As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 <comment><USER2> If you look at the theme of "workers get a smaller fraction of income because they have less bargaining power", women entering the workforce doubles the potential workforce, thus cutting the bargaining power and cutting wages.

When women entered the workforce they took many of the entry level service positioned filled by black men, so now black men are in jail.

Similarly, if universities want to hire professor's children to be professors, now there are twice as many professor's kids. Every (other) kind of discrimination can be pursued with twice the intensity with women in the workforce.

Of course, women entering the workforce mean that women's work gets taxed, makes billionaires rich, etc. And then of course two-income families can afford to spend more on housing, driving up the cost of housing, they can spend more to educate their kids.

Women entering the workforce has been a huge driver of economic inequality but neither the left nor the right wants to talk about it.

<comment><USER3> You're acting as if there are a fixed number of jobs. More people with jobs -> more people with money -> more demand for goods/services when they spend that money -> more jobs to produce those goods/services.

How do you expect it would work otherwise? Countries with too many people would run out of jobs? Is it population density by land area that determines whether we run out of jobs?

<comment><USER4> I know that price elasticity is a commonly known, and well-studied field.

I wonder if wage elasticity is similarly studied. I'd expect that in the short term, more qualified candidates suddenly entering a field (due to institutional barriers being torn down), would drive wages lower. In the long term, things might stabilize towards the previous status quo.

However what is 'short term', and what is 'long term'? This is something I'd love to know if it has been researched, or if we're still floundering for an answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> the article draws some weird conclusions

>> Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.

so, men made the computer programming prestigious and better paid? How about construction, why is it not prestigious (or not as prestigious as programming) despite the fact it is clearly dominated by men? how about plumbing? taxi?

<comment><USER6> There's absolutely nothing to back up the claim that programmer wages rose when more men took on that job.

The basic reasoning in the article is to produce the appearance of a conspiracy so structural and so vast that it doesn't matter if each individual claim is provably false or contextually misleading, the broader narrative remains somehow irrefutable.

<comment><USER5> >> The basic reasoning in the article is to produce the appearance of a conspiracy

right to the point!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women."

This statement requires historical perspective:[0]

"Coding implied manual labor, and mechanical translation or rote transcription ... [women] would code into machine language the higher-level mathematics developed by male scientists and engineers."

In other words, women did not do the type of "computer programming" done today. The job changed significantly as technology became easier and more accessible, and these type of "coders" became obsolete.

[0] [http://womensenews.org/2012/03/women-were-first-computer- pro...](http://womensenews.org/2012/03/women-were-first-computer-programmers/)

<comment><USER8> I stopped reading the article at this point, as this statement didn't merely undermine the the author's credibility, it actually collapsed their credibility into a gaping sinkhole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The median earnings of information technology managers (mostly men) are 27 percent higher than human resources managers (mostly women)."

My company has both an IT Manager and an HR Manager, and I interact with both and they have different roles and duties. This is not a fair comparison.

</comment><comment><USER9> OR new workers are never paid as much as the previous generation in the current regime of structural suppression of worker wages.

Sorry, but yeah kill all men.</comment>


Australian Government CovidSafe Admin Panel Source Code - <AUTHOR> https://file.io/cXdSAQhv <comment><AUTHOR> Got this from the JS source maps when the admin panel was still publicly visible.

edit: link seems to be dead, here's a direct pastebin [https://pastebin.com/pStF5pjw](https://pastebin.com/pStF5pjw)</comment>


Land deals in Africa and Asia: Cornering foreign fields - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13697274

<comment><USER2> Very interesting article - and we can see the effects of this sort of land ownership historically, particularly with regards to American multi-national agriculture giants.

From what I know of the situation, the effects of these massive land buy-outs are rarely positive. Yes, it generates employment locally, but it creates a trade deficit for the host country like you would not believe, and drives everyone into poverty in the long run. Not to mention that many of these countries are starving, and instead of using the land to grow food crops and feed the people, they're exporting bananas and pineapples, and re-importing staple foods that they're not growing themselves at high prices.

This behaviour has led to revolutions in the past - and we know that the ousting of the socialist Salvadore Allende in Chile (by the CIA, no less) was fueled largely due to American corporate objections over nationalization of farmlands. And then he was replaced by Pinochet - a story we would be better off not repeating.

Whatever the benefits of this sort of deal, I'm fairly certain the farmers at on the fields are not seeing it. Massive land buy-outs like these benefit only the gilded upper classes of these poor countries.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me of the Transnationals described in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red- Green-Blue Mars trilogy (which won an award for its realistic portrayal of economics). Basically, the multinationals found small countries with a GDP much smaller than their own profits and bought the whole country: land, infrastructure, and government. Then they refashioned the laws of that country through corruption and bribery to fit themselves and began operating at a level parallel to the governments of other countries, rather than being subject to their laws.

In this case, the governments of Saudi Arabia, China, etc., worried that the countries that supply them with raw materials will pass laws restricting exports, are buying massive portions of the production capacity of these exporting countries to essentially make it impossible for these countries to sell goods to anybody else. It's simultaneously a clever and sinister form of neo-colonialism.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd buy land in these countries if I had an army backing my land claim. In general, I have a strong dislike for national investments like these. If the only difference between me and China is that I can't trust their courts/government and China can, due to China's large stock piles of guns, then it presents an unfair (and illiquid) market place.

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill Read up on Benetton in Argentina also.</comment>


Ask HN: Where are all the Apple Watch apps? - <AUTHOR> I've done several searches and can't seem to locate a list of available apps.
After buying the Series 5, as a first-time AW user who also doesn't use activity/health apps, I've become very interested to find all the apps I can choose from. Aside from tech publications showing "our top 20" style lists, and a limited showing on the AW App Store itself, there seems to be no large lists nor, seemingly, a whole lot of interest in the growth of the AW app ecosystem.
Am I missing something or is there only so much that the AW can do, and thus few apps on offer? <comment><USER2> I think there are a couple reasons for this.

First, historically, Apple Watch development was difficult and very constrained. The framework had a lot of limitations and, on early watch models, third party apps were very slow compared to native apps (which themselves were not very speedy).[1]

This is changing now as the hardware gets better and Apple is opening up more powerful and easier APIs to third-party developers, but it will take a while for third party apps to catch up. And the situation is still not as good as it is on iOS.

The other reason is that there's a small number of app concepts that even make sense on the watch. The watch is very good at a few things: quick, glanceable interactions (like notifications) and fitness tracking. Apple suggests that apps should "support fast interactions and focus on the content that users care about most", and that "interactions with the Apple Watch are measured in seconds." [2]

A great deal of apps simply don't fit this category at all. Many existing iOS apps expose some basic watch functionality, but many won't, because it just doesn't make sense. Consider how willing you would be to hold your wrist up in front of you for 30+ seconds.

[1] [https://marco.org/2018/02/26/watchkit-baby- apps](https://marco.org/2018/02/26/watchkit-baby-apps) [2] [https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface- guideline...](https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface- guidelines/watchos/overview/themes/)

<comment><AUTHOR> >Consider how willing you would be to hold your wrist up in front of you for 30+ seconds.

I'm likely an outlier as I keep it in front of my face for 2-3 minutes at a time when playing games, but I admit that it's a limited use scope, and my raised arm is usually supported in some way.

After a week of inital usage, the more quick interactions I discover, the more I like the watch. But when that fades, I'll at least be left with the ability to read full Wikipedia articles and browse Reddit, thanks to 3rd party apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've played with the new Watch frameworks a little. Aside from the most basic toy apps, the Apple Watch app frameworks really aren't ready or stable enough for prime time.

It will take another year or two, depending on how much effort Apple puts into improving the APIs.

The most recent episode of the Under The Radar podcast goes into this a bit: [https://www.relay.fm/radar/174](https://www.relay.fm/radar/174)

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, it may first be worth asking how many Apple Watches have been sold overall. I haven't found any good stats for that, but it seems like it's around 30 million, and sales may have slowed down since then.

Meanwhile the iPhone's sales are in the hundreds of millions, and more are sold per year than there are Apple Watches sold since launch.

So it's quite probable many developers don't see the need to make apps for the device. The market isn't large enough compared to other places they could be focusing their resources.

Outside of that, as people have said, Apple Watch development was difficult early on, there are fairly few concepts that make sense for apps on a watch compared to on a smartphone, and it's more challenging working within the constaints of a watch than a phone overall.

