MMJ site w/ traction seeks tech cofounder - <AUTHOR>

420list seeks technical co-founder to take things to the next level.  After almost a year of doing my best as a non-technical founder, it is time to take things to the next level, which requires a technical cofounder.  Site receives over 12k monthly uniques and over 45k monthly pageviews.  Many changes needed in order to compete with WeedMaps (annual revenue over $6M) and disrupt the online MMJ space.<p>What do I bring to the table?  Industry knowledge (I cofounded a MMJ dispensary in Sacramento, CA), passion and whatever else I need to in order to make this happen.  There are currently ZERO legitimate MMJ startups in the Valley, and it is time to show the rest how it's done.  For more information, contact me at email@example.com, @jonhearty, or @420list <comment><USER2> My work filter says:

Your request was denied because of its content categorization: "Illegal/Questionable"</comment>


Flutter beta 3 release - <AUTHOR> https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/05/ready-for-production-apps-flutter-beta-3.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> Interesting been playing around with it for some time and so far it looks very nice, can't wait until i finally take the time to actually try to develop something with it</comment>


Apple wants your fingerprints on file - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/287632/apple-wants-your-fingerprints-file

<comment><USER2> Classic linkbait title. Apple wants no such thing. They just acquired a biometrics company, and the rest is ITWorld speculation.

</comment><comment><USER3> My motorola atrix has a fingerprint reader to unlock it, and it is one of my favorite features. Very fast, relatively accurate, unlock my phone without looking at the screen.</comment>


Cellebrite thinks it's close to hacking iPhone 6 - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/422444/iphone-5c-hackers-think-theyre-close-to-cracking-iphone-6/?utm_campaign=iphone-5c-hackers-think-theyre-close-to-cracking-iphone-6&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitter <comment><AUTHOR> I'm torn here. Either they really are close, and what I thought about the tech e.g. SE was way off (or there are exploitable bugs--possible), or this firm isn't done with the spotlight yet and are getting this poor grieving man's hopes up.</comment>


Cron in Amazon Web Services - <AUTHOR> https://alexcsantos.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/cron-with-aws-data-pipeline-and-aws-ecs/

<comment><USER2> One downside I see to this is the cost of the host for what will likely be a idling machine for a long time. Ultimately these services end up pinging some API or kickstarting a workflow, and the host itself isn't always super busy.

Looking at other services provided by AWS, Lambda[1] seems like you could easily schedule tasks out of the box, _and_ not pay for the host/capacity unless your script is running. If all you are doing is pinging other services, it won't even be running that long.

[1] [http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/](http://aws.amazon.com/lambda/)

"Scheduled Tasks"

 _AWS Lambda functions can be triggered by external event timers, so functions can be run during regularly scheduled maintenance times or non-peak hours. For example, you can trigger an AWS Lambda function to perform nightly archive cleanups during non-busy hours._

<comment><USER3> Something still needs to trigger your Lambda function. AWS really lacks a cron-as-a-service.

<comment><USER4> Agree, we have been using Dagobah ([https://github.com/thieman/dagobah](https://github.com/thieman/dagobah)) for a simple cron on top of AWS. Lets you create DAG, email alerts and logs. (Disclaimer: I am a contributor to dagobah).</comment></comment></comment>


Computer Language Engineering - <AUTHOR> http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-035-computer-language-engineering-spring-2010/

<comment><USER2> Um, OK. Yeah, Computer Science programs have courses in languages. It's pretty standard.

<comment><USER3> But the nice thing about this is that is part of the OCW at the MIT, u have the lecture notes, the video and audios of those lectures (although not all the lectures seem to be recorded).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They don't offer full set of lecture videos. :(</comment>


Ask HN: Canadian looking for advice on working for a US startup without a degree - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I'm a Canadian software developer without any sort of degree.  I have been programming since I was 8 and never attended a university, instead choosing to start my career right out of high school.  I freelanced for two years before joining a Canadian startup where I worked for an additional 2.5 years.
I have been fairly successful up to this point, with a few widely used open source libraries and am being actively recruited by a number Canadian companies.
Ideally I'd like to join an early stage startup in one of the US hubs.  I don't seem to qualify for either TN status or an H1-b visa because I lack the degree.
I'd really appreciate any advice you may have.  Thanks! <comment><USER2> 1) Are you sure you want to leave Canada? There are a TON of awesome startups with a lot of opportunity in Canada. Maybe you just need to relocate to a hub such as Vancouver, Calgary or Toronto? Also, did you know that the Eastern provinces have some crazy tax and startup capital advantages for starting your own tech / net related business?

2) Your best bet would be to gain employment by a company that has offices in both the U.S. and Canada. Then, with the help of your company, you could obtain a transfer visa:

[http://www.consular.canada.usembassy.gov/usa_visa.asp#transf...](http://www.consular.canada.usembassy.gov/usa_visa.asp#transfer)

Many companies with offices in both Canada and the U.S. aren't in the "startup" category. You could either accept working for a larger company or find a (somewhat more difficult) U.S. startup that is willing to start a Canadian branch for you. Opening a U.S. company in a province such as Alberta has a number of advantages beyond just employing someone as talented as you are.

3) Some certs qualify you for a "specialized" degree. Since you didn't go the education route, going the cert route might not be a bad idea if you make a wrong turn anyway. Obtaining a high level cert (even quickly) may be an easy way in.

<http://www.consular.canada.usembassy.gov/nafta.asp>

Specifically: "Computer Systems Analyst Baccalaureate or Licenciatura degree; or Post-Secondary Diploma or Post Secondary Certificate and three years' experience."

Note the Post Secondary Certificate in there.

4) Contract.

You can "contract" for a U.S. based company, work there for months at a time if required and not put a full-time strain on the startup. Reliable, competent off-site employees and "virtual offices" are the new black in startup life.

<comment><USER3> _You can "contract" for a U.S. based company, work there for months at a time_

Not technically legal. Just saying.

<comment><USER4> Not technically illegal either. Depending on the set-up. Though the 'work for months at a time' thing is suspicious. But I believe it depends on how the contract is laid-out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am not an immigration lawyer, but one thing I've heard is you could setup a corporation in Canada, and then sell consulting services to a US startup. That way they don't have to deal with the fact that you're not a US Citizen for payroll purposes, as they just pay you like any other vendor.

You can work remotely / travel to the US for periods of a few weeks at a time, working out of their offices - sublet apartments from craigslist for a month or two at a time, then return back to Canada. I believe there is a US visa you need to get to do this, under the guise you are working for a foreign business conducting biz in the US.

If the startup takes off, you will be integral enough to the process that they will (hopefully) hire an immigration lawyer to figure out how to get you into the country for longer periods of time and pay you directly. If it doesn't take off, probably best that they didn't issue your VISA after all...

I know of a few people who got in from eastern europe to the US that way... again, I am not a lawyer though, and therefore don't know if what these guys did was legal or not, just repeating what I heard...

</comment><comment><USER6> Go as a visitor for 6 months and maybe you'll find a wife? :P j/k

Have you already found a job? If you manage to get an offer and the company really sees you as an asset, they may be willing to hire as a _consultant_ on paper and not as the engineer/developer that you are. (probably best if you personally know the execs/founders)

This essentially enables you to qualify for the TN status without a degree. But you must demonstrate domain expertise and enough experience in the field to sway the border officer.

Business Consultants and (Systems Analysts) are the two NAFTA approved jobs for which you don't need a degree. There may be others, and the conditions may be stricter than normal, so I recommend consulting a lawyer about this.

Hope someone with first hand experience chimes in for a better answer, Goodluck!

<comment><USER3> TN'er working in US here (also without degree but in a different category)

You need a degree to work as an engineer category for the TN unless you have a Post Secondary Diploma or a Post Secondary Certificate + 3 years experience.

From my understanding if you qualify for this section you can be employed, you don't need to be a consultant (which is actually more trick to then get).

See [http://www.nafta-sec- alena.org/en/view.aspx?x=343&mtpiID...](http://www.nafta-sec- alena.org/en/view.aspx?x=343&mtpiID=147#Ap1603.D.1) for the categories and requirements (which despite not being a .gov domain is the official site for this, as linked to by state.gov)

You need to get a lawyer, or preferably, the company you want to work for does - applying for a visa is tricky and if you really mess up (say the wrong thing, etc) they can stamp your passport with a "do not enter USA ever again" stamp.

<comment><USER2> Lawyers are handy - just don't get scammed by one of the shops that specialize in this if you go that route. I'd get a referral from a good accountant to see a good immigration lawyer - those folks all play golf together.

As for the "do not enter USA ever again" stamp... they don't use that as often as we fear they do. You could very easily be questioned more frequently when you cross the boarder, but as long as customs / homeland security is sure that you're not going to be taking a penny out of their economy, they'll just use the "application denied" stamp rather then "do not import" stamp.

<comment><USER3> _You could very easily be questioned more frequently when you cross the boarder, but as long as customs / homeland security is sure that you're not going to be taking a penny out of their economy, they'll just use the "application denied" stamp rather then "do not import" stamp._

When you apply for a TN you do so in secondary checking (ie the interrogation room out the back), where the questions are more firmer and saying something like "I'm looking to move to the US" (a no-no on a non-immigrant visa like TN) may get you that do not import stamp. It's worth being briefed on what to say and what not to say, esp as they will try to trip you up (they do when I go, I've renewed my TN many times).

