Google Docs makes it easy to do market research - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/115195708001192408562/posts/BiGE3gwjDkB

<comment><USER2> This is a _perfect_ example of Google's absolute failure at marketing docs/apps.

If this had been rolled out as a feature in Apple Pages, we'd have seen it demonstrated on stage, even if only for a moment, and given an easy to remember name (Pages with "Cloud Complete", Pages with "Net Functions", etc.). There would have been deserved oohs and ahhs. It would have been widely reported on and helped ship units.

Google buries the lede and thus misses another great opportunity to show off a really neat feature.

<comment><USER3> May be this is intentional on Google's part.

I tried a few samples and the result was not always what the G+ Post suggests.

For example, I tried Nimitz, Independence, expecting the rest of the cells to be filled with a few more US Navy Aircraft Carriers and the result was nowhere close.

Advertising/Marketing a "feature" that does not work as intended is a far worse scenario for Google than the current state.

<comment><USER4> According to the buzzfeed article, the feature was pulled from a discontinued project called Google Sets. So yeah, sounds like they had a cool feature built that is no longer getting updated and they decided to toss it in to google docs.

[http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/a-glimpse-into- googl...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/a-glimpse-into-googles- brain-hidden-in-a-spreadsheet-app)

I personally think this is awesome.

EDIT: ahh, sorry. Just saw the other comment that points out Google Sets. Anyway, this is really cool, playing around with it now, when I should be working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is based on the now defunct Google Sets, a Google labs experiment. It looks at ordered and unordered lists in HTML to find related items.

Here's the official blog post covering this: [http://googlesystem.blogspot.be/2012/11/google-sets-still- av...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.be/2012/11/google-sets-still- available.html)

<comment><USER6> Actually, I implemented the feature and it was first launched in 2007 – [http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/09/google- spreadsheets...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/09/google-spreadsheets- lets-you-import.html)

And Google Operating System isn't an official blog of Google :)

<comment><USER7> So my guess is that (a) the Google Sets feature is discontinued, much to the dismay of the implementing team, (b) they (you?) see a lifeboat in putting this into Google Docs. It's way better there than deep-sixed entirely, but Google Sets was pretty useful to me as a standalone tool - cleaner UI for the capability.

<comment><USER6> FYI, I don't work for Google anymore.

They shut down the consumer frontend to Google Sets but there are clearly internal instances still running to power this feature (it may also be used in coming up with related terms in another ad tech product, but I'm not sure).

I was new to the Google Spreadsheets team back in 2007 and autofill was a feature that had not been implemented yet. We thought it would be a cool thing to make it a bit better by adding Sets support, so I worked with Simon Tong—the author of Google Sets—to get it playing nice with autofill. To be clear, I did not write Sets. Simon did.

This feature has been live since 2007. It was not created to be a lifeboat for Sets and the frontend getting shut down is the result of (my guess) low user traffic.

<comment><USER8> Google Sets was one of the best paid-search marketing tools ever.

Thank you for helping keep it alive in some form!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This doesn't work for me. I tried putting "chianti" and "merlot" in just like the little video, and after dragging across the cells I just got "chianti" and "merlot" repeating.

<comment><USER9> ok - my bad. you have to hold down the ctrl/command key when you are dragging.

<comment><USER10> Only appears to work on Windows. Haven't found any way to trigger it on OSX.

Edit: it's alt on the Mac

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My first thought was: will this work with Borges' "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge" taxonomy? It (mostly) does.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledges_Taxonomy)

<comment><USER12> you meant:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledges_Taxonomy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This works great. I am currently looking to get a small DB of related keywords and just beginning to think about how to get them. This is awesome. It needs two cells to get some context. One cell does not work and should be expected.

On a slightly related note, what do people usually do if they want a list of all say, manufacturers of Sunglasses? I usually am way behind the web server in C and recently dabbling into the JS and python world.

<comment><USER14> I can only speak about Germany, but there still are tons of catalogs, registers and databases (both in print and online), listing companies that supply specific goods. I am not sure about the US equivalent of Handelskammern or Chambre de Commerce.

<comment><USER15> Here in the US, a place like hoovers.com would be a good starting point for that sort of thing. There's probably also something like the "Sunglass Manufacturer's Industry Association" which probably maintains such a list. There are also government databases of various sorts, and things like the Chamber of Commerce, etc.

<comment><USER13> I used the Sunglass manufacturers as an example. Did not mean that literally. I was asking for a more general approach to get lists of related things, exactly like Google sets. Did not know it existed while it did.

<comment><USER15> Right, I was also just using that as an example. You could substitute the "Sunglass Manufacturer's Industry Association" for the "Mechanical Pencil Industry Association" or the "Nuclear Fuel Rod Manufacturing Association" or whatever. :-)

In either case, the point about Hoovers, various government databases, etc., still stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is pretty awesome - I would use it for very quick brainstorming to get the ball rolling since it's not extremely accurate, but still useful for ten words!

For more keyword suggestions I like ubersuggest.org a lot.

<comment><USER17> Thank you for this link, I had never heard of them!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a musician so I immediately started typing in a variety of band names and genres. After a few experiments I started to figure out ideal associations. Cool way to discover/rediscover related bands...

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how well the terms correlate with regards to search traffic. I often build up a list of search terms in the google adwords tool and see the traffic estimates for them and related keywords for evaluating niche markets.

</comment><comment><USER20> Cool trick!

I thought maybe this would be a good way to generate a list of fifty states (without having to find a random page that has a straight-up list) and so I started out by typing:

       Alabama
       Delaware
       Connecticut
       Iowa

And dragged down, however, it only found me roughly 20 more states. I guess there must be a limitation of the query interface...i.e. "find related items, limit 20", rather than: "This user is looking for all 50 state names, so autofill"

\--

edit: And for the hell of it, I entered three of George Carlin's seven dirty words and it only returned a fourth (and a few other non-canonical-dirty- words)

<comment><USER21> This is off topic but I absolutely love George Carlin. Very smart guy and well before his time. Just went back and listened to his seven words bit, still just as hilarious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there an app or API out there that does something similar... yet...?

</comment><comment><USER23> these sets are "interesting" to say the least. I tried it out putting "blonde, brunette" figuring it would give me hair colors.... I figured wrong.

</comment><comment><USER24> Previously discussed at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4764169>

</comment><comment><USER25> Awesome.. would save a good amount of time.. :D

</comment><comment><USER26> With the accuracy of data questionable and the universe of data undefined, at best this is entertaining :-)

</comment><comment><USER27> cf. related patent [http://www.google.com/patents/US7350187?printsec=abstract#v=...](http://www.google.com/patents/US7350187?printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false)

<comment><USER28> W/ Jeff Dean cameo!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Should be useful when playing family feud. ;)</comment>


As Its Stock Tops $600, Google Faces Growing Risks - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/technology/13google.html?ei=5065&en=ed9f095332e30562&ex=1192852800&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print <comment><USER2> I'm always wondering when Google will do their first stock split? Anyone care to predict?

I'm predicting never since I remember hearing that the founders looked up to Warran Buffet, and his company Berkshire Hathaway has never done a stock split (price is ~90K per share IIRC)

I don't remember the philosophy behind that though.

</comment><comment><USER3> "there are limitations to how fast you can recruit people"

Imagine how difficult it will become once the stock stabilizes and options go under water.

The best hackers will go to startups with some real upside (if it isn't happening already).</comment>


Tesla "insane mode" - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpaLgF1uLB8

<comment><USER2> The part with the kids was the best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the phone just sticking to the seat was surreal. It's hard for me to imagine that kind of acceleration (and I've owned some quite fast cars).

<comment><USER2> I liked the "oh, I probably shouldn't have been texting right there" look on the girl's face and the fact that her brother laughed at her for it.

I once owned a 1968 GTX with 635 HP. The closest thing I could compare the acceleration to was taking off in a jet. It would bend back the racing seats on launch so it may've been able to produce this result.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your most nostalgic memory a life-long career with computers? - <AUTHOR> Organize by decade.<p>'70s, '80s, etc... <comment><USER2> It was about 1998 to 2000, somewhere there. I was 14ish, and I got 6, 486dx 33MHz machines by literally pulling them out of the trash after my high school threw them away.

I connected two of them with serial cables and spent about 6 months in DOS with Djgpp compiler and dos IDE, I used a chess library and coded in C, and I finally got the two machines to play chess against each other, client / server architecture using a serial protocol I invented - state was held on the server but transmitted to the client and the client made the decision and sent state to server. Pretty inefficient but I was very young and self taught.

The feeling of pure joy when i finally got them working and I watched the moves scrolling down the screen.

I was hooked on programming

</comment><comment><USER3> From oldest to newest:

* In Ukraine sometime in the 90s we had no computer, but the local arcade did. Sometimes my parents would give us "kapeyki" (basically like pennies) and my sister and I would gather then up and then run to the arcade across the street to stand in line to play The Lion King. We were obsessed with both the Disney film and the game. As soon as you died you lost your spot and the wait back in line could be an hour sometimes. I kept dying on the giraffes.

* Later we had a short-lived computer course at School Number 11. We had to come in outside of normal school days (which were Mon-Sat) to participate. I was too young to remember the specifics, but we had to type in programs to play some car racing game. I was really fast at it and always got to play the finished product first - unfortunately the course was short lived.

