A Successful YC S13 Application - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zactownsend.com/our-yc-s13-application <comment><USER2> "No online demo yet. It might be awhile before we have a dashboard and mocking up a fake API for you doesn't seem worth it."

Honestly my favorite part of the application. It gives the implication that "you're smart enough to understand that this would be a waste of both our times"

<comment><USER3> Agreed. The confidence and maturity it takes to make this kind of statement is a positive sign, and I'd bet the YC partners interpreted it as such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not sure I understanding the 'hacking a system' answer..

> _When I started in Newark, I didn't have a computer or an email, and City > Hall didn't have wireless. So I tracked down one of the wireless networks I > could find - owned by a bails bondsman close to the court, and negotiated > with them for their wireless password._

Why did you need the wireless password if you didn't have a computer or email? Needed wifi for mobile device or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was working for the city but didn't have a computer or email. Brought my laptop to work but couldn't do all that much without Internet--couldn't access the network and no public wifi. Point was I got that through chatting with a bail bondsman. It's not the greatest hack in the world.

<comment><USER5> _It 's not the greatest hack in the world._

It's just a tribute.

<comment><USER6> I think it's your comment that's a tribute to a tribute :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is ironically close to a proposal over at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6556415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6556415) that I just saw the other day. We were complaining that there isn't a standardized, thought-out API for getting bank data, and someone got motivated to apply the YC with the idea. Is OP's proposal basically the same thing?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a subset of what we're doing, yes. We've focused on taking internal bank systems -- information, payments such as ACH, wires, bill pay, other products most people aren't aware of like virtual card numbers -- and presenting them as clean, RESTful APIs.

Also see [https://plaid.io/](https://plaid.io/) which is more directly going after Yodlee.

That's not a reason not to apply / work on it though. It's an ecosystem with a lot of space for innovation. Or you could come work with us!

<comment><USER8> What positions are you hiring for? I'm not a programmer but I would love to work with you. I've been paying attention to your blog since reading the post about online-offline businesses. It struck a nerve with me and I was thinking to contact you about my idea for a marketplace.

The idea kind of crashed and burned right after that because Balanced changed their merchant agreement regarding "high-risk" and I can't use them. The only way to make it work seems to be to become a processor too and I don't have the money/experience for that if it is even a good idea. I'll send you more info if that is okay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing that leaps out at me from the few successful YC applications I've read is some of the informal language used. For instance, I would never write 'Most banks suck at technology' If it was still legal when I was in school, my English teacher would have beaten me with a ruler for writing that.

On the other hand, I can't think of a way to state the point more succinctly.

</comment><comment><USER10> "O(100s of billions)"

I see big-O notation as shown in the application all the time, and it's completely meaningless. People, please do not use it as estimation function, but rather a bounding function with respect to the size of the input. The details are a tad more fine grained than that, but Wikipedia is a few clicks away.

<comment><USER11> I agree. O(100s of billions) = O(1).

<comment><USER12> Even more precisely: If a function belongs to O(100s of billions), it also belongs to O(1).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The thing I kept thinking when I was reading this was pedigree, pedigree, pedigree. Brown grad, University of Chicago, met at Harvard Summer School. Invested in a YC company already. One works at Stripe. This is quite the resume for two people.

On the other hand, it kind of worries me, because a lot of the most successful founders don't have anywhere near the level of accomplishment that is listed on this application. I think pg mentioned this at the last Demo Day. More and more "qualified" people are applying to YC now. I don't say this to diminish the quality of the application, I just wonder if these types of applicants are pushing out the young hackers that might have made it to an interview a few years ago.

<comment><USER14> The common perception is that YC is very big on pedigree (top schools, serial founders, worked at top companies). They are known for having a prototype (they liked to call it patterns) of what is the ideal founding team.

500startups for example are willing to take more risks on people and look more deeply at the product if it has traction and a business model, even the founding team is unknown / international.

There's a lot of different investment thesis, which all make sense for different reasons.

<comment><USER15> I think it's often a reasonable assumption for YC to make.

It would be interesting to see a break-down of school + degree for all successful YC applicants, though. Not sure if that's ever been listed anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Impressive application. I wonder what percentage of teams get accepted to interview with YC without a demo.

</comment><comment><USER17> How did you get in contact with the banks? Neither founder seems to have a background business development or banking, so I'm curious how you were able to pitch to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> The short answer is that we basically know a ton of people both in financial technology and in the valley. If people know you, know you're a good person, and know you're looking for something specific they'll often help you.

Tons of people have been surprised by our success to be honest. We had a talk with a potential investor recently and we told him who we were working with at [big bank]. The potential investor was shocked - the gentlemen leading our project at [big bank] is in charge of a 10-digit-a-year business and is a hard man to find time with. But one of our lawyers, who is also an investor, introduced us. They are old friends. Banking innovation / payments / technology, etc, is a small world.

<comment><USER18> Don't you think that leveraging relationships you may have made via Stripe alone is going to cause a huge legal fracas?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting question. The only people I interacted with in a work context through Stripe was Wells Fargo Merchant Services, a joint company of Wells and First Data. I've never spoken to one of the people again because it's a completely different part of the bank than the one I deal with now. One didn't lead to the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Key reasons this was accepted (in my opinion, anyway):

1) Stripe employee.

2) Very clear product. Potential market is huge and has money and is willing to pay for this service - they already pay banks for it. First successful product in this market will create huge barriers to competition by essentially setting the standard in banks. Also very clear descriptions of how/where they are tackling the problem shows a lot of understanding.

3) Second time founder, already built a successful product - Giftly.

<comment><USER2> I would like to think that its overwhelmingly due to #2. It's a really articulate, I-know-what-the-fuck-I'm-talking-about explanation of a huge problem and market. Rest is icing IMO

<comment><AUTHOR> I think #2 is the primary reason. We got an interview, which we didn't accept, for the Winter 2013 batch. I didn't work at Stripe then. Dan didn't found Giftly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My question after reading this application is why do you need YC?

YC, at least as it was originally conceived, was designed to help young very bright hackers with no or very little business knowledge.

You guys are very far from this category. I guess YC is still useful for their network and the simple fact that being a YC startup will open a lot of doors for you. But the fact that you were accepted could mean that YC is slowly drifting away from its original mission.

<comment><USER21>
        YC is slowly drifting away from its original mission.

I think that they tend to fund people who they think will have the highest chance of success. You end up with priorities like:

1\. Previous successes

2\. Company with traction

3\. Employee at Stripe/Google/Apple/etc

4\. Smart MIT/Harvard/Stanford student

5\. Misc. high magnitude achievements

I think what you're seeing might be a higher number of 1-3 applying to YC, not leaving much room for 4 and 5. The four and fives who do get accepted are extraordinarily impressive.

<comment><USER22> I agree with you because (afterall) they aren't a charity. They makes money by investing early in these start-ups, so they need to focus on bringing people through their program that have a higher chance of success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The key reasons they got an interview (and accepted).

-The application was concise. -They seem to understand the hurdles ahead, had a plan. -Founders have been friends a VERY long time. This removes a lot of risk since startups die when founders don't get along. -Little bit a domain experience.

<comment><USER24> Definitely cracked a smile when I got to the "who do you fear" answer --

I used to work for one of the large banks on a commercial operations team. It was one of the most bogged down, regulated things I have ever witnessed in my life.

This product will end up doing extremely well; then I see the regulators and major financial institutions going "hey wait a minute, these guys are making too much money, let's fix that"

Best of luck to the team -- I think you're onto something huge, should make the speed bumps worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can you guys discuss how far along you were at pitch day and how you strategized or optimized your time at YC given you had to deal with large BigCo's? Did this come up at all in the interview, do you have best practices, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> We certainly were not as far along on demo day as we (or the YC partners!) would have liked. That's the reality of big enterprise sales. Our customers have incredibly long procurement and sales cycles. We aimed to get signed LOIs by demo day and instead we got very serious negotiations.[1]

We spent the summer building the product to support a heavy amount of sales and business development work. We put together a prototype (we essential built the platform against something we call "fake financial") where we can use the terminal and some simple application to show banks and bank customers how easy it would be with our platform-as-a-service.

[1] Whats important here is that you can't bullshit investors. The proof is in the pudding. We had to account for where we were with every potential customer, who we were speaking to at the companies (investors might end up knowing them!), what terms were discussed, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> That was a good read, congratulations. Would you mind answering how you plan to work, or will you compete with, private ACH networks like these folks: [http://www.epaynetwork.com/cms/services/processing/001459.ph...](http://www.epaynetwork.com/cms/services/processing/001459.php)

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER27> Thank you for your posts! It's great to see alumni trying to help the next wave of people with their applications.

</comment><comment><USER18> Surprised at the success given the potential non-compete shit storm situation with Stripe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ultimately they're very different businesses. Card payments and banking are related but not directly. The truth is that all I know from Stripe about the card networks, card risk, etc, has proven not useful in commercial banking. I couldn't even use their IP if I wanted to (!) and they know that as well as I do. If I started a payments processor I'd be in deep trouble. But a different part of finance, with a different business model...no one seems that worried.

