A Post Mortem on Growth Hacking - <AUTHOR> https://andyjohns.co/a-post-mortem-on-growth-hacking/ <comment><USER2> I would caution against making conclusions solely on Google Trends. Less people may be googling growth hacking because more and more people are becoming familar with it.

However that doesnt mean the _demand_ for growth hackers is declining. People may already know what it is but the need for growth hacking may still be increasing. Or it might have different names that people call it by now.

<comment><USER3> I think this topic is an interesting one and I'd love to read about from someone who could speak authoritatively about industry trends. But trying to do the same by reading Google Trends tea leaves is just awful.

<comment><USER4> Hi there. I wrote the article. You bring up a fair point but unfortunately there isn't any other public data of high quality that can be referenced. I hit LinkedIn's APIs to try and get data on historical job postings for new roles containing "growth hacker" in it but the data is really poor and not useable. I'm also writing from experience + anecdotes having worked on growth for 10+ years and advised a variety of consumer companies on growth. The anecdotes suggest to me it is falling out of favor. I wish there was more data to reference otherwise I would have.

<comment><USER2> Hmm... why was the Linkedin data poor?

<comment><USER4> Not sure. Chatted with a few other devs and they shared similar experiences when working with their APIs. The biggest issue is that prior job postings data isn't expose on the API so you can only see current postings, which wouldn't be useful in terms of showing trends, which is what I hoped for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This post sidesteps the main issue: growth hacking becomes irrelevant because most involved parties are now aware of the breadth and depth of fraud involved. Fake users, paid download farms, automated registrations. VCs learned the lesson.

</comment><comment><USER6> For those who don't know, Andy was one of the early growth hacker leads at FB & Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER7> _Marketing is what you do when your product is no good._ \- Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid

... via [http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

<comment><USER8> And yet Polaroid has spent considerable amounts of money on marketing.

That statement is often quoted, but it's exactly backwards, and I'll raise you one more sensible quote:

"Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster." — David Ogilvy

<comment><USER7> Ogilvy found public, untargeted advertising essentially immoral.

 _Man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon._ \- David Ogilvy

... via [http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was not familiar with this term until now. You can read very far into this article without realizing that the topic is not some technique to gain a few inches in height.

> There are now several growth hacking bootcamps and large conferences.

</comment><comment><USER10> OK...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19062698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19062698)

</comment><comment><USER11> Growth hacking is _hard_. We had to learn a few tricks to grow our Hacker News alternative ([https://laarc.io](https://laarc.io))

Suppose you were to start a site similar to HN. How would you get the word out?

The most reliable way to grow is to have an audience (or access to one). But they have to be interested in what you're showing, else you're little better than a spammer.

Looking over the traffic for the last month ([https://imgur.com/a/O1wtzav](https://imgur.com/a/O1wtzav)) the spikes were from comments posted to lobse.rs:

[https://lobste.rs/s/jqkqwb/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c...](https://lobste.rs/s/jqkqwb/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c_v1rpuv)

[https://lobste.rs/s/kx4ojt/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c...](https://lobste.rs/s/kx4ojt/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c_wivai7)

This won't keep working, but it might have been enough. The site seems to be spreading through word of mouth now, and about 400 people show up each day.

Communities are also a strange thing to grow. Grow too fast, and you'll spoil it. Ditto if you grow from the wrong source of people.

Fundamentally, you have to have a product that users love so much that they spontaneously tell their friends about it. But press coverage – or at least social media coverage – seems to matter a lot. You probably need both.

We've been using [https://playbook.samaltman.com/](https://playbook.samaltman.com/) as a mantra, and it's been effective so far. But it's only been a month. We'd like to try Michael's advice next: [http://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/getting- press-for-your-sta...](http://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/getting-press-for- your-startup)

<comment><USER12> Why use the alternative when here we are on the perfectly fine original?

Maybe it can't grow because it's an unnecessary and inferior substitute. I don't mean to sound harsh but if it's difficult to gain traction there's likely a reason.

Which gets to the main point of the original article: you can't 'growth hack' a product that has no market from which to grow from.

 _Build something people find valuable and it will grow_ is the only "hack" that truly works.

<comment><USER13> I agree with you, but would add one caveat. You may have built something valuable, but have yet to find the proper distribution channel. In which case, you experiment selling through different channels until you either grow, die, or pivot.</comment></comment></comment>


Kaspersky Lab reveals cyberattack on its corporate network - <AUTHOR> http://www.net-security.org/malware_news.php?id=3054

<comment><USER2> Actual paper: [https://securelist.com/files/2015/06/The_Mystery_of_Duqu_2_0...](https://securelist.com/files/2015/06/The_Mystery_of_Duqu_2_0_a_sophisticated_cyberespionage_actor_returns.pdf)</comment>


The Truth about Download Time - <AUTHOR> https://articles.uie.com/download_time/ <comment><USER2> With scripts, it's famously difficult to decide whether a page actually has "fully loaded":

On one extreme, a single page application may technically load very quickly (static assets fetched, DOMContentLoaded fired) but still be practically unusable until all asynchronous content has been fetched.

On the other extreme, a complex AMP page might look like it finished loading after a split second - but it's still fetching assets for the parts of the page outside the viewport.

Finally, caching: If caching is applied well, a page may be usable long before it completed loading.

So when they talk about "actual download speeds", I think it's important to know how they measured those speeds and what definition of "fully loaded" they used.</comment>


Marissa Mayer's Email Promising To Make Yahoo 'The Absolute Best Place To Work' - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Marissa-Mayer-Sent-A-Late-Night-Email-Promising-3817913.php

<comment><USER2> So far all of Marissa Meyer's moves (at least the one's getting publicity) have made Yahoo! a bit more Google-like. While that's probably for the best, I will be real interested to see when/where she breaks with Google culture for the first time.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, sure, but most of that stuff worked amazingly well for Google back when their engineer headcount was at what Y!'s is today.

<comment><USER4> Correlation is not causation. We don't really know what combination of the many factors in Google's culture made them so successful. For all we know, it may have been due entirely to the people they hired, and the same team might have produced great results with or without all the perks that Google is famous for.

<comment><USER5> sure. but it seems to me that this woman was hired with a mandate to 'make the place more google-like' -

I'm with you; my belief is that 95% of leadership is picking the right people, but, then, I'm a bad leader.

It seems like it's worth a shot. I mean, Yahoo has tried and failed many other strategies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yahoo! is in crisis mode and I think Marissa is making the right moves. If what she says inspires current employees and keeps talent then it is all worth while.

Now the pessimist could see Yahoo! as a dying company/stock. Apple was in the same position before Steve Jobs came back.

Yahoo! could possible die a slow death or this could mark the start of a recovery. Marissa understands it begins with products and to have great products, engineers need to be happy and inspired. Perhaps Yahoo! could be seen as a down stock and is poised for growth? What if Yahoo! triples in value over the next 3 years? The best time to buy into a stock is when it is down.

I will add that what Marissa is doing is also making Yahoo! more attractive to prospective employees. If a prospective employee has the hypothetical choice between working at Facebook and working at Yahoo! and hears about the changes that Marissa has made then they may be inclined to work at Yahoo! Perhaps they have heard about the poor stock performance since Facebook's IPO. If that prospective talent chooses to work at Yahoo! instead of Facebook then it is a win.