* When we got our first computer after moving to Alabama and got AOL dial-up I realized "Holy crap you can make things." My mom thought it was a passing phase, but she dutifully went the library with me to check out stacks of books on HTML, CSS, and PHP and brought back video game CDs she spotted at her trips to random stores. One of those games was Creatures 3 and it was what got me interested in life simulations to this day.

* Later I got to work with one of the guys who helped make The Lion King

</comment><comment><USER4> 2002: Devised without a book what I later discovered was the MinMax algorithm (my father was quite unhappy when he discovered tic-tac-toe game trees penciled on the side of the staircase) and wrote a really terrible chess engine with it. That sparked a lifelong interest in programming. A couple years later, I had a blast implementing AlphaBeta (w/pruning), NegaScout, MTDf. Eventually got into NNs, which I used for leaf-node scoring, and made a bot that played on ICC (Internet Chess Club) that became a recurring opponent for an IM at the time. The IM would chat with the bot, since he was convinced by its play-style that it was human. In college, turned the leaf-node NN into an FPGA to speed up the calculations by parallelizing them.

Then I got a 9-5 job and my dreams of working in AI faded into the ether. Life comes at you fast.

<comment><USER5> Do you still have any of this stuff sitting around? Particularly the FPGA part.

If you do, I would love to see videos of this in action (not code). Would be absolutely awesome. Seriously! I don't care that it's from 2002, that's what makes me more interested if anything.

Also... people are Very Interested™ in neural networking now. I am 100.0% sure that if you threw this info at a few companies they wouldn't mind waiting a little while for you to shift gears (switch jobs) and catch up to the way things are done now (train, at expense, for a few months). You'd likely take a bit less time than the next person, in any case.

Yes, this would certainly be a major undertaking and not something to be rushed, but I don't think your interviewers would be disinterestedly waiting for whoever they're seeing next, to put it one way...

One thing. I'd recommend a position where you step back and look at the bigger picture rather than drown in implementational/technical details all day - you're clearly already figuring things out for yourself, so bogging yourself down with the ways others are doing everything would be noise you could do without.

<comment><USER4> The only thing I can find is one of the original versions of the chess engine. It's still running on a free web-host: [http://blitzter.atspace.com/](http://blitzter.atspace.com/). Pardon the writing style of 16-year old me.

Unfortunately, I can't find any of the newer versions of the engine or the FPGA code. I wrote most of the newer versions in college, eight to ten years ago; the hard-drive for my desktop may be around my house somewhere, but it will take some time to find, setup, and search. You've piqued nostalgic interest, so I may just do that...

I'm currently running a small software agency in the Boston area that employs a couple developers. One of our larger clients integrates their AI-based product with larger customers' platforms, and my company does quite a few of the implementations. That has given me enough of a taste for now; hopefully we can pivot completely into that space one day. For now, I'm enjoying working at an arm's reach.

<comment><USER5> Wow, I think I was in the middle of finding PHP really hard when I was 16... :)

I'm falling over a bit at how the high-bit-finding system actually works (in [http://blitzter.atspace.com/documents/game/index.html](http://blitzter.atspace.com/documents/game/index.html)), along with the rest of the page to be honest. I'd say this is 90% my brain not being great at this sort of thing, and 10% me not knowing chess (shh). I'm very impressed though.

It's great that you're able to keep AI on the radar in a reasonable capacity, even if it's not front and center at the moment. Hopefully the pivot you mention does happen one day, and works out really well. :)

<comment><USER4> I won't lie: all of this was incredibly difficult and time consuming to learn. Homeschooling was a double edged sword. On one hand, I had five to six extra hours per day for activities like this; on the other hand, I had no teacher, so I relied on Barnes and Noble and rare internet access. It took many years to reach even a basic level of competence. Sixteen year old me also found most things quite difficult :).

That said, the page definitely lacks the rigor necessary to communicate the concepts used in the chess engine -- another downside of my education. My parents emphasized engineering related subjects over everything else, which held back the development of my writing while accelerating subjects like math. You can see that pretty clearly in the descriptions on the site. Regardless, the terminology is correct, so it's easy to find a more clear explanation by searching for it elsewhere. Perhaps it's better to think of the descriptions as a poorly written glossary.

Talking about this brings me back to a time where I wrote software because it satisfied a burning passion, and not because it paid the bills. I still enjoy it, but with less intensity. Maybe that will return if I can get into AI again.

Thank you for the kind words! I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 50 years. Somewhat different to most. Mixed hardware/firmware/software, niche talents matched to niche markets. And practically all self-taught. Along the way got a BS and most of an MS in CS but none of it was applicable to my career, nor required for it, except the one class I keep alive was the FSM class. Perfect for Hard Real Time Event Driven applications. My metier. Almost all of the 50 years qualifies as nostalgia, even current, because it has all been fun, all been coninuous learning, all been continuous invention, and except for some esoteric math in my current Audio DSP path there has never been a book about it.

1967-9 accidentally hired at Elliott Automation UK as comissioning technician, finding bad wires/doa components in their 4100 series mainframes as they came to the end of the production line, prep for shipping. Completely discrete hand built machines, right down to hand-woven 48K x 24b main magnetic core memory. No prior experience outside of hobby electronics, only 19, CS did not exist then. This experience probably seeded all my first principles of computing, I had to teach myself in intimate detail how a room sized computer works, and how to program it. Both good and bad.

1969-71 (I know, by decade, but my trajectory does not fit decades easily) design engineer at an EG&G UK subsidiary called Nuclear Measurements. Another accident. Made instrumentation for the two main Nuclear Fusion labs Daresbury and Culham. Got to climb around inside the Zeta Pinch 1MF capacitor and the Tokamac. By chance visited a PCB layout researcher using my old 4130 with vector graphics, thesis on rats nest automatic layout techniques.

1971-5 Another poach, this time into data communications world. I'll note here that although I was then a hardware nut, programming computers is always an essential skill to have. And also in those days of really tight resources, doing it efficiently was default, whatever Tony had to say about premature optimization - the code has to at least fit before it can be made to work. In this phase I even had to design and write an ASM a custom computer a bit more featured than a Z80, only in SSI 7400 series TTL. And in 8008 days, no Z80 when I started.

Still a big-eyed kid, somewhat bemused that folks wanted me to actually pay me to do all this learning. Learning that even today seems to be missing from CS/CE, at least as I can tell from graduate hires since then even up to today. Got very good at "Making it up as I went". There was no book, really, for what I was having to produce.

1975-89 moved to sister company in LA - poached again - got even deeper into data comms, designing Statistical Multiplexors and protocols for University time share computer centers. Employers made their $Ms but neglected to mention stock options to me. OTOH as a founder and tech lead I had a blast, and seeded a great dev lab culture around me, many of whom are still in touch.

1989-97 This was a really fun time; I and buddy did our own start up (Lone Wolf Technologies) based on a mission critical deterministic protocol we had dreamed up and a product using it to network MIDI synthesizers and controllers in large venues and pro studios. Moto 68HC11 box did 4 ports, glass fiber networking physical layer allowed up to 2 Km separation, multiple boxen, each with a mirrored virtual 16x2 config LCD onto the network as a compound entity (edit any box from any box), full soft topology routing and filtering and remapping. Yet more learning OTJ, and inventing. And the customer base was, well, rarified. Herbie Hancock, ELP, INXS, that rarified. Not actually a Good Thing as it transpired. No volume. But oh what fun. Then Paul Allen invested. A long story not for here. But moved us all to Seattle.

1998-9 designed a FPGA for autonomous isochronous multi-medial FireWire transport (AFAIK the only one that did not funnel channel data through the CPU). Was missing hardware, this was an intense but ultimately successful gig, eventually made its way back into music world as control surface driver/interface.

2000-7 Second time Lone Wolf, soon renamed SingleStep, designing a graphical programming/delivery platform aimed an large scale network management. Again great OJT learning and invention but customer base not so much fun.

2008-present now this one is a fun employer with a fun product. Not just fun to my nerd core - fun is their product. I refer to Nintendo. Worked on Audio engines for WiiU and Switch.

The two big gaps: "Consulting Years". Nail biting, more like. No nostalgia for those.

So, not your typical career path. No front end / back end / full stack crowded job market. I'd have been out of that and unemployable probably 20 years ago if that were the case.

</comment><comment><USER7> About 1980, in the main terminal room in Wean Hall at CMU, late night but the place is packed because so many have assignments due the next day.

The DEC-20 is under heavy load, all the DECscope VT52's are occupied, as well as the less desirable DECwriter III terminals with fan-fold paper.

Many of the DECscopes are running TECO EMACS sessions, I see some people writing papers in Scribe (Brian Reid's word processing language.)

Suddenly everything stops in the room and everyone holds their breath for a couple very long seconds.

"%DECSYSTEM-20 NOT RUNNING" prints on every terminal in unison. Everybody cries out in anguish.

Good times.

<comment><USER8> and today we just yell at CMU-SECURE

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1998 - made IE4 pop calc.exe using some weird scripting bug that I didn't fully understand. I promptly forgot about it because "lol M$ is crap" and I didn't understand the significance. Maybe back then that wasn't special or significant.

</comment><comment> david-gpu Perhaps as a teenager in the 90s, cracking DOS games with a disassembler and a hex editor. It was probably more fun than actually playing them.

<comment><USER10> ResEdit in the mid-to-late 90s was such a fun toy as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hearing the loading-sound of a game being read from tape to a ZX Spectrum (circa 82-86):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4umA3_9YNs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4umA3_9YNs)

That sound is just so memorable, even more so than hearing the sound of a modem connect to the internet. (You could easily tell the difference between a 28k and 56k connection by hearing the modem responses.)