You could get questioned very frequently every time you cross the border but it's done so at the regular check point (they don't issue "do not import" stamps on the spot at the regular check point/CBP desks). Secondary checking is very different experience.

I agree with your point on getting a good lawyer - there are many lawyers that will take your case on even if they know you have no chance of getting a visa - especially as so few foreign employees are being employed now.

I can recommend mine to the OP/anyone else... he is based in SF and medium- tiered price. My email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One option, if you are good at what you do, is if you can get a 'treaty' company to say they want you. I need to confirm with our lawyer, but if we said that you would be helpful in building our company, all you would need to do is pass an interview with the US consulate.

I am not sure if there is a list of treaty companies available, but there should be a way of finding them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate on what you mean by "treaty company"? I looked around but all I could find were mentions of US treaty companies set up in Thailand. Is there a similar thing for the US?

<comment><USER7> The background details are boring. But if you want to look into more about it - lookup 'treaty visa'. A Canadian running a company under this visa, should be able to get you in if he feels like you are an asset.

E-mail me if you want to talk: vineet at company-name.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah that's very interesting. I'll look into it and may take you up on the offer. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> drop me a line - euwyn at opzi.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Done!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A bite-sized problem in your company that I could turn into a tiny SaaS? - <AUTHOR> I remember reading once from patio11 about how he (paraphrase) "started making money by attaching a random number generator to a web page".
As a technical person I often come up with interesting problems to solve that are way too ambitious for the time that I have to dedicate to the problem.
At the same time I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that I'm not aware of and don't have a way of finding out about them on my own.
As a challenge to myself I am wanting to create something useful for others in a reasonable time period and make a non-zero amount of income from it just to get myself excited. If I could make my monthly coffee money from this I would consider it a success.
So I'm asking about your simple problems and pain points that are not common, generic or popular enough for big companies to solve (like customer support, or email marketing) but common enough that a solution could be useful to more than just you.
For example this could be a cursed shared spreadsheet that could be turned into a basic CRUD SaaS if the same product could be useful to a small but reasonable number of other people/organisations too.
Or perhaps it could be something specific to your business domain and location.
So what pain points are you having that I could solve?
Looking forward to a discussion here :) <comment><USER2> Interesting idea. Are you aim for companies that don't have a team of developers?

I think for companies with their own dev, they would either put some resource to resolve the problem, or live with it because they can't resolve it(be it politics, sensitive data, legacy architecture, lack of resource, etc).

What about a web service for people to advertise their pain point with requirement, and put a bounty for solution?

<comment><USER3> > What about a web service for people to advertise their pain point with > requirement, and put a bounty for solution?

These have been tried before. The problem for many people lies in adequately describing a problem in non-specialist terms so developers without in-depth industry expertise will be able to grasp it.

Moreover, domain specialists often even don't recognise problems anymore because "It's always been done this way.". People have a habit of not seeing the forest for the trees when having worked long enough in a certain way. That's why getting outside advice and a beginner's mindset are such effective tools.

Lastly, non-technical people often can't estimate how much effort a solution might involve. So, an appropriate price for a solution might be higher than the cost of the pain involved.

In any case, such a service would involve a lot of to and fro between the parties, which probably is too much of a hassle for tiny, bite-sized problems.</comment></comment>


Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos - sahin-boydas https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/17/facebook-new-zealand/ <comment><AUTHOR> I think censorship is not going to fix the issue, people have the right to see and face evil if they so wish to and have a strong heart.

I am from NZ and a muslim and have watched the video myself an hour after the incident, I know people personally affected by this and I think we all need to come together as human beings and understand that there are some evil ideas and people everywhere around the world.

And that's the challenge we face that wouldn't go away because of censorship and putting our heads in the sand.

<comment><USER2> >> I think censorship is not going to fix the issue, people have the right to see and face evil if they so wish to and have a strong heart.

It's the inadvertent exposure that's more of a problem. The access is just so easy. If you were browsing at the time it was happening, you almost couldn't not watch the video because it was so prevelant.

I'm imagining a 16 year old coming across it, and wondering how they process it.

I made a conscious choice/effort not to watch it and 99% succeeded. But there are moments I couldn't miss because they were everywhere.

By the way, that's not burying my head in the sand. It's more about respecting the dead and not needing to see it to understand the darkness in some people.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious, on what sites/services did you find the video so prevalent it was hard to avoid?

<comment><USER2> If you need to ask me that ... I congratulate you on your restrained use of social media.

<comment><USER4> Are you saying that the video was being posted to social media as "shock videos" (ie. the viewer did not know that it was violent before watching it)? If so, why is censorship needed, rather than a NSFW/NSFL label?

<comment><USER2> I'm saying the video was readily available as "news".

I don't care how it's dealt with, but I prefer it not to be a part of my regular online diet.

<comment><USER3> So, how does having it be "available as 'news'", behind an intentional click or two for those who feel they want or even "need" to know, affect _your_ online diet?

Can't you just pass it over without clicking, like with the hundreds/thousands of other offered-but-unwanted links one encounters in daily web/app usage?

<comment><USER2> "Intentional" ....

It was beneath the top trending hashtag on twitter. Initially, it was absolutely not obvious what the video was that kept appearing. Sometimes it would auto play.

Obviously rapidly it became clear what was going on ... and then it was a basic game to escape ... and then to just switch off social media.

Honestly ... there are some f@cking weird questions asked about this subject on HN.

Do you mind if I ask your age and general location? I'm really curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The video of the 757s hitting the WTC isn't purged from the internet, why should this video be?

The world is dark and full of terrors (but getting better every day), and sticking our heads in the sand doesn't change that.

<comment><USER6> The WTC footage is documentation of a terrorist attack by innocent bystanders. The Christchurch Mosque shooting footage was created by the terrorist with the aim of becoming viral. It is a component of the terrorist attack itself.

<comment><USER7> If no one had recorded anything, but a few months later Al-Qaeda released ground-level videos of the attacks happening, would we ban them _then_?

<comment><USER8> Facebook already bans ISIS propaganda videos, so it's a small leap to assume that they'll also ban Al-Qaeda released videos as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The shooting in Christchurch is a tragedy that should not have happened.

That said, this massive wave of censorship across MSM, NZ ISPs, regardless of the motivation, is very disturbing. It will be inevitably used to suppress citizens' freedoms, it will cause more tension in society that will escalate into more tragical incidents. Also, the video may serve someone to study modus operandi of such an attacker to increase their chances of survival in a similar situation. Either way, the censorship and attempts at rewriting history (removal of Spacey, Jackson), again banning inconvenient books are extremely dangerous and slippery slope to get on.

<comment><USER10> Can I ask you: how can I, who does not at all want to see any graphic images, avoid these without censorship? It's not fair to allow these things in the public field where we might see disturbing things without wanting to. Videos and images must be tagged, and therefore given a rating so that I can self- censor.

<comment><USER11> Frankly, not my problem. That's your problem.

Today it is you who says we gotta censor what you find offensive, tomorrow President Orange-Nimrod will censor all of CNN because it's OK now to censor things that somebody/anybody finds offensive, and in a few decades time President Jenna Bush Hager will censor all depictions of an Earth that isn't flat because those are offensive to the good god-fearing citizens who are true to the word of the Bible.

<comment><USER12> The flipside being that you are making the argument that private entities should not be allowed to choose what content they host. You worry about flat earthers censoring non-flat earth depictions, but a much more realistic threat is flat-earthers forcing their insanity to have a larger share of voice than they should by strong arming platforms and people that know better into giving them a microphone, because were they not to do so, they would be accused of "censorship".

No one is saying the NZ video should be purged from the internet. But it is foolish to equate censorship with private social media companies scrubbing it from their sites. You are welcome to search out other venues that host the video, or host it yourself. Your rights are not being infringed upon if Twitter and Facebook won't.

<comment><USER11> Well, I didn't make this argument specifically here, and my answer would be: it depends.

Common carriers, like Telstra (largest mobile Australian ISP), started blocking websites hosting the video. That's not OK for an ISP to do. Same as it isn't OK for e.g. a utility company to cut off power to a "nazi" (whatever that means these days) or to Bernie Sanders supporters because the utility CEO doesn't like "socialism".

Private entities actually hosting the content would be a different matter, and the decision should be up to the private entity. Unless such a private entity is a de facto common carrier in itself. I'd argue Facebook, twitter, reddit, google e.g. are de facto common carriers running general purpose platforms - given their size, influence and reach - even according to their own PR. They are analogous to a utility company, and saying "you can host the content on your own server" is like saying "you can just run your own generator for your electricity needs/use solar panels and battery" or like saying "you can always create your own telephone network if you don't like what the companies are doing; all it takes is 2 old cans and a string".

