Clojure Debugger? - <AUTHOR> http://deliberate-software.com/clojure-debugger/

<comment><USER2> Tools like (trace ...) in Lisp are helpful, but most of the time you want an actual debugger. If you are using Eclipse as your Clojure IDE, the plugin Counterclockwise integrates with the usual Eclipse debugger and let's you do all the usual things:

[http://code.google.com/p/counterclockwise/](http://code.google.com/p/counterclockwise/)

<comment><USER3> I keep trying to learn how to use CCW for the debugger, but I've been using Emacs too long. Realistically we should improve the nrepl tooling so that everybody can use the editor they're happy with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I still remember how, when learning common lisp, I kept looking for how to enable a breakpoint in my code. I wanted a conditional breakpoint that would fire under specific conditions. I was _really_ surprised to learn that you just modify your code and insert a (when something (break)) -- and that (break) function call lands you in a debugger.

I found the elegance and convenience very impressive.

Clojure, unfortunately, is hard to debug, no matter how many trace macros one uses. In a long-running application I would much rather land in a debugger, inspect locals, think about what to do next, walk the frames on the stack, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Tracing functions was available in Lisp shortly after the big flood, when mankind killed the last dinosaurs.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right, it was just my first exposure it, and I wanted to share it with everyone who didn't already know about it. No disrespect intended to the Lisp's that already had it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Once in a while, I have felt the need to find out exactly what was going on > at a certain point, and had to awkwardly put in (do (pprint x) x) statements > everywhere.

Use this:

[https://github.com/dgrnbrg/spyscope](https://github.com/dgrnbrg/spyscope)

Less awkward and more informative!

<comment><USER7> Timbre has also a pretty useful spy function for that purpose.</comment></comment>


NextCloud gets bigger and better with Nextcloud Hub 19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/nextcloud-gets-bigger-and-better-with-nextcloud-hub-19/ <comment><USER2> I just turned off 2 of my NextCloud instances.

At first, NextCloud looks pretty and functional but that is only for the core feature that is file sharing and even with that, the UI isn't too polished. (Uploading indicator is quite useless and emptying trash never empties etc.)

As soon as you touch any of the extensions, things are worse. Talk plugin simply never worked, email plugin was uselessly incomplete (Rainloop plugin works well except can't get the auto login feature to work), and other plugins were like hacked over the weekend by young devs with poor performance and UI.

I liked that NextCloud offered CalDAV and CardDAV painlessly but NextCloud as a whole is so slow that I started using Radicale for CalDAV and CardDAV and kept a single instance of NextCloud purely for file sharing which is still better than other self hosted solutions.

They advertise their product well but their tech team isn't catching up with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just installed these Docker images (Nextcloud and Collabora) on my private k8s cluster. Fantastic setup and I have docs and collaboration everywhere (iOS, WebDAV, Linux, Windows) and it's out of the hands of Google. I like the integrations that some OSs do (Ubuntu). This is just one of the open source projects that are genuinely better than some closed/paid solutions (IBM Notes anyone)?</comment>


Spy agencies in covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gaming - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-spies-online-games-world-warcraft-second-life <comment><USER2> MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Could signals be sent with bids? Could a character's inventory contents be arranged to leave a message to someone else who shares the login info? Is that nonsense coming from what you presume to be a bot-controlled gold-farming crew really nonsense? When a game goes to great lengths to simulate a world, the possibilities for covert communication are nearly limitless!

I find the task of finding terrorist communications in MMO's so daunting that I'd never even consider making an attempt at it. However, the NSA is one organization that seems to have nearly infinite resources to throw at impossible problems. This is an organization that is literally trying to "hack the planet"! I seriously doubt they'll ever managed to uncover anything significant, even if they're plugged directly into the servers at Blizzard, etc.. However, at least some spooks get to play WoW for a living on the government's dime!

Seriously... The NSA makes military spending look frugal!

<comment><USER3> > MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. > Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse > code? Could signals be sent with bids? Could a character's inventory > contents be arranged to leave a message to someone else who shares the login > info? Is that nonsense coming from what you presume to be a bot-controlled > gold-farming crew really nonsense?

Precisely. WOW itself is the first level of steganography ("I'm not communicating, I'm gaming"), but one can think of many more, inside and outside of MMOs.

Given proper use of steganography, small groups will always be able to communicate with low risk of detection. But for obvious reasons, you will always have to roll your own scheme, and may end up overlooking aspects that render it insecure.

<comment><USER4> Is anyone aware of articles or books that deal with the creation of these types of systems? I'm guessing some sort of cryptography text would lead to it, but the last sentence of your post has me particularly interested. What kind of considerations need to be made when creating such a system, especially in today's age?

<comment><USER5> Nope, cryptography != steganography. The situation with stego, currently, is much the same as the situation with crypto was before the invention of public key encryption: truly high-grade stego is only available to governments, mostly because nobody knows how to do it in a secure way. In other words, stego is an art, not a science, just like crypto was before PKE. There are no good texts as far as I'm aware.

Your best bet is to read whitepapers on stego. See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6843575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6843575) for related discussion.

<comment><USER6> >>stego is art not science

what about "provably secure steganogrpahy"? there seems to be some papers on this. isn't is by definition science, not art?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> God I wish I worked for the NSA.

"Hey man, are you watching porn?"

"Hell yeah! Because terrorists are using it to send messages! It's in the Mise-en-scène! I'm doing this for freedom!"

"My God. You're right!"

"Also, I'm pretty sure they're doing the same thing in strip clubs. And with really high-quality whiskey. So...I'm going to need some really high-quality whiskey. And a fist-full of singles."

"Anything you need! You brave bastard!"

<comment><USER8> I hope I just upvoted you but I was laughing so hard I may have hit the down button by accident.

<comment><USER7> I go where I'm needed :-)

<comment><USER9> You brave bastard!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate"

The article is pretty good in most areas, but an epic fail in this specific small subpart. The solution to the problem is simply follow the cultural trend of redefining what terrorism means. The article fails by listing some actual real terrorists. The article succeeds by listing non-terrorists as terrorists such as academic scientists who are employed in a perfectly legitimate capacity by a government that our government doesn't happen to like at this moment. The article fails by not mentioning that most of the terrorists they're tracking are prank telephone callers, internet bullying, anyone who ever disagrees with anything our government does in any manner or the actions of any individual government employee, anyone who belongs to a religion or no religion at all, political candidates and supporters on whichever is the losing side, teens toilet papering houses, minorities who do illegal things like drive while black in white neighborhoods, you know, new school terrorism as opposed to the old school stuff they used to be concerned with like crashing planes and stuff.

What we really need is a .gov organization oriented against old school terrorism instead of the new school 1984 stuff.

<comment><USER11> I'm hoping one of the results from the NSA reform will be that we'll properly name who and what exactly is a terrorist. The government spies on everyone, and then to justify their spying they're calling all of them potential terrorists. That line of thinking must go.

<comment><USER10> Yes the funny part is the scientist they labeled as a terrorist is not a terrorist at all, but is a perfectly legitimate surveillance target. They not only have the wrong label for the wrong people, they have the wrong label for the right people.

As a followup to my original post we probably need two new .gov agencies not just one. One would focus on state level threats to the country like foreign nuclear scientists, pretty much the pre-1984 style CIA stuff, or at least the fraction of CIA activities that were actually legal. The other would be more police like and focus on nutty individual threats, that aren't national threats, more or less James Bond evil villain type stuff. Both groups might or might not "fit" under the same gov org. Probably neither fits under the existing 1984 organizations, and unfortunately no one is apparently working on those two problems, in favor of the much more exciting "stamp out political dissidents / implement Stasi/SS secret police in the USA" model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> These two comments on theguadian.com sum it up rather aptly:

> > This is beyond farcical. Does any working at GCHQ or NSA actually have a > fully functioning brain?

> Yes they do, and recognize a well paid cushy job when they see one.

<comment><USER12> GCHQ is not well paid ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I grew up in a world in which the Stasi infiltrating church groups was seen as state security going beyond the pale.

This is just beyond insanity.

These agencies should not just be reined in anymore, the need to be abolished and replaced if we are ever to return to an acceptable level of state surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is not as silly as it appears.

I spend a lot of time 'in' an online game playing with one of my relatives. We have a collective circle of online friends and we know when something is up with any of our friends. If they have not logged on all day that is a cause of concern. Equally, if someone is going to be away from the game for a few days then they will let everyone know. I doubt they would email the same to everyone in their address book.

With aforementioned relative I know if she is working from home, on business or with time to herself. Her involvement in the game shows that. I know more from her gameplay than I do from emails or from what anyone else in the family has to say. Important family news is relayed in game rather than on the phone or in email. Email might be moved to if something needs to be discussed away from a public forum, but, that first message, in-game is best.

