs do better than those on the JVM(s) in terms of memory.

<comment><USER16> <http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/demo/compare.php?lang=csc>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One factor is that Microsoft wanted a programming language with Java's language features that could be used to write Windows programs.

Sun was adamantly against the notion of people writing Windows programs in Java (or Unix programs in Java, or Mac programs in Java). Java programs were supposed to be for the Java platform.</comment>


How Amazon's 'invisible' hand can shape your city - <AUTHOR> https://www.curbed.com/2017/5/2/15509316/amazon-prime-retail-urban-planning <comment><USER2> If you want to see the future - look at london. It will come there 2-3 years before in the US. Whole classes of products are impossible to find offline. Like pc parts. PC world is stocked only with crap. And there is nothing else.</comment>


Facebook criticised over handling of reports of child exploitation content - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39187929 <comment><USER2> "The BBC first asked Facebook for an interview about its moderation system in late-2015, and repeated the request following this follow-up investigation. The social network's director of policy Simon Milner agreed to be interviewed last week, on condition the BBC provided examples of the material that it had reported, but had not been removed by moderators. The BBC did so, but was reported to the UK's National Crime Agency as a consequence."

That's either Kafka-esque levels of bureaucratic crazy, or a very well- concocted trap...

<comment><USER3> I always thought that the very notion that information can be illegal is like a contradictory premise that logically leads to crazy conclusions.

<comment><USER4> I don't think information is generally ever illegal, but rather the distribution of it is.

<comment><USER5> In this case, mere possession of this information is a major crime. No evidence or proof of distribution is necessary. In the US at least, every distinct image is its own violation as well, so you can easily end up with potential sentences reaching the thousands of years.

<comment><USER6> Let's say someone sent you a file, that was encrypted in such a manner (4096-bit RSA, maybe?) that you had no way - indeed, no entity on the planet had the means - to decrypt it.

Yet - unbeknownst to you - that file contained something so illegal, it would cost you your life if you knew about it.

Is possession of that file still illegal? Or does it only become illegal when you have knowledge of its contents? Does having that knowledge then entail a potential for "thoughtcrime"? What if you (somehow) imagined the exact information that was contained in that file - before seeing the file? You now have the knowledge, but you never saw the information - is it now illegal? Or - what if you created a very large number that matched the unencrypted value of the file? Does possession of that number become illegal?

Illegal enough to forfeit your life?

<comment><USER7> I am not a lawyer and you should trust what I say as much as you would trust graffiti scribbled on a wall in the bathroom.

That being said,

In Florida, it is treated much like drugs.

Most cases are constructive possession and in such cases The prosecution has to show:

1\. You had knowledge of the presence of the contraband

2\. You had knowledge of the contraband's illicit nature.

3\. You had the ability to excercise dominion and control over the contraband.

I read a case in which a person had, on their person, a over-the-counter Tylenol bottle. Inside the bottle was Tylenol w/codeine, of which they did not have a prescription for. They were convicted of possession of a controlled substance. Their conviction was overturned on appeal because there was no evidence showing that they knew the substance in the bottle was actually Tylenol w/codeine as opposed to just Tylenol.

Proving those three is a giant rabbit hole. Researching this was extremely eye opening for me, and if you live in a similar state, I would suggest you research it as well.

In your example, if there was no evidence that you knew what the encrypted file contained, and no evidence that you knew the password/key to the file, then only the first bar would be met -- knowledge of its presence, and thus your case could never even go to trial -- even an okay lawyer would get it dismissed for lack of evidence.

Now that 'evidence' word is very squirrelly. If a detective _says_ you told him you knew what was in the file, that counts and the case goes to trial and a jury gets to decide whether you actually knew what was there. With drug cases, they might listen, weigh the facts, and be sympathetic. With a child porn case, not so much. Yes, the detective would be perjuring himself if you did not actually say that, but how do you prove that? That's one of the reasons any lawyer will tell you NEVER TALK TO THE POLICE. If you excercise your fifth amendment and do not talk to them, they can't put words in your mouth.

A site with a ton of information on this is [http://www.ejdirga.com/criminal_offenses/drugs/florida- drug-...](http://www.ejdirga.com/criminal_offenses/drugs/florida-drug-case- law/drug-case-law-constructive-possession.html)

Edit: add IANAL disclaimer at the top

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Facebook's rules forbid convicted sex offenders from having accounts.

But the BBC found five convicted paedophiles with profiles, and reported them to Facebook via its own system. None of them were taken down."

This tidbit in the article didn't so much surprise me exactly as pop out as something that seems unreasonable upon consideration even if it looks like a good idea on its face.

Key points for me regarding this is that recidivism rates are greatly affected by successful integration back into the community after serving time, and sex offenders have the most difficulty integrating already. While there's certainly reasonable concerns around the risk of these people accessing Facebook, by the admission of the company itself it's a new type of influential global community. By banning sex offenders outright they're being othered in a way which is a significant impediment to being reintegrated into society.

That aside, at least in the US, you can end up a sex offender for life for things as innocuous as stopping on the side of a long stretch of highway to empty your bladder. There's also no unified worldwide or national database of sex offenders to check against, nor are their uniform standards between states and nations on what qualifies. This means it's both difficult for Facebook to enforce this rule at all and practically impossible to do so in a way which would only apply to people convicted of offenses we can agree qualify (molestation, rape, sexual assault).

I find it extremely odd that Facebook would willingly put itself in the position to police accounts this way and that there'd be public support for the idea of banning people outright without any basis in their activity on Facebook.

<comment> aaron-lebo _While there 's certainly reasonable concerns around the risk of these people accessing Facebook, by the admission of the company itself it's a new type of influential global community. By banning sex offenders outright they're being othered in a way which is a significant impediment to being reintegrated into society._

What do you mean? Facebook's business speak about being a new global community means what? People aren't being "othered" because they can't have Facebook accounts. The ability to have a Facebook does not have anything to do with getting back into society - lots of people do it (abstain from Facebook) voluntarily. On the other hand, the access a predator would have to children is a very real danger and is presumably dangerous to someone who has problems with that.