<comment><USER18> Well, congrats on making it and good luck either way!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> How cool that you met at Harvard SSP, an amazing program that I loved even though I preferred technical college over an Ivy.

May I ask if you were you roommates or suitemates (or how you met otherwise), and how you stayed in touch afterwards?

<comment><AUTHOR> We were the only two people in the same two classes.

The real answer about staying in touch is the internet -- yay AIM, the best communication tool of 2003. In reality though we didn't live that far apart in New Jersey so we could hang out from time-to-time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nice work kimerling. Congratulations and keep on cranking. That is all!

</comment><comment><USER30> A lot of people are going to do exactly what I did, "Oh this is cool maybe it'll work for......wait a tick! These guys have done amazing things! Of course they were accepted."

Congrats. :)

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow that "kudos" thing is really f'ing obnoxious. If you mouseover it then it increases the global counter. Beware!

</comment><comment><USER12> The more I read these the less I want to apply. There's just this "phony" feeling I get.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't quite tell if you're calling me a phony or yourself one. If you're call me phony then I'm sorry I come off that way. I have a lot of personal and professional flaws (far too long to enumerate here) but I don't think a lack of genuineness is one of them.

If, on the other hand, you're saying you don't want to apply because you feel phony, well, then, that's hogwash. Impostor syndrome is deep in most YC founders, in most ambitious people, and in Silicon Valley more generally. If you have an idea that you're passionate about then you should apply.

<comment><USER12> Ah sorry, I didn't mean to call you phony.

I guess the feeling I get is that to even bother applying, I need to present a phony picture of myself; to reflect certain values and use a certain language to increase my chances. Of course you can say that 'just be yourself', but no system works perfectly, or necessarily even well..

<comment><USER32> I know very little about the YC application process, but if you are confident that the problem you are tackling is real, and have done your homework, I don't see why you would need to present a phony picture of yourself. In fact I'm pretty sure that the YC folks have enough smarts and experience to pick out phonies.

If you're presenting the phony picture because you don't really have a clear understanding of the problem, then yeah, you will have bigger issues with your business outside of getting into YC.

If you've put in the work and still feel like a phony, try to ignore the feeling - it's probably just the impostor effect.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


XQuery: 10 lines. XQueryX (new and improved): 140 lines - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/TR/xqueryx/#Examples

<comment><USER2> XQueryX is not supposed to be a "new and improved" query language. It's just an alternate representation of the XQuery language. See the very first paragraph of the introduction:

 _The [XML Query 1.0 Requirements] states that "The XML Query Language MAY have more than one syntax binding. One query language syntax MUST be convenient for humans to read and write. One query language syntax MUST be expressed in XML in a way that reflects the underlying structure of the query."_

 _XQueryX is an XML representation of an XQuery. It was created by mapping the productions of the XQuery grammar into XML productions. The result is not particularly convenient for humans to read and write, but it is easy for programs to parse, and because XQueryX is represented in XML, standard XML tools can be used to create, interpret, or modify queries._</comment>


To Dissect a Mockingbird: A Graphical Notation for the Lambda Calculus (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://dkeenan.com/Lambda/index.htm <comment><USER2> My alternative graphical notation:

[http://www.cwi.nl/~tromp/cl/diagrams.html](http://www.cwi.nl/~tromp/cl/diagrams.html)

(also linked to at the bottom of the article)

Example: predecessor function on Church numerals:

      ┬──────────
      ┼─────┬────
      ┼─────┼─┬──
      │ ──┬─┼ ┼ ┬
      │ ┬─┼─┼ │ │
      │ │ ├─┘ │ │
      │ ├─┘   │ │
      └─┤     │ │
        └─────┤ │
              └─┘

</comment><comment><USER3> Given this and the other relevant article on the front page about CSS I'm now going to spend the rest of the day wondering if you can implement Starling and Kestrel in CSS rather than getting work done.... :-)

[I know the answer is almost certainly "you can't" \- but I am intrigued as to how close you can get]

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm going to repeat my comment from last time this came up-- this is a really neat way of getting around the use of dummy variables, but why does he only talk about beta reduction and never mention eta reduction? Describing eta reduction in this notation is still easy.

</comment><comment><USER5> I did like this. There is a certain elegance[1] to diagram based descriptions of mathematical/physical concepts.

Another that is maybe more similar in that it removes a lot of dummy variables(indices in this case) is the Penrose graphical notation[2] for tensors. I have actually never calculated anything using these diagrams so I don't know how practical they are.

[1]:[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram) [2]:[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation)

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of the Bret Victor's "Alligator Eggs!": [http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/](http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/)

</comment><comment><USER7> The notation is interesting, but the "bird song "metaphor" makes me suspect that this paper inspired the misguided era of monad metaphors that followed.

Birds, burritos, spacesuits ...

</comment><comment><USER8> I read this a while ago, and have been telling people that Haskell's `id` stands for `idiot` since then...</comment>


FreshBooks Allows Freelancers to Network and Collaborate - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/05/07/freshbooks-saan/

<comment><USER2> This is actually pretty sweet. When I was freelancing there were times when I was presented with pieces of a project that I didn't feel like doing, wasn't efficient enough at to warrant it, or didn't quite feel qualified to do. I thought, "How nice it would be to be able to just pawn this off on a capable fellow freelancer and have them bill me." But I didn't really personally know any better than me and I wasn't about to trust it to something like Elance -- it was my name at risk, after all.

I don't know if this is meant to be a thing you do manually, e.g. you already know other freelancers, but if it is a discovery process I hope it supports ratings and reviews from other freelancers and stuff so people can be vetted. There are lots of other features that would be cool, but I won't comment on it as I'm not sure what has and hasn't been implemented/planned already.

<comment><USER3> The new features announced today are about working with freelances. The new features don't help you find new freelancers, but FreshBooks has been doing some things to make that easier. First, our forum has a gig board (<http://community.freshbooks.com/forums/viewforum.php?id=23>) where customers frequently hook up. Second, we tend to fly around the country have have dinners to introduce customers to each other.

\-- Sunir, Chief Handshaker, FreshBooks

<comment><USER2> Okay, so I guess I'm saying it _should_ be easier ;)

You have places like Elance where people can find freelancers / contractors to do work for them and you have places like LinkedIn for finding employees, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to find fellow freelancing folks to trade / refer work with. You're already letting them bill each other, so why not help them find each other in the first place? I think a lot of independent folks could be a lot more successful if they had even a small network of fellow freelancers they know they can trust to do good work in areas where they aren't experts.

<comment><USER4> Offtopic, but why don't you try to do that here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I work for FreshBooks as Market Intelligence Manager (a data analyst role). This is our latest product dev/marketing push.

I linked to the mashable article because I think it does a pretty good job at describing this release. I would love to hear any feedback you guys have to offer.

Our CEO (Mike McDerment) highly respects the opinion of the posters here, so any comments will go right to the top. Thanks a bunch guys! -Zach Aysan</comment>


Ask HN: Are you seeing a lot more false positives with Gmail? - <AUTHOR>

Over the past 2-3 weeks, I'm seeing so many "marked as spam but isn't really spam" emails that I'm suspecting something has changed with their algo. These are not just random, mom-and-pop emails that I'm talking about - I'm seeing email newsletters from major and minor companies that I've received for 5+ years go to spam. I'm talking about emails from Apple, Amazon, and even eBay being marked as spam. It's too wide to say "Maybe that company changed carriers?" or "Maybe a major email sender has been compromised?" - I bet I've marked more than 100 emails in the past 2-3 weeks as "Not spam". Some of those companies roll their own, some use constant contact, mail chimp, etc. It's gotten to the point where, once my spam folder has more than 10-15 emails in it, I go mark the emails as "Not spam" that are legit (usually at least one) and then empty the spam folder so I can more easily spot the next ones.
Anyone else seeing this behavior?
A few domains that I've seen it from just this past week (from memory):
Apple Amazon eBay Constant Contact The Vitamin Shoppe Clamcase Pool Supply World OfficeMax Active.com Sedo.com <comment><USER2> No change in my spam folder. Everything as normal and after all the gMail filter is probably the best around. It may be that you inadvertently marked a set of good emails as spam and the filter is just trying to meet what it thinks are your requirements

<comment><AUTHOR> I was with you up until "It may be that you inadvertently marked a set of good emails as spam" haha. Thanks for the reply.</comment></comment>


Online Music Contests Are Lessons in Exploitation and Craft Development - <AUTHOR> https://festivalpeak.com/online-music-contests-are-lessons-in-exploitation-craft-development-bbe604bcbe15#.lj1uqcygw <comment><USER2> This is just an extenstion of the "Battle of the Bands" scam. Basically you market you band (and their event,at their venue) and sell tickets. They keep all the ticket money, and there is a small 'prize' for the winner. 'Prize' is often just the setup to another scam, predatory record contracts with small 'advances', access to play at other events by the agency, and various memberships.

