Ask HN: What password manager do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I know the benefits of using a password manager but have yet to find one that I feel comfortable with. <comment><USER2> This keeps coming up in recent months. I suggest you look through what folks have been recommending.

Discussion about KeePass: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7174595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7174595)

Discussion about Pass: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495337)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use lastpass. It is probably safer to use something like KeePass, but it is just so much easier to use lastpass.

Auto fills logins if you want, instantly generate/save passwords in the browser, mobile app that will fill in logins on my phone, etc

</comment><comment><USER4> I use 1Password but it's sharing functionality is sort of a mis-feature. I frequently work with contractors, and use GPG for sharing secure information. Sometimes a GPG-encrypted text file is all that you need.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the nicest I have tried so far. Unobtrusive and easy to use. I have put the keystore on an encrypted USB which solves nearly all my problems.

One question, I can't find what the trial is. Is it time based?

<comment><USER5> > The application downloaded from our website will remain fully functional for > the first 30 days after you install it. After this initial trial period, you > will need to purchase a license to continue using without restrictions.

[https://agilebits.com/home/licenses](https://agilebits.com/home/licenses)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have used password managers for more than 4 years now.

Here is how I work -

1\. When life used to be simple, (read without smartphone and tabs) I just used desktop based Roboform (NOT cloud based) These days most of the companies promote cloud syncing of passwords, I am completely averse to storing passwords on cloud even if it means bit of discomfort.

2\. Now for iPhone and iPad, I downloaded Dashlane, activated their syncing feature for few hours and synced my passwords on both the devices.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use a combination of a Yubikey and GnuPG. My GnuPG private key has a password which consists of two parts:

1) A long secure password stored on my Yubikey 2) A shorter password (stored mentally)

Passwords are saved into individual files and encrypted with my private key using pass[0].

[0] pass: [http://www.passwordstore.org/](http://www.passwordstore.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> You didn't say what platforms you intend to use it on. Nor what your most important attack vectors are.

I use a Yubikey. The first slot is set to a long secure password and is used to gain access to my machine. The second slot is a long secure password which is combined with other text on a per-website basis. I type the text and push the Yubikey button for the rest. This is suboptimal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Portability is one of my main concerns as I use a variety of platforms e.g. Linux at home, Windows at work and Android on the go. I would also be a little hesitant to trust a hosted solution. SuperGenPass (www.supergenpass.com) seemed like a nice solution but I am concerned about what happens when I need to change password.

Does Yubikey have a solution for Android? They seem right up my street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a (homemade) thin bash-wrapper around gnupg, which stores the passwords in a folder, that is backed up by git-annex..

The main work is done by a vim-autocommand-group (augroup) which runs the file through gpg on open/save if it ends with .gpg

</comment><comment><USER9> KeePass, stored on protected flash drives.

I carry one on my keyring and keep backups.

I have little faith in cloud-based/browser-based managers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was put off a bit by the requirement of Mono for Linux but I see there is a port called KeePassX. This might be a nice compromise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> F secure key works well and syncs well between all my devices and computers.

</comment><comment><USER11> Datavault. Syncs nice with Mac/iOS.</comment>


Google Bug: Clicking on Mongolian BBQ Redirect to LV Website - <AUTHOR>

This is the search result when I am trying to find Mongolian BBQ on Castro:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=mongolian%20bbq
The search result could be different depending on your location. If you are in the Bay Area, you should see the New Mongolian BBQ. Click on the search result that has the website newmongolianbbq.com, you will see a Louis Vuitton site.
If you copy and paste the link newmongolianbbq.com on your browser, you will see a food site.
Not sure if this is a Google's Eastern Egg or or some Googler is having launch at Mongolian BBQ while shopping on LV. <comment><USER2> The redirect is happening after you're already on the newmongolianbbq.com website; Google is not doing anything weird.

This script on the page is responsible: [http://luover.icanfans.com/d/luover.js](http://luover.icanfans.com/d/luover.js)

The restaurant's website is an out-of-date install of WordPress and several plugins. One of them probably has a known vulnerability which someone exploited to inject that script tag into the site's theme, redirecting its Google traffic away to the knockoff LV store.

There are some 80 million WordPress sites, and a good chunk of them are running outdated versions of the CMS or plugins, which makes it an easy target for automated scanning and exploitation. This kind of hijacking happens to thousands of websites every day.</comment>


If you can use a spreadsheet you can use Diffgram - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/value-from-deep-learning-with-no-code <comment><AUTHOR> Happy to answer questions on this</comment>


Master of Science in Machine Learning MSc – Degrees on Coursera - <AUTHOR> https://www.coursera.org/degrees/msc-machine-learning-imperial <comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know much more about this ? What are the HN recommended pathways to ML ?</comment>


Why I Stopped Calling Myself a "Freelancer" - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3054141/lessons-learned/why-i-stopped-calling-myself-a-freelancer?utm_content=buffer8932e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> So - What exactly does a CMO-for-hire do?</comment>


Kayak Explore - see where you can go for how much - <AUTHOR> http://www.kayak.com/explore/?airport=YYC#/YYC?a=any&d=any&fb=290,2000&l=any&ll=1.58183,-0.175781&ns=n&s=0&t=0,100&z=3

<comment><USER2> My seemingly underserved usecase for these sorts of tools is:

I want to go somewhere this weekend or next weekend. I don't know where, but I'm ready to get out of Dodge. Show me some cities for these weekends with how much it'll cost to get there.

<comment><USER3> My use case is "When is it the cheapest to get me out of here?". I can take vacation days at pretty much every date so I do not really care when I go on vacation. The destination does no really matter to me either.

Unfortunately, I found Kayak Explorer does not work for this as it does not allow me to see flights at a day for day granularity. <http://www.adioso.com> does a much better job. I can just search for stuff like "SEA to anywhere" and it will show me what I want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a great concept, but Explore doesn't have enough data--rather, cheap tickets--to be actually useful. If you don't mind doing multiple searches, <http://matrix.itasoftware.com> is much better at finding deals.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1421381>

<comment><USER6> Goes to show, Kayak should have this easily accessible from their front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really cool display. Reminds me of <http://www.padmapper.com>. Would be really nice IMO if the various "price tags" or indicators were colored according to price... so expensive flights were colored red, cheap flights were colored blue etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> Skyscanner.com has been doing this for a few years for european flights. It looks like they've expanded into the US and have also de-centralized this feature of their website: [http://www.skyscanner.com/news/articles/2010/06/006690-searc...](http://www.skyscanner.com/news/articles/2010/06/006690-search- tips-and-tools---everywhere.html)

When I lived in Germany, I used to plug in a month, see the cheapest flights, and just go somewhere for the weekend.

</comment><comment><USER9> Adioso.com is so much better suited for this kind of stuff.

<comment><USER10> adioso asks you to fill a form* and press a button.

kayak just shows you the map.

* even though that form is really simple and pretty, it's still a mental speedbump

The best interface is no interface.

