In Defense of Free Software: My Case Against Lenovo in Mexico - <AUTHOR> https://globalvoices.org/2016/06/16/in-defense-of-free-software-my-case-against-lenovo-in-mexico/ <comment><USER2> There's a collective of quixotic Mexican software developers and users that is quite active. I wonder why is it that FSF's philosophy with its exhortation to viciously defend freedom resonates so well in some parts of Mexico. It was those groups, which congregate on the Hackmitin[1], Hacklab Autónomo[2] and Rancho Electrónico[3] that helped Jacobo Nájera with his legal proceedings against Secure Boot.

I went a couple of times to the Hacklab. It's an interesting place. At the time, it looked like they were squatting in an abandoned building and they looked like Hollywood hacker stereotypes. If it weren't for the proliferation of hardware with Debian and Trisquel logos, their appearance make you would think these were just ordinary anarchist punks. In a way, that's what they are, except they are _techno_ anarchist punks, and obviously not completely anarchist as they know how to work with the legal system. They were _very_ left-leaning, distrustful of all corporations, completely aligned with FSF philosophy; radical, feminist, and fiercely protective of their rights.

I rather miss that scene. I haven't found quite something like it here in Canada.

I hope Nájera manages to get somewhere, but it seems like a hopeless fight against MSFT, the one that is really ensuring that installing the OS of your choice is impossible. The whole "security" thing is a sideshow; the real goal here with "Secure" Boot is to make it harder to install unlicensed copies of Windows.

\---

[1] [http://hackmitin.espora.org/](http://hackmitin.espora.org/)

("mitin" in Spanish is from English "meeting" but has left-leaning political connotations such as protests and marches.)

[2] [http://hacklab.espora.org/](http://hacklab.espora.org/)

[3] [http://ranchoelectronico.org/](http://ranchoelectronico.org/)

<comment><USER3> > The whole "security" thing is a sideshow; the real goal here with "Secure" > Boot is to make it harder to install unlicensed copies of Windows.

How does that make sense? The Lenovo laptop in question, like most non-Apple PCs sold in the West, came with a licensed copy of some version of Windows; and Microsoft's strategy lately has been to offer (almost coerce) free OS upgrades, apparently valuing users being up-to-date over the revenue it could gain from the meager fraction of users who'd pay for upgrades. So there's little reason for users to ever install pirated copies of Windows on such devices, or for Microsoft to care if they do (in order to downgrade or whatever).

In China and elsewhere the situation is different, but since the manufacturers are "in on" the piracy, there is no reason they'd enable any firmware features that could hinder users from installing pirated Windows; and even if a future version of Windows _requires_ Secure Boot, that would just be patched out along with the activation checks. (That is, if China ever gets off Windows XP!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you can't disable "secure boot" \- you should return that piece of lock-in trash and request a refund.

Lenovo are also infamous for refusing the refund the Windows tax (i.e. when you want refund the price of Windows that came with computer pre-installed, because you don't want to use it). Only taking them to court can help.

</comment><comment> Const-me I'm not defending Lenovo, I think they broke the law here and should fix their UEFI firmware.

However, when you throw away your OEM windows, you're essentially throwing away money.

There're good laptops that come with Linux or FreeDos preinstalled.

They mostly targeted towards enterprise market (who get their Windows through volume licensing). But I find it's a good thing: besides OS choice I usually get upgradability, reliability, and reasonable prices (IMO companies are better at tracking their expenses). For example, take a look at HP ProBook series: they are good, include wide range of specs, and if you want to, you can get one without Windows.

<comment><USER5> > However, when you throw away your OEM windows, you're essentially throwing > away money.

Can you actually get these *nix laptops for cheaper than their Windows equivalents? I personally consider Windows these days to be just one more piece of bloatware to remove, but I never got the impression that it added much to the bottom line cost.

<comment> Const-me Those aren't exactly *nix laptops, those are enterprise-targeted laptops without an OS.

And yes, models without Windows are typically cheaper, sometimes significantly.

Consider ProBook 450 G3 X0P36ES versus T6Q45ET. They both have i5-6200U, 4GB RAM, matte 15" FullHD, Intel GPU. The former has FreeDOS preinstalled and costs €540, the latter includes Windows 7 Professional and costs €750.

<comment><USER6> I am from Brazil. When I was looking for a laptop in 2013, most non windows laptops, even when compared to identical models that had windows, were usually 130usd more expensive...

I bought then an ASUS n46vm with win8, hoping to remove it and install linux... never figured how to boot any os installer, even after disabling secureboot even memtest86 refused to boot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I applaud the OP for pursuing this so far. I'd probably just have returned the device, demanded my money back and bought something else.

</comment><comment><USER8> What is Lenovo's incentive for DRM'ing their bootloader?

<comment><USER9> Secure Boot is designed to prevent malware from tampering with the BIOS by verifying bootloader (and sometimes kernel-mode driver) signatures.

In this case, it looks like Lenovo either accidentally or intentionally borked the implementation of Secure Boot, because you are supposed to be able to turn it off when using non-Microsoft operating systems.

FWIW, I believe Fedora supports Secure Boot by signing a static bootloader ("shim") that loads GRUB after checking its signature[0].

[0] [http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12368.html](http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12368.html)

<comment><USER10> > loads GRUB

As your link mentions, that loader only loads signed kernels (with signed modules).

edit:

> designed to prevent malware

That's the official story. Anybody familiar with Microsoft's history knows they have been trying to lock down the wintel platform for a long time. Creating a "Trusted Computing" environment specifically for DRM purposes has been a goal since "Palladium".

<comment><USER11> I thought twice about responding to this.

I worked on Palladium from very early days in 2002 through renaming to NGSCB and the eventual shutdown/transition of the project to ship BitLocker in Vista

The team never saw DRM as being an interesting use case. Remember that the Darknet paper [1] was written by the Palladium architects and product manager. The team fully understood that DRM wasn't an effective use of a secure computing environment.

The scenarios that we were interested in were more like credential management, or being able to run remote sessions from a trusted space within an otherwise untrusted machine, etc.

<comment><USER10> Interesting; I stand corrected. Thank you for responding!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google seems to turn up numerous people having no trouble disabling Secure Boot and installing Linux on that model computer. I wonder if the problem is confined to particular sub-models or particular revisions of the BIOS?

<comment><USER6> I had a asus n46vm with the buggy behavior... but found noone else complaining about it on Google.

Since it also had other quirks (usb 3.0 port never worked) it might be a hardware defect interacting with the boot process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The appropriate course of action is to get a refund for the defective goods and move on with your life.</comment>


Why Linux's biggest ever kernel release is no big deal - <AUTHOR> https://www.linux.com/news/why-linuxs-biggest-ever-kernel-release-is-really-no-big-deal/ <comment><USER2> It's a bit ironic that the author works for VMWare, since VMWare Workstation is completely unusable[0] with Linux 5.8 with no ETA to fix in sight.

[0]: [https://communities.vmware.com/thread/638457](https://communities.vmware.com/thread/638457)

<comment><USER3> The innovation coming from big name players in the VM space, namely VMware and Parallels, is all but non-existent. It's no surprise they were caught off guard when the requirements to update their product to a new OS version was anything other than replacing a couple lines of version number text.</comment></comment>


I Hate Kanban… - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/i-hate-kanban-2c3abb235915 <comment><AUTHOR> Visualizing work makes it transparent. But that causes problems in itself. The author asks:

> how can we create environments that are safe enough to make continuous > improvement possible?</comment>


Ask HN: Favorite Daily Tech Equipment? - <AUTHOR> Last year I bought a new headset - the Arctis Pro Wireless and it's been one of the best purchases in a long time - especially since I end up being on a lot of calls and I cannot sit still to save my life. <comment><USER2> I'm going to say my Plantronics RIG 800HD, they are light and sound reasonable, and they keep a charge forever.

Other than that, my Logitech G3 on which I've replaced the rightclick switch once and leftclick twice.

