Carousel was originally a training tool for death - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/the-carousel-was-originally-a-training-tool-for-death-ad9a4ff5cad3 <comment><USER2> This is a bit exaggerated. Apparently during the crusades knights learned about a training regimen used by arab cavalry involving riding a horse around a pivot and tossing an object between them. The object of the excercise was to train dexterity in battle. European knights inspired, developed games to train their own cavalry. In italian, they called it carusella (little war).

Regular folk thought it was fun, eventually this lead to the development of the children's carousel. So it's a stretch to call training tool for death. It was in a very, very different form a training tool for survivability for cavalry.

<comment><USER3> Also, which is the source of this etymology for "carusella"?

I'm Italian, and it sounded very strange, so I made a little research. Treccani dictionary, says the word comes from neapolitan "carusiello", ball of clay, equivalent to small head of caruso, caruso means boy in neapolitan. Because players originally threw each others clay balls. This makes lot more sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the underrated movie "Logan's Run" Carousel was also a ritual where people would willingly and enthusiastically be killed in the expectation of being reincarnated. [0][1]

[0] [http://logans-run.wikia.com/wiki/Carousel](http://logans- run.wikia.com/wiki/Carousel)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSnLU9nyFSA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSnLU9nyFSA)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a very dramatic presentation for something that does not warrant it.

I'd imagine medium's servers would combust trying to contain this guy's post about a hypothetical something that has its roots in something like the holocaust gas chambers.

</comment><comment><USER6> When I read the subject I assumed it meant that it was a utility to teach kids about death and was very intrigued! :D

After the that the story was still informative but more of a let-down.

</comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h Okay, so by "death" we mean "training cavalry, which ultimately means war".

</comment><comment><USER7> LOL @ title. Hyperbole much?</comment>


Sorry Facebook users, the IPO is exclusive to the rich savvy investor - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-gadgeteer/sorry-facebook-users-the-ipo-is-exclusive-to-the-rich-savvy-investor/5463?tag=content;selector-blogs

<comment><USER2> >I am not a financial expert or anything, but from what I understand most all of the actual Facebook users won't be able to get in on the initial purchase and will have to wait for major investors and institutions with all the cash to ride out the initial stock offering. With all of the Occupy movements bashing the 1%, I find it interesting that there isn't more of this uproar over the way the stock purchase system works where the rich get richer while the people using the products and services work to survive.

Clearly the author is not a financial expert (neither am I), but does he also become angered when someone is able to buy expensive property and sell it later for a profit? How about when someone flips a rare car for profit? The author's attitude makes it seem like he is entitled to the stock. Just because the underlying asset (facebook) is free doesn't mean you can own it for cheap.</comment>


Unravelling a Cold War Mystery – Central Intelligence Agency - <AUTHOR> https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol52no3/unravelling-a-cold-war-mystery.html <comment><AUTHOR> '''CIA'S extraordinary collection and Naval Intelligence's timely analysis of the ALFA Class SSN threat had saved the Navy $325 million in new torpedo designs. It was the first time in history that this type of intelligence collection and analysis had ever been officially credited with saving such a large sum of money.'''

Ever thus</comment>


An Unexpected Ass Kicking - <AUTHOR> http://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking

<comment><USER2>
        Do things that have never been done.

            -- Russell Kirsch,
               inventor of the computer.

The stories related from when this was submitted two years ago are similarly excellent:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4342790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4342790)

There have been other submissions, although none have any discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4460745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4460745)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4363317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4363317)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7785009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7785009)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4359776](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4359776)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4341217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4341217)

There are others, but they've been deleted, although one can still find some of them with this search:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=unexpected+kicking#!/story/forever...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=unexpected+kicking#!/story/forever/0/unexpected%20kicking)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - clearly I didn't check if it'd been submitted earlier expecting it to be identified if it was.

Was quite surprised to find that the submission took successfully - which I wasn't for something this old (even though I just came across it).

Is there some time limit after which HN accepts the same URL even if it's been submitted earlier?</comment></comment>


Pixar and RenderMan: Changing the distributed rendering game - <AUTHOR> http://icrontic.com/article/pixar-renderman-distributed-rendering

<comment><USER2> There are many other changes happening in the rendering world. Two others are:

\- More accurate calculations based on the physics of the light in the scene (i.e. techniques which tend to produce more "real-looking" renders). Ideas for how to do this aren't new, but the available computing has increased and made some of those ideas practical.

\- The use of GPU clusters for rendering. This may sound odd to gamers, who might think GPUs have always been used for rendering, but the real-time rendering done for video games is different from the rendering done for high- end movies and architectural visualization. Until recently, those rendering calculations were done by CPUs, but with the advent of general-purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPU), and standard ways to do that (CUDA and OpenCL), there's been an increase in the use of GPUs for rendering.

<comment><USER3> I was wondering about GPUs, after reading that sentence about "massive farm of CPU cores." GPU processing is here now, and I'd be surprised if the movie- quality rendering industry, who stand to benefit hugely from increases in speed, haven't explored this option yet. Especially as both GPGPU APIs have special structures and functions to help with graphics-related tasks like image loading, handling colours, etc.

On the other hand, I could see some difficulties: a lot of cards don't yet support 64-bit floats, and there are some severe memory restrictions. However, with a card on the expensive side, you can get can around both these problems, and it really will render the scene thousands of times faster than a CPU so the cost would pay off. Something like the NVidia Testla "personal supercomputers" are "only" on the order of 8000$ or so for 6 GB of video RAM and just an amazing number of cores available, a drop in the bucket for a company whose revenue depends solely on rendering graphics.

<comment><USER4> The reasons GPUs aren't yet used much in the VFX industry, are:

GPUs are currently limited by what they can do - they're fast in terms of float throughput in a simple loop, but as soon as you introduce a lot of branching (for things like global illumination - path tracing), their throughput falls off a lot. The Fermis are better, but Intel's branch predictors are very good.

SSE and AVX can also more than quadruple the throughput of CPUs in the best of cases.

Also, a typical VFX feature film scene can have up to 200GB of geometry and 100 GB of textures, and this is before acceleration structures, deformation motion blur caches and texture mip-maps have been created.

Transferring that amount of data through the PCI-E bus isn't worth it at the moment, especially given the limit of 6GB of onboard VRAM that would mean huge amounts of swapping.

Also, GPUs use even more power and produce even more heat than CPUs, so you don't save anything here.

<comment><USER5> One other reason why GPUs aren't as widely used: Primary Rays Cache, Secondary Rays Trash! GPUs are becoming a standard in some pipeline stages of rendering though. <http://www.nvidia.com/object/wetadigital_avatar.html>

<comment><USER4> That's Weta being weird and being wed to their PRMan pipeline using PantaRay as a first-stage radiosity solution which is fed to PRMan as an infinite series of lights. It works, but from what I hear it's limiting their pipeline quite a bit. But then, they're Weta so they're more than capable of writing their own stuff and they're good at what they do :)

ILM used to do something similar, but a lot of the big houses are moving from PRMan over to raytracers (specifically Arnold) with full GI support as it makes the overall pipeline and definitely artist look-dev a lot simpler and faster. PRMan 16 is also a very good raytracer now (it could previously do ray tracing through custom shaders).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The major problem for cloud-based services for studio pipelines is:

1) There are are large amount of assets that need to be sent over to the cloud. In my experience this can go up to several gigabytes per frame if you count CFX, FX, Rigs, etc.

2) Most studios are reluctant to have their data stored on the cloud due to piracy concerns.

I wonder how Greenbutton is handling these two issues?

<comment><USER4> 1\. Most VFX places are on a fat bandwidth pipe because it's becoming more and more common to shares assets with other studios. It's definitely an issue, but with geometry formats like Alembic which offer very efficient compression and de-duplication, it's not as bad as it seems.

<comment><USER6> True. Although, when I was at Dreamworks, they had a dedicated pipe between their two office locations and one to a offsite rendering center in New Mexico. I know they were having trouble still (even with a private dedicated pipe) transferring all their assets and render data. This got even more problematic as they switched to 3D-Stereo renders. Then again, that was a couple of years ago.

<comment><USER7> How does the switch to 3D-Stereo make the issue worse? The process of 3D rendering consists of rendering the same content from two angles and blending the two, is that right? To an amateur like me, it doesn't sound like additional data to transfer.

<comment><USER4> For 3D rendering, yeah, the geometry and textures are the same, so you re-use them.

But you get double the output. And it's not just RGBA data, generally you output AOVs of Z depth, UV coords, Normals, XYZ world position pass, motion vectors (forwards and backwards), specular contribution, reflection, ambient occlusion, object ID, material ID, etc, etc.

And that's stored normally as EXR files (16 or 32-bit float), which can be compressed, but for 4K res is generally around 40MB per frame (RGBA). For a full set of AOVs, you can be talking 640 MB per frame, x 2 for stereo which adds up to a lot. Assuming a 2 hour movie, at 24 fps, that's around 172k frames.

If it's not a full CG film, if you're lucky (i.e. no manual 3D conversion) you've got double the video footage as well.

These all need to be composited together, producing twice as much on the output of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Heh. I strapped together a LightWave cloud renderer as a side project a couple of years ago. Never really did anything with it, though. Wonder if I should dust off the code and see if there's interest?

</comment><comment><USER9> It's a shame that Xgrid never lived up to its potential. Unless your rending podcasts there's not much it's good for.