Breaks my heart every time I see a young guy or girl hawking them. Entertainment is a brutal business, especially to the talent.</comment>


Google seeks to patent all-knowing robot teddy bear - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconbeat.com/2015/05/21/google-patents-all-knowing-robot-teddy-bear-that-can-turn-on-your-tv/

<comment><USER2> Will Teddy [0] even read to you from your Young Lady's Illustrated Primer [1]?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super- Toys_Last_All_Summer_Lon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super- Toys_Last_All_Summer_Long)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age)</comment>


Intel unveils a new architecture for 2019: Sunny Cove - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/intel-unveils-a-new-architecture-for-2019-sunny-cove/ <comment><USER2> _Sunny Cove extends virtual addresses to 57 meaningful bits...The new limits enable 128PB of virtual address space and 4PB of physical memory._

This is interesting to me. At first glance I couldn't really figure out "why now". But I guess with Optane there really will be a need for addressing petabytes of ram, as it will span DRAM and Optane. It seems Intel thinks it will be a competitive advantage.

<comment><USER3> I wonder about the bincompat of such a change. "32-bit clean" all over again?

<comment><USER4> X64 was designed with this in mind. All non-active bits must be the same value (a so called canonical address) or the processor will fault. You can't use them for flag bits unless you make sure to clear them before dereferencing memory.</comment></comment></comment>


PyGraphistry – A library to extract, transform, and visually explore big graphs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/graphistry/pygraphistry <comment><USER2> Fun to see a link here!

Always happy to describe what's happening underneath w/ connecting GPUs in the browser to GPUs in the datacenter. Likewise, the connection between event data & graph analytics is powerful as data scales, so happy to dig into that too.

Not shown there, we're piloting a 'visual playbook' investigation layer to help teams who investigate through a lot of event data. This has been especially relevant for security (SOC/IR/hunt) and anti-fraud as a team grows and needs to cover more ground. Playbooks let you finally record common multi- step multi-datasource workflows and get real visibility out of them. When your alerting flags something, running the playbook will gather & correlate that data for you, and unique to Graphistry, present it in a full visual (graph) analytics session. Think visually automating multi-step queries across Splunk + Spark + various APIs. And of course, for the advanced analysts, giant GPU- accelerated visualizations. We're actively piloting with interesting teams, so please ping info@graph....com if it may be your team's kind of thing.

<comment><USER3> Is it possible to visualize graphs entirely on the client side (without sending any data to your backend)? We have some very large graphs that we'd like to explore, but unfortunately it's not possible to send the data to the cloud, hence a local solution would be great. I have investigated Gephi but unfortunately the performance is quite disappointing for very large graphs.

<comment><USER4> Not sure how large very large is or the performance you need but you might want to check out the fairly recently added graph support in datashader (examples: [https://anaconda.org/jbednar/edge_bundling/notebook](https://anaconda.org/jbednar/edge_bundling/notebook))

Here's an example of the output which I then put into tiles & rendered out: [https://proseandcode.co.uk/beta_gtr_viz/](https://proseandcode.co.uk/beta_gtr_viz/)

I think there's 600k edges in this, all rendered.

I did some of the work on the edge bundling, the split out code is here: [https://gitlab.com/ianjcalvert/edgehammer](https://gitlab.com/ianjcalvert/edgehammer)

All of this is more work than just loading it into a current program though, but it might be a useful component of what you need, hopefully a large useful part.

Get in touch if I can help out.

<comment><USER2> I'm a fan of the continuum team - we have been working together on the GPU GoAI project. We'll load 2M+ edges, and edge bundling helps make that visually useful.

Graphistry is a bit different where the result is a full interactive visual analytics session, not a zoomable png. So you get visual filtering, histogramming, search, etc. Our goal is to get from a lot of data to the answer, including whatever data pivots/cleaning/etc., as fast as possible, and that includes helping analysts skip a lot of the visualization/data coding and instead do direct visual interactions.

Worth stating: Edge bundling is beautiful! It was an early algorithm we implemented. A bit differently, we did it interactively, so you could do things like adjust sliders real-time to get the right physics settings. However, we found you'd want to hover over individual nodes/edges to see what's in them, and "zoomable image" style makes that hard. I've been wanting to bring it back now that we're getting close to supporting dynamic grouping interactions, so cool to see you call it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personally from using it, it goes well beyond just visualization of large graphs. Its not readily useful to see so many nodes, but what they've done is made it easier for people to parse through large graphs without a lot of hand holding. I would point out the work of others in this field, like Marc Khoury (which @MurrayHill1980 has already kindly mentioned), but this points to making large graphs usable for a variety of folks in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is it possible to run it locally? (i.e. without an API key)

<comment><USER2> Yep! Feel free to give the cloud version a go, and if it looks useful, we can help get you going on-premise. That would include our investigation platform as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I realized this is a great time to say -- we're hiring!

If you're into data visualization / UI engineering, fullstack node for data/security, or enterprise security sales, would love to chat. Our team is mostly in the bay area. If you've worked remotely before, that works great too.

We're especially growing in the security market around incident response + hunt. Our engineering work is around establishing more scalable best practices for investigation teams, building out our fullstack app, and we're in the middle of our next GPU visual analytics initiatives (accelerating interactive visual analytics another 100X!). So a lot of good stuff happening.

</comment><comment><USER7> Another plot.ly pushing their freemium product via Github? No pricing on the homepage yet. Will come later, after enough people integrated it in their projects.

<comment><USER8> Anyone looking for an opensource version of plot.ly, take a look at [http://www.metabase.com/](http://www.metabase.com/)

<comment><USER2> We're more complementary to Plotly & D3 than competitive. As an analogy for our developer API layers, we're closer to Google Maps than say D3 geo. Data tool teams shouldn't have to sink so much time on building out all the little interactions, just some configuring & skinning, and then back to data engineering & analytics. The result is we're getting embedded side-by-side. E.g., drop us into your Splunk/ELK dashboard that already does the basic charts. Or pilot our visual investigator, and get a direct visual exploration interface through a variety of connectors.

In terms of paid vs. unpaid, we're a pretty transparent team. We're iterating on a sustainable pricing model for enterprise investigation teams, advanced analysts, and developers building internal investigation tools. I don't believe in charging source developers, research scientists, non-profits, etc., and we'll be making our ongoing outreach work with those kinds of folks into a more formal program.

We have been and continue to be serious about community-minded open source contributions. Our team has contributed research that helped shape the modern web and leads open source projects that power a lot of tools used by the HN community today. Just this week, we released some work as part of the GoAI / Apache Arrow project, and that is part of our ongoing efforts to bring real GPU compute to the web world.

Maybe a good time to write -- we're hiring!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know a good tool to visually explore large ontology-type graphs?

<comment><USER10> You may want to look into Linkurious: [https://linkurio.us/](https://linkurio.us/) We provide a graph visualization interface that can connect to Neo4j, DataStax (DSE Graph), Titan or Allegrograph.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of the company

<comment><USER11> [https://linkurio.us/try/](https://linkurio.us/try/) should go straight to a demo page, not some signup popup

<comment><USER12> It goes to a signup popup.

I'm interested to see if anyone's offering a large-scale graph visualization that's not the "pulsating rainbow hairball".

<comment><USER13> Hi, I'm Gephi+Linkurious co-founder. I've found visualizing large graphs pretty useless beyond the "I see meatballs!" effect and my opinion, after a decade in the field, is that it's the wrong problem for data analytics.

Much more interesting information is discovered during the process of dynamically building a visualization that is focused on user questions. I see with Linkurious that investigators usually need to visualize less than 1000 edges of a 1M+ edges graph to get answers.

<comment><USER2> The ultimate answer is generally a small graph: Graphistry is a tool that helps you get there. Why that's hard is most Splunk, Spark, etc. queries will return a bunch of events, and each event has a bunch of metadata. A tool should help, not fall over.

I think you're referring to scenarios closer to why we created the visual playbook concept and our embedding APIs. Small visualizations are often a good starting point in investigative scenarios. Even better.. no visualization, just full automation. We find this thinking comes up when the investigative flow is more established and curated. With visual playbooks, teams can record & automate multistep flows, run them whenever an incident happens, take action, and share & document the results. If part of the incident involves a bunch of events, or the analysts wants to dig in, our stack won't fall over. Instead, it provides a full visual analytics session with multiple cross- linked data views.

And we're fans of Gephi. We GPU accelerated the core algorithm -- we may be coming from a different perspective and user base.

<comment><USER13> Yup, it's important that people understand the role of visualization in the complete data chain.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure I understand. Is there a resource that explains the role of visualizations in data flows in the context explained here?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Document Foundation announces the Document Liberation Project - <AUTHOR> http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2014/04/02/old-unaccessible-documents-rejoice/

<comment><USER2> Wow. I just found out that this (and, by extension, LibreOffice) can read all my old MacWrite Pro files that I'd given up hope of ever reviving. There goes the rest of the day digging through them all...

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems to be the natural continuation of Document Freedom Day... Not sure if the two are related.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe I'm missing it, but I see no mention of Access. I would think there'd be a significant need for that.

<comment><USER5> Access doesn't really have "documents" as such. Its a relational database, with tables full of records.