If I can only pick 3, then my WASD keyboard with red cherries, very happy with this and I type a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been dying for some keyboard recommendations. I'm using a corsair w/ blue keys but I feel like the activation force is becoming a bit too much for everyday continual use (my opinion).

<comment><USER2> I was really happy with my Filco Majestouch with blue cherries, loved the clickiness, it was a bit tough though, but I used it until I couldn't anymore due to bouncing (bad firmware, they had forgot that switches start bouncing a bit more with wear)..

The red switches are non-clicky, they activate somewhere around the lower half of the travel, they are super sensitive which takes some getting used to after being used to being able to more or less rest your hands on the keys without them moving :P I usually press them fully down anyway and that feels nice and tactile.. WASD also offers to install rubber dampeners on every key, I've not tried that and can't say if I'd prefer it.

<comment><USER3> I have a Majestouch with Brown switches, I love it to death, it's the best keyboard I've ever touched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My phone A stand. It makes mobile testing nicer and it's nice have a dedicated place on the desk for the phone</comment>


Ask HN: Am I the only one who keeps returning Apple's EarPods? - <AUTHOR> Hey guys,
Sorry for the silly question but I go to Apple every two months on average (November--January--yesterday) to replace my EarPods.
Every time it's the same issue: the remote starts accidentally pausing/playing music or activating Siri. The culprit ends up being the connection near the jack but every time I am assured by Apple employees that nobody ever goes back to them this often to replace their headphones.
I don't know if they assume I am running a scam or something but am I really the only one who has such a poor experience with the EarPods?
I'd be happy to upgrade to something more sturdier if my experience is unique but I am curious if it actually is... <comment><USER2> I've had the same pair for almost two years now and I use them almost every day. I carry them around in my pocket and throw them wherever. I've never had a problem. But I'm also extra careful about not crushing them or really tangling up the wires. Before I put them away, I full extend them out and then fold them up in halves until they get to the size I need to store them. They've kept up very well this way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you--that's helpful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've never had a problem. Probably you have some special use case that puts extra strain on the weakest link in the cord. Don't worry about it, you are the person warranty replacement is meant to protect.

Occams Razor tells me the Ear Pods are well made, given that Apple replaces them for free during the warranty period, and if you are nice to Apple Store personnel sometimes even out of warranty.

I have lots of criticisms of Apple, esp. the long delays in refreshing the Mac lineup. But of all their flaws, not knowing their costs ain't one of them (esp. with Tim Cook in charge), and so is not fixing them when it becomes a problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have the same issue; bought about three EarPods over the past three years!

Now, first of all, I'm not sure if I'd have been better off with other options. Most of my friends with EarPods seem to be fine with theirs, so there's something 'off' about how I use them. On the other hand, multiple friends have had to buy new MagSafe adapters while I've never had to, so it's not just that I'm rough with all my stuff.

Secondly, I went ahead and bought AirPods despite the fact that for me it's a huge price to pay for audio thingies. In hindsight, they're the best piece of technology I bought since my iPad 2. The main downside is not having the forward/backward buttons, but for me the advantages _vastly_ outweigh the disadvantages.

Third, if you're like me there's a decent change wireless might solve your problem. I have no clue if the AirPods are actually worth the price, but I've heard very good things about the Anker Sports thingies, which are also bluetooth. Might want to give those a try!

By all means email me if you have any AirPod-specific questions. For what they cost me I did a ridiculous amount of research before buying them (although I do that kind of stuff for fun, so maybe the price didn't play much of a role).

</comment><comment><USER5> I've had every pair of EarPods I've ever used break in some form. Either issues with the remote, or the non-dominant ear losing sound (% of volume, or entirely). This has probably happened to 5+ pairs I've had from various Apple devices.

I just use them until they break, then use something else.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have the same issue in the same timeline. Sometimes the sound goes out on one side before the controller stops working. I tend to plug and unplug the headphones frequently which I think is the culprit.

</comment><comment><USER7> So you have the same issue with a product over and over again and you still stick to it? Gosh, the dedication to a brand in some people..

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point but I do get them replaced for free since my iPhone is still in warranty. If I have to pay again, I will probably change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> ~10 years, every 3 to 6 months. Longest is 9 months. Shortest is 3 weeks.

The cable starts to fail underneath the strain relief boot. It unwinds, individual strands of copper start to break, and it shorts out. The play/pause (or ending a call) is the cable shorting causing the phone to interpret that command.

It happens most to people who walk with a device in their front pocket while listening to music. This accelerates the rate of failure of the cable underneath the strain relief boot.

I even brought it up at WWDC. Twice. Still the same boot after a decade. My AirPods show up in 4-5 weeks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! Music in the front pocket. Nailed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, buy a set of NICE headphones or earbuds where the cable is replaceable rather than integrated.

Your going to get better sound quality, a better cable and be happier with the product in the long run.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I didn't know this was a thing. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I dont have to return mine but I have to buy new ones very often. My rabbit (Boots) finds them tasty and ruins them with only a single nibble. This alone makes me consider getting the AirPods, but reviews seem to state that the audio quality is not much improved, so i'll wait.

</comment><comment><USER11> If a product breaks once, it could be the product, if it breaks multiple times - you might want to rule out something you are doing that could be breaking it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think I'm starting to see the same problem with a pair of mine. Once I started keeping track it hasn't happened again though…

</comment><comment><USER13> I used to have the same problem, I would wrap mine around the phone all the time. Get AirPods, you'll never go back.

</comment><comment><USER14> Never had an issue, but the AirPods are an awesome upgrade. You might want to try them out.</comment>


The Senate will move next week on comprehensive high-skill immigration reform - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/us/2013/01/25/the-senate-will-move-next-week-on-comprehensive-high-skill-immigration-reform/ <comment><USER2> The one thing that's really huge in this proposition is that it would allow spouses of H1B visa holders to work in the US. The fact they cannot do it is a particularly cruel aspect of the current immigration system in the US.

We moved to the Bay Area when I got a job at Google a year and a couple of months ago. We really like it in California: my job is super interesting, the weather is nice, and the people are amazing. I cannot imagine any place in the world where I could have a bigger impact being a programmer. However, going back to Europe is a topic of our everyday conversations. Why?

My wife is one of the smartest people I know. She is the webdesigner you would love to work with (you know, those who can actually code their stuff in a way that works with all browsers, use source control, and are not afraid of using the command line). She worked as a project manager and her team loved her. She has interesting things to say about startups, business models, and Goedel's theorem. She used to have a career back in Europe, but in the US she's almost a non-person. She can live here, yes, she can drive a car, but she doesn't even have her own SSN. She cannot do any productive work, and getting an H1 visa if you are not a software engineer is extremely hard (we had this conversation with a couple of immigration lawyers).

I have my dream job, but at the same time I cannot help the feeling that I am ruining my wife's life.

<comment><USER3> I remember that the wife of a former collegue of mine managed to get a job as a school teacher while he was still under h1b. I can't remember what kind of authorization she received, though; maybe she was granted her own h1b? Have you spoken to an attorney about this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, while a step in the right direction, it definitely does not answer most serious questions. The points that stand out for me:

* High bureaucracy levels while dealing with it, which means cost, which means most small companies won't do it.

* You can't just quit your job and live in the US for a while, while looking for another one (or not). IT salaries make it absolutely possible to take a year off if you feel like it.

* No cleaning of the path to greencard. It's possible, especially when you come from a country with a large number of applicants, like India, that you won't receive a greencard before your second visa expires and you have to go back "home" for a year.

* Just like above, the limit of 2 applications.

Overall a very mellow step, which does not make me any more inclined to come and work in the states. Greetings from the beautiful city of Cape Town, where immigration procedures took me a few days and 60 euros.

Cheers, fijal

<comment><USER5> The H1B is a temporary work visa. It's not a "sit around for a year and find yourself" visa, nor is it a "get on the path to citizenship" visa.