In my opinion common carrier and de facto common carriers should not be allowed to outright censor lawful content. Videos of newsworthy terrorist attacks, no matter if it is made by a terrorist (e.g. this one) or just an innocent bystander (e.g. 9/11, Las Vegas), are not illegal and should not be allowed to be censored by such de facto common carriers/de facto utility companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know people on here will disagree with this, but I think many of these events indicate that online censorship _is_ needed.

I believe it's becoming increasingly clear that merely allowing far-right dialogue online is essentially responsible for ease of radicalization, and that proactive censorship would be the best approach to forestall this.

<comment><USER14> >I believe it's becoming increasingly clear that merely allowing far-right dialogue online is essentially responsible for ease of radicalization, and that proactive censorship would be the best approach to forestall this.

Because of course, censorship only blocks the material you personally don't want others to view and never material you personally would want others to view. I can see a lot of politicians, especially those getting elected nowadays, wanting to block any discussion of minority rights, LGTBQ+ rights, trans rights, drug reform, abortion, women's health, women's rights, climate change, non-christian religion discussions, etc, etc, etc.

edit: Note that this isn't a straw man argument. All it takes is one to look at the censorship that happened in the US in the 50s and 60s (comic code, movie/television code, mccarthyism, etc. ) to see what is possible.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but on the other hand, the prevalence of far-right dialogue contributed to the rise of far-right politicians. When they are in power, they use their power to block the voices for minority rights, women's rights, LGBT rights, etc. Do you think they will stop, thinking "Oh but far-right voices are still allowed, it won't be fair if I silence women's activists"?

All things considered, I'm not convinced that censoring extreme far-right contents is a long-term net negative for freedom of speech. (Well, it _could_ be, but it's not a given.)

<comment><USER14> >"Oh but far-right voices are still allowed, it won't be fair if I silence women's activists"?

No, but they'd need to pass laws and fight court battles to enable censorship versus merely taking over existing systems of censorship. The latter is much easier to do and much harder to notice or right against. Especially when merely fighting against it is grounds for censorship.

>Yes, but on the other hand, the prevalence of far-right dialogue contributed to the rise of far-right politicians.

Depends on the scale you look at. In a sense, the far right is merely the average person's view as of 50-ish years ago. Censoring to the view of the average person merely ensures that in 50 years you'll be seen as having helped far right ideas. Or in a different way, I don't believe that my current views are the pinnacle of progressiveness (or morality or whatever) and I am loathe to prevent future progressives from being able to push their views forward.

<comment><USER15> > No, but they'd need to pass laws and fight court battles to enable > censorship versus merely taking over existing systems of censorship.

I don't think that's a significant hurdle to any politician with popular support.

Look at Trump, for example, not because I hate him (well I do, but that's not the point here), but because he is a good example of what a politician can do. He rammed into the freaking Supreme Court a candidate that was accused as rapist. And there was nothing the opposition could do.

And the crazy thing is, Trump doesn't even enjoy unanimous support. Far from it.

There's not much you can do once a politician is at power, has a semblance of popular support, and is willing to forego established political norms. Laws? They will change laws, they will take their matter to courts, and they will win.

So I'm still not convinced it's a net positive to have an uncompromising legal roadblock against censorship, when the cost is to _increase_ the chance that someone will rise to power and kick that roadblock away like a tin can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We have yet to have a real discussion about what we expect the largest platforms to do about content like this.

The nature of online content is that once it's created it can be copied quite easily, if Facebook was able to block 80% of this content that should be commended.

AI is not at the point where we can expect 100% of this content to be removed and if it was there would likely be some collateral damage that others would complain about.

At it's current state we need a lot more humans screening this type of content and who are we to subject other people to that type of mental disturbance?

<comment><USER17> 20% not being caught is surprisingly high to me. I would have assumed the majority of the upload attempts would be byte-for-byte identical, and that even if there were a dozen minor variations of the same content, they would be able to deal with >95% automatically.

<comment><USER18> 80% of the videos probably did match a simple sha1 lookup and were trivially removed. Now what?

<comment><USER19> It's not an easy problem to solve if you want a system with an instant response for the poster.

But if I am a journalist and I want to get something published it will take at least a few hours to get it through an editor of some kind. FB could do this even just for video. When a user pushes something up it takes a few hours to be published. It would cost FB because some users wouldn't use it without that instant hit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One can find thousands of copies of the video of President Kennedy's head exploding from the bullet of an assassin. All over youtube. What's the difference?

<comment><USER21> It was not created by the assassin and spread as propaganda.

<comment><USER22> "Know your enemy"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wish so many platforms didn't shove content in your face that you don't want... there would be far less call to aggressively censor this material if so many people weren't using platforms which were designed to cram things down the user's throat.

People should be able to live their lives largely free of unwanted exposure to this stuff. We shouldn't have to outlaw people who want to investigate it in order to achieve that.

<comment><USER24> It's your own Facebook feed.

<comment><USER23> I'm having a little bit of a hard time figuring out the meaning of your comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's absolutely awful. But im kind of glad it's impossible to fully filter. That's an important feature of the web. It's just going to really really suck sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER26> For more context into Facebook's decision-making process when it comes to censorship, you might find this episode of Radiolab insightful (it was for me):

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/post-no- evil](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/post-no-evil)

From what I recall: Facebook's dilemmas over how/what to censor have existed since very early in the company's history. Internally, FB developed a policy document - separate from the public one we see - which would be applied by both human and AI enforcers. The employment of those human enforcers could be considered unethical in itself (at least without providing adequate therapy). Over time, the secret policy document has grown substantially to account for a lot of edge cases. While terrorist/graphic violence is normally censored, there are provisions for allowing content that would otherwise not be seen/known if not shared on FB (e.g., content that governments seek to cover up). Still, there is considerable internal disagreement among executives at FB when it comes to handling edge cases.

The fact that this secret document (and the processes that define and apply it) has so much power in shaping public perception, politics, etc. with so little transparency is perhaps the most disturbing part of this.

</comment><comment><USER27> All the "free speech" advocates here, do you still stand by that when it comes to child porn, or specific threats against individuals? If you do, and publicly, well... at least you're consistent. If you don't then you're already ok with _some_ kind of censorship, and the argument is just about where the line is drawn.

I really don't like when people talk about "censorship in general" when they really mean "This is below _my_ line for what should be censored".

If you want to make the case for no censorship at all then you need to use the most extreme examples of what will be shared and consumed because that's what _will_ happen.

<comment><USER24> Yes. You should not go to jail just for having some specific sequences of ones and zeroes on a magnetic device on your home.

You should go to jail if you do actual crimes, you know, with real victims. Not imaginary victims that don't know when you see a video in the first place.

<comment><USER28> While I agree with this notion generally, you're avoiding the relevant point, which is that information is not something that inherently can have no direct effect on the real world. Child porn is the usual example where you can start to make a reasonable argument that possessing it creates a real-world effect, not due to the possession itself, but due to the necessary action required to possess, which is seeking it out and acquiring it from a provider, etc etc.

<comment><USER24> Acquiring child porn doesn't have to be any more difficult than acquiring videos of beheadings and other vile acts. It was only made difficult to acquire out of puritanism, there's nothing intrinsic about it that suggests you have to commit further crimes to find it.

And if the idea is that the public is too dumb and easy to influence and therefore cannot be shown child porn or killings in New Zeland etc then it doesn't make sense at the same time for me to be advertised violent movies in the cinema.

<comment><USER29> And yet CP aficionados often seem to end up producing their own because it becomes an object of trade on certain black markets. Here's an example from just a month ago: [http://www.foxla.com/news/local-news/porn-actress- director-a...](http://www.foxla.com/news/local-news/porn-actress-director- accused-of-sexually-abusing-young-girl-detectives-searching-for-more-victims)

How is it that people who become interested in and start to collect CP would ever become involved in its production, in your model? Having gained access to a product they desire, those people seem to follow the same pattern as enthusiasts of any other taste, and develop an interest in creating their own material, as opposed to being satisfied with that already available.

<comment><USER30> Just out of curiosity, are you fine with AI-generated child porn?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is why we need desentralized, hard to censor platforms. Or at very least a competing platform that has different stand on the issue.

<comment><USER32> Other platforms that don't moderate already exist. Unfortunately, because they don't moderate, they are so awful most people won't use them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I build a lot of computer vision systems and did my MSc on classifying what's happening in video and I am VERY skeptical that it's possible to prevent this from happening (without having a person watch every video).

You can edit a video to make it appear as safe content and it's a cat and mouse game because you need humans to annotate those variations before a ML system can detect them (an unsupervised model will likely lead to loads of false positives).

I think the solution is better control over what we see and who we trust enough to allow them to broadcast into our brains.

</comment><comment><USER34> It is a regrettable situation that is playing into attacker's hand.

Now a single tiny state gets to censorship worldwide? How is that not an inflammatory action?

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm not sure how Facebook stores media assets.

But it would be stupid to duplicate a video for a shared post more than once. A one to many relationship (one video used by multiple shared posts) is more likely.

If that's the case it should be easy to delete the original video, then all of the shares loose their content.

<comment><USER5> But trolls are smart and don't share, they reupload.