So it seems like more work for a more limited set of concepts on a device that may not have a market large enough to justify the effort.

</comment><comment><USER5> I haven't been on iOS for years but I had a first gen watch, aside from glancing at my wrist when driving or doing something with my hands to see what a text message said, I couldn't see any practical use for the watch, which is why I ended up selling it after 5-6 months. I did use it a couple of times to take a call when I was doing garden work and didn't want to fish my dirt- covered hand into my pocket but obviously that was a subpar experience and not something you'd likely do often.

I love the idea of devices like this but if it's something that requires you to look at, and manipulate things on, the screen... I'd rather just use my phone. I imagine many people buy them purely as a "hey look at me, I gots me an Apple watch!" and some people might buy them so they can glance at their watch (pretending no one notices) to check incoming text messages in environments where it would be rude or not allowed to pop out their phone, but from my own experience I just can't see them being practical enough to really have enough interest to spur development aside from "here's the most important data from our app mirrored on your wrist!"

<comment><USER6> I think the main use case is activity tracking. If you already have an activity tracking watch and it breaks, hey an Apple Watch let's you activity tracking and maybe vibrates during navigation so you don't miss your turn. But I have never seen much use past that.

Currently rocking a garmin 735 for activity tracking / run gps. When it breaks maybe I will get an Apple Watch? Or maybe a newer garmin. Nothing else the Apple Watch does really interests me. Also my watch goes 7-10 days between charges.

<comment><USER5> I forgot about the map notification, that was somewhat useful the few times I had to drive somewhere new (unless on the interstate/highway as it would vibrate with 1-2 seconds of notice, at least back then on gen1).

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes it's through reading comments on how others use the apps that I discover a new way to use it. I thought Maps was restricted to looking at a map and zooming in and out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my experience, 2 years with the Apple Watch, it is primarily used for notifications and fitness related activities. It does those very well, for everything else it's easier just to take the phone out of my pocket.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have an AW for a few years now and was somewhat following the Apps trend, to my best understanding it's not about HW limitations, ease of development or number of users but simply the lack of usability.

Companies pulled out of AW because they found out that there is no reason for a watch-app. The screen is too small, feedback is limited by nature etc.

<comment><USER9> > Companies pulled out of AW because they found out that there is no reason > for a watch-app.

There just isn't enough screen real-estate for ads and it's hard/impossible to embed creepy analytics SDKs in Watch apps.

<comment><USER8> on the older AWs everything went through the phone, and AFAIK even today for most things you still need the an application on the phone to do the heavy lifting- so analytics still looks possible</comment></comment></comment>


The Newbie Photographer's Survival Guide - <AUTHOR> https://phlearn.com/magazine/the-newbie-photographers-survival-guide/ <comment><USER2> I really like the content, as it's all about the artistry of photography. Too often so much photography content is about gear, which always does scratch an itch I must admit, and does matter a little bit, but is highly context- sensitive to the mission you have in taking photos.

I'm still a noob in photography, but one of the most helpful things in my learning has been youtube videos where other people's photo submissions are critiqued in a constructive manner. Nothing has taught me more about the possibilities of composition in different scenarios, and it has inspired lots of creativity in my own shots and techniques. My favorite Youtube channel for this is Tony and Chelsea ([https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkJEEIifDzR_2K2p9tnwYQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDkJEEIifDzR_2K2p9tnwYQ)) ... they do a weekly show every Thursday where they critique photo submissions- their feedback is great and they go through lots of high quality photos.

Other noteworthy channels:

Matt Granger ([https://www.youtube.com/user/thatnikonguy](https://www.youtube.com/user/thatnikonguy))... has lots of content on gear, but his videos about lighting and portraiture technique have really helped me with taking pictures of people.

Mike Browne ([https://www.youtube.com/user/photoexposed](https://www.youtube.com/user/photoexposed))... Great instruction on the basics of photography, as well as great advice about composing interesting shots (my favorite: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT- hh0wQ-GI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT-hh0wQ-GI))

Thomas Heaton ([https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfhW84xfA6gEc4hDK90rR1Q](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfhW84xfA6gEc4hDK90rR1Q))... One of the best at explaining the creative mindset and struggle of photography. He specializes in landscapes.

<comment><USER3> Some other good channels:

aows: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDvq7BPaphEIhBlyDN19rvQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDvq7BPaphEIhBlyDN19rvQ)

Gary Gough: [https://www.youtube.com/user/redfivestudios](https://www.youtube.com/user/redfivestudios)

Rob Blight: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6apPoUi2QPN4X_ZPZdz7iQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6apPoUi2QPN4X_ZPZdz7iQ)

Steve Perry: [https://www.youtube.com/user/backcountrygallery](https://www.youtube.com/user/backcountrygallery)

Mark Smith: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyGYUrC2IvaHWoX6dwEsrMA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyGYUrC2IvaHWoX6dwEsrMA)

Mango Street: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5bp5_6h-ZxkBz6S_33ZUVg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5bp5_6h-ZxkBz6S_33ZUVg)

All are more focused (see what I did there?) on photography rather than gear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I've realized about photography is that it's all but pointless. Virtually every single person on earth is a photographer, there's so much supply of great content that it's unlikely that anyone will ever give a damn about your photos.

So, just do what you like. Express yourself, shoot what you like, when you like it, and don't worry too much about the rest. Maybe I'm too pessimistic (or just bad), but I've relinquished any hope of ever getting any kind of audience.

<comment><USER5> How do you define "any kind of audience"? It's very easy to get hundreds and even thousands of followers on instagram.

Can you get into galleries? Eh that's really really hard you're right.

<comment><USER4> > It's very easy to get hundreds and even thousands of followers on instagram.

How? I post new photos every few days and my follower count actually goes down. I get a bunch of accounts following me automatically and unfollowing me after a few days, just to get me to follow them back.

Maybe my photos are terrible, but I don't _think_ so? [https://www.instagram.com/stavroskorok/](https://www.instagram.com/stavroskorok/)

<comment><USER6> I like your pictures. (I'm not a photographer, just someone who can look at some stuff and say "I like that" and not necessarily know why.)

But I find some of your comments odd. Such as: "Another shot of the lighthouse in Chania." Well, yes, it's a picture, so I can _see_ that it's a lighthouse, and it's obviously a shot. The only information in that sentence, then is "Chania," but where is that? From the tags, I guess it's Greece, so maybe the comment should just be "Chania, Greece." If the lighthouse has a proper name, then that would be better.

Another example: "Here's a boat." That doesn't have any information. Where is the boat? What kind of boat? Who is on it? What are they doing? You don't need to say any of this, but some context would help tell a story. The problem with "Here's a boat" is that it is completely reductionist. I get that maybe you're going for self-aware deprecation, but when presenting your art, that does not come off clever. It comes off unconfident.

<comment><USER7> This.

Tell a story with the photo. There are millions and millions of photos out there, but only YOU have your viewpoint. Only YOU have your intellect and knowledge. Tell a story, it will be unique and people might like it.

Also, Instagram is not the measure of success. I know a few photographers who are good, even excellent, and have more Instagram followers than Sebastião Salgado, who in my opinion is the best photographer walking the earth right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can know everything, and have all the right gear - but if you aren't interesting, or don't do interesting things, or don't find interesting people, you probably won't take good photos.

The hardest part about photography is what your photo is _about_. What is it saying, which can be different from the literal image, like how what a painting is about is often not exactly what is literally depicted

<comment><USER9> Regarding "about", if you're doing photojournalism, there's a simple idea that I found tremendously helpful (as an amateur student): _your image should tell a story_.

There's a lot of technical stuff you need to internalize, and some visual sense, but, at the end of the day, your main goal is not something that looks appealing above the fold on the front page, but that communicates some important essence of the story.

<comment><USER8> Right, that makes perfect sense for photojournalsim; of course you also can have non-representational things such as abstract photography; whether you want to use the word 'story' for that too I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > You are shooting in RAW, right?

No. I'm really bad at photo editing and try to invest my time in learning photo composition instead of editing. I feel that for me the results will be better.

<comment><USER3> Unless you have a tiny SD card there's not much to lose by shooting in both. If you get a shot you love but it's just a tiny bit under or over exposed, with a JPEG you're out of luck.