<comment><USER7> This is clearly the Hail Mary for Yahoo. I give the board a ton of credit for having the gumption, though I realize they tried every other permutation of crisis reaction first.

And they couldn't have chosen anyone more appropriate for the strategy than Marissa Mayer. I have no use for Yahoo in my life, but I'm really rooting for her and them, and I hope they change my mind.

You raise an interesting point about stock. It defies all logic to believe that Marissa could achieve what Steve Jobs did. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth a small bet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know almost nothing about her, but Marissa Mayer doesn't come off as a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk-like "visionary" who will drive Yahoo to unexplored and unexpected market openings. Her approach seems to be to make Yahoo a great place to work, attract and empower talent, and let said talent churn out great products. Some would say that she should focus on changing the market direction of the company, and that's certainly one of her responsibilities. At the same time, I think what she's doing is admirable and valuable. It's certainly putting Yahoo on the map in the communities that matter. Let's hope Yahoo can ride this momentum and make something of it!

<comment><USER4> Not every CEO has to be a visionary. If the CEO can hire good people who have good ideas and get out of their way, she doesn't have to provide all the ideas herself. But she'd need to create an environment where good ideas can be born and come to fruition. Giving people free food won't do this. You'd need to set up a culture in which good ideas actually get rewarded and people aren't afraid to fail.

<comment><USER9> I hope modern MBA courses teaches things like this.

<comment><USER10> They do! Modern MBA programs focus heavily on a concept called servant leadership. It can get surprisingly in-depth, but on the surface its a simple idea that can be summed up in two steps. First, hire good people. Second, provide the support they need to do their job.

Modern management models have tended to move away from issuing rules and directives. These days its more about designing jobs from which the employee can derive some self-satisfaction and than providing business context so employees can self-direct toward the company's goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've worked at a few companies where a fresh CEO asked the rank and file for a list of problems, suggestions, ideas, etc. But I've never seen it make much of a difference. I fear Marissa Meyer is already toast -- just like Yahoo.

<comment><USER12> She joined the sinking ship. She just there to soften the landing.

<comment><USER13> > to soften the landing.

I've always said that was Carol's job at Yahoo. If she didn't make tough choices to cut costs and trim products, Y! may very well have face-planted, hard. She did very little to create growth, but she did a good job to realign & reorg the company to a position where someone like Marissa can come in and create growth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is adorably cute, but Yahoo! won't be a great place to work until they begin creating great products again.

<comment><USER15> "Cute" it may be, but if new leadership inspires enough people to step up, want to do something great, and their path for bringing those ideas to fruition are cleared, then Yahoo can succeed.

That said, the biggest gripe I've read about Yahoo is the insane amount of middle management. If anyone (regardless of position -- an intern, an engineer, an architect) has an idea, I would hope there is a path for that idea to be evaluated and, if show potential, is allowed to come to fruition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Someone once told me: "Never tell anybody that you're good. If you're good, they'll tell you."

<comment><USER17> "So, son, why do you think you're fit for this job?" "No idea sir, you tell me."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You can't remove jams by adding a new process to report problems...

If you want to remove jams, just make sure decisions are taken as low as possible in the hierarchy.

<comment><USER13> Being able to report problems is the first step to figuring out what is actually wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Some things they mention should be done at every tech company:

1\. Give employees free lunch 2\. Give every employee an iphone 3\. Github for code review

<comment><USER4> Actually, I wouldn't be terribly happy if my company gave me a daily free lunch. It would be a disincentive to get out of the office and away from my co-workers once a day, which is something that I think makes me happier and more productive. (I work in a big city, where diverse types of food are a short walk away. If you work in an office park in Silicon Valley, I can see why a free lunch might be more appealing.)

Also, having a cell phone paid for by my employer might give my employer the idea that I'm always available to them, which I don't want to encourage. Since I'm a developer of software that doesn't get deployed to the web in real time, it isn't likely that an issue can't wait until the next work day. For dire emergencies, they have my home number.

<comment><USER20> > It would be a disincentive to get out of the office and away from my co- > workers once a day, which is something that I think makes me happier and > more productive.

If stepping away from your coworkers makes you happy and productive, your company has bigger problems than charging for meals.

<comment><USER4> I actually like my co-workers very much, but being an introverted type (as I suspect many developers are), I need a break from people once in a while. Even being with my best friends for ten hours straight would be a bit tiring for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The perks are certainly nice and likely a good move all things considered, but at some point she is going to have to inspire and innovate.

A "Google-like office", without a seriously great product, will probably be tough sell, longterm.

<comment><USER22> Based on the things that came out of google labs, I think it's more than possible that a seriously great product can be a byproduct of a google-type office and not just a prerequisite for said office environment.

<comment><USER21> It's possible I guess, but in the case of Google Labs, perhaps the more significant factor is the raw amount of talent/ability, per square foot. :p

<comment><USER23> i've known several ex-yahoo people. they all agree that yahoo has no shortage of raw engineering talent in the trenches; it's just that they aren't given the environment they need to get things done. hopefully mayer will change that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Steve Jobs reportedly seen at California's Stanford Cancer Center - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/16/apples_steve_jobs_reportedly_seen_at_californias_stanford_cancer_center.html

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing it's futile but I have to ask that we not up-vote this content. While his health will have a direct impact on Apple I think we should just leave this alone.

We're going to see it plastered everywhere else so no need to have his illness be a hot topic here too. I would say this of anyone, be it Gates, Arrington, etc.

my 2 cents

<comment><USER3> +1 I am surprised to see that someone even LIKED this link in google reader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well...yes..isn't it known that he's had signs of cancer for a while now?</comment>


Jakarta stock exchange floor collapsed - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-15/jakarta-stock-exchange-evacuated-after-floor-collapses <comment><AUTHOR> I thought it was interesting as I recalled from another article a few weeks ago that the city is sinking. Maybe the 2 are related?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15995399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15995399)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, and soon the stock markets will collapse too..</comment></comment>


Show HN: Our new platform to generate mind-maps with the crowd - <AUTHOR> http://www.cowonder.com/??

<comment><USER2> What are you showing us? a landing page? Great! I'm so excited! I am afraid you wasted an opportunity. I really prefer to see a product, even very young than a landing page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, great approach. Please check this out: <http://vimeo.com/48678780></comment></comment>


How Apple Built 3D Touch - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-how-apple-built-3d-touch-iphone-6s/ <comment><USER2> Referenced in the article:

""The biggest worry for me is, are we getting too locked in a formula?" asks Schiller. He recalls the 2002 Worldwide Developers Conference, at which Steve Jobs delivered a eulogy for Mac OS9, complete with cheesy organ music, a smoke machine, and a casket rising through the middle of the stage. "We haven't done anything quite that outlandish in a long time. It may be part of being a bigger company, not this small upstart. We feel a little uncomfortable being too strange and getting too far away from ourselves.""

The video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1SLCAiGkVQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1SLCAiGkVQ)

<comment><USER3> Steve is celebrating having 3000 apps. Apple sure was small in 2002.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This kind of philosophy bothers me:

> "There's a tax that comes with interoperability and what can be seen as > complexity, which is it can actually be an impediment to innovation."