If you want to expand those visas or reallocate them, advocate for it. I'm hugely in favor of eliminating nepotism based immigration (what we have now) and replacing it with something favoring high skilled individuals [1].

But that doesn't mean there isn't a place for temporary work visas.

[1] This is, however, a political non-starter. Bush's amnesty bill was killed because someone slipped this in as a poison pill.

<comment><USER6> The article title claims "comprehensive high-skill immigration reform".

As a highly-skilled South African (which, interestingly enough, appears to be where parent ultimately decided to emigrate), the effort, duration and uncertainty involved in acquiring US citizenship makes it a non-starter option for me.

I'm better off remaining in South Africa where I don't have to work non-stop for years and years unless I want to risk being deported, don't have to play a different game in the job market, can stop working at any time to go full speed on my startup, etc.

Eventually I hope to be successful enough that emigration through business and wealth is a simpler and more direct option. Of course by then I may very well have a family and other commitments that again make emigration a non-option.

Assuming I'm the sort of person this reform is meant to entice into the USA (a country I very much admire), it certainly isn't comprehensive, which appears to be parent's point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Allow me to ruin my karma...

Maybe we could focus on retraining non-technical people to fill tech jobs. Or people with outdated skills, and clamp down on age discrimination. There's a lack of programmers and an abundance of food-service/sales workers. We should re-work high school in the US to focus on vocational work, such as programming or other skills such as industrial electrical work. And as we've just renewed unemployment benefits, doesn't this give government leverage to force people to learn things?

We tell America that with new automation and technology comes the need to educate yourselves for the new jobs. Now we're going to add unlimited temporary workers to compete for these new jobs?

But that's not the quick fix corporate America is lobbying for. They want masters/php grads to come in and be essentially locked in to working for them for at best an average salary. If we refuse to educate our public in useful skills, then I'll take unlimited H1Bs, as I'd rather have a vibrant work force in our country than a scattered remote one and see innovation and taxes go elsewhere.

Granted, I'm all for comprehensive immigration reform. Let's do it comprehensively and let in a steady stream of people to fill all levels and variety of jobs. Let's let people live the American Dream and let them choose jobs or quit jobs or strike out on their own. That's what we're not giving H1B holders. And that's the competition we're giving ourselves.

<comment><USER4> I have no idea about the work areas where I don't happen to work. Maybe retraining people for doing PHP stuff is actually a very good idea. Some company (I lost the link) recently posted "$5000 for a month-long training and we guarantee you'll get a $60k job offer or your money back" for RoR.

However, there is a whole bunch of people who work in niche professions. I work in VMs. There is maybe a 100 people (maybe 200) who are even remotely in the area of dynamic language VMs. It takes years (sometimes tens of years) to be highly skilled and be able to deliver what some companies want. Right now, H1B is really the only viable option for such people to go to states and has a whole bunch of strange requirements, that should not apply. Do you really suggest a McDonalds-worker-trained-IT-professional can be competitive in such area?

On the other hand, I can assure you that visa costs outweight importing people for average salary. It's really about shortage of skills (or shortage of good immigration policies) that drives those efforts, not the will to employ people for less-than-average money.

<comment><USER8> >>Do you really suggest a McDonalds-worker-trained-IT-professional can be competitive in such area?

I think there probably is a pool of US developers doing more mundane work that have the capacity and skills to do the type of work you do. And I think there are some baristas that could do what most HN readers think of as mundane IT work.

<comment><USER4> Great. So what's wrong? Is the job market rigged? Do you suggest niche specialists get underpaid?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Contrary to popular belief, H1B is not about money. It is more about power and control. Businesses want to be able to bill someone out at 300 or 400 dollars per hour and know the person can't quit or start their own business. Whether or not that person is paid 25, 50, or 75 per hour is not as important as keeping that person working long hours for the company for years.

<comment><USER10> Er, how would paying someone 25/hr pass the required market rate salary component of the H1B application? There is now a list of H1B jobs an the average pay which the petitioner must prove they are paying above.

Also, how does a person become trapped working 'long hours' for the same company 'for years' when there is a porting aspect of the H1B where the visa- holder may port the visa to another employer after 6 months. If they don't wish to work for that employer, or another can provide them with a better option then they are free to port.

Sorry, but respectfully your comment is utter bullshit.

<comment><USER4> Porting is a mess. For starters, the list of employers willing to deal with your visa is limited (most startups are too small and moving too fast). Second, you can't quite your job, without having secured a visa transfer first. I mean of course you can but you must leave the country immediately (looking for job after quitting and before leaving the country is technically a violation of the law). While not 100% preventing moving between companies, it definitely puts higher pressure on job security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Comprehensive my ass. Comprehensive reform is a point based system with no caps.

It is also what is required to end the current recession.

<comment><USER12> In what way is the recession caused or exacerbated by a _lack_ of workers?

<comment><USER13> It's not, but high-skill immigration would certainly give the economy a boost. This boost to the economy would be good for everybody: lowering unemployment and increasing aggregate demand. And technically the US isn't even in a recession right now -- although the economy is still depressed.

<comment><USER5> _...lowering unemployment and increasing aggregate demand._

It's certainly true that importing new employed people will increase the denominator in the unemployment rate will reduce unemployment, but that doesn't help any human.

I believe you are making the fallacy of reasoning from a composition change. Amusingly, one of the better explanations of this I've found is at OpenBorders: <http://openborders.info/compositional-effects/>

<comment><USER13> No, those high skilled (and therefore high earning) immigrants use their salary to buy stuff so aggregate demand increases so unemployment decreases. I'm not playing compositional games here.

<comment><USER5> They also produce a bunch of stuff, thereby increasing aggregate supply commensurately. Since they are high skilled, they likely increase AS more than AD, since high skilled individuals tend to produce more than they consume.

<comment><USER13> Yes, high skilled people produce more than they consume but that's of course a good thing.

Look at it from the other way around. What would happen to the economy if 50% of high skilled people moved to a different country? It would be disastrous for the country. So AS and AD go down as a direct consequence of those people leaving, but AD will also go down as a consequence of the resulting recession/depression. Importing high skilled people has the opposite effect.

So yes, high skilled workers add to AS and to AD, and the ratio of AS to AD won't change much because of that. But the economy will still get a boost (another increase in AD).

<comment><USER5> I'm not a Keynesian, so I don't make arguments about AS/AD except in the context of "here is what the Keynesians believe".

Looking at it the other way, if 50% of high skilled people moved to a different country, it would be a disaster. I just don't think it would be a Keynesian disaster. If anything, AD should hold constant while AS dropped, leading to an increase in employment.

Note that I'm disputing your reasoning, not your conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This isn't "comprehensive" if it is "high-skill".

Comprehensive is DC code for "includes illegals currently in the US, low-skill immigrants from central/south america, etc." High skill is in the "etc." that everyone supports, but which was being held hostage to deal with the politically-contentious other groups (which are 100x the size)

</comment><comment><USER15> \+ wife those on H1B can work: currently regulations successful discouraged many europeans and let to abuses in other countries: <http://sepiamutiny.com/blog/2004/10/20/dangers_of_the/>

\+ cap increase for H1B

\+ easier green cards for US STEM students

\- easier for established companies, not startups and smaller ones

\- still fails for many of this founders: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/10/startup-act-2-0-great- for-f...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/10/startup-act-2-0-great-for-foreign- graduate-students-but-not-foreign-tech-entrepreneurs/)

</comment><comment><USER16> While this is a step, it's in the wrong direction.

Companies should focus on finding quality US personnel first.

Let's look at how the process works. A company advertises, in this case I chose to use Monster and looked for "SQL 2012" and found a company that's looking for someone with 5 years experience using SQL Server 2008. That "requirement" is impossible, so HR and management will bypass all applicants since they're "not qualified". The next company down wanted 2 years of SQL Server 2012. Again, an impossibility.