I don't really do any 'heavy' editing, but slight exposure adjustments, straightening and selective sharpening can turn an ok photo into a very good one.

<comment><USER11> Exactly! I shot in RAW when possible and most often do minor adjustment directly on Adobe Lightroom Mobile. It's free and powerful and takes about 2 minutes to do.

You can even re-apply your edit setting of one picture to a whole set.

Before: [https://i.imgur.com/c6SRXQQ.png](https://i.imgur.com/c6SRXQQ.png) After: [https://i.imgur.com/B6q1h82.png](https://i.imgur.com/B6q1h82.png)

Editing pictures is definitely one of the most useful skill I've learned from my last relationship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Light create shadow, not the other way around. So remember to use shadows, erm I mean light, to bring your objects to life.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I explain copyright to 11-year olds? - <AUTHOR>

My son and two other 11-year olds joined us for dinner tonight. One of my son's friends held up his iTouch and asked:
"What's Jailbreaking?"
After a few minutes discussion, they all started piping in...
"Isn't it legal to copy music from my Mac to your iPod? How come I am allowed to copy it to 5 different iPods?"
"Doesn't apple make the music?"
"I heard it is illegal to make a copy of a house key?"
Oh, brother. Where to begin?
Any tips?
I figured starting with "ignorance of the law is no excuse" was a bad idea... <comment><USER2> Put it in terms they understand, like this:

 _Copyright is kinda like, the "right to copy" something. When you type a book report for school, you can print as many copies as you want, because it's yours. Maybe you want to print extra just in case you lose one before you hand it in. Maybe you want to print a copy to give to your uncle Joe the English professor to proofread. The sky's the limit for you because you wrote it. But other people can't pick up a copy from Joe's desk and make a hundred photocopies or scan it and place it online for every 5th grader to hand in as his own work, and your teacher can't copy it and publish it in the school newspaper...without your permission...for which you should charge...and give me a percentage!_

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the snow shovel analogy, since it's easy to understand but allows for discussion of many of the nuances and tradeoffs:

<http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/Mcchesneysnow.html>

When it snows hard in Chicago, people have to shovel out parking spaces for their cars. But no one will want to do this if someone else can just take the space as soon as they leave. So the rule (not a law, but socially enforced) is that the person who shovels the space "owns" it for a limited time. This means that people can do useful work and be rewarded for it. But their "property" returns to the public after the snow melts. (Think about how the outcomes would change if the "ownership" were just for one day, or if it were forever.)

This doesn't capture all the interesting things about copyright (like the non- scarcity and zero marginal cost of information goods) but it does capture some important differences between "intellectual property" and real property that get left out of most discussions. And the Chicago parking system is controversial just like many copyright issues.

</comment><comment><USER4> Or maybe...copyright is a way to make sure that the guys who created the product get as much money for it as possible. Why make it a moral issue when its more like a cultural issue in the way humans have implemented resource sharing and creative compensation.

<comment><USER5> I'd start with moral rights - most kids seem to have an idea about not letting people copy their school work. Copyright means someone else isn't allowed to take your homework and hand it in with their name on it.

Then I'd talk about maybe an artist or musician and how they earn money to do what they do - ignoring the part about the record companies. Mention that it is the state that helps ensure, with copyright law, that the creators of works aren't ripped off, that the state protects them for a certain amount of time so they can get paid for what they do. Book writers is a good example for why a longer period of time is needed, people can spend years writing books, if someone can simply copy it then the author can possibly only sell one copy.

If they catch all that I'd progress on to how large corporations have perverted copyright so that they can get the most benefit from a creators work (but that creators may still make more than they would because of the companies marketing abilities) and then how copyright terms have increased and that has changed the whole deal stopping works entering the public domain [as early].

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, <http://www.copyrightkids.org> might be a starting point. It seems a bit hokey, but might give you some ideas.

It's put together by the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. I really don't know anything about the organization.</comment>


Pigshell – Unix the Web - <AUTHOR> http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/ <comment><USER2> Author here.

\- Please use a desktop browser (Chrome preferred). While mobile browsers kinda-sorta work if you're just clicking through the examples, keyboard input doesn't work on mobiles (yet).

\- Pigshell has few users (in fact, using the plural is a slight marketing exaggeration) so please bear with me for any teething issues, broken links, inadequate documentation...

\- One of the practical use cases is copying files across Google accounts, and backing it up to your desktop. (Details here: [http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/doc/gdrive.html](http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/doc/gdrive.html)) The nice thing about a unix approach is that the exact same cp command can be used to copy GDrive to Dropbox, or any other supported filesystem.

\- Some more D3 visualization examples here, using Mike Bostock's gist viewer: [http://bl.ocks.org/ganeshv](http://bl.ocks.org/ganeshv) (Do use the "Open in a new window" links, like this one: [http://bl.ocks.org/ganeshv/raw/46cc526d41d16995ccdc/](http://bl.ocks.org/ganeshv/raw/46cc526d41d16995ccdc/)).

<comment><USER3> Hi tubelite, on mobile safari and chrome IOS7.04 with an ipad the keyboard comes up after I clicked on this example command: pig:/$ cat [http://pigshell.com/sample/photos/bchips.jpg](http://pigshell.com/sample/photos/bchips.jpg) I can type in stuff and after enter the keyboard disappears again. A external bluetooth keyboard might work.

<comment><USER2> Yes, that happens, but it is awkward and unreliable. The CLI is a CodeMirror instance (version 2.something), which has known issues with iOS. I need to check if later versions work better on iOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> So if you are running psty, here is a fun sequence of commands to try out:

      cd http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-06-24/
      ls
      cat 21021.strip.zoom.gif

Never really liked the colorization of Dilbert. It was so much nicer as a line drawing. Best we can do is remove the colors.

      cat 21021.strip.zoom.gif | to canvas | pixastic -d

And to save your result,

      cat 21021.strip.zoom.gif | to canvas | pixastic -d >/home/dilbert-unix.png

Or to GDrive or Dropbox or even the local RamFS by changing the target directory.

(Scott Adams is fine with personal usage. I checked. And you need psty because it proxies HTTP requests for sites which don't have CORS enabled)

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, this is a really interesting way to think about web resources. After about two minutes of playing around with this, it gave me a more pleasant experience of the web than I've had in a while.

<comment><USER5> This is what it was like when I first got on the Internet (around 1992); there was no web then, instead you FTPed everything and used resources like Gopher, Archie, and Veronica to find documents.

I find PigShell interesting from a historic point of view but think it also points to a flaw in how the web currently works, with far too much glue and eye candy, which is a direct result of the ad business model.

<comment><USER4> I completely agree. I actually deleted a bunch of my comment before posting it, because I started getting carried away pondering about what the right level of abstraction is for dealing with web resources.

At the risk of sounding like one of the semantic-web xml-standards people, it really does make me wonder if all this horrible, incompatible, site-specific frontend crap is just a fad that will give way to tools (like psty) that ignore all that and just deal with the raw semantic content (and HTTP verbs) at a higher level of abstraction.

Woah, man. We're like... _surfing_ the Matrix, man.

<comment><USER6> Things like this really make me miss the old Firefox experiment "Ubiquity". It was truly a marvel for the time it was up, and I often wonder why they did discontinue it.

You could search websites, send emails, look at maps and much more (you could build your own commands) without ever actually opening a webpage. It had 200.000 users when they shut it down.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't you just be able to fork it and continue as a hobby project of your own? Who knows, maybe you find other enthusiasts and it becomes a real project again. Mozilla licenses are (I believe and could be wrong), quite lenient about these things.

<comment><USER8> This is what I found by looking at its Wikipedia article:

[https://bitbucket.org/satyr/ubiquity/downloads](https://bitbucket.org/satyr/ubiquity/downloads)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How is the procedure for "installing" new programs? Adding a local directory with javascript commands to the PATH will do it?

What about saving the state of things. I want, for example, to `mount` my local directory with psty everytime I open pigshell, and I wanna have my PATH set automatically. Will a `/local/.config/.pigrc` do this? (This raises another question: file editing. Where is the file editing tool? Maybe a web- based editor somewhere). Well, maybe a gist will do it.

<comment><USER2> There are two kinds of commands: Javascript commands (like ls, cat) and scripts (ps, kill, man, csv2js, table2js).