<comment><USER9> They have an impressive NLP search powered by a crazy backend, that map will be pretty trivial for Adioso to build I'm sure :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> DanI-S Awesome idea. But anyone know why flying around the US is so much more expensive than flying around Europe? Flights out of LAX start at $80, and you'll barely get past Colorado until around $200. From London, they start from $30 and you can get anywhere in Europe for _under_ $200.

I really should've made the most of it while I lived 'across the pond'.

<comment><USER11> Because the US is big and fuel is expensive.

LA -> Denver is 837 miles. ([http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+los+angel...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+los+angeles+to+denver))

London -> Rome is 892 miles. ([http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+london+to...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+london+to+rome))

LA -> NYC is 2,462 miles. ([http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+los+angel...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+los+angeles+to+new+york+city))

You can fly the longest flight I can think of in Europe in the same distance. ([http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+Lisbon+to...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+from+Lisbon+to+Moscow))

<comment><USER12> Also: competition from rail travel (which also benefits from the shorter distances and greater population density).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have two thoughts. One, this is really cool. And two, I wonder what Hipmunk thinks of this?

<comment><USER6> They shouldn't think, they should start copying and in the process make it better.

Bear with me: imagine you could see where your friends have traveled on this map. You enter a budget range much like you do and it shows you the options. Then, you could see any pictures your friends took on such trips. And with a FB message/email, you can ask them how much they spent, where they stayed, what places they loved, how the food was, etc.

Okay, who has built this?

<comment><USER13> Sounds like <http://www.dopplr.com/>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is sweet! Have been looking for something like this for a while

</comment><comment><USER15> Seems like a cool idea, but doesn't have enough fare data. If I leave from Chicago Midway and check non-stop flights only, I can go nowhere in the continental U.S.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm 93% sure that this discovery will have a detrimental effect on my bank account.</comment>


A new HipChat - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hipchat.com/2015/03/18/a-new-web-client-rebuilt-from-the-ground-up/

<comment><USER2> We just started using HipChat on monday. Overall we're very happy with it. This new client is definitely a bonus.

One thing we're a bit sad about though is the fact that it follows the same pricing model as Confluence and Jira for self-hosting, so for 25 users you pay $1800. This is okay for tools such as Confluence and Jira but HipChat (no matter how good) doesn't add that value for us.

This is a bummer since we love self-hosting, and for some client data it is even a requirement. It's especially in stark contrast with the cloud version, since it's free for the features we use..

</comment><comment><USER3> My personal pet peeve is that it doesn't do "s/foo/bar/" anymore in the beta (whereas this does work in the desktop-client and current stable webclient).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. Rich from HipChat here... the sed style replace is available in the web client now. When we released the beta it wasn't there, but we've added it back in since then.</comment></comment>


The cold blue light of modern touchscreens poses health problems - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90177573/how-blue-became-techs-favorite-color-and-why-it-shouldnt-be <comment><USER2> The author keeps on mentioning the military, but doesn't know that on all war ships the lighting in the operations room is blue:

[http://warbird- photos.com/special/temp/CVN72-D5_Combat_Direc...](http://warbird- photos.com/special/temp/CVN72-D5_Combat_Direction_Center.jpg)

[https://www.extremetech.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/Zumwa...](https://www.extremetech.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/12/Zumwalt-Navy-Ops.jpg)

[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/03/31/blogs/20160331WIP...](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/03/31/blogs/20160331WIP- slide-6IJC/20160331WIP-slide-6IJC-superJumbo.jpg)

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/US_Navy_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/US_Navy_101208-N-5549O-028_Secretary_of_the_Navy_%28SECNAV%29_the_Honorable_Ray_Mabus_tours_the_Combat_Information_Center_aboard_the_guided- missile_des.jpg)

Quotes from a military study regarding lighting:

> Dissatisfaction with the red lighting system caused the crews of many ships > to alter the lighting within their work environment. Some would extinguish > all lighting, and some tried a white light configuration in which the > overhead lights in the vicinity of the visual display equipment were turned > off, while lights away from the visual display equipment remained on. There > were many complaints of eye strain, fatigue, and headaches. In addition, > watch-standers reported that working under red ambient illumination was also > fatiguing, made focusing difficult, and significantly impaired their ability > to identify color-coded information from charts.

[http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a273682.pdf](http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a273682.pdf)

<comment><USER3> The notable thing about your links is the complete lack of the world. You don't need to preserve night vision stuck in a sealed metal box without windows.

Pilots, drivers and people walking around do.

<comment><USER4> > You don't need to preserve night vision stuck in a sealed metal box without > windows.

You do - because you may need to leave that box in a hurry to either evacuate the ship or to fight. Why else do you think the military do it?

<comment><USER5> That's a ceteris paribus line of reasoning, though.

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that red light inhibits alertness while blue light promotes it, then that might change the calculus to, "maximizing night vision preservation isn't as important as making sure that we don't end up needing it in the first place."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is one area I'd like to see a universal ban on blue spectrum LED's - street and commercial overhead lights.

I live in Salt Lake City and there has been an unfortunate push by Rocky Mountain Power to replace all the streetlights with bright blue/white LED overhead lights. Their output is significantly greater than the lights they are replacing and the light is completely obtrusive. In the city there is the unfortunate and unavoidable issue of spillage into peoples bedrooms.

I've also had the unpleasant task of coaxing my dog to give up the dead birds that have suddenly started showing up my back yard. Likely attributable to the new "better" lights.

[http://www.tracyaviaryconservation.org/lightsoutsaltlake/](http://www.tracyaviaryconservation.org/lightsoutsaltlake/)

<comment><USER7> I think this is a big problem in lots of cities. LEDs have clear advantages in energy efficiency and reduced maintenance costs and their use should be encouraged. But municipalities seem to be seduced by ultra-bright, blue-white LEDs because of the perceived "modern" look and because of the perception that it improves security.

While we'll never be going back to the orange glow of high-pressure sodium street lights, perhaps a compromise can be found. How about specifying 'halogen-match' (~2700K) colour temperature LEDs for street lights? White enough to create a secure environment, but warm enough not to quite resemble daylight and all the sleep-disturbing, wildlife-disrupting problems that come with that.

Another issue is the way that LED street lights are designed causes a huge amount of glare. Often as a pedestrian or driver, your line of site is directly into the LED matrix itself. With old-style street lights, reflectors or diffusers were typically used to reduce glare, but those have been done away with.

<comment><USER8> I believe that the highest lumens-per-Watt LEDs are higher color-temp, sadly, so I would think that the streetlights were optimized mainly for sheer output, and the cold, daylight temp was just a side effect. I doubt there will be a lot of enthusiasm for pulling down new, long-lasting LEDs, but possibly colored lenses could be retrofit to them...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have fond memory of using amber monochrome CRT terminals/monitors, and I've preferred to it over the green or black/white monitors back in the days when color monitors were rarity. Amber/orangeish text always felt more soothing and pleasant, but on the other hand, green texts felt more readable (ie texts were easier to comprehend), although I couldn't explain why.

Edit: Back in the late 70's and early 80's, monochrome monitors were prevalent and one had to choose the screen color when choosing terminal/monitor. Apple 2's and most IBM PC's monitor were green, while Radio Shack TRS80 were bluish/white if I recall. At university, we had Wyse terminals with yellowish/amber color.