Yes, it's possible that standards can become too complicated. Rather than refusing to participate, as Apple has done with pointer-related designs, why not join the group and give rational reasons for simplifying the design? Every thing Apple has reinvented here is already supported by W3C Pointer Events as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER5> The article is confusing, I believe Ive was talking about Apple and its product line, not about outside standards. He seems to be saying that keeping compatibility within a product family can stifle innovation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Those gifs make the article impossible to read

</comment><comment><USER7> They might try _not_ timing these PR pieces with major Apple announcements. A week after could provide the necessary plausible deniability.

<comment><USER8> Plausible deniability about what ?

<comment><USER9> The article was clearly written before today's announcement, given its detail.

This means that Apple's PR team is behind this piece, giving this reporter early access then framing the story around the touch device which is the big feature of the iPhone 6s launch.

The article may be good, but it puts into question the independence and neutrality of the article since its an article that was clearly initiated by Apple's PR team.

<comment><USER10> Yes, the interviews clearly come from prebriefings. What parts of the article do you think aren't independent or neutral?

<comment><USER9> The entire piece reads as a promotion piece for people trying to evaluate Apple stock, emphasizing how Apple's design team within its corporate structure has a unique process that allows it to deliver the kind of innovations that produced the iPhone.

That may well be true, but read the article and there is no hint of a single criticism or critique of Apple's description of its design team. There is little external evaluation of the claims that are being made about how they operate. There is no meaningful 3rd person analysis from the reporter about the "truthiness" of any of the claims being made here about Apple's design team.

It's a fascinating article, but the OP has a point in saying this is clearly an article whose content has been carefully crafted by Apple's PR team. That doesn't mean it's not informative, but we should be aware still of how an article like this gets produced. This is precisely the kind of in-depth coverage that Apple needs for boosting their stock price amongst market investors. It reassures them that Apple's "still got it" when it comes to producing big wins into the future.

<comment><USER11> I was left with the exact opposite impression (perhaps because I read it till the end).

"It also means that every few years it has to bet its future on the instincts of a few people with strong opinions about how things should work [...] its business plan, basically, is to trust that he and his team are right."

That is extremely harsh criticism in my book and should make all kinds of bells ringing in the heads of people responsible for putting money in Apple's stock.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Globe visualizations in Golang - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mmcloughlin/globe <comment><USER2> Glad to see more graphics work being done in Go. This is built on `pinhole`, which is built on `gg`, a 2D rendering library that I wrote. How many layers deep can we get? :)

[https://github.com/fogleman/gg](https://github.com/fogleman/gg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Standing on the shoulders of giants :)

gg and pinhole made this easy to write. The globe package really just deals with mapping (lat, lng) space to cartestian coordinates (and also includes some land/country datasets).

<comment><USER3> Looks so good. The detail is just amazing!

This may or may not be useful, but here's a Go package containing a bunch of city data. It might be a good fit for people using your project.

[https://github.com/tidwall/cities](https://github.com/tidwall/cities)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh nice! Should have used this for the cities example here

[https://github.com/mmcloughlin/globe/blob/master/examples/ci...](https://github.com/mmcloughlin/globe/blob/master/examples/cities.go)

In fact I might switch it, since the cities json file I used has some oddities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's always nice seeing unique projects in Golang appear like this. Also worth noting that this includes the ability to upload directly to imgur via the github.com/mattn/imgur tool. Once thing that I particularly love about Go is the built-in testing suite which mmcloughlin makes good use of.

The only critique I have here is to see some benchmarks! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I was really glad to find that imgur tool. I wanted to make sure the images in the README were kept in sync with the code.

Also credit has to go to [https://github.com/tidwall/pinhole](https://github.com/tidwall/pinhole) where all the actual rendering happens!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The map in the readme is puzzling me. It's almost like a riddle: what is there a lot of in the UK, east America, Portugal, and barely any of in Norway, Spain, and Belgium? It looks country-related, since you can see the borders defined pretty well. Is it the Starbucks data? It would explain why Finland appears to have a few, compared to its neighbours.

<comment><USER6> Judging by used color, the picture might be a result of this demo: [https://github.com/mmcloughlin/globe/blob/master/examples/ci...](https://github.com/mmcloughlin/globe/blob/master/examples/cities.go)

I have no idea what kind of cities might be listed in 'cities.json'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the first image in the README is from cities.go. The data file is too big so I didn't include it in the repo, but the Makefile will fetch it.

[https://github.com/mmcloughlin/globe/blob/master/examples/Ma...](https://github.com/mmcloughlin/globe/blob/master/examples/Makefile)

It came from this node package

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/cities.json/](https://www.npmjs.com/package/cities.json/)

It looks like the dataset has more cities in some countries than others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How possible / appropriate would it be to utilize this library to create an interactive version similar to this example using d3: [https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/rotate/](https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/rotate/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Jason Davies has some beautiful maps!

Interactive would be hard. It would be relatively simple to output an animated gif though, as the pinhole library does here

[https://github.com/tidwall/pinhole/blob/master/examples/eart...](https://github.com/tidwall/pinhole/blob/master/examples/earth.go)

I'm planning to add this feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know why isn't it possible to get the same perspective (preserving scale, distances, areas) in Google Earth Web?

For example, you wouldn't be able to get the shapes of continents along with the size of the whole globe in Google Earth visually match the projection under "line" example in README.

[0] [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-25.48168721,-8084...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-25.48168721,-8084.09363679a,16700413.46093416d,35y,0h,0t,0r)

<comment><USER9> There are lots of different map projections[1] and coordinate systems[2]. As the old joke goes, "the best thing about standards is there are so many to choose from!"

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

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system)

<comment><USER8> If you want to map whole planet's surface onto a plane then sure, there're tons of options (Dymaxion projection is my favorite). I can't understand why areas and distances would be distorted if user manipulates a 3D globe though; yet it seems to be the case here.

<comment><USER9> That is exactly the problem. It is easy for programmers to start with a 3D sphere and start randomly projecting things on to it. However the earth itself is an ellipsoid that bulges around the equator, so again you have a projection problem of people trying to put one shape onto a different shape.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks really cool! One comment, in this picture: [https://camo.githubusercontent.com/16434461a69346de4ee07b950...](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/16434461a69346de4ee07b950f8c9e3f7ec733b5/687474703a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f4b4a66496c396c2e706e67)

The left and right side of the rectangle are correctly bent around the shape of the globe. However, the top and bottom sides of the rectangle are not. Is this intention (or am I being stupid?)

<comment><USER11> The red lines are the shortest paths between the corners of the rectangle, not lines of constant latitude (which would follow the latitude lines drawn on the globe).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks really cool! How many points can one draw with this before it becomes too slow? I did a similar looking 3D globe animation with WebGL once and the total number of points was quite an issue

[http://jsfiddle.net/go2t1r4q/2/](http://jsfiddle.net/go2t1r4q/2/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks great!

Was there a particular reason why you chose Go to implement this? (strong side of the language or sth like that)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I guess I wanted to use it to visualize data coming from other Go projects I was working on, so it made sense. A tiny example of this is [https://github.com/mmcloughlin/spherand](https://github.com/mmcloughlin/spherand) which correctly generates random points on a sphere. I also had seen pinhole ([https://github.com/tidwall/pinhole](https://github.com/tidwall/pinhole)) and thought it would be fun to play around with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's pretty cool! It would be nice if the API allowed writing to io.Writer instead of taking filenames.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you'd like to output to an arbitrary writer, you can use the Image method.