The companies will whine to politicians that they can't find anyone that meets their requirements. The politicians will do some grandstanding about how quality tech personnel are scarce and next will be the flood of personnel driving down salaries even worse than they already are. Developer salaries have been stagnant since the dotcom bust 10 years ago.

The best solution is eliminate H1B and utilize the people who are unemployed.

</comment><comment><USER17> I hope it's more comprehensive than the filibuster "reform" they've just passed.

</comment><comment><USER18> How this will impact US programming job market?

<comment><USER19> Make it even harder for companies to find good programmers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Prepare to get fucked!</comment>


Notice of security breach on Ubuntu Forums - <AUTHOR> https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/07/15/notice-of-security-breach-on-ubuntu-forums/ <comment><USER2> I like the direct communication style of this document.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, if only all such disclosures were so transparent.

I suppose transparency ends up being in reverse proportion to perceived liability, or some approximation thereof. This seems rather minor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Although they obviously failed in their security efforts, I think, they did a good job in communicating the incident. No beating around the bush.

</comment><comment><USER5>
      They used this access to download portions of the 'user' table which contained
      usernames, email addresses and IPs for 2 million users. No active passwords were
      accessed; the passwords stored in this table were random strings as the Ubuntu Forums
      rely on Ubuntu Single Sign On for logins. The attacker did download these random
      strings (which were hashed and salted).

Is that a session token they are talking about? What part of the OpenID protocol would involve saving a so-called "password" in the users table which is really just a "random string", but which was also hashed and salted?

Ubuntuforums does use Ubuntu One for SSO, there should be no "passwords" at all in the table, so I'm not quite sure what to make of that paragraph. Typically session tokens are not salted and hashed, although you can actually do that do avoid having to revoke them after a breach.

<comment><USER6> It's likely leftover schema from when a password was used instead of the SSO. I've seen this when a system transitioned to SSO that is based on another forum technology that also supports password. Just filled the regular password fields with garbage basically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not another one? Didn't they get p0wned a few years ago?

<comment><USER8> yep. [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/21/ubuntu_forums_breach...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/21/ubuntu_forums_breached_18_passwords_pinched/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Hardening

> We've installed ModSecurity, a Web Application Firewall, to help prevent > > similar attacks in the future.

> We've improved our monitoring of vBulletin to ensure that security patches > are applied promptly.

What? They _just_ added a firewall in their forum? What were they thinking all these years then? Either none of their engineers thought about adding an extra layer of security to this website during all these years, or the chain of command in this company is so strict that any suggestion from their engineers is dismissed until a security breach is detected. What a shame, first Linux Mint, and now these guys.

<comment><USER10> A "WAF" like modSecurity is not the same as a network packet firewall. And a WAF might contain lots of heuristics and overly strict rules that might break web applications in subtle ways.

<comment><USER9> What are you talking about? I am saying that they added ModSecurity just now, why didn't they added it years ago? Whether a WAF will affect some features in their forum has nothing to do with my comment that was intended as a critic for the bad timing of their sysadmins. Why add ModSecurity now "after" the breach and not before? Wasn't it obvious that someone would try to hack their forum?

Are you just saying that my critic makes no sense?

<comment><USER10> Sorry, I thought you assumed they were talking about a "normal firewall" missing since the start. Installing a WAF isn't always standard procedure for LAMP stacks as far as I know, so I wouldn't fault them for not doing that initially. Obviously they have changed their minds now :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hong Kong protests: Authorities to announce face mask ban - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49918889 <comment><USER2> Gee I wonder if this is any reason for the ban?

[https://thenextweb.com/security/2019/09/30/chinas- new-500-me...](https://thenextweb.com/security/2019/09/30/chinas- new-500-megapixel-super-camera-can-instantly-recognize-you-in-a-crowd/)</comment>


Steam Machines – Prototype Details - <AUTHOR> http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse#announcements/detail/2145128928746175450 <comment><USER2> I can't wait to hear more about how they'll lessen the "fragmentation" confusion with different Steam Machines. Perhaps they'll do a tier system like "Steam Machine Bronze / Silver / Gold / Platinum" and then games can be rated "Gold+" or something.

Or maybe they'll have a minimum spec that gets bumped every 2 years, so a game can say "runs on all Steam Machines (2014+)".

But it's clear there's going to have to be _some_ way of "tranching" the different hardware levels, because nothing will kill this idea faster than a general public who's heard that you can never be quite sure if a game you buy will run on your particular Steam Machine.

But then I realize something: where do people get Steam games _from_? The Steam store online! I'm pretty sure they'll build in the equivalent of the windows performance score that can be sent to Steam's servers, and they'll simply be able to show you the games that will run best on your machine and hide games that simply won't run at all.

Thoughts? I think that, as with the controller, this is a _really_ important aspect of getting this whole big idea to work.

<comment><USER3> Umm, how is me not even being able to see Half-Life 3 when I visit the Steam store on my Steambox supposed to make me feel better when friends with more powerful PC's and newer Steamboxen can enjoy it just fine?

No. And none of this tier stuff either. The point of the Steamboxen is to kill the windows dependency of games, probably why they are future proofing them so much. They'll last 3-5 years in their present iteration and at that point it will be moot.

<comment><USER2> > Umm, how is me not even being able to see Half-Life 3 when I visit the Steam > store on my Steambox supposed to make me feel better when friends with more > powerful PC's and newer Steamboxen can enjoy it just fine?

OK, you don't have to hide it, but there still needs to be some kind of guide about how games will play on your Steam Machine.

This is not a big deal right now, but what about in, say, 6 years? You have an original Steam Machine and a new game JUST came out. It doesn't run on your Steam Machine because yours doesn't have a Whatsit Quantum Coprocessor. Shouldn't the Steam UI, you know, _let you know that_ before you go about buying and downloading that 30GB game??

And I don't want tiers, either, but Valve did say they'd have something to say about this; I'm simply speculating about what it could be.

<comment><USER4> "..Shouldn't the Steam UI, you know, let you know that before you go about buying and downloading that 30GB game??.." Yeah, wouldn't that be the point? It seams like Steam wants to be a platform, and the point of the steambox would be to own your living room (as well as your computer room).

I would think that the Steam environment will do a lot of your thinking for you. It'll check your hardware, suggest upgrades (since the boxes will evidently be upgradable), etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I initially thought it would be better to go with Nvidia to provide some kind of "competitive advantage" over the AMD-based consoles, but that's going to be hard to do when PC's tend to be unsubsidized, and when the same level of hardware is actually weaker because of the DirectX/OpenGL overlays.

Then, after I saw AMD announcing the Mantle API, I realized, it would be a _perfect match_ for the Steam Machines, to get some of that console-level performance for more or less the same price. John Carmack agrees that Valve+Mantle would be a deadly combination:

[http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-mantle-api-xbox-one- pla...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-mantle-api-xbox-one- playstation-4-john-carmack,24434.html)

Mantle is the _future of gaming machines_. It will not create lock-in, because both Nvidia and Intel will scramble to create something similar, or even compatible with AMD's API (which will be open soon), and what this will lead to eventually is a _reset_ of standardized overlays for GPU hardware, that will support AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and probably even ARM GPU's, but with much lower overhead than DirectX and OpenGL.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/7371/understanding-amds- mantle...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/7371/understanding-amds-mantle-a- lowlevel-graphics-api-for-gcn)

[http://semiaccurate.com/2013/09/30/amds-mantle-biggest- chang...](http://semiaccurate.com/2013/09/30/amds-mantle-biggest-change- gaming-decade/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm actually more interested in the enclosure and its exciting to see that Valve is providing the CAD so that we can effectively fabricate our own. It'd be awesome if they just sold the enclosures and let us put our own hardware in. Nevertheless this is fucking brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am curious about the enclosure they've built to minimize heat and noise coming from the GPU and the 450W PSU.

A couple of years ago I built a small AMD Llano based computer using a small enclosure sold by Mini-Box and an 80W fanless Pico Power Supply also sold on the site.