 _That aside, at least in the US, you can end up a sex offender for life for things as innocuous as stopping on the side of a long stretch of highway to empty your bladder. There 's also no unified worldwide or national database of sex offenders to check against, nor are their uniform standards between states and nations on what qualifies. This means it's both difficult for Facebook to enforce this rule at all and practically impossible to do so in a way which would only apply to people convicted of offenses we can agree qualify (molestation, rape, sexual assault)._

Do you have any stats for this? This gets thrown up from time to time, but how many people are sex offenders cause they took a piss on the side of the highway?

 _This means it 's both difficult for Facebook to enforce this rule at all and practically impossible to do so in a way which would only apply to people convicted of offenses we can agree qualify (molestation, rape, sexual assault)._

This information is readily available. Presumably Facebook can run the same check the BBC did. If they've been unfairly convicted that's not Facebook's issue, it is the courts, but Facebook does a have a very simple qualifier in most places.

Sorry if I come off as a little aggressive...it is just that in many of these cases there are real victims here and it isn't the sex offenders, it is the innocent children (or other) whose lives they have destroyed. There are cases were people are accused unfairly, but most cases are not that way (it is a major charge that is taken seriously). Sometimes people do things which are destructive to others, and there's only so much empathy when rights are restricted as a result.

Just don't personally feel that sorry for a sex offender who can't get on Facebook. If they've been wrongly convicted, they've got bigger problems, if not, then it's a privilege not a right.

<comment><USER9> >Just don't personally feel that sorry for a sex offender who can't get on Facebook.

How do you feel about other criminals who have been convicted of a crime, then let out? Sure, Facebook isn't really the issue here, but why are they facing impediment to being included in society? Are murderers OK to do it? How about people who steal things?

Facebook's policy is clear; the question is whether it's a just policy, especially with their aim of building a 'global community' and the almost necessity of having a social life that has some online component nowadays in order to lead a happy life.

Facebook on its own is no big issue, but if other providers follow suit, I can't help but think it is unjust or at lesat unfair.

<comment> aaron-lebo I think it's very debatable whether people having online lives is beneficial to them or society.

People lived for tens of thousands of years without the Internet and were happy doing so. I don't see why it is unfair that someone who has taken someone's innocence (and perhaps their ability to have a happy life) has certain privileges taken away.

<comment><USER9> >someone who has taken someone's innocence (and perhaps their ability to have a happy life) has certain privileges taken away.

They should have already been served the 'punishment' or retribution within prison, and hopefully have been reformed. Why do you still want to punish them? Do you not think the punishment is adequate?

One of the aims of the prison system is rehabilitation into society. You're actively trying to stop that out of revenge?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the more Orwellian moments I've experienced on Facebook happened when it didn't allow me to send an image link to my sister in a private chat because the string had sex written in it.

We're both adults and have been using Messenger to talk to each other every day for a few years now, but nope Facebook wouldn't relent. It even froze my ability to message her from my smartphone app for a short amount of time.

This amuses me more than it annoys me, because someone at Facebook decided that it's a good idea for a messaging product to censor private conversations between adults. What on Earth led them to believe that my messaging app should be my nanny?

 _EDIT:_ Here's a screenshot of the dialog: [http://oi65.tinypic.com/33wt9br.jpg](http://oi65.tinypic.com/33wt9br.jpg)

<comment><USER11> That's bonkers. When was this, and what country or countries were you both in?

FWIW though, it's also possible she unknowingly had some sort of anti- obscenity filter turned on in her settings.

<comment><USER10> She's an American citizen and was in the US at the time. I was in Cambodia.

Nope, pretty sure that wasn't the case. We aren't aware of any such setting. What's really funny is that the context wasn't sexual at all. It was a medical conversation with a family member. I'd gotten the HPV vaccine earlier in the day and we were talking about it.

The image in question was from an online medical resource, and it didn't flag the image itself as I ended up sharing it directly with her anyway. I think it got flagged because the string had the letters sex in it. Or, if someone else had flagged it for some reason elsewhere... Who knows?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, this is quite an ugly story for Facebook, especially hot on the heels of Zuckerberg championing the platform as the key to building global community. I'll stand by my assertion that not all communities are good ones worth supporting. Thus, it puts a lot more responsibility on Facebook to arbitrate than I generally feel is logical in a capitalistic system. There are flaws. Like this for instance:

> _When provided with examples of the images, Facebook reported the BBC > journalists involved to the police and cancelled plans for an interview.

It subsequently issued a statement: "It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation."_

I much more expected Facebook to blame their AI - which, as Zuckerberg claimed, is going to clean up Facebook just you wait and see - rather than admit outright they should go to jail for hosting the content that the reporters found.

Between this and the terrible use of Facebook to exploit Marine Corps females, it's going to take a lot more gardening in South Dallas before I believe Zuckerberg is actually interested in ethical behavior more than perceived image. YMMV.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if Facebook will report themselves to the police as well, since they're the only ones in this situation who are distributing these images.

<comment><USER13> That's not true. The owners of the routers and switches between Facebook and its users are also distributing child porn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> And Facebook reported the BBC reporters to the police for sending Facebook examples of the content that the reporters found- on Facebook- which Facebook wouldn't remove.

<comment><USER15> As mentioned earlier, this seems like Facebook were asking for links to the offending content, got sent the actual content itself, and were then bound by law to report it. It also seems unlikely there is an overlap between the things they reported to the police and the things they wouldn't remove.

<comment><USER16> It shouldn't matter. If BBC had the links, they obviously had the content too. BBC's computers downloaded the CP and stored it. Therefore Facebook should report them either way.

Distinction between sending links sending images + links makes no sense in this case. Both proves BBC downloaded CP.

<comment><USER17> It's not about downloading the CP, it's about distributing it. Sending a link may not be distribution, while sending the image itself is.

<comment><USER16> Possession is a crime too. And if you have indication of someone possessing it, and don't report, then what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just post a few pictures of breastfeeding and it will be closed imminently.

<comment><USER6> But a murder scene absolutely drenched in blood and body parts would be a-ok.

<comment><USER18> Yes, video from decapitating a woman in Mexico was alright to keep public for months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The title is misleading. It's not entirely clear from the article what kinds of images were not removed, but the article does make clear some of the ones reported were not child abuse images.

It sounds like some of them were regular images of children, but with suggestive comments attached. Now, that's still against facebook's TOS, but not illegal.

Edit: title has been changed to reflect source title better.