Which is still easy to catch if you hash the video. But doing something like mirroring or otherwise making a small tweak to the video breaks that hash lookup. Hence 20% making it through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The body cam video clip showed the spent casings disappearing into thin air. It was a doctored video with special effects added. I saw it and reposted it on both my Twitter and Facebook page. This video covers the discrepancies. Two men in baseball caps were also shooting. [https://youtu.be/dOCwYd4ogFY](https://youtu.be/dOCwYd4ogFY)

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm thankful Hacker News doesn't have pictures or video, and it's too bad more online forums don't do the same. More places should stick to plain text. You can link if you need to.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've done some work in the AI content moderation space and I have come to suspect that while computer vision is advanced enough to probably detect all of this, the neural nets are so big and deep that it costs over 10x what anyone is willing to pay to run, on such a large scale.

It's like looking for needles in a haystack, and it is expensive.

There is a cost-quality tradeoff with these neural nets as well, but if you go cheap, then your accuracy isn't useful either.

I don't know such a sweet spot exists today where it is both cost effective and useful.

<comment><USER39> I wouldn't have thought that scoring video with a pre-trained model would be much more computationally expensive than other routine operations like transcoding and compression.

<comment><USER38> But it is indeed quite a bit more computationally intendive, especially for the highest quality models.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> People around the office were watching it. Shockingly easy to find.

<comment><USER41> You have ask what sort of people would watch this ???.

<comment><USER42> The same people who gathered around TVs on 9/11 after the first strike and then saw the 2nd strike live? So most of the country?

<comment><USER43> On the morning of September 11, 2001 nobody knew there would be a second attack on the other tower. I distinctly remember everyone including myself thinking about the B52 that accidentally ran into the Empire State building. We were all at work so it wasn't like we were watching TV.

You're assuming at the time that everyone knew it was a terrorist attack, which is false.

Nobody knew that until well after the second plane hit. And even after the third plane crashed into the ground.

The only reason anyone watched TV was because it was a major event with a dramatic incident. Most of the people at the time in my town didn't turn on the TV I had to ask several times at a bar to have the TV turned on. Even then people had no idea what was going on.

<comment><USER42> No assumptions. We were gathered around the TV in the conference room after the first one hit and part of the conversation was whether it was terrorism, since it was pretty obvious you don't just happen to ram into the side of the tallest building in the country.

But your comment is a non-sequitur regardless- even once we all knew it was a terrorist attack it was replayed endlessly on TV for months, including the people throwing themselves off the building.

I haven't watched any of the footage of the New Zealand attack, but to somehow say it is exceptional to watch the footage is historically speaking, incorrect.

<comment><USER44> There's a pretty big difference between watching an event that killed people, and watching people - individuals - die.

<comment><USER45> Can you elaborate on the difference please, I'm not sure I see it myself...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Const-me I wonder if I'll try to upload a music video by Britney Spears, what will be the false negative rate of FB's censorship algorithms? Will it be the same 20%?

</comment><comment><USER46> >> _Facebook failed to block 20% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos_

Fixed title: Facebook blocked 80% of uploaded New Zealand shooter videos, or 1.5 million of them.

</comment><comment><USER47> And how is world supposed to be eaten by AI?

</comment><comment><USER48> I am almost as saddened by some of the responses here as I was after hearing about the shooting.

Have you all become so gradually desensitized to violence that absolutely nothing is beyond acceptable?

Are YOU, personally, YOU, happy with how things are in the world?

<comment><USER49> That anyone feels the public has some "right" to watch other people die turns my stomach. I didn't grow up on 4chan, or watching far-right propaganda on Youtube, so I still see sadism as a character flaw, not a virtue.

<comment><USER48> thank you.

<comment><USER49> At any rate, as far as distribution _by private companies_ goes, that's my view. Before someone jumps on me, I don't think _government_ should outlaw documentation of atrocities, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Facebook and YouTube would sure as f--- fix this problem if, you know, it was the law that they hold liability for any and/all content that was hosted on their platform that they were, you know, profiting off of by displaying ads next to said content.

But that would require regulations which is bad for job creations or something.

</comment><comment><USER51> The US has shootings this big most years now. Las Vegas festival shooting, 2017, 59 dead. Sutherland Springs church shooting, 2017, 27 dead. Orlando nightclub shooting, 2016, 50 dead.

Yes, guns don't kill people, people kill people. But for a high body count, you need a good assault rifle like the AR-15 family, the choice of most mass shooters.

Streaming your mass shooting is fully supported by off the shelf products. GoPro sells an official mount for mounting a camera on a rifle.[1] Video of deer hunting with this.[2] Instructions from GoPro on how to set up your camera for live streaming.[3] It's so easy now that anyone can do it.

And it's all legal in most US states, right up until you pull the trigger. America, Land of Guns!

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/GoPro-Sportsman-Mount- Official/dp/B00...](https://www.amazon.com/GoPro-Sportsman-Mount- Official/dp/B00F19Q4LY) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAOTO5ydGbE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAOTO5ydGbE) [3] [https://gopro.com/help/articles/block/getting-started- with-l...](https://gopro.com/help/articles/block/getting-started-with-live- streaming)

<comment><USER52> I don't follow. Ban certain guns and GoPro? What happens when someone crazy starts stabbing people with hunting knife? Ban knives? Ban live streaming? I don't follow how you turned a shooting in NZ into a `America, Land of Guns` rant.

<comment><USER44> Because it turns out that where this happened, New Zealand, has much laxer gun laws re: semi-automatic rifles, then where the shooter was from - Australia.

Quite directly, this person went somewhere where it would be easier to acquire the guns he used in the attack.

Unlike America, New Zealand is probably going to implement Australian style laws after this.</comment></comment></comment>


Students being prepared for jobs that no longer exist – how that could change - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/students-are-being-prepared-jobs-no-longer-exist-here-s-n865096 <comment><USER2> Funny, I was talking to my parents recently about how they were told basically the same thing when I was in high school (let's just say over 20 years ago). "Your kids will have jobs that haven't even been invented yet!"

That turned out to be somewhat true, especially if you get really specific. I have worked on drone and SSD hardware, two things that didn't exist when I was in high school. In general though, that stuff is not that crazy and new, core math, electrical engineering, and software skills are still the same.

I suppose jobs like "self driving car backup driver" and "Bitcoin miner" are a little more out there :-)

<comment><USER3> Coming from a long line of miner families from my father's side (my hundreds of times great great parents used to be dwarven miners some time before the defeat of the Sauron) I must say the concept of Bitcoin and gold mining are not that different. It is just the tools which have changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Critics say high schools aren't doing enough to prepare young people for > life after graduation, in-demand jobs and a pathway to the middle class.

Maybe there is no "pathway to the middle class". Because the middle class is disappearing.

<comment><USER5> Yet the lower class (for however nebluous a definition "classes" are) is shrinking or staying the same.

So...seems like a great trend to me. Right?

<comment><USER6> Curious, by which metrics?

<comment><USER5> Most sources I believe. Pew Research: [http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american- middl...](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class- is-losing-ground/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Much of the world still does not have basic physical world needs being met (air, sustenance, clothing/shelter, sleep). Heck, a lot of America still doesn't have those needs met. Many of the jobs, and much of the money can still be made by tackling them. And its relativistic, so you can always make "better" versions too. Sure, automation is reducing them, but clever people can tackle how to build a better house, grow food more economically, ect... and employ people while they're doing it.

Safety / security needs (personal, financial, health). Tons of money and jobs here too. Much of America is floating in this zone and needs these services or better versions. Much of the world barely has them. The current health care system (in America) is atrocious and vastly overpriced, smart folks like Buffet are rightly pushing into that space.

Social needs (family, friendship, intimacy, esteem). Vast amounts of money / jobs, and tons of room for innovation. People need real versions of these, not virtual software things. Ways to actually meet new friends - in the physical world. To find intimacy in natural ways. To feel like they actually have a family instead of being increasingly isolated. (I say this as I type alone on a computer at a coffeeshop...)

I won't even cover actualization and transcendence. I suspect such a small percent of the world could even describe what that it means to fully realize themselves that if you can make a job out of it, you're set.

Short version - hand wringing is silly. What do people actually need? There are future jobs and money.

<comment><USER8> Needs don't create jobs, economic demand creates them - and the big difference between a need, necessity or desire versus economic demand is the _ability_ to afford that good or service.

If people can't afford basic physical needs, then that's going to create jobs only if these people somehow get extra resources for that. The current job trends won't do that, they're likely going to make it worse for those people that can't afford basic needs - either it's going to be solved by some major politic-economic intervention redistributing resources (UBI being one of multiple possibilities) or it's not going to happen and those needs will stay unmet.

<comment><USER9> From the article: She hates school. "Elementary school: hated it," Amber says. "Middle school: h-a-t-e-d it. School just isn't for me. I hate coming to school. I hate waking up early. I hate homework."

Amber envisions a comfortable future that includes a family, a modern-yet- rustic house and a good job, maybe as a business owner

Hmmmm. Not sure that much can be done, or should be done, to help lazy unmotivated people with unrealistic expectations.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure how you got that impression from this article. We don't learn very much about Amber, but nothing in there seems to suggest that she's unable or unwilling to work as hard as anybody else to achieve her dreams, merely that school doesn't offer any options which are appealing to her. I think it's very disingenuous to suggest that any paths which are not supported in current schools are "lazy and unmotivated".