[https://godoc.org/github.com/mmcloughlin/globe#Globe.Image](https://godoc.org/github.com/mmcloughlin/globe#Globe.Image)

This can be passed to an image encoder like

[https://golang.org/pkg/image/png/#Encode](https://golang.org/pkg/image/png/#Encode) [https://golang.org/pkg/image/gif/#Encode](https://golang.org/pkg/image/gif/#Encode) [https://golang.org/pkg/image/jpeg/#Encode](https://golang.org/pkg/image/jpeg/#Encode)

These functions take io.Writer objects. SavePNG was provided for convenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there any provisions for drawing a color mesh on something like this?

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER16> I need to learn go

<comment><USER17> No you don't, it has no benefits relative to languages in its space of competition (Rust, D, various JVM/.NET languages, Haskell, ML, Nim, etc.).

<comment><USER18> Team friendlyness, simplicity, readability, tooling, native compilation, built in syntax for concurrency and really fast compilation times for large projects.

<comment><USER19> Few of these, honestly, benefit one man side projects. If you want to learn Go (for whatever reason) its fine, but otherwise I personally would prefer more expressive and less dogmatic language.

<comment><USER20> Who said they wanted to learn it for "one man side projects"?

<comment><USER19> This is what OP project is, no?

Two people see cool sideproject in Go, his thoughts "damn this looks good, I need to learn Go", my thoughts "Whyyy you do this in Go and not D? Simplistic Go has no strong sides here! Why nobody promotes my favourite language with things like this, it deserves hype no less!"

<comment><USER21> I guess it's because no one is writing anything "cool" in D?

Simplistic Go has a lot going for it - focussing on knocking out cool projects rather than the minutiae of build/package/dependency systems is one of them.

<comment><USER19> Its because D has way less developers, support and, consequently, way less hype, than a language backed by one of the biggest world corporations in existence.

Anyway, care to elaborate whats wrong with excellent build/package/dependency system in D called Dub? Never had any problems with it.

<comment><USER21> [https://www.google.com.au/search?q=D+Dub](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=D+Dub)

I gave up after the Urban dictionary link. I assume you're trolling?

<comment><USER19> Try googling "go" instead of "golang" then. Try "dlang dub" after that. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reimplement the Redis based on seastar - <AUTHOR> Seastar is an advanced, open-source C++ framework for high-performance server applications on modern hardware. Seastar is used in ScyllaDB, a high-performance NoSQL database compatible with Apache Cassandra. Applications using Seastar can run on Linux or OSv.
The seastar project home page: http://www.seastar-project.org/
NoSQL data store using the SEASTAR framework, compatible with Redis.
githhub: [https://github.com/fastio/pedis] <comment><USER2> Clickable: [http://www.seastar-project.org/](http://www.seastar-project.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This should be updated to just be a link to Pedis on GitHub. Most of the added information is either covered in the README or through the links back to the Seastar project.

</comment><comment><USER4> How does it compare performance-wise?</comment>


People can sense single photons - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/people-can-sense-single-photons-1.20282 <comment> white-flame If you pay close attention in very low level light situations, you'll notice that what you do see (or at least what _I_ see) is actually reminiscent of the RGB graininess of low level light photographs. That graininess is to my understanding caused by the variation of the number of photons hitting that portion of the receptors, which is unnoticeable when flooded with quadjillions of them in decent lighting.

So this is a nice semi-expected result in this experiment, though it does seem to be near the limit of default human perception.

I wonder how well somebody could train themselves to notice single-photon events, much like musicians can notice tiny audio events and variations.

<comment><USER3> Probably at this stage it's all about reducing the noise. I'm not sure what that means, maybe cooling your eyeballs?

<comment><USER4> Related - this was on HN just the other day. Birds have a "hyperuniform" distribution of rods and cones which is superior to our own.

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160712-hyperuniformity- foun...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160712-hyperuniformity-found-in- birds-math-and-physics/)

<comment><USER5> Sorry for being lazy and not doing proper research, but maybe someone knows this right away. Is Sobol sequence hyperuniform? If not, is there an algorithm you can use to generate hyperuniform random variables? (Basically I am thinking that it could make Monte Carlo simulation in some circumstances a bit more effective)

<comment><USER6> If you take the 2d Fourier transform of the sequence and the low frequency components go to zero the point process is hyper uniform [1] . Poison disk noise has this property but is generally slow to generate.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.4645v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.4645v1.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's sticking out to me is that they definitely showed individuals can detect a single photon in some sense, but they did so statistically-- No individual was ever confident that any single event happened.

There's something really philosophically fascinating going on here that I can't quite articulate. It's like, did some people really see single photons? Or did the group collectively see a photon packet?

<comment><USER7> Why don't you conduct another experiment with paramaters to answer that question, thus observing and collapsing the possibility space of distributed photon wave collapse observations into a single reality state?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You know how cool this is?!

It should be possible to set up an experiment with entangled photons and use your eyes as the detector. We could literally see quantum mechanical behavior with our own eyes! Pardon my crudeness but how fucking cool is that!

<comment><USER9> Can this be used for neutrino detection? Instead of ice + light sensor, you use sweatshop + human. Someone should do the math, perhaps in the right country it is cheaper to use mass indentured labor than electronics. (This is just a thought experiment, I am not supporting sweatshops)

<comment><USER10> This concept is explored in Neal Stephenson's Anathem. To avoid spoilers, I will be vague. One of the orders in the novel runs such an experiment. They have many people watching a pool or water or ice, and they independently record flashes they may see. If everyone sees the same thing, then they have captured a neutrino.

<comment><USER11> That book is awesome sci-fi for so many reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In a related vein, the kid who built a fusion reactor in his bedroom--which was on the HN front page the other day--had a fascinating comment about visualizing a single neutron:

 _Q: How does one detect fast neutrons? A: Neutron bubble dosimeter. It is basically a tube full of gel suspending small drops of a special liquid. If a fast neutron strikes one of these droplets, the drop vaporizes and turns into a visible bubble. It still amazes me that a single neutron has enough energy to make its presence known to my naked eye._ [1]

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4tgsaz/iama_i_built_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4tgsaz/iama_i_built_a_fusion_reactor_in_my_bedroom_ama/d5hbr6r)

<comment><USER13> Likewise similar, "cosmic ray visual phenomena": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The statement about detecting a single photon by an eye is new (and possibly contradictory), but detection of a very few number of photons by human eye is not a new thing. Cherenkov radiation[1] was discovered by observing a very small number of photons (actually only a few of them) in short time interval by eyes.

The experiments were conducted this way because there were no sensitive enough photodetectors in 1930s, so the eyes were the most sensitive available tool for this kind of experiments. Eyes of a physicist were prepared to the experiments by being in complete darkness for a few hours before the measurements. Description of the experimental procedure can be found here[2].