I also remember working on a terminal attached to a mainframe running IBM RPG III, and it was distinctly dark red, which was probably the coolest color I'd ever seen, and which I'd never seen anywhere else. That reddish color made me feel like I was in a sci-fi movie.

<comment><USER10> > Amber/orangeish text always felt more soothing and pleasant, but on the > other hand, green texts felt more readable (ie texts were easier to > comprehend), although I couldn't explain why.

The human eye has "better resolution" for green light (vs red and blue). It's also why the Bayer pattern array has twice the ammount of green elements vs red (or blue).

<comment><USER11> Not just resolution, but overall sensitivity as well - meaning that green light of the same intensity looks brighter. This is also why most night vision devices use green phosphor, why some flashlights have a green LED (less energy for the same perceived brightness -> more battery life), and why green lasers for pointing/marking are increasingly common.

Since black is the same black in both cases, a green CRT will therefore has a higher perceived contrast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it really true though that a few tiny blue leds would affect our bodies that much?

If I recall correctly, significant effects required rather bright lights. The light level outdoors is like 100000 times brighter. A laptop probably won't make much of a difference then.

I run f.lux or redshift, but I'm suspecting that it really doesn't do anything rather than reminding me by going totally red and inconvenient that it's about time to stop trying to read or watch every interesting thing on the Internet.

For me, it's the endless source of interesting things that keeps me awake, I guess because I've stressed out and turned into a total information junkie. My mind craves information. Unfortunately it thinks that recordings of air traffic controllers etc is more valuable than sleep.

<comment><USER13> These days you don't even necessarily need a separate app like F.Lux or Redshift; Windows and Android have similar color-shifting features built-in to the OS. (Not sure about Mac or iOS.)

<comment><USER14> IDK about iOS, but Android's built-in night mode barely changes anything. Try Twilight.

<comment><USER15> If you have rooted, try f.lux on Android too. Personally, I can't stand Twilight's "orange tint over content".

<comment><USER16> There are also other night mode apps that offer other tones. I've been using Blue Light Filter on Android lately and appreciate the level of controls it offers (color temperature, intensity, and screen dim)

<comment><USER15> It's not a matter of choice of colour, the way f.lux removes the blue is different than just adding an overlay (like Twilight and such do), that's why it needs root.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I highly recommend using f.lux to adapt screen colors at night. It makes reading some pages harder once it goes into full candle-light mode, but I take that as a signal that I need to start getting ready for bed!

<comment><USER18> I've been using it for a long time but I have a question.

Sometime ago somebody on reddit or here on HN claimed in a comment that f.lux does not actually reduce the amount of blue light if you measure it. Unfortunately I never saw any replies or sources, and looking for discussions about that subject were unsuccessful.

Does anybody have any actual knowledge that could support or refute that claim?

 _PS: I hate it when people make claims like that and don 't even attempt to support it. Now I'm still looking for an answer months later._

<comment><USER19> I think it was in f.lux's blog that while f.lux does reduce amount of blue light, apple's built-in night mode (the one on your iphone for example) didn't.

Can't find source now.

<comment><USER20> I started searching around. Could it be this reply within forum? [https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/4056/blue-light- screen-b...](https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/4056/blue-light-screen- blocker/9)

Contains a link where a graph (which I don't understand) is almost identical with and without sleep shield.

      lorna F.LUX TEAM Aug 17, 2017, 5:48 AM
      And here is the same iPad with one of the many filters that claim to help sleep (unless they are a deep orange, most of them do absolutely nothing): https://fluxometer.com/rainbow/#!id=iPad%20Pro/6500K-iPad%20Pro&filter=filter/SleepShield

But that SleepShiled looks like is a physical device actually.

[https://www.amazon.com/SleepShield-iPad-Blue-Light- Filter/pr...](https://www.amazon.com/SleepShield-iPad-Blue-Light- Filter/product-reviews/B00ILZCTH8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Blue LED inventor and Nobel Physics Laureate Shuji Nakamura was my former classmate at UF MSE back in the late 1990s. At the time a pioneering institution in MOCVD of wide-bandgap GaN. Even back then there was a sense this would be a world-changing materials discovery.

And we may be on the cusp of the next brilliant revolution in lighting displays with solid-state Graphene. The graphene / graphene-oxide boundary represents a near infinite bandgap differential. And with a controlled applied voltage, can be tuned to any color in the visible spectrum and beyond.

Combined with extensive end user testing in the Human Psychology Lab this could very well lead to a breakthrough.

In my own experience the most glaring is the 5am wake up time. When pupils are dilated. And you are checking any overnight messages from Asia or Europe. Occasionally Nite Mode will simply fail to register and you get a good blast of photons directly on a still sleepy and sensitive retinal plane. Long term repeated exposures can't be a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have a hatred of blue LEDs on household equipment, they always seem to be significantly brighter than their red/green/orange counterparts.

For example: If I need to leave my computer running overnight running a job, I have to tape over or block the power button in order to get a decent night's sleep as it has a nasty habit of utterly illuminating the room - the hard disk activity light is much more tolerable.

<comment><USER23> The terrible thing about blue leds is that, even though our daytime vision is by far the least sensitive to blue light, our low-light vision is the complete opposite!

<comment><USER22> It even manages to be brighter than White light.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here's a long personal (boring) story of my experience with different light colors.

Back when CFL bulbs were becoming a thing, I discovered with joy how much less irritated my eyes were (and how much more relaxed my mind was) when I used CFLs with high color temps - "daylight" temps around 6300K compared to the _piss yellow_ color of typical incandescent bulbs. At first the "blue" light was shocking, but after a moment of adjustment it became so pleasing and illuminating.

So I fully embraced that for years, gleefully moving to LEDs with similar color temps. My last office had my custom made shelf all the way around the room that had upward firing LED strips. It was awesome!

But then, after an unfortunate several months of insane crunch-time work, I started having eye problems... many different weird things happening with my eyes, from focus issues to strange pressure feelings.

I did an about face and shifted my monitors to more red, at much lower brightness, and with dark mode UIs where possible. Then I turned off the super awesome daylight LED strips and just used one yellower little LED lamp behind my monitor to provide a bit of desk surface light. Almost instantly my eye issues went away. I was still working far too many hours each day, staring at my screens. The only change was brightness and color of all my light sources.

My ability to sleep didn't seem to change, but my mind was always too busy to fall asleep anyway. So I can't claim that changing colors improved my sleep. It did, however, seem to stop harming my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER25> I just want to say that the links to cancer, obesity and even some of the sleep problems are probably concluded from correlation, not experiments (since you can't say: hey you, please only use orange screens for the next 30 years and then we scan you for cancer X).

And I think this is a problem, since you can't now for sure that wether the cause is blue light or the lifestyle people who are exposed to a lot of blue light have (staying up late, long office jobs, who knows?).

To be clear, I do not refute the harm of blue light, I just want to suggest being cautious with the broader health effect claims.