I've done a lot of things I'm proud of, like patching binaries, reverse- engineering games/tools to get extra lives or registered status, but hearing those noises? They take me back.

</comment><comment><USER12> Pirating "gamez" and warez on IRC, back when it was cool to have coloured text announcements spamming the channel from a hundred dcc bots, and listening to the chip tunes included on all the MYTH and CLASS cracktros.

</comment><comment><USER13> 90s:

Some guy in another country wired his christmas lights to be controllable, along with a few other lights. He didn't get much traffic. A small group of gamers started turning them on and off and emailing him "DISCO". Later we tried to send him morse code (E A T A D I C K) but he didn't figure it out.

I know it sounds mean, but I miss when trolling was cheeky and fun, not mean and weirdly racist.

</comment><comment><USER14> I began programming in 1968. 50 years later I can't think of anything I'm nostalgic about. There were some OK to Good times, but nothing stands out. I'd rather have done something else. I do recall first reading Tog's edition of Macintosh User Interface Guidelines as opening up my perspective. For lack of anything else I'd choose it.

<comment><USER15> I'm curious to hear about your 50 year career spanning some of the most important revolutions in computer history. What do you work on now, and how does it compare to what you worked on it 1968? How did people such as yourself get into computing in 1968? What was the availability of computers and what rules dictated human participation with computers? What improvement was the biggest leap forward? Where there any 'winters' you felt where innovation became dormant, stagnated or even declined?

<comment><USER14> At the time I started, you couldn't get a degree in software engineering. "Software Engineering" wasn't even a thing. I took a course in programming for geologists just before I flunked out of Stanford. Later, I took an evening course in Pascal. Even later I took Stanford's online course in iOS programming. Whenever some new concept came out, the hardware/systems vendors had to prime the pump by educating everyone with manuals. Every new thing was so obviously superior, one eagerly sought books, magazine articles, or manuals to get on board. We all hauled ourselves up by our boot straps. It was an exciting time.

Back then computers filled huge rooms, and time was allocated by the second. "Nobody" knew how to program then, so it was easy to get a job programming for a contractor at NASA-Ames and later for the U.S.G.S.

The first thing I ever did was a FORTRAN IV program that contoured simulated lunar regolith data. These maps were crude line-printer maps with each character representing a depth.

The last major thing I did before I left the U.S.G.S. was an interactive color geologic map integrated with an ore-deposit database. That was about 1989. Since I left the U.S.G.S. in 1995, I've done website programming and "side projects." I'm currently working on a word processor for professionals engaged in a major writing project, one involving lots of source documents and notes. Like most side projects, the biggest problem is marketing.

I suppose everyone else would point to PCs as the greatest innovation. I disagree. For me it was the hugely powerful APIs Apple provided with the Mac. Before, you had to create nearly everything from scratch. It was revolutionary. As an application-programmer, the Mac's APIs were hugely empowering. I could now do things it would have taken a team a year or more to do.

I realize C is very popular and I mean no offense, but I hate it. It's prominence grates on my nerves. It's lack of discipline appeals to the worst emotionally immature tendencies among very young programmers and can lead to life-long bad habits. That is the perspective of an scientific-application programmer. I'm sure the world seems very different for folks focused on systems etc where C has advantages.

This has been rather long, but there were lots of questions to address. Thanks for the opportunity.

<comment><USER15> I really interested reading your comment. Thanks for sharing your experiences, I hope other users also found your comment enlightening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 80s - I was 12, programming in AppleSoft Basic typing in assembly programs from InCider that added double hires graphics support to Basic. I wrote what would now be considered presentation creation software.

It was written mostly in basic but I also found another assembly language extension that let you load Print Shop clip art from Basic.

My next project was an Eliza ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)) clone. I hacked SAM (Software Automated Mouth) a voice synthesis program to work with the 80 column card and Prodos (long story).

I wrote a few other little programs but those two stand out. I learned some Assembly language and wrote some routines that were too slow for Basic.

</comment><comment><USER17> 2001 - discovering regular expressions in "Dreamweaver Bible" which led me to Jeffrey Friedl's "Mastering Regular Expressions" which in turn led me to "Programming Perl" and other O'Reilly Perl books before building my first back-end with CGI.pm and MySQL.

</comment><comment><USER18> 80's the day my grandparents bought me an Amiga.

90's Scraping every penny I could get to buy a NeXT box so I could download the WorldWideWeb browser and editor so I could check out this new thing Tim Lee had created called the web. Got the money, got a NeXT box, built a page and decided that I wanted to get out of the desktop app development business that day. After the CGI spec I knew I was going to be able to.

A good follow up to this conversation would be what are your biggest technical disappointments by decade:

80's would have been LISP machines not catching on.

90's downfall of Commodore, Apple's handling of Copeland and the purchase of CosmoWorld's by Computer Associates (that might have been early 00's).

</comment><comment><USER19> 90's - I was coding a Turbo Pascal assignment in my brand new Pentium 66Mhz. Previous computer was an 286 @12.5Mhz. You could really feel the difference in speed compiling... and debugging.

I remember not beign able to spot a bug because the machine was so fast. Inside a loop I mistyped extra zero in the counter: Instead of 1000 iterations it did 10000.

After those 9000 extra iterations the program output was wrong and I didn't knew why.

In the Pentium you couldn't tell the difference in speed because the output came instantly... but in the i286 the difference in speed was so big you could tell you iterated too much.

</comment><comment><USER20> 1995 ish - I build a milling machine controller using a BBC Computer, some stepping motors (requiring an 8 bit port to control, 4 bits each, 2 motors) a unit I researched and ordered and some machine code.

</comment><comment><USER21> 80s: Mario, 90s: Wolfenstein and Final Fantasy, 00s: WoW, 10s: Minecraft. (I'm a game programmer, so it's relevant to my career. I mark every era by which games are most inspiring.)

</comment><comment><USER22> 80's: Coleco Adam. Cassette tapes, Buck Rogers, and programming for the first time in BASIC. It died when I was about 10 years old.

90's: 486, 28.8 modem which I spent a small fortune on (for a teenager). Programming in C++ and Assembly. Getting a CD-ROM drive for Xmas and installing it. Getting a book on Linux and installing Slackware from the included CD. Finished high school and within a year I began my now 22+ year career as a programmer and it has taken me around the world.

</comment><comment><USER19> 90's - I went to the computer room in college and found a friend copying stuff to a lot of floppy discs.

Turns out he was downloading linux for the fist time...

I grabbed another computer and help him download copy the stuff. We could not download the floppies in parallel because the university had a shared 64kbps connection to the Internet.

4 hours and 100 floppy discs later he when home and installed Linux for the first time and opened my first linux account outside the university lab.

</comment><comment><USER23> I was in the Systems Lab at UTSA in 1979 when a professor came in with a tape and said that he got it from Bell Labs with a thing called Unix. We had studied about Multics and the word play wasn't quite obvious to me them. In any case, we did not have a PDP-11 to read it on; the lab had a Data General Nova. My attention was devoted to my project and I did not have time to waste on frivolous things like the newfangled OS from Bell Labs.

</comment><comment><USER24> My early teens around when I first got a copy of GNU/Linux. Someone in a local IRC channel sold me a CD with Slackware 6 for a couple of bucks. That launched me into an intensive period of learning.

In these youthful days, when I didn't have to earn a living and school ended at 3 PM, learning stuff about hacking computers was pure in some sense, maybe because it was purely self-directed out of curiosity.

</comment><comment><USER25> 11 years old (1980-1981) learning to program a ZX spectrum in machine code (yes machine code - not assembler). No internet. Just a single thin "Z80 Machine Code Programming" book for reference, and nobody to ask for help. A roller coaster experience from deep despair to an ultimate high :-)

</comment><comment><USER26> It started in the 80s when a friend brought me into a department store to type quickly into a computer "10 PRINT 'HELLO'; 20 GOTO 10" and then he pressed return. Magic! I was hooked from that moment on forward.

</comment><comment><USER27> 80s: getting to run IBM mainframes by myself

90s: getting my first Sparcstation on my desk

</comment><comment><USER28> Reading Denthor's tutorials in a basement, the 90s, learning C++ and assembly. Pure joy getting thingslike a 3d cube and a 3d star field up on the screen.

</comment><comment><USER29> Owning a commodore 64 in the 80s. Learning how to call out from my new modem with atdt commands.

</comment><comment><USER30> root having the real powers, just send MOTD to all logged users: the system will reboot in 5 minutes...

</comment><comment><USER31> I've worked with computers since the early 80s, starting with a Commodore Vic-20 in 1982. My first program was implementing a complete "choose your own adventure" book. I had never heard of Zork.

In high school, we used Apple ][+ and Apple //e computers. I was not able to get into any of the programming classes as a junior, because the classes were all filled by seniors. But they let me into the computer lab in my own time, before and after school and during lunch. After a couple of months had passed, I was already helping the seniors with their work. When I became a senior, I they let me skip the intro class, because I had basically helped teach it the previous year. I went straight into the advanced class, which was Pascal and not Basic. I was on a team of two that finished the class project so fast that the teacher assigned me to a second team where the guy was alone. On that second team, we still finished before any of the others. I graduated in 1984.