Case - [http://www.mini-box.com/M350-universal-mini-itx- enclosure](http://www.mini-box.com/M350-universal-mini-itx-enclosure)

PSU - [http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-80](http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-80)

It is much quieter than an Xbox 360, but also can't play any XBox level games on it (I use it as an HTPC). I'd be curious to see what I can do today with the same amount of power using Haswell, some 28nm GPU and SteamOS.

<comment><USER8> Hopefully it's a big advance over most of what's out there. Thermal design on the PC-assembled-from-standard-parts seems to often leave a lot to be desired. Folks like Dell or HP do a little better in their 'workstation' lines, but aside from that, desktop PC thermal design tends to be ignorant of the assembled system as a whole. On top of it, nobody seems to understand that these things should have removable and washable dust filters. It's unrealistic to expect the average user to keep it in a low-dust environment and it's even more unrealistic to expect them to open it up and clean the dust out.

<comment><USER9> I would truly love to see a new form factor appear that's designed for large heatsinks that vent directly to the outside. It's always seemed terribly odd to me that GPUs often consume more power than CPUs, yet have tiny heatsinks and loud blower fans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't even know why I'm interested in this: I have neither the time nor the desire for games any more. The only game I play is DOTA2, and I want to quit it.

<comment><USER11> I've played DOTA2 twice, and I have absolutely no idea of what's going on or how to play. What's the big deal anyway?

<comment><USER12> The learning curve is very steep. I'm still learning how to play it after 1+ years with it. For me, the big deal is that it is a new genre (for me) and I also love that it forces teamwork and strategy with players that play a 'support' role which their sole goal is to help a 'carry' win his lane. Check out highlights of Dendi from Navi in Dota 2 International 2013.

It's basically a game of chess.

<comment><USER10> It's not really a game of chess, it's more like a game of basketball. There's not very much calm, focused thought, but there is skill and strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Link doesn't appear to be pointed at anything relevant? Was it taken down? Link or mirror please? Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER14> Those specs are very high-end (cue someone dismissing that compared to their triple-SLI, etc) and it is hard to imagine that is at all commercially credible: that would be a $1200+ machine. The GTX780 alone is $700, the Titan $1200. Add that the notion of a living room media/gaming box using up to 450w seems oddly backwards.

After all of the talk about leveraging the AMD successes with the game consoles -- and about smoothing ports -- surprised to see nvidia only.

<comment><USER15> This is not necessarily bad, most hardcore PC gamers already have a setup similar to this one.

At this point if I have to be skeptical about something is about how well the hardware will work with the OS considering the reputation nvidia has with Linux...

<comment><USER14> Hardcore gamers are far too small of a market, however. I really had hope that Valve would do some serious system integration that would you get you much more for less (effectively what the shortly to be released consoles do. PC wise they are a fantastic amount of power), but instead it's just apparently the same PC market, with the only novelty being the shape of the box.

<comment><USER16> Isn't the point of Valve's console that they want to get SteamOS out to people to test, not because they actually want to sell it to people? It looks to me like they're shipping with a variety of system configurations (one of them even has an i3 in it, certainly not a hardcore processor) and they're seeing how each of them holds up. They're going to leave it to other companies to actually make some real consoles (they might release their own too, but they're not the only ones who can), and one of those companies certainly could perform the system integration that you'd like to lower the cost.

The point of SteamOS is that it's open, and anyone can make them (and people other than Valve can sell them). If they become insanely popular, I'm sure that someone will jump on integration to sell a cheaper console.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Goes to show you how the OS is 40% of the cost of a computer. take that away and you can get great hardware for the same price.

<comment><USER14> Where are you getting that from? There is nothing at all about price, and we all know that the OEM cost of Windows is ~$50. Valve is going with Linux because it decouples them from being vulnerable to fits of Microsoft, not because that $50 whole system price somehow makes a $1200 nvidia Titan less expensive.

<comment><USER17> $1200 Titan?</comment></comment></comment>


Pagination 101 - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/622561 <comment><USER2> One of the more non-obvious issues around pagination, especially with something like a webcomic where you're expecting to view multiple pages, is to have the page layout ensure that the buttons appear in the same place on each page.

This means that you can read the page, click 'next', and _not have to move the mouse_ in order to progress onwards. Also annoying in slide decks and image slideshows.

<comment><USER3> Even better, just allow the user to navigate by hitting the left/right keys. The Atlantic's "In Focus" photo galleries do this, though all the images are on the same page in that case.

It's not always possible to place pagination links at the same location if the webcomic has images of different sizes, but I have yet to see a physical keyboard that moves around depending on what's on the screen.

<comment><USER4> Using the left/right keys is a great idea, but you'd have to have some clever way of making users aware of it.

You'd also have to come up with a solution that works on devices that don't necessarily have a keyboard available at all times (on iOS, for instance).

<comment><USER5> You can use a title attribute that displays the shortcut. Desktop applications (such as GIMP) do that all the time

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > 7\. Put First and Last links on the outside > Nothing is more counter- > intuitive than a Last link followed by a Next link.

Instead of making the following change like the author suggests:

        prev first [numbered links] last next

to

       first prev [numbered links] next last

IMO, it's better to always show the link to the first/last page as the first/last numbered link. For example:

        prev 1 ... 56 57 58 [58] 60 61 62 ... 120 next

Advantages:

1\. You avoid showing disabled "first" or "last" link when you're at the first or last page.

2\. The numbered link to the last page also show you the total page count.

3\. It's more likely that people will want to click the "next" link than the "last" link.

4\. It's more likely that people will want to navigate from page 2 back to page 1 via the browser's back button than clicking on a "first" link.

</comment><comment><USER7> Actually, I think a big one is missing: _make next/previous redundant and put them side-by-side_.

In other words, the layout should be like this:

        Previous   Next   1   2   3   4  . . .   Previous   Next

I hate accidentally clicking too far and then having to stop and figure out where the mouse should be to go back one page. Actions that are opposite should be side-by-side so that they can be undone quickly with minimal mouse movement.

Another good form of redundancy is to put all controls at the top of the page _and_ all controls at the bottom. The top of the page is really good for keeping things in exactly the same place on every page, yet the bottom is often where people are after they're done reading.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rule #0: Have proper pagination in the first place. Nobody likes it when they have to use "infinite scroll" to get to page 357. Especially if your site takes forever to load anything after the first few pages. (Yes, I'm talking to you, Twitter!)

</comment><comment><USER8> "I'm In Like With You is a brand-new site that is best described as an online flirting site, or if you don't mind the term, a "Web 2.0 dating site". Think eBay + dating + Web 2.0 + social networks. "

funny to see omgpop's old description.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that's a very strange description as well. As far as I remember, it's always been about social gaming, and far before that was what it was even called.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing he misses is that a not insignificant number of webcomics will let you click on the _comic_ to go to the next page. Biggest target you could ask for.

Sadly it's not a default on the very common Wordpress+Comicpress combo. Well it wasn't for a while, I just checked and there's a switch for it in my installation but I can't remember if it defaulted to on or off.

</comment><comment><USER11> The best pagination style I have come across is this: [http://karaboz.ru/2007/11/19/paginator-3000-postranichnaya-n...](http://karaboz.ru/2007/11/19/paginator-3000-postranichnaya- navigaciya-budushhego/)

Just add text links for previous, next, last and first and you're set.

<comment><USER12> nice, someone make a better example in english

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think an updated version of this article should address continuous scrolling and when should it be used vs. pagination.

</comment><comment><USER12> worst is evow.com <http://i.imgur.com/LyGPV.png> can you guess what page I'm on?</comment>


Ask HN: Which (IT) automatization saved you the most time? - <AUTHOR> What software or script saved you a lot of time due to automating a repetitive task? <comment><USER2> cfengine, though not due to merely automating a repetitive task, but because it changed the way I think about servers and because it showed me a really well thought out architecture of such system.</comment>


Breaking Google Captchas for $3 a Day - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/breaking-google-captchas-for-3-a-day/index.html?ref=technology <comment><USER2> An interesting idea is to use culturally biased captchas, based on popular local movies, local news and politics, names of local bars or restaurants etc.