Currently, Javascript commands have to be built-in at "compilation" time. (I need to add a load command which will evaluate a new JS command inside the pigshell closure)

Scripts can be anywhere in PATH.

There is an rc mechanism for doing exactly what you want. At boot time, we run /etc/profile, followed by /local/rc.sh - this is a file saved in the browser's localStorage. Mine is very simple:

      HOME=/home
      mount http://localhost:50937/ $HOME

You can create it simply by

      echo "HOME=/home\nmount http://localhost:50937/ $HOME" >/local/rc.sh

or running "edit /local/rc.sh". Edit provides a simple inline CodeMirror-based editor (actually even the CLI is a CodeMirror editor instance). I use vim on the desktop to do any serious editing. If you run psty, /home is a desktop directory visible inside pigshell, so edit on desktop/run in shell is a low- friction process.

If you manage to mess up /local/rc.sh to the point where pigshell is not "booting", then you can boot it in "safe mode" by appending #norc to the URL, i.e. [http://pigshell.com/#norc](http://pigshell.com/#norc)

<comment><USER10> I downloaded [http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/psty.py](http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/psty.py), started it with "python psty.py -a" and did "mount [http://localhost:50937/](http://localhost:50937/) /dir" successfully.

Unfortunately only "ls /dir/file" works but neither "cat /dir/file" nor "cp /dir/file ." although "file" was marked with "chmod a+r". I get the message "Cross-origin request denied (check if psty is running)". What do I wrong?

<comment><USER2> Argh! This is a bug. Has been fixed in master ([https://github.com/pigshell/pigshell/commit/f402ef445977015a...](https://github.com/pigshell/pigshell/commit/f402ef445977015afd0f6a9ea2b10e9facfa6a9e))

As a workaround in 0.6.2, please use a trailing slash in the name of the mount point. ( /dir/ rather than /dir)

Alternately, use [http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.3-pre4/](http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.3-pre4/) which would have the fix.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately these suggestions don't work also. Could the problem be in psty.py? Or is my Python 2.7 obsolete? There is a strange error message in psty:

EXCEPT timestamp out of range for platform time_t Traceback (most recent call last): File "psty.py", line 404, in send_head self.send_header("Last- Modified", self.date_time_string(entry["mtime"])) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/BaseHTTPServer.py", line 468, in date_time_string year, month, day, hh, mm, ss, wd, y, z = time.gmtime(timestamp) ValueError: timestamp out of range for platform time_t

<comment><USER2> This is a new bug. I'm guessing it got exposed because you have a 32-bit machine, and I've been testing so far on 64-bit. Edit line 404 of psty.py as follows:

      -            self.send_header("Last-Modified", self.date_time_string(entry["mtime"]))
      +            self.send_header("Last-Modified", self.date_time_string(entry["mtime"] / 1000))

If it still doesn't work, maybe we can continue the conversation on the google groups forum?

<comment><USER10> I have a 64-bit machine but your fix works great :-)

Thanks for this, and thanks for sharing your amazing pigshell!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More in this comment by the author: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436716](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8436716)

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting. I'm trying to really go out all the API for my project and was thinking about something like a Mathemathica-like notebook for the local API. E.g. say you want to execute an API call which normally does GET /api/v1/x/y/z; in the "API shell" you type x/y/z and the JSON collection is summarized as a small datatable (not showing all of the 500 rows / 40 columns that might have, but an interesting summary) that you can later interact with.

I'm thinking that such an approach can give the user their own way to explore/modify the data ,especially if you combine this with some kind of pipe lines that let you analyze/mutate/visualize the data without having to write some Python code to access the API (even though with a REST API plus e.g. requests it's simple).

I like the psty idea to integrate with the local system. Sounds like it could also be used to start e.g. emacs on a remote page. Say you have a site with an API that lets you read/write files, you mount it and then can fire up emacs on it via pigshell.

<comment><USER12> Is this approach similar to something like flickrfs[0], to make one's flickr account locally accessible? It always seemed like a cool idea (though I never had much luck with flickrfs itself), and it is neat to see the broader utility of psty.

[0] [https://launchpad.net/flickrfs](https://launchpad.net/flickrfs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The psty links in README file are broken. A working link is [http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/psty.py](http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/psty.py)

As mentioned in the README, you need to run psty server locally and establish websocket connection (mount in pigshell). This will enable you to harness local filesystem from pigshell.

</comment><comment><USER14> I just had a glance about the functionality, but for my understanding, this is the best idea right behind ifttt. Pipelining all the web's things with well designed interfaces on a shell. Even if the product itself would be unstable, alone the idea is great enough for a gold-medal. Keep it up!

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord So in many ways, this is like having a FUSE/Hurd translator implementation directly from the browser, though it also provides a mini-Unix environment due to needing to implement corollaries to some Unix utilities.

The scope of this project is definitely what makes it nifty.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's very cool, gets back to using the power of the simplicity of UNIX. I found though, that X middle click paste doesn't work.

I made a directory at /mnt/mccomsoft then ran Firefox and didn't see it which is good. :) Then I tried mounting that using your HttpFS with:

      mount http://www.mccomsoft.com/index.html /mnt/mccomsoft

It gave me:

      Cross-origin request denied (check if psty is running)

Which is also good. :) If I load Pigshell from my domain though then it should mount fine.

One user commented below it's like the Internet was a shell and you've cracked it open. I agree.

</comment><comment><USER10> Congratulations!

The way how you implemented "man" ("man ls" for instance) shows how a convenient shell can look like. Pigshell could be a foundation for a completely new kind of toolchain for web development. I am thinking of seemless integration of JS editors, D3 graphics for pipe output, etc. ... Wait - it's already working :-)

[http://bl.ocks.org/ganeshv/raw/b971989c337e958c0531/](http://bl.ocks.org/ganeshv/raw/b971989c337e958c0531/)

If it just were possible to access the bare bone hardware so that we wouldn't be restricted to the JS world (in a closed environment, of course).

<comment><USER16> The way the man page is formatted is great but I don't like the scrollbar inside a scrollbar effect. It's been traditionally a worst practice. It's better to have the man page take all the vertical space it needs in the main frame and add a Close button to the end of the man.

By the way, from [http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/doc/psty.html](http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/doc/psty.html) "Websocket server: Every unix app on the desktop which uses stdin/stdout can participate in a pigshell pipeline" so maybe your request has already been implemented.

<comment><USER10> > By the way, ...

Thanks, meanwhile I have realized that also :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Kudos, tubelite. This is really cool. I'm not sure I'd ever really use it but it's been fun to play with. Definitely made me think that I'd like to use the web in a more command based fashion.

</comment><comment><USER18> Have you given thought to exposing this to the regular shell with FUSE?

<comment><USER2> The concept of lazy-stream-of-JS-objects and HTML as a display engine underpin pigshell.

I guess it would be possible to adapt the filesystem code to fuse4js. It won't be a drop-in; unix FS ops differ from pigshell's, but it shouldn't be too hard. Personally, I find psty ([http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/doc/psty.html](http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/doc/psty.html)) a better way to incorporate (a part of) the unix filesystem into the web rather than fuse - which is the other way round.

<comment><USER19> Isn't this -- at least in spirit -- what IPython notebook tries to do? In IPython, you can use shell commands with a bang, e.g. `!ls -l`. And `ipython notebook` uses ZMQ to connect the server and client.

At any rate, awesome work. I've been thinking for a while, offhandedly, about the idea of piping web URLs around. But I don't know how in fact it would work under the hood. I write a lot of API interfaces in my work, and it's all in the details -- every API is different in small but important ways.

<comment><USER2> Yes, it is similar in spirit to IPython.

We have been developing pigshell off and on since ~2012, and I was unaware of IPython notebooks until ~6 months ago. When I'd last used IPython, it didn't have any of the notebook stuff. So it was a bit of a jar to see that they had been there, done that, got the T-shirt, published the book, etc. etc. :)

Pigshell can run in the browser with zero installation, and has a low barrier for casual usage. "Notebooks" aka gists can be shared without requiring a backend. The focus of pigshell is more around providing file adapters for web/cloud data stores.

That said - more power to IPython! I love the conversational, exploratory, CLI style of interacting with a computing environment. The more ecosystems of this sort, the better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I do love this idea, but it bothers me from a security standpoint. Is there a way to do something like this without giving the author explicit control of all of my online data?