It's a story so common as to be a trope in media for the school dropout to end up going on to great things once they find an avenue for their enthusiasm, and the article hints that Amber may be finding something like that in her culinary work.

How, then, is this meaningfully different from typically well-recieved stories about teenagers who don't get on with school but are enthusiastic engineers or programmers? The specific path is different, but the story is the same. Why should one be interpreted as "potentially the next Bill Gates" and the other as "lazy unmotivated"?

<comment><USER5> > I hate waking up early.

I've never seen a school start earlier than 8:15am.

<comment><USER10> 8:15am is pretty darn early for an every day start. I know that personally I find starting work even at 9am less than ideal, and so shift those hours forward. You can't do that with school for obvious reasons, but that doesn't mean people who aren't morning people are lazy and unmotivated.

<comment><USER5> > 8:15am is pretty darn early for an every day start.

???

That's less than 4 hours before noon....

Most americans[1] are awake by 6:30am. If you sleep past 7:30am you are in the last 1 out of 6.

[1] [http://www.edisonresearch.com/wake-me-up- series-2/](http://www.edisonresearch.com/wake-me-up-series-2/)

<comment><USER10> Okay? 8:15am is the start of _a school day_, not the point at which a student wakes up. That's significantly earlier than the average work day, and nobody suggested the average worker woke at 9am.

Are we just assuming students don't have commute times here? That isn't true for a _lot_ of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The truism these days is that you are either taking care of people, making software, or being replaced by software.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there really such a thing as a "future proof" job?

<comment><USER13> I found it laughable they think lawyers are robot proof.

<comment><USER14> I don't. They'll just pass a law to make robot lawyers illegal. Rent seeking can be a powerful force against automation.

<comment><USER13> It will play out like H&R Block in accounting. One firm will aggressively automate most procedural, standard advisory and contract law, undercutting the rest. They will be joined by others for the race to the bottom. The beginnings already exist. [https://medium.com/legal-tech/legal-tech- startups-9755b18f93...](https://medium.com/legal-tech/legal-tech- startups-9755b18f93ac)

PS. Any legal firm without a strategy here can hire me (at lawyer rates) to tell them how to get with the program. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >Eighty-four percent of students are graduating on time.... Nationally, just 25 percent of high school seniors are able to do grade-level math and just 37 percent score proficient in reading.

The factory model of education is similar to Tesla's automated Model 3 assembly line. A pat on the head, push 'em out the door, and Prozac for the unhappy.

</comment><comment><USER16> I personally do not think any jobs will be except from being replaced by human-level AI. And there are many signs that this may happen within 10 years or even less.

<comment><USER17> Care to share any? I haven't yet seen indications of a general AI being achievable in any kind of short term, and I'm somewhat sceptical of it happening this century at all.</comment></comment>


MaidSafe: A Wildly Successful Cryptocoin Debacle - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/maidsafe-a-wildly-successful-cryptocoin-debacle/ <comment><USER2> This article makes a lot of assumptions you've been following some MaidSafe drama online. But searching HN show that MaidSafe has rarely been mentioned here. Maybe someone could summarize?

<comment><USER3> Apparently they made the SafeCoin IPO (safecoin being the altcoin/blockchain that powers MaidSafe) available to purchase with both MasterCoin and Bitcoin. Based on exchange rates at the time, it was possible to get more SafeCoins if you purchased with MasterCoin, than if you used Bitcoin (since MasterCoin was so cheap).

Some people thought they could take advantage of the situation, and bought up MasterCoin to purchase SafeCoin. However it sounded like the IPO purchase cap for MasterCoin purchases was filled quickly, meaning a lot of people were left holding near-worthless MasterCoin. Thus began the cries of "Mastercoin pump and dump", which the IPO had (inadvertently?) caused.

<comment><USER4> Correct. More info on this here: [http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/maidsafe-embroiled- safec...](http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/maidsafe-embroiled-safecoin- presale-mastercoin-pump-dump/2014/04/22)

From an outsider's perspective the 'IPO' did indeed look like a planned pump on Mastercoin: People were buying up Mastercoin to take advantage of the btc- msc arbitrage. This drove the Mastercoin price up by ~100%. Meanwhile certain people could potentially have offloaded tonnes of msc purposely bought the week before (for half the price). This may not have been intentional. But either way some people lost big money when Maidsafe stopped accepting msc for their 'IPO' \- thus causing the msc price to collapse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 404 for [http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/maidsafe-a-wildly- successfu...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/maidsafe-a-wildly-successful- cryptocoin-debacle)

</comment><comment><USER3> MaidSafe sounds intriguing, but the one thing that gives me pause is their licensing page ([http://maidsafe.net/developers- licensing](http://maidsafe.net/developers-licensing)), which says that any non-GPL MaidSafe codebases requires 1% revenue fee. I still dont know if that means I can or can't create my own MaidSafe application from MaidSafe compatible libraries that I've written myself, without having to pay them. I also don't know if they have some sort of central enforcement mechanism to prevent such an Application from working on the MaidSafe network. I can only hope they start releasing example code and applications soon to clear up the confusion.

<comment><USER6> They've ditched the 1% bit.

<comment><USER7> It's still showing up on the URL that OP linked to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good to see that after 8 years of working on such a distributed network, it's finally paid off for them - at least in terms of reaching this level of funding, we don't know yet how successful the network itself will be in the long term.

The 3 such networks that excite me right now are Ethereum, MaidSafe and OpenLibernet, and I guess there's also BitCloud, but the last two are still mainly in whitepaper phase I believe. I don't mind that there's some overlap between them for now. Each is taking a bit of a different approach, and some things might work better on one than the other, and I'm excited to see what comes out of all of these in a few years.

<comment><USER9> See also: [http://cryptosphere.org/](http://cryptosphere.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the MaidSafe IPO. Exercise due diligence before sending coins over to them. More info here: [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=579797.320](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=579797.320)

</comment><comment><USER11> For those wondering what happened, it looks like this article was removed because the author was fishing for BTC donations somewhere in the middle of it

</comment><comment><USER4> I think one of the most overlooked aspects of Maidsafe's 'decentralized internet project' is:

"(...)application developers are called Builders and the network will reward use of these applications by paying the Builders in safecoin based on the application use by users of the system. This is possible since the application developer can insert their own network immutable wallet address in their application." [1]

This has huge implications for the future of application development and automatic 'crowdfunding'.

[1] [http://www.safecoin.io/](http://www.safecoin.io/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Having never heard of MaidSafe, the promises made in that promo video seem ridiculous and bordering on parody.

</comment><comment><USER13> The article was removed because OP snuck a Bitcoin tipper into the article.

[https://twitter.com/alexia/status/459376944006856704](https://twitter.com/alexia/status/459376944006856704)

</comment><comment><USER14> Link's been removed from Techccrunch. Any other source?

<comment><USER15> The google cache is still up: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Atechc...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Atechcrunch.com%2F2014%2F04%2F24%2Fmaidsafe- a-wildly-successful-cryptocoin- debacle%2F&oq=cache%3Atechcrunch.com%2F2014%2F04%2F24%2Fmaidsafe-a-wildly- successful-cryptocoin- debacle%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.2126j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Techcrunch took the article down.

It is now available here: [http://letstalkbitcoin.com/maidsafe-wildly- successful-crypto...](http://letstalkbitcoin.com/maidsafe-wildly-successful- crypto-crowdsale-debacle/)</comment>


Ex-Guardian editor: Iranian volleyball picture ban by Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6919537/ALAN-RUSBRIDGER-woman-banned-Facebook-posting-two-photos.html <comment><USER2> "Marlene Weise was banned from Facebook for 30 days for posing the two pictures of the Iranian national women's volleyball team in the 1970s in T-shirts and shorts and the current Iranian team covered up in hijabs and clothes covering their arms and legs"

Not the picture but rather the person posting the picture has been banned.

By the way, happy I quit facebook over a year ago. Not missing any of it.</comment>


Monsters of the Programming World - <AUTHOR> http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-12-10-n70.html <comment><USER2> Now all I need to do is give these monsters stats and I'll have the next big role-playing game "cubicles&bugs"</comment>


Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system (1970) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Conant_Ashby.pdf <comment><USER2> This paper is so popular all over the web but nobody has ever managed to follow the proof of its 'theorem'. This guy is a math professor and quantum physicist and he was unable to extract any sense from it: [https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/the-good- reg...](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/the-good-regulator- theorem/) He points out that the proof uses terms that aren't even defined. The fact that the authors of the paper are a psychiatrist and, I think a humanities academic, doesn't fill me with confidence that the 'theorem' and its 'proof' are actually those things. It's disquieting to see so many people taking the paper's claim and running with it because it 'resonates'. I know there is also an 'internal model principle' paper which is technically correct but that applies to a specific set of linear systems under specific conditions.