In college, my first programming class was in COBOL on IBM 3081 mainframes, using punched cards. Then FORTRAN. Later, I got to revisit Pascal. For my Numerical Methods class, I wanted to learn C. So the grad student who was actually grading the homework for the professor agreed, and we got to learn C together. I was so excited by learning C that every one of my programs executed perfectly, and I turned in all my homework before anyone else. I didn't even have to take the final, because there was no way I could score low enough for that to hurt my grade. The next major language I learned was Prolog, for what was supposed to be a class in Artificial Intelligence. My senior year, I took a Software Engineering course. I finished my work to graduate in August of 1989, but due to problems with my professor failing to give me a grade before he took a job programming for one of the airlines, I didn't technically graduate until 1990.

In September of 1989, I went to work for the Defense Communications Agency, in the basement of the Pentagon. My first programming task was helping to port the classified AIRFIELDS database from COBOL-66 to COBOL-77. However, I had learned UNIX in college, and so they also made me the UNIX Adminstrator in the branch. They gave me a diskless Sun 386i soon after I arrived. I got tired of constantly updating the /etc/hosts file from the HOSTS.TXT file from nic.ddn.mil, and so I set up what I believe was the first caching recursive nameserver inside the agency, and learned a lot about bind in the process. Later, when the agency was having a lot of problems with their Internet e-mail service, I got drafted in to fix that, and I learned a lot about sendmail. I did a few other things, including personally pissing off the Director of the NSA with a letter I wrote to the editors of the Communications of the ACM in 1992 (published in November of that year, see [http://www.shub- internet.org/brad/cacm92nov.html](http://www.shub- internet.org/brad/cacm92nov.html)), but I still managed to become the official Technical POC for DISA.mil, and I convinced the SIPRnet administrators that they should use the DNS and not HOSTS.TXT tables, as well as using real network numbers as assigned by the NIC instead of just pulling random numbers out of their ass. I also turned several Class B and at least one Class A network back to the NIC, because the agency wasn't using them. By 1995, I had become the sendmail FAQ maintainer, and that lead to a new opportunity to go work at AOL.

At AOL, I helped install their fifth internet email gateway in my first week there. I did a lot of stuff in a short period of time, and became their Senior Internet Mail Administrator. In 1996, I got blamed for taking down all internet e-mail around the world (as a side-effect of the network outage explained at [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-day-america-online-went- off...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-day-america-online-went-offline- in-1996/)), and I have been told that both qmail and postfix were created as a result of that incident. By 1997, AOL had become a toxic enough place that I could no longer survive there.

I could go on, but although I remember a lot of these details, I find that I'm not really nostalgic for them. I guess the times were pretty good, but frankly I think the times since then have gotten better and better.

Well, maybe not with regards to the recent US presidential elections. But otherwise, I think many things now are much better than they have ever been for many people, and maybe that scares some of the 1%ers at the top.

</comment><comment><USER32> SYS 64738

</comment><comment><USER33> using 20+ floppies to install windows 95 only to get up "windows protection error", like a zillion time, and trying again in hopes it ll work the next time?

</comment><comment><USER34> Winter Games, on a 486, when I somehow managed to edit the high-scores with a hex editor and put my name on top. I started programming the next day and haven't stopped since.</comment>


SLP86 Planb – Frontrunning the Bitcoin Halvening? - <AUTHOR> https://stephanlivera.com/episode/86 <comment><USER2> This is the second time that Planb is on. First episode is interesting too, and can be found here:

[https://stephanlivera.com/episode/67](https://stephanlivera.com/episode/67)</comment>


Assembly Optimizations: (Un)Packing Structures - <AUTHOR> https://haneefmubarak.com/2016/02/25/assembly-optimizations-i-un-packing-structures/ <comment><USER2> That bit where gcc unrolled the loop and renamed registers to get 2.5s, besting even the hand-optimized code, was impressive.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems that GCC6 does some more optimizations here: [https://goo.gl/Y6W5q1](https://goo.gl/Y6W5q1)

<comment><USER4> I'll definitely be using gcc 6 in the next post in the series. I just use whatever is the latest version of each available on Matt Godbolt's Compiler Explorer,and unfortunately when I was working on this post, 6 wasn't out yet.

<comment><USER3> Cool! Didn't mean this to sound negative, I think the post is pretty cool. It would be interesting to know how performance compares with these optimizations, a cursory look makes it seem like it does similar things as you did manually (although no build ID for gcc6 pre-release in Matt Godbolt's (otherwise absolutely amazing) tool doesn't really help with reproducibility)</comment></comment></comment>


You need to agree the new Xcode Licence to use git on OSX - <AUTHOR> $git status
Agreeing to the Xcode/iOS license requires admin privileges, please re-run as root via sudo.
$sudo git Password:
You have not agreed to the Xcode license agreements. You must agree to both license agreements below in order to use Xcode.
Hit the Enter key to view the license agreements at '/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/License.rtf'
###LICENCE ...
By typing 'agree' you are agreeing to the terms of the software license agreements. Type 'print' to print them or anything else to cancel, [agree, print, cancel] agree
$ <comment><USER2> That's always been the case, with any command line package that was installed and linked to Xcode. It's not just the latest version.

</comment><comment><USER3> You need to agree to the OS X license to use OS X. What, if anything, is in Xcode's license that's so objectionable to someone that has no problem with the OS X license?

</comment><comment><USER4> A git binary is also included with source tree or maybe you could install a git binary via home-brew if that's a problem.</comment>


The weird metaphysics when states try to tax digital goods - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/05/08/can-you-touch-an-electron-the-weird-metaphysics-when-states-try-to-tax-digital-goods/

<comment><USER2> "When I download music, and when I listen to music online, and when I buy a CD, ultimately I want the same thing," Kirkell said.

"Shouldn't that all be taxed in the exact same way?"

No, it isn't. And, no, you shouldn't.

When you have a physical good, you can loan it out or resell it. While doing the same thing with digital good is a violation of the DMCA and a felony. If there is a applicable service tax, perhaps that is acceptable, but it sure as hell isn't a "tangible good".</comment>


Hackers and mental health (violet blue29c3) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq-bloM4Cmo

<comment><AUTHOR> Aaron's death makes it even more obvious how much we need to support the mental health of people in our community.

This is a talk from the Chaos Communication Congress 2 weeks ago, about using "harm reduction" methods from drug and HIV prevention programs. First, you accept people's existing behaviour without judgment. That gives you a baseline, from which you can discuss how to reduce the harmful effects of the behaviour.

I'm not sure this talk really nails any practical steps we can take to help one another, but it's a useful perspective to have around.</comment>


Source code of C++ projects to be read by an average programmer - <AUTHOR>

What are some small or medium C++ projects(some small games may be) whose source code an average programmer should read to improve his C++ design and programming skills? <comment><USER2> I don't have any examples, but people keep asking me about this sort of stuff, so I've been working on _making_ some. The idea is that we pick a web site or two, identify a couple of interesting features, and then I clone it. All the while, I take copious notes and snapshot often so everyone can see how it grows from an empty directory into an actual usable site.

This isn't about having yet another Twitter clone (or whatever), but rather having the ability to see one come into being, one step at a time.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. you have a github profile or some blogposts describing those cloned features that you made?

<comment><USER2> Sure, I just started talking about it here: <http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/01/20/learn/>

I'm gathering interested people right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> libc++, llvm's c++ stl

<http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/libcxx/trunk/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. There are some hn'ers who are ready to help newbies. But that kind of requires atleast a minimal knowledge on compilers. right? What i am looking for is an application or a small game developed in c++ that uses various libraries, to understand how the project is structured in the first place. How the classes have been designed and how they interoperate.</comment></comment>


On Wall Street, a high-ranking few still avoid email - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-wall-street-email-idUSKBN12W4F7 <comment><USER2> Sounds like things are going as planned for Wikileaks[1]:

> RS: One of the unintended consequences is the opposite effect, which is what > we've seen with the Department of Defense, and even the State Department, > here in the U.S., of trying to make secrets more impenetrable rather than > less and trying to take precautions against what has happened from happening > again in the future. How do you regard that?

> JA: Well, I think that's very positive. Since 2006, we have been working > along this philosophy that organizations which are abusive and need to be > [in] the public eye. If their behavior is revealed to the public, they have > one of two choices: one is to reform in such a way that they can be proud of > their endeavors, and proud to display them to the public. Or the other is to > lock down internally and to balkanize, and as a result, of course, cease to > be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because > organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be > closed, conspiratorial and inefficient.

1: [http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034040,00...](http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034040,00.html)

<comment><USER3> Time for Wikileaks to make all their internal communications public.

After all, don't they believe in full transparency?

<comment><USER4> At risk of taking bait, they explicitly _don 't_ believe in full transparency.

They've backed and associated with various privacy groups and suggested that individuals and groups not in the public interest deserve privacy. Assange has complicated that a little by releasing personal, unredacted emails, but it's been their stated intent at least.

Give that transcript another read: "organizations which are abusive and need to be [in] the public eye". That's not decrying privacy, its decrying use of privacy to hide abusive behaviors. I haven't seen Wikileaks accused of that; the usual accusation is that their public behaviors are politically motivated, which is very different than alleging internal corruption.

<comment><USER3> Wikileaks claims they use leaks to serve the public's interest. That makes them a public interest organization.

Being politically motivated can very much be a form of abuse. When you have the ability to significantly hinder or tear down public organizations through leaking, I think the public deserves to know how Wikileaks decided what to leak, how they are funded, and what interests they represent.