<comment><USER2> The author has NO control whatsoever of your data.

\- Pigshell is a 100% client-side Javascript app. There is no server side. pigshell.com is a dumb static html/js/css server.

\- All data (username/password as well as user data like photos and files) travels directly between the user's browser and the provider (e.g. google.com, facebook.com). pigshell.com is not involved at all.

\- Pigshell is free software - you are free to download the source code, examine, modify and run it locally yourself. ([https://github.com/pigshell/pigshell](https://github.com/pigshell/pigshell))

\- Our privacy policy is minimal because we know NOTHING about you - not your name, email address, facebook id, nothing. Only your IP address is recorded in apache logs, which is the case with every website you visit.

What is more, _we don 't want to know_. Pigshell has been deliberately designed so as to afford maximum privacy and freedom to the end user.

<comment><USER20> I don't really doubt you or your intentions, but I guess I might just not understand how authentication works for something like this.

When I try to sign in with Google Drive, it tells me that PigShell (developer email: email@example.com) would like access to my Google Drive, as well as my photos and videos. Does that give your API key access to my account, or does only code that I run that's hosted on pigshell.com have access? What do the permissions get tied to? And how would it work if I were to host it locally?

<comment><USER2> We use OAuth2 client-side flow. Many pure client-side apps use the same technique - pigshell is not blazing any new trails here.

Only the code you run that's hosted on pigshell.com has access. The permissions are tied to the app-id which is embedded in the code. The access token is persisted in your browser either as a cookie or explicitly in localStorage.

We don't and won't support OAuth 1 (Twitter, Flickr etc), which lacks a pure client-side flow, just to avoid the issue of users having to trust the pigshell.com server to generate (and not leak or misuse) the access tokens.

Here is a rough guide to local setup:

\- Check out the git sources, run "make" (some more details here, but reading the Makefile should help)

\- set up apache to serve the virtual host pigshell.com (if you want to use Dropbox, you need to create a self-signed SSL certificate and set up https as well)

\- modify /etc/hosts and set 127.0.0.1 to point to pigshell.com

This way, static assets as well as redirect URLs from the OAuth2 server will hit your local server rather than pigshell.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Error loading root filesystem at > [http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/root.tar](http://pigshell.com/v/0.6.2/root.tar): > Forbidden

:(

</comment><comment><USER22> I like the idea. If I'm playing with some facebook data, right now I use whatever language I'm confortable with and use its HTTP request functionality, and than manipulate the data how I want in that language. To achieve the same thing in pigshell I have to write a shell script that manipulates the data. What can pigshell do that I can't just do in another language?

<comment><USER2> In theory, the availability of APIs should be enough for the technical user to write their own data extraction routines, connect them to other APIs and so on, using their preferred language and toolchain. In practice, reading up the documentation, writing and debugging code sets up enough of a barrier to entry that it discourages casual usage without a powerful incentive.

The availability of a file abstraction covering many popular cloud services, web resources etc. enables casual, low cost experimentation _across_ these domains, without having to read up each one of the APIs. If something clicks, then it may make sense to write a better "native" implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> With some practice, or even better, some support libraries, this looks like a great way to quickly explore viz prototypes. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER24> Attempting to copy photos out of Facebook albums into GDrive gives me "Exception: SecurityError: The operation is insecure." I'm not running psty locally.

This is super cool, though. There's an undocumented template engine built in it seems? (see /bin/mostliked) which is neat.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does not work in Internet Explorer 11: Exception: The property "slice" of an undefined or null referance cannot be accessed (Exception: Die Eigenschaft "slice" eines undefinierten oder Nullverweises kann nicht abgerufen werden.)

<comment><USER2> Sorry, Internet Explorer is not supported currently. Please try Chrome or Firefox, in that order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is awesome. It reminds me of a talk I saw recently, linked from hackernews at some point in the last year or so. Something about re-thinking internet infrastructure into a "directory-tree" like model. Does anyone remember it?

<comment><USER27> I don't, but I am interested if you find it. We already have a hierarchy in a way.

The domain tree goes from top to bottom this way <\---

The resource tree goes from top to bottom this way --->

So, using numbering for order, you could look at a URI like:

0002.0001.0000/0003/0004/0005

Meanwhile, in an alternate reality...

        $ ls /net | shuf -n 16
        coffee
        net
        рф
        한국
        org
        dating
        pw
        中國
        institute
        இலங்கை
        ninja
        com
        みんな
        su
        政务

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wow, this was like the nutshell cracked and the universe spilled out ...

</comment><comment><USER29> Ah! Nice feeling that whole of internet as a single (unix) machine.

<comment><USER30> reminds me of Plan9 sorta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I like the sentiment, however I think it'd be cooler if you could get the Facebook, Google, and other APIs to behave in the "everything is a file" tradition of UNIX.

</comment><comment><USER32> Looks a lot like webshell ([http://webshell.io](http://webshell.io)). I wonder if there are other similar tools out there?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious about how are people using this. Is it just a visualization tool for data or what else? Is anyone using it as their primary navigation tool?

<comment><USER33> perhaps stating the obvious here, but with the abstraction pigshell provides of resources on the web, it should be reasonably straight forward to build arbitrary "internet applications" too.

with deferred pipes, split and joins (that pigshell already provides/supports) it should be possible to implement arbitrary work/data flow definitions one desires.

coupled with psty, one could build/harness special purpose "transformers" on the web

pushing it further, one could conceive of setting up pipes between transformers on the web.

of course getting there will require significant work on a security model as well.

[and then someone will figure out a way to interject ads]

<comment><USER10> > of course getting there will require significant work on a security model as > well.

It could probably be easier than you imagine. The security model could be implemented in psty completely by granting/denying requested resources whose permissions are stored in a database on the psty server, and managed by using long security IDs in the URLs. This way the security model could even be fine- grained. In other words, pigshell itself could be embedded into a secure environment, covered by the permissions of psty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My connection is shaped at 128 kbps at the moment - am grateful that this loads really quickly. Awesome stuff. HN itself is really low bandwidth too.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is beautiful!

</comment><comment><USER36> I have no idea what I would use this for, but I really wish I did.

Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER37> How do I know what are all the fields available on a file?

<comment><USER2> Here is one way:

      ls -d /path/to/file_or_dir | printf

This command prints the stack of file objects. The last one printed is at the "top" of the stack and tells you the fields available. You can then print a field

      ls -d /firstname.lastname@example.com/somedoc | printf "%(raw.ownerNames)s"

Sorry, a lot more documentation is needed. Working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I typed in `oink` but the command was not found...

</comment><comment><USER39>
        rm -r facebook

ah, that feels good.

</comment><comment><USER40> holy crap this is awesome

</comment><comment><USER41> A new toy! Thanks!</comment>


Social Investing Site Covestor Is Now Open to the Public - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/18/social-investing-site-covestor-is-now-open-to-the-public/ <comment><USER2> when i first read this, i thought it was going to be a site like prosper, but for investing in startups. which would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use coinflippr.com.</comment>


Chinese and Russians Claim 9 of Top 10 Spots in International Programming Comp - <AUTHOR> http://www.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/behold.pl?ascribeid=20100205.104715&time=11%2023%20PST&year=2010&public=1

<comment><USER2> WTF?!?!

Hmmm interesting. The real story here seems to be that Taiwan is now part of China (or is it Russia)?

"Shanghai Jiaotong University took first place followed by Moscow State University. Third place went to National Taiwan University, and Taras Shevchenko Kiev National University finished fourth. The only non-Chinese or non-Russian team in the top ten was the University of Warsaw in eighth place."

Or could it be that Americans know or care nothing about anything that doesn't occur outside their own country?</comment>


Startup to fund Startups - <AUTHOR>

While poking around HN we always see stories about startup's being funded, how to bootstrap your startup, startup's seeking funding etc...  From my perspective it's strage that in order to fund a startup or to be considered an investor to a startup you have to have an elite status already.
How about a startup to fund startups by allowing the general public to buy shares of the startup, sure there are lots of 'issues' to think about here but it's possible right ?
Maybe I'm late to the party and something like this already exists and I'm not aware... anyone ? <comment><USER2> An interesting idea. So it would be like secondmarke meets kickstarter? But unfortunately these "issues" do outweigh in my opinion any value. Like Diolpah posted you have accredited investor issues and you also have a huge issue with how many people can invest in a company and still remain private. I believe facebook is facing hurdles with this right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are regulatory issues.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm></comment>


Solitary Confinement Is Cruel and All Too Common - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/03/opinion/solitary-confinement-is-cruel-common-and-useless.html <comment><USER2> I wonder if I am an outlier in that I have a massive paranoia about being thrown into jail randomly because of being in the wrong place at the wrong time or cops executing a warrant on the wrong house.

