OpenSSH for Windows update - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2015/10/19/openssh-for-windows-update.aspx <comment><USER3> > Leverage Windows crypto api's instead of OpenSSL/LibreSSL and run as Windows > Service

Was wondering about that. I'm surprised the OpenBSD team is accepting the commits - something so fundamental and Windows specific doesn't seem like their kind of thing - but great!

PS. If you're coming from a Unix background and interested in learning posh: [https://certsimple.com/rosetta-stone](https://certsimple.com/rosetta-stone)

<comment><USER4> Was just coming here to voice my concerns over this choice as well, wondering what their reasoning is for changing crypto systems.

<comment><USER5> I really don't like that there replacing an open source crypto with a closed source one. Putting on my tin foil hat but didn't Microsoft hand over a back door to the NSA already.

<comment><USER6> They collaborated with the NSA to develop an exploit in the SSL implementation used in Outlook.com.

From the Snowden documents;

 _July 31, 2012

Microsoft (MS) began encrypting web-based chat with the introduction of the new outlook.com service. This new Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption effectively cut off collection of the new service for FAA 702 and likely 12333 (to some degree) for the Intelligence Community (IC). MS, working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal with the new SSL. These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012._

<comment><USER7> It's not clear this should be called an "exploit". It sounds like Microsoft in its capacity as a cryptographic endpoint turning over either plaintext or session keys (or in the severely worst case, long-term private keys). It doesn't make much sense to me to refer to that as an "exploit".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Address POSIX compatibility concerns

Best way to address POSIX compatibility concerns is implementing a proper POSIX layer in Windows (and not in a half-baked manner like the now deprecated SUA). I can't imagine how it would hurt anybody.

<comment><USER9> SUA was not half-baked, this is a very, very hard problem. There is a very serious difference in the way POSIX and Windows model a lot of really important OS primitives, from asynchronicity model in signals, to the semantics of syscalls like `fork`. Every process using these primitives on POSIX has specific behavior defined under those primitives, and if you don't choose _exactly_ the right behavior on the POSIX subsystem in Windows you will definitely break programs.

So, no. You can't "just" implement a POSIX subsystem correctly. These systems are just not compatible. It will always be half broken.

<comment><USER10> Microsoft does control the kernel, and given that, none of this stuff is particularly complicated.

As for choosing "_exactly_ the right behavior" ... the whole _point_ of POSIX is to clearly define the exact right behavior!

<comment><USER11> Sure, its "easy" if Microsoft wants to redefine Windows in POSIX terms; iits not easy to keep Windows functioning as Windows _and_ provide a POSIX compatibility layer, since Windows _isn 't_ designed around POSIX expectations.

<comment><USER10> Do you actually have specifics, here? I'm happy to discuss things like how to model fork() in-kernel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Will this OpenSSH server be able to run interactive console programs (like cmd.exe or python.exe), or will it be limited to (say) PowerShell?

Windows doesn't have a good API for hosting a console--it's not like Unix, where a pty has a master end and a slave end. Trying to run a console program in mintty.exe ([https://github.com/mintty/mintty/issues/56](https://github.com/mintty/mintty/issues/56)) or Cygwin SSHD fails for this reason. I wrote a tool, winpty, that makes a best-effort attempt to emulate a Unix pty master by scraping the console buffer, but it has some limitations, so I'm not sure Microsoft would want to use it. Maybe they would expand the console API?

<comment><USER13> I too was very skeptical. Something about posts from "The Powershell Team" about porting sshd makes me deeply cynical that they would get the integration right from a layering perspective, i.e. as if they would make it support powershell and nothing else.

Fortunately this example shows it going straight into cmd and then they invoke powershell as a next step:

        C:\Master>ssh.exe -l email@example.com
        firstname.lastname@example.com's password: **********
        Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.10566]
        (c) 2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
        user@DEV-10566-829 C:\Users\user>powershell -File -

\- [https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/wiki/ssh.exe- exa...](https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/wiki/ssh.exe-examples)

That gives me some hope that it's being done right.

<comment><USER14> There are these two interesting commits, "Add pty mode support code":

[https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/commit/55f2ec682...](https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/commit/55f2ec6825e720e1395d77ece55fb411c861bb18)

and "Add ANSI parsing engine and console draw support to SSH client":

[https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/commit/7aac59e52...](https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/commit/7aac59e524e6dc9f1c1faed18340cff7dfd9a47c)

Something about this reminds me of ANSI.SYS.

<comment><USER15> you could run ANSI.sys in modern cmd.exe, sadly there's no ANSI.sys in Win7 anymore.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.msdos.batch.nt/Y...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.msdos.batch.nt/YZnoq80Mcds)

<comment><USER14> Cool. Looks like that is essentially listing DEVICE=ANSI.SYS in config.nt? Google results imply some things about 16-bit emulation here -- was that post about running actual DOS ANSI.SYS in a VDM running actual DOS COMMAND.COM, within a native Windows terminal?

<comment><USER15> IIRC, the command.com only bootstrap the ANSI coloring, after that you can run anything in cmd.exe

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Never was much of a windows fan, so a (slightly ignorant) question for someone who is a Win admin - can most administrative things nowadays be done via the command line on Windows (like we've been able to do in *nix land) or is there a gap between what can be done via the GUI vs the command line?

<comment><USER17> Microsoft are pushing the command line to the point that:

a) Many operations in newer bits of Windows have simple-mode available in the GUI, but more sophisticated options must be scripted. StorageSpaces has a few examples of this, where some of the options around tiered storage, SSD caching, and the layout of pools can only be accessed via posh.

b) Microsoft are pushing completely headless versions of Windows Server for 2016.

<comment><USER18> About headless version , it is so great to hear that , although I am not using windows , but hearing that is good news overall , it seems with new CEO Microsoft back on truck . I would not remember with ballmer they released windows server with Metro UI . WTF !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is very goddamned awesome. All I hope is I can set the default user shell for my account. I already use msys2's zsh for my shell (because I use zsh everywhere, on all OS), and being able to ssh into my Windows machine 'normally' (for me, anyways) would be extremely useful.

</comment><comment><USER20> I suggest making Update update, ie lower case, I was confused as to why Windows Update was getting ssh

<comment><USER21> I thought standard title rules were every word other than words like 'and' and 'is' were capitalized.

<comment><USER22> I don't believe there is a hard rule for titles that should take precedence over clarity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The more things change..., from:

[https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/wiki/Deploy- Win3...](https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/wiki/Deploy- Win32-OpenSSH)

"If you need key-based authentication:

Install key-auth package

run setup-ssh-lsa.cmd

 _reboot_ "

Reboot?

And this gem: "SSH daemon needs to run as System to support key-based authentication".

Which means, either use weak authentication, or run the daemon as system. I don't even understand why, it's not like the public keys are particularly sensitive (certainly much less sensitive than being able to check passwords for validity)?

<comment><USER24> Have you checked what user OpenSSH usually runs as on a linux machine in order to allow key-based authentication? I'll give you a hint: it's root. That's no different than running as SYSTEM on Windows.

<comment><USER23> As a sibling comment mentioned, it makes perfect sense that the ability to create a user session requires a certain privilege. What struck me as odd, was that it only needed this on Windows when using key-based authentication - <USER2> when allowing password-based login.

AFAIK ssh needs access to /etc/shadow on Linux, if you want to use system passwords. But also, AFAIK, nothing stops you from running ssh in a chroot, without any such access (well, access to _a_ /etc/shadow under the chroot probably).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very off topic - I thought that publically was a mis-spelling, but apparently it may be acceptable now!

[http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45136/difference-...](http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/45136/difference- between-publicly-and-publically)

</comment><comment><USER26> For those interested the source code is here: [https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/](https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I am waiting the moment when I can throw away WinRM and SSH to all the servers.

<comment><USER28> You have to create a god damn scheduled task to do Windows Updates over WinRM. And it takes ages for Powershell to realise the task is running, and polling the status of the job is a PITA.

Took me days to automate Windows 2012 with Packer. Ugh

<comment><USER29> For others facing a similar situation, I very strongly recommend starting here instead of DIY. :-)

[https://github.com/joefitzgerald/packer- windows](https://github.com/joefitzgerald/packer-windows)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm interested in how this is going to work in PowerShell with the way everything works now, if there happen to be any details about that (whether here, somewhere else, or a past link)?

<comment><USER31> I don't know anything about PowerShell, but I have a similar question, I think: how is this going to work? Will I be able to do something like this command line (from my *nix machine)?

        ssh email@example.com dir d: | less

<comment><USER32> You should be able to do that just fine. 'dir d:' runs on the windows box and 'less' on the unix box.

<comment><USER31> Excellent. That's very useful!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It would be good if there was a good free terminal for Windows. The only option is putty.

<comment><USER34> Check out MobaXTerm:

[http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/](http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/)

I don't work for them, I just think it's a nice tool, so much so I paid for the Pro version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is exciting to hear.

I might be overly nitpicky, but holy inconsistent coding styles Batman: compare [https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/blob/bafc1df7c5c...](https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/blob/bafc1df7c5c15dbdd2e0c0112936a74d97d9f327/contrib/win32/win32compat/cng_cipher.c) to the other source files.

<comment><USER36> Ugh. And calling strcpy() with user-supplied data inside a SSP of all places... :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What's the plan for supporting OpenSSH in the long run? Or is this just a one off port that will become stale after a few years?