It would be awesome to have something like seti@home or folding@home for rendering small independent studios work.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I go with Chromium or Google Chrome? - <AUTHOR>

Much to my chagrin, I just found out that I have both Chromium and Google Chrome installed on my Ubuntu laptop; furthermore, they're different. Does anyone have any advice about which one is better to stick with, and why? Which one will be better kept up-to-date, which has (and will have) better features, etc? <comment><USER2> I'm currently using Chromium on Ubuntu. I find the dev builds to be buggy. It is not very stable and it has some really annoying display bugs.

I haven't tried Chrome yet, but if you are looking for stability I would trust it over Chromium.

</comment><comment><USER3> Chromium will give you the latest builds. You will also need to use it if you want to use plugins on Linux or Mac.</comment>


Mandiant Exposes APT1, One of China's Cyber Espionage Units - <AUTHOR> https://www.mandiant.com/blog/mandiant-exposes-apt1-chinas-cyber-espionage-units-releases-3000-indicators/ <comment><USER2> "Without establishing a solid connection to China, there will always be room for observers to dismiss APT actions as uncoordinated, solely criminal in nature, or peripheral to larger national security and global economic concerns. We hope that this report will lead to increased understanding and coordinated action in countering APT network breaches."

This really is the key point. People generally believed that the major hacks have been Chinese government based, but without publicized proof public policy is unlikely to change. China (and people who don't want to insult China) can get away with dismissing the mountain of circumstantial evidence because few people with power want to directly accuse it. Maybe this report will start to change the situation.

<comment><USER3> Strong ties have been established with attacks like this already, this isn't the first time. Sadly my source [1] has disappeared, but I literally just finished an aggregation of other content [2] this morning.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Rain#cite_note-SANS-2> \-- archived at [http://web.archive.org/web/20051214143959/http://www.breitba...](http://web.archive.org/web/20051214143959/http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/12/12/051212224756.jwmkvntb.html) but I can't find any further quotes from the SANS Institute on what their deductions were based on.

[2]: [https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/T4THntTx...](https://plus.google.com/112353210404102902472/posts/T4THntTxbRE)

<comment><USER2> I agree that pretty much anyone who gave a cursory inspection would come to the conclusion that the attacks were from Chinese intelligence. There were still lots of defences of China claiming it could be patriotic hackers, or that the evidence was circumstantial. I think some of this was that if US officials make it clear that they know the attacks are from China it puts them under pressure to act (potentially in a way that would anger China). Diplomatically it's more convenient to pretend not to be sure.

<comment><USER4> There's also the matter of "is this worth starting a war over?"

One thing about this is that Chinese military is not the same thing as Chinese intelligence. The main Chinese intelligence agency is the Ministry of State Security. Mixing up the PLA with the MSS is like mixing up the DOD with the CIA.

I doubt that the United States government will do anything more than "raise the issue." The trouble is that if the US does something like file a formal diplomatic protest, it will be a promise by the United States not to try to do anything similar, and I don't see how the US would consider that to be in its national interest.

One other interesting thing is that the Chinese hacker community is very different from the US hacker community, in that US hackers tend to hate the military and authoritarian systems whereas the Chinese hacker community sees themselves as patriotic defenders of the motherland. A lot of this has to do with differences in history (i.e. the US involvement with Vietnam). Something that gives you an idea of the difference is that if you go to any newsstand, you'll see a lot of military magazines, and so hackers in China are "solider wannabees" in ways that hackers in the US aren't.

<comment><USER5> APT is just an externality for US biz right now. The fact that the Chinese were able to steal the plans to the JSF doesn't really hurt Lockheed-Martin's ability to sell the plane to the US or allies. Of course it hurts the ability of the buyers to effectively deploy the JSF against anyone able to buy JSF data from the Chinese; but LockMart really doesn't care too much about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 An interesting side-note on Mandiant's report:

 _And of course Mandiant's not just releasing this information for fun. Chinese hacking is big business for them. Brad Stone and Michael Riley reported earlier this month for Businessweek that Mandiant's 2012 revenue of more than $100 million represented a 76 percent year-on-year increase. They say they represent 30 percent of the Fortune 100. Mandiant is so dominant in the China-focused counter-espionage game that the New York Times' reporting on the Mandiant report and other sources of information abotu Chinese hacking had to include an awkward disclaimer_

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/02/19/mandiant_is_t...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/02/19/mandiant_is_the_big_winner_from_increased_anxiety_about_chinese_hacking.html)

<comment><USER6> Mandiant report debunked:

Part 1: [http://cybernonsense.blogspot.com/2013/02/chinese-hackers- an...](http://cybernonsense.blogspot.com/2013/02/chinese-hackers-and-security- malware.html)

Part 2: [http://cybernonsense.blogspot.com/2013/02/chinese-hackers- an...](http://cybernonsense.blogspot.com/2013/02/chinese-hackers-and-security- malware_19.html)

Part 3: [http://cybernonsense.blogspot.com/2013/02/chinese-hackers- an...](http://cybernonsense.blogspot.com/2013/02/chinese-hackers-and-security- malware_4130.html)

EDIT: Updated to include links to all three parts

<comment><USER7> There is a lot of jealousy between security companies, especially since Mandiant is getting a lot of the spotlight with the China hacks.

The way those posts are written with personal attacks against particular people I wouldn't be surprised if it was written by somebody at a competing firm.

<comment><USER6> That's quite plausible. I think the posts are worth reading to remind oneself that healthy skepticism is a good thing.

"Investigators say the surge of malware attacks on U.S. companies may be coming from Eastern European cybercriminals rather than being Chinese state- sponsored espionage."

[http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57570194-83/apple- facebook-...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57570194-83/apple-facebook- twitter-hacks-said-to-hail-from-eastern-europe/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I haven't read the report yet, but it's on my list.

That said, our (USA) national interests are at stake here. So far, we've left it up to the individual commercial parties to police and defend their own networks and that isn't working as well as we would like.

I know that there was once a trial balloon floated to get the NSA to help commercial interests properly detect and defend their IT infrastructure. IIRC, the privacy interests considered that a bigger risk than the Chinese. I'm not sure that isn't a bit myopic.

When a company like RSA gets hacked, you need to think about the guy with a gun banging at your door, not the boogeyman under the bed.

<comment><USER9> This is the real conversation we need to be having; why are companies having to go toe-to-toe with nations, without the backing or support of their own government?

<comment><USER10> U.S. companies do receive significant support from their government, typically in the form of FBI support for the investigation and mitigation of intrusions.

The really sophisticated stuff is on the military side, which is a black box. But who is to say that the NSA or DOD is not actively engaged in trying to analyze or degrade the capabilities of Chinese APTs? It's possible someone in the NSA is reading the Mandiant report right now thinking "not bad, they got almost half of what we know."

The recent Obama executive order should help get more of such info into the hands of companies.

<comment><USER5> From what I've heard, the US govt has basically decided that the best defense is a good offense. You don't hear of any of their successes because a) the US doesn't want to let it out, and b) the Chinese aren't especially fond of losing face.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am not an expert, but from my work experience, I'd guess that about 80% of all of the companies in the world have ineffective defenses and are essentially open to this kind of attack. The people doing this to US companies probably think of themselves as superior and think of us as hapless rubes.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, when you look at the industry standards that large enterprises use for IT security, is it any wonder?

I am not an IT security expert by any means, but what I've noticed when I look at all of the industry certifications is a focus on taking network engineers and educating them enough to make them able to defend against attackers. What I don't see is any push to take software engineers and educate them about the lower level stuff to defend against hackers. Why is this a problem?

In your typical large enterprise, software people are paid much better than network people. (remember, we're not talking about Google or Rackspace. administering a typical corporate network is relatively simplistic, since the level of variance in software is higher than in network configurations).

I used to work in networking, and quickly got bored and learned software and GTFO of the lame networking world. The networking people I currently know who have obtained the CISSPA security certs have no friggin clue how to code, and frankly just aren't that smart when it comes to this kind of thing. The people I want defending our networks are the folks at DEFCON who are hacking into every other machine in the room just for fun. But if you look at the requirements for getting these industry certs, I don't think these people would even qualify. So you end up getting talented penetration testers and talentless people who have never hacked anything on defense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One major issue that I find with this report is how they link the addresses to PLA unit 61398.

They essentially find 2 IP addresses that can be traced back to a region of Shanghai with millions of people, and because one particular building that's been known to house Unit 61398 is within this broad geographic area, they make the conclusion that Unit 61398 is involved, which is a key foundation of the report.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER14> Possibly. There are quite a lot more addresses than two. From page 40:

 _Over a two-year period (January 2011 to January 2013) we confirmed 1,905 instances of APT1 actors logging into their hop infrastructure from 832 different IP addresses with Remote Desktop... Of the 832 IP addresses, 817 (98.2%) were Chinese and belong predominantly to four large net blocks in Shanghai which we will refer to as APT1's home networks._

Actually their conclusion is not that straightforward:

 _Either a secret, resourced organization full of mainland Chinese speakers with direct access to Shanghai-based telecommunications infrastructure is engaged in a multi-year, enterprise scale computer espionage campaign right outside of Unit 61398's gates, performing tasks similar to Unit 61398's known mission._

 _Or APT1 is Unit 61398._

I don't have any idea of how much of this can be taken for its face value though, as they don't share much of how they have gathered the information in the report. And granted, Shanghai is a big place.