Maybe it's because I am mixed race and grew up in a poor minority neighborhood but it seems like the system is just eager and waiting to put everyone in it. Kind of like a low grade terror all the time.

<comment><USER3> To be honest, I'm afraid of travelling (to America even) and of leaving the relative safety of Canada because of that.

I've heard so many stories about people ending up in jail in the USA or Mexico or other countries from things that would be considered minor and them having to fight their way out of it.

Missed bribe there, racist cops there, at least I'm safe home where the only time I have to worry about the police is during protests.

<comment><USER4> Please don't use what you hear on the internet to base your option of the USA. Spent my whole life here and I have never once had to bribe anyone period.

If you tried to bribe a cop you would be immediately thrown in jail.

That being said just be respectful and they will be respectful back. Its been working for me for 29 years.

<comment><USER5> Past performance is not indicative of future results.

I can't tell if police behavior is getting worse, or whether it was always this bad, and it is just being caught on camera more often, thanks to ubiquitous smartphones. But you can now go on YouTube and watch only new videos of cops behaving badly every waking moment of your life. They shoot dogs. They beat up handcuffed suspects. They arrest protesters for trespassing on public property. They use pepper spray from 30 cm away against nonviolent protesters. They make racist and sexist remarks. They shoot people in the back and drop a weapon next to the body. They literally murder people, on camera, and are not required to take any personal responsibility for it.

You should give a cop no more deference than you would ordinarily give to any other person who could murder you on the spot and get a paid vacation as his only "punishment". Be respectful, and they _probably_ won't kill you, or do a roadside body cavity search, or arrest you for resisting arrest, or drag you to multiple hospitals until they find a doctor willing to comply with their ethically dubious and medically unnecessary requests, or shoot your dog, or simply trash your car while performing a "search".

Be respectful, and they won't punish you for "contempt of cop". The Andy Griffith cop no longer exists. He has been replaced by the "made man" cop.

Your best course of action now is to avoid all police contact altogether, even while they are off duty. If they force you into contact, just _keep your mouth shut_ and leave at your earliest safe opportunity.

My advice to foreigners is to not voluntarily visit the U.S. If you must come, do not stray from the tourist-friendly areas, and try not to be outside of your hotel or other lodgings between 11 PM and 5 AM local time. Write the phone number for your nearest consulate in permanent marker on the inside of your forearm, and make sure it stays legible for the duration of your trip. Purchase a health insurance policy designed for international travelers to the US before you arrive. If you find my advice dubious, read this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sureshbhai_Patel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sureshbhai_Patel) .

<comment><USER6> From that link:

"Former police officer Eric Parker, who is accused of injuring Patel, was fired from the Madison Police Department and charged with third-degree assault. In March 2015, Parker was charged by the FBI with felony civil rights abuse."

<comment><USER5> More recent updates:

[http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index.ssf/2015/02/why_wasn...](http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index.ssf/2015/02/why_wasnt_madison_police_offic.html)

[http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/04/state_charges_delay...](http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2015/04/state_charges_delayed_against.html)

[http://whnt.com/2015/09/03/prosecution-rests-in-madison- offi...](http://whnt.com/2015/09/03/prosecution-rests-in-madison-officers- federal-trial/)

I find it somewhat curious that there is apparently no further news coverage of Parker's misdemeanor assault trial after April 29th, which was the original trial date. But I'm not curious enough to pay the _ten dollars_ Alabama charges for online access to court records _per case_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > When the suit was filed in 2012, 500 of these inmates had been held for more > than 10 years in tiny, windowless cells with virtually no human contact

That is just... horrifying... evil even.

 _10 years_ in solitary confinement... it's just unthinkable what that would do to someone

<comment><USER8> If they are not in solitary confinement, they are being confined with other people.

Would you want to be the confined with someone who has a history of being violent with his cell mates?

<comment><USER9> Considering the inmates in solitary are the ones suing because it is cruel I think that answer is quite apparent. Yes, people would rather be with people even if those people aren't perfect.

<comment><USER10> Not necessarily.

If I was in prison and could make a case for _anything_ you can bet I'd be the biggest pain in the ass (wrt legal wrangling) I possibly could. I mean, my life is pretty much trashed already, right? No harm in seeing if you can get a reduced time or even a settlement out of it.

That said, I can only imagine that enforced solitude would be pretty awful in its own right.

<comment><USER9> Solitary wouldn't be used as a punishment if people preferred it. It's nearly universally feared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "California will end indefinite solitary sentences. In all, the reforms are expected to reduce the state's solitary population, which is now over 2,800, by more than half."

So they only ended indefinite solitary sentences. The definite sentences will stay. The main issue this opinion column raises is that it took several hundreds of inmates to form a class action for the change to take effective. The settlement will mean that the issue isn't being ruled as 'cruel or unusual punishment' so there's very little change that is making through the court system in the country.

<comment><USER12> What do they do with the supermax prisons where all the inmates are in solitary confinement.

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

Just to be blown away read the population in one supermax in Colorado. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADX_Florence#Notable_current_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADX_Florence#Notable_current_inmates)

Scary.

<comment><USER13> What's scarier is who's inside the prison.

<comment><USER12> That was my point sorry :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Solitary confinement is a form of torture. But of course there is no torture in the US. If the US does it, it can't be torture.

<comment><USER15> Not saying you are wrong, but here's a different perspective:

[http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/nietzsche.html](http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/nietzsche.html)

<comment> steve-howard From the conclusion:

>Nietzsche is a complex and provocative thinker, but he is a clear advocate of the role of solitude in every level of human activity, from philosophical and psychological to creative and societal.

Can't do any of those in solitary confinement. Solitude you choose is quite different than being locked in a small room indefinitely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The 13th amendment allows for slavery if a person has been convicted of a crime. It makes a lot of sense when you consider prison, especially America's take on it, just a continuation of slavery.

<comment><USER17> Who do you consider should pay for the food and shelter of criminals? Their victims - society? IMO themselves, through labor, forced if necessary. If that's what you're talking about.

<comment><USER18> Society should pay. Society has a responsibility to treat everyone - even the lowest of the low - with basic dignity. Society has a responsibility to reintegrate and readjust those it has failed.

<comment><USER19> People also have a responsibility to Society, they should not steal murder, or any number of other criminal actions.

>Society has a responsibility to reintegrate and readjust those it has failed

Where is the accountability in your world? If I pistol whip somebody in the face and take their wallet, then it sounds like (by your logic) that society has failed that person, rather than that person failed to abide by the shared social contract (to not engage in criminal behavior).

<comment><USER16> >People also have a responsibility to Society, they should not steal murder, or any number of other criminal actions.

How many are in prison for non-violent actions that harm none but themselves?

<comment><USER20> I like this point, but it doesn't really refute ManFromUranus' point. You're talking past him.

When we create this nebulous idea of a patriarchal "society" that should guide us in all things, it is easy to blame all of one's shortcomings on society.

"Hey, I didn't get into that college!" "Society has failed you, sorry."

"Hey, I didn't win that track meet!" "Sorry, society will do it's best to not let you down in the future."

I think that if you ever try to cash in on what society owes you, you will find yourself woefully disappointed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another thing not mentioned in the article is the fact that a lot of small jails in the US have instituted a 23-hour lockdown policy, similar to super max prisons. So now socializing and free time out of your cell is rare, and lockup is the norm. I don't think they truly care too much about rehabilitation, so much as they care about control. Just my humble opinion.

<comment><USER22> When you have a building designed for 500 people, and hold 750 every day, you do what you have to to avoid large-scale violence. I'm not saying I agree with it, I'm just saying why it exists.

Prison overcrowding is a thing across the US.