<comment><USER20> > pages explicitly for men with a sexual interest in children

> images of under-16s in highly sexualised poses, with obscene comments posted > beside them

> groups with names such as "hot xxxx schoolgirls" containing stolen images of > real children

> an image that appeared to be a still from a video of child abuse, with a > request below it to share "child pornography"

That's what I thought. None of the above things are illegal (well, maybe the last one. IANAL). The 2nd one was common on Reddit's /r/jailbail subs before they shut them down.

They most likely do violate Facebook's terms of service, but with their massive userbase, I bet these pop up and get removed faster than their staff can deal with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Assuming all the images reported by the BBC were what they say they were, Facebook handled the case very poorly, especially the part where they reported BBC journalists to the police. The least Facebook could have done was to acknowledge the journalists' role in being proactive about reporting abuse, have a human review the images and delete whatever was illegal or against their ToS.

This incident raises the question of how a company like Facebook should deal with people reporting content. There is no concept of community moderation in FB where specific users are moderators and can deal with reports of abuse. Maybe facebook should consider community led moderation efforts until the bots are ready to take over. Community led moderation efforts (not specifically dealing with reports of abuse) generally work very well for large communities where the company building the product does not have the bandwidth to deal with moderation. Some examples that come to mind : reddit, stackoverflow.

<comment><USER22> > have a human review the images and delete whatever was illegal or against > their ToS.

Except the BBC didn't "report" it (provide a link to it), they "distributed" it (spread the actual content). Online hosts/services have to report distribution or they are liable: 18 U.S.C. § 2258A / [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I work on spam and abuse (but not at Facebook). Also IANAL.

CP is radioactive / considered contraband. You cannot download or resend it to anyone under any circumstances. It sounds crazy but it breaks the law -- BBC should have sent links instead / used platform reporting. By downloading to their hard drive and emailing it, they engage in proliferation.

"But didn't their browser already download it? When they saw it?" Yeah. But they had to define sharing such images as being illegal, so...I don't know how laws work.

When you detect CP, AFAIK you must report it (...ironically sending this copy is OK though I'm not sure what the full mechanism looks like) and immediately delete it from your servers. You can keep an irreversible hash to do future detection.

Also fwiw our org has some special contractor who has to identify this stuff. None of eng has to look at it, thank heavens.

</comment><comment><USER24> A lot of people here seem to be focusing on the fallout, not the problem. Have you ever reported something to Facebook?

A while ago, a random guy friended my sister and started posting nonsense on her wall. I checked his profile and immediately found a dozen groups full of 5-10yos in swimming costumes interlaced with softcore and Photoshop'd merges of the two. Unpleasant, illegal and against the community rules. I reported it.

In another case a friend liked a video of a chap visibly getting a blowjob at the top of a mountain. Sure, why not... But that's hardcore content that's just started auto-playing at my workplace. Reported.

In both cases I got messages back saying the moderators actively disagreed with my reports and that the content would stay.

The problem seems to be that Facebook hired teenage boys and paedophiles to moderate.

Not shocked the BBC got the same results.

</comment><comment><USER25> Theyre often under order not to remove terror or child abuse content so the government can track the perpetrators.

<comment><USER13> What kind of orders? Do you have a citation?

<comment><USER26> While I seriously doubt this is the case here, there is precedent for such things. See the FBI led TOR sting for example. However 'darknet'=/=Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How hard would it be for Facebook to automatically detect this kind of stuff by keywords? BBC shouldn't have to be doing this. They have how many thousands of employees? Why on earth are they complicit in this kind of stuff staying online?

I wonder if we'll see the #PizzaGate tin foil hat people being vindicated the same way that Vault 7 has vindicated the "1984" people.

<comment><USER15> How hard? Extremely. It turns out that people work around keywords extremely quickly, creating new euphemisms, acronyms and mispellings to avoid it. Eventually (or already) they will use such common terms that you get such a high false positive rate it makes the rest of the site useless.

People always make out like this is an easy problem, it's not. The best we can do without false positives is probably hashes - something already done (there are databases of hases of known images, and I think I remember there being a hash collision that got tons of sites reported for some normal image at some point, so even that isn't foolproof), and those are trivial to work around by modifying images in tiny ways.

Human moderation has huge cost and means that you have to give humans eyes on private content, which can be abused in itself, so you have a catch-22 there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Facebook is obviously not policing the content on their platform very well. Though it does sound like the FBI could easily run a sting operation and take down the perpetrators who are sharing. Then force Facebook to be text only. ;)

<comment><USER29> The crime happening on Facebook should make it _far_ easier for the FBI to track down the real people behind it.

This is something I don't understand... the NSA is listening to everything we do, watching everything we do, but when it comes time to find criminals we still struggle. Why? If they have all of our phone conversations and emails and social media profiles and the CIA owns Facebook and the FBI doesn't need warrants and all these doomsday scenarios about how the US is a police state, why do crimes even happen? And when they do, why does it take good old fashioned police work to solve them? And why do some still go unsolved?

If Facebook is tracking everything you do across the entire web, if they know who you are even if you don't have a profile, if they're invading your privacy _that much_ , and if they're hosting illegal content, why can't they find the real names of these people? Why can't the FBI just issue a warrant for the data and Facebook hands over the people's names and home address?

Either law enforcement doesn't want to enforce the law, or the agencies don't actually have the capabilities we've been told they do. If they had the capability, you'd think they would actually use it. But when someone is threatening to shoot up a school on Twitter, it's not NSA wiretaps that catch him, it's users reporting him to Twitter and Twitter reporting it to the police. Where's the breakdown here? What happened to ECHELON?</comment></comment>


Updating a CPU's Microcode 0x02: Update Process, Encryption and Microcode Blobs - <AUTHOR> https://blog.matan.me/2014/12/updating-cpus-microcode-0x02-encryption-problems-microcode-blobs/

<comment><USER2> _Is it legal to reverse the CPU to figure out those things? According to Intel, it's not_

According to the basic law, it should be (DMCA and others notwithstanding):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Chip_Protection_A...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Chip_Protection_Act_of_1984#Reverse_engineering_not_prohibited)

However, you're unlikely to be able to make any significant progress in a reasonable amount of time due to the overwhelming complexity of a modern x86 CPU. The fact that there are many hidden/undocumented MSRs (Google 9C5A203A for some nice links) makes it all the more difficult.