<comment><USER4> And the particular neighborhood which the report targets happens to be the place where the main US-China cable hits the China network...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPE_%28cable_system%29>

In other words, you'd

1) expect to find a lot of PLA spooks in that location 2) expect to find that any China related hackers have their address there, because that's the last point that they can change their IP address before the packets head over to the US

Doesn't mean that the two groups are connected....

One thing that surprised me looking in this is how most internet traffic goes through a very few links. There are only two major connection points between the US and China and the neighorhood with the IP blocks hosts one of them.

In particular, if you the hackers were physically located in Beijing, I'd bet that the packets would look like they came from that part of Pudong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 From the report:

 _Mandiant continues to track dozens of APT groups around the world; however, this report is focused on the most prolific of these groups. We refer to this group as "APT1" and it is one of more than 20 APT groups with origins in China._

Does anyone know what some of the other "APT groups" are / where they are located? (Original site seems to be down)

<comment><USER15> Most of them get the fingers pointed at China (PLA or otherwise) or Russian Mafia.

<comment><USER16> Criminal groups are generally referred to by Mandiant as "CDT" for "Card Data Theft."

The overwhelming majority of APT groups that actively target private corporations, individuals, the media and Mandiant's commercial customers are in China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems like if someone wanted to hack a US company, the best thing to do would be to make the attack look like it originated "somewhere" in China...

</comment><comment><USER18> Site seems to be down right now. Here's a link to the report from reddit: <http://intelreport.mandiant.com/Mandiant_APT1_Report.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER19> Could somebody file suit against the Chinese government? Could they prove a case to the standard required in a civil case?

<comment> brown9-2 In which court would that suit be held in, and who would be the judge of any case? If the judging body ruled against China, how would any sort of punishment or punitive damages be enforced?

There seems to be a common myth that the "law" in "international law" is in anywhere near as strong as "domestic law". International law is mostly meaningless and just comprises agreements between countries that could be broken or ignored.

<comment><USER19> The plaintiff would not be invoking any international law. Individuals working for the Chinese government stole computer secrets from U.S companies, stored in computers on U.S. soil. That's covered by U.S. and state civil and criminal laws. If they prove their case, and a judgement is awarded, China has to pay up. If they don't pay up, then a judge sends a sheriff or a marshal to seize property. Here's a random link about a lawsuit against Iran and Syria [http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/05/16/11733643-family-w...](http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/05/16/11733643-family- wins-323-million-against-iran-syria-over-terrorist-attack?lite).

'Wultz Attorney Robert Tolchin told msnbc.com that with the court judgment in hand his clients can seek Iranian and Syrian assets to collect the award. Tolchin said he couldn't be specific, but he would explore "various avenues." "There is a lot of litigation by people seeking the turnover of Iranian assets," Tolchin said. "The Iranians have kept U.S. courts busy."'

<comment><USER4> At which point China kicks the US company out of China, and said company loses far, far more than any amount that is due to hacking.

Iran and Syria aren't subject to this problem because the amount of business that US companies do in Iran and Syria is trivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I guess all the security vendors in the US should be sending thank-you notes to China. Also, probably to Oracle/Sun.

</comment><comment><USER21> one thing that would be cool to see is not just china, but how governments in general engage in hacking attempts for espionage and other purposes.

so data on countries like Russia, US, middle eastern and European countries.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is pretty cool, they hacked the hacker <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p7FqSav6Ho>

That the Chinese are doing this, we knew from many corp and military espionage stories.

I wonder about Mandiant. The Chinese will probably target target them with all their might, but then they will get a lot of work in USA. Going public must've been a tough decision.

<comment><USER23> I should imagine going public wasn't too difficult- it was already known that they were hired by the New York Times to investigate hacking attempts against them.

I suspect, as you state, they'll get a good amount of business out of it. And it's a lot easier for them to stay secure than the average company.

<comment><USER22> All of what you say is true, but then there was <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HBGary> Security is probably a relative thing, depending on how much they really want to get you.

 _I should imagine going public wasn't too difficult- it was already known that they were hired by the New York Times to investigate hacking attempts against them._

Investigate and release a public report are two different things. Looks like they gambled that they could win a lot of new business, given that this Chinese hacking is prevalent and their study makes that point even clearer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> site is down. it's either the chinese or HN!</comment>


Lime Scooters Suspended Temporarily Due to Safety Issues - <AUTHOR> https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12206406 <comment><USER2> My view is that these things should be disallowed from all urban areas. Municipal inaction on them is increasingly frustrating and they are an unmitigated menace to pedestrians. Of course some urban areas are better suited than others, but most, especially in Europe, are not</comment>


Show HN: Gmail Contacts Sync - <AUTHOR> https://www.gmailcontactsync.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> This uses the google contacts API to sync gmail contacts between accounts. Attempts to match on name or existing email, then updates or inserts the contact.</comment>


Why do programming languages suck at math? - <AUTHOR> What's the whole reason behind distinguishing between integers and float/doubles?
units = 2
price = 3.17
2 * 3.17 = ERROR
It blows my mind that so much effort has put into things like functions taking functions as arguments, and the characteristics of classes - yet a computer can't handle basic calculator math out of the box. PHP, Ruby, Swift, OCaml.. what gives?
What is the complexity behind this? <comment><USER2> The most of programming languages suck even with integer numbers, their integers is more like ring of integers modulo 2^n.[1] Its not true for every programming language, but for languages like C, C++ it is. To implement math integers one will need to allow that integers to grow in size and to be more like strings. But such a engineering decision will hurt speed of program and raise memory usage. Though some languages do it. Common Lisp, for example, uses arbitrary precision numbers, and so you can get very big numbers while calculating without any special efforts like using external library for arbitraty precision numbers, GMP for instance.[2]

Computer numbers is not math numbers, and its better to always remember this fact.

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

[2] [https://gmplib.org/](https://gmplib.org/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been answered pretty extensively on Q&A sites like StackOverflow and Quora, so I'd recommend Googling it for the most thorough, specific, and well- vetted answers.

Here are links to get you started:

\- [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1089018/why-cant- decimal...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1089018/why-cant-decimal- numbers-be-represented-exactly-in-binary)

\- [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5098558/float-vs- double-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5098558/float-vs-double- precision)

> _It blows my mind that so much effort has put into things like functions > taking functions as arguments, and the characteristics of classes - yet a > computer can 't handle basic calculator math out of the box._

Much effort _was_ put into it, but no amount of work allows a computer to violate the laws of math. The fact that computers use binary and have limited memory isn't something that can be hand-waved away.

You're also talking about two totally different types of problems. Classes make programming languages easier to organize (at least theoretically) -- it's easy to change the syntax of a language, but hard to know exactly how it should look to be the easiest to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the links. It all seems like excuses.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, you're right. Computer scientists are whiny little babies who can't sit down and work hard enough to overcome the laws of mathematics. What a bunch of losers, focusing on designing programming languages instead of defying natural laws.

And you know what, why haven't they invented human-level AI yet? Are they just that lazy?

Don't even get me started on chemists... too lazy and stupid to learn a simple method to turn iron into gold.

<comment><AUTHOR> And we can't even time travel or leave the galaxy yet (◔_◔). C'mon scientists.

[https://www.google.com/#safe=off&q=2*3.18](https://www.google.com/#safe=off&q=2*3.18)

<comment><USER4> Did you mean [http://www.geteasysolution.com/pi*2=3.18](http://www.geteasysolution.com/pi*2=3.18)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > What's the whole reason behind distinguishing between integers and > float/doubles?

Because historically CPUs worked efficiently natively on integers, and everything else was software. (Modern CPUs also work efficiently natively on floats, but with different representation and operations.)

Note that not all languages (even o n your list) have the problem you describe though; plenty of automatic coercion with numeric operators so, e.g., float times int works (doing a float operation). Ruby, for instance, does this.

And many also do the calculation you present exactly (not merely without errors) because they treat decimal literals as exact numbers (using either a decimal or rational type, rather than binary floating point.) Perl 6 and Scheme, for instance. I think Haskell also can, if the right priority for numeric literal types is set.

> What is the complexity behind this?

It's not really complex, it's just a matter of prioritizing making performance vs. accuracy & generality simple, with a dash of consideration of programming history which shapes expectations.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was actually working with Ruby and dollar/cents amounts for Stripe that led to this frustration, haha. Thanks for the insight!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Short answer, no decimal in binary and math is hard. :) Here's a couple handy videos explaining it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZRI1IfStY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZRI1IfStY0)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzx7HN4wo3A&t=59s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzx7HN4wo3A&t=59s)

</comment><comment><USER7> Simply put: Out compilers and interpreters force us humans to think more like the underlying machines, rather than vice-versa. It is ass-backwards. We should absolutely demand that our tools help the computers under what we want and not the other way around.</comment>


Second-gen Google Glass looks even dorkier than the original - <AUTHOR> http://www.techhive.com/article/2059222/second-gen-google-glass-looks-dorkier-than-the-original.html <comment><USER2> I didn't realize that it plugged into the charge port. That is worse than dorky, it is functionally crippling. I hope that it is just an accessory and doesn't replace the bone speaker. I can see where it has practical application in a noisy environment, but more often, depending on my activity, I think I'd be better served with an extension cable running to an external battery pack.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why does everyone care about looks. Reminds me of the 4th grade when people were afraid to get regular eyeglasses for the same reason.