(Not that I disagree with the general idea: it would be great to have solid tools for migrating old Access databases to something open. I have no idea whether these exist or how good they are.)</comment></comment>


Obfuscated Erlang (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://ferd.ca/obfuscation.html <comment><USER2> Lol, this reminds me of Erlang: The Movie

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

<comment><USER3> And just in case you missed it, — Erlang The Movie II: The Sequel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRbY3TMUcgQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the comments in the code states

> According to many Haskellers, type signatures represent sufficient > documentation.

And then:

> %% I am ... %% learning ... %% cabbage

You surely do. Hmm, so much wisdom in all this

</comment><comment><USER5> The "texture" of the code reminds me a bit of the JJencode/JSFuck[1] JavaScript obfuscator --- lots of repetitive patterns and the same concept of building bigger and more complex pieces from recursive applications of very trivial rules.

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

</comment><comment><USER6> Macros are expanded at compile-time, yes? If so, does that mean you can have obfuscation with zero runtime overhead?

<comment><USER7> Yes and yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> if you like obfuscated BEAM languages, back when the eeee thing was a thing, I wrote this:

[https://gist.github.com/isaac- rstor/8bab8a47f6848613d7a23092...](https://gist.github.com/isaac- rstor/8bab8a47f6848613d7a230929a4974c8)

<comment><USER9> Just for the reference of us brats that don't know what "the eeee thing" was, could you please enlighten us?

<comment><USER10> It's a GitHub repository with a name consisting of 132 'e's, the maximum limit on GitHub [0][1].

People started contributing more and more esoteric code to print 'e' repeatedly in their favourite programming language. Eventually the repository was disabled, and the author got into a long-winded discussion with GitHub. Eventually the repository was archived [2].

[0]: [https://github.com/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/eeeeeeee...](https://github.com/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee)

[1]: [https://linuxwit.ch/blog/2018/12/e98e/](https://linuxwit.ch/blog/2018/12/e98e/)

[2]: [https://linuxwit.ch/blog/2018/12/everything-that-lives-is- de...](https://linuxwit.ch/blog/2018/12/everything-that-lives-is-designed-to- end/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 52-6F-62 As one currently slowly and gradually undertaking learning Erlange—that was... inspirational? Definitely hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER11> So this is like quadratic obfuscation.

<comment><USER12> Is this a joke about regular Erlang's readability? :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bravo</comment>


The Shallowness of Google Translate (by Douglas Hofstadter) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/the-shallowness-of-google-translate/551570#hn?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Previous comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16267363)

</comment><comment><USER3> Superb reminder of the difficulty of true NLP. Google Translate is an amazing and very useful tool, but machines have a long way to go before they really understand language.

Example sentence used by article:

> In their house, everything comes in pairs. There's his car and her car, his > towels and her towels, and his library and hers

<comment><USER4> I agree with the thrust of the article, that Google Translate is fundamentally limited (as most systems are) by its inputs and ostensible goals. But what does it mean to "really understand language"? What is the recognizable benchmark for "true NLP"?

At some point, how "good" comprehension/translation is very subjective, because it intersects so heavily with culture and history. Think of how debates still rage over interpreting Shakespeare among Western readers and academics, even though there isn't a language barrier.

<comment><USER5> I notice you quoted "really understand language." That is not a quote from the essay. Is it an indicator that you are taking the conversation in a different direction?

Hofstadter has written a lot about the question of what it means to "really understand a language", and the related more relevant question of what it means to translate from one language to another. Several of his essays in "Metamagical Themas" in the 1980s covered those topics, and they are quite interesting.

He gives an example "Mary was sick yesterday", with different levels of 'understanding'. Call it "sentence M" (quoting from [https://archive.org/stream/MetamagicalThemas/Metamagical%20T...](https://archive.org/stream/MetamagicalThemas/Metamagical%20Themas%2C%20Hofstadter#page/n29/mode/2up/search/street) , including apparent typos)

> 1\. Sentence M contains twenty characters.

> 2\. Sentence M contains four English words.

> 3\. Sentence M contains one proper noun, one verb, one one adverb, in that > order.

> 4\. Sentence M contains one human's name, one linking verb, one adjective > describing a potential health state of a living being, and one temporal > adverb, in that order.

> 5\. The subject of Sentence M is a pointer to an individual named 'Mary', > the predicate is an ascription of ill health to the individual so indicated, > on the day preceding the statement's utterance.

> 6\. Sentence M asserts that the health of an individual named 'Mary' was not > good the day before today.

> 7\. Sentence M says that Mary was sick yesterday and

> Just where is the boundary line that says, "You can't do that much > processing!"? A machine that could go as far as version 7 would have > actually understood-at least in some rudimentary sense-the content of > Sentence M.

Elsewhere in the same book he (like in this Atlantic essay) talks about the problems of translating gender across languages.

I think it was in Godel, Escher, Bach where he talks about the problem of translating a line from Russian, along the line of "He lived on B____ street." It's possible from the story, which takes place in a real city, to figure out which street that was. Let's say it was "Main Street". Does the English translation keep the original Russian word and initial? Does it translate to "Main Street" and replace the "B" with an "M"?

Or consider his book "Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language", which contains 88 different translations of a 16th-century French poem.

I think it would be difficult to incorporate all of those thousands of pages of writing on the topic into a single essay for a lay public magazine, and that your expectations are too high.

While it's true that "good" is subjective, this is a solved problem in the Turing test or Chinese room sense. We judge professional translators, like those who work at the UN. We judge students learning a foreign language. There's no reason to believe that we can't apply similar techniques to judge machine translation.

Indeed, he gives many concrete examples of a minimum level of translation competency which should be expected for a good-enough system.

<comment><USER4> I agree that the OP gives good and reasonable examples of what _should_ be doable by a competent translator. I think he is entirely on point about how people fail to realize how shallow Google Translate in terms of what we understand as "understanding" language. My quote about "really understand language" is from the GP -- I was asking _him_ what he meant by that phrase.

I don't think I disagree with the OP much at all. But I was confused because much of his essay shows how Google Translate is getting the most basic things wrong. But then he ends with discussions about what it means for a computer to have true understanding, the type of understanding that can't be achieved with just more data.

It seems to me that the obvious screw ups that Google Translate is demonstrated to make _could_ be alleviated through better algorithm design and data -- I.e. _without_ achieving what Hofstadler argues is true understanding. Just like a self-driving car could be very safe despite having no more deep understanding of driving than Google Translate does of words.

<comment><USER5> My apologizes, I missed up on the thread context.

This sort of conversation of "really understand" is Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Hofstadter and many others have written a lot on the topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> oh-kumudo Seems Google has update their translation model?

For the Chinese one, at least:

>> After one year of working in Tsinghua University, Zhong Shu was transferred to Mao's translation committee to live in the city and back to school on weekends. He still holds the post of graduate student.

The leader of the Mao Selected Translation Committee is Comrade Xu Yonglian. Introducing Zhong Shu to do this job is Tsinghua classmate Qiao Guanghua.

On the appointed day, after dinner, an old friend hired a rickshaw to come from the city to congratulate. After the guests go, Zhong book said to me in fear:

He thought I had to do a "Southern study walk." This is not a good thing to do.

>>

Now they correctly singles out person's name, "锺书(Zhong Shu)", as comparing to transliterate it as Book(meaning of the character Shu). Even with that 南书房行走,IMO, it did a not bad job, at least knowing it is its own entity, not to break into parts then translate.

As a native speaker, the style of the example text provided is quite elegant and old-school. 南书房行走 is a very confusing phrase, it looks like a verb but used as a noun phrase, and without context, it is hard for me to tell the meaning of it.

The updated version of the translation is pretty serviceable. Google Translate works best with functional text, like news/report, etc. Not quite there with literature, which is well known, probably on purpose. As someone works on MT project, this quality is pretty amazing. I won't necessarily say it is shallow, TBH.

<comment><USER6> >As someone works on MT project, this quality is pretty amazing. I won't necessarily say it is shallow, TBH.

Kind of exactly what this article is saying. To the people who work on this stuff, it's fascinatingly accurate and servicable, but to regular people it's a very poor substitute for actual bilingual understanding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder about those samples. The Chinese I would expect to be kind of garbage going off BLEUs from published papers, but the French and German should be great. Am I imagining it, or do they just not sound like RNN translations? The RNN translations in my experience tend to flow well and are comprehensible, albeit sometimes just wrong because they picked a wrong semantic interpretation. But these samples sound like the older phrase-based translations, where they immediately descend into word salad. As people noted at the time, the jump in quality for French/German was so large that people knew when the new translations went live without Google publishing anything... (I assume Hofstadter at least was careful enough to do his sampling _after_ the new RNN translations were opened up.)

Google doesn't discuss how it rolls out the translation upgrades, exactly, and it's an uneven deployment. Can any Googlers comment on the possibility Hofstadter was using the old translations? Or can any NMT researchers compare and contrast his examples with current SOTA models?

<comment><USER8> The French translation in the article matches what Google returns today (ie garbage), albeit for one difference (it now translates "in pairs" to "par deux" instead of "en paires" (which is a slight improvement, but doesn't address the fundamental errors of the translation).

The garbage it gives is consistent with the garbage statistical approaches tend to give; particularly when translating from a language without gendered pronouns to a language with them.