Simple hypothetical scenario: Wikileaks gets compromising information about a left-leaning and a right-leaning organization, but they only decide to make public _one_ of those leaks because they're biased. Or they receive some damaging info, and use it to trade for political or personal favors in return for suppressing the leak.

Given that there are so many ways that Wikileaks could abuse the public's trust, their 'transparency' rhetoric very much should apply to themselves.

<comment><USER5> Quite honestly, when wikileaks releases material such as the Podesta emails, undoctored (most Podesta emails are verifiable by checking google's DKIM signatures), it does not matter what wikileaks objectives and motives are and if they are ethically clean.

Corruption is still corruption, no matter if it is made public by a "good" organization or another corrupt organization. The corrupt organization does not get a free pass just because their competitors might be even more corrupt (and wikileaks might know that and hold back that information).

<comment><USER3> The question is not whether we should give corrupt organizations a pass (we shouldn't), it's whether we should try to keep Wikileaks honest, given that its position gives it strong incentives to do shady things without any transparency.

Wikileaks' core activity forces it to walk a very very thin moral and ethical line. I think we the public have obligation to make sure they don't cross it, _especially_ if we benefit from the leaks.

I'll note that in another context, it was for a long time not alright for prosecutors to use illegally obtained evidence, in order to discourage prosecutors and police from breaking the law, _even at the cost of potentially letting criminals go free_. Why doesn't that logic apply here?

<comment><USER5> I was replying to this specifically:

        Being politically motivated can very much be a form of abuse.
        When you have the ability to significantly hinder or tear down public organizations through leaking [...]

If there is no (major) wrongdoing, you cannot just tear them down. The organization needs to be corrupt in the first place.

        it's whether we should inspect Wikileaks itself,
        given that its position gives it strong incentives to do shady things
        without any transparency.

I don't see anything suggesting strong incentives to do shady things, can you elaborate please?

I see the opposite, however, they got strong incentives NOT to do shady things, because if they are caught even once doing shady things, their reputation is in the gutter and nobody will ever listen to them again. That is not to say that they got no political bias and even political bias. When the emails you obtained contained Hillary asking why they cannout just "drone him" (aka Assange), you might take that a bit personally too. But political bias and personal bias is in no way evidence for "shady things" and wrongdoing.

But yes, wikileaks too should be scrutinized, and I think it is, by pretty much everybody, the government, it's agencies, the media. Still, so far, after a decade of operation, there is no proof wikileaks did anything sinister, and the best attempts so far to discredit wikileaks was coming for their leader with rape charges instead of discrediting what the organization is doing.

And yes again, we the public should not stop to be vigilant and continue to scrutinize wikileaks.

<comment><USER3> > If there is no (major) wrongdoing, you cannot just tear them down. The > organization needs to be corrupt in the first place.

I'm not so sure that's true. As the size of an organization grows, the probability that someone in it will write an e-mail that looks incredibly damning when leaked approaches 1. That's true regardless of whether there is any _actual_ corrupt behavior, but the political damage is done regardless. IMO, the public is generally not great at teasing apart real misconduct from stupid private e-mails, because the public either lacks or chooses to ignore context.

I know in this day and age it's not very popular to say that things should be kept from the public, but I'd like to point out the example of the legal system. Judge often decide that evidence should _not_ be shown to juries because the evidence is inflammatory and will cause bias. _Sometimes showing more evidence leads to less truth, not more_. Obviously, Wikileaks is not a court, but it does choose who gets to see what, and they have some idea of how the public will react to what is revealed. But we have no real idea how they internally make that decision.

> I don't see anything suggesting strong incentives to do shady things, can > you elaborate please?

Sure -- this is an organization that often gets illegally obtained information from perhaps anonymous sources. Because the sources are by definition secret or inaccessible, and yet the information can be very damaging, there's always the temptation for illicit dealings. Here are some possibilities:

\- Someone in Wikileaks uses the information to blackmail the target of a leak

\- The target of a leak gets wind of it and tries to buy off Wikileaks

\- Outside actors (e.g. the Russian government) effectively use Wikileaks as a 'neutral' channel to cloak their interference in the political affairs of another country. This may in fact be what is happening today, but we can't be sure because again -- Wikileaks is not transparent.

\- A Wikileaks staffer is arrested or otherwise threatened by a government to do their bidding

Contrast this how major news organizations handle sources and leaks: journalists form a professional body with their own journalistic code of ethics and conduct. Leaks are evaluated for their newsworthiness and sources are scrutinized.

Obviously, traditional media organizations aren't perfect either, but they are far more open and transparent than Wikileaks is, because there are institutional norms developed over decades that constrain their behavior.

In a perfect world, Wikileaks would be open and transparent in their _process_ of how they evaluate and pass on leaks, so we can be sure that they're not being unduly influenced or using it to advance a hidden agenda.

<comment><USER5> You talked about incentives to do shady things, but only provided examples of theoretical abuse (there is no indication any of which ever happened). Of course there is a danger of abuse, but I fail to see how shadiness is being _incentivized_ by the structure of wikileaks and the work they do.

All your examples apply to traditional journalists as well, by the way.

Wikileaks has their own code of conduct and ethics. I fail to see how their self-imposed code is any less valid than the self-imposed code of traditional journalists.

wikileaks claims it evaluates and scrutinizes their sources. So far it seems they actually did that, and did not fall for any hoax. Traditional journalists also claim they evaluate their sources, and most of them did not fall for any hoax. Both don't do so transparently, in fact journalists went to jail for not being transparent and disclosing their sources, so I fail to see how traditional journalists are any better or worse than wikileaks. The lack of transparency when it comes to sources is a feature and not a failure, protecting said sources, for both wikileaks and traditional journalism.

It's a bold claim to state that traditional journalists are more open and trustworthy simply because they have been around longer (the organizations, not the individuals of course).

Regular news organizations reported the Iraq had WMDs because the government sources said so, without any actual evidence. Or published fake Hitler Diaries. Meaning it's not all that rosy and checked and ethical as you make it out to be.

I don't see the "contrast" you claim exists. If anything, wikileaks has a better track record than a lot of traditional media organizations when it comes to publishing verified information, so far.

PS: The likes of Murdoch and Bezos prove outside influence in journalism is a real thing to worry about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Dimon uses email but is known to keep his replies short and factual, > favoring "yes," "no" and "thank you."

I mean, come on. Everyone uses email. Having said that, everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone.

And the dividing line doesn't necessarily have anything to do about breaking the law.

Everyone on wall street has had an email they typed up get into the hands of someone who they wish it wouldn't.

Whether its shitting all over an analyst for not being good at their job that got back to the analyst or doing something similar to a CEO, these things can harm your future relationship with these people who you may need to do business with again.

You rant over the phone, you issue actionable orders via email for the same reason. One has no trace, the other has a record you can point to.

<comment><USER7> >Having said that, everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone.

A lot of people don't know this. One of my favorite classes in business school was "Business Communications." a lot of the stuff seemed really basic, but I'm amazed how much of it is disregarded in the wild.

<comment><USER8> First job out of school (early 1990s), working at a "big" consulting company. All the new hires had it drilled into them that you do not talk about work outside of work. And you never discuss anything client-specific in public, on a plane or in a cab, in a restaurant, etc.

Email wasn't a worry, nobody had it then. I think they had an internal system of some sort but the line staff consultants didn't have access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My first job was at an investment bank. I was taught very early on that I needed to watch what I said in my emails. I'm not sure if it was true or not, but someone told me that every month, someone from compliance looked over a random selection of my emails and my manager would have been informed if they found something wrong.

What everyone on Wall Street appreciates is that your emails are a permanent record and should be treated accordingly. When there's a real risk that your emails will later turn up in court, you are gonna be a lot more careful about what you say. Even things that seem innocuous when you write them may not look good if they come under the spotlight later (something like "Hey John, the code in that repo looks messy..." may come back to bite you if it turns up in court). So I was taught to always keep to facts in emails rather than opinions ("this data set has 246 invalid phone numbers and 20 fake email addresses" is a fact... "this data looks messy" is an opinion subject to all sorts of interpretation later).

You might think that there's nothing that you have to hide. If that's true, then by all means, say what you want in your _personal_ email. But when you are using your company email, remember that you don't have many rights to privacy there and so treat it accordingly.

<comment><USER10> That's actually true in _most_ large corporations.

I once dated a lady who did data recovery and "e-discovery" for the legal department of a large corporation. A large part of her job involved grabbing disk images of people's hard drives, and then digging through them and people's email, looking for any information relevant to lawsuits, internal investigations, subpeonas, etc..

As far as I know it was never at random, though.

<comment><USER11> Compliance vs Discovery. Typically, you would check for compliance periodically while discovery happens after the fact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "His staff filters important messages, prints them out and puts them on his chair for review"

A desire to filter out noise and apply their attention in a selective manner is probably the biggest motivation to avoid email. At this level, I imagine people would like to receive a concise written or spoken summary, think about the content, discuss it with the relevant people and then make a decision. Since they control their own time, and have staff to respond to "tactical emergencies," they're free to organize their schedule and staff in order to optimize the decision-making process.

<comment><USER13> I remember hearing talk about Bill Gates having _four_ assistants who did nothing except filter and redirect email sent to him.

I can easily believe that major figures with a public email address receive far more mail than they can deal with in person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Dimon volunteered: "Don't send emails after you've had a drink."

good advice for everyone, not just bankers and politicians.

<comment><USER15> Don't send emails when you are angry either. Just wait a while before sending.