<comment><USER3> I think as long as the characters are still readable, it doesn't matter.

\- also the fact that they can use the ones they bust to make their algo smarter is scary.</comment></comment>


Transformers Are Graph Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://thegradient.pub/transformers-are-graph-neural-networks/ <comment><USER2> Better explained by Chaitanya Joshi (while at the NTU Graph Deep Learning Lab)

here: [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1233220586358181888.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1233220586358181888.html)

and here: [https://graphdeeplearning.github.io/post/transformers-are- gn...](https://graphdeeplearning.github.io/post/transformers-are-gnns/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I appreciate the effort the authors put to this post, but this is like saying DNNs are stacked logistics regression: the connection is superficial, and doesn't lead to deep insights about how they really work.

<comment><USER4> I'm genuinely a bit surprised by that, that was always my high-level understanding of what the essence of neural networks was (at least feedforward vanilla ones), would you care to elaborate?

<comment><USER5> While they can be thought of as stacked regression, it's only logistic regression with one particular non-linearity. And for many non-linearities you'll have a hard time usefully interpreting them as a regression.

<comment><USER6> I think the common ones have statistical interpretations (that predate deep learning by a lot). Perhaps the one for the rectified linear unit is pretty obscure. But as I understand it, the statistics concept is called the "Tobit" model. It's meaning is not so obscure though, just a prediction that can be non-negative only, which is pretty common like a mass or energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting watching these attempts to understand Transformers. Are they Graph networks? Are they Hopfields networks? Are they convolutions?

There was this research: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AcKRB8wDpdaN6v6ru/interpreti...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AcKRB8wDpdaN6v6ru/interpreting- gpt-the-logit-lens)

Turns out, GPT-like architectures appear to use the same representation throughout all the layers. So you can use the final head layer as a lens to see what words the network is thinking of as it ... "thinks". That's a bit contrary to what I imagined a GPT-like architecture was doing. I would have assumed that its embedding of ideas changed throughout the network, only reaching a sensible embedding near the end. At least from the perspective of the head layer, that doesn't appear to be the case.

Facebook's research demonstrates that the MLP layer can be dropped in favor of more attention over learned knowledge vectors: [https://ai.facebook.com/blog/making-transformer-networks- sim...](https://ai.facebook.com/blog/making-transformer-networks-simpler-and- more-efficient/)

> Reading new Transformer papers makes me feel that training these models > requires something akin to black magic when determining the best learning > rate schedule, warmup strategy and decay settings.

I found GPT-*'s schedule straightforward. In fact, most training schedules these days are "boring". Adam with warmup and either a linear or cosine decay. CNNs have been doing that for awhile, and the hyperparameters now are fairly robust. If you get within an order of magnitude you'll land within a few percent of optimal accuracy.

The OpenAI paper Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models does a good job of exploring the hyperparameters of GPT-like networks. It's a fascinating read.

That paper suggests another thing about Transformers that we don't understand. Beyond some minimums, the layer count, embedding size, and number of attention heads _isn't important_. The most important factor in the performance of a model is simply the number of parameters.

That's quite unusual, as the classic intuition is that adding more layers to a model improves performance. Yet for GPT-like architectures that isn't the case. You can get the same performance gains by just increasing the embedding size. 4 heads? 12 heads? Doesn't matter. Weird.

> Initially introduced for machine translation, Transformers have gradually > replaced RNNs in mainstream NLP. The architecture takes a fresh approach to > representation learning: Doing away with recurrence entirely

The more I study Transformers, the more I suspect that their success has more to do with our utter failure to train RNNs. In theory, RNNs have infinite attention. In practice, the only tool we have for optimizing models is backprop, and so to train an RNN we have to use BPTT. This defacto creates a learning horizon. There is absolutely no training signal that tells an RNN to remember something beyond the BPTT horizon. So why would it?

Our training loop for RNNs involves giving them, for example, 1024 tokens, running them for 1024 iterations, and computing loss on 1024 predictions.

A Transformer's training is nearly identical. They get 1024 tokens of context, make 1024 predictions, and compute loss.

The difference? Let's consider a scenario where it's the last prediction, and that prediction should be a copy of the first word in the sequence. Very simple, right? Yet for an RNN to learn how to do that, it needs to backprop the loss through 1024 iterations of its model. Even for a simple 1 layer RNN that makes it look like a 1024 layer model. Vanishing gradients turned up to 11!!

For a Transformer this is dead simple. Its attention mechanism allows the last column of the Transformer to directly use knowledge from the entire sequence. Not only can it see the first token in the sequence, it can see all the computations it previously performed on the sequence, all at once. All with easy backprop. No vanishing gradients here.

So is it really any surprise that Transformers have dominated RNNs? Given the exact same compute, memory, parameters, etc Transformers make much more efficient use of the resources. (During training)

To put it another way, a Transformer is exactly like an RNN. It just uses attention to access history rather than recurrence. And we know that backprop and recurrence are incompatible. So Transformers win.

Of course, that's a huge problem. We have a temporary win. A HUGE win. But Transformers haven't solved what RNNs were meant to solve. By the end of a book, human brains can remember things from the beginning of the book. RNNs trained with BPTT cannot. Transformers cannot. Even Transformers with linear attention mechanisms cannot. There's another leap here left to do.

We need some kind of long term memory mechanism. A big Transfomer model can probably approximate the active parts of a human brain. The image-gpt model and papers using Transformers in place of CNNs for classification tasks have shown that Transformers are a generic substrate. But the big missing puzzle piece is long term memory. Give a Transformer some method to query a bank of memory and I think we're going to see that next big leap. Plus, with access to a memory bank, a Transformer can free up all the resources its using today to behave _like_ long term memory and instead use them for more "thinking".

Yet we have absolutely no mechanisms available to us today to build such a thing. To teach any kind of model to act as long term memory requires some way to show to an example from its distant past, see how well it remembers it, and then ... backprop that. But we can't backprop it, because we can't backprop across an entire book, let alone WikiText or WebText2.

We're really back at square one. We need some way to make the theory of RNNs a reality. Transforms haven't bought us that. They've only bought us a short- term cheat in performance.

EDIT: Just so it's clear, none of my comment is meant as a criticism of the linked article. I actually thought the OP was great and sources a lot of research in trying to understand the mechanisms of Transformers. Really I just springboarded off the article to dump some of my own musings.

<comment><USER8> Actually we do have few mechanisms for long term memory like Neural Turing Machine, which has explicit memory cells which neural network could read and write. I think the only thing that is holding back NTM is that it is computationally not efficient like fixed sized context transformer.

<comment><USER9> What's holding back NTM is that they are hard to train, even worse than RNNs. They are not much less efficient than a Transformer. Instead, Transformer has all the advantages of the NTM but it is much easier to train.

Actually, the way I see it, Transformer is a direct descendent of memory-based architectures (NTM, MemNet, stack-based RNNs...) that is both expressive and easy to train.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Attention really reminds me of focusing in proof theory [https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/focusing](https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/focusing)

</comment><comment><USER11> I thought Transformers were "Robots in disguise".</comment>


Metaobject protocols: Why we want them and what else they can do (1993) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5869/764764bffdadcff0c840f25d1417ddf4c670.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely seminal paper. In 1997 Alan Kay called the book by the same authors, _The Art of the Metaobject Protocol_ : "the best book anybody's written in ten years."

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

I strongly feel that if you don't know MOP and CLOS, you shouldn't be allowed to call yourself an OO expert.