<comment><USER3> I felt like I followed the proof. The claim is actually very narrow: that to be a _perfect_ regulator of a system you need an exact model. Obviously, lots of devices in our world can regulate things reasonably well with simple models.

For instance, a standard thermostat keeps your house at 20 +/\- 2 degrees C. In order to keep it at 20.00000000 exactly, it might need to model every air molecule bouncing around.

<comment><USER4> That's a problem, because we don't actually use "perfect" regulators for any system. I'm very willing to believe those things don't even exist.

So, it may be a correct proof, but it's a useless one.

<comment><USER5> The implication being what, exactly?

<comment><USER4> Well, except for the fact that the article is trivially wrong, and that there is no reason to trust its conclusions, I don't think there are any.

But you didn't need my comment for that, the fact that there is an entire engineering discipline thriving on doing exactly what the article claims to be impossible should suffice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very interesting in more modern fields of reinforcement learning where debates rages between "model-free" and "model-based" approaches. I'd no idea that there was actual any proofs around this. However, I have to say the theorem goes against my intuition. If you want to control a heating system, you don't really need to build the model of heater which could be very complex requiring the knowledge of how it works internally. Instead, you observe the temperature for given action and successfully control it without ever knowing how your heater actually works. You do build a model but its model of observations and actions, not the heater itself. In fact, for vast majority of things we control such as bicycle or fan or oven, people rarely knows the model of these very complex systems (in terms physical principals and internals).

<comment><USER7> > You do build a model but its model of observations and actions, not the > heater itself. In fact, for vast majority of things we control such as > bicycle or fan or oven, people rarely knows the model of these very complex > systems (in terms physical principals and internals).

I think you're mistaking the term model for a replica. You don't need a replica, but you do need a model for your relevant tasks.

If the heater needs 30 mins to warm up before it starts pumping heat, you'll need to model that. If it overheats after running for 3hrs straight you'll need to model that too. You don't need every molecule of the physical item replicated but you do need to model all of the relevant behaviors.

<comment><USER8> This sounds a little circular. If a "model" is defined as a representation of a system of sufficient fidelity to control it, then of course all controllers contain models. Deciding which behaviors are "relevant" would appear to be the key issue here.

<comment><USER9> You have a point, but I think it is useful to have a unifying general principle to use in analyzing the design of regulators, and having a theoretical basis makes it harder to dismiss.

I can think of a couple of places where it could have avoided accidents (one tragic and one expensive.) The 1974 DC10 crash in Paris was supposed to be impossible because the airplane could not be pressurized unless the cargo door was properly latched, but the mechanism depended on the position of the handle rather than the latching pins. At Three Mile Island, the operators were trained to use the pressurizer water level as a primary indicator of the state of the system, and turned off the emergency cooling feed as a consequence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale It's funny, because I initially thought the title was about regulators as in "government regulators", not about control theory.

Even more interesting is the fact that this idea from control theory in fact completely transposes to government regulation, as in: it'd be _really_ good if regulators had the faintest idea what they're doing (aka in a perfect world, they would have a somewhat decent model of the system they're trying to regulate).

Except ... that's very probably not the case ... (I'm looking at you economists).

<comment><USER10> > Except ... that's very probably not the case ... (I'm looking at you > economists).

I'm not sure I agree. From what I've seen, it's usually politicians that ignore unintended consequences and incentives that lead to poor outcomes. Not sure what that has to do with economists ... they don't run the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the main results of Cybernetics. You can get a PDF of Ashby's book "Introduction to Cybernetics" from here, as well as a lot of other information:

[http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html\](http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html\\)

(edit: Ha! I just realized it's the same Principia Cybernetica Web!)

</comment><comment><USER12> In the management sciences this is one argument for diversity. If you have a complex environment, then your team has to mirror that complexity. But the whole thing based on system theory, so the basic assumption is that there is no direct access to the internal parts of the system, that is difficult if one assume that they are human actors.

<comment><USER13> Why would "diversity" help modelling the complexity of the environment? Would a chess-playing program get better if it also contained a go-engine, checker- engine, scissor-paper-rocks rules and tiddly-winks?

<comment><USER14> I think what they mean is that your market is the system, and your team is the controller, so if the market is diverse, your team should be diverse too.

I think it's still cargo-cult control theory. You can't just make your team as diverse as your market and expect results to magically improve.

<comment><USER13> I agree that that's what they mean.

What I'm not seeing is how the "requisite variety" that control theory talks about, relates to "diversity" in modern usage (which for practical purposes is coeval with the _political_ demand of hiring fewer members of certain demographics).

Let's use a less loaded analogy, intellectual diversity: the Manhattan Project, which needed to adapt to a most complex and adversarial environment (world war), hired a lot of STEM scientists, in particular mathematicians, physicists and chemists, and mostly from a few top universities, in other words, a highly homogeneous group that were educated on the same few core subjects (linear algebra, real and complex anaysis, Newtonian and quantum physics, special and general relativity). I do _not_ believe that the Manhattan Project would have been better by hiring fewer STEM graduates, and more psychologists, historians, yoga teachers and so forth. How would modern management science convince me that I'm wrong?

The heart of the issue is the conflation of "diversity" (a _political_ concept) with control theory's "requisite variety". The two are related, but not the same.

I partly agree that it's cargo-culting, but that's not the whole story: the Melanesians after whom Cargo Cult is modelled, would probably not have tried to fire / doxx / cancel anyone who wasn't on board with the belief that building of an airplane runway will by itself bring desirable Western goods.

<comment><USER15> You're missing the part where they say that diversity is needed because the target audience is diverse. The goal of the Manhattan project was to deliver a working nuclear weapon. Consequently its hiring practices were in line with this goal. Consequently your example of yoga instructors and psychologists (I'm sure there were psychologists consulting for the Manhattan project, however), is something of a strawman.

What was being discussed was the idea that a company or organization that wants to appeal to the populace at large should have a workforce representative of that population at large. I think that's debatable, but you can imagine that having someone on staff who can say "this is offensive (to my group of people)" can be useful to an organization. In this case, "I find this offensive" would not be a political or cultural message, but an actionable piece of data that says "For our goal of appealing to the populace at large, this statement/product may have lower, or negative, utility in appealing to this part of the population we'd like to like us/like to sell widgets to."

<comment><USER12> correct. the Manhattan project's complexity is generated by a natural, to be distinct from a social problem. and it is not just about offence, but also the inherent complexity of subsidiaries, that can be controlled by having a diverse workforce in the headquarters, that has cultural or organizational knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16545537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16545537)

</comment><comment><USER17> If we wish to be good regulators of the environment, we must be a model of the environment.

What does this mean?

<comment><USER18> You must figure out the causal structure of the system you are trying to regulate and incorporate it into the regulator. Using some generic and simple model to observe variables will not do.

When the system becomes very complex this involves simulation. Think the game of chess as a system you try to regulate towards win. The only working solution is to simulate gameplay, dong sequences of moves and evaluating their outcomes (search). Chess computer replicates the system it regulates.</comment></comment>


Call traffic to European companies up 15% over March after big slump in April - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/lenz/status/1264982281854365704 <comment><USER2> In Europe there is a feeling the worst is over. Personally I'm not so sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's hard to tell. Whatever about the virus itself, the economical consequences are to be felt for years.</comment></comment>


7 Tricks to Level Up Your Tech Game This Summer - <AUTHOR> https://shecancode.io/subscribe-to-our-newsletter/ <comment><USER2> Seems to be the wrong link, I end up at the newsletter subscription page. The article can be found here:

[https://shecancode.io/blog/7-tricks-to-level-up-your-tech- ga...](https://shecancode.io/blog/7-tricks-to-level-up-your-tech-game-this- summer)</comment>


Thomas Piketty Responds to Criticism of His Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/upshot/thomas-piketty-responds-to-criticism-of-his-data.html <comment><USER2> In this age of metrics everywhere, evidence-based everything, big data...

I think what this story actually is, is a reminder that just because something is based on quantitative data, that doesn't make it 'objective' or automatically 'truth'.

Quantitative analysis rests on so many choices, as to how to measure, what measurements to use, what statistical formula to use, how to interpret what they say. Each of those choices can be mistaken -- _or_, even more troubling to the worldview that quantitative==objective truth, be subject to debate among reasonable and well-intentioned people about the best choices to make and the implications thereof.

I'm not saying it means there is no 'truth', and all research conclusions are equally valid. I'm saying that research conclusions based on quantitative data, no less than those based on qualitative information, are subject to debate and argument, not physical objective material reality simply because there were measurements and numbers involved.

<comment><USER3> In this age of metrics everywhere and big data, the data on inequality, a very important social issue, took Piketty and his collaborators, all professional economists, many years of research to assemble and publish.

This data is not even big: to paraphrase a joke I read on HN recently, you could do the analysis in Excel and it wouldn't even crash.

There is something to be said for systematically gathering a lot more data than governments collect now, especially income and wealth data in this case. Not because it benefits anyone economically right now, but because without collecting it now, it is that much harder to reconstruct it later.

<comment><USER4> The primary issue here is how you can define "wealth" or "rich" and "poor." Income's one measure, sure. But what about the trust fund kids? What about college kids?