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

[2] [http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3367/UFNe.0179.200911c....](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3367/UFNe.0179.200911c.1161/pdf)

<comment><USER15> It isn't even completely new. Its hard to Google how that this paper is new, but the claim has been made decaden ago. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_threshold#Vision](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_threshold#Vision):

 _" 1972 Sakitt conducted an experiment that combined elements of signal detection and threshold theory. Two key elements of the study were a high tolerance for false positives and a multiple-choice option on deciding whether or not a light was seen. In the classic studies described above, the tolerance for false positives was so low that threshold was biased upward. Based on statistical analysis of a large number of trials, 6 photons each absorbed by one rod near-simultaneously looked "very bright," 5 photons looked "bright," 4 photons "a moderate light," 3 photons "a dim light." Two observers were able to see 2 photons as "slightly doubtful if a light was seen." One observer saw a single photon as "very doubtful if a light was seen." Zero photons were seen as "did not see anything."_

One thing to note is that these experiments are hard to do. Dark adaptation ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(eye)#Dark_adapta...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_\(eye\)#Dark_adaptation)) takes a long time; some researchers claim it continues for up to 24 hours (sorry, can't find a reference)

That means sitting in the absolute dark for hours (you will not want to do a few short experiments, as that means dark adapting more times). It's not like you can easily repeat this with Rens of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Considering only the answers with the high-confidence R3 rating, we found > that the probability of providing the correct response was significantly > elevated compared with all responses (0.60±0.03, P=0.0010),

For "high-confidence", that's a massive false-positive rate.

<comment><USER17> You misunderstand and subsequently misrepresent the whole experiment and paper.

 _Nobody_ but headliners (people only reading the headline) and overexcitable readers even tries to make this about "we can reliably detect single photon events". Yes that's what the headline _seems_ to say.

The detection is clearly much better than chance. This is about exploring the absolute lower limit of human perception. It is _not_ about "we can 'see' single photons", even though that's not even wrong - we sort-of _can_ , the experiment shows we have a chance higher than random. On that low level it isn't about absolutes but about statistics.

I'm really disappointed in the comments here, the first time I saw this - <USER2> it on HN too not that many days ago? - comments were a lot better. Do't use a tabloid-paper interpretation and _do_ read the actual paper too, as always headlines are useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Some physicists have suggested that such experiments could test whether a superposition of two states could survive in a person's sensory system, and perhaps be perceived in the brain."

This sentence surprises me. I would have thought that maintaining coherence during the interaction with someone's eyes would be impossible. Does anyone know anything in more detail about this part?

</comment><comment><USER19> If the eye can detect a single photon, it must mean that the triggering system in the human eye, which starts the electrical signal that carries the visual information to the brain, needs less energy than a photon contains to be triggered. That's pretty amazing to me.

How many photons does a CCD chip need to change one pixel from pitch black? A billion? 1e20? I'm curious to know.

If we could figure out how this triggering system works, we could build amazing stuff. Probably more than really good camera chips.

<comment><USER20> Electron multiplying CCD cameras can respond to single photons with > 90% quantum efficiency [1] -- that's better than rhodopsin. (I use one on a semi- daily basis.) To take advantage of that sensitivity you need to cool the sensor to -80°C so that thermal noise doesn't swamp your signal, but obviously you can't do that with your eyes.

[1] [http://www.andor.com/learning-academy/ccd,-emccd-and-iccd- co...](http://www.andor.com/learning-academy/ccd,-emccd-and-iccd-comparisons- difference-between-the-sensors)

<comment><USER19> That's pretty cool! Would you happen to know how many photons it takes to activate the average consumer CCD?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am in skywatcher group, we travel to Atacama desert...

One of the experiments we did was determining maximal visual magnitude. My friend was able to see 8.1 magnitude star with 90% probability. We counted stars in triangles, 2nd person prepared maps and validated results.

</comment><comment><USER22> A lovely thought, but how do we know they didn't just sense some vibration caused by an electrical surge in the machine firing the photon.

</comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me of F. Alton Everest's notes in "The Master Handbook of Acoustics" that the threshold of hearing lies coincident with the SPL of Brownian motion of air particles on the ear drum... except this is with respect to light.

</comment><comment><USER24> The BS-factor is high on this one..

"An ideal single-photon source has yet to be created." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single- photon_source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-photon_source)

Still, detection of single particles has been hinted to during the Apollo program; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena)

<comment><USER25> Rationale for disbelief:

      - Ambient human body temperature is a
        constant source of noise as infrared
        photons.

      - In a dark, cold environment the human body
        is radiating a constant shower of photons
        in a limited spectrum. Interference patterns
        could augment paths and energies of photons
        in flight.

      - A human might simply guess at sensations
        and produce statistical anomalies that we
        want to believe in.

      - A guessing human might intuitively gain
        an understanding of implicit tells in the
        detection process, and notice cues from
        the researchers, and interpret behavioral
        signals to provide affirmative responses
        to stimuli.

      - How many photons can an individual simply
        think into existence by willful thought?
        Who's to say that the test subjects aren't
        detecting psychic brain waves from the
        researchers, by way of Vulcan mind melds
        and subsequent "remote viewing" events?

...after all, photons _are_ tiny.

<comment><USER26> > \- Ambient human body temperature is a > constant source of noise as > infrared > photons.

Which are outside of the visible range, and wouldn't interfere with the experiment, assuming they used visible range photons (the article doesn't mention this, but why would they not).

> \- A human might simply guess at sensations > and produce statistical > anomalies that we > want to believe in.

Isn't literally any study susceptible to this? Besides: "Still, participants were able to answer correctly more frequently than would be expected if they had guessed at random — and their confidence level was higher when they were right." suggests this wasn't an one-off anomaly. (Although N=3 nonetheles...)

> \- A guessing human might intuitively gain > an understanding of implicit > tells in the > detection process, and notice cues from > the researchers, > and interpret behavioral > signals to provide affirmative responses > to > stimuli.

I think the researchers might have heard of the double-blind method.

> \- How many photons can an individual simply > think into existence by > willful thought? > Who's to say that the test subjects aren't > detecting > psychic brain waves from the > researchers, by way of Vulcan mind melds > > and subsequent "remote viewing" events?

I might be missing a joke?

<comment><USER27> OP is kidding, I can identify the first statement as the pre-quantum ultraviolet catastrophe argument where everything warmer than absolute zero should emit one single honkin big gamma ray and drop back to absolute zero, whereas in practice blackbody radiation doesn't go to infinity with short wavelengths but goes to a peak (for example "red hot steel")

What I can't identify by name is the philosophical arguments in the other statements.

I'm about 90% sure one is a metaphysical Copenhagen interpretation of QM (You've heard of Heisenberg's lucky cat?) but I'm not as certain as the UV catastrophe analogy. Depends how you read it, I guess.

<comment><USER25> Who are you, and how did you find me???

(...and it's _Schrödinger 's_ Cat)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Am I the only HN reader whose bullshit detector has gone off and, admittedly without reading the study at this stage (I will attempt to do so when I get home), thinks this has all the hallmarks of future non-reproducible results?

A photon? Really?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...and to me that's a pretty extraordinary claim. And yet when I read the report it sounds like a probability based argument from a group of 3?

ESP trials all over again anyone?

I mean, as scientists, I feel we should be cynical/skeptical...

<comment><USER29> It's reasonable to be skeptical, but it is even more reasonable to evaluate a peer-reviewed publication in one of the most rigorous subfields of psychology (sensation & perception) after having read at least its abstract, ideally the whole paper.

<comment><USER30> Especially when papers before it have established that at most only a few photons were needed for perception. The very first line is:

"Landmark experiments by Hecht and colleagues in the 1940s established that dark-adapted human subjects are capable of reporting light signals as low as a few photons (~5–7)."

Looking around, [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/jphysiol.1979.sp0...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/jphysiol.1979.sp012716/abstract?cited- by=yes&288/1/613) is a 1979 paper showing that a toad retina can respond to a single photon.