As for online friends, I am not that picky. I have online in-game friends from all over the world and I don't care if they are raving Christian nutters. In real life I would not have time for those that want to quote the bible to me every day, but I will tolerate it in-game, so long as they further my game goals. Therefore I am easier to befriend in-game than in real life.

I get up to things that my friends and family don't get to hear about, they are not to know. However, if I was to be targeted for spying then the in-game communication would show whether I was busy with something else or not. I don't have to conspire with others in-game for the communications to be useful, so I don't think the NSA/GCHQ actually have to be looking for 'bomb plots', just a level of game devotion.

<comment><USER15> > _This is not as silly as it appears._

Oh yes it is. This is the readily and deservedly lampoon-ready tail end of snooping on everything without know what you are looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some poor NSA analyst was caught playing WoW in work and had to develop this enormous ploy to explain his actions as a way to capture chat terrorist traffic in-game. It just blew up from there.

</comment><comment><USER17> >The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which boasts more than 48 million players.

In other news, the NSA to start a new reality TV show: Living Room Security! Find out who's added to a no-fly list this week as we take you live inside your own living room. Brought to you by the Xbox Kinect.

<comment><USER18> Strangely, for once I wouldn't be very mad if they put angry, profane Call of Duty children on no fly lists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Online games are interesting to infiltrate because they can be a conduit for downloaded code; a lot of the clients are native code with the capability for remote execution (e.g., for anti-cheat challenges).

I have no evidence that the NSA has done this.

To the NSA, your user base is just another set of people to monitor, just another set of machines to infiltrate. They don't care about your user's trust.

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought this was reasonably public information for a few years now. IARPA (basically the intelligence agencies' version of DARPA) has had a series of public grant calls since the late 2000s for research on various kinds of data- mining in MMOs and virtual worlds, ranging from behavior modeling to transaction tracking. Of course, they didn't say precisely why they were interested in such research, but one could surmise...

edit: Here's a 2008 Bruce Schneier post about it: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/searching_for...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/searching_for_t.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> >According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other.

I can't understand how this can be true, 48 million players vs. 30,000-40,000 NSA employees[1], number of agents is probably a few orders lower.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Employ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Employees)

<comment><USER4> Say there are a couple hundred servers in various games they're observing and participating in (not an absurd number given that one person with a 40-hour week could play quite a bit), it's reasonable to assume multiple agencies might overlap servers.

<comment><USER21> Well, I was just hinting on overspending: if a few agents are watching one target it's miscommunication and mild overspending, but when there's a whole "deconfliction group" it's overspending squared.

<comment><USER10> Aside from overspending you might want to look into existing BATF sting operations. If the majority of the criminal activity in an area is law enforcement sting operations trying to catch the small fraction of actual criminals, then you need a deconfliction group or the vast majority of arrests will be law enforcement agents arresting each other.

Imagine if the city cops decide to crack down on prostitution by posing as johns in a sting, the same night that county sheriffs decide to crack down on prostitution as prostitutes in a sting, and the streets are 90% full of cops arresting each other. LOL all you want, this has happened IRL, also with drug trafficking. There is also something of a meme that the majority of underage girls on chat services are creepy FBI agents.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, it's bureaucracy gone wild: one criminal per fifty employees. But I guess it's even less than so in this case: no convicted criminals, so many agents that a "deconfliction group" (how many employees were in that "group"? 3-5? 10?) was needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I suppose HN is also infiltrated. Those damn 'hackers' _must_ be reading Hackers News, right? I hear some are even 'small government' types. I can understand why people think that must be the reason every NSA article disappears of the frontpage after 40 comments...

</comment><comment><USER23> Relevant (from 2010):

"Detecting Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing Activity in Second Life and World of Warcraft", Angela S M Irwin, Jill Slay - University of South Australia

[http://ro.ecu.edu.au/icr/5/](http://ro.ecu.edu.au/icr/5/)

</comment><comment><USER24> This ought to finally get the script kiddies up in arms about government surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if NSA has reversed chat protocols for non-MMO games in order to facilitate broad, keyword-based intercept directly from player network traffic.

Namely games that don't send chat traffic through a centralized server. Perhaps older games that had lackluster releases and are currently ghost towns in terms of active players. If bad guys are trying to fly under the radar, those are probably a smart bet (relatively speaking) compared to games that are popular. Most non-MMOs don't even require an account, let alone billing details.

It would be laughable if firing up some ancient, crappy game that nobody plays is all it takes to dodge dragnet surveillance. On the other hand, I imagine dragnet surveillance never was intended to catch smart people (only blackmail them), and terrorists by definition tend to be dumb.

Obviously if someone is already targeted, reverse engineering game chat protocols becomes irrelevant. Analysts would just read screenshots and key- logger data courtesy of NSA TAO (or whatever GCHQ's equivalent is).

</comment><comment><USER26> See also Andrea Sharpton's notes on Linden Lab and its opposition to allowing users to chat over OTR: [http://pastebay.net/1371265](http://pastebay.net/1371265)

</comment><comment><USER27> > A later memo noted that among the game's active subscribers were "telecom > engineers, embassy drivers, scientists, the military and other intelligence > agencies".

Perhaps these were the targets.

<comment><USER10> If not targets, an idea not discussed so far is bribery victims?

"Sure, I can op you... but we like to know when ops will be around, you know, for coverage so there's always one online, so if you could just let us know when you'll be working (embassy driver) overtime hours..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Even if this was a legitimate concern to the NSA, if you don't cover every game you wouldn't catch any possible terrorist. If I were a smart terrorist, I'd just simply use a fairly obscure game unlikely to be targeted.

<comment><USER29> You mean, like, Furcadia?

"This 'dream' is trying to tell someone something. I just can't figure out what 'yiffing' is..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Terrorists: we will Candy Crush you.

<comment><USER31> This just in. Head of Al Qaeda has this to say:

        "The inf1del n00bz of the Alliance, will be crushed by
       our grand Jihad Horde. We will bomb their cities, and rain
        death in Arathi Basin on all major servers. Allah is great!"

General Alexander wasn't able to comment, because he was apparently speed leveling his Paladin. Anonymous sources cite that his palandin is still level 30 and that quote: "Keith is quite a newb. He doesn't know that he can insta level his Paladin.".

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It is always great when evil is incompetent. I dislike that the NSA, GCHQ, etc. are spying on everyone and violating everyone's basic dignities, but it's great that they waste time doing so in rather insane ways, e.g. by playing video games.

Basicly, I hate the NSA's spying, but if they want to spy on me in ridiculously convoluted ways... it's better than them being actually competent.

<comment><USER7> That's a good point. This has to be one of the most Rube Goldberg ways I've ever heard of someone trying to collect intelligence. Did that teenager really have sex with my mother? Or is that some sort of code! Or is he just mad that I fragged his team and broke his streak? Or was the streak itself some sort of code!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This sounds like it is actually closer to traditional spy work than most of the revelations we have heard recently. If you tell an NSA agent (or anyone online) something they will know what you tell them. It is more worrying if they are leaving vulnerabilities un-patched as this could allow anyone to exploit the same methods. Are foreign governments using this to spy on Americans?

</comment><comment><USER34> When I read this I just though of the Penguin Party scene from Four Lions, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew- SrlQ9tlI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-SrlQ9tlI). Turns out these morons get there ideas from satirical black comedies.

<comment><USER12> Or the laundry verse where the external assets experimented with using WOW to communicate.

Persephone has a "WWLJD" bracelet. When she's trying to infiltrate Schiller's compound, everyone naturally assumes it stands for "What would Lord Jesus do?" Actually, it's "What would Leeroy Jenkins do?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> From what little has been confirmed, the system we know about works "better" the more connections you feed into it.

I doubt they intended to find anyone directly using this information. Instead, what is more likely is that collecting data in these games might help identify "friends" of people considered suspicious via some other means.

Although now that I think of it, games like WoW and EVE Online do make for quite a milieu. I know that several of my colleagues play such games and with each other.

It certainly chills the spine a bit when you realize that there are people who've had this kind of data for quite some time, using it for who-knows- what...

</comment><comment><USER36> They have to monitor the cesspool of XBox Online screeching 14 year olds?

I feel sorry for them.

</comment><comment><USER37> tl;dr, NSA analysts want to play WoW during working hours. Can't blame 'em.

</comment><comment><USER38> If you have to monitor all online communication, then infiltrating private message boards by means of technology or human interaction is essential. An in-game chat is just an additional communication protocol next to email, Skype, etc.

Leaving such communication channels unmonitored would pose a potential threat. This behavior is in line with the current state of affairs and should be expected.