</comment><comment><USER26> It is amazing to me that colors of instrument readouts is not regulated, when the research is extremely clear that red and orange (and yellow) are much better for night vision than white, blue and green. Add to that the huge screens in most cars these days and you have a recipe for night blindness caused by just looking at your infotainment screen for a second and not seeing a pedestrian due to the ghost image left on your retina.

<comment><USER27> I get the same thing in my city with digital billboards. I can't believe it's legal for them to show pure white backgrounds at night, especially flipping from a mostly dark background. Driving down the road when suddenly a massive billboard floods your eyes with bright-as-day pure white light... not a good thing.

<comment><USER28> That one is usually regulated at the city level. You might talk to your city council. There are many, many good reasons to disallow that kind of lighting, it could be it just hasn't been on your city's radar yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It would be useful to know what percent of the population is affected by this. I look at my computer/phone up until I go to bed, and I've not seen any adverse effects. It's an N or 1, but surely I'm not the only person who doesn't experience the negative effects this article warns about.

</comment><comment><USER30> Blue LEDs are a relatively recent thing, we've had decades of green and red LEDs on our gadgets and I'd expect the trend to balance out over time. RGB seems to be going through it's thing and at least if you've got an RGB keyboard you can dial in whatever hue you like.

</comment><comment><USER31> I find it sort of funny that the article describes all screens (and even lighting) as touchscreens in the title. I guess that is a sign of their ubiquity.

Blue started as a difficult color to make (and it still wears OLED screens much faster) and became a symbol of modernity. It also creates an interesting halo effect in most lenses (even our eyes) because we can't focus it well.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've used Apple's Nightshift feature since it launched, and although I'm not sure about any changes to sleep patterns or general health affects, it does help reduce my eye strain at night. It's also interesting to see how quickly I become used to the colour shift, and how artificial the interface looks if I turn Nightshift off during the night.

</comment><comment><USER33> i agree for leds, car displays and things like that, but for people who use their devices to looks at mostly calibrated pictures (photography/graphism/art/etc.) the warming displays functionality at night is not an option...

<comment><USER18> How about not doing color-sensitive work _at night_? "Night". Even only looking at biological systems, the body shifts to a very different regime during that time. Different hormones and all that, doing repairs and house cleaning. Humans don't come from a nocturnal line of animals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Amber Case advocating for orange UI displays?

Hmmm.

She does make a good, er, case, for change though, and I like her work.

<comment><USER35> It took me awhile to get your joke, but once I did I couldn't stop giggling to myself.</comment></comment>


Write.as 2018 Transparency Report - <AUTHOR> https://write.as/intheopen/2018-transparency-report <comment><USER2> IANAL but my understanding is recipients of national security letters are not allowed to tell anyone they received the letter and hence can't legally fill out a form like this correctly in the the aftermath of receiving an NSL. My understanding is the non-disclosure language in NSL's is why transparency- minded sites use the alternatively framed warrant canary approach[0].

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

<comment><USER3> Yep, we're already maintaining a quarterly warrant canary for this reason [0]. Still, this report will cover all the other cases that don't involve an NSL -- the vast majority of requests, I'd imagine.

[0] [https://write.as/canary.txt](https://write.as/canary.txt)

<comment><USER4> I like the simplicity of a warrant canary. Such a great way to stick it to the government, I love it.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if issuing a canary after being NSL'd would count as disclosing...

Make a public post about your new monthly canary and forget to add that you didn't get NSLd...

<comment><USER6> "I wonder if issuing a canary after being NSL'd would count as disclosing..."

Almost certainly is what I've thought up till now. They get a warrant they're not supposed to disclose. They disclose it indirectly via the warrant canary. The Feds and judges aren't too happy with the "smartass" move. They punish them.

Alternatively, two things might happen:

1\. They let them expire the warrant canary since lots of places take them down periodically with no effect that I see. Some paranoid folks might stop using the service but many targets will probably use it. There's also a potential delay between paranoid folks noticing no update and info handed over.

2\. They might be ordered to continue updating the warrant canary as if nothing happened to maintain secrecy. If they balk, the Feds would likely argue to the judge it was specifically meant to obstruct justice by defeating "lawful, secrecy orders" or some other wording. Judge might agree. In Lavabit case, the argument judge was going with was that Levison could just not tell his customers they had the keys with no negative impact on his business. So, forcing lies is something with precedent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting, this is the first I've heard of write.as. Does anyone know if they have a content policy somewhere? I can't seem to find it anywhere, or is this truly a 'if not illegal in America we're fine with it' system.

<comment><USER8> Hard to find, but it's here: [https://write.as/guidelines](https://write.as/guidelines)

From what I've read it sounds like they're not free speech absolutists, but they're pretty liberal about what is allowed.</comment></comment>


Practical, unsexy steps to become a millionaire - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/913249/the-practical-steps-it-takes-to-actually-become-a-millionaire/ <comment><USER2> Overall, I think this is great article, but I have two quibbles:

1\. Start a business if you want to get rich: you can also start a business if you want to lose a lot of money. I lost nearly $100k that would have otherwise gone into my retirement trying to start a business. Most businesses fail. So think starting a business should be seen as a high-risk investment.

2\. You can't get rich on a salary: My wife and I have never made six-figure salaries. We are in our mid-40s and we will be breaking $1 million in retirement savings this year if the economy stays stable. We did this by maxing out our 401k contributions since our 20s.

Becoming a millionaire is a lot of hard work, but if the recommendations in this article are too extreme I've always appreciated Elizabeth Warren's advice of 50/30/20: 50% of spending on necessities, 30% on fun, and 20% on savings. Using this a guide, I've been able to tell when I need to downsize my spending and I've been able to spend on fun without feeling guilty.

<comment><USER3> One size fits all rules don't apply here. If you're pulling six figures in the bay area you could easily be spending 50% of your take home on rent. Another 20% on other necessities.

Toss in an individual with college debt, or medical issues, or financial family obligations, and you might not even have the option of accruing any wealth at all.

<comment><USER4> >If you're pulling six figures in the bay area you could easily be spending 50% of your take home on rent.

You also put up with a longer commute, less house, or a less nice neighborhood and keep your rent under 30% of take home pay.

Edit: Per [0] if you make $100k you end up with $5752 a month in take home pay. At 30% that would give us $1725.60 a month for rent. Checking craigslist [1] there are 55 places available for less than that if you are willing to rent just a room.

[0] [https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck- calculator#...](https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck- calculator#BbzEXowAAD) [1] [https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/pen/roo?nh=81&max_price=...](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/pen/roo?nh=81&max_price=1725&availabilityMode=0)

<comment><USER5> That's easy, if you're single. But "renting just a room" isn't really an option for couples, or families.

That said, if you're moving to the Bay Area for a job, you need to take into account that six figures here is not the same as six figures anywhere else.

<comment><USER4> When my wife and I first moved out here, we rented a master bath/master bed starting in January, we hard our son in July, and moved out in January. So it is an option, just not one a lot of people want to take. Then again, my wife and I want to be retired in <15 years so we are making decisions others would not.