The claim from this new paper doesn't seem that extraordinary given what's been known for decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm honestly a bit surprised that such an article is placed in Nature, as there seem to be a couple questionable details in the article regarding the experiment:

\- Only 3 volunteers on which the experiment has been tested

\- The volunteers were left "in total darkness for around 40 minutes" before the actual experiment

\- "In many cases, they got it wrong; this is to be expected, given that more than 90% of photons that enter the front of the eye never even reach a rod cell, because they are absorbed or reflected by other parts of the eye. Still, participants were able to answer correctly more frequently than would be expected if they had guessed at random and their confidence level was higher when they were right."

\- The three volunteers sat through a total of more than 2,400 trials in which a single photon was emitted (and many more in which it was not).

\- That high volume of testing, the researchers say, gives them strong statistical evidence of single-photon detection

\- The participants had to say on which occasion they thought they saw a photon, and how confident they were (on a scale of 1 to 3) about their sighting.

In summation, they put 3 volunteers for 40 minutes in total darkness, then performed more than 2400 trials in total (i assume 1000+ trials per person, taking into account the tests in which no photon was emmitted). "Many" times the volunteers guessed wrong, but when they guessed right they were pretty confident of it (using a rather simplistic scale of 1-3).

What I'm seeing with this experiment is a result which is more confirmed due to psychological bias rather than actual results by putting these volunteers in a straining test. How would you, as a volunteer react, if you were left in the darkness for such a long test duration and would asked over a 1000 times whether you have seen a flash.

Edit: After having read the actual paper on the methodology, I do retract my comment.

<comment><USER29> In the typical psychophysical study on perceptual thresholds, participants are given a two-alternative forced-choice test: a stimulus (here, a photon) is placed in one of two intervals at random, and the participant guesses which interval had the photon. Using this design, a bias that systematically selects one response more often than the other will lead to performance below chance. Finding that performance is significantly better than chance is evidence that the observer can detect a single photon. Demonstrating that performance is reliably above chance requires many trials because the level of performance is close to chance. Compare this to a yes/no design, where a bias can create the appearance of an ability to detect a single photon where there is none.

The reason for waiting 40 minutes is that the eye and brain adapt to darkness. If this experiment were performed outside in daylight, it would be impossible to detect a difference of 1 photon. Only when the observer sits in a room without light can the brain adapt and have its greatest sensitivity to light.

Finally, note that the logic of this study is an existence proof that people can detect single photons. Selecting three normal observers and finding that all of them have this capability is reasonable evidence that most normal observers can do the same, unless you have some specific reason to believe that these observers are unrepresentative of the population (as the researcher in the press release did re gender differences).

<comment><USER29> I have a slight correction to my earlier comment, in which I said "Using this design, a bias that systematically selects one response more often than the other will lead to performance below chance." A bias of this kind will drive performance closer to chance. Performance that is significantly below chance would be evidence that observers _can_ see single photons, but that they have the response labels reversed in their minds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Of course the real test here will be a duplication study, but with more than three test subjects. The selection bias in the study as performed is essentially unacceptably huge.

</comment><comment><USER33> Tested on 3 people only.

<comment><USER34> I don't count that against this study -- it isn't about determining the effects of a drug or something like that. If we can show that there exists one person that can detect a single photon in a statistically significant way (vs random guessing), that still seems like a fascinating result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I knew I just felt something brush against me

</comment><comment><USER36> People can hear single frequencies too

<comment><USER37> A photon is not a frequency.

<comment><USER38> But both the sound the frequency of which we hear and the photon which we sense.. are waves

<comment><USER39> Look, I'm in laser plasma physics, and people conflate photons and monochromatic plane waves in my field _all the fucking time_. Even worse, they conflate plasma waves with phonons * shudder * . There is similar _mathematics_ that describe both but conceptually they are different things.

<comment><USER37> Unrelated question,

I want to heat some micro particles in an heterogeneous mixture. However, they need to be heated with precision so that the other components of the mixture don't get melted. So, I was thinking in getting a laser to do that. The laser would need to have a wavelength that targets only the component that I want to heat.

picture I drew [http://i.imgur.com/RdWRpnHl.png](http://i.imgur.com/RdWRpnHl.png)

Do you think it would be feasible? I am not a physicist.

<comment><USER39> So, I am more on the plasma side than the laser side, unfortunately, so get a second opinion :) but I'm not sure it would. First of all, when talking about _heating_ , you're mainly relying on dielectric heating[0], which depends on the dipole moment (perhaps) and polarizability of the things you're looking at. The wavelength might play a role but the idea is dielectric heating is a classical phenomenon, not quantum. I'm don't want to misunderstand your idea, but it sounds like you are applying intuition from QM regarding a material's absorption spectrum, which is,obv., quantum and thus selecting regarding wavelength. Dielectric heating will affect both species regardless given if both can be polarized leading to heating.

Now, say one is more polarizable than the other and so is heated first. However, a more important consideration here is that this is a heterogeneous mixture, so I think what is more likely is heat will be even distributed between the species. You're essentially trying to achieve a non-equilibrium state (high temp in one species and not the other) when one species is on top of the other! On shorter time scales, the more polarizable/polarized stuff might be "heated" first but that heat will eventually move to the other species from collisions leading to equal heating.

So it all depends. Will your target species be heated to melting before that heat transfers to other stuff? This does depend on the coupling of the laser energy to the particles but it also depends on the time scale it takes to melt too and the collision frequency between target species and other species. So, as you see, it depends specifically on the materials you're thinking of, which you could probably look up.

Honestly, you could try something much simpler, like just choosing species based on their melting point. Obviously, your question seemed to imply that they melt at similar melting points and you make to make species A melt before species B. If you just choose species with diff species with diff melting points, you don't even need a laser, just a heat bath.

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

This might be helpful if you want to learn what effect material properties has on effectiveness of dielectric heating. First google scholar result :)

[1] [http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/1998/cs/a82721...](http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/1998/cs/a827213z#!divAbstract)

<comment><USER37> Thank for the answer.

\- Will your target species be heated to melting before that heat transfers to other stuff? = That's the plan, the heat will propagate so I want to apply just enough heat to minimize the amount of heat transferred. They have different melting points: around 50C in difference.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blinkenlights Berlin Documentation [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/6175054 <comment><USER2> Facinating. Also see the video for their follow-up project "Arcade", which had gave them many more pixels to work with, and also an eight-step grayscale for each pixel. A much better effect IMO.

You can watch here: [https://vimeo.com/14219561](https://vimeo.com/14219561)

</comment><comment><USER3> This was a really cool project 15 years ago. Here is some more information about it: [http://blinkenlights.net/blinkenlights](http://blinkenlights.net/blinkenlights)</comment>


Babadook: Connectionless, Persistent Powershell "Backdoor" - <AUTHOR> http://wroot.org/posts/babadook-connection-less-powershell-persistent-and-resilient-backdoor/ <comment><USER2> After a certain point, it stops being a clever prank and becomes much more of "my coworker is a jerk". The author of the article got lucky that upper management decided to put up with his antics rather than fire him for them.

<comment><USER3> I forbade my team from doing that, your teammates should have your back, not being hostile or publicly shaming each others. I want them to trust their co- worker, to be able to leave each other on their machine to go to the bathroom even if Facebook and mail are logged in.