EDIT: And how much I do miss when Dr. Dobbs was actually good:

[http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/lisp-classes-in-the- metaobje...](http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/lisp-classes-in-the-metaobject- protocol/200000266)</comment>


China bans all government departments from using US-made technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/12/09/china-bans-all-government-departments-from-using-us-made-technol/ <comment><USER2> That seems like fairly big news given how pervasive US tech is. Not so much the built part but the software side</comment>


How to distinguish walking on a sphere or on a torus? - <AUTHOR> http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/854380/how-to-distinguish-walking-on-a-sphere-or-on-a-torus <comment><USER2> If you're trying to distinguish between a "classic" torus (volume of revolution created by sweeping a circle around an axis coplanar with said circle) and a sphere, there's a fairly easy way.

Measure the curvature at your current point. (Say, by drawing a triangle and measuring angles). Walk in an arbitrary direction in a straight line until you come back to your starting point, measuring curvature at at least two points along the way. Then do the same at 90 degrees from your previous walk.

If you're on a torus, at least one of your measurements of the curvature will be different. If you're on a sphere, the curvature will be constant and positive.

</comment><comment><USER3> Walk two perpendicular loops. Try tightening the loops. On a torus, one will not tighten to a point. See Perelman and the problem he solved.

<comment><USER4> How do you maintain your bearing? It's certainly possible to walk two contractible paths on a torus each of whose intersections are orthogonal. You can know that you've failed to keep your bearing if there are two distinct points of intersection between your paths, but I don't see how to guarantee that you succeed.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: We have had our 100 thousandth bookmark and wanted to tell you about it - <AUTHOR>

We created an online bookmarking site over a year ago - favilous.com. We had never released a website before and after 4 months of hard graft we released to the world!
We posted on HN to begin with and got a mixed response, however we got some great comments on how we could improve the site. Whilst this was going on a few blogs covered us - Venturebeat, Killerstartups, thenextweb and we began to slowly grow traffic.
What was exciting for us was that people from all corners of the Earth were using the site! To us novices this was really cool!
Whilst this was going on we posted more and more articles on HN to try and find out what people wanted from bookmarking. We emailed our userbase to try and find out what they liked and more importantly what they didn't like about our (their) site. We then collated all this info and set about improving the site. Given that we launched on HN, we wanted to share with you what Favilous looks like now.
We have:
Added an import facility from Delicious
Amended the community page and done it in such a way that we can now keep on top of spam.
Completely overhauled the homepage so as more people understand the site and sign up and share useful sites with you.
Stripped back some of the functionality as some felt it was too complicated - therefore menu's are cleaner, options are simpler and instructions are better explained. We hope it is now a more straightforward bookmarking tool.
Added a tag based view so that users who are more familiar to Delicious will now be able to use Favilous in a Delicious type way.
Sharpened up the panels and uploaded more background images for you to choose from.
Given users the option to choose a different theme this means you do not have to have a background image at all and this improves performance significantly.
In the interests of building a sustainable product, we are currently finalising a list of paid features which we believe our community will value. Having conducted our own research we will be looking to implement Bookmarking of RSS Feeds, Archiving and Search of web content, plus some features which are unique to us. You guys helped us get to this position and so we come to you again - what you would most like to see from Favilous (or just a bookmarking site in general).
Thanks for all the help in getting us this far!
Steve <comment><USER4> So... why would I want to use your site instead of using delicious?

Also, "It's free... for now! Users signing up from February 2011 onwards will be required to pay a small fee." - in contrast with "Bookmark for Free" in the features.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a mistake on our part! We were thinking of charging and when we made the changes we planned on charging. Since then we have had a change of heart but have obviously forgotten to change that text - we will do that tonight!

With regard to the Delicious question - we get that a lot. Yahoo could be shutting Delicious down, which would be a bonus! But the best explanation I can give is if you are a visual person, like things laid out in a nice way and you also want to know what your friends are bookmarking then we are a good fit. We offer Twitter like functionality whereby you can follow people - <USER2> then therefore see what they are bookmarking. If PG signed up to Favilous, you could follow him and see what sites and articles he bookmarks - we think this is a cool feature which Delicious do not offer.

<comment><USER5> So, since you say you decided to change your monetization strategy, what will it be?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have had some interest from businesses and academic organisations - <USER3> want their own bespoke version of Favilous. So currently we are working on this so that we give these organisations the ability to have their own bespoke version of Favilous - for a fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.favilous.com>

</comment><comment><USER6> So after reading this I signed up. First thing I did was add the bookmarklets to my Chrome Bookmarks Bar, went to something I wanted to Bookmark, hit the bookmarklet and... nothing. Chrome blocked the pop-up. And to show it I have to enable pop-ups on a per-site basis for anything I want to bookmark. Not happening. So... yeah. So much for that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not going to trust no website for my bookmarks, thank you: Import/Download your Delicious Bookmarks to Firefox 4 without loosing Tags using Slurp Add-on, <http://wp.me/pkvq6-w4>

<comment><USER7> Man I hate it when people downvote my comment instead of replying. What an affed up system this is here at HN.

<comment><USER8> You are probably being downvoted because your comment is 94% spam, and because "loosing" is not a word that makes any sense in the context of your post.

<comment><USER7> Can you show me spam in my comment? And where did I use the word "loosing"?

<comment><USER9> > Firefox 4 without loosing Tags

It's right there. Also most people look down on url shortners, because it's a great way to hide spam.

<comment><USER7> I corrected the URL, Wordpress.com as you know has really long URLs so I didn't want to post the whole thing.

I am not sure if I am following how Firefox 4 and no tags is a spam?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Disruption is coming with quantum computing - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2016/10/10/massive-disruption-quantum-computing/ <comment><USER2> The phrase "quantum supremacy" sounds click-baity but it's actually bona-fide jargon. These guys are working with complexity theorists, such as Scott Aaronson and Michael Bremner, to nail down specific tasks that are going to be completely impossible for classical computing. Part of the motivation is to move beyond the whole D-wave saga, and build something that for-sure kicks the shit out of current classical computing technology. Calling it "quantum supremacy" is a nice bit of marketing, imho.

Earlier this year I sat down with the guy that runs the google quantum computing lab (Hartmut Neven) and chatted a bit about what they are building. One of the ideas is to be able to re-purpose silicon fab technology; whoever gets this to work (if it's possible) is going to win big.

There are many other approaches being explored, by many research labs around the world. One particularly interesting idea is to use photonics (think fiber- optics), which has the great advantage of not needing to be ridiculously cold [1].

Source: me doing a PhD in the area.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.08535](https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.08535)

<comment><USER3> Could you elaborate on "repurpose silicon fab technology"? I know pretty much nothing about quantum computing. How does the manufacturing process differ?

<comment><USER4> Most superconducting qubits, such as the "Transmons" used by Google and various other labs are made of Aluminium, as this is a material which has good properties and can be easily deposited using e.g. evaporation-based methods (i.e. heat Aluminium in a vacuum so it evaporates and gets deposited on the surface of a chip that you put nearby). The microwave circuits on the chips are typically made out of Niobium (another superconductor), which is not very suited for making qubits but which provides very good properties for building large-scale structures such as coplanar waveguides.

To fabricate a qubit, normally one first deposits Niobium on a Saphire/Silicon wafer and then etches structures into this using photo lithography. Afterwards, the Aluminium qubits get deposited using so-called shadow evaporation technique, where you create two layers of Aluminium separated by a thin insulating barrier that is created by first depositing a single layer of Aluminium, oxidizing it and then depositing another layer of Aluminium at a different angle. This process is quite finicky and the yield of working qubits you get out of it is (or at least was at the time I worked on this) rather low. Adapting techniques from conventional semiconductor manufacturing (were error rates are < 1^-9 per transistor) seems therefore very promising. So far it seems that there are still many hurdles to overcome for this, though the fabrication methods get more reliable every year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Martinis has been working on a quantum supremacy demonstration chip for a few years already, and it's not unrealistic that they will make it work in the next 12-18 months. The term "supremacy" is a bit misleading though as it suggests that general purpose quantum computing might be around the corner, which it is not.