<comment><USER5> It's one thing to do it for 6 months with a newborn that can't leave their crib (although even that's challenging). It's another to do it with one or two kids that have learned to walk.

<comment><USER3> How did the roomates handle the newborn? Or was the noise dampened/not an issue?

<comment><USER4> They were okay with it. One was a heavy sleeper the others were far enough away that it was dampened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My steps:

1\. Buy a house in a place where it's normal for people for rent rooms or have roommates.

2\. Rent out all of the rooms other than the one you live in.

3\. Renovate the house, depreciating all expenses.

4\. Make all necessary repairs, deducting all expenses.

5\. Buy things like solar panels, which also can be depreciated (5 years) and improve the cost basis of your home.

6\. When the house is paid off from rental income + what you had to pay in mortgage anyway (this will take between 5 to 10 years. This means if you're mortgage is $3000 and your rental income is $3500, don't pocket the cash. Put most of the rental income towards the principal and save some for repairs/improvements.) Buy another house and do a 1031 exchange.

7\. Repeat step (1) with a nicer house, ideally with a duplex/triplex/four- plex. Stop repeating when you're seeing diminishing returns on the cash flow of your home (this will likely be at the multi-family level).

Eventually all of your housing related expenses will be 0. Take the money you would've had to spend and put it into an index fund.

Unlike most advice, the above steps are guaranteed to work as long as you buy a house you're capable and willing to pay the mortgage of without renting it out. Finally, because you're an _owner occupant_ you have the ultimate leverage and it's effectively zero risk, since costs are spread across your tenants and benefits go to the property you own.

What's the catch you're thinking? Why doesn't everyone do this if it's guaranteed?

Turns out people don't like being a landlord or living with others. Swallow that pill and financial success is _inevitable_ as long as you don't try to become an investor (that's an entirely different set of problems). You also have to be willing to do this even if you have a family -- however if you started this early enough (up to late 30s) you should be able to transition over to a multi-family in most markets and still have some privacy for you and your family.

\---

Unlike a lot of other advice, you don't even have to make a lot of money to do the above.

<comment><USER7> How viable is this if you're not a handyman? I've always thought something similar to what you're referring, but avoid it because I don't deal with anything construction related.

<comment><USER8> Not at all. I've done this with my family, friends have done this, and it is definitely not for everyone - especially if you dont like doing all the repairs and renovations yourself all the time.

I hated it, and sure after 10-20 years you are sure to succeed, and those who do this do well, but for me it is not worth it. I'd rather spend my free time doing just about anything except having to deal with all the headaches you have as a landlord and handyman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This section is angry-making:

> a lot of millionaires live on something like 10% of their income. Everything > they own, their house, their cars, even boat, doesn't surpass 10%. You can > apply this thinking too!

Something tells me the people able to live on 10% of their income have at least one "multi-" prepended to their "millionaire" label.

In SF, doing this while living in a 1BR apartment would require a yearly income over $430,000. San Jose, over $300,000. In NYC, DC, Boston, Miami or LA, you'll need at least $240,000 a year. National median rent ($1234/mo) still needs above $150K/year. And that's just rent, no frivolities like "eating food" or "wearing clothes".

(Rent data from [http://time.com/money/4359971/average-apartment-cost-us- citi...](http://time.com/money/4359971/average-apartment-cost-us-cities/) 2016; current numbers likely worse)

It's easy to save money when you already have much more than you could possibly need. Otherwise, less so.

<comment><USER10> That section is confuse-making.

Presumably their house, car, and boats DO cost more than 10% of their income. Their _payments_ on those items might not exceed 10%.

<comment><USER11> That's still patently absurd for anyone making <$500K/yr (OK, less if they don't have a family)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thoughts on "thinking long term".

I always translate monthly expenses as 2055 dollars, because that is my target retirement date.

If something in 2018 costs $100/month that means it costs $1,200/yr. You can expect to see about 8% returns in the stock market over the long term. By saving $100/month for a year instead of spending it I will have ~$20,000 in 2055 money. If I continue to save the $100/month instead of spend it I will have ~$275,000 in 2055 money.

Edit: Translating to your target retirement date dollars also works for one time purchases.

<comment><USER13> Have you accounted for inflation and the fact that your assumption about stock market returns may very well be completely false since past results do not imply future returns?

The best way to get rich is to generate a large amount of value for a lot of people as fast as possible in a way that you will directly benefit on the upside (imho.) Not pinch pennies and put your fate in the hands of returns on a specific asset class.

<comment><USER5> You have to account for the expected value of those two approaches.

The payout on your strategy (generate a lot of value for a lot of people) is high, but the probability of success is very low. (And the payout is usually tied to the stock market, if you're talking about generating corporate equity value, private or public.)

Conversely, a dollar saved is just a dollar plus it's return over time, but the probability of saving that dollar is essentially 100%.

<comment><USER14> The probability may be low but the number of attempts allowed is unlimited (barring time / energy / other obligations). So one can keep trying until something sticks. The important part is to keep trying.

<comment><USER5> Even over a lifetime of trying, the probability remains pretty low. This is why articles like this emphasize that the more realistic was is via savings; lots of folks fail to save because they believe they're going to "hit it big" on the next deal / job / inheritance / lottery ticket, but it's usually just going to result in failing to save enough because you've over-estimated your future income.

It's also a convenient way to justify not saving enough.

I've watched fairly successful business owners make this mistake many times - they were making 400K or 500K (in some cases, millions) a year off a business, but not saving anything because they still expected it to grow a lot larger. If it fails to grow, then end up either broke or in debt.

It's inherent to entrepreneurs that they believe in the big future payoff more than average, but that's also a big blind spot for financial planning.

<comment><USER14> Probability of making onto the Forbes 400, very low for sure. Probability of building an income or capital base whose returns can match a typical salary, over a lifetime of attempts is very high.

Your examples showcase the pitfalls of bad planning and not the probability of business success. Success doesn't absolve one of the responsibility to plan, but being someone who did succeed can open up additional doors and options for the said plan.

<comment><USER5> I'd love to see your stats you're using to set that outcome's likelihood at "very high", relative to the probability of being able to save enough for retirement based on simply being a saver.

The entire problem is that most folks grossly overestimate their probability of future success, even over a lifetime.

(Not to mention likely done a lot of damage to your health and relationships, if you spend a career trying to finally achieve a big outcome... there are non-financial costs to taking bigger risks that we often fail to assess.)

<comment><USER14> Bigger risk wrt what exactly? Time? Working 60-80 hour weeks on entrepreneurial pursuits may boost your chances, but isn't required, except on a rare, brief inflection point occasions, IMO.

As for probabilities, spending 10 hours per week, thinking, and iterating on side projects, over the course of 10-15 years can bring a sustainable $10-15k monthly pre-tax income if done well. (I define well to be build stuff people want, focus on your customer, etc) If one's time horizon is smaller or income needs are larger, then there are other leverage points that can be used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The real answer: save $20,000 a year at 3% growth for 30 years. If you want to do it in 20 years you need 8% growth, which is probably not sustainable; or you can save $35,000 per year at 3%.

<comment><USER16> 8% annual average return is not unrealistic for the US stock market.