AMD microcode used to be unsigned, and it was possible to induce some... _odd behaviour_ with it: [http://www.securiteam.com/securityreviews/5FP0M1PDFO.html](http://www.securiteam.com/securityreviews/5FP0M1PDFO.html)

(Interestingly enough, no one at the time thought to hit it with a fuzzer and see what could really be done... or if anyone did, they didn't tell. Also, I remember a far more detailed version of this article was on the 'net around a decade ago, but Google seems unable to find it, just like how information on AMD's hidden MSRs was far easier to find a few years ago..)

<comment><USER3> [https://www.dcddcc.com/pubs/paper_microcode.pdf](https://www.dcddcc.com/pubs/paper_microcode.pdf) seems to have more details on AMD's K8 microcode format.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have a look at: [http://inertiawar.com/microcode/](http://inertiawar.com/microcode/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, that's some fantastic work!.

Just to quote the conclusions of what Ben Hawkes found: Several previously undocumented header fields have been identified and described. The results suggest that microcode updates are authenticated using a 2048-bit RSA signature. The RSA signature operation appears to be constant-time (i.e. unaffected by changes to the supplied exponent, modulus or signature value). Timing analysis reveals 512-bit steps correlating to supplied microcode length. This is a common message block size for cryptographic hash functions such as SHA1 and SHA2 The RSA signature was located, and the signed data is a PKCS#1 1.5 encoded hash value. Older processor models use a 160-bit digest (SHA1), and newer processor models use a 256-bit digest (SHA2).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

If you have any questions about the post or series, i'll be glad to to answer.

I'm still looking for how i can evolve this further, If anyone has done any research into this himself and found a way around one of the problems that exist, i would be very interested to hear!.

Thanks!.

<comment><USER5> Interesting research. I was wondering why did you think that the microcode might be in Verilog? Isn't verilog ascii? I suppose it's quite obviously some custom Intel binary format.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, it's almost definitely in some proprietary format, i mentioned verilog just to give some basis of what kind of language it would be like, i should have just mentioned VHDL's in general i guess.

<comment><USER3> The microcode format's unlikely to be like any kind of VHDL. It's probably going to be a program consisting of a series of micro-ops for whatever underlying architecture they're translating x86 into. So it'd have fairly typical control flow structures like conditional branching, along with ways of controlling dataflow paths in the CPU and dispatching operations to various execution units. You can probably get some idea from 80s-era systems whose microcode formats were publicly documented.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


YouTube employees implicated as uploaders in Viacom copyright case - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10365329-261.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1 <comment><USER2> Wow. A $1 billion email? Reminds me of Bill Gates' emails about crushing Netscape [2nd paragraph: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#Tria...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#Trial)]. I guess those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...</comment>


How BlackBerry's bid to one-up the iPhone failed - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/excerpt-how-blackberrys-bid-to-one-up-the-iphone-failed/article24555365/ <comment><USER2>
      When he pressed on a digital key, the entire
      screen clicked down like a giant button, replicating
      the tactile feel of tapping a BlackBerry keyboard.

That sounds tone-deaf to me. The appeal of the physical keyboard is that you can feel _where_ the keys are, and not as RIM apparently thought, the joy of tapping on something that depresses by half a millimeter without any tactile position feedback at all. A touch screen that you have to physically press combines the worst aspects of keyboards and touch screens, doesn't it?

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Did we push the teams too hard?" says Lazaridis. "Probably. Can you show me > a company that doesn't? I'd be hard-pressed to believe you. The pressure > Jobs put his iPhone team through was worse than anything I ever put on my > team. The fact is, that's how business runs."

Asshole.

<comment><USER4> Yeah... he is a jerk but he is right, Jobs was way worse and the myriad of people buying iPhone make look like he was right.

<comment><USER5> The question is whether it's a precondition, or enhancer, of success in this sort of field. Not whether some particularly well-known business leader happened to share the property.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, Apple had the ability to leverage AT&T's weakness to deliver a phone focused what consumers actually wanted, access to the internet. Blackberry in response, is pressured by the other carriers to focus on delivering a hard to execute "better" touch experience, as if that meant anything to anybody. Apple in the meantime, works on delivering mobile apps. I guess the takeaway is if others are focusing on the real needs of consumers, that's what has to be on your roadmap, not the whims of powerful channel partners.

<comment><USER7> Ah, well RIM didn't really sell Blackberry phones to end users, they sold Blackberry phones to carriers. Carriers were the customers. This makes a conflict where making carriers happy is more important than end users. The fact that Apple changed the game and could sell directly to carriers and provide updates without carrier permission was a game changer (and still is, just look at the majority of android devices that will never get an update). This is briefly touched on in the article, but not really highlighted and I am guessing is talked about more elsewhere in the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I gave blackberry a chance, buying one of their OS 10 based devices. But they simply don't get it. Boot time is measured in days. Lots and lots and lots of snags and bugs and glitches still persist even though it is now 10.3.

They have services that keep running that then annoy you to log in, even if you don't want to (no I don't have a BlackBerry login, nor do I want one, and don't keep bugging me in the alerts).

They send spam alerts, for example when trying to offload their new failing handset models.

Cut and paste is a disaster.

<comment><USER9> I'll admit boot time isn't the best, but I never turned my phone off and I've got 3 day battery life on my passport so I've never run out of battery before hitting a charger, so a moot point to me.

Also no idea what you are talking about for services. I'm sure if you didn't use any integrated key features on any OS it would bug you to use them though.

You can also unsubscribe from their newsletter. Copy/Paste doesn't seem that bad.

<comment><USER10> He never signed into BBID. Which is a required feature for BlackBerry. He just doesn't know how to use his phone.

Sent from my Passport ;)

Also, since this thread seems to have a lot of BlackBerry users, check out my appp Reader YC.

<comment><USER11> Reader YC must be one of the apps I use the most on my Passport. Thanks for creating it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 'On a scale of 0 to 10, if 10 means no way, then this project is an 11. It's impossible. It's something I would not be able to deliver.'

Project was doomed from that first meeting but it's the same story every time. It's not lack of innovation that kills companies, it's inertia from within.

Was waiting for the punchline where Storm faced resistance from BB's own staffers / engineers, and this article didn't disappoint.