My favorite, most concise example to demonstrate this is the sentence "my cousin and her wife". Anyone with basic understanding of English grammar would infer that my cousin is a woman married to a woman; Google Translate gives me back a French sentence where suddenly my cousin has become a man.

This is a great example of something that a rules based translation system would never get wrong (of course, rules based translation systems have plenty of other shortcomings) and that statistical approaches have a hard time dealing with.

See also:

[https://twitter.com/seyyedreza/status/935291317252493312](https://twitter.com/seyyedreza/status/935291317252493312)

[https://twitter.com/taikadahlbom/status/935612093906194432](https://twitter.com/taikadahlbom/status/935612093906194432)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hofstadter's "Le Ton beau de Marot" (which is about translation) is one of my favorite books of all time.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hofstadter is still a boss. I felt like I was reading Metamagical Themas again.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great article that tackles some of the unwarranted hype machine learning has gotten lately, with everyone foaming at the mouth about Skynet and their jobs becoming obsolete. The author also tackles the common excuse of "it'll only get better". One interesting highlight of the article for me was the parenthetical around his translation of a paragraph in Chinese: "it took me hours". Translation is so much more than vectors between words in two languages and this article expresses that quite clearly.

</comment><comment><USER12> Google translate, like a screwdriver is a tool. One can possibly do nasty things with it, but one, if is not a tool, and if limits oneself to just screwing things, should be ok.

Can we translate that? Naaa. But that doesn't make the tool shallow.

P.S - I use the following trick to improve the odds of a good translation - the phrase has to be a "stable Google translate triangulation".

This is when a phrase does not change while switching back and fourth between three languages, two of which you know at a native level.

Dope for me. YMMV. :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Always nice to read Hofstadter, but in my experience Google Translate often returns gibberish even for single words, never mind subtleties of grammar. I don't think it replaces a foreign language _dictionary_ yet, so arguments that it doesn't replace human translators seem like overkill!

Random examples for Japanese: for "七輪" (brazier) it returns "tambourine", for "ちゃぶ台" (tea table) it returns "Shabu-bashi".

</comment><comment><USER14> If you don't know any Chinese, and you need to use a website in Chinese, what's the alternative?

I like the Firefox add-on Perapera for Chinese and Japanese. You hover, and see pop-up translation.

Edit: style

<comment><USER6> Hire a human translator...

<comment><USER14> Really? You can get short translations 24/7 with just a few minutes lead time? Can you recommend any services?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I tell to you, although he appears as the friendly interlocutor, this fellow is an interrogator of the utmost cunning, with the most sinister goal... of entrapment!

</comment><comment><USER16> Rev works really well but an actual human that transcribes what you say and it takes a day.</comment>


Microsoft's E3 Xbox One demos ran on Nvidia-powered PCs - <AUTHOR> http://hexus.net/gaming/news/industry/56841-microsofts-e3-xbox-one-demos-ran-nvidia-powered-pcs/

<comment><USER2> The joke here, of course, is that given the architectural choices for the console, a normal gaming rig PC may very much be considered a "dev kit".

Not that that will assuage the angry gamers. :(

<comment><USER3> Considering that the One has an AMD GPU, one might wonder why a dev kit would use Nvidia.

<comment><USER2> Any good developer kit needs woodscrews...?

EDIT: For anyone not getting the reference, consult the debacle as reported by SemiAccurate ([http://semiaccurate.com/2009/10/01/nvidia-fakes-fermi- boards...](http://semiaccurate.com/2009/10/01/nvidia-fakes-fermi-boards-gtc/)) years ago.</comment></comment></comment>


Getting to the bottom of the ads-coinciding-with-conversations mystery - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/wjbzzy/your-phone-is-listening-and-its-not-paranoia <comment><USER2> I've heard about this multiple times and there was even a Reply All podcast about it.

If it were true, there are plenty of security researchers and bug bounty hunters that install their own CAs on phones and pull packet dumps. You'd think we'd see reports of this by now.

Facebook/Google and others have some pretty advanced learning algorithms, and a whole shit ton of data on you. What if, via some predictive analysis based on browsing history, messages, photos and other sources, their algorithms guessed the author would be thinking about Tokyo before the conversation happened?

If true, it's kinda sad such a powerful system is simply used to sell shit to us. And if true, it could also provide some crazy insights into determinism and human predictability.

The post is shit though. The author needed to team up with a researcher, pull apart the Messenger/Facebook/Instagram apks (or whatever iPhone packages are) and find real evidence the apps passively listens to conversations and transmits that data.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author's "evidence" of Facebook eavesdropping on conversations is the fact that he talked about 'shirts' and then saw adverts for them in his newsfeed. He doesn't seem to have realised that every other post on r/entrepreneur is from a FB ad bro with a drop-ship t-shirt business.

<comment><USER4> Confirmation bias is a more probable cause.

<comment><USER5> I used to ascribe many things to confirmation bias, but now I worry that I can only remember the times when confirmation bias was the cause, and I've simply forgotten the other times.

Think about it, isn't it eerily common that you can ascribe something to confirmation bias?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not an expert on the iOS security model so I'm happy to be corrected about this, but as far as I understand this (enabling the mic without the alert banner or fetching data from wherever Siri might cache requests) would mean that either Apple is secretly colluding with Facebook or that Facebook is using an iOS exploit and sneaking it past app review. Thats an extraordinary claim that needs more then yet another anecdote and a vague technical expert to back it up, especially since it would not be unreasonably hard to provide some technical proof for this.

<comment><USER7> I'm not an expert either, but I've played one on TV, and I agree, it's utter BS this was happening on an iPhone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Continuous speech recognition is difficult. There are technical reasons why this entire supposition is wrong, at least in the phone case.

The reason for the "Hey device..." preamble to most conversations with the device is that, in most battery powered devices at least, the always-on mic and processing unit that handles this is a separate, very low power unit that recognizes _only_ the preamble, then fires up the rest of the system (usually along with buffering a bit of audio) to handle the rest of the query which can be more complex.

I could imagine that it's always listening/recording for non-catchphrase data on the power unlimited always-on pucks though, but a network traffic analysis would probably reveal that as well.

<comment><USER9> It's probably possible to do speech recognition with much less power / computation, if you don't care about its reliability. For the purpose of targeting ads it doesn't really matter if you get it wrong, as long as you improve the probability of getting it right.

That said, the article lacks any conclusive evidence this is happening. It's a scary prospect that it could happen though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty sloppy reporting on Vice's part. If you wanted to definitively test this you could, but the author's method brings no real conclusion outside of confirming their own bias it seems.

<comment><USER11> That was my takeaway as well. I notice coincidences like the examples all the time, but I don't always have my phone and many times the ads are on TV or Radio. Usually when I see the ads online that seem like a coincidence it tends to trace back to me actually looking for an item I had talked about on amazon or something. And honestly based on the number and variety of ads I see I wouldn't be surprised to see something pop up out of the blue that I had recently talked about.

I'm not convinced, but I think I could be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really don't understand this conspiracy theory.

These devices don't run on magic but on technology that's well understood by a very large number of engineers and scientists all around the world, even in countries that are not exactly friendly enough to maintain the conspiracy of the American corporations or whomever else you believe is behind this.

Because these devices run on technology and not on magic we can also observe their behaviour and reverse engineer them. We can see when and what is transmitted from these devices, we can observe individual components, we can observe apps.

I find it very unlikely that such a privacy violation and grand lie can survive the scrutiny of mortal enemies of the corporations that are allegedly behind this.

What's more likely is that your unscientific observations are flawed and you are biased to confirm your "theory" and write an article to make some ad money and fame.

<comment><USER13> I think if it were true, someone would have leaked it by now.

I think what is happening is the effect where you discuss buying, say, a new Ford XX car and then when you go for a drive you see them everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Where's the control in this "experiment"? Even just a colleague at the same location checking ads without uttering these ridiculously generic test phrases. Did he ensure his logged in account wasn't used to research some points for this story, either on his laptop or phone? There's quite a few trivial ways he could have polluted his ad stream before needing to look to voice monitoring.

Half of the stories on this topic seem to be merely the effect (I'm sure someone's coined a name for it) of seeing more of what you look for. e.g. Decide you are buying a Tesla and suddenly you notice there seem to be more Teslas on the roads...

I'd like to see some studies and stories on this that are a significantly more credible. I am naturally suspicious but in the absence of evidence I tend to think it's not happening, yet. This piece clarifies nothing.

<comment><USER15> > Half of the stories on this topic seem to be merely the effect (I'm sure > someone's coined a name for it) of seeing more of what you look for. e.g. > Decide you are buying a Tesla and suddenly you notice there seem to be more > Teslas on the roads...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion)

Frequency Illusion or Baader Meinhof phenomenon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Phrases like _I'm thinking about going back to uni_ and _I need some cheap shirts for work._ Then I carefully monitored the sponsored posts on Facebook for any changes.

The test phrases are way too common.

Proposed phrase for a future experiment:

I surely need to find a new postillion (as the previous one was struck by lightning).

though there is the risk that no postillion is paying for the ads, making a false negative ...