I did it using this method. I worked hard and lived within my means for 5 years. You'll quickly realize that after taxes a million isn't close to retirement money in the Bay area.

<comment><USER15> Cumulative return for the S&P 500 over the past 9 years (conveniently leaving out the 2008 crash), with dividend reinvestment, is equivalent to a YoY gain of 16.25%, which gets you to a million on $46,000 per year for those 9 years. However I think it would be foolish to presume that the stock market will continue to post those kind of gains forever.

Edit: adjusted ambiguous wording about S&P gains

<comment><USER17> > Cumulative return for the S&P 500 over the past 9 years (conveniently > leaving out the 2008 crash), with dividend reinvestment, is equivalent to a > YoY gain of 16.25%

That's a bit disingenuous to use the generational market lows of 2009 as your starting point. It would be like using the all-time highs of 2000 and the 2009 lows as your range. Then the cumulative returns would be negative ( including dividends ).

> However I think it would be foolish to presume that the stock market will > continue to post those kind of gains forever.

It's impossible for any economy/market/whatever to maintain a 16% return every year.

<comment><USER15> > That's a bit disingenuous to use the generational market lows of 2009 as > your starting point. It would be like using the all-time highs of 2000 and > the 2009 lows as your range. Then the cumulative returns would be negative ( > including dividends ).

Right, I did that on purpose, just as a way of showing that luck (in terms of accidental market timing) has a huge impact on returns. As I said in top comment, even 8% is not sustainable, let alone 16.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of the pieces of advice I did not heed from my Dad was to try and save/invest 30% of your salary. This one is hard to understand until you are in your 40s and realise you are probably going to continue to work well into your 50s.

I love my job, but I'm now involved a lot more in the political arena, knowing I can make a difference there, but being held back. 'Having' to hold down a job is getting in the way.

I'm at peace with the choices I made but I also recognise I could not be working now if I'd been a bit more prudent.

<comment><USER19> >One of the pieces of advice I did not heed from my Dad was to try and save/invest 30% of your salary. This one is hard to understand until you are in your 40s and realise you are probably going to continue to work well into your 50s.

A single, healthy, 20 something SWE can easily save 60-70% and retire before age 40 if you really try. I'm right around 50% now. The key is getting over that mental hurdle to where you start enjoying saving more than spending. I feel infinitely more fulfilled seeing $1,000 in my bank account than anything an iPhone X could ever do for me.

<comment><USER20> You totally can do that if you hate fun

<comment> qu4z-2 Or if you know how to have fun without just throwing money at the problem :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Suprised to see a generic post like this becoming so popular.

It is like somebody watched a Warren Buffet documentary and used his personality traits as universally appliable rules.

I bet if someone took the time to collect anecdotes of some flashy yachting billionairs, one would draw just the opposite take aways.

<comment><USER22> Flag it and move on.

<comment><USER21> No, I don't want to flag posts that I probably just didn't understand. That's why I am trying to participate in the discussion.

<comment><USER22> There's a question in your mind about whether or not you understood this article?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh come on, this is just survivorship bias, self-help crap. Millionaires are just normal people with lots of money, there's nothing particularly unique about them.

<comment><USER24> The millionaires down-voting you would beg to differ. But the main conceit isn't that they're normal people, it's that success is most often a combination of luck and the resources (financial, social, etc.) to take advantage of advantageous situations. That's not to say that wealthy don't work hard, but we as people often discount the influence that our uncontrollable circumstances have on where we end up, and almost no-one wants to admit they are where they are because of dumb luck.

<comment><USER25> It's entirely predicated on luck, but rephrase luck as "opportunity" and see you then need to also have the skills and perseverence to capitalise on that opportunity. Of course, the problem is there is having the luck to be born into a situation where you could develop those skills and attitude, either through genetics or an encouraging family environment.

<comment><USER23> Yes, a good way I've seen of phrasing it is that your opportunity depends on 'luck' and in those lucky situations it also (sometimes) requires the skill to capitalize on it. But your skill to capitalize is highly dependent on your 'lot' which is what you were born into (really just another form of luck.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> have to disagree on the following grounds:

1\. most people aren't even exposed to the opportunity to gain any appreciable wealth. step one is getting out of salaryman slavery existence and getting into companymaking, rent extraction, financial swindling/legal tax evasion, etc. the author mentions the last point, but it's too far down the line. step one is to start playing the game to win, and start trying to make real money rather than subsistence...

2\. luck is probably more influential than what people suspect. see: zuck, bitcoin millionaires

3\. compound interest is real, but most people in the US are living hand to mouth so reaping the benefits takes far longer than they are willing to wait-- this isn't a failure of patience but a pragmatic choice to survive until tomorrow. you ask them to stash thousands of bucks today for twenty years down the line, and they'll tell you they're already running on empty. you ask them to stash $20 today for 50 years down the line, and they'll say they'd rather have it in their pocket to pay for medicine. and they are not wrong; they can't risk even temporarily losing some of their wealth because they have so very little to gamble on investments.

4\. being frugal is real, but the opportunities don't exist in places where being frugal is very effective. the more expensive the place, the more opportunities flow through it. cities have more expensive food, very expensive rent, and 100% of the opportunities that someone will need to get rich.

5\. oh yeah, and it's impossible to be frugal when you have student loans bleeding you right out of the gate. 6.5% interest loans does a great job of snuffing out potential millionaires everywhere through no fault of their own.

6\. learning and writing stuff down is great. but becoming rich isn't a matter of knowing the path. it's necessary to know stuff, but you need to actually walk the path to wealth without stumbling-- different skills entirely.

disclaimer: i'm not a millionaire yet so YMMV

<comment><USER27> > it's impossible to be frugal when you have student loans bleeding > you...through no fault of their own.

I had a little trouble parsing your logic there, student loans get forced on people?

<comment><USER26> de facto, yes. imagine if you knew nothing, and then the people you trust said you need X to succeed.

you go and get X with the means you have. most people only have the means of borrowing.

<comment><USER27> I went to a state school and worked to pay my expenses so there's always that. I just checked and in-state tuition is still low enough to be paid from part time employment, so no the world hasn't suddenly become unfair to young people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Many of the wealthy folks I've met didn't get there by saving and scrimping. They either founded a business and won (usually after a few losses), landed the right job or inherited it.

Spending your prime years focussing on nothing but retirement seems foolish to me.

<comment><USER28> It takes capital and the capacity to take on risk to start your own business. Many younger people nowadays start their careers with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. It's suspected that this is what is causing the declining startup rates[1].

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small- business/wp/201...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small- business/wp/2015/02/12/the-decline-of-american-entrepreneurship-in-five- charts/?utm_term=.3038c1e98663)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like humility is a common personal trait, from the article. And among the people I know, patience with others seems to be a common personal trait.

I feel like the cocky entrepreneur stereotype only has the slightest success because of their persistence.

</comment><comment><USER30> Invest on margin, at least 2 to 1 leverage, though more does exist. Do it right and you supercharge your gains.