<comment><USER16> Actually, just the act of writing out your anger or pain without actually sending it can reduce the anger or pain

<comment><USER17> Just fill in the address field at the top of the email last, if ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Its incredible how there's all this email related stuff in the press and not one word about email encryption. Pretty much everything supports S/MIME, yet almost no one uses it. The DNC hack could have been avoided if those emails were encrypted, for example. Hackers would then also have to get private keys on top of data. That's another layer to get through.

I suspect baby boomer led management think memorizing passphrases and using encryption is "too hard" and are calling the shots right now and we're all paying the price for it. We should be teaching each other and the younger generation that email encryption should be seen the same way we look at https now. Not too long ago https was regarded as for just 'credit card stuff only' because it 'cost time and resources.'

Its sad that something as critical as email doesn't have end to end encryption.

<comment><USER19> _memorizing passphrases and using encryption is "too hard"_

It's not just baby boomers, it's most people outside HN unfortunately.

<comment><USER18> The worst part of this is that memorizing passphrases is far easier than passwords. Compare:

mydog'snameisAliceandsheiscute

to

P@ssw0rd

The latter is harder to memorize (what letters did I substitute with symbols again?) and far easier to crack.

I suspect until regulators make people use encrypted email we'll keep using plain-text.

<comment><USER20> I'm a big fan of passphrases for important sites. For most sites I use a randomly generated pw that's stored in a password manager. I use separate pw managers for home (1password) and work (lastpass).

Since a pw manager can be cracked, for important sites (financial , email, etc), I make up a sentence that describes my feelings about the site. These I keep memorized. As a bonus, as my feelings about the site change, it's a great prompt to update my password.

I'd like to throw a layer of physical security into the mix (eg one of those usb keys), but it seems like there still aren't universally accepted options. Anyone have suggestions for this?

<comment><USER21> LastPass supports 2FA (Yubikey, Google Authenticator, etc.) and it's pretty seamless and works well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have worked with C-level executives at several very large companies. Due to the nature of regulation at companies of this size, many of these individuals are under subpoena almost continuously. As a result of the record keeping requirements of a person under subpoena, their life is much simpler if they conduct all business in person and keep no files. They use e-mail exclusively for interactions that are intended to be public. Any business communication to them is usually scheduled through a secretary and done in in-person meetings with projected slides.

It's not that they have anything to hide -- but at the same time, corporate espionage is a real thing and you have to protect trade secrets and you know the government receives a copy of every e-mail and document that you do.

<comment><USER23> So, they have something to hide.

<comment><USER22> Well, there are a lot of things that look bad but aren't criminal.

<comment><USER9> To add to this, there are also lots of things that can be misinterpreted or taken out of context. I imagine that most people would treat email differently if they knew that all of their emails would become public information. Smart executives at large companies simply _assume_ this and send emails accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> People only use email to create a paper trail. It's not a discussion, as a medium it's a set of assertions and challenges.

If you don't have a personal relationship with someone, questions aren't even honest questions, they are signals of liability transfer.

The cc: line is a kind of blackmail where assholes list the people they are performing for, or threatening to scandalize you to.

Everything about e-mail is abnormal.

It's a performance. The only way to win is not to play. Hence executives eschew it.

<comment><USER25> Please name the organizations that led you to believe this so we can never work for them.

I don't doubt that this toxic environment exists, but I'm fortunate not to have worked in one yet and I'd like to keep it that way.

<comment><USER24> The entire public sector, and most organizations over 1000 people. Bureaucracy is what happens when your dunbar-number sized network overflows and starts to metastasize.

When people say they work for a company that is collaborative and non- hierarchical, I've found it either means they are a manipulative and delusional tyrant or they are the sucker at the table.

<comment><USER25> My large organization manages this pretty successfully by having small teams that don't interact much.

It's absolutely hierarchical from a macro level, but engineers live in pretty collaborative 5-10 person leaf nodes and we don't need to interact across the tree very often.

What you describe might exist for senior management, but they generally take cross-team dependencies to be a bug in the way the tree was partitioned, and fix it at the next re-org.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wouldn't you prefer encrypted email more than a conversation. You do get a lot of self destructing emails too. And custom protocols included. And they use phone calls too I presume. Those would also come under the same scrutiny right?

<comment><USER27> In some cases, they need to preserve email in case the company is sued and emails are subject to discovery. If these guys want to talk in private, they talk face to face. Email is only for things that should have a papertrail.

<comment><USER28> You can have a data retention policy and delete email after a certain period of time, you don't have to keep them just because they are created.

Of course the nature of email makes it difficult to make sure the policy has been enforced.

<comment><USER4> For personal use or many companies, you can get by with a common sense data retention policy and systematically delete aged-out emails.

That's not true for banks; they have specific reporting laws to comply with for anything that gets emailed.

<comment><USER29> For insurance companies, you're largely bound by whatever policies and procedures you define in your MAR specifications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The thing I always think when I read articles like this (and this one from the NY Times about Senators & Email [1]) is that they don't use email because they don't have to. They have jobs that come with many assistants & aides who can communicate electornically on their behalf. They started working in these positions before email became the norm for business/professional communication and happen to have had careers that span both eras.

I wonder if these people are the last (or some of the last) people that don't use email to communicate.

1: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/us/politics/storing- emails...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/us/politics/storing-emails-from- these-senators-will-be-easy-if-they-ever-send-one.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> This doesn't seem so crazy. Google deletes emails after a few months for rank/file and 6 months for executives for the sake of avoiding lawsuits as well.

<comment><USER13> > ... after a few months for rank/file and 6 months for executives

What's your source for this? I can easily believe they delete emails. But I would expect them to be subject to various laws about email retention, and those laws typically require companies to hold on to emails for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not covered in this article, some people simply never transitioned to new technology because they are older, unfamiliar/inclined with tech and didn't have to.

A colleague who was at a fairly known investment company told me of a senior exec whose PA left printed emails and left them on his desk. He would then write replies on the paper version and the PA would type and send them.

Nothing to do with secrecy. He was just older and never adapted to computers. I feel this logic fits occam's razor nicely rather than being over conspiratorial. It's not like you can't use email for efficiency, and do the 'lets take this offline' response when going somewhere sensitive/secretive.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wonder how many tech executives don't use email?

I've got a feeling Tim Cook doesn't use a computer, maybe just an iPad with a carefully curated list of messages and financial reports for him to browse.

</comment><comment><USER34> Janet Napolitano never used email as the head of DHS

<comment><USER15> Donald Trump is also said not to use email. I think he said "I'm smart. I don't use email.".

<comment><USER35> In case anyone else, like me, assumed this was comedy, there's no Politifact on it, but Bloomberg claims it's true: [http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-20/trump-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-20/trump- strategy-meeting) (last paragraph)

<comment><USER36> He probably does use his phone to tweet [http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump- tweets/](http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Probably the most productive lot.</comment>


Linux, Open-source and my Macbook - <AUTHOR> http://jjinux.blogspot.com/2009/08/linux-open-source-and-my-macbook.html

<comment><USER2> If you've already got the Macbook then follow the advice given by DZC in the comments:

 _"I install a minimal Ubuntu (like JEOS) to a VirtualBox instance on my MacBook. It's set up to be as minimal as possible -- no sound, X, etc. Then I set it up as a local server -- mounting it's file system via SSHFS (or NFS or whatever you like) to the Mac OS side.

Then I can use Mac OS Terminal, Textmate, Firefox, etc. for development. The only major downside so far is the ~10% CPU VirtualBox seems to use at idle."_

And if you intend to run Linux, don't buy the Macbook. In fact if you're technical enough to be reading this then you're technical enough to plan to buy a machine that's going to run well under linux (no binary blobs etc.) which isn't, even today, a complete no-brainer.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. I specifically purchased a machine that would run well under Linux, with no proprietary modules, and that suspended, displayed, and generally ran flawlessly.

I did that because running Linux was worth having poorer performance hardware.

Nevertheless, I still had problems - even the Intel drivers can't composite properly when plugged into a monitor. Oh well, these were acceptable limits.

Then Ubuntu 9.04 came out, and me, like everyone else, got stung by Intel drivers changes that broke many machines and had been identified in the betas but not fixed.

That's it. After 10 years of the Linu desktop, including running rawhide and sid, I gave up and brought a Mac, struggling with OS X for about two weeks then getting into the feel of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why I sold my MacBook and bought a ThinkPad T500. While it's nice that every single MacBook that is your exact model has the exact same hardware and runs very well on OS X, I have found that Lenovo laptops run better on Linux.</comment>


Mt. Gox announces they actually still possess 200,000 BTC  - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/20x0ww/mtgox_announces_they_actually_still_owned_200000/

<comment><USER2> in ten years we will remember those bizarre early bitcoin days where casual nerds become daytrader and exchanges defrauded, got robbed, got their assets frozen, file for bankruptcy and find millions under their sofa. All in 3 months.

It wouldn't surprise me if Mt.Gox will be a strong brand in the years to come. Nothing surprises me anymore with bitcoin.</comment>


Google shifts software value to operations, away from IP - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10393323-16.html?tag=reddit2 <comment><USER2> The point about Open Source contributions not meshing well. It is HARD to write any open source contribution that meshes well. Especially when you are on deadlines and your mods aren't quite what is needed but is a good starting point/proof of concept.

People that have never tried to get patches committed just don't get this.</comment>


What was your most clever use of a python script in everyday life? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/xl2ai/what_was_your_most_clever_use_of_a_python_script/

<comment><USER2> This serves as a nice reminder that programming is not about the language, design patterns, hardware architecture or whatever.