</comment><comment><USER13> I attended one of their Blackberry 10 jam sessions in 2012. While having a conversation with one of their managers, he was emphasizing on the virtual keyboard in Z10 over and over as if that was the magic sauce of a successful smartphone. What I realized later, the physical keyboard was really the magic sauce of blackberry phones. And even though they were stepping into the virtual keyboard era, it was very hard for them to come out of the shadow of their golden time.

Apparently the failure of Blackberry 10 devices has proven that keyboard is not the magic sauce of a successful smartphone anymore.

<comment><USER14> BB can bog off. They chose their customers - the carriers, over the poor end users. I made the fatal mistake of buying one of their unlocked devices. I always bought unlocked devices, as, I want to choose the settings, not get a locked down set of options the networks prefers. But BB? no, insert a SIM into one of their unlocked devices, and it then subsets the options for those it has agreed up front with the carrier.

Fuck. That. Shit.

Never again BB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looking at the stock price on this one is interesting. RIM's market cap hit its peek in 2008. So it didn't instantly crater. It took a bit for people to see the effects of the iPhone.

<comment><USER16> Do you remember the tech community's and the business world's reaction to the iPhone in 2008? To say that there was massive skepticism is an understatement. (There was also a large amount of hype and excitement, but the RIM's stock price tells the story of which was _actually_ bigger.)

There were plenty of people saying stupid things like "a smartphone is what a blackberry does or what windows mobile does, this iPhone thing doesn't have apps or even a keyboard so it's not even a smartphone." Whereas I hope anybody on HN would immediately be able to see "OMG it has a full web browser, this changes everything, refuse to call it a smart phone or whatever you want, but this is the future of mobile."

<comment><USER15> > Do you remember the tech community's and the business world's reaction to > the iPhone in 2008?

Yep, and it more inline with what you said than the article's tone of inevitability. I still wonder what would have happened if RIM attacked the low-end / pay-as-you-go market aggressively with a basic Blackberry with a good programmable camera. The text loving younger market might have been fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I remember when the Storm came out. I was doing IT work for small businesses in the area and many of my clients, the Blackberry Faithful, would get their latest phones whenever possible. From the consumer side, it was every bit of the disaster this describes. The keyboard was an unbelievable disaster, it was horribly slow, crashes constantly, but they kept buying them. The Storm 2 was a relief, mostly because its improvements made my job so much easier.

What was always really interesting to me about Blackberry/RIM was how they managed to create some loyal fans who would happily follow their march into the sea. For years, even as iPhone and Android market share grew, there were (and probably still are) some power users who refused to even consider switching. These were exclusively owners or execs at small businesses, mostly companies with in-house Exchange servers that needed Blackberry Enterprise Servers. The BES always added an extra layer of pain for everyone, since we never got good enough with it to be anything more than a hornets' nest. Still, the Blackberry fans couldn't be swayed, called iPhones "toys," and insisted that their products were the magic to their productivity.</comment>


Car flies into house - Computer addiction saves a life - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11649999 <comment><USER2> Coincidence saves a life.

</comment><comment><USER3>
      > in a house in Melbourne's outer east suburb.

Like Melbourne has only one, outer East suburb ...</comment>


How to Get More Clicks by Testing Titles - <AUTHOR> http://gettingmoreawesome.blogspot.com/2010/10/get-more-clicks-by-testing-titles-how.html

<comment><USER2> PickFu is awesome. However, this business of scamming people into clicking links by using misleading titles seems yucky to me. In this context, the method also exposes its greatest weakness: the most amoral and blatantly false headline will always win out over the factually correct one.

<comment><USER3> It's not scamming, it's marketing. The customers aren't committing to anything more than a simple mouse click. Scamming would be telling them they get one thing and then giving them another on checkout or form submit.

This is no different than hanging a "50% off everything" sign in front of a store with fine print that says "except for certain marked items"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was a cautionary tale not long ago of a company that did this with their ads. Only to discover that the number of people finishing their signup page remained constant.

Driving traffic to your page that is uninterested in your content does nobody any good. You need to figure out how to get traffic that is interested in your content.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm ashamed to admit that I completely misread that title. Rather badly in fact, lol.

</comment><comment><USER6> Actually some people have used PickFu to test out kid names :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to use such a service, but for free. Ex: you get karma by giving your A/B preference, that you can then spend later in getting feedback yourself.</comment>


Ask HN:  How exactly can I clone HN for another industry? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a high school student and am curious as to how HN was cloned (banker news, coinspotting).  I'm sure the front end stuff is simple, but what about back end?  What about IP infringements? <comment><USER2> HN is open source. You can download from Github and install it yourself. [https://github.com/wting/hackernews](https://github.com/wting/hackernews)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. Thanks for the info!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi,

I'm actually a building a network for teen/high school development at [http://teen2geek.com](http://teen2geek.com), and one of the things that is part of the initiative is a social news application not too different from HN to discuss teen and high school development. I would love to have you on board, whether it be as a user, or as an open-source contributor considering you are in high school :) We already have a group of high schoolers working on this, and I would love to have you on the core team if you're interested (email in profile).

To answer your question, Telesc.pe is gaining popularity, although I'm refraining from using it in favor of Lamer News, simply because Telescope is not as established and runs on Meteor, which isn't even 1.0 and does not heed to progressive enhancement principles.

\- Krish

</comment><comment><USER4> HN is just a basic web CRUD. Something you could build in many languages without much trouble. You don't even need to write code due to the amount of free web discussion boards available. What sets apart HN is the community. That is the hardest thing to develop.

</comment><comment><USER5> Even though HN is open source, you might want to use a more "modern" and approachable project like [https://github.com/jcs/lobsters](https://github.com/jcs/lobsters)</comment>


Stop just blaming the Internet for killing newspapers. Start blaming editors - <AUTHOR> https://reassociated.press/2016/10/24/stop-just-blaming-the-internet-for-killing-newspapers-start-blaming-editors/ <comment><USER2> I can't begin to tell you how awful editors were, long before the internet showed up. 'Twas all about selling ads, even then.</comment>


Finally, a VC Firm With The Balls To Tell It Like It Is - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/the-last-vc-memo-we-ll-publish-this-week- <comment><USER2> Ah, now _that_ I didn't think of. When stock prices go down, companies can no longer make purchases based off stock exchanging. So startup purchasing will go down as markets reduce to more sane levels, meaning that gambling investors will find something new to put their money in, and all your built to flip startups will leave a lot of people flipping burgers.