</comment><comment><USER38> I've been running OpenSSH on Windows servers for years, using Cygwin.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm a fan of Bitvise SSH for a Windows SSH server; it's been enough to replace Terminal Services when each employee has their own work machine to remote desktop into.

It's nice that Microsoft recognizes the need for this functionality; I wonder how they will approach the potential per-client licensing issues they like to bring up with their server OS's.

[https://www.bitvise.com/ssh-server](https://www.bitvise.com/ssh-server)

</comment><comment><USER40> Out of curiosity...why run this as a service?

EDIT: I misread this and though it was only a _client_. Geez. If it's a server, then of course it should be a service.

<comment><USER41> How else would you expect an SSH server to run? As a desktop application?

<comment><USER40> Oh, I thought this was just a _client_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> A great openssh for windows for the time being. Being using this and it is great, only thing is not able to do powershell from it once connected to host.

[http://www.mls-software.com/opensshd.html#botpage](http://www.mls- software.com/opensshd.html#botpage)

</comment><comment><USER43> I have had really good luck with this open source, native windows, ssh server. [http://www.kpym.com/2/kpym/index.htm](http://www.kpym.com/2/kpym/index.htm) I have no affiliation with the project, i just thought i'd mention that it is a nice alternative i found.

<comment><USER44> Why does this support telnet? Just seems crazy to me. Is it on by default? That would be a violation of any sane security policy pretty much anywhere. Seems like a serious edge case requirement and odd to bundle with SSH. This is like buying a new car but then having the dealer give you a free horse with your purchase.

<comment><USER45> Telnet has the unique advantage of having an implementation for the opposite part on any TCP/IP compatible system without external libraries, crypto etc. and that you can recreate both a server and a client in literally an hour with nothing but a C compiler and an ordinary libc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> That is great, i have tried some ssh servers for windows they have all been constantly crashing or not working with ssh keys.

</comment><comment><USER47> Cool. Looks like Userify.com (SSH Key management) will support yet another platform sometime next year.

(disclaimer: I work there.)

</comment><comment><USER48> Interesting, they're still using MinGW. I wonder if they'll ever get it to build under MSVC?

</comment><comment><USER49> That's a good engineering project. Lucky team working on it!

</comment><comment><USER28> The comment submit button doesn't even work in Safari. That must have taken some effort to break.</comment>


A "cloned you" at lifenaut.com - <AUTHOR> http://lifenaut.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> The whole concept seems a bit "eh" but imagine if this company grew into something?</comment>


Show HN: Stdlib.com – Building a Standard Library of Node.js Microservices - <AUTHOR> https://stdlib.com <comment><USER2> My opinion is that this is disingenuous to the 'stdlib' title.

Consider it.</comment>


Google I/O Event Easter Egg - <AUTHOR>

Go to i/o announcement page: https://developers.google.com/events/io/ click on the zeros and ones in the following sequence: 01111111 <comment><USER2> I get a Matrix-style 1/0 screen.

<http://t.co/7nUseCviLa>

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone figured out any meaning behind these numbers? Or are they just random?

</comment><comment><USER4> 00111001 gets you a hotdog and burger

</comment><comment><USER5> 11010011 gets you a Simon game

</comment><comment><USER6> 00101010 gives you outer space

</comment><comment><USER7> 11100111 = cats

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> also try: 10000001, you get pong

</comment><comment><USER8> 10001000

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 10010000

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 11011011

</comment><comment><USER4> nice find!</comment>


CIA employee's quest to release information 'destroyed my entire career' - <AUTHOR> http://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-employees-quest-to-release-information-destroyed-my-entire-career/2014/07/04/e95f7802-0209-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html

<comment><USER2> It seems like that as time has gone on, the intelligence apparatus in the US and closely allied countries has come to depend more and more on holding any and all information on anything.

It's their leverage and it's their ability to control and influence events. Even small concessions are probably felt to be too much, and I imagine to many in the CIA and elsewhere, a cold war domino effect mentality still permeates.

It's ridiculous, and it undermines a free flow of knowledge that our society desperately needs to function effectively. However, it only seems to be increasing in scope, and I believe the people related are more concerned about their positions and power rather than the long term viability of our country.

Addenum: Perhaps worse, is that behaviors like this from the CIA, FBI, and NSA give ample diplomatic ammunition to every totalitarian and oppressive state on the planet and it legitimizes their actions. Even more so, they can argue that they were at least transparent about it rather than lying to the public. It's sad to think that a place that used to stand for freedom from oppression can more and more be used as a justification for it.

<comment><USER3> When was the last time you filed a FOIA request with the FSB or KGB? Or the BND or Säpo?

Every totalitarian and oppressive state on the planet will find a reason to legitimize their actions regardless of whether or not America passes acts like the 1966 FOIA.

<comment><USER4> Should we also let all the murderers and rapists out of jail because they didn't commit genocide? The fact that the US intelligence apparatus is one of the taller pygmies around doesn't make it a giant.

<comment><USER3> If its genocide you are worried about, best pay more attention to those committing genocide rather than murderers and rapists. If its freedom of information you care about, best pay more attention to the FSBs, KGBs, BNDs and Säpos of the world than the CIAs, NSAs and FBIs.

But I guess you can't hate what you can't see. And I say that with the understanding that FOIA + CIA is probably as uniquely American as it gets.

<comment><USER4> It's a good point, but my point was that it's not an either/or thing. There's plenty of outrage to go around, and the fact of the matter is that the NSA has enjoyed a very privileged position on the internet that the FSB simply doesn't have, so even if they're _relatively_ transparent and respect the rule of law _more_ than the FSB, we never trusted the FSB with anything sensitive in the first place, so they had no opportunity to commit the crimes that the NSA has perpetrated.

Not to mention, the NSA are the ones that the Americans are actually paying for and who we have _some_ (albeit low) chance of stopping. There's no point letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

<comment><USER3> It is an either/or thing. Either you have a robust American FOIA-like system... Or you don't. (If you're outside America: You don't.) You want us to hate them all, I argue it is practically _impossible_ to hate anyone else besides the NSA/CIA/FBI without an equivalent to the FOIA. Its epitomized by the American phrases "what you don't know can't hurt you", "what the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over" and "ignorance is bliss". I think where people get it wrong is when non-Americans think America is the problem-- and that is because they lack a FOIA.

> _we never trusted the FSB with anything sensitive in the first place, so > they had no opportunity to commit the crimes that the NSA has perpetrated._

Don't mistake absence of evidence as evidence of absence. And I say that knowing full well that without a FOIA, such a mistake is impossible to avoid. The fact is you have no clue about any agencies besides the NSA/CIA/FBI. Be careful how reliant your hatred is upon knowledge when your knowledge is deficient.

> _the NSA are the ones that the Americans are actually paying for and who we > have some (albeit low) chance of stopping_

The NSA/CIA/FBI are the ones that _anyone_ has _any_ chance of stopping. Because its the only one where FOIA information can overcome your ignorance that "they had no opportunity" or some such nonsense. But the first step is to enact FOIAs, not stopping the NSA/CIA/FBI.

<comment><USER5> >It is an either/or thing. Either you have a robust American FOIA-like system... Or you don't. (If you're outside America: You don't.)

You might not have meant it that way...but there are other FOIA-like laws in other countries. For example, RTI (Right to Information) Act of India - I have several people that I know who have used it for great success. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, it is broader in scope than the FOIA - since it is used to get information on things like why a certain person was rejected for a govt promotion, the internal status of my passport application, etc

<comment><USER3> Indeed I did. Specifically in the context of FOIA requests for CIA-like agencies. I am sure other countries have them; I am unsure how many apply them to their foreign intelligence services.

Does India's RTI Act apply to agencies like the RAW?

<comment><USER6> From what wikipedia says[1], it seems that in India you can't get information that would affect national security, but I highly doubt you can get that in USA either. You brought up BND and SäPo earlier, and from the same article it appears that both Germany and Sweden do guarantee access to all official federal information.

[1] [http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_information_laws_by_cou...](http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_information_laws_by_country)

<comment><USER7> I think [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index) also relevant

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I dislike many of the recent revelations about the intelligence community's activities, but if this guy based a freedom of information request on information that he only knew about due to his access to classified information, then he did in fact mishandle classified information. You are only allowed to use classified information to perform your duties at work.

I agree that there should be things in place to protect legitimate whistle blowers, but that doesn't even seem to come into play here.

Then again, we don't know the complete story, so I reserve judgement.

<comment><USER9> From the article:

> Scudder's FOIA submissions fell into two categories: one seeking new digital > copies of articles already designated for release and another aimed at > articles yet to be cleared. He made spreadsheets that listed the titles of > all 1,987 articles he wanted, he said, then had them scanned for classified > content and got permission to take them home so he could assemble his FOIA > request on personal time.

So, apparently the CIA said 'nothing classified in this list of titles' and let him take them home... only to attack him later for some of the titles being classified. If he isn't lying, then do you support the CIA punishing him for someone other agent's mistake?

> if this guy based a freedom of information request on information that he > only knew about due to his access to classified information, then he did in > fact mishandle classified information

So just knowing that they exist to create a FOIA request is a 'mishandling' if classified information? What about the 1,400 articles that were cleared, but were just sitting around? What about the fact that the CIA cleared his spreadsheet of titles to take home and work on the FOIA requests?