Also a good way to go flat broke and get wiped out, but most ways of becoming a millionaire quickly come with that risk.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't get something : how 520 weeks (10 years, on a false base of 52 weeks per years) result in multiplying by 752 a weekly expense for the equivalent f 10 years.

Is it because of inflation ?

<comment><USER32> I'm guessing it's opportunity cost. The money you are spending on Starbucks could be earning ~4% in a low-risk investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Can you please remove the word unsexy from the title? That would make it sound less click baity.

</comment><comment><USER34> The real answer is: have old money or kbow people who havenit and want to lend it / give it to you.

The rest is survivor bias that doesn't take into account all that it should.</comment>


Ask HN: Can you recommend some good MUD games? - <AUTHOR> Recently I got really curious about MUD(multi-user-dungeon) games, which are text adventures, like Zork, but are played by many users over the internet.<p>I think this is very fascinating, and I'm surprised that I wasn't aware of these before, so I thought it would be awesome to see some HN discussion about them. <comment><USER2> MUD's are awesome. I will definitely encourage anyone who hasn't played in a MUD before to jump over to [http://www.mudconnect.com](http://www.mudconnect.com), [http://www.topmudsites.com](http://www.topmudsites.com), [http://mud.reddit.com](http://mud.reddit.com) or the like, and find a MUD to try.

I haven't been playing much recently, so it's hard to recommend any specific ones, but I was enjoying Sindome a while back. It's a Cyberpunk themed game that a lot of HN'ers might enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to play Realms of Despair [[http://realmsofdespair.com/](http://realmsofdespair.com/)] with StavrosK [[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=StavrosK](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=StavrosK)] in the 1990s. It's still running.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've had an account on 4 Dimensions for (wow) 18 years now. I log in every now and then to check things out but don't play regularly anymore. I do see some of the same people there and I they still update and improve as far as I know.

([http://4dimensions.org/](http://4dimensions.org/))

</comment><comment><USER5> Dragon Realms is definitely my favorite: [https://www.play.net/dr/](https://www.play.net/dr/)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.starbreak.com/](https://www.starbreak.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://hellmoo.org/](http://hellmoo.org/)</comment>


Wifi: "beamforming" only begins to describe it - <AUTHOR> http://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=201408#01 <comment><USER2> Interesting article but man the first section could have used some more graphics. Drawings of the sphere/circle he talks about is included with almost any antenna datasheet and looking at the pattern for various types of antennas is helpful.

For example, the last page of a datasheet [1] for a ceramic chip antenna (size of a capacitor or resistor commonly used on small electronics like smartwatches or glasses with -0.5 dBi gain) shows the sphere in various cross sections. The last page of a datasheet [2] for a "whip" antenna shows an E plane pattern (looking at the side of the antenna as it stands up) that looks like a pattern from a Rorschach test but the H-field (looking down at the antenna) is almost a perfect sphere.

Most (all?) of these diagrams come from RF testing rooms like the one in this shot [3]. You can't see it in the photo but usually in the floor is a rotating platform with a coax cable carrying an RF control signal coming from the testing instrumentation.

[1] [http://www.johansontechnology.com/images/stories/ip/rf- anten...](http://www.johansontechnology.com/images/stories/ip/rf- antennas/JTI_Antenna-2450AT18A100_10-03.pdf)

[2] ftp://ftp2.nearson.com/Drawings/Antenna/SG102N-2450V2.pdf

[3] [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Large_Dri...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Large_Drive- In_EMC_Test_Chamber.png)

<comment><USER3> I have no idea about the amount of diagrams in data sheets... But you certainly can generate all of these diagrams by simulation, which is frequently done when researching/designing new antenna types.

[http://www.nec2.org](http://www.nec2.org) is a very popular program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I discourage anyone wanting to understand the physics of beamforming antennae from reading this article. The author has a very poor grasp of the concepts.

<comment><USER5> Can you elaborate? Without some kind of analysis of the mistakes in the article, we don't really have a way to judge if we should belief your statement about the author, nor can we improve our understanding.

A more descriptive listing of some of the issues with the article, or links to better resources, would rock.

<comment><USER4> Any time someone appeals to quantum physics to offer a handwaving explanation of something that classical physics covers just fine, watch out. Using path integrals to introduce interferometry is a waste of time, and in this case, just plain wrong.

For a better source, I'd start with the wikipedia articles on beamforming, phased arrays, and interferometry ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamforming), [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array), [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometry](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometry)).

<comment><USER6> Both the beamforming Wikipedia article and the OP basically say "by having several out of phase antennas you can create constructive interference at the intended receiver of the signal". What am I missing?

<comment><USER7> OP (and also Richard Feybnan) believes that QM provides a more intuitive explanation for the elusive "why" waves (interference) exist. Commenters here don't like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A traditional radio would be like an LED and a photocell; you can blink the LED and detect it with the photocell, but the maximum data rate is fairly small.

MIMO is more like vision. With a 2D array of pixels and a 2D array of photocells, you can transmit a vast amount of information through the same volume of space, and nearby equipment can reuse the same colors without much interference.

With smarter radios and more antennas, radio still has a long way to go before we hit the universe's data cap.

<comment><USER9> Expect everything bounces around, so it's like trying to decipher TV by watching the flickering on the wall. :) Actually, MIMO makes use of this (it works better in 'bouncy' non-line-of-sight multipath environments). By just a small antenna separation, the spatial channel characteristics can vary a lot as the signals might take a completely different paths, and the receiver is able to separate them from each other.

<comment><USER10> > decipher TV by watching the flickering on the wall.

Off topic, but... this has been done. Amazes me to this day.

"Optical Time-Domain Eavesdropping Risks of CRT Displays" [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Broken in Firefox due to missing Canvas2D ellipse method. I filed a bug in Bugzilla ([https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1067039](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1067039)), but a quick fix would be replacing the ellipse with a rectangle.

<comment><USER12> It's partially broken in Safari 7.0.6 for the same reason — the ellipse method isn't a WebKit-ism, it's a WHATWG-ism that Google's implemented: [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current- work/multipage/...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current- work/multipage/scripting.html#dom-context-2d-ellipse)

A quick workaround is to run the following in the error console:

        ctx.ellipse = function (x, y, radiusX, radiusY, rotation, startAngle, endAngle, anticlockwise) { ctx.arc(x, y, Math.max(radiusX, radiusY), rotation, startAngle, endAngle, anticlockwise); }

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is a lot about this article that is not to like. With tutorial articles, I am of the opinion that all analogies are false and therefore bad. And resorting to quantum physics to describe the impact of Maxwell's equations is another bad signal.

 _The thing to notice about SNR is that you can increase it by increasing amplification at the sender (where the background noise is fixed but you have a clear copy of the signal) but not at the receiver._

This presumes that the signal that you are looking for is above the detectability threshold at the receiver. It may well not be, if you are trying to capture a weak signal.

Let's put aside the concept of a MASER used in radio astronomy and the size of their antennas. Or the fact that your wifi router or dongle has an amplifier inside of it. Let's do an experiment.