<comment><USER21> Yes that's exactly why, and I do have empathy for the situation. That's why I mentioned the control part. I don't mean that they would rather be oppressive than help. What I really mean is they simply don't have time or money to worry about what happens to these people, because just maintaining control is hard enough. Just keeping the prisoners safe, while keeping yourself, and society safe also, is a very tough job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Solitary confinement is a violation of international human rights and should be treated accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER24> The US is a country in which there are people and companies profiting off of the imprisonment of human beings. So I wouldn't expect this to change completely for the better for quite some time.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone seriously doubt that the use of prolonged solitary confinement will be listed in the history books alongside other examples of state- sponsored torture, slavery, and terrorism?

I'm not going to make any cliched remarks about karma here, but the United States will have to deal with the consequences of its actions eventually.

Ironically, our own history books are filled with such redemption stories, which forms the basis of the ludicrous exceptionalism that so infects rational discourse about most anything these days.

</comment><comment><USER26> For those looking for more, there's a lot of data and reporting on prison privatization, and its impact on policies like solitary confinement, up here:

[https://www.muckrock.com/project/the-private-prison- project-...](https://www.muckrock.com/project/the-private-prison-project-8/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Death sentence is considered harsher than imprisonment for life, right? It includes paying for your crimes with all your time and your existance.

What if, in the future, it becomes possible to serve a x year sentence in a chemically induced coma or such, in a way taking away your existance too temporarily? Wouldn't that be a milder punishment because the element of "serving time" is no longer there?

<comment><USER28> It seems like that would take away any rehabilitative effect prison might have. Convicted of a crime, go to sleep, wake up ready to continue committing crimes.

<comment><USER29> Except that prison doesn't rehabilitate at all: it does the opposite and makes people worse. The rehabilitative theory of justice is essentially nonexistent in the US, nobody even pretends. Instead it's about punishment/retribution and "keeping them off the streets" during the period of their sentence. The coma solves the second concern, but isn't cruel enough to solve the first so I don't think you'll ever see it accepted in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would be interested in seeing the Supreme Court's rationale that solitary confinement constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The four principles guiding the court are as follows from Wikipedia:

The "essential predicate" is "that a punishment must not by its severity be degrading to human dignity," especially torture.

"A severe punishment that is obviously inflicted in wholly arbitrary fashion."

"A severe punishment that is clearly and totally rejected throughout society."

"A severe punishment that is patently unnecessary."

The Eighth Amendment was copied virtually verbatim from the English Bill of Rights and wasn't actually used to proclaim a particular punishment was unconstitutional until 1910, 119 years after the American Bill of Rights was ratified. Since then, the principles of "proportionality" and "evolving standards of decency" are evolving to ascertain constitutionality questions. Neither principle appears to do the trick.

Of the four principles above, only the first seems to apply. So the Court will have to declare that solitary confinement is torture in order to stop its widespread use. As seen, the Court has historically been cautious in declaring punishments unconstitutional, waiting until the battle has already been mostly fought in the sphere of public opinion.

Given the stances the Court has taken concerning the death penalty, I predict that no sweeping, immediate prohibitions will take place, rather the Court will apply largely ineffectual provisions to the imposition of solitary confinement.

For example, the Court has ruled in 2002 that capital punishment is constitutionally cruel and unusual when applied to inmates with intellectual disabilities. Georgia promptly responded by making it virtually impossible to obtain a judgment.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm glad as a society we're starting to look at how we deter crime and how we manage convicted criminals. I hope we learn to not only take people who are danger to society out of circulation, but once incarcerated work to have them become useful when they reenter the general population.

For too long it has resembled third world punishment models. The objective should be mainly to improve safety and to that end reeducate, reform, inculcate, etc. in order to make reentry viable.

That said, if it's useful to monitor electronically to ensure compliance, I'm okay since breaking social norms come with consequences like incarceration, and reform, etc then electronic monitoring during the probatory period. But we should put great effort into making those people useful, rather than the traditional outcasts we've made them to be post release.

</comment><comment><USER32> May be solitary confinement should replace capital punishment.

<comment><USER33> This is what probably will happen in the southern states if capital punishment is found to be unconstitutional again.

The people in power in the south believe that prison time never rehabilitates, and prison's sole purpose is to punish. If the death penalty option is taken away, they'll try to make prison life as difficult as possible for people convicted of capital murder.

<comment><USER29> This isn't people in the south who believe this, it's most people across the US who are involved in the non-defense side of the CJ system. And they believe it doesn't rehabilitate because it's a fact that it doesn't, the only fault we can find with them is that they believe it shouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't think solitary would be that bad with Internet access and TV. Maybe the problem isn't solitary but that they don't get these things. Also I would prefer _not_ to have a cellmate in prison.

<comment><USER9> A cellmate and no contact with people ever are different things though. You don't even see the guards when food is delivered, it's shoved through a hole in the door. Recreation meant being in a concrete walled yard alone. It's literally worse than a modern zoo.

<comment><USER35> I start to get a bit cabin-feverish on the odd weekend when most of my friends are out of town and I spend a couple of days alone...and even then I talk to a few people. It feels awful just imagining what it would be like to spend years in solitary confinement. A form of hell for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why am I hearing different stories? Some feel like prisoners are being treated too well, some feel like they are being mistreated... and isn't the fact being in a prison with all your freedom being taken away is cruel and all too usual, too? I'm so confused about this discussion.

<comment> Brian-Puccio My theory is that if I see someone's arm being broken as a form of punishment, the pain and suffering is readily visible, which triggers a sort of empathetic reaction.

But if I see someone in a windowless room by themselves, it's easy to dismiss that as "not so bad". I could even rationalize is and say "I'm an introvert and like quiet" or "general population is probably less safe, this would be better for me". There is no understanding of what it is like to spend weeks (which would do me in, let alone months or years) locked in a cage with no natural light, no calendar, a light that is never turned off and no conversation with anyone else.

Similarly, I've heard and read many people claim waterboarding isn't torture because "all they need to do is hold their breath, they should rationalize to themselves that the captors aren't actually trying to drown them". I believe solitary confinement is cruel because of the psychological effect and shouldn't be used as it is today for the same reasons I think mock executions shouldn't be either. (Sure, you don't kill the person, but you're still psychologically torturing them.)

If you don't believe that humans are social animals and need to interact with other humans on a regular basis, read about feral children [0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child)

<comment><USER36> But what if they gonna stab somebody or somebody gonna stab them? I can see the purpose of solitary confinement. It might have been misused (like everything else). If the solution is better trained prison guard, or an alternative "nicer confine area" which cost more tax money, it seems pointless. Of course we need better prison guard operation process, but all you gonna get is "they are trying their best" kind of answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Am I in minority to be the kind of person that would _prefer_ serving something like a 1-5 years sentence in _solitary_ instead of a regular american prison

(Yeah, probably at a 5 years limit or something like that it would be too much and it be psychologically impossible for you to come back to society...)

<comment><USER38> Respectfully, this is spoken like someone who doesn't realize what solitary confinement actually entails, nor is familiar with the rich body of literature on the subject.

Suggested reading:

[1] [http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.140.11.1...](http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.140.11.1450)

[2] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/01602527869...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016025278690083X/pdf?md5=90c889c6110e1d47abf870989df10e82&pid=1-s2.0-016025278690083X-main.pdf)

[3] [http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...](http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1362&context=law_journal_law_policy)

[4] [http://www.jaapl.org/content/38/1/104.short](http://www.jaapl.org/content/38/1/104.short)

</comment></comment><comment> shawn-butler I don't often make these comments and trust the filtering to work but I really fail to understand why this is on HN front page.

It has no technology or startup confluences or flavor. It is not even a factual story but an "editorial" opinion piece with zero information content.

<comment><USER39> "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." \-- [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


India to install CCTV cameras at the homes all the ministers - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2221097/Akhilesh-use-CCTV-surveillance-cabinet.html

<comment><USER2> DR; DM (didn't read, daily mail)

Need a better source.</comment>


Safe Crime Prediction: Encrypted Deep Learning for Less Intrusive Surveillance - <AUTHOR> https://iamtrask.github.io/2017/06/05/homomorphic-surveillance/?hn=1 <comment><USER2> The number of people killed by terrorism in developed countries per year is, what, a hundredth of those killed in car accidents? A tenth of those shot in Chicago alone?