Who the hell cares what everyone else does?</comment>


Infinity: open-source search engine - <AUTHOR> https://infinitysearch.co <comment><USER2> Neat, their ads are powered by: [https://www.ethicalads.io/](https://www.ethicalads.io/)

This makes me wonder - what ads would be acceptable in the eyes of privacy focused developers? Any?

And i don't mean UX - i mean, what ads would you, a privacy focused developer, recommend i install on my site. Assuming i want to fully respect by users privacy, while still attempting to pay for the server costs.

Maybe this warrants a AskHN, but it seems relevant here as they're implementing this exact concept. Thoughts?

<comment><USER3> I've spent a lot of time over the last few months looking at different privacy focused forms of monetization, specifically aimed at search engines because of my use case. [0]

The main factor determining your options is whether you are comfortable having a 3rd party ad provider have access to the IP, user agent (and potentially search term in some cases) of your users.

If that is not a dealbreaker for your use case then there are a lot of different options, including EthicalAds which I believe is a great service.

Understandably, the main reasons for this are because the ad networks need to prevent fraud, and the ad sponsors usually want some kind of measurable metric to determine ROI.

If you are not comfortable with the above compromise then your options for contextual advertising are significantly limited with the only real option being to sell direct ads to companies.

[0] [https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine- Moneti...](https://coil.com/p/runnaroo/Privacy-and-Search-Engine- Monetization/5dXAW6NwF)

<comment><USER4> >with the only real option being to sell direct ads to companies.

Maybe I don't understand the complexity behind the ad-network curtain today, but direct ad sales worked fine pre-internet. Serve the ads from the same domain as your content and you can prevent ad blocking. Sounds like a win-win to me.

<comment><USER5> Almost all companies won't bother with buying ads directly from a random small company, because they don't know if you are trustworthy or won't show up some controversial content that hurts their brand. Much easier to use an ad bundler (from their standpoint) like google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > When you search for something on our site, we take the results from other > search engines and our own indexes,

<comment><USER7> Currently its just Bing: [https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch/infinity- search/-/blob/mas...](https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch/infinity- search/-/blob/master/MainApplication/Aggregator/CombineResults.py#L46)

<comment><USER8> Since Yahoo! got out of the game, Bing is the only major search engine in the English speaking world providing an API for developers against their index.

Yandex _might_ be another option (haven't looked) or even Baidu. Of course there are unofficial ways to scrape Google but you can't build a legit business on that.

Side note: a far simpler first step than trying to break up Google would be requiring them to have a search API and contractual obligations that enable others to do business on top of it.

<comment><USER9> Yes, adversarial interoperability is a fantastic antitrust tool that isn't discussed or used enough these days: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial- interopera...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial- interoperability)

<comment><USER10> This would have been a _great_ way to deal with Facebook's attempt at building out a single backend for their messaging platforms.

Because yes, the ability to use a single protocol for cross-service messaging, with E2E by default, disappearing messages, and text (or presumably email) fallback would actually be spectacular. _But as a spec._

Hell, as a spec, this would create an argument to migrate toward a user@service model and finally start relegating phone numbers to legacy status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish there was a way to differentiate a "search engine" as in one that crawls the web and a "search engine" like Elastic or Solr.

Maybe the latter should be a search server?

<comment><USER12> search engine vs full-text search engine?

<comment><USER13> Google would count as a full text search engine then.

<comment><USER14> Web search engines generally are also full text search engines.

This project is useless for people who have their own private text to search.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If the devs are reading this, I found a bug: if you use the wikipedia bang and search, say: "!w knot theory" the actual search page it brings up is for "knottheory" without the space.

<comment><USER16> Also if you search for just "!w", you don't arrive at the English Wikipedia front page, which is the behaviour I'm used to from DuckDuckGo. "!bbc" should also lead to the BBC front page, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> See also: peer to peer free search engine [https://yacy.net](https://yacy.net)

</comment><comment><USER18> I find it really disturbing that you can't link to result pages. I think this is some kind of REST principles violation.

<comment><USER19> Guessed the param on first try:

[https://infinitysearch.co/results?q=test](https://infinitysearch.co/results?q=test)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to mention that DuckDuckGo's backend is not open source.

</comment><comment><USER21> If GPT-3 is trained on a corpus of the entire internet, could you just use it as a search engine by posing questions to it?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, but it can look deceivingly able to:

[https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060](https://twitter.com/paraschopra/status/1284801028676653060)

(and this is how to prime it:

[https://twitter.com/vybhavram/status/1284803750146617344](https://twitter.com/vybhavram/status/1284803750146617344))

The main problem is that GPT3 has a free will of a creative but delusional person and will distort facts as it pleases to maximize its output function score.

So, similar to evening news.

<comment><USER22> Hmm, can you turn GPT-3 api into a fact checker by priming it with tuples of (in)correct statements, true/false? And then maybe prime it to add explanations and references for the responses as well.

<comment><USER23> Yes, but it's only effective for things a few months before its creation; anything after that is just "sounds plausible to GPT-3". Likewise, its explanations aren't very good unless it has good domain knowledge on the subject; if it doesn't know something, it won't tell you so unless you've primed it with not-knowing being an option.

[https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#expressing- uncertainty](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#expressing-uncertainty)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Any info on search operators ? And do they work, unlike Google ?

And where's the source ? could i create search plugins just for my own use ? because that would be a killer feature.

So it's only technically open-source, it uses Bing's API probably for their "web" tab.[1]

Their "infinity tab" doesn't give good results at all, currently. This is what may run on their own system. Maybe.

[1]"How It Works For the web application, we use Flask. For the search results, we use the Microsoft Cognitive Services Search API and the DuckDuckGo Instant Answers API. We will have more detailed information about how our system works in the future."

\-- from their source : [https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch/infinity- search](https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch/infinity-search)

<comment><USER13> > If you have ever used DuckDuckGo before, we integrated the same bang feature > as them so that you can redirect your searches to other websites directly > from our site. Here is an example: > [https://infinitysearch.co/results?q=!ddg](https://infinitysearch.co/results?q=!ddg) > privacy Right now, we have the same ones as DuckDuckGo so you can use the > same ones found at > [https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang) for now.

> The whole Infinity Search system is open source and the code can be found at > [https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch](https://gitlab.com/infinitysearch).

From the FAQ here: [https://infinitysearch.co/why](https://infinitysearch.co/why)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hm. Another company in this space, like Neeva. Are people seeing opportunities going up against Google?

<comment><USER26> This is the first one I've seen that's open source, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very cool to see innovation emerging from Oklahoma!

</comment><comment><USER28> is this just a searx instance that's been loaded with ads?

</comment><comment><USER29> > You will need to enable JavaScript to view the results. If you do not, the > loading bar below will keep staying that way.

Really? Or you could fix your site.

</comment><comment><USER30> What's the difference between "web" and "infinity" search? It doesn't seem to be explained anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not sure why this post is getting scathing criticism, but this would be a nice project to fork for a metasearch engine.

</comment><comment><USER32> The video search is broken for me, tested on Chrome with the keyword "golang". It's just showing blank.

</comment><comment><USER33> I saw everything this search engine has to offer, all looks good except their _' Ethical Ads'_. What does that even mean?

There should be NO ads. period.

I would go so far to say that ALL ads are a distraction.

You're supposed to be an open source privacy focused search engine, not a surveillance capitalist serving search ads like Google, this is NOT OK.

<comment><USER34> How do you propose to pay for the infrastructure?

<comment><USER35> Apart from you question not being in good faith (because there have always been business models to support publishing and providing services that do not rely on adverstising and these models are well known), the main point is that they do not have to provide the answer to this question. Push advertising is unethical and culturally toxic and thus is not justifiable using the simple pragmatic argument of "It pays the bills". You can't justify unethical behaviour using a simple pragmatic argument. (Quite obviously; this shouldn't even need to be said.)

<comment><USER36> Fine then, how about a compromise: The people that are fine with ads can get it for free and people that have an ethical problem with ads can pay.

<comment><USER35> That's not a compromise; that's worse.

What it's essentially saying is that the publisher should be able to continue to act unethically in polluting minds by pushing ads but _also_ collect extra money from people who object to their pollution. IOW, "I'm going to keep polluting but if you pay me then I won't pollute in your personal space." Well actually, I care about your society wide pollution too. Just stop polluting.

On principle I will _never_ give money to a website that runs this sort of policy.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Automotive Grade Linux Platform Debuts on the 2018 Toyota Camry - <AUTHOR> https://www.automotivelinux.org/announcements/2017/05/30/automotive-grade-linux-platform-debuts-on-the-2018-toyota-camry <comment><USER3> Infotainment system developer here, A number of people have mentioned preferring/wanting Android Auto/CarPlay in their infotainment systems, and that it would be preferable to many of the systems that exist in current vehicles. I have a couple of thoughts.

The Infotainment system is one of the most user-facing components of the vehicle. It's something that can reflect the brand identity of the vehicle, and most OEMs are not eager to cede that space to Apple or Google. Google and (especially) Apple certainly aren't interested in mixing their branding with a manufacturers.

The utilization of AGL doesn't necessarily mean CarPlay or Android Auto are out. AGL is a system, and CP/AA are applications.

While I certainly believe there are a lot of terrible systems out there, I also think there are a lot of systems that people don't like because they never took the time to figure out how to use them. Cars aren't like phones. When you're in them, you're most likely driving and you don't have the bandwidth to figure out how to do something as well as drive. A while back I saw a study that concluded if you didn't learn something about your infotainment system in the first 3 days, you never do.