<comment><USER8> >If he isn't lying, then do you support the CIA punishing him for someone other agent's mistake?

I didn't say I supported punishing him. I said "If" he did a certain thing, he would be guilty of mishandling classified information. If he didn't do that certain thing, then he's not guilty.

In the course of handling nearly 2000 documents, it would be easy to make a mistake and accidentally include one that had not been approved by his supervisor.

Going solely off of the information in the article, if he made no such mistakes, the fault should lie with his supervisor (If and only if it can be proven that his supervisor approved the release of information that he should have known was still sensitive.)

I was just talking about the handling of classified information in general. From the limited information we have, it seems like this particular CIA agent was just trying to do the right thing. I was just attempting to illustrate that when it comes to handling classified information, it is very easy to make an honest mistake that could land you in a world of trouble.

That's part of the reason I got away from working for the government. Too much stress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is amazing:

> _The CIA disbanded the Historical Collections Division last year, citing > budget cuts_

How much have we increased overall intelligence services budgets in the past 10 years? And they can't afford to keep paying their internal historians?

<comment><USER11> It seems to have been going down in the last two years [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intelligence_budg...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intelligence_budget#Top- line_figure_of_aggregate_NIP_and_available_aggregate_MIP_budget.2C_FY_2006-present) Although it's still higher than it was in 2009.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is less an issue of an agency that lost sight of legal requirements to allow documents be released to the public than it is an indicator of an institution stuck with boys-club hierarchy where any questioning goes against the parental nature of things.

And despite the washington posts desire to paint this with the same stroke they did the email cache from snowden, the two are entirely different issues. this juxtaposition along with how overboard the post went in considering "ongoing intelligence operations" in the snowden case, just feels like ass covering.

</comment><comment><USER13> > In an interview, Scudder, 51, cast his ordeal as a struggle against > "mindless" bureaucracy...

I think this is wrong.

Bureaucracies are made up of people. Some of those people choose to persecute whistle-blowers. They don't have to, they have a choice. They are not automatons.

Blaming it on bureaucracy wrongfully absolves the individuals.

<comment><USER4> > _Blaming it on bureaucracy wrongfully absolves the individuals._

I agree with the sentiment, but I think the point of calling it mindless bureaucracy is to emphasize that these systems themselves tend to reward this sort of behavior and punish deviation. Even if you punished all the individuals involved (which you _should_ , because that's one of the _reasons_ that these bureaucracies have these incentives), you might get a good organization for a while, but the natural entropy of things would push it back to something resembling the status quo unless you change the fundamental incentives.

Frankly, I imagine the bureaucrats in general would be happy to blame it on "a few bad apples" and just move things along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It is troublesome that I am afraid to comment on this article in fear of my NSA_SUSPICION_INT rising.

<comment><USER15> It's not the NSA_SUSPICIOUN_INT rising I worry about. I am certain that individual monitoring of the average hobo like your or me (I don't know maybe you're actually a TOR dev or something) isn't happing, BUT someday you may become an interest to the police for something and THEN they look at your posting history and THEN they will find your possibly less sensitive comments on how you hated such and such and put some horrible out of context quote in big print on a poster at your trial when the prosecutor makes his case for why you should be in jail for the rest of your life for something you may or may not have actually done.

And so I use anonymous accounts to post things other than nice happy words relevant to my job so they don't show up in search results. I create new accounts and stuff. I can be pretty opinionated and I don't want the average person googling my very googlable name and seeing my stupid uninformed opinions and using that to misinterpret me or something.

<comment><USER16> I would much rather post anti-government opinions with my name attached than anonymously. As much as we complain about the NSA, we do in fact still live in a free society with a right to habeas corpus. Should you ever find yourself at trial, where the prosecutors try to turn "anti-government sentiment" against you, would you rather it be written behind an anonymous pseudonym or your real name? If they're going to find it regardless, then at least with your real name attached, you have the credibility of your persona, which you should confidently feel is worth something to a jury.

It's much easier to argue a case for freedom of speech when it doesn't appear you're trying to hide something. After all, who would attach their name to an opinion he didn't want people to know he held?

Furthermore, I'm proud of my opinions. If I'm going to perpetuate them, I'm going to do it with my name attached. God willing, should I ever have to defend those opinions in court, I will proudly and defiantly do so. Hiding behind a pseudonym strikes me as needless cowardice in the face of yet manifest oppression.

This anti-government, anti-NSA, anti-1984 rhetoric is healthy and valuable, but let's keep our emotions in check and avoid overdramaticizing the situation. We don't live in a police state. Yet. If we ever get to that point, I would like to have my trail of opinions to fall back on and use to defend myself.

<comment><USER17> I have been on Reddit for eight years, and only came out with my name today. People should be encouraged to use aliases for any number of reasons. To name a few:

      * You should be able to express an idea without that idea being attached to a known identity (partly because people may judge the idea based on the known identity)
      * You should be allowed to "start over" (heck, I might want to start over soon)
      * In the face of an Orwellian government or an unaccepting society, you should be able to safely express your true opinions

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> He should have used parallel construction. Had someone else actually submit the requests for the docs he found that he figured should be public.

</comment><comment><USER19> Getting your home raided for submitting a FOIA request seems to neatly summarize the state of freedom of information.

</comment><comment><USER20> This should be pushed over to swintonreport.com. Not to push it as a site, but it does carry this type of pertinent information.

</comment><comment><USER21> What did he think was going to happen? He acts like an idealistic and naive attention grabbing princess.

<comment><USER9> > He acts like an idealistic and naive attention grabbing princess.

Please put in at least a little effort to remain civil on this site. All that you've contributed to the discussion is:

> He got what was coming to him. <insert-name-calling>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations that _he concluded_ were > still being stored in secret years after they should have been shared with > the public.

Ya, I'm trying to figure out what he thought would happen.

<comment><USER11> That sentence might be unclear, but there are laws and policies that govern how long certain operations can be kept secret once they are concluded. Since the CIA has since published 1400 of the 1700 documents, it seems he was mostly right.

Edit: this is clarified later. _In the process, he said, he discovered about 1,600 articles that were listed as released to the public but could not be found at the National Archives._</comment></comment>


Link rot and redirect madness - <AUTHOR> http://donmelton.com/2015/12/09/link-rot-and-redirect-madness/ <comment><USER2> For anyone interested, the Internet Archive has a small but tight open source community called Archive Labs <archivelab.org> (all experimental services)

We're working on several initiatives, like bringing OpenAnnotations to the wayback machine, reducing link rot (see: vinay goel & [http://vinay.blog.archive.org/2014/12/17/9/](http://vinay.blog.archive.org/2014/12/17/9/)), universalizing access to open-access publications, and supporting efforts to distribute and decentralize the web.

Send me an email if you're interested in checking out our slack channel and meeting fellow contributors. Also, if you have a public-good or open-access project you would like help with or resources for, we'd love to hear about it --

email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a startup idea that I'd been holding close to my heart, but now that my teammate's working for a BigCorp, earning beyond her dreams, it's time for it to go public. Steal this idea!

Link rot is only going to get bad from now. It's real, and it's awful.

It's not even random websites. NYT will post a link to a popular Youtube video, two days later the video gets pulled, and one week into the article, the links are already stale.

As Wiki gets more 'reputable', newspapers will posts links to it. Wiki being what it is, the reference to the page will go stale.

So here's an idea for a service: hash all the outgoing/inside pages on a website. If they change, either 1) give options for users to review, 2) update the link 3) delete the reference. If the original website 404's, change the link to the archive page. If a video link is outdated, provide tools to search for similar videos to link, from inside the dashboard. For Wikipedia, automatically link to a certain version of history of a page, not the general page. This is different from the idea posted below because it integrates with existing publishing systems, so it'd be more b2b, and one would start cashflow right away.

For links to social media, use a 'photo snippet' tool that looks to check if the link is valid, and goes to the image version of the link if validity is dead.

I'm certain people would pay GOOD MONEY for this service. I know I would if I were running a publication.

Give me some spare change if it succeeds. : )

<comment><USER4> The ultimate version being complete capture of the Internet at large with hour to hour snapshots and history perhaps using deltas between versions.

Git Internet!

I've personally started saving sites I want to keep using the print-to-PDF feature. Bookmarks aren't enough when you really care to save the data.

<comment><USER5> I use the Firefox version of Zotero[1] to archive links. It works quite well, and is more searchable than PDFs.

[1]: [https://www.zotero.org/](https://www.zotero.org/)

<comment><USER6> You can save a lot of space by using a "reader-view" version of the webpage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my visualization of perfect blogging platform, it automatically periodically scrapes all your old links and looks for either redirections or wild size changes in the content. It also auto-archives linked content for you (which used to be easier, but can still be at least tried), and could offer these archives to either the blog owner or post reader. But among the many challenges implementing that provides is that it is hard to make it work at scale, because of the resulting legal issues.

<comment><USER8> I've recently started to consider tools like wkhtmltopdf [1] to easily dump a website I'd like to link to. Then I'd include both the original link and the pdf version on the blog page, in order to keep the linked structure and the archived version at the same spot.

I haven't done it yet, but would be interested in other's experiences. It would be interesting to have a crawler that does it automatically for each new post.