[http://www.businessinsider.com/death-risk-statistics- terrori...](http://www.businessinsider.com/death-risk-statistics-terrorism- disease-accidents-2017-1)

Terrorists have to kill literally hundreds of times more people per year for it to justify even the meagerest response. And one may argue about the economic impacts, but that's just a reflection of this underlying irrationality. If we had media focusing on "Keep Calm and Carry On" like Israel does now or Britain did in WWII it would have a much smaller economic impact - and terrorists would stop doing it, since it would be less effective at achieving the subgoal of "terror".

So this post is really begging the question IMO.

<comment><USER3> If the media wouldn't cover terrorism it would probably go away by itself. Israel is probably the only country dealing with it effectively.

<comment><USER4> Not just the media. A lot of current U.S. politicians apparently believe their best path to power is endless fear mongering. And it works pretty well.

<comment><USER5> That's interesting. While studying the Reichstag Fire in grade-school history class, I ran across a quote from someone in the Nazi propaganda machine, who asserted something to the effect that exerting control over a democracy was simply a matter of manufacturing a large enough exterior threat for them to fear. Sadly, I cannot remember the quote nor the author.

<comment><USER4> It was a well-discussed idea at the time, so I'm not sure who you're referring to. But Hermann Goering famously discussed it with Gustave Gilbert:

"[...] the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

<comment><USER5> That was the one! Clearly I didn't remember the details of the wording well enough to use the right search term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are multiple elements to unpack here. The obvious pre-crime problem other commenters raise. The fact that terrorism is such a rare risk it isn't worthy of our attention.

But I'd like to raise another objection: Homomorphic encryption does not provide integrity over the ciphertext, which could open the door to active attacks against the systems that undermine its privacy goals.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14443191](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14443191)

[https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/08/crypto-misnomers-zero- kno...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/08/crypto-misnomers-zero-knowledge- considered-self-descriptive)

If you really need to build such a dangerous and needless system, would you want it to be built with such an error-prone cryptographic design? I'd say "No".

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting, I didn't know that homomorphic encryption was already advanced enough to be feasible for actual computation. Years ago I just read about the proof-of-concept systems that worked but were too slow.

I'm still doubtful if the specificity of such pre-crime systems will be high enough that only a negligible number people will be wrongfully investigated. After all, the prevalence of terrorism is extremely low in any population. I guess if you trust law enforcement enough to escalate the investigation slowly and carefully (instead of putting a suspect on a no-fly list immediately) it can work.

Also, with regard to the audits by NGOs or government watchdogs: I suppose you would also need the auditors to cryptographically sign the version of the software they audited so that users can check that a trusted surveillance system was deployed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Re: cryptographically signing the software version. I think that's a brilliant idea. I'll look into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ok, I'm probably missing something.

How is public-key homomorphic encryption possible? Suppose I know the pub-key, and have some cipher text X. Can't I simply encrypt 0 and try, for all plausible values V, whether encrypt(V) - X = encrypt(0). Or is the encryption function not reversible, i.e. there are multiple 0s?

If not, it seems like you'd need quite a bit of true entropy in the plausible values. I don't see how you add something like a Nonce to artificially add entropy.

Heck, if you have nice integer under/over flow on division, that would give a crude implementation of comparison, bringing the search down by a logarithm.

It seems like the only reasonable situation is one where indeed multiple different values decrypt to 0.

<comment><USER9> > Or is the encryption function not reversible, i.e. there are multiple 0s?

Yep, there's padding.

<comment><USER8> Whats to prevent me from finding 'almost all' zeros by trying enough (say 10 000 000) versions of enc(v) - enc(v).

That, combined with comparison based on integer division and underflow would still make decryption quite easy.

<comment><USER9> replace 10 000 000 with 2^256

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "A positive prediction should launch an investigation, not put someone behind bars directly."

That is the scariest thing I've read. All we need is a black box to investigate people at anytime.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are already thousands of black boxes. Consider satellite photography, malware detectors, fire alarms, sniffing dogs, credit fraud detectors. All of these are tools ("black boxes") used to launch investigations. The future of crime fighting is impossible without tools like these as criminals become more sophisticated.

The real question is who owns them and are they audit-able? This blogpost is about making neural networks used for these purposes auditable by a third party without making them vulnerable to evasion by criminals.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. Stop, assess and arrest is now audit-able thanks to body cameras and we're already seeing the results in greater accountability. However, with greater visual accountability has come de-policing, a serious problem in some cities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Several problems with your points \- Data

For the SPAM example you provided, you used a Data Set available publicly with no consequences. But where will the training data for prediction of homicides will come from? Will it be accurate? Will it unfairly target minorities?

The predictor uses features in the data to predict the future. What features will the machine learning algorithm learn to predict homicide? location? age? gender? ethnicity? mannerism? income? I could see big problems with any features used to detect and potentially send law enforcement for "Investigations"

\- Detectors

Capturing and sending users data to a warehouse is a privacy/security risk. But what is worse is installing a detector in their house, or in their computer. What happens when a citizen removes the SPAM detector from their computer? Well, the next logical step is to pass a law requiring all citizens to run a specific process on their computer and are not allowed to reverse engineer it or else...

For me, this is even worse than having my privacy violated. It would mean users would not have root access to their own computer. It would mean, many applications will be illegal and developers cannot write certain applications that enable people to send emails. If this is not impossible, it would be the worst outcome for everyone.

\- Globalization

The SPAM detector, the fire detector and the sniffer dog are great localized examples. But todays problems are globalized. Attacks might be planned and coordinated from different country with different set of rules. And not all countries are considerate when it comes to privacy. How will global security surveillance deployment work when we can't even agree on matters of climate change?

</comment><comment><USER13> For those unfamiliar with homomorphic encryption, I found this to be a good algebraic treatment. [https://web.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-04261...](https://web.wpi.edu/Pubs/E-project/Available/E-project-042612-132350/unrestricted/Meissen_MQP2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> I like this, but I would argue that predicting crime isn't the core problem that law enforcement has today. The real issue is the incentive structure that disincentivizes crime prevention.

That sad truth is that police bear no cost when they fail to prevent crime and, in fact, get more funding and power if crime goes up.

<comment><USER15> >> The sad truth is that teachers bear no cost when they fail to teach a student.

<comment><USER14> In public schools, this is often the case. In private schools, bad education will lead to a loss of profit. If you think this doesn't apply to teachers, you must've never been in a bad public school

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think you mean "Pre-crime"

<comment><AUTHOR> i think you're right

<comment><USER16> The dog argument was cute. But the dog also doesn't make a searchable, indexable list of all your personal information.

Someone will inevitably make this though, and it will inevitably be abused.

Plus what if I start switching search parameters from say, 'planning a terrorist attack' to, likely to to vote one way, believe on thing, or be of a certain religion.

We will trade all our privacy and the nefarious people will switch to a new method of comms...like they always do.

<comment><AUTHOR> So part of what makes this work is that it's _not_ an index. As opposed to doing general storage of people's data, this restricts a surveillance operation to only be able to identify specific concepts.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's strange, i would have assumed that they would be averse to a tool that doesn't give them un-restricted access to the data. right now, the dialogue is "privacy vs security... take your pick" but this breaks that rhetoric... showing that it's a false choice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Far from it, this tool prevents the need for us to give up our privacy. (not sure why HN isn't giving me a "reply" button to your posts)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm concerned with a tool such as this that can be directed to target anything of interest to those administering the system. We've already seen mass surveillance shift from being used "exclusively" for terrorism to also assisting in the war on drugs. Where else would the lens be trained? As the author suggests, murder. What about organized crime? Gangs? Illegal downloads ... the sharing of Netflix passwords?

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone know what minimum level of "homomorphism" is necessary to insulate the entity doing surveillance or analytics from legal action?

I ask this about the following contexts:

\- government surveillance: does using a homomorphism remove the need for a search warrant?

\- in-app analytics: does using homomorphisms allow a firm to consider data not disclaimed by the firm's privacy policy?

\- research: when does a homomorphism eliminate the need for IRB approval?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. I sincerely doubt there is legal precedent in this area though. I'd love to be wrong here though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There was a great talk at USENIX on how Whatsapp reduced spam while maintaining end to end encryption

[https://youtu.be/LBTOKlrhKXk](https://youtu.be/LBTOKlrhKXk)

</comment><comment><USER20> I have nothing useful to add to this discussion. I just like that this idea is a core part of the TV show Person of Interest.</comment>