The real problem with collecting data like this is that there's no real good source of it. Most of what you get has selection bias, and the other stuff you can get is riddled with holes. And then you try to do it across countries, where definitions change and governments college disparate data at differing granularities and it just gets...frustrating.

An economist's toughest job is finding good data. The analysis is the easy part!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately, ultimately, the research, data and analysis isn't going to matter much.

Consider the debate on climate change, 98% of climate scientists agree that humans contribute significantly to climate change, but large numbers of Americans (including some of the most powerful politicians and talk-radio hosts) either deny climate change or claim that humans don't do much to cause climate change.

I expect the inequality debate to play out in a similar fashion. Many economists may agree with Piketty. However, the FT has thrown sufficient "doubt" on his findings (it doesn't matter that they compare past tax data with today's "survey" data etc).

This "doubt" provides sufficient ammunition for those who'd like to deny that inequality is on the increase. So the debate will end up as another one of those "he said, he said" topics in the media and people are likely to take sides based on which side of the ideological divide they are one.

<comment><USER6> I'm surprised anyone is still repeating that 98% consensus hoax. [http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2013/08/open-letter-to- vice-c...](http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2013/08/open-letter-to-vice- chancellor-of.html)

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry, are you seriously saying that this paper was a hoax and the data was manufactured, based on a ranty blog post?

That's ridiculous, and just proves the point of the comment you were replying to.

<comment><USER8> Dr. Tol was appointed to both the Copenhagen Consensus and the IPCC, is an accomplished and respected economist, and very often is a voice of reason for both sides of the debate.

I hope you can appreciate the meta-irony of declaring a blog post "ranty" to invalidate its findings and then going on to accuse the parent of proving a point about partisan ideology.

<comment><USER7> First, the blog post does not rise to calling the initial survey a hoax. So that addition of jstalin's, is well, completely ridiculous and inappropriate.

Second, the blog post _is_ ranty (and many if not most scientists are ranty, in case you hadn't noticed). The associated comment manuscript isn't evidence of a hoax. I'm not surprised it wasn't accepted anywhere. There's no meta- irony in pointing that out.

<comment><USER9> The post seems like strong evidence that the finding of the paper is wrong, or at least not justified by the study performed. "Hoax" taken literally would imply deliberate malfeasance, and that doesn't seem to be proven

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Response in full (pdf): [http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014Tec...](http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014TechnicalAppendixResponsetoFT.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Quoting from the response:

 _a 44% wealth share for the top 10% (and a 12.5% wealth share for the top 1%, according to the FT) would mean that Britain is currently one the most egalitarian countries in history in terms of wealth distribution; in particular this would mean that Britain is a lot more equal that Sweden, and in fact a lot more equal than what Sweden as ever been (including in the 1980s). This does not look particularly plausible_

Shame on the FT.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Having lived both in Sweden and in Britain you don't even need data to know this isn't very plausible. That said, Sweden is getting a bigger gap between the highest earners and the lowest at a fast rate. "the most equal country in the world is becoming less so." -The Economist [http://www.economist.com/node/21564412](http://www.economist.com/node/21564412)

<comment><USER11> You're confusing stocks with flows. Wealth inequality and income inequality are completely different things, and Sweden being more unequal than the UK does not seem at all implausible. Here's one paper from a few years ago showing exactly that result: [http://darp.lse.ac.uk/papersdb/Cowell_(Hills_Wealth_UK).pdf](http://darp.lse.ac.uk/papersdb/Cowell_\(Hills_Wealth_UK\).pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The FT is actually a pretty balanced high quality paper - but their alternative analysis of the Piketty data is shoddy.

I can't imagine any good comeback from them to Pikettys comeback.

<comment><USER13> Burden of proof is on you to prove that FT's data is shoddy since you made that claim. What specifically are you referring to and what sources are you citing?

<comment><USER12> There is a 10 page rebuttal .. but if you insist I précis the killer points for you then:

The first of two substantive changes the FT notes that greatly changes Pikettys European wealth trend would be the wealth estimate for Britain.

The FT choose a Fig of 44% they have got from a wealth survey carried out by the ONS (Britains govt statistical office) - compared to Pikettys 71%.

The 71% is from estate tax data from Britains tax authorities (HMRC) and is the same method used for the whole time-series.

The FT take that historical time-series then drop the 44% ONS figure in for the most recent time points.

So according to FT methods - Britain unlike the US and the rest of Europe has had declining inequality throughout its period of Thatcherite financial deregulation.

This is just stupid.

The second substantive difference the FT note is that Piketty should weight the 4 European series Britain, Sweden, France, Germany by the size of their economies rather than a straight average.

He could but it only makes difference to the overall European trend if you accept their crazy estimate of declining British inequality. Otherwise Briatin is similar to the other 3 and it make no difference.

Thats about the main points.

<comment><USER14> Piketty used data that was "unreliable"

[https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...](https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/255772/personal- wealth.pdf)

The ONS was used as a result. Piketty relied on similar self-reported surveys for his US data.

<comment><USER15> Perhaps you would care to point to the part of the PDF that indicates the data are unreliable, and to comment on the plausibility argument, i.e. that the FT's analysis indicates that "Britain is currently one the most egalitarian countries in history in terms of wealth distribution" and in particular that it is far more equal than Sweden is or has ever been?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Most data is released to the public in ways to make the data as use-less as possible. This is particularly true with economic data and SEC financial information. So, none of this type of "noise" or its analogue "noise cancellation" should really be taken at face value. The threshold for even disclosure of such mistakes is typically based on "material adversity", and this is the type of standard which people should look to in this case. The question is simply does it move the needle? Its not clear from reading these multiple threads that it does.</comment>


Not even the darkest minds imagined it would be this bad for China - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/not-even-darkest-minds-imagined-192833192.html <comment><USER2> What is the expected impact on the US economy, stock market and real estate markets?</comment>


Care to share your monetization stats? - <AUTHOR>

Wondering if folks here would care to share any web monetization stats for sites they run (personal projects OK).  Not looking for more than:<p>* How many uniques are you getting per month. * What is the site genre/target audience (i.e., "tech blog, geek audience) * How are you monetizing it? (google adwords, buy/sell ads) <comment><USER2> I hope with this kind of threads doesnt become like a digital point forum

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure what that means. I've always just been curious as to some "rough" estimates of what sites are making based on some basic stats. I don't care about particular URLs or marketing strategies or the like.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Find matching donations to ACLU? - <AUTHOR> I have seen a number of people offering to match donations to the ACLU[1], but when I dig in, they have either they have capped out or at best unclear if it's still going.<p>Is anyone keeping an updated list? I want to donate more, but ideally I would like to get a multiple on that donation. Thanks!<p>[1] Small example list; http://avc.com/2017/01/a-20000-match-offer-on-aclu-donations-today https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/825836275827564544 https://twitter.com/mvernal/status/825846013638299648 <comment><USER2> [https://lukebelliveau.github.io/aclu- matchers/](https://lukebelliveau.github.io/aclu-matchers/)</comment>


Oceans Running Out of Oxygen - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50690995 <comment><AUTHOR> _If we run out of oxygen it will mean habitat loss and biodiversity loss and a slippery slope down to slime and more jellyfish_</comment>


Manticore: A Symbolic Execution Framework for Binaries and Smart Contracts - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.03890 <comment><USER2> We're seeing a small cottage industry of state-machine verification techniques presenting themselves over the past year. K-framework has its accessibility proofs (ranging over the state space of possible program paths), Manticore has its symbolic state analysis, and a few others do roughly the same thing. None of these frameworks are focusing on improvement of the language or supplementing its features - they're just trying to make up for how easy it is to write bug-ridden EVM contracts! Good on them, but it points to how fundamentally flawed the EVM is by design.

<comment><USER3> It's like saying that "assembly is fundamentally flawed" because people came up with haskell.

<comment><USER2> It's in the sense that it's extremely difficult to write a program and fully understand what it's doing - that's why higher order representations and correct-by-construction languages were invented. Rather than putting bandaids on it with secondary and tertiary frameworks, languages like Haskell were built to be correct by construction.

But then there's the question of whether any of those flaws are even reasonable to take upon your contract when you consider their use-case within a blockchain context. If you're only ever running terminating programs, why expose the entire language to the attack surface of non-determinism and re- entrancy bugs when there are very reasonable and expressive CbyC languages available?

<comment><USER3> EVM is not a language. EVM is deterministic otherwise the whole Ethereum would not function at all. Your criticism is directed more towards ie. Solidity. However alternatives are not availble as far as I know. There are some research projects but everything in this area is in alpha-research state.

<comment><USER2> The problem is with the structure of the VM and its bytecode language. There are additional problems with Solidity, but the VM itself is the problem. Solidity only amplifies a poor architecture: [https://medium.com/kadena- io/the-evm-is-fundamentally-unsafe...](https://medium.com/kadena-io/the-evm- is-fundamentally-unsafe-ba486cb17f1f)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you are interested, last November we benchmarked Manticore against other security tools based on common Ethereum smart contract bugs. Here are the results [https://blog.coinfabrik.com/smart-contract-auditing-human- vs...](https://blog.coinfabrik.com/smart-contract-auditing-human-vs-machine/)

<comment><USER5> If you're looking for push-button vulnerability detection for Ethereum smart contracts, then you want to use Slither ([https://github.com/crytic/slither](https://github.com/crytic/slither)), not Manticore. Manticore's detector features were shoe-horned in because it kept getting compared to Mythril, not because they are a core feature. Manticore's core feature is its ability to reliably explore the state space of a program and generate inputs to reach them.