I encourage you to actually identify the things you find confusing/frustrating/difficult about your vehicle and write a letter to the manufacturer. Customer input makes a big difference. And no, "It's not CarPlay" doesn't help. That's kind of like sitting down to Windows and complaining to Microsoft that they didn't give you macOS.

(Thoughts are my own, of course)

<comment><USER4> No offense, but I have yet to find a infotainment system that I liked. They reflect the brand identity of the vehicle, yes, but badly. The majority of in- car-entertainment systems are clunky, slow, and look outdated. The hardware is already at release a few years behind, and you can't easily replace it. (This also applied to smart TVs, and to some extent to in-flight-entertainment).

What I would love is a simple standard for aftermarket radios, like you used to have. One connector, and it wires up to the speakers, a display (that you can replace), and all the hardware buttons e.g. in the steering wheel. You'd have a one-way connection from the car to the device for information like speed.

When I buy a car, I don't want an integrated entertainment system. I want to buy a system from a stereo manufacturer that integrates with the card.

And I want the _option_ to buy an "in-car-ITX" barebone from NewEgg, pop in an SD card with a LibreICE distribution or whatever, and roll my own entertainment system if I like.

I want things like changeable themes, Spotify support, information about the currently playing radio song (even if not supported by the station), and so on. I want fluid animations and no latency, readable text, and idiot-proof usage. That really shouldn't be so hard.

<comment><USER5> > What I would love is a simple standard for aftermarket radios, like you used > to have. One connector, and it wires up to the speakers, a display (that you > can replace), and all the hardware buttons e.g. in the steering wheel. You'd > have a one-way connection from the car to the device for information like > speed.

That would be nice, but unfortunately it has a number of drawbacks:

1) "one connector" does not work well with today's 20+ speakers

2) display interface? Either you do it using DSI as interface (which is fucked up so bad that a Raspberry Pi supports exactly one specific type of display - and when even the Pi hackers can't get it done, I seriously doubt car makers can), or you use HDMI which will lead to vibration issues. Furthermore, the range of display resolutions, aspect ratios etc (you can have anything from 320x240 to retina FHD)... no way ever that radio/car makers will implement this.

3) Interface to rest of car (HW buttons, speed feedback, and maybe even GPS/IMU for navigation): no standard for this except CAN-bus, which is a security hellhole itself...

I agree that having the option would be nice but it's a real niche market.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it is that unrealistic. It seems that for 1), aftermarket radios are available for most cars and can utilize the speakers. There are various adapters available. For 2) I can imagine HDMI or DVI, if necessary with a more sturdy connector. Stock monitors have supported multiple resolutions for 20 years. For 3), it seems there is information available to access this from CAN or LIN buses or ODB. Lots of hobbyists do this. I can imagine you could buy an adapter for, say, "Ford 2010-2014", like you can do with various aftermarket parts.

It might be a niche market, but so are all kinds of aftermarket mods for cars. And I think if somebody did to car stereos what Nest did to thermostats, it would be phenomenal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Checked the software stack, it's basically: Yocto(OS framework) + Tizen(application framework) + Genivi(infotainment). Yocto is totally over- engineered and only RTOS vendors really enjoy it as they can sell services on top of that, it's a nightmare for small players, they should just use Buildroot the alternative to save money and time. Tizen has never reached what it wanted to be, partially because of Android. Genivi has been around for a few years but I have yet to see it took any market share on the infotainment side, many infotainment systems are just using Android instead as well.

Actually because Camry is using this stack, my next car will certainly not be it. How am I going to upgrade the kernel with patches every few weeks?

<comment><USER7> I don't think that Tizen is used as an application framework.

In the HMI architecture document, they mention Qt, HTML5 and JavaFX for apps:

[https://wiki.automotivelinux.org/_media/eg-ui- graphics/17080...](https://wiki.automotivelinux.org/_media/eg-ui- graphics/170802_agl_hmi-fw_arch_0_2_4.pdf)

the WindowManager spec seems to assume Qt as default: [https://wiki.automotivelinux.org/_media/agl-hmi- fw_windowman...](https://wiki.automotivelinux.org/_media/agl-hmi- fw_windowmanager_spec_v0.1.0.pdf)

and most of the UI demos seems to use it too : [https://gerrit.automotivelinux.org/gerrit/#/admin/projects/A...](https://gerrit.automotivelinux.org/gerrit/#/admin/projects/AGL/meta- agl-demo)

I could not find apps built with Tizen's native toolkit (EFL).

<comment><USER8> Tizen has had multiple UI reboots since the Meego days.

The latest one is .NET Core + Xamarin.Forms.

[https://developer.tizen.org/development/tizen-.net- preview/i...](https://developer.tizen.org/development/tizen-.net- preview/introduction)

I really don't thrust anything useful will ever come out of it, given how Samsung has managed it thus far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well this is interesting. I purchased a 2018 Toyota Camry in August (first ever car purchase), and I absolutely love everything about it _except_ the Toyota Entune 3.0 system. Lack of apps, useless Scout GPS navigation gimmick, and it doesn't even show album cover art while you're driving.

When I was comparing cars, the lack of CarPlay was the only (massive) downside with the Camry, but the other features of the car were so good that I went with it in spite of it.

I wonder what AGL means for the driver. I would love to tweak the OS myself, but I doubt Toyota would let a customer flash their own version of the code (at least not without violating the warranty). I suppose it could mean more frequent updates with better features. Curious to see how this plays out.

<comment><USER10> I'm a happy Prius owner, but I bought mine before CarPlay existed. I'm not sure I would buy another Prius to replace my current one, primarily because of the lack of CarPlay and Android Auto.

The Entune interface just isn't very good, and it's not going to get better. This isn't unique to Toyota -- no matter how good the system in your car is, it will seem very outdated after 5 years. In contrast, CarPlay and Android auto are great now and will improve with software updates over time.

<comment><USER11> The lack of CarPlay made the Volt vs Prius Prime a pretty easy choice. That... and the design of the Prime, but I digress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been a loyal toyota buyer for over 30 years. But I will not buy another car, unless it has first class CarPlay support. (and it should support the android equivalent as well) Having to interact with the phone while driving is a safety problem and Apple (and presumably android too) delivered a great solution several years ago-- no excuse for not implementing it.

Especially given that auto makers really suck at this kind of software. My car has navigation and all the bells and whistles (was not a choice when buying) and I ONLY use it as a bluetooth audio receiver, effectively. IT's just terrible for everything else.

I'm drawing a line in the sand here. I will buy a 10 year old used something if I have to and put in an aftermarket CarPlay system. (They're also making it harder to put in aftermarket systems..... ok you going to do that, then you better make yours first class.)

I love that with my current toyota when I get in my phone hooks back up and starts playing music, but I hate having to use the phone screen for navigation and the like, since there are no good auto mounts I can find. [1]

[1] I have a vent based magnetic one. The magnetic attachment is great, but the vent vanes swing back and forth and its never been quite satisfying... right now if I turn at the right speed the phone swings over and turns off the radio by hitting its button. annoying.

<comment><USER13> > Having to interact with the phone while driving is a safety problem

Surprised and dismayed if this is the prevailing viewpoint, that using a phone while driving is a necessity that should be made as safe as possible.

<comment><USER12> I'm guessing you're not thinking about GPS, are you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Based on everything I've read about automotive software development, I'm impressed they've managed to degrade the Linux kernel enough to call it Automotive Grade.

<comment><USER11> I found out my car's infotainment system can run HTML/Js/CSS apps. The performance guidelines give you a great hint about the hardware (or lack thereof), they discourage using percentages for example. And have strict versions of Angular 1 and jQuery you're allowed to use

<comment><USER3> Mazda by chance(?) - I've worked in this space, they're interesting systems. A number of OEMs have explored web stacks as an option for applications. It's very accessible for vendors to work with. Dealing with the system resource limitations is a huge deal.

<comment><USER11> GM/OnStar's "Next Generation Infotainment" headunits

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The thing I hated most about my automotive purchase was the nav. I'm not sure any built-in, eventual bit-rotten nav would be any better though.

On the one hand, we can't even get manufacturers of our phones to keep the software on their devices up to date past a couple years and somehow they're our last hope for your in-dash media player? I guess some people jump to a new lease every couple years, but I don't see the mobile model being the future of car ownership.

On the other hand, cars have mostly avoided the security disasters of other embedded devices so it might be fine. Unless of course, we make them into the eventual IoT device everyone wants them to be. I mean these software- controlled navs now need to both downloads updated maps and show you engine diagnostics. Doesn't this seem like a bad idea waiting to happen?

It sucks that only the low-quality models can escape these devices. Soon it'll be like Smart TVs where your choices are 480x600 or 4K Samsung SpywarePro.patchfix-m2015.

</comment><comment><USER16> Toyota's previous generation of head units (all Entune-branded, started rolling out in 2013/2014) used different hardware platforms and OSes, depending on the supplier. But they all ran a UI that was virtually identical, although there were some very minor differences.

The Panasonic-made units ran QNX, Pioneer and Fujitsu Ten units ran Linux. Presumably this means no more QNX.

</comment><comment><USER17> This just reminded me of my personal pet "first world problem."

The move from hardware based interfaces to touch screen interfaces is an astonishing regression in usability.