[1] [http://wkhtmltopdf.org/](http://wkhtmltopdf.org/)

<comment><USER9> This would be problematic legally, even when what you're linking to offers a permissive license of some sort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I keep all my bookmarks in a Delicious account and I was shocked that around 40% of links I saved since 2013 are now gone. I managed to find few archived pages in archive.org but many of the pages I "saved" are gone forever and I can never refer to them again.

I now save every single page I find important or interesting on my local HDD and then move it to a backup disk later on.

<comment><USER11> I was having the same problem with my bookmarks disappearing from the internet. Searching for a solution I eventually made a browser extension to send bookmarks to an online archiving service (archive.is). I then added an option to save archives locally in mhtml format. I have around 370 bookmarks archived that way and it takes 240MB of space.

The addon can be found here: [https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror](https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror).

<comment><USER12> Saving archives locally is great, but I wouldn't count on using archive.is for long-term reliable storage. Seeing as how it must cost its operator(s) more than a few ducats to operate and stores copies of copyrighted material on a centralized server(s) without being able to hide behind the "lol we're just a library" shield that Internet Archive can, I wouldn't be surprised to see it suddenly disappear one day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently went through a large portion of my old blog. It's astounding how many excellent resources from just a few years ago have completely vanished due to link rot; in a few cases I was unable to find archives even on archive.org.

It's really sad, and more than a little disheartening.

<comment><USER4> Hosting the content or having your own copy of something is the only real way to be certain. I had the same experience and I've started saving all my work. Thanks for the idea about the blog though, I need to go back through mine and export everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can add to the sample size here and have found similar results. I wrote an SEO test piece a while ago which inadvertently became quite popular[0] (and did rank well for the targeted terms).

In updating it recently (couple months ago) I found many of the links simply 404'd, not even any redirect at all. Wikipedia was pretty bad for this too as the author found.

I took to hosting all the files I linked to myself to at least be sure they'd stay around but it is a bit of a losing battle with regard to linking to normal webpages.

I might look to link to an archive.org page instead in the future if the link rot keeps happening. Perhaps that would be a more stable option.

[0] [http://josharcher.uk/blog/why-margaret-thatcher-is- hated/](http://josharcher.uk/blog/why-margaret-thatcher-is-hated/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Wikipedia handles redirects mostly fine. Mostly.

The one big problem with Wikipedia redirects is those to sections: if a page is moved or disappears, the software notices, but it doesn't if a section changes its name. Thus, frequently the anchor in an intra-wiki link is broken.

<comment><USER16> FWIW broken anchors are tracked here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/Bro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/Broken_section_anchors). Maybe you can help alleviate the problem.

<comment><USER15> Awesome, I didn't know about that page. I've gone and fixed a few of the top ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To some degree, this is why some sites use services like archive.is to link to third party sites, because the archiving service will keep a cached version of the page even if the original source goes down. Maybe this could be the solution for certain cases? Okay, it won't be super popular with all site owners (they'd rather traffic came to their sites directly so their ads were viewed), but it's certainly more stable.

<comment><USER18> This is worse as centralizing creates a single point of failure over which you have no control. Specifically archive.is has repeatedly taken a stance against going opensource and offering a self-hosting solution while being privately funded with no option for you to take part in it.

Archive.org or maybe something like wallabag or even a screenshot, but anyways to work around link rot one is better off with a local cached copy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I always thought blogs should link to immutable content addressed mirrors of sites. Perhaps it could be a paid service.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wrote a script to help manage linkrot on my blog: [https://github.com/kaihendry/linkrot](https://github.com/kaihendry/linkrot)

Number of issues: People who squat pages & accounting for temporary failures.

</comment><comment><USER21> I very rarely update my website. (Most of it predates modern CMSes, anyway.)

One of the things that I do when I put up a page, though, is make PDFs of everything that I link to. This way, if the link dries up, or is changed, there's still something to fall back to.

</comment><comment><USER22> > I'll soon upgrade to HTTPS here.

Pardon my ignorance and probably silly question, but what is the point of making data transfers to/from _blog_ hosted at _own domain_ more secure? If I get it right, it will just hide which certain articles reader visits (not that he visits this certain domain) and it will prevent caching along the wire. I suppose there must be some real benefit of this right in from of me (see _" everyone else seems to have performed the same upgrade"_), but I cannot see it. Any clues?

<comment><USER23> For the user, the benefit is privacy and MITM protection. Hopefully, eventually browser chrome will explicitly mark non https sites as unsafe (like a red bar at the url).

<comment><USER22> Ok, valid point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One possible approach to link rot: each web page embeds within it (or in associated resources) a copy of every page linked to. Then when a link is clicked on it's always possible to show the page as intended.

The biggest issue with this approach would probably be legal, as you'd find yourself redistributing copyright works. Could a fair use argument be made since it would be furthering public discourse?

</comment><comment><USER25> This is why I don't bookmark things anymore, I save them directly to Evernote.</comment>


Douglas Adams: Hyperland (1990 Fantasy Documentary About The Internet) - <AUTHOR> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7190175107515525470

<comment><AUTHOR> Is that a SemWeb Agent he's talking to? :-D</comment>


An epic Twitter thread on venture capital, startups, and zebras - <AUTHOR> https://siliconflorist.com/2019/01/14/an-epic-twitter-thread-on-venture-capital-startups-and-zebras/ <comment><USER2> This is fantastic. I wish this movement becomes 'a thing'. Also see @socialcapital letter to investors: the VC industry underperforms S&P500. And nobody cares.</comment>


The Hidden History of Phlogiston (2010) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/16-2/chang.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Spun off from the discussion in this thread about empiricism and the history of science/medicine: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509271)

Some basic background on what Thomas Kuhn would have called the "phlogiston paradigm": [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory)</comment>


EDA Playground with Commercial Tools - <AUTHOR> http://eda-playground.readthedocs.org/en/latest/intro.html <comment><USER2> hi thank</comment>


The Facebook Privacy Wars Heat Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/the-facebook-privacy-wars-heat-up/56344/

<comment><USER2> Though Zuck may be right about "changing social norms", that doesn't mean that he understands what those changing social norms are.

Though we may all (or most) actively contribute to the web, we do that on and with web properties by our choice, and that we are familiar with and comfortable with.

He doesn't get to make that choice for us.</comment>


Mavericks – power use / service battery - <AUTHOR> https://discussions.apple.com/message/23505531#23505531 <comment><USER3> Holy shit a 2 page Apple discussions thread when probably 20 million users upgraded in a one week span. Someone wake up cnet, there's clicks to be had!

I wonder if any of those users are having wi-fi issues. Or crashes. Reports from World of Warcraft are that Onyxia has been deep breathing more since Mavericks released.

There may be a real issue here. Or this may be the eleventyth installment of _Apple sells a lot of devices_.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, but Apple is having an easy job there, they have a really small amount of hardware versions compared to microsoft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This happens frequently with OS X updates, and it's why I usually wait a month or two before upgrading:

2012 - Mountain Lion: [http://www.webpronews.com/mountain-lion-may-be-hurting- your-...](http://www.webpronews.com/mountain-lion-may-be-hurting-your- macbooks-battery-life-2012-08)

2011 - Lion: [http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1194978](http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1194978)

2010 - Snow Leopard: [http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10426564-263.html](http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10426564-263.html)

<comment><USER6> As always with any major OS release, you have people crawling out of the woodwork that are pinning every problem with their systems on the new OS. It couldn't _possibly_ be the hardware that they're using.

I'm not saying Apple is perfect, but when you've got millions of people downloading an OS - many of which are jumping 2-3 entire major OS versions - even 0.01% of people having the same problem is going to result in hundreds of people with that problem. When you combine that with a public discussion forum run by the company (that's regularly indexed by the major search engines) and a small but vocal portion of the customer base that feels entitled to immaculately perfectly functioning devices because "they bought an Apple computer" (read: luxury) and you end up with runaway threads of coincidence- now-fault.

"Wow, Apple is giving away 10.9 for free? Even for old machines running 10.6? Gee, I've got a 5+ year old laptop with the original battery I haven't used in a while - wonder how it'll work with that."

Saw that someone mentioned the MacBook Air Gen 1 (they probably meant Gen 2 since Gen 1 had 32-bit EFI and maxed out at running OS X 10.7) - <USER2> originally came out with 10.5 ... but you could still get 10.9 onto it if you did the USB installer trick. In point of fact - Apple actually added the visual indicators for servicing your battery in 10.6. If people are installing 10.9 over the top of 10.5 (it works if your machine can run 10.9), they will likely be seeing a battery warning indicator for their 5-6 year old machine that has been a valid issue for quite some time (especially since the battery isn't considered user serviceable on a Unibody Mac) - it just never popped up in their face. I would be more believing of this thread if _every single person_ posted their battery readings and all turned out to have amazing low cycles combined with amazingly reduced capacity (which is when the Service Battery dialog appears).