</comment><comment><USER15> It seems to be a bold statement without much proof or explanation.

<comment><USER17> I can't believe this is on Hacker News.

The only source here is a random cybersecurity guy with no factual basis for making the claim. That and a poorly thought-out "experiment" that seems to be about as sophisticated as "I talked about shirts and I see shirt ads."

And what the hell is this referring to? "Seeing Google are open about it..." What exactly is Google open about in regards to sending random audio from phones to any app that wants it? How can this writer just throw that out there with no explanation?

The conspiracy theory here is that Facebook built the most sophisticated ad product ever invented and is using it secretly for their advertisers to improve advertisers' results without telling them about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'll take Occam's razor on this one. This is much better explained by people becoming more aware of something after having been exposed to it recently [1]. They talk about it with a friend, and suddenly the ad that usually goes under the radar now goes above the consciousness threshold. It connects to more neurons that usual, and thus makes a complete cycle in the brain.

Furthermore, this is highly amplified by marketing tactics. Their friend would have been exposed to the same campaign, and this might be why he/she talked about it. This is the co-occurence that the second person actually reacts to. It knows the statistics are skewed on this one. Something is up.

I would not be surprised if Facebook campaigns are rolled out clusters by clusters of friends. It takes repetition for consumers to remember a message, and this is an efficient way to create it.

That's the nature of social ads.

If anything, it informs us of the emergent phenomena that can arise in a social graph.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion)

</comment><comment><USER19> Genuine question: is there definite proof that phones and services (Siri/Alexa/Google assistant) are NOT listening and recording everything? I've always refused to use those services because I have no idea what kind of data they collect, regardless of what they claim.

<comment><USER20> Yes. Attach the device to a network where you can monitor the amount of traffic (don't need to monitor the actual content).

Streaming voice takes a bit of data. That traffic would be clearly evident. 320kbps rate translates to 2.40 MB per minute or about 1 GB every 8h. I can assure you my data plan would notice that.

As I don't see gigabytes going out of my devices (I have several amazon and apple devices at home), it's fairly safe to say they aren't uploading all the noises of the house for analysis.

<comment><USER21> Nice try zuck. Prove that Facebook didn't infiltrate the iPhone supply line to plant secret microphones (not even Apple knows about them!) that are triggered by the word "shirt" and communicate back a shirt count to the facebook by delaying TCP packets ever so slightly. You can't disprove it! Nobody can!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So... yet another article full of nothing but anecdotal evidence.

What will it take to actually get a real answer on this?</comment>


Flickr – A Year Without a Byte - <AUTHOR> https://code.flickr.net/2017/01/05/a-year-without-a-byte/ <comment><USER2> One area that may be impacted by this strategy is bulk-downloading your photos. My wife set her phone to automatically backup all her photos to flickr. Thinking she could get them back at anytime, she started deleting them off her phone. After three months, I discovered she was doing this and begged her to also backup her files to an external hard drive.

Every year we sync all our family photos to have redundant backups. When she went to get the three months of backups from flickr she got "download error" after error. She sent me this link and hypothesized that the bulk-download feature is no longer working because of the need to now first decompress the files before transmitting them.

Luckily, she was able to get the 25 gigs of family photos down using a third- party application, but it's another reminder to never wholly trust the "cloud."

</comment><comment><USER3> Really interesting that (if I'm reading the article right) you can take an already-compresed JPEG, recompress it losslessly using another technique to get _better_ compression than the original compressed JPEG, and then decompress it to the original JPEG again.

The concept makes sense but I'd never thought of that before.

<comment><USER4> No, I think you've misunderstood.

What they're saying is that you can take a JPEG compressed image, decompress to raw pixels, and then recompress with JPEG more efficiently (if you're careful, no specifics on how this is done), and you save space.

That's why they mention that they're doing it very carefully, because you've got to make sure that when you decompress the new optimized image that it pixel for pixel matches the original decompressed image.

<comment><USER5> That's not how lossless compression of JPEGs work.

Besides removing information from the file that doesn't affect the rendered image (like EXIF data), lossless recompressors typically replace the huffman coding of DCT coefficients with a more efficient arithmetic coder. So you don't start over from raw pixels, but you replace the type of compression used with a more modern and efficient algorithm. That means ordinary software can't read the JPEG (since you've essentially created a new format) but you can just decompress into standard JPEG whenever someone wants to look at the image.

<comment><USER6> > Besides removing information from the file that doesn't affect the rendered > image

You can do this if the goal is pixel perfect accuracy, but Flickr can't do this since they have "a long-standing commitment to keeping uploaded images byte-for-byte intact"…

<comment><USER7> I bet a lot of those ICC color profiles are the same across many images though... One you could strip the metadata and keep it in a separate deduplicated database, and then reassemble when the user accesses the file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, this is really impressive! A whole year without any new storage for such a large enterprise is downright miraculous.

<comment><USER9> Hard to really judge without knowing how much excess storage they started the year with.

<comment><USER7> Some large organisations store as many as 15 copies of each bit of user data...

When you have a database which keeps redundant master slave replicas and mutation logs, a backup system which keeps many previous backups on-site and offshore on tapes, a storage system that has many RAID mirrors per host, a distributed filesystem which stores replicated chunks of data across an entire datacenter to handle host failure, and you keep copies of the entire lot in multiple datacenters for accessibility during planned downtime and natural disasters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another way to reach this goal is to make sure features of the service remain unfriendly to users. Case in point, when providing a search interface, only return as many results as you want to, not as many as you have. And don't bother coalescing spammy results all from the same account into one expandable item; instead let them flood the results because they used keyword tag spam, and then cut off the search results after a few pages.

Make it hard to navigate by hiding everything behind hashes, to prevent fair use downloads. Keep tags in beta for 15+ years.

Of course, when usage goes down, that helps with the problem quite a bit. A poor experience, even for viewing content, lessens engagement and leads to lower usage and fewer uploads.

Sadly, I'm afraid a much more extreme data storage reduction approach awaits faithful users of Flickr.

When Yahoo! bought a large photo blogging site in Taiwan, it simply shut it down with about six months notice, deleting everything as it did.

<comment><USER11> > Case in point, when providing a search interface, only return as many > results as you want to, not as many as you have.

Do you have an example of this? Seems like a bad way to run search.

> instead let them flood the results because they used keyword tag spam

Tag spam largely doesn't work but it's not impossible. Flagging these results makes them go away and brings them to our attention.

> Make it hard to navigate by hiding everything behind hashes, to prevent fair > use downloads.

Huh?

> Keep tags in beta for 15+ years.

Double-plus huh? Flickr is only 13ish years old. It's not ready to get a drivers license yet.

> Sadly, I'm afraid a much more extreme data storage reduction approach awaits > faithful users of Flickr.

Nope! Unless you know something I don't?

> When Yahoo! bought a large photo blogging site in Taiwan, it simply shut it > down with about six months notice, deleting everything as it did.

That sucks. Which one?

<comment><USER10> 無名小站 (wretch.cc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> git-pull I'll tell you what Flickr isn't spending money or time on: Support.

I have a flickr pro account from 6 or so years ago with hundreds of photos on it. I've tried over 10 times over a year to contact their support and get turned over to Tech Support in India that won't even read into your case!

Of course, the original email address I used for my flickr was deleted, so none of the avenues on Yahoo Help (which is where they redirect you) work. Not to mention the password may be reset after all the leaks Yahoo had.

So when I see these people on @FlickrHelp on Twitter (No replies) and Flickr having office parties, it really makes me feel quite disappointed! Yeah sure, real human touch! Former paying customer who just wants to login his account with tons of priceless photos. And they have a thread of like thousands of people who can't get into their accounts [1]

At least the employees are having fun with data compression. Sad I can't talk to an actual human to get access to my account!

[1] [https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en- us/72157668446997150/](https://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en- us/72157668446997150/)

<comment><USER12> I have the same issue.

Fortunately I can log in if I remember just correctly what email I used for my Yahoo! account. my browser fortunately remembers and the credentials in lightroom still allow my to put stuff up there.

<comment><USER13> If your browser has the password saved then you can extract it now and save it to a more secure place, like a password manager. Presumably you could then use it to update your Yahoo! account email to a current, working address.

As noted here - [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30013032/prevent-user- to-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30013032/prevent-user-to-find- password-through-firebug-chrome-dev-tools) you can get it using your browser's web inspector dev tool.

<comment><USER14> FWIW, Firefox lets you view the stored passwords directly (about:preferences#security → Saved Logins → Show Passwords). Very useful feature :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For a less ad hoc approach to reducing storage costs, I suggest looking into the ZFS filesystem. Compression is completely transparent in ZFS. Once you enable compression in ZFS, all of your files will automatically be compressed when written, and decompressed when read.

I am currently managing a Postgres cluster with a petabyte of data in it. We found ZFS to be a great way to reduce overall storage costs. We just switched our machines to machines running ZFS, and we were suddenly using 1/3rd the amount of disk space. Although it took us a while to learn all of the gotchas of ZFS, it wound up saving us a huge amount of $$$.