If you want to compare the effectiveness of symbolic execution engines, then you should compare how many unique codepaths they can reach. ETH Zurich recently completed such an analysis in their paper on VerX ([https://files.sri.inf.ethz.ch/website/papers/sp20-verx.pdf](https://files.sri.inf.ethz.ch/website/papers/sp20-verx.pdf)), an abstract interpretation-based verifier, and found that Manticore had the most complete model of the EVM compared to other symbolic execution engines by far, and we have continued to improve its accuracy in the releases since then. That said, ETH Zurich did underestimate a few of the capabilities of Manticore that we hope to better describe in an upcoming academic paper.

If you're looking to start using Manticore, then browse through the manticore- examples repository ([https://github.com/trailofbits/manticore- examples](https://github.com/trailofbits/manticore-examples)) where we have complete working solutions to CTF challenges, crackmes, logic bombs, and other programs that Manticore excels at exploring.

<comment><USER4> This is our benchmark for Slither: [https://blog.coinfabrik.com/auditing- solidity-code-with-slit...](https://blog.coinfabrik.com/auditing-solidity- code-with-slither/) and also another for Securify: [https://blog.coinfabrik.com/auditing-with- securify/](https://blog.coinfabrik.com/auditing-with-securify/)

<comment><USER5> The SWC benchmark is not an effective way to test bug detection tools. The SWC only contains contrived examples that are not representative of vulnerabilities in real code. As such, it fails to capture important outcomes like false positives, which quickly lead to developers uninstalling the tool, and rewards "noisey" tools that simply alert on everything.

It would be more effective to test bug detection tools against a database of real smart contract code with precisely identified vulnerabilities and example patches. Any benchmark must contain more than simple tests: it must approximate real software with enough complexity to properly stress tools for automated bug discovery.

There is more discussion about what a good bug detection benchmark looks like in our own Challenge Sets from DARPA ([https://blog.trailofbits.com/2016/08/01/your-tool-works- bett...](https://blog.trailofbits.com/2016/08/01/your-tool-works-better-than- mine-prove-it/)) and something we were working on that is similar for smart contracts in "Not So Smart Contracts" ([https://github.com/crytic/not-so- smart-contracts](https://github.com/crytic/not-so-smart-contracts)).

You'll note that ETH Zurich and ChainSecurity came up with their own benchmark that meets the description above when they evaluated VerX in the paper I linked above. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of those test cases since they'll help us improve the functionality of many of our tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm in need of an audit for HEX.win if any of the super smart folks here want to reach out. RichardHeartAuthor at gmail dot come.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pardon me if I sound dumb, but going by the abstract, this is essentially concolic analysis of smart contracts ?</comment>


Ask HN: Where Do You Live? - <AUTHOR> Try to search for your city and upvote to avoid double submission. <comment><USER2> Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Orange County, CA

</comment><comment><USER3> Lubec, Maine, US

</comment><comment><USER4> who is my lover</comment>


JavaScript: Servo's only garbage collector - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/08/26/javascript-servos-only-garbage-collector/

<comment><USER3> This is similarly motivated, and a similar approach to Oilpan in Chromium ([http://www.chromium.org/blink/blink-gc](http://www.chromium.org/blink/blink- gc)).

But because Oilpan is written in C++, there is still some manual annotation of GC'd members that needs to be done.

<comment><USER4> DOM workers in Gecko also used to use this approach, but it was a bit ad hoc so eventually it was abandoned in favor of using the cycle collector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome writeup. It's really interesting to see how some classes of errors can disappear entirely with the right technology.

<comment><USER6> Some classes of errors yes, but this still has a giant hole in it that the writeup calls out:

"But there's a hole in this scheme. We could copy an unrooted pointer — a JS<T> — to a local variable on the stack, and then at some later point, root it and use the DOM object. In the meantime, SpiderMonkey's garbage collector won't know about that JS<T> on the stack, so it might free the DOM object. To really be safe, we need to make sure that JS<T> only appears in traceable DOM structs, and never in local variables, function arguments, and so forth.

This rule doesn't correspond to anything that already exists in Rust's type system. Fortunately, the Rust compiler can load "lint plugins" providing custom static analysis. These basically take the form of new compiler warnings, although in this case we set the default severity to "error"."

Requiring additional layers of static analysis on top of unsafe code (and still not catching all the error cases) is beginning to sound an awful lot like plain old C or C++ again.

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure that one can be fixed by enhancing the lint to actually look at inferred types. (This is easy to do.)

In any case, empirically we have seen a lot fewer rooting errors (none, AFAIK) in Servo than we have in Gecko.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does this suggest that "Encodable" isn't the right name for this trait, if it's being used for something that has nothing to do with encoding?

Visitable?

<comment><USER9> It actually suggests that we're misusing the trait in the short term, since it's one of the few that has built-in deriving magic in the compiler. In the future that won't be the case, but Rust is still a work in progress.

<comment><USER10> It's still pluggable (as it's just a normal syntax extension), it's only the #[deriving(...)] syntax that is not overloadable. E.g. a custom attribute #[js_traceable] can use all the back-end code of #[deriving], with only the surface syntax different.

[https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/2774](https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/2774)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The interaction between native code and JS on the DOM is certainly an area of complexity and plenty of chance for subtle bugs in a browser implementation - I wonder if the observation that native code can only manipulate the DOM in a limited fashion compared to JS could be used to simplify things.

For example, the initial DOM tree will be created (by native code) when loading the document, and it needs to be freed as a whole when another (or the same) page is loaded. On the other hand, JS can create/add/remove objects on it, but they must not be freed if some parts of the tree still reference them. This suggests to me that some sort of ownership scheme is appropriate, and in the case of Servo they've decided to make the GC own everything - <USER2> certainly makes a lot of things easy - but it might be interesting to think of whether being able to transfer object ownership between GC and something else would have any advantages, e.g. "all objects in the DOM tree of the document are owned by their parent, and objects not in the DOM tree because they've either been removed from it or newly created by JS are owned by the GC."

<comment><USER12> > "all objects in the DOM tree of the document are owned by their parent, and > objects not in the DOM tree because they've either been removed from it or > newly created by JS are owned by the GC."

How does this solve the issue pointed out in the article (i.e. a JS object referencing a DOM object referencing the JS object back)? In any case, if something is "owned", then you must ensure that it's not referenced by anything not part of the same "ownership" tree. Otherwise, you can get use- after-free errors. In general, GC is the only viable option for big cyclic object graphs with unpredictable lifetimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there any plan to write a javascript engine in Rust as part of the servo project?

<comment><USER9> Not right now. It's a huge amount of work to create something competitive, and as soon as you add a JIT you lose most of the safety benefits that Rust provides. There is js.rs ([https://github.com/TomBebbington/js.rs](https://github.com/TomBebbington/js.rs)) that already exists, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Easy to use

<comment><USER15> If you think this is complicated, you should see the alternatives!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What not-so-well-known website do you check at least once a day? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious what websites HN users visit regularly each day that may not be so well known to others (e.g. apart from HN, Techmeme, Techcrunch etc)
I guess the definition of "not-so-well-known" is subjective, but hope you know what I'm getting at.
Love to find out! <comment><USER2> The local news website of where you live. It can be fascinating to read what goes on in your own neighbourhood.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why Evolution Is True,

<http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/>

which includes a lot of personal posts by the site's keeper, but also includes very interesting posts about cutting-edge research in biology.

</comment><comment><USER4> Kindle Desktop Publishing, to see if my short story has sold any copies (the answer is nope).

</comment><comment><USER5> Webmaster world - good info about what's what in the webmaster world.

</comment><comment><USER6> hackaday.com - hardware/software hacks, pretty technical but some real gems pop up here

</comment><comment><USER7> bitcointalk.org, the home of occasional bitcoin news but usually just drama</comment>


India uses recycled pipes to detect solar storms - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-39100109 <comment><USER2> With humble materials you can do some pretty amazing science.

I'm surprised that given the stingy budgets of many American labs that this isn't more typical.

<comment><USER3> Bro, I don't care what this article is trying to sell you. Science is never cheap. It is awesome that these scientist figure out some creative way to cut cost. If everyone is starting to do this on the large scale, the human civilization will stop developing.

<comment><USER2> > Science is never cheap.

History disagrees. Some of the most fundamental discoveries were made using little more than junk laying around the scientist's laboratory.

You don't need a billion dollar budget to do important work. If you think you do, human civilization will stop developing because it's too busy applying for grants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> macgyver

"he MacGyvered a makeshift jack with a log" Origin 1990s: from Angus MacGyver, the lead character in the television series MacGyver (1985–1992), who often made or repaired objects in an improvised way.</comment>