Older car "audio" systems could be controlled with simple knob and button interfaces. This would allow the user to fine tune the audio playback, as well as find radio stations, without having to look at the device.

Asside from picking the music, and adjusting the volume, my most desired adjustments are to: bass, treble, L/R balance, front/back balance.

In my current run of the mill, screen based, "infotainment" system, doing this without endanger myself and others, requires stopping the vehicle, and undertaking a series of awkward and unresponsive controls, none of which are accessed on the same screen!

The whole concept of a "touch screen" interface in a car is dubious. Ironically, touch screens require visual attention, due to lack of haptic feedback, and inconsistent UI patterns.

If I ever"upgrade" my car audio, I'm going back to an old-school style unit, with an aux plugin.

<comment><USER18> Worse, I believe some cars are now doing this with almost all of the controls, not just the entertainment system controls.

Controls I want to operate without looking at them: fan, temperature, air routing, defrost, windshield wipers, high beams, turn signals.

<comment><USER19> I was surprised with a friend's Jeep where the seat warmers were in the touch screen interface. Really? On my old 2003 wagon, they were just dials.

<comment><USER20> To be fair, on a Jeep the screen is probably easier to seal against dust/dirt intrusion. But otherwise, I agree and much prefer buttons/knobs. Also - <USER2> seats? On a Jeep? Being uncomfortable is part of what you're paying for...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone explain to me, honestly, why I would want an 'entertainmaint' system built into my car? I do long commutes, I drive a lot, I am an occasional truck driver, I have crossed Australia east to west more than once - and I still don't get it. My car is the one place in the world where I stand a decent chance of escaping the all-pervading goddamn film and music industry.

<comment><USER22> Podcasts? Audiobooks? I've had some really great experiences on long drives listening to thought-provoking non-fiction audiobooks. Recommend it highly. (Of course a pair of headphones and your device of choice can probably do just as well if not better.)

<comment><USER23> Headphones in a car is generally a bad idea, as you wouldn't hear car horns, sirens, and other important audible signals that might prove critical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> They all suck. BMW, Ford, Honda, Infiniti are all ones I've had ample experience with over the past year and they're all horrible. I've gone back to headphones and it's glorious (I use maps very rarely, just audio content)

<comment><USER3> I absolutely love our 2017 Mini Infotainment system. It's not perfect by any means (It's BMWs), but I find that it meets all my needs, is very fast and responsive.

Not sure where you are, but here it's illegal to drive with headphones.

<comment><USER24> Even if it's legal it's a terrible idea.

<comment><USER25> As a non-car road user, I'm with you. mark212, please don't do this. You're making the world a more dangerous place for everyone, with (extremely limited) benefits only to yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Personally, the last thing I want is Silicon Valley engineering at work on my car: I'm happy with the built-in console of my RAV4. It's the most reliable piece of software I've ever ran.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think why Toyota is spearheading this AGL is related to its prior software failure related deaths[1], considering broad the scope of AGl: "..advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving.."

[1]: [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/toyota-unintended- acceleration-...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/toyota-unintended-acceleration- has-killed-89/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Hope Entune dies a horrible death real soon now.

</comment><comment><USER29> Got a prius with touch and go, I connect my phone with bluetooth and I can control all my music and phone calls from the steering wheel without having to look to anything. Good job Toyota for supporting open innovation and sharing code with other car manufacturers! I enjoy the way you design car for ecology. Supporting linux is top. I hope they will support userspace apps so end user can also be part of the car innovation!

</comment><comment><USER30> How are these infortainment systems rated for Functional System? Last time I looked (about 7 years ago), Linux was only suitable for QM rated systems, and that was questionable already.

<comment><USER31> They're not. That side of the car systems is firewalled off because of the tyre fire that is Linux/Android/Internet connectivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have a Prius C with Toyota's infotainment system. It works fairly well.

</comment><comment><USER33> Reminds me of this joke: [1], which may now become a reality.

[1] [http://mistupid.com/jokes/msvgm.htm](http://mistupid.com/jokes/msvgm.htm)

</comment><comment><USER34> How is this different than Windriver Linux?

</comment><comment><USER35> There's an increasing amount of people that won't buy a new car unless it has Android Auto/CarPlay compatibility. To ignore these consumers and think that you have a better solution is ignorant to what's happening around you.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. I think this will be Toyota's last generation of head units without CarPlay/Android Auto, simply because all the competitors now have it, and the complaints will only get louder from here. In particular, when every Toyota reviewed by Consumer Reports lists "no CarPlay" as a negative, and every competitor uses it against them, their current position will become untenable

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Automotive makers like FCA is still sticking with QNX and Harman made headunits hardware for many years. Having programmed on them, it was a pain with so many constraints while we have watches 100x more powerful than them. While the UI/UX and performance of headunit telematics apps are not the forte of automotive manufacturers, they need to change with times. Headunits are still marketed as an add-on with which the manufacturers can up the price by several thousands. While too much of an entertainment system on a car is a distraction even though they have speed lockouts, a little bit of improvement will be a welcome change. Its not that they should have APIs for CAN Bus access, but can piggy back on CarPlay for a good music & nav system.</comment>


I Quit My Job Today. (And So Can You) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-coffeelicious/i-quit-my-job-today-d2adfe3c048e

<comment><USER2> I read down to the part where she said she had savings and a partner to rely on. That's great that she has a safety net...which gives the author a choice to quit at all. She kind of slides that information in at the end when it's pretty important to the equation of just saying, "screw this."

<comment><USER3> Exactly. I wish i could quit right now.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Slashpackaging.org - <AUTHOR> https://www.slashpackaging.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Creator of Slash Packaging here — it's a tool I am launching today (Earth Day) to help people find brands that care about sustainable packaging and have a /packaging page on their site.

This was a really fun project to build. You can search for any brand in the world and get a screenshot of their current /packaging page</comment>


How I turned "Street Sharks" into an online social experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/news/how-i-used-lies-about-a-cartoon-to-prove-history-is-meaningless-on-the-internet-1656188/ <comment><USER2> I don't think it's the internet's fault. In 1941 a couple of friends made a few phone calls to newspaper sports desks and concocted a college football team:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/sports/ncaafootball/the-41...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/16/sports/ncaafootball/the-41-season- at-plainfield-teachers-college-when-every-play-was-a-fake.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER3> In Tampa we have an annual celebration each year, in the style of New Orlean's Mardi Gras, of the notorious pirate José Gaspar capturing the city more than a century ago. Of course its all made-up nonsense. None of it ever happened. We still have a great party for it.

<comment> nommm-nommm The National Baseball Hall of Fame is located in Cooperstown, NY, a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. Cooperstown was chosen because a man named Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. A baseball field, Doubleday Field, stands on the exact location where baseball was invented.

Of course, that is a totally made up story.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was an article a couple days ago about why everyone believes Columbus proved the world was round[1], even though that isn't true[2]:

        The real myth of the medieval flat earth begins first
        in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has
        two principal sources. Probably the most influential
        of these was the American author Washington Irving
        who in his fictional biography of Columbus claimed
        that Columbus had to fight against the Church's
        belief that the world was flat in order to get
        permission and backing for his voyage, a complete
        fabrication.

I see an interesting parallel between the two cases. When you're the most influential person talking about something (or the only person at all...), people who later want to learn about the subject treat you as the best available authority, even if you're a bad one. Information is copied from authorities and self-reinforcing over time, much like genes in a population. What that means is when there's a bottleneck in the number of people talking about a topic, you can see a founder effect[3].

[1][https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/repeat-after-me- they...](https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/repeat-after-me-they-knew-it- was-round-damn-it/)

[2]That Columbus proved it, that is, not that the world is round.

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

<comment><USER5> Of the many sources to demonstrate that it was well known that the Earth was round, I like Dante the best: His Divine Comedy explicitly described the world as spherical, described how that meant different parts had day and night at different times, described how the stars would be different, etc.. It's not a very early source - there are many earlier ones -, but his level of detail shows that it was well understood what it meant and that the idea could be published in a work dealing with religion without controversy in the middle of Europe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know this is pitched as an experiment about the internet, but I think it is an even more telling experiment about the malleability of human memory.

<comment><USER7> I'm still wondering if its really the malleability of human memory or our need to fit in / social pressure to conform ?

<comment><USER8> A little from column A and a little from column B.

I have young kids and it's _fascinating_ watching them talk about half- remembered stuff from the past. They'll start off not really remembering much and taking guesses. Then the other takes that guess as gospel and repeats it back. Now the first has more confident. Soon they are both fully convinced of a whole pile of fabrications.

It made me realize how much of our memory is socially constructed.

<comment><USER7> Not sure I understand. Isn't memory of experience different than our believing it ?

Or is it something like there isn't "truth" in our memory ?

<comment><USER9> Excellent question, and the answer is that human memory is generally highly fallible, malleable, and unreliable.

We all have the naive impression that memory is somehow like a video recording and we can just access it to find out what happened. Indeed, we all have some very vivid and probably quite accurate memories about some exceptional events, or can recall exactly what page and what part of the page we read some specific item. There area also examples of amazing memory stunts and records, and even memory contests and championships.

But we cannot assume that just because we have some very good memories, memory is generally good, indeed, it is mostly pretty bad, especially compared to any kind of recording system.

This is supported by several areas of research demonstrating how easy it is to plant fake memories, reshape memories, and get people to be completely convinced that they are describing are exact and real.