</comment><comment><USER39> Well, this is a good excuse for gaming MI5 analysts, and probably a reason for their recent Russian vacancies, someone has to play Russian MMORPGs (just kidding). But seriously speaking - do you remember that American spy killed in Tripoli before the Lybian war (if memory serves)? He was a huge authority in EVE Online as it turned out.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wasn't Topiary busted because of using Xbox live? Wonder about that informant now

</comment><comment><USER41> Or... you find players that are obsessive 1st person shooter players, you cross reference their mental health history and access to guns. That pops up Adam Lanza in Newtown. You engage him and coerce him. hmm..

</comment><comment><USER42> As always, Randall Monroe had a pithy comic about such monitoring: xkcd 1223 "Dwarf Fortress"

[http://xkcd.com/1223/](http://xkcd.com/1223/)

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder about the financial impact on gaming companies once users get creeped out by this. Nice job, NSA.

</comment><comment><USER44> Most important question not answered: were the Alliance or Horde?

</comment><comment><USER45> I think it's becoming very clear now:

Either the NSA/government goes or technology goes.

If we want to attain a sane degree of democracy in our Western world, both can not continue to coexist in their current form.

<comment><USER46> But you can't get rid of the NSA when there are real threats in the world. It's just not going to happen, because there actually are real threats (the number is debatable), and the existence of more than an anomaly of threats will always be justification for NSA and their ilk.

The only way to _get rid of the NSA_ is to get rid of the threats. The most effective long term way is to work for and achieve a much higher level of peace, tolerance and community than the world currently has.

<comment><USER47> > But you can't get rid of the NSA when there are real threats in the world.

Sure you can. The existence of real threats does not mean that the NSA is the only means of dealing with them, nor even that it is an effective way of dealing with them even before considering the negative impacts it has, nor, finally -- and this is the key consideration -- that it is a net positive considering the benefits it provides against the threats against the direct threat it produces to freedom.

<comment><USER46> I'll concede that getting rid of the NSA regardless of threats is within the realm of possibility. But it's very unlikely. Maybe more unlikely than world peace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> i thought this was an onion article.. america has become quite sad.

<comment><USER49> The United States is collapsing, and the show will take a while. I'd say sit back and enjoy, but in this show most of us die, and those who don't will wish they did.

<comment><USER50> The passive spectator stance is part of what causes this, not really a sane reaction to it. It's not a show, it's the result of our (in)actions.</comment></comment></comment>


Someone Just Found An Embeddable Google +1 Button – And It Works - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/31/omg-someone-just-found-an-embeddable-google-1-button-%e2%80%93-and-it-works/

<comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2393081>

<comment><AUTHOR> this one was unintentional</comment></comment>


Kinect sex is here, game company says - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20025804-52.html?tag=rtcol;pop

<comment><USER2> Clearly a popular item, as it's been submitted twice already:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2010349>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2012703>

It hasn't prompted and significant discussion yet.</comment>


Coding Machines - <AUTHOR> https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/ <comment><USER2> What a great read, a stellar example of hard sci-fi. Unless it's real, of course...</comment>


Show HN: Change outfits in your photo with computer vision - <AUTHOR> http://m.me/wandappcomingup <comment><USER2> requires a facebook sign in?

<comment><AUTHOR> yup it's on messenger</comment></comment>


Show HN: Serial communication using the WebAudio API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cteubank/AudioSerial

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd appreciate any feedback, especially from more experienced devs. I built this JS class to send serial commands over the headphone port of an iPhone using Javascript and the HTML5 WebAudio API. This enabled me to use an iPhone application to control my embedded systems design senior project.

<comment><USER2> This is a great hack, very clever. You mention on the GitHub page that you use a comparator to convert the signal for the ATMega168. I know that the ATmega328 has an embedded comparator so I'm wondering how easy you think it would be to create a library for Arduino projects?

I currently have a few projects which are bound to servers so I can control them with web apps and this seems like a great way to liberate them from the network. Low-level analog signal processing is about where my knowledge comes to a screeching halt (hence using Arduinos in the first place) but I'd love to play around with any AVR code to try and implement this for high-level language hardware people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know about the JavaScript code, but I did look at the uC code (EE459 repo I guess?).

Since you are already taking the flash hit with sprintf, you might be interested to know that you can redirect stdout to print all data through your serial line, i.e. just using printf. Saves going through an intermediate buffer. Looks something like this:

[http://pastie.org/8073251](http://pastie.org/8073251)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip! I'll try and implement this once I get the parts in for my new board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great hack and worth doing just because it is a great hack, but since it was a senior project, wouldn't it have been easier to just grab an old Android phone off Ebay and use standard 2-way communication directly?

<comment><AUTHOR> Possibly. It was an embedded systems class, and I have a background dealing more with webdev and audio systems, so I figured I could combine all three into something novel. It actually worked out really well for the purpose, which was supposed to be a power-saving application. This way required only the addition of a comparator chip between the ATMega168 and the headphone line, which made it a super low power (and computationally light) way to communicate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's something similar doing FSK with Javascript and HTML5 audio:

[https://github.com/NeoCat/FSK-Serial-Generator-in- JavaScript...](https://github.com/NeoCat/FSK-Serial-Generator-in-JavaScript/)

</comment><comment><USER6> You could have applications that talk with your smartphone without a network and just a browser providing you can access your microphone in Android and iOS. reply

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. The next step on this project will be to try and get two way communication working. I ran out of time before the class ended to get that established. If I remember correctly I ran into some issues with the mobile safari and the microphone input via javascript. I believe PhoneGap provides an API for this though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very neat! Maybe you could even implement read using navigator.userGetMedia to provide two way communications ...

</comment><comment><USER8> Neat project, but would be great to see a demo page.

Also, s/buad/baud/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in the process of building a more general purpose dev board using the same processor I used for the class, so once I've got that up and running I'll try and post more "How to" related stuff on the github.

<comment><USER9> Do you think there might be a way to receive data? Maybe measure the voltage drop from a normally high circuit?

Edit: Awesome project. (:</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How did Hacker News take off? - marco-fiset I've been an avid Hacker News reader for the past 6 months. I like the content and the discussions that spawn here. But I'll put it straight: usability sucks. And it's ugly. How did such a badly designed website became so wildly popular? I know that the content is responsible for a lot of traffic, but why didn't anyone just build a better alternative in the last 2-3 years?<p>This is not a rant or anything, I'm just trying to understand how Hacker News became what it is today, with such a simple implementation. <comment><AUTHOR> Forums, like social networks, are networks effects businesses. HN grew from a seed set among YC people, applicants, pg's essay audience, likeminded individuals. After there is a community and conversations, they pull in other people. (I randomly got drawn in when someone referenced my blog some years ago, and I just happened to stay. etc, etc)

Assume you have the magic wand of product design. You wave it and create The Best Forum Ever. That's great. I don't use it because I use HN and you have no reason for me to switch. People who want to read what I have to say can't find what I have to say on your forum, because I'm not on it. Sum up that interaction over the entire space of possible users and it leads to a forum with 0 users and no content.

If you (hypothetically) want to create a competitor, your big problem is not creating a better designed website. It is, instead, convincing a seed set of users to use your new website even in the absence of much content on it, and having those users be such wonderful/connected/popular/thought-provoking/etc people such that people will join your site just to hang out with them.

</comment><comment><USER2> > Usability sucks

Could you be a little more specific? What actions are difficult to do with the current interface? What specific modifications would make them easier?

I think the design of HN is really tight and focused. My one complaint is that it's difficult to go back and find ancient comments I've made for later citation.

> And it's ugly.

It doesn't load hundreds of images and enormous JavaScript libraries. It doesn't leak memory and cause my system to swap. It doesn't spam obnoxious ads with sound everywhere. This makes it beautiful to me -- almost a nod to what the Web was like in the early days, back when completely unstyled content was still good enough for a lot of sites.

The color scheme doesn't matter to me as long as I can read the text.

</comment><comment><USER3> HN is better looking than Reddit, which is much more popular. Both sites tend to give lie to popular (among us nerds) theories of how well-designed a site needs to be to serve its audience.

</comment><comment><USER4> People migrated from Reddit as it became too mainstream and less tech focused. Reddit has a similar design. I like the simplicity personally

<comment><USER5> Reddit was great when it started. It gradually diluted.

HN was opened to the public, who then had access to already tight and information-dense conversation started by YC members. HN was, at that time, some of the best, most focused, highest signal-to-noise conversation one could find on the open Web.

Usability is in good part determined by the users. In addition to the length of time involved since its inception and initial tweaks to appearance, there is the matter of what the core HN population was and, I hope, continues to be interested in: _Communication_. Getting knowledge and ideas across. Sorting the most valuable (as determined by the community) to prominence.