I guess it's time to start building features for solar panels, but that's where the gamblers are going to be heading towards.

<comment><USER3> Not a good idea to take stock as payment when it's about to plummet anyway.

<comment><USER4> Unless you know that it's inherently valuable... oh wait most of it is worth less than it was after the dot-com bubble burst

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This hit here several days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=331077>

<comment><USER6> It's so funny, it deserves to be put up twice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> geez give matt a little link love or at least a mention

<comment><USER8> You know, I'm finding that thing all over the net and almost nowhere is there a link, other than the one in the presentation. Such is the hazard of hosting it via docstoc or any other youtube like service.

On the other hand, I made it just for fun, and it costs me nothing for people to see it, so I'd rather it get around. And it does have a link in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good use of the word "turd" to describe Seesmic

</comment><comment><USER10> Found slide 13 particularly interesting!</comment>


Ordinary Income vs Capital Gains  - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/05/ordinary-income-vs-capital-gains.html

<comment><USER2> The thrust of this post is wrong; while I'm looking for a good breakdown of tax burden by quintile I'll just observe:

"We live in NYC and according to our accountants, we pay a marginal fully loaded tax rate of 47.62%. That means we keep about half of the ordinary income the Gotham Gal and I generate." The second sentence glides over the key word in the first sentence, "marginal". AVC and GG pay much lower rates on the first income they earn during the year -- it is only the income that exceeds what most people will ever earn during a year that is taxed at the higher income rate. Conversely, the first income -- the income they have in common with ordinary people -- is subject to social security and unemployment tax -- but the extraordinary income that makes them very wealthy is not. They also probably pay much less of their income in sales tax and small fees that most Americans.

Finally, according to the IRS in several recent years 10% of the capital gains income in the entire country has gone to the richest 400 tax payers, whose average tax rate is not the 47% rate AVC cites, but 17%: [http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/30/who-benefits- fro...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/30/who-benefits-from- bubbles/)

Edit: here's total tax distribution by quintile: [http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2009/01/07/moving- fr...](http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2009/01/07/moving-from-judd- greggs-dubious-tax-math-to-robert-reichs-dubious-tax-language/) . Note that the 34.5% paid by the richest 20% drops sharply for the very richest.

<comment><USER3> Yes, instead of paying taxes directly, the corporations owned by those 400 taxpayers paid taxes on profits (15-35%). Then their owners paid an additional 15-35% tax on those profits (averaging out to 17% for the top 400).

I agree - we should make it fairer. We should eliminate taxes on corporations and replace it with taxes on their owners. It's unfair that the owners of corporations are taxed at such high rates, but the taxes they pay are ignored by journalists and propagandists.

<comment><USER4> When dealing with corporate tax rates one should talk about effective tax rate. There are quite a few examples of corporations paying very little tax on their profits. Some even pay zero tax whilst making billions in profit.

I believe that the effective tax rate on U.S. corporations is roughly the industrialized nation average. Having no corporate tax would make the U.S. an outlier in terms of tax policy. This doesn't make it unsound but does make me hesitant to agree with you on this point. Are the tax policies of most nations unfair to corporations? I have a hard time believing this to be so.

Imagine a business with one owner. The owner employs 5 workers. Shouldn't the business pay tax on the profits? Suppose the business owner makes a profit of $100,000. Should this be tax free because he/she owns a business? If the business owner made $100,000 while working at 3M then the salary (profit) would be taxed.

I think the philosophy under girding the tax system is that, roughly speaking, any entity that gets money [edit] should pay tax on it. This seems fair to me.

There are notable exceptions of course. If I find $5 million dollars in gold while on a walk I pay tax on the whole amount. If I get the money because someone died I don't.

<comment><USER3> _Some even pay zero tax whilst making billions in profit._

Yes, typically because they lost billions in prior years. Sometimes also due to various tax subsidies (e.g., green energy tax credits in the case of GE).

 _Are the tax policies of most nations unfair to corporations?_

I didn't say it was unfair to corporations. I don't believe that a claim like "unfair to corporations" even makes logical sense.

I said it was unfair to their owners. Consider your hypothetical business owner. Out of the $100k in profits, the business pays perhaps $20k. The business owner then pays another $15k. But then people trying to score political points complain that he is getting away with something, and paying only $15k on $80k (19%). I think that's unfair.

Under my proposal, the business pays $0k and the owner pays $35k. This way, he gets to take (moral/political) credit for the taxes he pays just like a salaried employee. (Similarly, I favor eliminating payroll taxes.)

<comment><USER4> In the example provided, the business does not pay tax on the $100,000 given to the owner (as salary or other form of compensation) as that is an expense of the business. The business only pays tax on the profits to the business (as an entity separate from the owner).

There is nothing illogical with the phrase "unfair to corporations". A corporation is a person in the U.S. Is is it illogical to say, "unfair to people"? It can be said of a policy that it is unfair to corporations. Suppose the only entities that were taxed were corporate entities. In such a case one would reasonably say that the tax structure was unfair to corporations.

Owners of a corporation are stock holders. They make a profit on their holding via dividends and selling the stock at a higher price than what they bought it for. I disagree that it is unfair to a stock holder to pay taxes on the dividends received or on the capital gains. I believe it is a sound principle - for the maintenance of consistency, which is what fairness really is about in this issue - that entities that make a profit pay tax on it.

<comment><USER3> You are conflating salaries and dividends. The business doesn't pay tax on $100k salary (it's an expense) and the owner pays ordinary income tax on that. The same is true for pass-through corporations, which make up a large fraction of the profitable corporations that pay no taxes.

The business does pay tax on profits and spends _after tax_ dollars distributing dividends to shareholders. Similarly, _after tax_ dollars contribute to a corporate valuation which enables owners to sell shares and take capital gains.

 _A corporation is a person in the U.S._

The term "person" has been overloaded and you are conflating different uses of the term. A corporation is a legal person, which means they can enter contracts, file lawsuits and be sued. This provides a common interface for counterparties, nothing more.