One area of research is eyewitness testimony, which has pretty much been the standard in courts since courts existed, yet when eyewitness accounts are compared, they almost always come up with a variety of contradictions.

There's also been research into the phenomena of "found" or "recovered" memories often used to convict accused child abusers. Again, it turns out that suggestion and guidance on the part of the investigator can create things our or whole cloth, so it must be very carefully guarded against.

There's also several other research areas in which this is relevant, but the outcome is pretty consistent -- human memory is generally pretty bad (sorry I haven't got the time to track down the references).

I've found that it's best to just treat memory as merely a good hint about what might have happened (or where I might have left that tool or the keys), and then look for actual evidence of what really happened.

<comment><USER10> Also the "Mandela Effect".

For example I, as well as many others on the Internet, remember the James Bond Semi-Villain Jaws's romantic interest as being a blond, pig tailed, bespectacled girl with a large smile and a mouth full of braces. We're sure she had braces, that was the whole joke! Turns out, no record of her having braces whatsoever.

Weird that a memory could permeate society like that.

edit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/3vzk53/my_ma...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/3vzk53/my_mandela_effect_memory_about_the_james_bond/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I honestly don't understand the animosity towards the author.

I consider this sort of mischief to be a healthy thing. If you are exposed to _true facts_ constantly, all facts are true, in the same way that a TSA X-ray tech who sees ten thousand not-bombs might miss the one actual bomb.

I think of lies and disinformation as good for a mental agility, and an adjunct of storytelling. Is there no space for the trickster in our lives?

<comment><USER12> If you're referring to my comment and the tree under that, there isn't any animosity whatsoever, just a lack of respect for the notion that the author's own mischief is somehow a sign of how the Internet isn't capable of representing truths, which is absurd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> To those who are questioning how much truth the 'confession' has in it, you are definitely getting in the spirit of things.

The confession is sort of a buzzfeed-ish version of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and he digs in, at length musing on lies and truth and how they mush together in ways that are very hard to untangle.

At any rate, if you liked the essay, I recommend the book.

</comment><comment><USER14> In my opinion, this prank is very intricate and took a lot of effort while not actually proving the point that "history is meaningless on the internet" because the subject matter - the Street Sharks - are/were essentially forgotten by history itself. Sometimes things just naturally slide away and nobody cares. It's like, "What year did the black Power Ranger turn good?" or "What was the top selling Rock band in the years 1975-1983?" and then making up an answer because, well, it's not really pertinent stuff. There are much better cons online, I like to think...edit...even if this is some kind of meta-joke where it turns out all the fake parts are being faked...sigh...

<comment><USER15> > "What year did the black Power Ranger turn good?"

Was the black power ranger ever bad? I recall the green ranger going bad, then later returning, reformed, as the white ranger.

Or was mixing up the colors intentional to further your point?

<comment><USER16> The episode was Season 5 Episode 14 "Once You Go Black, You Never Go Back".

In the season finale, Zack absorbs Rita's evil power crystal and turns on the Power Rangers and Angel Grove. Zordon informs the Power Rangers of a secret cave containing the reversal crystal, but Rita and her Octopig monster have other plans. Can the Power Rangers morph in time to save Zack and Angel Grove?

<comment><USER17> > "Once You Go Black, You Never Go Back"

I lol'd. Too over the top though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's great. I love how myths can still be created and spread in this Internet age.

Another example : around 2005 someone made a playlist for himself of some Mars Volta b-sides and called it "A Missing Chromosome" [1]. Somehow it spread on P2P networks, was even listed on Wikipedia in the band's discography section with a back story etc.

I still have it in my collection under that name with the art etc and don't see the need to correct it.

A forum I'm in maintains a list of some fake things they put in Wikipedia. It's harder to do these days but some are still there and we joke that some parts may have found their way in some student school work.

1\. [http://forum.thecomatorium.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=105...](http://forum.thecomatorium.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=105589)

<comment><USER19> Consider the Slender Man story, which was concocted more-or-less whole-cloth on Somethingawful.com's fora. Two young people stabbed a third ostensibly to sacrifice her to this character, and one of the editors of somethingawful.com posted an article [[http://www.somethingawful.com/news/slenderman-not- real/](http://www.somethingawful.com/news/slenderman-not-real/)] reminding people that the story was 100% fabrication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What surprised me the most was people willing to go along with a lie. Human memory is a pretty faulty and malleable thing, but this level of confusion as was cited at one point in the article? I think it requires someone to be either consciously lying or have utter disregard to the value of what they're saying. It's one thing to repeat a lie because you didn't know the information wasn't true (though I'd consider providing confidence estimates on information you repeat as a basic human decency); it's something else entirely to repackage the lie and sell it as something you vouch for personally. These people are bullshit amplifiers.

<comment><USER21> Information that's mostly true with a few lies thrown in is very hard to verify. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street)

<comment><USER20> Fair enough, but posting that you have a movie that never existed recorded on tape because you presumably liked it so much - that's a completely different thing. That people are willing to do this - for what? Internet points? - saddens me deeply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Back in the early days of the IMDB, and before they got strict with verification, my brother uploaded information and credits for his high school movie assignments, which I had 'acted' in.

A Google search for my real name still returns my IMDB actors page as one of the top links.

</comment><comment><USER12> I can't help but read this like:

        Let me show you how dangerous sidewalks are
        by telling you the story about the time I
        went for a walk while swinging a spiked bat
        at every passer by. It was great fun, but it
        demonstrates why sidewalks are dangerous.

<comment><USER23> No. It's more like he was swinging a foam bat and is warning us how easy it would be for someone more malicious to swing a spiked bat.

Seriously, I don't really care if some teenager creates a non-sense fanfic world on poorly monitored sites.

However, it is noteworthy how the utter lack of quality control on so many Internet properties can propagate falsehoods.

This undermines the claim that the Internet was supposed to be this "Information Superhighway" (lol, remember that term?) leading to a more informed society.

This just hasn't panned out the way the tech utopians of the 90s thought it would. What they failed to foresee is that the abundance of information can lead to just as much ignorance as the lack of information.

<comment><USER12> I think the problems you're bringing up cannot be solved.

Information (re: "Information Superhighway") is information. In this utopian idea of "quality control", who does the quality control? Houghton Mifflin[1]?

If history is just a set of lies agreed upon[2], I'd rather have the consensus of the Internet than whoever it is you purport should be in control of quality.

1\. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer- sheet/wp/2014/09/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer- sheet/wp/2014/09/12/proposed-texas-textbooks-are-inaccurate-biased-and- politicized-new-report-finds/)

2\. [http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/napoleonbo161968....](http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/napoleonbo161968.html)

<comment><USER24> Not necessarily. The key problem is that primary sources are either in non- searchable hardcopy format (books, etc.) or inaccessible behind paywalls, making it impractical to do wide-ranging research outside of the academic libraries maintained by by large universities.

It would take quite a major revision to copyright law but it's not impossible to imagine some future version of a library where one can search digitized versions of all known works and correlate between them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's going to be a much bigger problem in the future.

I looked at the descriptions for the three shows. Frankly, nothing seemed out- of-line because I didn't watch toy-oriented cartoons in the 90s and that subject matter falls into a genre I just don't care about. Truthfully, I suspect that those synopses pretty much describe all 90s cartoons.

For that matter, your entire article could be a social experiment, but the subject matter of Street Sharks is so far off the spectrum of things I care about that it's the first time I've ever even heard of them.

But, it does illustrate how easy it is to slip things in like that. Do it enough times with lots of small things and sooner or later, you have enough evidence for something larger and so on and so forth.

Still don't care about Street Sharks, though.

And please, for the love of <deity>, don't show this to Michael Bay.

</comment><comment><USER26> None of this is the author's fault. The initial lie was meant as harmless fun, the fact that so many (largely highly regarded) media properties went and spewed it out as fact later on is the real problem. I mean how many times a week do we hear about Old Big Media retweeting nonsense or publishing Onion articles?

News sources these days are so programmed to chase every story that there's no room for fact checking and they all look like incredible idiots. It's amazing to me that anyone takes Old Media seriously anymore.

<comment><USER27> What news sources do you use? What is New Media?

<comment><USER20> Doesn't matter. Pretty much everyone knows most of media publishing is bullshit. After N+1th comment thread debunking a news article I'd thought at least everyone on HN understands that implicitly now. But quite many people agree and then immediately forget about it when the next story hits.

On-line news publishers don't care about accuracy or truth. Period.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have done something less malicious, but right around the same time.

When I was in NYU's grad math program, the Wikipedia just getting going. It had a lot of articles, but not on every topic. I was studying Analysis and decided to start the article on the Hessian Matrix.

Yes, I started that article and it's been fun to watch it grow over the years. Most sections I have added are still there, as well as some phrases such as "more can be said from the point of view of Morse Theory". It really set the direction of the subsequent topics and edits.

One section in particular, there, was completely made up by me. It was ACTUALLY TRUE, but it was never (to my knowledge) stated anywhere. No one had really made a treatment of the matter. Namely:

Hessians of vector valued functions. I said they were tensors of rank 3.

There was a discussion in the talk page about it. Some people were confused and argued for a bit but since was true, the community kept it, thinking that being a true math concept it must have a source somewhere. Now it has been expanded and an actual analysis of how it can be a tensor of rank 3 has been worked out. Now this may have led to citations that will lead to research on Hessians of vector valued functions acting as tensors. All because I wrote it there.