HN continues to do pretty well at this.

And even in its graphical design... Well, the Verdana typeface was developed by one of most prominent type designers, for Microsoft, to be particularly readable on-screen. (Admittedly, screens at the time were still mostly CRT's. But even with LCD's, for quite a number of years the dot pitch did not change all that much.)

Text is nice and black. It's on a light gray background rather than white, to reduce eye strain.

Just because it doesn't look like a highly customized version of Bootstrap version whatever, doesn't mean it's not good at what it does.

I have seen complaints about usability on mobile devices. Overall, I think this simply hasn't been enough of a concern, nor considered to be having enough of a negative impact, for pg and crew to take it on.

Also, realize that any number of site and design decisions may and I suspect are made without any publicity or acknowledgement. pg and moderators fix problems and determine optimizations, and some of these depend upon a lack of publicity.

It might even be that pg doesn't particularly want the influence of "momentary" attention in conversations. Enhancing mobile usability might be viewed as contributing to a decline in the quality of conversation and/or voting.

I'm not saying this _is_ happening. But I am saying that, with respect to some aspects of the site, sometimes you have to read between the lines if you're seeking the why of it.

Unlike reddit, there has been no private messaging facility on HN. pg has stated, IIRC, that he didn't want to / see the value in putting the effort into developing one. But... the decision might also be viewed as lessening the avenues for "submarine" conversations and the development of cliques.

He did support a third party initiative for notification of responses to comments. And your profile does allow you to state means of contact outside of HN. But there's a bit more friction in those means, and perhaps to good effect.

Finally, pg has stated repeatedly that -- in what started out as a side- project that was specifically YC focused -- he puts the effort he does put into HN where he thinks it adds the most value. E.g. comment quality, spam and destructive participation whack-a-mole, etc.

Not that pg needs me to speak up for him. But, to state what I've observed from my perspective and so perhaps contribute my bit to overall efficiency, here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I disagree that it's ugly. Usability has been fine for me on the desktop, where I use it most. Mobile usability is weak, but I'm usually not trying to participate in forums on my phone.

That said, I would probably use a forum that I did find ugly if the content was interesting enough.

</comment><comment><USER7> The more time you spend on HN, you'll discover and become more paranoid how large the iceberg is supporting its simple visible surface. Vast lisp AI kraken and spermaceti entangle down in its knotty and murky abyss. Are you prepared to go down this rabbit hole?

</comment><comment><USER8> How exactly does "usability suck"? It looks great to me - all content, no bullshit. Only thing I'd change are those bizarre "expired link" errors, which I can only explain as a deliberately perverse incentive against discussing yesterday's news.

</comment><comment><USER9> Aside from the weird link expiration issues, I wouldn't call HN a bad design.

It's simple, efficient, and information dense. Page load times are quick because it's not having to load CSS and JS frameworks. Simplicity isn't a bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Because we took the red pill as we want to see how far the rabbit hole goes.

Fancy graphics are for the mainstream crowd who took the blue pill, want to wake up and believe what they want to believe.</comment>


Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974) - <AUTHOR> http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html <comment><USER2> > In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to > judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to > judgement in one particular direction or another.

Sometimes I think if we could extend this principle to human communication in general, we'd end up with a lot less misinformation.

I try to communicate doubts or possible weaknesses in my arguments when I can, though it's difficult and I'm sure I've failed to do so on numerous occasions. It occurs to me that perhaps we simply don't have the cognitive capacity to include that level of information in our everyday communications. Still, I wonder if perhaps this should be an ideal to strive for. Information travels so fast now, and it seems like most people aren't very mindful of how they participate in this transmission.

<comment><USER3> For the general audience total confidence always beats the person who delivers a confidence interval.

Hedgehogs also beat foxes, despite the obvious difference in prediction accuracy in favor of foxes.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps the answer is a kind of confident non-confidence. "I have studied this problem and am about 70% confident that the answer is this, and I am confident there's not enough information available to be more certain than that. If anyone tells you they know the answer for certain, they are probably trying to sell you something."

<comment><USER3> I think this is a really valuable approach to try, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Surely You 're Joking, Mr Feynman_ is a brilliant read. My high school Physics teacher lent it to me a few years ago; it really opened my eyes and increased my love for the subject.

<comment><USER6> I just happened to finish it today. I already knew throughout the book that it would be a very important read, in several aspects. The very end is about the cargo cult in science, and it looks like he put this collection of anecdotes of his life in the sole point of illustrating the cargo cult problem, only exposed in the end. It's almost the sole time he talks extensively about science in this book (and it's why it's so awesome). Cargo cult is the result of a trap that our own brain seem to be wired to fall in. We all know or knew at some point how to avoid the trap, but it gets another perspective when reading about someone that put it in practice his entire life.

Question everything, discover everything, take nothing for granted.

If it's seems unrealistic, just read the book, it'll just teach you how it happens. If it's intimidating, it's by its ruthless simplicity.

<comment><USER7> _Cargo cult is the result of a trap that our own brain seem to be wired to fall in._

Yeah, tell me about it. I fell into the trap a couple of months ago. I was tasked with porting my company's browser's 2D graphics backend onto Android OpenGL. My first attempt allowed the browser to draw into graphics buffers that I would load into a texture using glTexImage2D.

A few co-workers felt that this was less efficient than the old 2D APIs, where we would draw into a buffer that would be directly read by the blitter hardware, without having to do a load step. I agreed - on the face of it, if we could arrange things to draw into the texture buffer directly we could save memory and processor cycles, so I started hunting on the Internet to see if anyone else had come to the same conclusion.

It turns out that the guys that were developing Firefox for Android had had exactly the same problem, and they hacked together a solution where they used some internal Android APIs for graphic buffers, that they accessed through dlopen/dlsym. They then linked the buffer to an eglImage, and created a texture from the eglImage. I figured that hey, if the Firefox guys are doing it, then it's probably not to bad an idea.

Unfortunately I should have taken the next step in my investigations, and ask myself exactly what that code that created an eglImage and linked it to a texture was actually doing. If I had investigated that more closely, I would have realised that behind the scenes there's an implicit equivalent of glTexImage2D being done - the problem being that the internal format of a texture is not a simple bitmap. The image is tiled so that OpenGL can draw a texture to the screen with any rotation and have roughly the same performance - if you use a standard bitmap layout, memory paging makes drawing tall thin rectangles much slower than drawing wide short rectangles. So, for OpenGL (or at least OpenGL ES) to be able to draw the texture to the screen, it first reads the data in from the eglImage, tiling it as it goes. This is exactly the same workload that you have in glTexImage2D, and it requires you to keep two copies of the buffer - the one you draw into, and the one that has been tiled for OpenGL.

Anyway, it took me about a month to get the eglImage solution to work (apart from everything else, you are exposed to odd behaviour by the graphics libraries of each Android tablet that your code runs on, that you have to write special code to handle, ie it's not very portable as a solution). Once I realised that I wasn't actually gaining anything from the exercise, I had to go and rip out all of that native graphic buffer code, and put back in the original standard texture code. I probably wasted 6 weeks stuffing around with all of this.

Lesson learned - if you are worrying about optimising code, you need to understand what is being done by the compiler / hardware, and it is pointless changing code until you _have_ that understanding. Don't just accept stuff that you read on the Internet, where possible you need to go and look at source code, or official documentation. Anything else is running the risk of cargo-culting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excellent read. Maintaining integrity in daily life has been a constant struggle. For many people, myself included, paying bills or taking care of people that depend on you can get in the way of integrity and it's a shame. Mr Feynman is lucky in that his skills will allow him to have his cake and eat it so to speak, not to discredit his message.

<comment><USER9> Except he died of cancer (probably related to his work on the manhattan project) in 1989.

This article seems to appear every couple of months. Still enjoyable and useful however.

<comment><USER10> > Except he died of cancer (probably related to his work on the manhattan > project) in 1989.

Something like a fifth of the American population will die of cancer, without ever having worked on the Manhattan population.

<comment><USER11> "worked on the Manhattan population" is an interesting linguistic slip. [saving for AI research]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love this speech so much I wrote an italian translation for my blog. Which other speeches in science do you think are worth a translation?

<comment><USER13> Randy Pausch: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

<comment><USER12> I loved that. But I fear a blog post can't do justice to Pausch's excellent delivery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not to distract from the Important Scientific Discussion, but Esalen is as wonderful today as it was back then. The hot tubs and showers have been rebuilt, and the scenery is just as striking. Out of this world.

If you're there over Thanksgiving, say hi.