A corporation is a set of assets, liabilities, a web of contracts governing the management of said assets/liabilities and a government guarantee of limited liability. I can't see how it makes sense to discuss whether something is unfair to my company. Similarly, it makes no sense discussing whether something is unfair to my cell phone and service contract.

 _I disagree that it is unfair to a stock holder to pay taxes on the dividends received or on the capital gains._

Me too.

All I said is that it's unfair to tax profits to the tune of $20k, dividends to the tune of $15k, and then pretend the owner of the corporation is only paying $15k in taxes.

If you want to discuss the taxes paid by the top 400 taxpayers in the US, include the corporate taxes paid by the companies they own.

<comment><USER4> In my example the $100,000 was salary. When you wrote:

"I said it was unfair to their owners. Consider your hypothetical business owner. Out of the $100k in profits, the business pays perhaps $20k. The business owner then pays another $15k. But then people trying to score political points complain that he is getting away with something, and paying only $15k on $80k (19%). I think that's unfair."

I thought you were talking about salary. Sorry for the confusion.

I can't think of an example where it makes sense to say, "that isn't fair to your cell phone". I can think of lots of examples where it makes sense to say, "that isn't fair to cell phone providers [companies]".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The major problem with the much cheaper taxing of capital gains remains the growing inequality: Of every you dollar you earn through your own labor, you get less (until you pass the max threshold). And this while your capacity of personal labor is clearly somehow limited. On the other hand, people earning one million dollars from capital gains are taxed equally with people who earn one billion.

<comment><USER6> There are two counterpoints to this. The first is that capital gains taxes tend to be on investments made with income you've earned, so there's already been an income tax. The second is almost all of the uber-rich made their fortunes by growing a small company into a big one, so it's not as though they're already being taxed (through progressive corporate taxes).

There are obvious flaws to this scheme, but it's pretty hard to tax income in a fair way. Some places (notably the EU) favor using a consumption tax instead.

<comment><USER7> > The first is that capital gains taxes tend to be on investments made with > income you've earned, so there's already been an income tax.

I don't really get this counterpoint; isn't _everything_ in the economy a flow of money that has been taxed at a previous point in the flow? If I have $100,000 that I've already paid taxes on, I could invest it in external assets and hope to make capital gains on them; or I could plow it back into my own occupation and use it to generate income (say, by setting up an art studio). Why should I pay more taxes in the second case?

Consider two eBay-painting-seller scenarios. In the first, I buy painting materials, paint paintings, and then sell them on eBay. In the second, I buy existing paintings on eBay that I think are underpriced, and then resell them later for a profit. Why should I pay _more_ taxes in the first case, just because I painted the paintings? In both cases my occupation is basically "selling paintings on eBay", but in one I'm creating new ones and selling them for an income, and in the other I'm flipping existing paintings, making a capital gain. In both cases the starting capital is money I've already paid taxes on. If anything, the first occupation seems like the one policy should encourage, rather than the second, but at the very least I don't see any reason to actively encourage the second version over the first.

<comment><USER6> I am not a tax lawyer, but my understanding is that capital gains only count as such if you've held the asset for at least a few years.

By the way, in the first case, your outlays are tax-deductible.

(edit: I'm not an expert, so downvoters, please explain your disagreement.)

<comment><USER7> The outlays being tax-deductible is the same in both cases: you only pay tax on the gains between what you put in and got out, not on the total revenue. If you spend $100k on art supplies and sell $110k in paintings, you pay taxes on the $10k net profit. Same as if you bought a bond for $100k and sold it for $110k; you only pay taxes on the $10k net gain.

But in the second case, you're taxed at a lower rate, so the tax code appears to want to discourage you from investing your capital in your own work. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you could make a 10% return on capital by putting that capital to work yourself, or could make the same 10% by putting that capital into a passive investment, the tax code promotes the 2nd option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Several points from a NYC taxpayer:

47.62% is the top marginal fully loaded tax rate on ordinary income. That is, 35% individual federal plus 8.97% state tax plus 3.88% city, less rounding and maybe a few dollars of unused credits. This is the rate on the next dollar of ordinary income (and the number you use if you wish to maximize your claimed tax rate). The claimed capital gains number of 27.63% is 15% plus that same amount for state and local taxes, which do not treat capital income differently (the .62% on the end of both is the giveaway). Neither of these numbers is an _effective_ tax rate (=tax actually paid/pretax income), or "tax pressure," whatever that is -- at my guess, Mr. Wilson probably pays effective tax in the 30-40% range, depending on how much capital gains he realized in the year.

On capital gains rates generally, tax does work on the margins, but this means that we should worry about what kind of investments are incentivized by lower capital gains rates. I seriously doubt that a Mr. Wilson taxed at the regular income rate for capital gains would put even one fewer dollar into his fund, making 20+% pretax, if his other choice were, as he says, the mattress making 0%. Even at equal income and capital gains rates, the incentive to maximize your returns is pretty strong, so the idea that the differential rate is changing behavior in a useful way needs more analysis than Mr. Wilson gives it.

For corporate taxes, effective rates are indeed what matters when comparing tax burdens since corporations get such a variety of credits; that said, the fewer deductions/lower rates tradeoff is free economic growth and we should do it (it'll never happen, though, since congress is too dysfunctional).

And last on "double taxation": gopi is right that most corporations are organized as passthrough entities -- they pass all income through to their owners, who then pay tax on it. Those that aren't do have lower taxation of dividends to make up for the equivalence of share buyback and dividends.

</comment><comment><USER9> Most of the small business in US are pass thro entities so they pay ordinary income tax rates and also they reinvest the money back into business. They are inherently non-scalable business so the owners don't realize wealth by selling the business instead they get it thro the profits from operating the business... IMO, its not ethical that his tax rate is double than that of a tech entrepreneur or a wall street hedge fund guy.

My personal preference would be a lower overall rate (25%) with no deductions for both ordinary income and capital gain. For a brief time in US history (in the Reagan administration) this was the case and from what i read it never discouraged capital investment.

</comment><comment><USER10> > _And when you go to the pay window [...], you will be sharing a lot less > with the government and keeping a lot more._

Ever used a road? Or went to a public school? Do you have a local library? Your tax money doesn't go to the government, it goes to the state. And yes, the state has an expensive administration, but by and large the state is all of us.