It wasn't false, like the Colbert's lie that "Elephant population of Africa has tripled in the last six months." But it was an experiment to see what an unsourced original statement would lead to on a fairly mainstream article.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think Rox->Roxie is a pretty plausible confusion even without "malicious" interference, so I'm not sure those parts prove anything.

<comment><USER30> The actual Rox was a human, though, not a female Street Shark as the author described her and people are claiming to remember her.

Edit: to be fair, I'm trusting the author's current account, I never watched Street Sharks myself. I could be the victim of some epic meta trolling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> IMHO I think it was the fact that the show was so obscure and lacked enough popularity to actually motivate people to bother validating it. If it was a much more popular show, say The Big Bang Theory, there would be enough knowledgable people to catch the falsities.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have done very similar stuff to Wikipedia for almost ten years now. It is astonishingly easy to make specious claims in backwater articles that no one cares about. It is pretty insane what happens to the articles afterwards. For example, on one article, _someone else_ has made a couple of edits adding _even more lies_ to my completely invented claims! Another "subtle vandal" (as I call myself)! I never expected that. And when someone else edits your false information for clarity, or whatever, it's as good as gold. One trick I use to encourage that is to make minor grammatical or spelling errors. If a human doesn't lumber by to edit (and then seal into fact) my bullshit information, usually an automated bot will eventually do the same thing. It's very important not to make your information sound too trite or wild. Most Wikipedia editors take everything with a big grain of salt the last few years.

</comment><comment><USER33> Truth is such a slippery concept. How easy it was to create by a school kid, and how organically it grew over time despite being entirely made up. Imagine how much better people with professional tools and desire can generate much more harmful information than fake Henry Winkler appearances.

<comment><USER34> A while back, I forget who, but someone tracked down some false facts that were supported by circular references in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia doesn't allow you to cite Wikipedia, of course, but the trickster added an unsupported, false fact to Wikipedia, which was quoted by someone's blog, which was quoted in an article by a "science" "journalist", and then the trickster updated the Wikipedia page to reference that article.

I think it's important to take note that this can happen instead of dismissing it as childish pranks. We should apply the "security mindset" to our sources of information, not just to our computation.

<comment><USER35> Maybe you remember [https://xkcd.com/978/](https://xkcd.com/978/)

<comment><USER34> Good point. It's clearly based on a real thing, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A little scary what this implies about groups of people with axes to grind on places like wikipedia.

<comment><USER36> It's why the wikipages on hot button issues that special interests care passionately about (Scientology, Abortion, etc) are so heavily moderated.

<comment><USER7> But who moderates the moderators ?

In this article, the author mentioned he became an editor for street sharks to help him spread his lies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What I think is most interesting is the people who all claim to "remember" these lies. Are they knowingly claiming to remember something they never saw to appear more knowledgeable or is their memory shaped by these lies they read? The latter is scarier.

</comment><comment> tuna-piano For those blaming the guy, and not the system / sites.

If Obama used the fake fact in a speech of his, would you blame his researchers or the guy who originally made up the lie?

I think the point is that authorities on information have a responsibility to ensure the information is accurate.

<comment><USER38> How deep you go for checking the fact ? Ultimately you always need to depends on someone/something else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> "I'm living in an ontological nightmare of my own making. It's jawsome!"

Had me in tears. Also, I completely forgot about that show until coming across this so thanks for bring back some history!

</comment><comment><USER40> This is a jawesome playbook of how "facts 2.0" get created.

</comment><comment><USER41> I was hoping this would reference the Berenstain Bears thing. I thought that was stupid because someone was obviously introducing a psychological impression when creating the theory.

</comment><comment><USER42> The idea that lies and misinformation can spread quickly and widely on the internet is proven almost daily. If you've ever seen a onion or any other satirical website post a story and then get shared liked, commented on, restated and then its like wait did none of you 60-70 ppl realize the article was fake?

</comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of the tale of Slow Blind Driveway, which if I recall correctly was the longest running hoax ever on Wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia/Slow_Blind_Driveway)

And of the fingerboxes meme on 4chan.

</comment><comment><USER43> This reminds me of the time some fangirl invented an entire season of _Inspector Gadget_ with her fan character in a prominent role as a love interest for Gadget -- and tried to pass it off as if it really happened, replete with faked screenshots of Gadget and her invention. The IG fan community actually took the bait for a while before she was outed.

</comment><comment><USER44> [http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/wikipedia-hoax-yuri- ga...](http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/wikipedia-hoax-yuri-gadyukin- nitrate-movie/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724350)

</comment><comment><USER45> What if this article was the social experiment. Did anyone verify any of the claims that he had even actually lied. Maybe he is fabricating a story about fabrication? I know I didn't verify. But don't fall into his sneaky trap again(or perhaps the first time).

</comment><comment><USER46> More like, "I used lies about a cartoon to convince some people online that history is meaningless on the internet." Nothing was proved, and I wonder how long that deception lasted. Edit: Title has since been changed.

</comment><comment><USER47> It's interesting that in this case the misinformation can readily be proven false. What method is there to identify incorrect information when no primary source exists? How much trusted information can never be verified?

</comment><comment><USER48> No one has mentioned the 2016 Election and the fabrication of stories from the front runners of both parties. History and memory are not being erased, just overwritten with new "facts".

</comment><comment><USER49> This seems like an interesting article. However, the large advertisement on the screen covering the entire viewport with no 'close' button makes reading it a real challenge.

<comment><USER50> You need a better ad blocker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> think about how much worse it was before the internet

</comment><comment><USER52> One word applies: JAWSOME!!!

</comment><comment><USER53> The fact that people have blindly accepted them as false is subtlety proving his point about history on the internet.

the fact that you do not understand that people simply do not care about street sharks does not make his premise intelligent or thought provoking.

</comment><comment><USER21> So, you lied, but it's someone else's fault?

 _After all, what kind of person would intentionally sow lies about Street Sharks across the internet?_

Well, not a good one.

<comment><USER54> Meh. I see this more as god-tier trolling. We have no way to easily tell if this piece is a total lie or a long delayed admission of truth. I'm certainly not ever going to research this to determine if it is valid. And that is what makes the troll god-tier. The nugget of truth he alludes to is then instantly suspect for everything now. Though I may forget that the internet of made up of dogs impersonating people from time to time, upon reflection I will remember the Street Sharks guy and be brought back to the 'center'; that everything on the net is a lie. The commentary on epistemology and nihilism aside, this guy is a god-tier troll. Soberly, I'll never trust a thing on here again.

<comment><USER55> Grandparent probably doesn't consider trolls to be "good people". Of course, with the wisdom of experience one finds that trolling is just another form of rhetoric, neither "good" nor "bad". Good people will troll us to the truth at least as often as bad people will troll us to butthurt.

<comment><USER21> Liars, not trolls. I mean I guess there's overlap but it's the lying I'm calling out. The author seems continually surprised and concerned that people would believe lies about history, but that's not new or surprising or even interesting. In fact that's why we each have a responsibility to tell the truth.

<comment><USER55> Everyone who communicates, lies. One who doesn't expect that, won't be able to make much sense of the world. It's not useful to draw bright lines around the category of "lies". It would be pretty awful to lie to your boyfriend about whether you had an STD, or to your kid about the existence of imaginary holiday characters. Making up shit about some forgotten TV show just ain't the same thing.

The best trolling may not be _precisely_ lying, but it's certainly more about assuming alternate versions of reality than it is about e.g. just being rude.

<comment><USER56> > It would be pretty awful to lie [...] to your kid about the existence of > imaginary holiday characters

True. But people do it, regularly and consistently, and in fact protect their children from finding out about said lies, with ever more complex mechanisms. But, strangely, most people who do this seem to think it's a good thing to lie like this. Not sure why, and I suspect it sets a bad example to children that adults are not to be trusted, as they make things up. And that it is OK to do it, since there are no bad consequences for the adults, so why not lie themselves?

<comment><USER55> Are you around kids much? They certainly don't need any encouragement to lie!

It has long been my policy to tell my young nieces and nephews really obvious lies on a regular basis, just to let them practice their critical thinking. I love the looks of dawning realization and the swiftly following cries of "nuh- uh!" My oldest niece has heard enough of these that she just smirks when she hears another one.

Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are sort of an internal critique of Christianity. Sadly I think this critique goes over most people's heads, and their eventual disillusionment is more upsetting as a result. Still, parents have to try. To give away the game, I don't actually think there's anything wrong with this particular lie.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How a Steel Box Changed the World: A Brief History of Shipping - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/video/series/a-brief-history-of/how-a-steel-box-changed-the-world-a-brief-history-of-shipping/CF460889-9984-483E-AF44-324330B89ECA <comment><USER2> If you found this video interesting, check out the book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't find a link without the pre-roll 15 second ad - sorry!</comment>


[Feedback] Do you need this? - <AUTHOR> At OneScreen Interactive we developed a platform where, right out the gate, you can create dozens of web apps within minutes and publish them, at scale, wherever you want!
What can you do with it you ask? Landing pages, forms, product highlights, or events… simply use your creativity and imagine all the cool things you can do!
a) Would you use it to promote your business/products? b) any enhancements you suggest?
Please, try it here --> https://goo.gl/KEQ5AZ <comment><USER2> For people who don't like clicking on shortened URLs: [https://web.onescreen.io/admin/login?utm_source=HN](https://web.onescreen.io/admin/login?utm_source=HN)</comment>