(As I understand it, ZFS would not have helped in Flickr's case. Since JPEGs are already compressed, ZFS would not have provided any benefit. Flickr was able to save storage by using an ad hoc compression algorithm.)

<comment><USER16> The article suggested that they had to carefully balance the processing cost of compressing and decompressing data and the storage cost.

Did the use of ZFS in your system incur noticeable processing cost in your system? Any noticeable increase in latency on your system?

<comment><USER15> When we first switched to ZFS, we had some ingestion issues. It turned out the problems were caused by poor architecture decisions we made and was merely exaggerated by ZFS. So yes, there was a noticeable increase in latency, but ZFS was only a tiny piece of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > "There are several accepted resize algorithms, but to retain the Flickr > "look", we implemented the same Lanczos resize and kernel sharpening > algorithms that we've used for years in CUDA."

How exactly is the Flickr "look" defined?

<comment><USER18> Flickr's resized images have a characteristically (over)sharpened appearance.

<comment><USER17> Does that mean that any artistic depth-of-field effect is (partially) eliminated by the Flickr look?

<comment><USER19> Ordinary image sharpening tends to just make existing edges look sharper; dof blurriness obliterates the edges. Strong sharpening on a strongly DoF-blurred image might actually make the visual contrast between in-focus and out-of- focus areas stronger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Peter Norby, Teja Komma, Shijo Joy and Bei Wu formed the core team for our > zero-storage-budget project. Many others assisted the effort.

Looks like someone's hoping to get hired

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting read... They're just using "S3 costs" as a comparison we can all understand? They don't use S3 do they?

<comment><USER22> The first link in the article [1] says Yahoo deploys Ceph internally for object storage.

[1]: [https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/116391291701/yahoo-cloud- ob...](https://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/116391291701/yahoo-cloud-object-store- object-storage-at)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> \- h.265 would help a lot, eventually this (or equivalent patent free codec) will be mainstream for storage and devices.

\- They say cost is 0.03/GB? Doesn't backblaze b2 charge 0.005/GB? Why isn't B2 a real option?

<comment><USER24> Can B2 reliably handle something the size of Flickr, with its consumer access demands (vs an enterprise/business focused service with far lower requests and bandwidth usage), as opposed to knowing for certain that AWS can? That has to be a rather dramatic consideration for a service the scale of Flickr. It's a near certainty that AWS isn't going away for the next decade at least; the same cannot be said with even remotely the same confidence for Backblaze. It's the difference between 99% and 90% confidence that your provider is going to still be around and offering a high quality service ten years out.

<comment><USER25> Its very likely Backblaze is going to outlive Flickr.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there a name for an exploit where a malicious client requests rarely- accessed contents that has been tucked/compressed away in order to overwork their server?

<comment><USER26> Cache pollution. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_pollution](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_pollution)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is anyone else confused by the baseline thumbnails and current thumbnails bar graph? I'm not really sure what it is measuring

<comment><USER28> The file sizes of the different thumbnail sizes. Baseline shows all the different sizes they used before, and current thumbnails shows the space saved by switching to just two thumbnail sizes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> >On a very high-traffic day, Flickr users upload as many as twenty-five million photos. These photos require an average of 3.25 megabytes of storage each, totalling over 80 terabytes of data.

>increasing camera resolution, burst mode and the addition of short animations (Live Photos) have increased bytes-per-image rapidly enough

>Users only rarely delete or change images once uploaded.

I'm very curious, how much of all this tr.. sorry, sweet memories are _never ever viewed_ after, say one week from upload.

</comment><comment><USER30> Regarding the lossless JPG compression change: the review strategy... was that done manually by eye or automatically using some sort of image comparison library?

<comment><USER31> Both

<comment><USER30> That's neat. I wonder if they'd consider expanding the details around how they did that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is really interesting to read! Also quite surprised by some of the statistics, I had no clue Flickr still saw this much activity.

</comment><comment><USER33> > We've pencilled out a model where we place one copy on a slower, but > underutilized, tape-based system while leaving the other on disk.

Store images on tape? What about degradation of the tape overtime? Certainly seems to be a factor compared to hard drive degradation.

<comment><USER34> I have no personal experience, but think an LTO tape would last longer than a HDD for long term storage. LTO tapes are rated to 30 years of storage and I doubt anyone would be using an HDD to store data that long.

<comment><USER7> With drives, you are typically checking every few hours that data is readable. If it becomes unavailable, you create a new replica right away.

With tapes, even though they might last longer, you typically wouldn't scan and check the data as regularly. That means, if it does go unavailable, there is a larger window of time for other replicas to fail in before re-replication completes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Optimization done right.

After a certain point, datacenter growth (both physically and logically) gets so brutal that you need to consider running things more efficiently.

<comment><USER36> They just postponed the inevitable. You can't optimize significantly forever. They will have to start getting more storage soon.

<comment><USER37> Every meal you eat is postponing the inevitable. But I imagine you still think it's worth doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is fascinating stuff. I would love to see what the Google Photos team is doing in detail (but that will likely never happen).

<comment><USER39> Google uses lossy compression on its images, so it has more flexibility than Flickr does with regards to optimizations.

<comment><USER40> Google uses lossy compression on it's unlimited free "high quality" image storage[0].

Storing original uncompressed images eats into the 15GB free storage budget, and uses paid storage upgrades after that.

Unless you have a Pixel phone (free unlimited original uncompressed image storage).

[0] [https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791](https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> i wonder if they considered decompressing on the client. not that it's a great way especially on mobile, but i was curious how numbers played out :)

</comment><comment><USER42> I hope these engineers get a few million $ bonuses.

<comment><USER43> I'm sort of surprised to see you're getting downvoted by all the greedy wanna- be zillionaire founders. If they had any brains, they'd _be_ the ones developing this compression code and getting the million-dollar bonuses.

<comment><USER42> Hah yeah I was surprised by the downvotes. My point was that if you were in finance, these sorts of numbers generate massive bonus'...but not in other fields sadly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Switching over to erasure based storage such as Minio could bring down the cost even further.

[https://www.minio.io/](https://www.minio.io/)

<comment><USER7> I want to see a distributed erasure coding system. For example, the data is distributed across 10 datacenters, and every object is available in one datacenter without requiring slow costly network roundtrips, but if that datacenter becomes unavailable it can be recovered from a combination of the other 9.

<comment><USER45> I'm not aware of any company doing that (I know backblaze does that but at the pod level, not at the datacenter level... because they only have one)

You may be interested in Tahoe-LAFS though ([https://tahoe- lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs](https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs)). It has many good things in it, one of them is that all files get erasure-encoded so that k nodes out of n are needed to restore the file. When you set a node to be a storage provider (such as S3, GCS, ...), then you effectively have erasure encoding over providers: If S3 is down, you can still retrieve your data from the rest of the providers.

Some people have actually tried to do it, as described in the first section in ([https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/TipsTricks](https://tahoe- lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/TipsTricks)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> TL;DR; the longtail (rarely accessed images) becomes really expensive. So to save storage (and thus cost), both highly compress and dynamically generate rarely accessed images.

<comment><USER47> I always wondered if YouTube hates people who put lots of unlisted family videos for friends that get say 10 or so views. It's costing in them storage but with virtually no ad revenue.

<comment><USER48> disks have hit 10tb per 3.5" disk, which means you could have _petabytes_ in each rack. I think we're at the point now where the materials are almost "free" compared to the amount of information you can fit on them.

Plus, they mine the shit out of that data. Even if they're not earning ad revenue on it, they're tracking location, usage statistics, I wouldn't be surprised if their user agreement includes the ability to have AI "watch" the video and try to mine data about what's happening in the video the same way they mine your email to build smarter and more effective consumer profiles about you. So even with nobody watching your video, I wouldn't put it past the "G-men" to find a way to eke some profit off it.

<comment><USER49> According to Parkinson's Law, data will always expand to fill available storage.

We may have petabytes for rack, but 4K videos are coming.

wiki.c2.com/?ParkinsonsLaw

<comment><USER50> > 4K videos are coming

Yes, but screens increase in resolution very slowly, and you're physically limited in how much resolution you can get on a small sensor.

And video compression is improving quite impressively.

So in the end, storage is growing a lot faster than the bitrate of videos.

I'm sure there will be plenty of demand, it comes through changes in the way we use things.

<comment><USER51> _> So in the end, storage is growing a lot faster than the bitrate of videos._

Is that true? I've been pricing hard drives recently, and they seem to have stagnated for the last few years, staying at about the same price, with the best value per Gb at around 4Tb.

I thought h265 took about half the space of h264 for the same quality, but a 4k screen is actually 4x the pixels of 1080p...

So I'm guessing 4k h265 would be about double the bitrate of 1080p h264.

<comment><USER50> The price of hard drives is still dropping, there were just some setbacks from the flood. [http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm](http://www.jcmit.com/diskprice.htm)

More importantly, don't just look at a year or two. 1080 availability is significantly more than a decade old. In fact, you should probably be comparing against 1080 mpeg-2. That gets you nearly the _same_ bitrate between then and now. In that time hard drives have gone from ~1GB per dollar to 35GB per dollar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> So Indians are not "actual humans"?! Wow...