<comment><USER15> How does it compare to Harbin? I was just there and it was also lovely (a bit too much like a resort than i'd prefer, though)

Also off of the scientific tangent: If you find yourself in a hot tub with a beautiful nude and no idea what to say, compare poetry to liquid thermodynamics. "Rock Star" doesn't begin to cover it.

<comment><USER14> Very different vibe from Harbin, plus of course the ocean. Much more of a sense of "community" at Esalen, while at Harbin you generally interact with the people you came with, if any.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This story has been particularly sccessful on HN recently partly because of this year's Burning Man festival's theme being "cargo cult". Quite happy to see this pop up again. Feynman never goes out of style.

<comment><USER17> This year at Burning Man, I happened to notice a car with the California state license plate "TUVA". I recognized it as belonging to Ralph Leighton, Feynman's close friend and author of _Surely You 're Joking, Mr. Feynman!_. (The plate is a reference to the story recounted in [ _Tuva or Bust!_ ]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuva_or_Bust!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuva_or_Bust!)).) I reached out to Ralph, and it turns out he wasn't there but his son was. I thought it was a fun coincidence given the theme of the burn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> That this story can thrive on HN every few months is a strong indicator that a nontrivial chunk of the userbase is 16.

<comment><USER19> Why, do only 16-year-olds read interesting stories from famous physicists?

<comment><USER18> It's a great speech.

Having never seen this before is perfectly reasonable if you're new.

<comment><USER19> And it's unreasonable to have never seen this if you're older?? I don't know about you, but I still discover new things despite being twice the quoted age.

[http://xkcd.com/1053/](http://xkcd.com/1053/)

<comment><USER18> [https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=cargo+...](https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=cargo+cult&sortby=create_ts+desc&start=0)

<comment><USER19> I don't understand your point. Or you don't understand mine.

My point is that age is irrelevant. "Newness" may be, but that doesn't imply age.

<comment><USER20> His point is something along the lines of, the older you are the more likely that you've heard of it, especially if you have a history of reading HN much.

<comment><USER19> "More likely" is a far cry from "there's a lot of 16-year-olds around here" (paraphrased). There's no reason to think that's the cause rather than the alternate theory that there are new people joining HN all the time (as you suggest), or simply that even people who have seen this thing before still upvote it.

<comment><USER20> And you are correct. I do not disagree with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yeah, yeah. _Java - the planes don 't land._

</comment><comment><USER22> I didn't truly respect and understand Feynman until I read _American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer_ And it really shows how important Mr. Feynman was to not only making the first computerized filing system for the manhattan project, but also in solving some of the crucial challenges they faced. He had such a unique way of approaching physics that I think a lot of his contemporaries admired.

<comment><USER23> That was a great biography. Oppenheimer is fascinating in his own right.</comment></comment>


Reddit downgrades technology community after censorship - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27100773 <comment><USER2> We lost USENET, and it has been replaced by a website owned by Conde Nast.

We had an open and decentralized discussion system that was globally replicated. We had scores of NNTP clients to choose from.

Now it is 2014 and I am lamenting what was lost by editing a post on a webpage. This is a catastrophe.

<comment><USER3> The death of USENET was uncontrollable spam, and that it was coopted into a binary media distribution network. For a decentralized discussion forum, the overhead was absolutely massive, and nobody wanted to pay for that and receive no direct revenue.

Websites, while still spammable, are able to control it a bit better, and if you can't figure out any other way to monetize your forum, you can always slap some ads on it.

This stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum. Someone has to pay the bills, unfortunately.

<comment><USER4> You could avoid most of the binaries by not distributing some alt.* groups, and use existing email filters for the spam. As for making a buck, ISPs could just tack on a fee for running NNTP servers. Alas, we have shitty web forums wrapped in ads instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the real problem is that Reddit's core mod tools are pretty woeful and age-old problems haven't been fixed.

/r/modhelp is basically full of the same problems and issues that mods have been having for years.

Some examples:

* Want to run your sub without downvotes? Sorry (you can hide the button via css, but people can still hotkey it)

* Have a sockpuppet downvote brigade screwing up your sub? Message the reddit admins and hope they bother reading your message and doing anything about it. Because you have no idea who's doing it and can't really do anything about it. Current best advice is (this is not a joke) "wait for them to get bored".

* Somebody was granted admin access, kicked the rest of the mods off and has turned the sub to private (and the sub creator is incommunicado?) Tough luck.

* Want to delete a sub I created? Too bad.

* Fuzzed numbers, votes, subscribers, current people on the sub, etc. Some mods don't want it in their sub. Too bad.

* want to ban some URLs from your sub? try and use the spam filter, but good luck otherwise.

and on and on.

I think practically what the sub's admins wanted to do was to just push down submissions on certain topics so a wider variety of things floated up, this happens on here all the time. But Reddit's tool set to do the same is pretty ham fisted. It's like changing the battery on a watch using a mallet.

Given the choice of using the mallet or not, they decided to go ahead and use it, I disagree with this and they're suffering the consequences of it.

<comment><USER6> The only times I had to contact the admins (sex pest approaching children; sub linked to from other sub causing massive brigading) I got quick responses that took action.

The sex pest was banned from Reddit; his sock puppets were banned. (I hope, but do not know, that the admins reported him to one of the law enforcement agencies. He was pretty clearly unpleasant and definitely breaking US laws).

I had worse experience when I tried to report stuff to Tinychat, who appear to ignore their own TOS.

<comment><USER3> You got quick action because the admins faced a legal and monetary penalty for not acting. And reddit has gotten massive bad press in the past for attracting kiddy fiddlers.

If their necks aren't on the line, casual neglect and indifference seems to be the overriding M.O. from the reddit admins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reddit had another moderator scandal that happened son after the /r/technology incident: On Reddit, it was recently discovered that a moderator on r/hearthstone was upvoting links to a certain Hearthstone fansite and flagging all others (even when the other sites have better info). That site was owned by gaming network Curse, and it was discovered that said moderator was employed by Curse. It wasn't pretty. (more information here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23cf60/blizz...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23cf60/blizzard_game_subreddits_are_run_by_curse_network/) )

The "first-dibs" system of selecting moderator for subreddits may not be the best system nowadays.

<comment><USER8> What's the alternative?

<comment><USER7> There are a few alternatives:

1) Have each subreddit democractically elect/delect its moderators after N period of time.

2) Make moderation log public to provide more accountability to moderator actions

3) Pay the moderators, either from the Reddit business itself, profit-sharing from ads on the subreddit, or through community donations.

All 3 would disincentivize the moderators from behaving badly. However, the methods may not scale easily.

<comment><USER8> I think moderator elections are a bad idea. First, participation will never be very high. Second, there is no way to make the elections reliable.

Public moderation logs have been tried in the past, and nobody bothers to read them. They're an important move towards transparency, but they are powerless without user engagement.

Paying moderators might sound fair, but it would lead to all sorts of perverse incentives. How would the revenue be split? What is to stop top moderators from removing others in order to keep more money for themselves?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do not HN also use a very similar list? I know they don't get deleted, but I remember their position decaying faster compared to threads without those keywords.

<comment><USER10> Yes, it does. This is to keep politics and other crap out of the site.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120530)

<comment><USER11> The "It's politics" thing is so very bogus.

Snowden's revelations set off a broad distrust of US tech products and services and have a multi-tens-of-billions impact on the tech economy and investing. Whoever can fix this will make a more valuable contribution to tech than a smart watch or smart TV ever will.

Questioning whether Tim Cook is capable of running Apple is OK because he didn't help start disastrous wars, but questioning the thudding tone-deafness of putting Condi Rice on the DropBox board is "political?" Or is it sensitivity over DropBox acquiring some YC companies?

Because the politics of it is so intractable, it is very likely that the privacy issue will have a large technology component. That is, mass surveillance will be reconsidered only when mass surveillance isn't valuable.

Overall, the biggest threats to tech and investing in the US are the surveillance/security state, over-militarization, wars, and the things like education they prevent being properly funded.

<comment><USER12> The fact that you just started a pointed, partisan political subthread in an otherwise boring metathread isn't at all evidence that HN should avoid politics. No, I don't see how anyone could come to that conclusion.

<comment><USER11> Partisan? Which party do you think I registered for? You will almost certainly get it wrong.

I am all for making money. I am not for wishing away problems, which many people here seem to think will work: if we wish hard enough, we can make believe we have privacy when we have none, so that we can continue to sell both "security" and "forensics."

Pick one and go with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I see this as a weird failure of reddit.

You have creators of a subreddit that want to move discussions in a certain way. As I understood they didn't want "old news", "political" or "spammy" topics.

They get a huge amount of posts in /new as they're now a default subreddit. One of the efficient thing to do to narrow the job is to ban keywords.

I really don't blame them, some defaults subreddits don't get moderated at all (looking at you /r/funny).