The most important aspect of programming is the way in which it improves our lives.</comment>


Show HN: Code draws better than you - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kpicturebooth.com/?p=25

<comment><USER2> I've been intrigued by this idea of computers creating art. And not electric sheep those are just people creating art then computers building and sharing it, I don't like it.

The idea of using genetic algorithms to reproduce art is interesting, the idea of computers manipulating images to create new art from old art is also cool(automagically). I've been playing around with it.

<comment><USER3> I think computers originating great art is synonymous with the search for general AI. (Not going to happen, IMO)

<comment><USER4> I agree, but my argument is based on semantics. I believe when one creates "Artificial" intelligence, it isn't really artificial. I don't think intelligence cares what medium caries out the function of being intelligent.

As for art - computers are just as able to create art as humans, but only because so many people define art from the observer's perspective. If a person is inspired by an image, it shouldn't matter that it was nothing more than some pixel shifting algorithm reshaping a random google image selection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have seen the genetic algorithm demo of mona lisa and its pretty cool. My problem with it is that using genetic algorithm for something like that seems "forced" because there's no real "evolution" involved in it.

Would it be possible to use genetic algorithm to .. say, evolve a face by beautifying it? by "mating" it with anther face? It would be an interesting experiment. Perhaps I'll explore this concept in code.

<comment><USER5> Yes! Though activity seems to have died down of late:

<http://facemaker.redshiftmedia.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Facinating! this is pretty awesome. It'll be cool if there's a way to generate synthetic realistic images from this.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask PG: Any plans to make the YC talks public? - <AUTHOR>

I saw that Kevin Rose came and spoke at YC last night, and of course we know that other entrepreneurs do regularly as one of the benefits of being in the YC family.<p>I can completely understand that the talks take place in a safe environment such that companies may reveal details they don't want public, or that the entrepreneur may be giving sneak peeks into their own upcoming projects, but even so I was wondering if these talks are recorded with the intent to be published sometime down the line? <comment><USER2> I think the answer has to be 'no', or they simply won't get people to be as candid.

Not that I wouldn't like to see them too, but this has been asked before. At the end of the day, YC is a business, and this is part of the benefits of getting in, so those of us outside will just have to live without it. C'est la vie.

<comment><USER3> I doubt a CEO would be "candid" in any environment. You can't really say anything without realizing that it might end up getting reported the next day.

Two people can keep a secret, as long as the other person is dead

<comment><USER2> Well, I've never been to these talks, don't know pg, and don't know the people involved, so I'm just reporting what I read. Argue it with pg if you think they ought to do things differently.

<comment><USER3> oh I'm not saying the talks should be public, its one of the reasons why people do YC. I was just replying to the candid part of the response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google publishes techtalks. They always save "delicate details" for the question break, which is not recorded.

<comment><USER5> Google publishes _some_ tech talks but there are many many more that are only internally available. Maybe in a similar way selected YC talks could be published.

<comment><USER6> Is that for some strategic reason? Surely no one goes to work at google for access to the tech-talks...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When you already have interesting people coming to speak, why don't you make a separate short interview or summery and publish? Would be great both as a promotional thing and as a "log" for the ones who were there.

<comment><USER2> That sounds like a really smart idea. Something like a blurb on X's advice for startups...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It'll be great, if you could do that

</comment><comment><USER9> Occasionally, pg will transcribe one of his talks into an essay. Read his essays. Same with Joel.</comment>


Squareup API not escaping json outputs. A quick note on unsafe API's - <AUTHOR> http://zenincognito.com/squareups-api-not-escaping-json-outputs-a-quick-note-on-unsafe-apis/ <comment><AUTHOR> Happy to hear about people's thought on who is responsible for safeguarding the API ?

The one consuming the API or the one releasing the API.

<comment><USER2> Unless the API deals exclusively with returning HTML I'd vote it is the consumer's responsibility. It is impossible for the API producer to know in what context the consumer intends to use it. For example, what if the API consumer is an iOS application and intends to use it in a non-webview? The API should return raw data and leave it up to the consumer to decide how it will be used and what sorts of escaping may be necessary.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its is very intresting outlook. I read a few stack overflow discussions around this area.

I think that item names specifically inventory product names ought to be escaped. A person consuming the API may not necessarily expect unescaped outputs. Although this makes it for a very intresting discussion.

<comment><USER2> Nor might a consumer expect escaped outputs. Using my iOS example, the consumer would end up with malformed data and be required to manually unescape every API response. Assuming all data should be escaped is a very HTML centric view, and only applies to one (albeit popular) consumer of the data. For example, we don't store html escaped data in the database for the same reason (we don't know in what context the data will be used).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Identify with email: no need for passwords - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/d6509aa3c60b

<comment><USER2> Isn't this _exactly_ what Mozilla Persona [1] does?

EDIT: In fact, Persona goes one better. Persona has the browser act as an intermediary between your e-mail provider and the site that you're logging in to, so that the e-mail provider doesn't get to see the source of the authentication request, and the site that you're authenticating with doesn't get any further details beyond your e-mail address.

[1] [http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/persona/](http://www.mozilla.org/en- US/persona/)

<comment><USER3> > the site that you're authenticating with doesn't get any further details > beyond your e-mail address

But Mozilla's servers (or the email provider, but I don't expect to see any significant uptake of this feature) get information in the HTTP requests, whether they like it or not, and they're based in the US.

<comment><USER4> Right now, you're right and that's because of the temporary centralized components:

1\. JavaScript shim 2\. include.js 3\. Centralized verifier 4\. Fallback identity provider

However, we've designed the protocol so that all of these pieces (necessary to bootstrap the system) will go away over time.

#1 will go away once we have native support in the browser (some of our developers have starting working on this). #2 will go away once we make include.js self-hostable, which we are definitely planning to do. #3 will no longer be needed once sites can use local verification libraries, which we have started writing. #4 can already be avoided if you put up your own identity provider (several people have done so).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've implemented a site before that did exactly that, because logins would be very infrequent so users were probably just forget a password anyway. It worked great.

BUT, it would drive me nuts if I had to do that every time I logged into my bank, for example, because sometimes e-mails take 1-2 min to arrive, very occasionally even half an hour. They get queued up somewhere along the way, who knows -- maybe the spam filter's being overloaded. Sometimes your organization's e-mail simply goes down. Sometimes your webmail goes down. Heck, sometimes your e-mail gets inadvertently disabled.

If it were instantaneous, and your e-mail account always worked perfectly, then it would be great. But the way things are set up right now... this isn't a viable option for a lot of sites. And it's certainly not going to replace your e-mail password ;)

<comment><USER6> > "sometimes e-mails take 1-2 min to arrive, very occasionally even half an > hour"

That's because SMTP (the protocol that moves email around) doesn't guarantee delivery in any specific time period. Many MTAs (message transfer agents) are configured by default use retry intervals measured in minutes, not seconds.

Relying on email for authentication means asking your users to wait minutes, not seconds, and asking users to wait minutes to get logged in to your website is horrible usability.

<comment> __--__ Isn't this also horribly insecure? Unless it's encrypted (ha. ha.) anybody can intercept the email and get access to your account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _And believe it or not, some people do not use, like, or trust Facebook or Twitter._

Yup, I'm one of those people.

I don't use Facebook, and it's unreasonable to expect me to sign up for a Facebook account so that I can use your service.

I do use Twitter, but I'd rather not share my account details (even just the username) with someone I've just met.

I've always thought that being able to explore the web of information out there about me was kind of creepy, and I'm not about to make it easier for someone to do by creating connections between the accounts I have with disparate service providers. I like when my data is siloed, and only shared on my terms, with my explicit consent.

<comment><USER8> Not only that but facebook may block your account at a whim. Happened to me once for posting 'explicit pictures'. The picture was not even explicit, apparently something tripped their automatic 'skin detection system'. But the result ? I couldn't log into any 'facebook connected' sites.

Better to create separate accounts on each site and minimize dependencies. Also, if you lose your facebook password, it's just your facebook account that'll potentially get affected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not a fan of this idea:

From a user experience point of view, it's much more effort (at least 3 clicks more) to have to open an email client, open an email, and click a link, as opposed to just entering a password.

Also as airlinenut mentioned, it would allow others to send you an annoying email just by entering your email address, and any methods to prevent this (captcha etc) will just make it even harder for the user.

<comment><USER10> People sending you annoying emails with this method is not really an issue as anyone that knows your email can (and does) find easy ways to annoy you (spam, phishing, chain letters etc.). I do agree however that the user experience is a deal breaker. I'd rather enter a password than open a client and wait for an email to arrive just so I can log in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > They now need not implement any cryptography.

This sentence implies to me that under the current system, sites need cryptography, because sending login information in plaintext is not secure enough.

...and that the solution is to use email, because we already treat it as if it's secure.

...even though it sends the data in plaintext.

Okay, so most end-users probably accesses their email via https these days, but it's a (potentially) long journey from the website to the email provider's server.

Is any of that server-to-server journey ever encrypted? I'm no expert, but my impression has always been that it's not.

<comment><USER12> > Is any of that server-to-server journey ever encrypted?

It can be, thanks to RFC 3207 (STARTTLS).