Plus if you don't know who is entering your room you don't have a problem with the keyboard but with your door lock. And if one team member is going rogue, well, he already has the passwords.

<comment> Stefan-H This mentality is patently wrong to me. You have to realize that maintenance, house keeping, and any manner of other people may enter your area(either legitimate people, or people in disguise). Additionaly, if I were to "go rogue" you better believe I would take advantage of being able to frame someone else and remove attributation from my shoulders. The in-office risk asside, you are also training terrible habits. These habits could lead to your employees leaving their computers unlocked in coffeee shops, at conferences, in their hotel rooms, etc. You have to instill the habit of if you are leaving your computer, you lock you computer into people and make sure they understand why that is.

<comment><USER4> The author is obviously smart and dedicated - and I'd probably be forced to terminate him. He is an non-supervisory employee, who has not been given administrative access to these computers. He created and deployed a program to other computers without permission that actively thwarted attempts to be shutdown, and modified it get around a GPO that was more than likely pushed out because of what he was doing. This is malware - for a good purpose but still an undesirable application being run without permission.

If the company has decided that computers need to be locked when away from keyboard there will be a policy and procedure for reporting and dealing infractions. This won't be it. While in this case the program might have been mostly harmless, one never knows when a programming error might spin things out of control. It's clever, funny to some, but if it accidentally resulted in downtime the stuff the flows downhill would come fast and be unpleasant in some organizations. Plus, annoying your teammates isn't the best idea long term. I know this may seem harsh, but from my experience organizations with the most need for this security would be the least likely to approve of this method.

<comment> Stefan-H My coment is not at all talking about what the OP was doing. I think that he went beyond what he ought to have. I am specifically referring to the mentality of "employees should trust their coworkers and can therefore leave their computers unlocked".

<comment><USER3> I didn't say they have to keep their computer unlocked, some of them did lock, but I did not enforce a locking policy because I don't think it was necessary in the context. And if I did have to enforce screen locking in other places, it would be out of question to use _any_ passive aggressive behavior or public shaming towards a teammate, if you need trust from your employees, you treat them well. My first reflex would be to look at technology, because locking the computer is a stupid and consistent task and technology is for stupid consistent things.

I think people are too focused on working for military and paranoïa, we need a range of behaviors, from the paranoid to the welcoming, that guy watching your screen could start an interesting discussion about your project, and give you the contact to the right person to help you. You don't want that in a military context, you highly desire it when you're building a vegan pet food marketplace for hipsters.

Not everyone needs to develop like in Aerospace, not everyone needs to develop like in video games, not everyone needs de behave like a NSA agent, and not everyone needs to behave like a farmer's market salesman, we need a range of behaviors.

And whatever the policy, you never, ever, let co-workers be dicks to each others, no "pranks", no public shaming, no sending a prank email from each other's computer. If security is really an big issue, then not locking a computer is a strike, it goes between the boss, the offender and HR, not a matter of joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aren't there better ways to ensure "desktop protection" than relying on conscious actions of employees?

For the company in question, security seems to be very important as shown by the fact that each computer sits on its own VLAN. Maybe they should consider using something like wireless tokens that lock the workstation if the token is too far away (e.g. [http://www.gkchain.com](http://www.gkchain.com)).

I've also worked in companies where lots of doors require a key card, which also unlocks the computer (by means of a card reader at the workstation). So if you leave the room, you take the card with you anyway and the computer gets locked automatically.

<comment><USER6> back in 2006ish I used bluetooth proximity of my Mac running 10.4 and a Sony Ericsson cellphone to auto-lock my machine. It'd kick in around 10 metres away, which was about the size of my team's area. Quite handy, but the feature was removed.

<comment><USER7> Having bluetooth enabled on your cellphone might ultimately be the method used to crack in to your network though .. so there's a tradeoff of security in such a scenario.

<comment><USER8> How can Bluetooth be used as a vector?

<comment><USER9> HID spoofing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is cool and it's one of my favourite types of projects - where you have to hack your way through security to pull off a prank. However, I think it would be better and more impressive if the author limited the collateral damage. Spawnkilling other programs _is_ an effective way of protection, but I think it disturbs people too much by interfering with normal (for a technical person) computer use.

Interestingly, the author pretty much delivered half of a Malware Writer 101 here. I had to deal with methods like these when removing crap from non-tech computer users more time than I would like.

</comment><comment><USER11> The CTO of a company I worked for had a solution for this problem that, while crass, was effective.

Any time he saw an unlocked and unattended workstation he would set the home page of the browser to a hard core porn site.

Then later after the person was back at the desk he would claim to need to check on something real quick. He'd fire up the web browser, and up comes the porn site.

Then he'd pretend to be all pissed off and start yelling at the person for browsing porn at work.

Eventually, he'd explain what happened and made his point.

<comment><USER12> This could, I think, be classified as sexual harassment. At least in Sweden ("sexuellt ofredande") where I live.

If my boss did that, I'd probably quit. So yeah, I guess it's "effective".

<comment><USER11> Most definitely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you want to get employees to lock their workstations, make it a policy and fire the ones who repeatedly break it. If you have to get their attention via childish pranks it's a waste of everyones time.

Also, the IT provider has put a lot effort into security for a reason. The second any employee starts shell coding of any type, it becomes a risk to the company. Management, as always, is blind to this and is probably why they rewarded the author. What they should have done is fire the person for breaching the company's User Access policy. (You do have one, right?)

It may be the employees lunch hour, but it's not their right to abuse company property.

<comment><USER10> > _the IT provider has put a lot effort into security for a reason_

It really depends. All too often the reason for various restrictions IT set up is to limit their own workload. It sometimes goes to the point of making everyone else's work harder. It's especially irritating in schools and universities, where I could swear IT departments often live by the idea of "if we make a system X completely unusable, nobody will use it, so we won't have people breaking things".

<comment><USER13> I can safely say that it's never to limit our own workload. Considering we'd get paid less if we had nothing to do, it would be pretty dumb to work towards that goal. It's to save the company from going bankrupt with explosive costs of maintaining infrastructure in a hostile environment.

Any and all restrictions are there to prevent risk, to both data security and operational costs. There's nothing worse than allowing a user to do as they please because as Bruce Schneier once said, "A user will choose dancing pigs over security every time."

This is why we work with management to show them the costs of allowing users the ability to roam free. Management makes the decisions, IT implement it.

Security is hard. It is highly invasive to usability. It's not your IT department's fault, it's actually yours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Posting this using a throwaway as I don't want to be associated with this one.

I did a demonstrator a couple of years ago of why we should be using 2FA for everything. We added a single binary to the post-build event in Visual Studio and checked it and the binary into the VCS. The binary grabbed the person who did the build's Chrome password database and used powershell to POST it to a private address. Then we chucked it through some shareware that reads the file and mailed the password back to the engineer we were demonstrating it to.

It's pretty easy to backdoor a machine without even having console access.

Be careful people.

</comment><comment><USER15> At one place I worked we had a team agreement that it was ok to do _small_ pranks to people who left machines unlocked.

Often small changes can have huge benefits, the smallest effective security hack I can remember was a one word change:

We changed "last person to leave for x activates lock" to "first person to leave for x activates lock".