If you find yourself to be in the same boat as the people in this thread, you should probably read this KB article from Apple and immediately have your laptop retrain its battery knowledge:

[http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964)

"Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)"

 _After performing normal troubleshooting, these symptoms may indicate that an SMC reset may be necessary:

-Power-: [...] The battery does not appear to be charging properly. [...]"_

<comment><USER7> I had the service battery warning show up on Mountain Lion: did the SMC reset, it went away for a little bit, then came back. Installed Mavericks, it went away for a day. :) Got a new battery a month ago, and it's still indicating over 100% of design capacity. (6958/6900 mAh MBP 8,2)

<comment><USER6> Yeah. When you install a new major OS, it's supposed to trigger a SMC reset and relearn the battery profile - which it sounds like it did for you on 10.9.

After calibrating it did indeed determine that, yes, you still had a failing battery.

I'm not quite in the same boat as you - my machine is a MacBook Pro 2008 pre- Unibody. But I've been through the "Service Battery" warning on this 5 year old machine before. And they were right! Chemically, the battery had degraded and could barely hold a charge for more than 25 minutes. The machine would power off randomly without the 10 minute "charge me now!" warning because the power curve was so bad, it could never predict I only had 30 seconds left.

Apple goes to great lengths to try to educate their consumers about how to protect the life of the batteries of their laptops:

[http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html](http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html) \- Long term storage tips, maintenance tips, best practices, a little calendar reminder you can add to iCal to remind you to do these things, etc.

[http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1446](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1446) \- What you can do to increase your battery life, how to diagnose battery problems, etc.

10.9 itself! [http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5873](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5873) \- Click on the battery icon. It will tell you what processes are running right now that demand high power. The Activity Monitor has a new "Energy" tab showing per-process power utilization. At the bottom are various charts and statistics about your battery usage.

People abuse the hell out of laptop batteries by leaving the laptop connected to the charger all day, every day, like it was a desktop. They're perpetually 99%+ charged which stresses out the battery. The battery is meant to be used - use it!

And like you, I'm not experiencing the issues in this thread under 10.9.

<comment><USER8> > People abuse the hell out of laptop batteries by leaving the laptop > connected to the charger all day, every day, like it was a desktop. They're > perpetually 99%+ charged which stresses out the battery. The battery is > meant to be used - use it!

How do you figure?

<comment><USER9> i've "abused" countless laptops over the years this way. none of them seem to have been affected negatively. in comparison, my wife routinely lets the battery on hers run close to empty- her last laptop could barely hold a charge for 5 min.

[http://www.marco.org/2009/09/24/laptop-battery- myths](http://www.marco.org/2009/09/24/laptop-battery-myths)

[http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html](http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll bet money that this "battery flaw" is just Spotlight indexing. The service battery warning is probably an actual bug, but anyone losing battery life after upgrading will probably see their battery life improved once indexing is over. That's what happened in my 2012 Macbook Air.

<comment><USER11> For me, so far no. Even after the Spotlight indexing, I've noticed a very significant decrease in battery life after upgrading. I don't know why, and the Power tab in Activity Monitor doesn't give any hints. It doesn seem that the fans are also running more frequently than they used to, even on battery power.

<comment><USER12> It's almost always the case of some third-party program causing power draw (or other bugs like not sleeping when the lid is closed). Remove things until the problem goes away, and add them until they come back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is why I advise everyone to actually wait before upgrading your existing OS. See, if this was any other software, say like a word processor, you can probably use a replacement as a temporary measure, but as for the OS, you should never gamble, because it's one of the most painful experiences to install and re-install an entire OS and all the necessary programs after that.

Also, I would like to point out (again) that if you are running Adobe's Creative Suite 6 and below, Mavericks has compatibility issues with some programs for _some_ users. Ex: Photoshop's 'save as' doesn't work, and stuff like that. If your business is dependent on any of these softwares like in my case, I suggest you wait for a few months before these bugs are squished (which Apple of course is pretty good at).

Cheers.

<comment><USER14> To be fair the same thing could happen with any OS update, even from regular security patches, not just from the actually semi-meaningful upgrade Mavericks is.

So if you are the kind of person to be super conservative obviously you should just never upgrade or wait for at least 3 years because you can never be sure that there won't be problems.

And you know, not having access to the 'Save As' menu in Photoshop is going to create millions in support costs, so it's worth exposing all your users to untold hordes of security vulnerabilities from an unsupported and outdated operating system.

(Or at least that's how things work if you're a large Enterprise heavy on MS technologies?)

(Please don't take this post too seriously.)

<comment><USER13> I think you misunderstood that I was implying asking people to wait indefinitely while I just meant for them to wait for a few months.

And, if the software that's making my both ends meet doesn't work on a newer OS version as expected, I think it's fair that I (or anyone else) wait for a few months just to be sure that it works as expected so we don't end up in the streets, you know.

(Please take my comment seriously)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Call me old fashioned, but my rule of thumb is to always wait a good month or so for a few hotfixes to be released before I upgrade an OS. I'd rather other folks get bragging rights to the new OS than risk myself getting into a crisis over unforeseen QA problems

</comment><comment><USER16> TL;DR many laypeople don't understand cause and effect, and this drives up the cost for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thanks, now I have a problem I didn't know I had ;) I haven't upgraded to Mavericks, yet, but after reading this thread I clicked on my battery indicator (mid-2009 MBP) and there is a "Service Battery" warning.

I haven't noticed any issues, and typically get 4-5 hours of usage from a full charge. /shrug

</comment><comment><USER18> Wasn't Mavericks supposed to _improve_ battery life?

<comment><USER19> It's useful to distinguish between bugs and features/refinements. This is a bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Since I upgraded to Mavericks I've been watching battery life (hoping for an improvement) and it does _feel_ like it's draining quicker now.

But in reality I'm sure this is just because I'm watching it more closely than I ever did before. I have no quantitive measure of how battery life has changed for me.

I suspect this is a common problem when you announce that an upgrade improves something like battery life. All of a sudden users start looking when they didn't really look before and report issues based on feelings.

Of course this doesn't apply so much for users who're now reporting 'service battery' warnings on new batteries...

</comment><comment><USER21> There always will be some lucky from millions of users, whose mac will die after installing new update, but this does not mean the update was the reason.

Where are all the "data scientists"?

</comment><comment><USER22> Hmm, I hadn't noticed but I do have a "service battery" warning as well. I don't use my personal laptop a lot anymore but it seemed to be drained every other time I would pick it up. So it does seem that something is amiss. I'm not too worried, it'll get fixed.

Though to be honest, there _is_ some risk of damage to the battery if the firmware is not doing its job properly. But Apple has usually done the "right thing" about big problems like this.

</comment><comment><USER23> My (new) MBA 2013 has been perfect with Mavericks, haven't noticed any battery drain like this.

<comment><USER24> It added about half an hour to my mid-2011 15 inch MBP. I'm pretty happy with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Mavericks was all about performance I thought. Could be a bug they will fix in an update.

<comment><USER26> Sounds like it. They've been releasing firmware that fixes battery issues on a semi-regular basis, as well as the recall of certain defective batteries.

Mavericks does improve battery life:

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/18/#battery-b...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/18/#battery- benchmarks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This, and TextMate 1 plugin incompatibility, is why I have deferred my upgrade.

<comment><USER28> Can't you fix that with RVM?

<comment><USER27> How?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Most of these people have 3 year old machines.

Gee, I wonder why the batteries need service…

</comment><comment><USER30> Apple OS version x.0 excitement! My battery life improved on 2011 MBP, but it will crash on boot if I have an external display plugged in through an HDMI > MDP adapter.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have 5 macs, they're all working great.

<comment><USER32> Why would you need 5 Macs? I'm really curious.

<comment><USER31> I'm an iOS developer among things...

1 iMac for home, 1 MBA for myself, 1 MBP for the wife, 1 iMac at work (primary work machine), 1 Mac Mini as a build machine at work,

I'm planning on buying another mini as an HTPC as well :) Now, go ahead and ask me how many iPad's I have lol

<comment><USER32> Living alone and working from home, I don't see the need to have that much computers for myself but I can understand the need for you.

<comment><USER31> Yea, I think it would be best to just have one machine. It's very difficult to keep 4 dev environments in sync (mackup is some help).

As for living alone, you can decide if that's best :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Eeeks!.. i just updated to Mavericks last night.. i hope i do not face the same issue.

</comment><comment><USER34> I am using Mavericks on my MacBook Pro 15-inch, Early 2011 without any problems.

</comment><comment><USER35> Man, Apple's had a real string of dog products lately. My 5s has crashed a couple times and I've only had it for 2 weeks. Prior to this I'd never had an issue with the 4. Can't wait to see how poorly the MBP fares.

<comment><USER24> Have you tried restoring it? If that doesn't help take it to the Genius bar for a replacement because your hardware may be defective.

My 5s has been completely solid, and I haven't heard of any problems from the several people I know who have them.

<comment><USER36> My father in law called recently to get help on a strange email issue he was having. I suggested a restart. This worked. It turned out the poor thing hadn't been restarted in nearly a year, with heaps of use every day. Another anecdata point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> inb4 the thread gets nuked by apple :(

<comment><USER38> Here's a snapshot, just in case: [http://archive.is/B9g9D](http://archive.is/B9g9D)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> For when the censorship kicks in: [https://mega.co.nz/#!a8RwCB7D!dOj9HAyof01vALrVKnZ9wQlrhdscc_...](https://mega.co.nz/#!a8RwCB7D!dOj9HAyof01vALrVKnZ9wQlrhdscc_8DNSLKgDRxqyw)</comment>


The Incredible Shrinking Apple - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/opinion/apple-steve-jobs.html <comment><USER2> This is vacuous punditry at its worst. Why did the NYT hire this guy?</comment>


The Troubling Reality of Forensic "Science" - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/24/badforensics/ <comment><USER2> I've had my own bad experience with forensic science.