However, unless you configure your sending MTA to require TLS (and in turn give up the ability to send email to a large swath of the internet) you have no protection against a MITM adversary hiding the recipient's advertisement of STARTTLS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I tried a similar approach on [https://www.moraleapp.com](https://www.moraleapp.com) with mixed results. It makes sense for a manager/boss to have an account, but I didn't want to have every team member sign up for yet another service. So each email sent out gets a randomly generated token that allows the recipient to "log in" (all responses are anonymous, each sent email has a token - not each email address). I think the idea is really great and helps with adoption within a team, but it has also led to some confusion because there is also a traditional Login page.

My take-away is that it is probably better to go all-in on one approach (all email-based or regular logins) than a half measure. It is kind of interesting because it seems to cause trouble for users that are semi-technical; the ones that know how a username/login works in general, but are thrown for a loop with this whole "email is how you login to our special app!" thing. Super technical users understand and super newbies don't really seem to notice, but those middle ground users are a bit confused.

</comment><comment><USER14> How is this not identical to sending the user password in the clear via email?

<comment><USER15> I guess it is as good as sending an email with a link to reset a password. In theory, the link that gives you access to your account couldn't be used after X minutes and could be use only once, making it useless for future attempts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Allow the user to sign in with their password, if they cannot remember their password or would rather sign in with their email then allow them to receive an email containing a token that logs them in. From their account settings they can change their password.

This is already how most websites work isn't it?

<comment><USER17> Kind of, the only thing missing is proper user experience. Like having an input for e-mail and another button right on the login form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't most sites let you do this already? It's usually behind a button labeled "forgot password"

</comment><comment><USER19> Since virtually every service has a 'forgot password' option, all the OP is suggesting is to formalize this as a default login process for second tier services that are too much of a bother to keep track of.

The net positive, if this were implemented across the board, is that users would focus their efforts on securing a few high value accounts, versus reusing the same password across dozens of low value accounts (chain, meet weakest link).

</comment><comment><USER20> This is actually the same method we use for logins, when the cookie is absent or expired, at a forum I'm currently running. They get sent a unique login token that expires in a few minutes (or is force expired if they request a resend of the login token) and get presented a CAPTCHA after following the link if they've already tried a few times.

Login email delay increases exponentially with each request.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've thought about this exact thing. Couple additional ideas - I would make it email or SMS and two, you could reduce the number of steps by using gmail actions - [https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/actions/actions-...](https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/actions/actions- overview#go-to_actions)

</comment><comment><USER22> This doesn't change much does it.

You could have one email account in which case it becomes the single point of failure / attack and you are only as secure as that email provider.

Or you have multiple email accounts in which case you have multiple email account passwords to remember manage. You might as well have multiple site passwords

</comment><comment><USER23> > It would tremendously simplify for services. They now need not implement any > cryptography.

Uhh.. I sure hope the cookie tokens are not stored directly on the server- side, but rather verified against a (cryptographic) hash of same. These credentials are as valuable to an attacker as a password (albeit relatively short-lived).

</comment><comment><USER24> Sometimes there is a significant delay in Gmail sending new emails to a desktop client. That can be a dealbreaker for this.

</comment><comment><USER25> Besides the problems with email delivery speeds, which tend to make this frustrating in reality, this also has the problem of being different. And users don't really want to deal with different just to log in to your site. They know userid + password, and there is no learning curve.

</comment><comment><USER26> I built a Rails engine that does this, see [https://github.com/alsmola/nopassword](https://github.com/alsmola/nopassword) and [https://nopassword.alexsmolen.com](https://nopassword.alexsmolen.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't know if I would trust this as the sole authentication method for any of my online accounts, but this could be useful as a multi-factor authentication method instead.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you wanted to later make an iOS or android app, wouldn't you need a password since you wouldn't have the cookies?

</comment><comment><USER29> E.g.: [http://hi-games.net/login.cgi](http://hi-games.net/login.cgi)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is essentially just two-factor using email... give me your phone and I can steal anything I need.

<comment><USER31> Assuming the phone isn't locked.

A combination with email confirmation plus two-step verification like Google Authenticator could work as well.

<comment><USER14> If the attacker has the phone, the second factor (typically sms) won't work very well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> [http://pixelpin.co.uk/](http://pixelpin.co.uk/) ?

<comment><USER33> thats basically the same what windows 8 does. curious that microsoft didn't patent this in some way?

<comment><USER32> PixelPin's mission is to rid the world of passwords for ever and replace them with an engaging and easy to use picture based system.

They provide businesses and organisations an authentication service for their customers. The service is enabled for all web applications, and can be accessed from any user device. PixelPin replaces the current password solution which is expensive to manage and full of vulnerabilities with a very user friendly and memorable solution that uses personal pictures from the users own device as a means of authentication. The service is very secure and maintains the users privacy. Once a user has completed the simple process to set up a PixelPin account, they can then login to any PixelPin enabled web service.

Info and the Dev pages at [https://login.pixelpin.co.uk/Developer/Index.aspx](https://login.pixelpin.co.uk/Developer/Index.aspx) for tech integration info. Integration can be achieved in 2 to 4 hours.

By the way Windows 8 can not do this, but PixelPin can replace Windows 7 and 8 login

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Emails are postcards.

</comment><comment><USER35> One downside (not security-related) would be the need for captchas to prevent people from being robo-spammed by repeated entry of email address into various forms. Alternatively you could rate-limit emails, I suppose.</comment>


Survival Guide for Junior Developers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/learning-new-stuff/survival-guide-for-junior-developers-d35371dd0818#.e0p9lnr3w <comment><USER2> Thanks. This is reasonable and useful advice. I like #3 - the less you know about a subject, the more complicated and scary it sounds.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been a developer just for 2 years. Good advice!!</comment>


How to See Invisible Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/how-to-see-invisible-infrastructure/401204/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Rule 101: If it exists, there is a game of it.

This fascinates me - not the subject of the article itself, I gave up on it pretty quickly, it has little interest for me - but the meta-subject, that people will make games out of almost everything.

And it's more than the gaming aspect that fascinates me, it's the community or sociology aspect: These games drive the evolution of communities, societies, events, etc., all for things that a) I didn't know about, b) never would have guessed at, c) find intriguing but not compelling, and d) am completely unlikely to ever participate in.

Think geocaching.

But then, I've long been fascinated by the existence of the myriad societies and paths and doors closed to me (I can never be Pope, President of the US, e.g.; I can also never be a mother, but that restriction was imposed by biological accident, not by human politics and organization, and so is in a different class).</comment>


EU Starts Geo-Blocking Antitrust Case Against U.S Movie Studios - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/eu-starts-geo-blocking-anti-trust-case-against-u-s-movie-studios-150723/

<comment><USER2> Awesome. It's incredibly annoying that I can't watch Netflix when I go and visit my family in Poland, even though I'm a paying UK customer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Eliminating geo-blocking would go a long way to reducing the piracy that publishers and copyright holders claim damages them so much.

They know this already though I imagine.</comment></comment>


A Soldier's Eye in the Sky - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/business/12combat.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> Having seen combat and being exposed to some of these bots as a soldier in the recent past, I can confidently say that the mobility and situational awareness provided by some of these bots superlatively increases the operating effectiveness of a platoon. There was an instance when we were handed "maps" of an AO before an operation and to my surprise the maps were nothing more than hand drawn topo details, with rather miniscule details of the area itself. All this when the bad guys were using google maps to coordinate their own operations!

Months later, we inducted a mobile UAV into the platoon and I still, to this day think about the number of times it saved us from certain trouble.

Today, as I work on autonomous military bots as an engineer I can only appreciate the effort that goes into building these things. Occupancy grid mapping in a noisy environment of a battlefield being one the most challenging aspects of making these bots.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing that. I'm intrigued by your wording "we inducated a mobile UAV into the platoon". I've long thought that battlefield robots (especially those that have some sort of autonomy) would be considered almost humans by the flesh and blood troops along with them.

Sounds very cool to be working on military bots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know this article isn't specifically about this, but it's something I've been thinking about for a while now.

I strongly disagree with the use UAVs like the Predator and the Reaper. They detach the operators from the very traumatic act of killing another human being. Military Brass will argue that it makes war safer. That's a fucking insane statement to make.

I'm not sure where I'm even going with this, but I wish more people would really consider the repercussions of such technologies.

<comment><USER5> A lot of bomber pilots feel the weight of their actions, even though they are also physically detached from the killing area.

Even squeezing the trigger on a gun and seeing a guy fall to the ground is a detached experience.

Any weapon besides a knife provides detachment, because you don't see the face and pain of the person you're killing.

There were terrible, bloody wars where the majority of the killing was with axes, knives, and swords. Not having weapons that allowed detachment didn't stop them.

Feeling the weight of your actions is about the man, not the weapon, I think.

<comment><USER4> But even in a bomber you are still in the situation. You out there flying. With a UAV, you can get up go to the bathroom or walk down the hall and grab a Coke out of the vending machine.

<comment><USER5> I fail to see your point. I assume you feel that since the soldier is not physically inconvenienced or in personal danger, that he is more likely to make inappropriate kill decisions. In my opinion, exhaustion and fear are the enemies of good decision making. Your guy with the can of coke doesn't fire blindly because he's terrified. He doesn't fire on his own men because he's too tired to see they're friendly.

Whether he "gets off" on firing on random targets, is a problem with the man, not the technology. Such a man would be a menace anywhere he was, even without the can of coke.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can't keep up - <AUTHOR> https://blooki.st/BlookElement/ShowTextPhoto?blookElementId=2176

<comment><USER2> I feel like this every day of my life.</comment>