<comment><USER53> While the wording may not have been the best, the "Indian call centre" is just a place where people have been turned into drones (these exist in the US too, but the fact that it's been out-sourced to India reflects more on the "cost- cutting" mentality around support that the company itself has). They have a script to follow and not much agency to do anything (and possible penalties for escalating issues rather than "resolving" them at the first tier of support).

<comment><USER54> To be fair, most issues that call centers deal with are rather simplistic, and don't really justify employing highly qualified people there. Apart from those not being interested in that job anyway.

Of course I'm mad too when I have to deal with a clueless call center rep, especially when they don't move you up to higher tier support even if they have no idea how to handle the issue. But as long as they do that, I'm fine with the concept.

<comment><USER53> The problem is that every issue that is escalated costs _more_ money to resolve, so there is pressure from managers to make sure that the number of escalated calls is minimal. The reality is that this is a horrible metric to go by. The issue that a caller wants resolved it what dictates the level of support that they need, and the company really has no control over the volume of calls that require more than tier 1 support (other than building a decent product, I guess).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> > get turned over to Tech Support in India

How do you know they are in India? Accent? Asking because India offshore support peeps used by Dell, Walmart etc are all give white christian names - like Mary, John, Adam etc - and also undergo 3 months of rigorous 'American Accent' training. I know because 2 of my Indian cousins ( I am American-Indian born and raised here) work at such call centers in Mumboi and Chenna respectively.

So it's quite difficult to discern that they are Indian cos the Companies that hire them spend millions of $ trying to disguise their voice and tone to make them sound like they are local / American.

<comment><USER56> be a whole lot cooler if they'd spend those millions just hiring Americans in the first place. 3 months of voice training isn't going to trump having english as your first/primary language your whole life, and those voip connections are the worst.

<comment><USER57> Seriously? I would bet that there are more Indians speaking English and willing to work a call center job than Americans.

The whole "Hire Americans!!1!" kind of viewpoint smells like Trump and honestly: The world deserves better.

<comment><USER56> I'm about as anti-trump as they get my friend. The notion that the world deserves better than having native tech support however is something I disagree with. When you are frustrated to the point of putting up with sitting on hold to get help, the last thing you want to be confronted with is an understanding barrier. Between accents and regional colloquialisms this is a likely reality of foreign tech support.

Also, your assumption is wrong. 95%+ of Americans speak English while only 12.5% of Indians speak it. Even with India's much larger population that still amounts to roughly a 3rd as many compared to the U.S. There is also a knock-on effect. When only 12% of the population speak a language they tend to avoid using it as a primary conversational language and thus only get practice in professional settings which lowers their fluency in it. Add to that all of the regional oddities and its quite different from American English. Consider for example phrases like "Kindly do the needful" or "out of station". Phrases they say daily that are completely foreign to American ears.

When you next have a chance compare someone in the Philippines (92% english) speaking English vs someone from anywhere in India speaking English and it'll become very apparent to you that the percentage of the population that speaks the language makes a huge difference in the intelligibility of said speaker.

<comment><USER58> I think you missed one of the points. How many of those 95% of Americans want to/are willing to work in a call center?

<comment><USER59> Millions?

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/580586/states-with- the-h...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/580586/states-with-the-highest- employment-call-centers-us/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Gotta get the capex down for new management moving in.

</comment><comment><USER61> Well sure, it's not so hard to go a year without adding another byte of storage if you're Flickr ;)... let's see Instagram or Facebook do it. Are people even still uploading things to Flickr?

<comment><USER62> I think it's a different demographic.

Photographers still use and make projects or series on stuff like Flickr or Behance.

Instagram and Facebook are more "blog-like" and aimed at snapshots of daily life, holidays etc to share with friends. It's normal imho that these are much higher in volume.</comment></comment>


TLBleed: When Protecting Your CPU Caches is Not Enough - <AUTHOR> https://www.blackhat.com/us-18/briefings/schedule/#tlbleed-when-protecting-your-cpu-caches-is-not-enough-10149 <comment><USER2> I'm beginning to think that running _any_ software on the same physical machine where secure code needs to run is a liability. Someone could backdoor a stupid useless utility and grab important keys.

What scares me is virtualization; could this attack be practical on EC2 across guests instead of hyperthreading? (I know there's a very large difference in the way these two concepts work)

Finally, how exactly is this possible with a EDDSA or Ed25519 based ECC curve? The claim to fame there is that because they don't branch, side channel attacks are much harder.

<comment><USER3> Your first sentence is why part of hardening systems is getting down to a bare minimum footprint of installed software.

To your second question, cloud vendors are generally very happy to sell you threads instead of cores on multi-tennant hosts. So, almost certainly- if not with this attack, than with a Spectre variant or something as yet undiscovered/undisclosed. If you want to avoid that some let you pay extra for dedicated hardware.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, all of the standard host types that AWS offers, for example, are pairs of hyperthreads, so you are getting a dedicated CPU and are presumably not scheduled on the same core as a thread from another tenant.

That is, unless Amazon has made some unusual scheduling decisions.

I didn't check the other cloud providers.

<comment><USER3> Given that CPU steal remains an ongoing problem (ie, another tenant is eating into your instance's allocated processor share), on what do you base your implication that AWS is binding cores to specific VMs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there anything more substantial about this out there? We can update the link if so.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems that this is the main reason behind OpenBSD disabling Hyperthreading support. But at the moment there is not a lot of information out there. I think that if we start to see other distribution (Redhat) disabling hyperthreading too we might have another Meltdown on our hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350278)

Connection(s):

[https://www.mail-archive.com/source- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg9...](https://www.mail-archive.com/source- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg99159.html)

[https://www.mail-archive.com/source- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg9...](https://www.mail-archive.com/source- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg99161.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> More details today at The Register [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/22/intel_tlbleed_key_d...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/22/intel_tlbleed_key_data_leak/)</comment>


GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio: Minecraft can prepare kids for future - <AUTHOR> http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2015/09/03/gops-rubio-says-minecraft-can-prepare-kids-for-future

<comment><AUTHOR> Quote: "Kids might not realize they're coding, but that's going to be almost a basic proficiency just because of the way they grew up."

We REALLY need to get him (and other presidential candidates) aware of Scratch. I've pinged UK Scratch advocates about this. See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10144228](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10144228)</comment>


Everything You Wanted to Know About Blockchains (Part 2/2) - <AUTHOR> https://unwttng.com/what-is-bitcoin-ethereum <comment><AUTHOR> This is a follow up to: [https://unwttng.com/what-is-a- blockchain](https://unwttng.com/what-is-a-blockchain) previously discussed at: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15497729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15497729)</comment>


The impossibility of perfect forgeries? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.oup.com/2015/02/impossibility-perfect-forgeries/

<comment><USER2> I think the author is trying to say that there is a concept of knowledge that is inherent to words "perfect forgery". That either someone knows the origin of an object and therefore it is not a perfect forgery, or all such knowledge has been erased and now there is no way to say that an object is not authentic.

I think this is something of a straw man argument. There is an entirely satisfactory functional definition for "perfect forgery" which is that an object is a perfect forgery if it cannot be distinguished from an authentic object by someone with no prior knowledge of the object's origin. This is what I believe common intuition would determine the word "forgery" to mean. An object does not fail to be a perfect forgery because its creator knows it is not real. It is a perfect forgery if it can fool everyone else into believing it is real.

Making zero knowledge of authenticity a prerequisite for a "perfect forgery" is to neglect that there are multiple independent minds in the world with their own viewpoints. I can _know_ "that is a perfect forgery" if I know it will fool anyone without my private knowledge. Such knowledge is not incompatible with the object being a perfect forgery, because the most sensible definition of "perfect forgery" is that it would fool anyone else, not that it has already fooled everyone including me.

</comment><comment><USER3> When we talk about whether something is real or a forgery, I don't think we really care _what_ it is composed of, we care about its provenance. The composition is really just a shortcut often used to help us identify obviously fake provenance; if something is not composed of the same stuff as the real thing, well then we can disqualify it from being real. I don't think anyone should suppose that identical composition is sufficient to guarantee real provenance though.

For perfect forgery detection, I think you need a complete and unimpeachable record of where each bill has been at each moment of its existence. The current physical properties of the item are just not enough. Obviously that is infeasible, though I guess crypto-currencies basically do that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't this just saying that not all proofs are constructive? That is, just because you can prove the existence of an object doesn't mean you necessarily have a method for identifying it.

Also, there is some vague appeal to a substructural logic here, since by mixing up the forgery with the genuine article, you're destroying the information about their origins, which is what prevents you from identifying the forgery afterward.

I'm not up on my modal logic, but I think this can be expressed as ◻∃x.P(x) ↛ ∃x.◻P(x)—proving the existence of some x for which P is true does not imply that there exists any particular x for which P is provable.

</comment><comment><USER5> In other words, to have a perfect forgery you must not know it is a forgery. If you could screen for knowing that a bill is a forgery, it would be useless to make one (since you could not spend it, since you knew it was a forgery). Bummer we can't. /s</comment>