And as I said in another comments, the community that I find the most interesting are the ones which are the most heavily moderated : /r/askscience, /r/games and HN. Less trolls, less spam, less racism.

<comment><USER14> Reddits designed to moderate its self. This has it's downfalls, but for the most part things that aren't related to a subreddit don't make it to the top unless the users want it to. IMO Snowden and the NSA is _heavily_ related to technology and banning those terms was one of the dumbest moves they could have made. The reason they get upvoted is because the community cares about that kind of stuff. Plus the comments in a snowden thread on r/technology actually discuss the technological aspects of it while r/politics commenters focus on other aspects.

Isn't it kind of Orwellian to know your government is spying on you, yet go to the biggest tech forum on the net and no one is even talking about it?

<comment><USER15> Grownups don't try to stifle the discussions other grownups are having. _waves to HN_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It was less the "censorship" and more the complete collapse of the mod team that led to /r/technology's removal from the default set. See the SubredditDrama recap [1] for more information about the situation there, and the leaked notice from one of the reddit admins [2] which gives the reasoning behind the action.

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23dyes/recap...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23dyes/recap_the_failed_moderation_and_gaming_of/)

[2] [http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23aunv/rtech...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/23aunv/rtechnology_removed_from_the_default_list_of_subs/cgv6dlx)

</comment><comment><USER17> Without better moderator tools to manage large subreddits they didn't really have an option other than remove all threads seeing how majority of bitcoin, tesla etc related stories was not really for /r/technology. Even for that they had to use 3rd party tool.

Just because Tesla Motors is more tech oriented company than its competitors that does not mean every mention of teslas should be posted in /r/technology - and pretty much everything was posted. Same goes for bitcoin related stories.

It also depends on personal interpretation of word "technology", I'm sure that pretty much _any_ topic can be somehow be tied to technology sector but that does not, and should not, mean that every news article about a topic should be posted in /r/technology.

On the other hand the vote brigading that happens from related subreddits is, even though it is against reddit rules, ignored by reddit administrators...

<comment><USER14> >they didn't really have an option other than remove all threads

Aw dang, really? No other options except to remove 100% of threads containing the words "snowden" and "national security agency" and "tesla"?

It's too bad the community has no way of moderating it's self by somehow giving submissions "scores" to rank them. Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top. If you think about it, a system like this would allow for stories that only partly relate to technology, but are still hot topics that tech enthusiasts want to talk about, to make it to the top.

<comment><USER17> > _Aw dang, really? No other options except to remove 100% of threads > containing the words "snowden" and "national security agency" and "tesla"?_

No. Either allow the posts and remove them once the discussion start and then deal with 100 "MUH FREEDOM OF SPEECH, !!CENSORSHIP!!, MY PRECIOUS KARMA!" threads or remove them as soon as they're posted.

> _Then only threads that a majority of people like would make it to the top_

That's part of the problem. People want to see thread like this - you'd see "NSA spying people" thread upvoted in EVERY SINGLE default subreddit if it was posted and allowed by moderators.

Votes are horrible for determining what kind of content should or shouldn't be allowed. Especially for default subreddits since majority of people vote from frontpage and are not familiar with subreddit rules, or don't even notice which subreddit it is.

People don't even read more than titles! You'll often see threads marked with "false information" flair, or people pointing out in the comments how the whole story is fake/wrong/etc. Those threads continue to gain upvotes after it has been proved to be wrong information. Do you really think that people would notice the subreddit and/or rules regarding that submission?

> _If you think about it, a system like this would allow for stories that only > partly relate to technology, but are still hot topics that tech enthusiasts > want to talk about, to make it to the top._

Nope, read above. It would allow for stories people like (upvote) to make it to the top.

And plus you have threads linked in other subreddits, IRC etc. that skews up votes too.

____

tl;dr: votes work in theory but fail miserably in practice, especially when dealing with large amount of voters.

<comment><USER14> Why not have system that allows one or two posts on the front page with certain terms instead of blanket censorship?

        if (termCountOnFrontPage > 2) remove();
        else letItRide();

<comment><USER17> If the 2 items on the frontpage are irrelevant for the subreddit that would make it impossible to post threads which are actually relevant.

Relevance of the posts on frontpage is also affected by problems I described above, meaning the thread that shouldn't be posted in /r/technology has (almost) equal chance of being on frontpage as the one that's relevant.

I have no idea how to solve the issue, maybe a modqueue like page where moderators can isolate specific threads until they're approved?

But just removing all threads if 2 (similar) already exist has too many issues.

<comment><USER14> It has less issues than removing all threads period imo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Joe Rogan recently had alexis ohanian (4.11) and then David Seaman (4.16) on his podcast and David Seaman brought up the fact that the technology subreddit was using a bot to censor certain keywords. With over a million listeners listening to that podcast I think that may have had some influence in getting more people aware and eventually leading to this decision.

[http://podcasts.joerogan.net/](http://podcasts.joerogan.net/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Did they revoke the filter? I would love a tech news site where all those things are banned.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is great news. I was very surprised that the term "Tesla" was being blocked. Later, submitters were using "Telsa" to beat the auto-deleting mod script.

When pressed on this subject the mods claimed that Tesla wasn't technology worthy and should go into a car subreddit, yet endless articles about how wonderful the new iphone is don't get shoved into /r/apple.

It looks like a couple moderators decided that their pet fanboyism would define the sub. Reddit had a choice of intervening and getting rid of those mods or delisting them from the front page. I think delisting them was the right move. If you want to have your own personal subreddit running on your own personal bias, then go for it, but don't expect to be a default anymore.

I find the mandatory default system to be more than a little broken. Instead, at account creation, show me all the defaults as checked checkboxes and the most popular non-defaults below, unchecked, and let me choose.

<comment><USER21> And then Tesla fanboys voted up spam pages like this:

[http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-how-tesla- pus...](http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-how-tesla-pushes-auto- technology-20140321,0,7268712.story)

Which reinforce the notion that, maybe the moderators banned Tesla over the quality of the submissions after all not some personal bias.

<comment><USER14> Still not an excuse to ban the word 'tesla'.

On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all, and now you've come to find out that key words relating to the spying scandal have been censored on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments in the sticky over in r/technology, it seems the main problem mods are still in power (at least according to the community) and the mods that are being called out seem to have no comments and have actually removed posts calling them out. I assume the main mod accounts have been bought and sold over and over and the current owners are trying desperately to pass it on to the highest bidder. Kind of makes you wonder if banning terms like "National Security Agency" and "Snowden" was an honest mistake (HA!) or if they're just trying to pass it off as one now.

<comment><USER22> On a side note, isn't it a bit Orwellian to know for a fact that your government is participating in mass spying, but the largest tech forum on the internet isn't talking about it at all and now you've come to find out that key words like "NSA" and "Snowden" have an automatic downvote penalty applied to them on said forum? Not only that, but if you go and read the comments from moderators on Hacker News, it seems the main problem is mods either ignore criticism of this policy or spew boilerplate non-denials about automated rank penalties for submissions with more comments than votes or a high number of comments in a small period of time indicating flame wars.

<comment><USER23> PG has straight up admitted that there is classification of articles (automated or manual) and that penalties are applied to certain classifications, such as "political". There is no real denial.

> "So already for the past week TSA stories have had an automatic penalty > applied. Or more precisly, they've been _autotagged_ as being _political, > which entails a penalty_."

> "When anything gets over a certain number of flags, it shows up on a list > that admins see. They decide either to kill it, _mark it as political or > whatever_ , or do nothing."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934950)

<comment><USER22> Just because the mechanism for censorship is well meaning, excellently engineered and transparently implemented does not change the end effect.

<comment><USER23> I'm not saying it's a good thing (for that matter, I'm not saying that it's bad either). I'm just pointing out that HN has been open that this is going on; it's not something that is denied or excused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Funny how getting reddit to take action in their most toxic communities had traditionally been a teeth-pulling affair, but censorship actually gets them to move fast.

</comment><comment><USER25> r/technology was an absolute disaster before this anyway.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is just one of basically countless examples of how the Reddit model of moderation does not scale. Moderators are chosen by other moderators, and the subs become fiefdoms.

</comment><comment><USER27> The mods of the default subreddits are basically handed millions of users but can a lot of the times run the subreddits however they see fit. I would rather let the site moderate itself instead of relying on automated mod scripts and often highly biased people.

<comment><USER13> > I would rather let the site moderate itself

This is how it moderate itself, by having admins moderating their communities. What do you propose?