<comment><USER11> Roads are paid for with gas taxes, something that is hard to avoid if you drive. Public schools and libraries are supported by property taxes, again, something all residents pay. Income taxes primarily go to the federal government to pay for military bases abroad, wars, and a lot of other functions that either aren't needed or could be better done by non-government entities.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. In Germany, the law states that taxes can't be bound to a certain goal. Taxes all go to a big budget basket, which is then allocated by the year budget. It means that the oil tax can finance school, military, or anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Note that many _states_ , including California, tax capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income.

</comment><comment><USER14> Taxing income higher than capital gains encourages investment over consumption.</comment>


Reverse engineering a Qualcomm baseband processor [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/attachments/2022_11-ccc-qcombbdbg.pdf <comment><USER2> This topic is close to my heart. I spent a few years immersed in the Qualcomm basebands as part of the unrevoked project and personal research. I stared at the ARM code for what must be hundreds of hours.

There are so many vulnerabilities in the baseband that it's not even funny. Even the QCOM secure boot process is full of holes. If a government agency wanted to drop a persistent baseband 'rootkit' on your device with full access to userspace, they could (unless you're using one of the few phones with separate userspace and baseband processors).

The DIAG commands are particularly fun. You can read and write memory on most phones. Some have locked it down to certain areas, but this varies wildly depending on manufacturer.

<comment><USER3> My phone is a HaiPai Noble N7889.

I have complete control over my phone (baseband and userspace), including a nifty tool sanctioned by MediaTek to insert arbitrary AT commands in my processor at will.

I also have the ability to toggle something on the range of 75 GPIO pins. I'm not entirely sure what they do, so I don't play with them. But aside that, I have complete control over every part of the hardware.

<comment><USER4> Would you please elaborate as to how you have complete control over the baseband ?

Would you further provide the name of the mediatek tool ?

<comment><USER3> The tool is available on the Google play store: Mobileuncle Tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately this is almost guaranteed to bring a legal attack from Qualcomm, with or without actual grounds. I've never encountered a more litigious company in my (long) involvement in electronics, or the tech sector in general. Whether Qualcomm employs more engineers or more lawyers is an open research topic.

</comment><comment><USER6> Are there any opensource baseband phones out there? Does opensource baseband actually exist? So many people think that they have a phone with opensource software but so many components, especially the baseband can give so much control over the phone.

<comment><USER7> Related question: does anyone know of any no-baseband devices?

I've been unsuccessfully looking for a wifi-only phone, ideally a relatively modern one which comes with an unlocked bootloader and can easily run Cyanogenmod.

<comment><USER8> Can't you just run a regular phone without a sim and with a snipped antenna lead?

<comment><USER7> This is an excellent suggestion; thank you. I don't think there would be room for a tablet (or "phablet") in the pockets of any of my current pants or jackets.

I wonder how easy it is to identify the cellular antenna vs. the ones for wifi/Bluetooth/NFC/inductive charging, but definitely something to look into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the video of the talk that Guillaume Delugre did on this pdf at 28C3 in 2011.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1lYU0VMCoY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1lYU0VMCoY)

It's both fascinating and frightening.

</comment><comment><USER10> So the usual view is that the capabilities we hear of the NSA having (keeping phone on even when it appears to be off, using GPS etc to locate the phone, transmitting microphone in the background, etc) is enabled in the baseband, when it receives coded requests from the network.

It'd be interesting if reverse engineering of the baseband could find those capabilities and see what's really possible and how it works.

<comment><USER11> Those capabilities are apparently standardised and documented; see these, for example:

[http://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/41033.htm](http://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/41033.htm)

[http://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/42033.htm](http://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/42033.htm)

[http://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/43033.htm](http://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/43033.htm)

33.106, 33.107, and 33.108 on [http://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/status- report.htm](http://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/status-report.htm) also make for some... interesting reading.

<comment><USER12> No. You are linking to lawful interception documents. That is not handled in the phone or base station but in the core network. You can not use it to track or listen to shut off devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you're wondering, iPhones have used both Qualcomm and Infineon baseband processors: [https://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Baseband_Device](https://theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Baseband_Device)

According to a note in this presentation, Ralf-Philipp Weinmann has noted exploits on broadband processors from both.</comment>


Ask HN: What would you like visualized from databases you interact with? - <AUTHOR> It seems problematic that when working with databases the primary interface is terminal text output. I'm aware there are many options for getting nicely formatted displays of your tables etc. (e.g. with html and css), but it seems to me like it might be useful to visualize more than this. For instance, wouldn't it be useful if I could just grab my User with ID 23456, and see a tree display of all the data referenced by it, rather than trying to piece this together by looking at various tables? What about its evolution in time? Wouldn't it be useful to just have a slider so that I could watch the data in this tree at previous points in time, or to be able to step through changes that were applied to it?
I've done a bunch of work on a general data visualization system that I'm considering specializing for this—but I wonder if there are enough interesting useful things to visualize, and whether it's something other developers would easily recognize as valuable or if it would seem too foreign.
Any general thoughts on the subject? or particular things you run into regularly that would be useful to have a better visual representation of? Maybe it would be possible to specialize even further around particular (widely used) database-centric software?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> > wouldn't it be useful if I could just grab my User with ID 23456, and see a > tree display of all the data referenced by it, rather than trying to piece > this together by looking at various tables? What about its evolution in > time? Wouldn't it be useful to just have a slider so that I could watch the > data in this tree at previous points in time, or to be able to step through > changes that were applied to it?

This! Looking at the data as a tree of references, or the data itself being hierarchical, is usually the most intuitive way I visualise it in my head. Same for the time, looking at the visualisation changing with time should be the way to visualize data evolution. In my work we deal with a lot of navigation logs, and what I miss the most is the ability to eaily visualize the navigation of a user and all of its attributes in the time, or how he steps from page to page. Or to visualize how the page attributes change with time, or the whole tree of url levels and how it evolves. The most challenging thing about it IMHO is how to correcltly handle not only one instance in the visualization but many, say millions, without forcing the user to pre- aggregate and loose all the interesring details.

<comment><AUTHOR> > The most challenging thing about it IMHO is how to correcltly handle not > only one instance in the visualization but many, say millions, without > forcing the user to pre-aggregate and loose all the interesring details.

I wasn't sure what you meant by pre-aggregate here. By 'instances' do you mean the states of the User data in time?</comment></comment>