I was a research intern at Oak Ridge National Lab. They put on several educational events for the interns. One event was a guy from the group doing forensic science to come in and talk about it. He talked about rate of decay of corpses and things like that.

Then he brought out dowsing sticks. Said something about the bones of buried bodies giving off magnetic fields that affect the sticks.

He then took a leg bone out of a trash bag, put it on the ground, and walked passed it holding the sticks. The sticks moved when he did it, but of course when anyone else in the room tried nothing happened.

Honestly, all the interns in the room were dead quiet. I think we were all really confused, thinking that maybe it was some sort of joke or hazing. Or maybe a test of some sort? It was really weird, but destroyed my regard for forensic "science".

<comment><USER3> He could have been a complete nut, or...

I have tried dowsing for water and found it very accurate.

We had a problem with the water supply to a house. There was a spring that fed a collection tank through some pipes under agricultural land, we guessed that a tractor had squashed the pipes somewhere along their length. A backhoe was booked for the following day so it didn't really matter whether we got any results or not but we decided to try dowsing to see if we could work out the path of the pipes, just for a bit of fun more than expecting it to really work.

We used some bent aluminium rods and walked about a bit in the field sticking twigs into the ground wherever the rods moved. This worked for some family members, not for others. The next day the backhoe dug out the old wooden pipes and they were exactly underneath where we had placed the twigs on the surface but several feet down.

<comment><USER4> Well then, can I interest your successful family members in a million dollars? It's a genuine offer. One million dollars if they can do it. Dowsers have tried and failed in the past, but perhaps your family really do have supernatural powers.

<comment><USER3> I'm more interested in finding out how we were "fooled".

Even if whatever you hold just acts as an amplifier for small changes in the firmness of the ground underfoot it could still be useful.

<comment><USER5> You were fooled by randomness and a poor analysis of prior probability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Coming from a statistics background, it seems like there is an easy fix for many of these problems (trigger warning: p-values ahead).

For example, if you want to claim someone's fingerprints are a match for a given fingerprint from a crime scene, you need to show that the probability of a random person's fingerprints matching is small. One direct way to prove this is to get the prints of N random people, plus the prints of the suspect, and compare them to the print from the crime scene. If the suspect is a better match than N(1-p) of the other fingerprints, then the match has a p-value of p.

Even if matching is done by a human expert, a computer could be used to reduce the set of potential matches before a human was used to select the best match out of these candidates (of course, the expert would not know which one belonged to the suspect).

I know all of this is obvious to someone with a thorough knowledge of statistics, but I honestly think this is just lacking in the discipline.

<comment><USER7> IIRC, part of the problem is that fingerprint comparison methods do not produce consistent results. Different experts produce different results with the same set of fingerprints.

Also, as the article says, fingerprints 'in the wild' are often incomplete, smudged, etc.

EDIT: From the National Academy of Sciences report linked to from the article (the ACE-V method is the standard fingerprint analysis):

 _the ACE-V method does not specify particular measurements or a standard test protocol, and examiners must make subjective assessments throughout. In the United States, the threshold for making a source identification is deliberately kept subjective, so that the examiner can take into account both the quantity and quality of comparable details. As a result, the outcome of a friction ridge analysis is not necessarily repeatable from examiner to examiner. In fact, recent research by Dror23 has shown that experienced examiners do not necessarily agree with even their own past conclusions when the examination is presented in a different context some time later._

Don't miss that last sentence.

<comment><USER6> I don't see how any of those things prevent the methodology I described being applied.

<comment><USER7> For example, you say,

> If the suspect is a better match than N(1-p) of the other fingerprints, then > the match has a p-value of p.

There may be no way to objectively determine if the suspect's prints are a better match than others.

More generally, I lack your expertise but it seems to me that statistics require data; we may not have reliable data. More colloquially, garbage in, garbage out.

Anyway, I recommend the National Academy of Sciences report, which is authored in part by their Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those interested in these kinds of issues, I recommend the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, written by the National Academies of Science for federal judges.

[http://www.fjc.gov/public/pdf.nsf/lookup/SciMan3D01.pdf/$fil...](http://www.fjc.gov/public/pdf.nsf/lookup/SciMan3D01.pdf/$file/SciMan3D01.pdf)

Just the chapter "How Science Works" by David Goodstein, Professor of Physics Emeritus (and former Vice Provost) at Cal Tech, is a revelation for anyone outside the scientific community. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER8> Warning for those on mobile bandwidth, that's a 1000+ page PDF.

<comment><USER7> Sorry. You can read it online, one page at a time:

[http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13163/reference-manual-on- scienti...](http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13163/reference-manual-on-scientific- evidence-third-edition)

There also used to be a place to download PDFs of individual chapters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a BBC radio programme talking about bad forensics. Only one episode so far, but it talks about some of the same cases.

"Forensics in Crisis" [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05r3tf1](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05r3tf1)

Edit this submission links to [http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- watch/wp/2015/02/18/a...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- watch/wp/2015/02/18/attack-of-the-bite-mark-matchers-2/) which is a better read.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what became of the National Commission on Forensic Science[1] ?

[1] [http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/new- commission...](http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/new-commission- set-standards-troubled-forensic-sciences)

</comment><comment><USER11> All of this points to the fact that it is just so hard to find out about "reality". And when egos are involved triple that. Actually, you could probably _define_ ego to be the denial of reality.

I'm still waiting for particle physicists to do double-blind experiments. (Not going to happen.)

<comment><USER12> I curious what a double-blind experiment would mean in the context of particle physics. The particles don't know about the experiment?</comment></comment>


Discuss HN: Are hackers "unbullies"? - <AUTHOR>

On reading this story http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=453708 and the comments it spawned, a feeling suddenly dawned to me that hackers are more likely to have been bullied upon at some point of time than normal population.
Is it me being a cliche-jerk or is there some truth to this feeling? <comment><USER2> A trip down memory lane: <http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/23/1521250>

      Voices From The Hellmouth Revisited: Part 1
      Posted by JonKatz on Wed Nov 01, 2000 01:30 PM
      from the uncover-your-ears dept.

</comment><comment><USER3> Upon my moving to the US in 98, some kids at my middle school found out the hard way that that is certainly not a universal rule.

I certainly do think that hackers are more prone to being inept at social situations (and when I say "social" I don't mean social as in "social network," I mean real interpersonal contact). Since bullying is a kind of social situation, I could totally see how the aforementioned ineptitude could lead to not knowing how to deal with bullies. That's why it's important to have other stuff going on in your life beyond hackery. Sports, sex, parties, music - SOMETHING.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html></comment>


PenTile OLED Screens - <AUTHOR> http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2011/05/09/pentile_oled_screens/

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I had this exact issue with the Galaxy series (not Galaxy II, which as martythemaniak mentions, fixes it) and mentioned it in my review. Some people simply don't see it, though, it really amazes me. I can't NOT see it.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Samsung Galaxy S2 uses a non-pentile OLED screen, so these screens are on their way out. I have one of these on my Nexus One and the only time it's noticeable is when you use very small red text (8sp IIRC).

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure this is why google made a visual change to green shading in their latest version of android.

<comment><USER5> That's possible, but green has been the color of the Android logo, mascot, etc. since very early on, so the switch to green in the UI makes logical sense from a branding perspective.

Also, I think Samsung is the only Android phone maker still using AMOLED displays (they control the supply), so that seems like a pretty big concession to just 1 handset maker.</comment></comment>


The classic game Snake in 3D using stereograms - <AUTHOR> http://hidden-3d.com/games_stereogram_python.php

<comment><USER2> An old Bullfrog game called Magic Carpet had a stereogram mode, as well as red-cyan 3D specs support.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Carpet_(video_game)#Innov...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Carpet_\(video_game\)#Innovation)

</comment><comment><USER3> In my browser (chrome) the image updates slowly and unevenly after each keypress, which interrupts the 3D illusion, and then I have to refocus on the new image. Otherwise, very cool.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome game! Although I wish it moved one square at a time for each key press, making it less of a timing game.

And I _really_ like their captcha for posting comments.</comment>


Facebook shows inbox messages publicly pre 2010 - <AUTHOR>

Due to a FACEBOOK glitch, private inbox messages are now visible for everyone to see - from 2009 and earlier. Check your timeline from those years. They look like wall posts but they are not!
Fix it like this: when you're in your own timeline, just click on the year on the right (2007, 2008, 2009...) ( top right hand corner by the cover picture) and you'll see a box with an amount of friends' messages and a header that says '89 (or whatever) people have written on XXX timeline' - hover over the right until you see the pencil, click and select hide from timeline. Do that for each year. BOTH parties have to delete.
Unless you want everyone to see your post-party gossip / bitching about work / social life organising / that sort of thing. <comment><AUTHOR> OK.. maybe false alarm

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/24/reports-facebook-users- seei...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/24/reports-facebook-users-seeing- private-messages-pre-2009-showing-up-on-timelines-as-posted-by-friends/)

Some messages back then do look pretty close to private messages

</comment><comment><USER2> Calling BS.