<comment><USER27> Moderators should keep obvious spam, explicit behavior, vote manipulation, etc... out but not to decide which content gets posted. Otherwise, let the members of the community judge content I mean that's the whole point of the site after all. You basically have to read an article before posting on a subreddit because who knows what the moderators have decided is allowed on that subreddit. For example, look at /r/games. They allow "quality" gaming content only but the definition of that is extremely subjective and the list of things you aren't allowed to post is huge ( [http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules) ). Now maybe its possible to be less strict w/ non default subreddits and make the default ones adhere to a global set of rules instead of letting each default subreddit pick its own rules. They are handed millions of users so they should be less subjective imo.

<comment><USER28> I agree with you, however /r/Games was explicitly created to be heavily moderated. The original /r/gaming isn't moderated nearly as much and a lot of people dislike it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is slightly off topic but I spend a lot of time on /r/bitcoin (I have done for about two years now). Over the past 60 days there has been a sustained attack by some group or entity, I am sure of this. The subtilty of attack is really astonishing, I never thought that I would witness something with coordination that seems on a scale of a nation state. These users are employing advanced techniques to trip up and stall discussion, causing in- fighting, promote other agendas (really gently) and just generally destroy the group. In times like this we need heavy moderation to stop it in it's tracks until everything clears up.

<comment><USER30> This sounds really paranoid. Do you have some concrete evidence? What does "coordination on a scale of a nation state" even look like with respect to a subreddit?

<comment><USER29> I agree on the surface it seems paranoid, here are my data points-

I'm a reasonable person of sound body and mind and very well socialised (I'm certain that I don't have a mental illness). I've been on the sub since there were 20k users, there are now 120k I've helped countless newbies and formed relationships with other long term users of the sub who also have a high reputation. I've made many high quality posts on bitcoin data analysis (and a few crappy memes along the way).

Something is definitely different in the past few months, and a lot of the other old timers would agree with me, the subject matter is not normal. I have loads of anecdotal "Wait a minute, that not the way things are meant to work" situations, where some comments are being downvoted and upvoted abnormally. Some comments are meant to only confuse you or deride the conversation and bring it off topic. Some threads are calling into question the Mods and their motives. Some comments on threads are pushing the traditional banking system benefits. There has been an influx of 0 day users who seem to speak on authority about financial instruments. These are not trolls. Some users will reply with what seems like a positive post and then flip completely 180 degrees by the end of their reply.

What I'm trying to say is that the human neural network pattern matching machine is incredibly good at finding inconsistencies, my alarm bells are ringing, there is some organisation at work in the sub.

I would like to start gathering data on the extend of this by comparing users account age, their topic of conversation and the techniques they use. I'll need some help from my trusted friends on /r/bitcoin and I'm still coming up with the process on the best way to collect information to prove or disprove my hypothesis.

<comment><USER31> Are you sure this isn't just the result of a 6x growth? As Bitcoin and the subreddit becomes more popular, wouldn't you expect more people of various backgrounds and with various goals to join?

It also doesn't take a small nationstate to stir shit up, it just takes a vocal determined minority; or a bunch of noobs; or a bunch of trolls. (And when I say "bunch", I mean a number that's in the double-digits.)

<comment><USER14> >It also doesn't take a small nationstate to stir shit up, it just takes a vocal determined minority

Very true. It doesn't really take many upvotes to make it to the front page of a sub-reddit, just a high up-to-down ratio. Reddit would be an easy target for manipulation by a small group if they really wanted to.

My idea: have a default post sorting algorithm, but create an add-on that allows users to create their own sorting algorithm. Most likely users will find the best algorithm, share it, and spread it, but their would also be many algorithms in use, so you have multiple systems you would have to game.

<comment><USER31> Would that scale to the Reddit userbase? Worst case scenario is one algorithm per user, 120k algorithms on /r/bitcoin alone.

<comment><USER28> They could have it done locally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> That headline is a good example of a garden path sentence. I thought reddit was making a technical change to their website for a few seconds.

</comment><comment><USER33> What does that mean, 'censorship'?

[http://xkcd.com/1357/](http://xkcd.com/1357/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Censorship or decent moderation?

<comment><USER35> Lazy moderation. An auto-delete filter for major news keywords is a poor way to run a news subreddit. They're throwing the baby out with the bath water.

<comment><USER13> You have no idea how hard it is to moderate a subreddit that is a default one. This is not "lazy" moderation. This is to avoid all the spam in /new

<comment><USER36> Deleting all stories containing the word "Tesla" is lazy moderation. That policy was in place for at least some period of time.

<comment><USER13> I think that spending a day trying to moderate /r/technology would make a lot of people understand "why".

Tesla got relevant suddenly with the apple news, then with the texas law, but then it was just spams to get the interest around Tesla going on.

Technology moves quickly and I can see why moderators wanted the discussion not to focus on ONE thing for too long.

<comment><USER36> I mean, you can sympathize with their bad behavior, but ultimately they were de-listed for it. Their bad behavior was a mistake.

<comment><USER37> They were also unlisted for having (as you can see) too small moderation team. This is said to be fault of /u/maxwellhill and /u/anutensil. (They are one of the oldest mods -- they have whole power).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This makes me realise now why my AMA was denied and trolled into oblivion.

I had started a successful AMA (being former Military Intelligence/Palantir) regarding the realities of the role.

Regardless of ID, Letters of Service Commendation and scanned evidence of having served in Afghanistan/Iraq the mods would not have it and refused to respond to my emails.

Within an hour it was trolled to obscurity.

Almost all of the terms on the filter list published in this article were contained in my AMA.

Ha, you live and learn.</comment>


Python 3 at Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/758159/f1f631e1535ab9d6/ <comment><USER2> dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417201)

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this yesterday. Prior to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417201).

<comment><USER3> HN bug? [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=johnramsden](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=johnramsden) says 16 hours ago but [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17413350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17413350) says 1 hour ago. Maybe related to the thing where resubmitting a URL gets deduped into a vote for the original…

<comment><USER4> Not a bug. If a post gets re-upped by the mods, the timestamp as shown on the frontpage will be temporarily changed to match the re-up time. Otherwise people will get confused about why an old post with few upvotes is still on the front page.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple to hold call March 19th to talk about its $97.6B in cash - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/03/18/apple-to-hold-call-march-19th-to-talk-about-what-its-decided-to-do-with-its-97-6b-in-cash/

<comment><USER2> I swear it's Apple's only choice, throw up your hands and raise your voice.. monorail!

<comment><USER3> Well, maybe not a monorail, but I feel compelled once again to point out that Apple could afford to build its own space station: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_space_station#Pro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_space_station#Program_cost_in_United_States_dollars)

<comment><USER4> Indeed! And that's at inflated government prices. If they just contracted with SpaceX and Bigelow or others they could probably have a space station for a tenth of that or less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also, Apple does not hold $97.6B in cash _in the United States_. Over 50% of their cash is overseas, which prevents them from using it in the United States unless they take a huge haircut. So keep that in mind when theorizing on U.S. centric uses of cash. Think global!

edit: Pretty graphs: [http://seekingalpha.com/article/318794-apple-s-foreign- cash-...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/318794-apple-s-foreign-cash-hoard)

<comment><USER4> For the same reason Microsoft paid far, far too much money for Skype.

It's a bit of silliness that really ought to go away. Corporate taxes are rather silly. Get rid of them and make capital gains count as regular income for tax purposes.

<comment><USER5> Say for a minute that Congress announced a moratorium on tax of repatriated foreign funds. Do you believe this would be viewed as "evil" companies gaming the system, or do you think that the huge influx of funds back into the U.S. would actually help spur economic growth?

<comment><USER6> The choices

> would be viewed as "evil" companies gaming the system

and

> huge influx of funds back into the U.S. would actually help spur economic > growth

are in no way mutually exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I will eat my shoe if Apple buys Twitter.

Edit: In light of this post (<http://dcurt.is/100-billion-units-of-strategy>) I'll add that I will also eat my shoe if Apple buys Netflix.

<comment><USER8> Twitter wouldn't even put a significant dent into the nearly $100B in cash they have. They'd still have ~$90 billion left over after buying out Twitter.

<comment><USER9> Then buy Facebook.

<comment><USER7> That's more than they can afford, at least without substantial equity in the deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd like to see them take $10b and create a huge amount of free educational content on the Internet. In the long run, this would drive enough sales to be a worthwhile commercial decision for Apple, but it would also make the world a much smarter, more peaceful, and more economically vibrant place.

Particularly, I'd like to see this content available in Spanish, Arabic, various subcontinental languages, and Chinese. There's been some progress in English, but not a whole lot in other languages.

Online (free) education is right where technologies usually are before apple swoops in and makes the Apple version -- concept proven, but somewhat painful user experience (no one could look at coursera, khan academy, mitx, etc. and call them Apple-quality UX).