The "supremacy" algorithm is designed to demonstrate -for the first time- a quantum processor that runs an algorithm which cannot (or just barely can) be simulated on a classical computer (due to the number of qubits in the system). The circuit they're using for this contains around 45 qubits (which is enough to make a classical simulation very hard) and the result of the algorithm that runs on it can be verified using a conventional supercomputer (as otherwise it would be hard to prove that it actually did what it's meant to do). So all in all this is a very clever way of demonstrating the possible supremacy of a quantum computer with the currently available means of technology, but it's no general purpose quantum computer.

</comment><comment><USER5> Quantum Supremacy sounds amazing, like a blockbuster movie! One imagines a disjunctive change, with humans either assuming the mantles of wise, beautiful gods or being dragged, screaming, from their place at the head of nature by blank eyed quantum computing powered robot deamons.

But actually my understanding is that the people who are driving the Quantum Computing research agenda mean something fundamental which is very distantly related to application. Quantum supremacy will be declared when :

"But what quantum supremacy means to me, is demonstrating a quantum speedup for some task as confidently as possible. Notice that I didn't say a useful task! I like to say that for me, the #1 application of quantum computing—more than codebreaking, machine learning, or even quantum simulation—is just disproving the people who say quantum computing is impossible! So, quantum supremacy targets that application." [[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2943](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2943)]

Also, the article doesn't point out that there are many people working on this internationally, there are groups in the UK and Australia which are developing differentiated approaches which have a strong chance of underpinning the technology for QS - preserving QBITs for long periods and creating large numbers of them which can be usefully manipulated.

<comment><USER6> cmon now. This is a good attempt at pandering to the hackernews audience by being skeptical and cynical, but Quantum Supremacy is a big deal. From the same article:

If I have any policy advice, it's this: recognize that a clear demonstration of quantum supremacy is at least as big a deal as (say) the discovery of the Higgs boson. After this scientific milestone is achieved, I predict that the whole discussion of commercial applications of quantum computing will shift to a new plane, much like the Manhattan Project shifted to a new plane after Fermi built his pile under the Chicago stadium in 1942.

<comment><USER5> I didn't want to be skeptical, much less cynical. I agree with the second bit of the article too but the operative word for me is if!

If a * clear* demonstration happens things will change, alot.

But this has not yet happened, it may never happen, that's science! Personally I bet into 5 or more years but would be delighted to be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I can't find any other source for this claim. It's written by Dr. Peter Diamandis. I don't know who he is, but his biography seems impressive. Could this be true?

Statement is about 2/3 down the article.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's very unlikely. Quantum computing is just a bunch of random generators (very fast generators indeed) with bunch of filters on top of them. They good for searching a solution in broad space, but that is all. It's reinvention of analog computing with electric models, but using new tech.

<comment><USER8> _" Searching for a solution in a broad space"_ describes virtually every hard problem in computer science.

For example optimization problems are everywhere. In planning or in machine learning, just to name a few.

Having efficient ways to solve such problems would very definitely make a difference.

I agree that it's unlikely to happen anytime soon, though.

<comment><USER7> The problem with analog computing was that they tend to oscillate or pickup noise which greatly limits their usefulness for precise calculations. With quantum computing, you will need to use series of runs and average them. For simple cases, it will be e.g. 10 runs, for complex cases you may need thousands or millions of runs. IMHO, it still will be faster (because quantum produces random values at mach faster rate than macrosystems), but (IMHO) efficient quantum algorithms can be reimplemented with electronic circuits, which will consume much less resources than general purpose quantum computer.

<comment><USER8> > efficient quantum algorithms can be reimplemented with electronic circuits,

You can emulate a quantum computer with a classical one, but it takes exponential time.

If you could emulate them efficiently, quantum computers would just be another Turing machine, with all the limitations we already know. I think this is the whole point of quantum computers, they are different from what we already have.

<comment><USER7> I talking about analog computing, not about digital computing.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quote: "Here's the list of the underlying technologies:

(1) Electromechanical;

(2) Vacuum Tube;

(3) Relay;

(4) Transistors; and

(5) Integrated Circuits."

Surely not in that order? Because Relay = Electromechanical. The "Relay" item is certainly out of place. In the history of computing devices, relays (and purely mechanical computing devices like the Difference Engine) predated vacuum tubes, which predated transistors, which predated integrated circuits.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps electromechanical is in reference to something like the enigma machine. Characters light up on a board, but the character that lights up is chosen by a purely mechanical process that selects the current path. I'm just speculating.

<comment><USER9> > Perhaps electromechanical is in reference to something like the enigma > machine.

Yes, I agree, good example, but that also predates vacuum tubes as computing/logical elements. So the temporal order is still wrong.

Maybe the author didn't really intend that the list be temporally ordered -- but it seems as though that was the intent.

<comment><USER11> I think by relay they are referring to reed switches: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_relay](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_relay)

Which were used for memory and other computing tasks after tubes were already obsolete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This, VR and smart 3D television.

Vacuous comment pieces are great for generating and maintaining interest and pushing understanding and ideas forward. However, reality checks are essential to avoid this being little more than a sci-if short story, with realistic considerations.

Delving into why quantum computing may not be useful for implementing PHP 8 would be an interesting article. Encryption is the quantum computing poster child. What else will it give us?

Only being negative to help us find the positives and promote practical and realistic understanding of the subject.

</comment><comment><USER13> For context, check out this 'Science International' video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF8vLUEp29E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF8vLUEp29E)

If you're of a certain age, you'll remember this series from when you are a kid, they talked about 'all the future things'. Except almost none of it came true.

The future is hard to predict.

Maybe they will make some progress in 12-18 months in Quantum, we we are a long way off from seeing anything working, I believe.

The Crytpo implications alone are pretty crazy.

</comment><comment><USER14> _By the time you get to 300 qubits, you've got a computer that can do more "calculations" than there are atoms in the universe._

I don't understand what this means. Last time I checked, the Universe was infinite.. So what does this claim exactly mean? Because it's not the first time I've seen it.

<comment><USER15> The author likely meant "observable universe". 2^300 ~= 2*10^90, and it's estimated that there are around 10^80 atoms in the observable universe[0].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_content)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Judging by the sensationalist clickbait articles in the list on the left, I wouldn't hold my breath for anything that's said here.

</comment><comment><USER17> Stop Quantum Supremacy Now!

<comment><USER12> In Trump's hands...!

<comment><USER18> Next article: "Making silicon computers great again!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nope.</comment>


Show HN: Memex – A proof of concept built in Electron and Chrome Extension - <AUTHOR> https://www.steveliu.co/memex <comment><AUTHOR> This blog is a summary of a fun 1 month adventure I had with Knowledge Management Systems and building a POC that I thought had potential. It was inspired by so many of the products I see on Hacker News. I've open sourced all the code + written down some notes on my insights/ architecture. Just a warning, the code leaves much to be desired as this was a mini project over 2-3 weekends.

At the moment, I have 3 key layers of the application. The first is Chrome Extension which allows data collection. It tracks all sorts of data such as attention, time on page, scroll/ click and hover behaviour. It then sends this data to the Electron app.

The Electron app receives this data through an API and saves it down locally using PouchDB (data structure is compatible with Apache CouchBD and thus allows easy cloud storage).

Within the Electron app, I use an Express/ NodeJS web server to expose endpoints for functionality with the front end/ receiving data from Chrome Extension.

For the front end I use ReactJS.

If you're interested, please read the full article! There are lots of videos of the application in action.

<comment><USER2> Was interested to try this .. appears the Chrome extension is missing build.js when I run yarn.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me fix this when I get home. My bad!</comment></comment></comment>


Fossil Group to Buy Wearable Maker Misfit for $260M - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2015/11/12/fossil-group-to-buy-misfit-for-260-million/ <comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/12/9725478/fossil-group- acqu...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/12/9725478/fossil-group-acquires- wearable-maker-misfit-260-million), which points to this.</comment>