Also: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/09/24/facebook-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/09/24/facebook- users-are-convinced-years-old-private-messages-are-being-shown-publicly-on- their-timelines-but-theyre-probably-wrong/)</comment>


Stochastic Pattern Recognition Dramatically Outperforms Conventional Techniques - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27598/ <comment><USER2> Wow, that's poor reporting. _Stochastic Pattern Recognition_ can be useful, but that article misrepresents the advantages. Just read the paper arxiv.org/abs/1202.4495 if you want to understand what this is about.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are probabilistic techniques _still_ not considered conventional? It's not like the mathematical foundations of probability haven't been laid hundreds of years ago (I'm talking about the rules of inference, not the axiomatization).

<comment><USER4> I believe that was in reference to the construction of logic gates. In that context I don't think probabilistic gates are considered conventional.

<comment><USER5> Yes they are: bayesian neural networks can model stochastic logic gates, and are used for pattern recognition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is similar to work myself and Vikash Mansinghka were doing in 2008 -- [http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/43712/MIT- CSAI...](http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/43712/MIT-CSAIL- TR-2008-069.pdf) . It's actually the basis of my PhD thesis, "Stochastic Architectures for Probabilistic Computation" -- if only I wasn't so busy with this startup!

<comment><USER7> Hmm. Unbiased rendering is evaluating PDFs millions of times per second. Do you think stochastic logic could be used to speed that process up?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I have understood this whole thing right, stochastic logic would also be much tolerant to manufacturing errors on silicon, low voltages, high clock rates etc. which would allow cheaper, smaller and more power efficient signal processing. Great deal of energy is consumed on current chips to make sure that every bit is just right.

I'd also like to know if there's any good sources for learning more about this.

</comment><comment><USER9> This actually seems VERY important, although probably less so if you've been exposed to the idea before.

Regardless, the results are impressive, and the ability to impose the mathematical properties' of PDFs or CDFs over those of discrete numbers could have an enormous impact on the efficiency of certain types of algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER10> Imagine if, for any given position in a list, there were only 4 values allowed:

A

T

G

C

What is the value of the next item in the list? Pure guessing and you have a 25% chance of being right. But what if a review of past lists allows you to develop weighted averages, to the point where you could be, say, 70% correct? What if there was a way to do multiple scans, such that the chance of correctness gets to be some value of 99.x% ?

Imagine the 4 values stand for:

Adenine

Thymine

Guanine

Cytosine

It seems to me there is here suggested a new way of parsing a genome. I have friends who've worked on automated cancer detection based on recognizing certain patters in photos of cells. Possibly similar techniques could take electron microscope scans and figure out a sequence of DNA?

<comment><USER3> Well, this is actually the old way of parsing a genome. What you've described is essentially a Hidden Markov Model with discrete states, which is the bread and butter of genome sequencing.

<comment><USER11> I'm actually curious about that distribution; could you gain compression efficiency by grouping them into 3-base-pair codons? Or is DNA pretty much random at the base-pair level and the codon redundancy makes it actually work anyway?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The description on the page reminded me about how nervous systems might compute. Neural firing is stochastic on small time scales. People fight over whether the fine timing between spikes is important for computation, but largely it seems rates of firing are important.

But, we know that the nervous system has coincidence detectors - basically AND gates for spikes.

This article got me excited because I never thought of coincidence detectors as performing multiplication - an operation very hard to thing about in neural circuitry terms.

</comment><comment><USER13> Stochastic computing is not used by current digital technologies. About the processing in the brain is complex to know exactly what's happens there. Probably there is a synergy between chaotic and ordered behaviors. In Nature Procedings you can find a pre-print paper of the same authors talking about this point. <http://precedings.nature.com/documents/6935/version/1>

</comment><comment><USER14> I have heard of this before and was rather excited to see further developments. But am I reading this right? The stochastic processor is 70x slower than a conventional processor. The only reason they achieve 3x faster is due to "parallel" processing? The details are vague, but does the speedup have anything to do with the fact that the processor is non-deterministic?

</comment><comment><USER15> Has anyone come across an emulator/simulator for experimenting with stochastic logic?

</comment><comment><USER16> This is so the future. Determinism is over rated.</comment>


Breakouts: Helping you choose a JavaScript game engine - <AUTHOR> http://city41.github.io/breakouts/

<comment><AUTHOR> The feature comparison is also nice: [http://city41.github.io/breakouts/featureComparison.html](http://city41.github.io/breakouts/featureComparison.html) So many javascript game engines and this is a common game used in all to compare.

</comment><comment><USER2> Thank you very much for doing this!

A friend of mine and I started a game using crafty, but then switched to melonJS because of the tight integration with Tiled. I wish I had access to your sample source code back then...</comment>


Man Who Built the Retweet: "We Handed a Loaded Weapon to 4-Year-Olds" - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-the-retweet-ruined-the-internet <comment><USER2> Wetherell was not involved with launching retweet, and didn't implement much (maybe any?) of the code in that Nov 2009 launch. He probably did write a version of the frontend for retweet at some point, and had done some backend code, but all of that was largely rewritten by launch day.

To be fair, he probably didn't claim that, but making his involvement out to be more than it was probably did well for the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reading through some of the comments here, it occurs to me that there's a moral trilemma at play here: you can have _power_ , you can have _righteousness_ , or you can have _impartiality_ , but you must pick 2 out of 3. If you bring something new into the world that gives new voice or new capabilities to previously disenfranchised groups, then you have a choice between explicitly selecting _who_ you bestow this power on (in which case you can preserve your righteousness, but sacrifice impartiality), or giving this gift away free to everyone who can make use of it (in which case you remain impartial, but will inevitably end up empowering people you find morally abhorrent). Or you can choose to do nothing and never bring anything useful into the world, which is also valid, but means you're eclipsed by people who _do_.

Silicon Valley (and science/tech in general) has traditionally selected power & impartiality, while nation-states and religions have traditionally selected power & righteousness. Many of the commenters here would seemingly select righteousness & impartiality, which perhaps speaks to why we're discussing this on a message board rather than bringing startups into the world.

<comment><USER4> "Choose two out of three" triangles are sexy, but I fail to see how this applies here. Doing nothing doesn't really mean choosing to be impartial and righteous at the same time, and there is no way to both moderate and be impartial if you actually run a platform.

I see it as every platform being able to choose a point on a sliding scale between enforcing its morality and being impartial. The more moderation you do, the less impartial you are, sure - but nobody actually wants the extremes of this scale.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that argument applies here. The article isn't advocating censorship or legal restrictions on social media. Instead, it's saying that reducing friction from a very specific content-sharing workflow and giving it a prominent position in the UI of social media sites may not have been a good design decision.

Edit: I intended this as a reply to a different comment, but it has a reply now so I'll leave it as-is.

<comment><USER4> It does apply a little if you extend the definition of "moderation" to include choosing the right set of features in order to direct your users' behavior.

That said, I was mostly replying to the parent comment, not discussing the main thesis of the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One _major_ problem with this: It's not like he "invented" the retweet. The userbase invented the "RT" prefixed message. Twitter the company simply took what the user base had done and weaponized it and empowered it. But at the same time they made it easier to track a single specific message being RT'd. So blessing and a curse.

<comment><USER7> The article specifically argues that the retweet button causes problems that manual retweeting didn't, and so he did invent the thing that's actually a problem.

<comment><USER8> Yea the act of copying and pasting to do a retweet required just enough extra work that people had to think about what they were typing, and so users used it in a less reactionary way.

It's kind of incredible that a tweak to one small feature could have such a large behavioral impact.

<comment><USER9> I distinctly remember people typing "RT @whoever some fake tweet they never said" as a joke or to be purposefully misleading. It solved a real problem with the old fake RT system.

<comment><USER10> There's a really solvable answer to that, though: ban people who do it. Enforce some controls on your platform.

But the search for more money continues...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I found this to be a rather refreshing take on the traditional "tech people didn't consider the consequences" \- it doesn't place blame on the tech person, and reflects thought and awareness before and after. (It's easy in hindsight to say "people suck, so this is a terrible idea", but far harder to do in advance).

Left unanswered is what do about it - the implied "require some effort" isn't likely to be successful, as the incentives to make things easier is there, and the incentive to promote long term civility is...not.

</comment><comment><USER12> For a long time, I've made the argument that the First and Second Amendments of the US Constitution are indistinguishable from each other.

Previously, when the government was attacking encryption, I made the argument that this was gun control for software. "What you have is too powerful. No one needs 'military grade' encryption. Some people are misusing it, and we need the government to control it. No one's coming for your encryption, we just want key escrow." Of course, encryption is not only a protection for banking, it's a protection for free speech.

I agree that words can be a "weapon"\--but in the same way that a scalpel can be a weapon. It depends how you use it. It's frightening that people are now starting to apply the "gun control" thought process to "retweets".

Before anyone jumps down my throat with "but Twitter isn't bound by the constitution", no duh. But regardless whether it's a company or a government, hearing someone with a lot of power advocate for suppressing freedom of expression isn't a great thing.

Whatever happened to the "Free Speech Wing" of the "Free Speech Party"?

</comment><comment><USER13> So tired of these "OMG What Did I Create?" stories from social media devs. How about you grow a conscience _before_ you build these things? I have told managers to go f themselves for: _Content that would demean people_ Lying to or misleading customers *Hosing over my fellow engineers ... among other things

I don't think it's that special of a thing to do but reading these things makes it seem like it is.