</comment><comment><USER16> Not persistent as babadook but in similar pranking fashion for Linux:

[https://github.com/Snaipe/confloose](https://github.com/Snaipe/confloose)

[https://github.com/GreedLabs/Zloose](https://github.com/GreedLabs/Zloose)

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe a dumb question: who exactly is locking your desktop supposed to protect against? Do some offices have untrusted people running around with access to workstations?

I can see the necessity of locking when you go home, so the maintenance staff does not have access, but presumably this happened during the day.

<comment><USER10> Rouge employees happen. Or an attacker may be posing as cleaning staff (in my company we have cleaning during business hours, and every few days we all leave our room while the cleaning lady vacuums).

But primarily, it's not about distrust towards your cow-orkers - it's because not locking your workstation leaves you (and the company) vulnerable to external attackers that made their way to the office via acting confident. Social engineering is extremely effective and quite easy to perform, if you can keep your cool.

<comment><USER18> Cleaners seem like a huge way in. They often come at night and have unrestricted access. What's stopping them from keylogging or worse? How tight of security can the cleaning crew even run? It's not like you're paying a ton extra to vet folks, and it can't be that desirable a job.

<comment><USER10> Indeed. Add to that the fact that many cleaning companies employs their crews as "contractors", pay them almost nothing and treat them like human trash (ditto for security personel in relatively safe areas), and you have a perfect attack vector - it won't be hard to find someone who will plug that little stick behind a computer in exchange for some cash and you being nice to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I quite enjoyed the technical solution, but I think the author is a bit of a dick. And I have to ask myself why group policy wasn't setup to lock automatically after 10-15 minutes of inactivity?

</comment><comment><USER20> Am I missing something or is this pretty much like stealing a car that was unlocked with the keys left in it?

<comment><USER21> As far as car analogies go, this is not too far off the mark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Everybody would laugh about it but still wasn't giving the needed outcome

It's scary how many people don't take their machine's (or their network) security seriously.

I used to run reverse shells on machines that my coworkers left unlocked (easier as our network is more relaxed) - after launching annoying things they got the point very quickly and now nobody leaves their machines unlocked.</comment>


Leap Motion: Three Dimensional Gesture Control - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428350/the-most-important-new-technology-since-the/

<comment><USER2> We've talked about this quite a lot here on HN[1, 2, 3, 4]. It is a cool technology nonetheless.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4002418>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4029524>

[3] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4008520>

[4] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4007083>

<comment><USER3> All of those are to leapmotion.com, though. It's exciting to see a third party saying, "yes, it really is that good."

Because if this really is that good, and that cheap, they've crossed a fundamental line. We're looking at a hardware accessory that has a good chance of being as ubiquitous, and maybe even as revolutionary, as the mouse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, despite having spend some time surfing the web, mostly right after the device was announced, I still don't know how the Leap Motion works. I realize, that this is proprietary technology so it might be simply unknown. Still, from a magazine like TR I would expect to hear at least an educated guesses.

They link to a different article [1] which apparently got a demo from one of the founders. They claim, that _the Leap uses VGA camera sensors_ but then they talk about a _force field_ \- whatever that is supposed to mean in this context. _[...] Leap's device tracks all movement inside its force field [...]_

Earlier, I heard some crude speculations about electro magnetic sensing and a mathematical breakthrough, that lead to the foundation of the company. But I have no idea what to think of them. A quick search on google scholar about the the two founders didn't reveal anything so far, either.

There is a Quora thread [2] on the topic, where someone, without any further comment linked to a 2012 Microsoft Research paper [3] with the title _SoundWave: Using the Doppler Effect to Sense Gestures_.

My assumption would have been, that they do indeed use optical cameras only. By using a bunch of them, combined with different angles and positions as well as a very limited workspace, they are able to increase the accuracy when compared to the Kinect. Do we have any hint on whether or not they project an infrared grid like the Kinect does?

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/26/3118592/leap-motion- gestur...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/26/3118592/leap-motion-gesture- controls) [2] [http://www.quora.com/Leap-Motion/Does-the-Leap-product- work-...](http://www.quora.com/Leap-Motion/Does-the-Leap-product-work-as- advertised) [3] [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/redmond/groups/cue/pu...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/redmond/groups/cue/publications/guptasoundwavechi2012.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm still waiting for the kind of interfaces used in Ironman 2: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KPhqy7ZwHU>

<comment><USER6> Then you will like this likely component of such a system: <http://www.ultrasonic-audio.com/products/syntact.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks cool; has high resolution but what about accuracy? I didn't actually see him touch anything in particular, just wave around and create lots of swoops. Can you select an individual item from one of those swarms?

Also, exhausting. Waving your arms all day, just to scroll. Still its coarse motor control instead of fine motor, which is less tedious.

<comment><USER3> _Also, exhausting. Waving your arms all day, just to scroll. Still its coarse motor control instead of fine motor, which is less tedious._

Yeah, I'd be shocked if this replaces the scroll wheel. I can see a few ways it might complement existing input devices, though. One is for maybe a dozen intuitive, system-wide shortcuts. Like "if I stick out two fingers and twitch to the right within six inches of the screen, and I'm not in a touch-enabled app, switch to the next song." (This takes too long to say -- try doing it.) Or, "if I make the classic 'stop' hand gesture within six inches of the screen, stop playing music." This may not sound like much, but imagine a random non-geeky user is playing music in the background and gets a phone call and wants to pause. I bet 25% or less of users use a system-wide shortcut for that. I bet 75% or more would intuitively remember and use the "stop" gesture if you showed it to them once.

A second use case is collaboration. Someone comes into my office and I turn my screen around and show them a map of a given facility we're working on. (This happens a couple times a week.) They want to zoom out a little and see what's to the west of the facility. Instead of asking me to do that, they just reach in and do it with gestures. They don't think about it, it just works.

The third use case is all those things we do with our hands in real life that there's no analog for on the computer. Like, say, oil painting. Or conducting. Or playing rock-paper-scissors. Or air guitar. Or juggling. Or ping pong. There are a million things we do that involve _holding something in the air and using it to cause some effect on the world_ , with little or no direct physical feedback. There are a million more that we haven't thought of yet because they're not physically possible (but they will be virtually possible).

I'm pretty excited about this.

<comment><USER8> I think that 3D modeling is where this will shine. Imagine something like SketchUp with gestures. Manipulating 3D objects with a mouse is very tedious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be neat for tech like this to "revolutionize" TV remotes. TV:s continue to grow more and more complex, and it's also something you interact with semi-seldom, in bursts, as opposed to computers (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#.22Gorilla_arm.22>).

</comment><comment><USER10> I agree with others who are saying that waving your arm can quickly become tiring, but maybe you could point this device on a table so you could rest your hand on the table (or surface of the laptop) like using a mouse and only your index finger would be in the air. I think that way it would be less tiring.

</comment><comment><USER11> This should replace trackpads. As, in every laptop out there.</comment>


HN commenting broken with Chrome 56 - <AUTHOR> Attempts to comment on HN just hang. The console shows "Form submission canceled because the form is not connected" from jquery. This stackoverflow answer says that Chrome 56 is now enforcing a part of the html spec that requires forms to be added to the document:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42053775/getting-error-form-submission-canceled-because-the-form-is-not-connected
Please fix :-) <comment><USER2> For this kind of comments, it's better to email the mods directly firstname.lastname@example.com They usually reply soon by mail. Sometimes threads like this are not noticed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems to be working for me with Chrome 56.0.2924.87 for Windows.</comment>