It would also be a great way to deploy part of the $70b or so which is trapped outside the US. As much of the US portion of the cash as possible should be returned to shareholders as a dividend (assuming the tax code doesn't change in 2013 to change dividend taxation from 15% to 39.6+3.8%; if so, a buyback makes much more sense, or just holding cash).

<comment><USER11> Since when is Apple a charity and should do altruistic things? I don't see how this will help apple and just seems like a way to spend money.

<comment><USER10> Increased sales of Apple devices -- either via explicit lock-in (delivery via iTunes) or implicit (the iPad is the best consumption device, and maybe could use trusted platform tech to do exams without cheating, etc.) Sell $149-$199 iPad 1 refurb units (or get the iPad 2 down to $250-300), and you'll end up eventually owning the corporate workspace.

I am with you on not liking corporate philanthropy in general (profits should be distributed to individuals, who can then make their own charity decisions; I'd hate it if Apple donated to causes I dislike or find sub-optimal), except in cases where the company can achieve both commercial and charity objectives and do so better than anyone else. At the very least, it would have to provide as much cash return to Apple as the blended mix of investments they currently make.

<comment><USER11> Apple is not in the business of making content. Apple is in the business of making platforms for other people to put their content on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know it's not feasible but I would love for them to become a telephone service provider.

<comment><USER13> how many percent of customers would the other carriers lose if apple made the iphones/ipads apple-carrier-only?

<comment><USER14> How many percent of customers would Apple lose if Apple made the iPhones/iPads Apple-carrier-only?

Not gonna happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would love if Apple would try to buy out one of major Hollywood studios or music labels. For instance Disney's market cap is $80B and Steve Jobs also was the largest shareholder of Disney. This could truly cause a revolution in digital content delivery.

I know making films or music has nothing to do with their core business, but if a search engine can buy Motorola. Why the hell not?

<comment><USER16> Antitrust among other non-regulatory reasons.

<comment><USER15> Okay. To buy a music label, would be problematic, but Apple is not really a big deliver of movie content in terms of market share, yet, are they?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to see Apple hack the system. There are a huge number of institutional funds that are not allowed to invest in Apple due to regulation that limits them to companies which provide a dividend. It would be awesome if they announced a $0.01 dividend, simply so that they were now an investment vehicle for all such funds.

edit: I could have been a bit more clear.. I was referring to funds such as pension/mutual funds, not banks.

<comment><USER17> Are you suggesting that Apple is undervalued and therefore would be a great longterm vehicle for your parent's pension?

<comment><USER3> Their P/E is currently lower than Amazon and Google, and just about even with Oracle. Yeah, I think it's undervalued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm really hoping apple will try to become an ISP and revamp our infrastructure.

<comment><USER5> Given how dependent Apple's devices are on wi-fi, I'd love to see them invest in building out real, full-coverage wi-fi in the top 10 U.S. cities available for free to any Apple device.

Getting into the cellular game seems like a mistake, but investing in wi-fi "towers" to side-step cellular companies seems like a win.

<comment><USER19> Or they can simply keep making money with LTE / G4 without any investments?

<comment><USER5> Trust me, I agree with that more than anything. I don't want to see them spend money on anything, really, if they don't need to. More wishful thinking.. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Monthly dividend. End of story.

<comment><USER3> I think a one-time dividend is much more likely. A recurring dividend sends the wrong signal to Wall Street (we're no longer a growth company). A one-time dividend says something more like, "Yeah, we have a crap load of cash...here, have some."

<comment><USER20> A reasonable dividend (1% per yr) leaves more options open for a big acquisition in the future if they want, eg Sony, or Comcast, or Netflix (they can afford all three if they want). I highly doubt they'll blow the whole load in one shot.

<comment><USER21> If they're going to make an acquisition of that magnitude, then they should buy a controlling interest in Amazon.

<comment><USER20> They can afford a monthly dividend for the next year, and still buy 100% of Amazon.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> They're going to acquire every startup they possibly can and then turn into what we all feared.... Skynet

<comment><USER23> Why would we fear that? Skynet was an unparalleled pinnacle of engineering achievement.

<comment><USER24> ...and almost killed off the human race</comment></comment></comment>


Anonymous Downloading and Streaming Specifications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/Anonymous-Downloading-and-Streaming-specifications <comment><USER2> This sums it up nicely:

* Essential part of our work is that everybody who downloads anonymously also becomes a relay.

* Our work brings the Bittorrent tit-for-tat idea to darknets. You help other become anonymous to get your own privacy.

* Known weaknesses: We weaken security with decentralization.</comment>


Hactar: The solution to JavaScript Fatigue - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Hactar-js/hactar <comment><USER2> I know it may seem silly, but I've been putting off Babel because of the the initial learning involved. This might be useful. Unless it takes as much learning as Babel.

<comment><USER3> It seems it does not take any learning:

> Because Hactar simply writes code, your code is not dependent on it. Nothing > Hactar does is dependent on Hactar to work. No one contributing to your code > even need know Hactar exists. Hactar is transparent and designed to fade > into the background. It is just another coder on your team -- one you pay > with CPU. If Hactar stops being useful you can simply fire it.</comment></comment>


Big Data Puts Linux Talent in Hot Demand - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/02/25/big-data-puts-linux-talent-in-hot-demand/

<comment><USER2> GNU/Linux is also really great platform for programming. Things feel right, work right, and there are nice tools everywhere. I grew up in win32 land, and this really gave me some warped ideas about the world. But after about a decade or so of Linux programming, I'm finally feeling level-headed, as though switching to the Linux world were an intense psychotherapy. The 'hot demand' for 'Linux talent' might as well be motivated by HR requirements for a sane workplace.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I spend a large portion of my day in the Windows environment. It's a nice change when I get to work in a Linux environment. With that being said, Windows as a non .NET developer platform has come a long way.

I rarely have any issues finding Python libraries that don't work on Windows. PHP Development has become much easier on Windows that it has been in the past. One of my personal glaring exceptions is having a working memcached extension for PHP on Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The key word here is "professionals" because, let's face it, there folks that can look up an error code or warning and maybe Google around for a configuration setting or two are dime a dozen. Read: Actual experts. In every sense of the word.

How many people do you know that actually _know_ how to administer a system? And I do mean administer, not throw on/off a few switches in a conf file and hope it all works. I've lost count of how many times I've seen questions on forums on how to get two or more pieces of technology to talk to each other well enough. Sometimes well enough, isn't well... enough. Especially when real money is involved.

"I work with x and I need it to work with y and give me z amount of throughput" can be very complicated. Especially when the wiring is only sort of familiar to the user from a previous encounter doing some home tinkering.

<comment><USER5> I work at a pretty successful SaaS start-up in the valley and one of my responsibility is to hire system engineers. It's been one of the most challenging positions I ever had to fill. We see many developers using Linux nowadays - which is an improvement I guess, but there's a big difference between building your little rail apps on your local Ubuntu instance and setting-up/managing/scaling/troubleshooting Linux based ecosystems of applications & servers.

[edit sp]

<comment><USER6> One issue is training and test environment. Easy to set up a VPS and play with it, but the larger system you probably have to learn on the job, as apprentice. What skills/resources do you suggest to improve for "my app runs on linux" developer - towards "I know linux" in the level you seek for?

<comment><USER7> This is a genuinely interesting question. I can manage my own linux server well enough but I could not in a million years scale a larger system.

<comment><USER5> 'I know linux' is different than 'I know how to scale on a linux stack'.

Many engineers who build native apps on Linux can claim 'i know linux'. Native is an important distinction, as many good java developers for example have no clue what is going on down the stack.

For the 'I know how to scale on linux stack', I'd think the fastest way would be for you to look into a (1) system imager (e.g. kickstart) and a (2) configuration management system (e.g. puppet or chef). This will bring you scale and management. Throw in a (3) monitoring/alerting system (e.g. nagios and cacti). Finally, put your coding skills to work by building a small app that glues all the above together.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Instantly generate Kotlin types and serializers from JSON - <AUTHOR> https://blog.quicktype.io/kotlin/ <comment><AUTHOR> quicktype infers types from JSON, then outputs models in Swift, Java, Objective-C, and many other languages for reading that data. We just released Kotlin support today, and we're looking for feedback on the generated code, or what we could improve.

As usual, quicktype will:

      * Infer nice class and property names
      * Generate convenient `fromJson` and `toJson` methods for top-level types, including top-level arrays and maps
      * Deduplicate types inferred to be the same
      * Detect enums and emit custom marshaling code for them
      * Detect heterogeneous JSON data and emit sealed classes with custom marshaling code to keep your Kotlin typesafe
      * Distinguish Map<String, *> from custom object types automatically using Markov chains

Thank you for taking a look!</comment>