<comment><USER14> The problem is idealism.

> "I was very excited about the opportunity that Twitter represented," > Wetherell said, noting that he initially felt the retweet button would > elevate voices from underrepresented communities.

The problem is that it didn't register to him, or anyone, that "racists" were an "underrepresented community", as were sexists, misogynists, homophobes, anti-intellectuals, quacks, and so on. When attempting to give a voice to minorities, they gave a voice to all "minorities", including people who had minority opinions. The idealism came in the form of expecting that these tools will, by default, be used for good... it wouldn't surprise me that people in the tech community, who have often come from privilege or at the very least live within privileged bubbles, are naive about what people are really capable of.

"A rising tide lifts all boats..." unfortunately some of those ships are full of pirates and disease.

It's sad, but you really need think about these things from a jaded and cynical perspective when building them, it's unfortunate that there's been a long crusade against cynicism. Being optimistic and feeling optimism about the world and humanity leads to problems like this.

<comment><USER15> Well said. In addition to simply being naive, I think there is also the self- delusion that everyone subscribes to when they convince themselves that their job (no matter what it is) is somehow helping contribute _something_ good to the world. I had a relative that worked as a telemarketer selling predatory debt consolidation packages to people on the verge of bankruptcy and when he described what he was doing, he enthusiastically framed it like he was helping the people from going bankrupt, even though he was just helping them dig a bigger hole.

If your company is a public corporation, your only purpose is to maximize shareholder value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the real problem is Twitter refuses to make sophisticated filtering available to users. Simple mute, block, and keyword filtering are inadequate.

<comment><USER17> I was wondering today why Facebook et al. don't break their share functions into emotionally binned categories.

"Share because it makes me angry" etc

Seems like they'd get amazing whole text training sets, as well as a signal to better guide their platforms (e.g. under-weighting negative emotions in share velocity).

<comment><USER18> People would quickly realize that if they share it under a negative category their share velocity would be hit. A better approach might just be to sentiment-detect negative emotion in Tweets and adjust share velocity accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There seem to be a growing idea in Silicon Valley minds that we (IT crowd, devs, techies, managers) are in fact great! Way smarter then those stupid peons around us which use our products. So logically we have a mission to bring those unwashed morons to the bright side, and we must manipulate them for their own good.

While it's certainly pleasant illusion for us, there are two glowing problems:

1\. We are not necessary better (neither morally, nor intellectually) then other people, it's just a current importance of IT economy which makes us a bit more successful, and and sometimes gives us some sort of influence.

2\. There's an empirical evidence of activist journalism which suggests the only achievable result on this way is loss of respect, and growing animosity.

</comment><comment><USER20> Retweets function to spread messages, but the quote tweet (combined with the retweet) is the ultimate hate/shame tool. I rarely see it use outside of "hey universe look what this idiot once said".

</comment><comment><USER21> Been saying for years that the Share button is what ruined Facebook. I went there to see what was up with people I know, not to get news or Memes.

The problem now is that FB makes a lot of money via sharing paid content so they won't get rid of it.

</comment><comment><USER22> The mainstream media has weaponized the use of the word weaponized

</comment><comment><USER23> I think it's funny, this developer is calling his users 4-Year-Olds. Reminds me when we used to call them lusers.

</comment><comment><USER24> So -- remove the button.

No? Why not?

<comment><USER25> The guy in the article doesn't even work at Twitter. He's not in a position to remove it.

<comment><USER26> Maybe other people work at twitter who could remove it? Questions was why not just remove it.

<comment><USER25> The people who are in a position to remove it aren't the ones who said it's like handing a loaded weapon to a 4-year-old, so they don't have the reason to remove it that the question was referring to.

They have a more nuanced view and are quoted in the article saying that they're looking into how to modify the interface to "encourage more consideration before spread".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Twitter was not made for serious, challenging conversation from the beginning. Every feature it has is designed for short, sarcastic tweets or replies. It's almost hardcoded to the product. Possibly that's why politicians love it.

</comment><comment><USER28> There is a much larger problem here than RTs, and that is lack of journalistic integrity.

You can spread pretty much any sort of information without research or even a logical basis. Weirdly, we tend to default to accepting it as valid rather than questioning it.

The only realistic cure for this, outside of draconian authority, is to teach people how to be more skeptical and educate them on logical fallacies.

These are things that should be taught from elementary school and onwards IMHO.

<comment><USER29> So I don't remember this well enough to find a link, but some time ago there was a viral clip of someone tripping on the subway steps in NY. They drop all their stuff, look like a dork, everyone's fine, whatever. But then someone takes a longer look at security camera footage from the station (or someone independent sets up a camera, I forget), and finds that _lots_ of people trip on that particular step. Turns out it's slightly taller than the others, so it's easy to catch your foot on it.

One possible solution is to convince everyone individually to pay really close attention to their feet all the time. Or you could fix the steps.

No one had to go around and convince people to be shitty to each other on the internet. A structural change made it easier and more rewarding, and our dumb monkey brains went wild. If your solution is to change the dumb monkey brain part and not the structural part, you're gonna have a bad time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Did they know it was a weapon? Would it be a weapon if twitter wasn't popular?

</comment><comment><USER31> The same thing could be said of every tech product back to the sharpened rock.

</comment><comment><USER32> Retweet is like gossip but easier. There are people who are wired to enjoy gossiping. They can have this stupidity.

On the other hand I prefer to avoid Twitter all together and get my news from actual journalism.

</comment><comment><USER33> Similar - [https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/man-created-facebook-like- bu...](https://www.nowtheendbegins.com/man-created-facebook-like-button-now- warns-mind-can-hijacked-social-media/)

<comment><USER34> Also a guy who did major pioneering work on infinite scrolling [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Hyperbole. Social media is not broken. The retweet is not why. And this guy didn't invent the idea of republishing content. Other microblog services had that, and I'm pretty sure Twitter users were doing it on their own.

<comment><USER36> So I'm curious what you think is the problem, or if there is one - and if so, what your proposed solution would be?

<comment><USER35> People create their own problems out of nothing. People make mountains out of mole hills. Twitter is one of those problems. Twitter is one of those mountains.

<comment><USER36> So you haven't thought very deeply into this? Those statements don't tell me anything - I can say there's the colour white, but that's actually made up of a spectrum of colours. I ask because if you haven't thought deeply into it, how are you confident that your macro statements are accurate?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When two medical residents visit the 99U design conference - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@emmabruns/when-two-medical-residents-visit-a-design-conference-999f9f8d157a#.c02r5j1u4 <comment><USER2> This was a short but interesting read, even if just to see the takeaway they had from visiting a conference of a completely different field. They had the same impression I've had from attending some hardcore-engineer conferences that haven't been exposed to much graphic design or startup culture.

I would've loved to hear more of the reverse though, if the design folks learned any insights from talking to the medical residents, or if they saw some obvious, glaring flaws in how the more design-centric folks approached things.</comment>


Tips for selling your software in China - <AUTHOR> http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/08/12/selling-your-software-in-china/

<comment><USER2> Does anyone have experiense selling to Chenese users or companies ?

We have a large cluster of users in China for our mobile software (freeware), but we have not an idea how to monetize them. The basic paid-for services we offer are off the use for them and as it was pointed out in the article, it's kind of futile to sell anything to Chinese persons directly.

<comment><USER3> How are you asking them to pay? Keep in mind that Pay-Pal isn't as popular in China as it is in the West.

You should try to get a group of China residence together and interview them; you could do this numerous ways.</comment></comment>


Testing in Startups with Joe Stump of Sprintly - <AUTHOR> http://pythontesting.net/podcast/testing-in-startups-joe-stump-sprintly/ <comment><AUTHOR> In this episode, I interview with Joe Stump, cofounder of Sprintly ([https://sprint.ly](https://sprint.ly)), to give the startup perspective to development and testing.

Joe has spent his career in startups. He's also been involved with hiring and talent acquisition for several startups.

We talk about testing, continuous integration, code reviews, deployment, tolerance to defects, and how some of those differ between large companies and small companies and startups.

Then we get into hiring. Specifically, finding and evaluating good engineers, and then getting them to be interested in working for you.

If you ever want to grow your team size, you need to listen to this.</comment>


DirBuster-ng? Timing Attacks to Discover Remote Files - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wallarm.com/post/69598321538/timing-attacks-against-file-systems Proof-of-concept to discover remote files using timing attacks against filesystem <comment><USER2> "However, our efforts in this area aren't entirely focused on file systems, those will be announced at BlackHat 2014. In our project we look at timing attacks from the perspective of their application in nosql databases and key- value repositories, granting the ability to extract data from tables in a manner similar to SQL injections but without actually using them."

Good for Blackhat 2014!

</comment><comment><USER3> nice!</comment>


Tutorial – Lego iMac + 1984 Apple Mac - <AUTHOR>

Want to know how to build both the old and new lego iMac and 1984 original apple mac?? Video links below! :D They're cute and minifig-scale so perfect for any lego city :D XD Enjoy :)
iMac - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVXHAIYzCKU
Original 1984 mac - http://youtu.be/Mujr_RA8KI8 <comment><AUTHOR> :D</comment>