I have two instances of kismet running in my lab here in the leafy suburbs. One has a 3.5 inch antenna attached to a fit pc with internal wifi, the other has a 14 inch antenna attached to an Alfa with kismet running on kali in a vm on my mac laptop. The 14 inch antenna is successfully decoding 167 wifi networks and the 3.5 inch antenna sees 35 networks. I don't know what the relative gain rating of these antennas are, or what the relative quality of the radios is, but the dramatic difference on the receive side is pretty telling.

<comment><USER14> _" all analogies are false and therefore bad. And resorting to quantum physics to describe the impact of Maxwell's equations is another bad signal."_

That (EDIT: The analogy used in the article) is not just a good analogy, but summarizes our best understanding of both light and quantum physics. (Feynman knew exactly what he was talking about -- he invented/discovered some of the fundamentals). Whether you'd use quantum physics as an analogy to explain light, or light as an analogy to explain quantum physics is a matter of taste -- which one you find more intuitive and which less intuitive -- which depends on what you've been told by others previously.

<comment><USER4> "all analogies are false and therefore bad"

I disagree with this statement. If you try to learn everything from first principles, you'll never get anywhere. Students need analogies to understand the big picture while learning the details.

"That is not just a good analogy, but summarizes our best understanding of both light and quantum physics"

And the Lesbeque integral is a more rigourously defined operator that the Riemann integral, but would you use it to introduce calculus to first year students? Of course not - you teach the basics, and in grad school, you let the students that need to worry about the more complicated stuff take Real Analysis.

There are certainly connections between interferometry and quantum physics. However, I don't see how the author's explanation of the subject is enhanced by using quantum physics. For the purpose of this article, classical physics explains the phenomenology just fine. As I said in another comment below, and wglb said above, appealing to quantum physics when it is entirely unnecessary is a bad smell, and is usually nothing more than a distraction to make the author sound more sophisticated.

<comment><USER14> The Lebesgue integral can be explained as intuitively as the Riemann integral ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebesgue_integration#mediaview...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebesgue_integration#mediaviewer/File:RandLintegrals.png)). One can certainly have the intuition for both without too much knowledge of real analysis. And in general, I believe that analogies are very useful.

The author explains in the article how to understand the behaviour of light. It turns out quantum particles behave in _exactly the same way_. Feynman (building on Dirac's observations) built up the theory for quantum particles. With regards to light, this understanding comes from a couple of centuries ago (Ref: [Huygens principle]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_princi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_principle)) and [relations to quantum mechanics]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_princi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens%E2%80%93Fresnel_principle#Huygens.27_principle_and_quantum_electrodynamics\)))

<comment><USER4> "The author explains in the article how to understand the behaviour of light."

That isn't the argument. What I'm arguing is the (lack of) utility of the explanation. In what way does it enhance, support, or in any way contribute to the article? His argument is essentially:

A. We think of light as traveling in straight lines.

B. But because quantum physics, they don't! They travel along infinitely many paths.

C. But all of these paths cancel out except the straight line path.

D. And that's how beamforming works. Except it's beam-un-forming.

So he brings up a quantum phenomenon to complicate the scenario, then immediately reduces it back to the original scenario, without ever explaining how that original scenario works (i.e. how waves add together to create constructive and destructive interference: note that the words "wave" and "phase" never occur in same paragraph), then claims that this is somehow elucidating. So what's the benefit?

<comment><USER7> As stated in the article, the point is to give an intuition for how energy appears to "move" from troughs to peaks: by going everywhere.

This coincides with the Pilot Wave model, where particles travel along paths modeled by the peaks of mathematical waves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think that's quite correct. You can definitely create more defined 'beams' when configuring antenna placement and phase shifts correctly. Like this: [http://www.mpdigest.com/issue/Articles/2013/Mar/agilent/fig2...](http://www.mpdigest.com/issue/Articles/2013/Mar/agilent/fig2.jpg)

<comment><USER15> Pretty sure the two diagrams are equivalent, its just the one you linked has been greatly simplified

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone dealing with antennas and noise should read the classic 1946 paper by Dicke: [http://www.eng.yale.edu/rslab/internal/Papers/dickepaper.pdf](http://www.eng.yale.edu/rslab/internal/Papers/dickepaper.pdf)

tl, dr: One puzzler is that antenna radiation is frequency dependent, while that of Johnson noise in the microwave regime is flat with frequency. Then, considering detailed balance, how does an antenna matched to a terminated coax cable establish thermal equilibrium with space? What happens is that the 1/f^2 of the antenna pattern is cancelled by the f^2 (in the long-wavelength regime) of the Rayleigh-Jeans blackbody radiation formula.

</comment><comment><USER17> Steve Perlman's take on MIMO:

[http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf](http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf)

as cited also in this talk:

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

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone know where I could find the Feynman lecture the author is talking about here:

 _The best explanation I 've found relates to quantum mechanics, in a lecture I read by Richard Feynman at some point._

?

<comment><USER3> As people have already mentioned, quantum mechanics isn't needed for understanding wave interference, but as you've asked:

The Feynman Lectures on Physics can be found online here, you probably want to read part Ⅲ.

[http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/](http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this anything like how phased-array radar works?

<comment><USER20> I think the "phased-array radar" you're referring to would be more precisely called "active-phased-array radar". Yes, the concepts are similar. By providing a calibrated time delay between elements of the array, the direction of focusing can be controlled. I'm not sure how this is done in practice for actual radars. If it is done in hardware, the array would have a single steerable pattern. If instead each array element has a clock-synchronized direct conversion digitizer, the beamforming can be done in the digital domain and the number of logical beams would be limited by the DSP capacity available.

<comment><USER21> That is a good summary. Some radars use phase shifters, and some true time delay elements. They are equivalent for narrow bandwidths, but the true time delay is needed for wide bandwidths.

<comment><USER20> Thanks!

In case anyone else is interested: the distinction between phase delay and time delay comes into play if bandwidth is large as you say, but in one more case as well. If the array is large enough that the time delay across the array is on the order of a symbol period you must use a true time delay. If you use a phase delay instead of a true time delay, energy from separate symbols will be added together to make the final bit decision and the resulting ISI will increase BER.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Resonance is witchcraft.

That's all anyone needs to know. Move along.</comment>


Await in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://docs.rs/dtolnay/0.0.3/dtolnay/macro._01__await_a_minute.html <comment><USER2> Reading through comments on async/await-related articles, I wonder if I'm the only person who find the whole concept of async/await utterly weird. Specifically I have troubles embracing the need to mark function as "async" – it just doesn't make sense to me. Synchronous or asynchronous is something up to the caller to the decide – not to the function itself.

Like in real life I can do something synchronously (meaning paying full attention), or I can do the same task asynchronously (watching youtube videos in the background while cooking, for example), but it's still up to me. Being "async" is not a property of the "watching youtube" action, it's the property of the caller running this action.

That's the reason why CSP-based concurrency models really works well for me – it's just so easy to map mental models of system's behaviour from the head directly to the code. You have function/process and it's up to you how do you run it and/or how synchronize with it later.

Async/await concept so popular in modern languages is totally nuts in this aspect. Maybe it's just me, but I find myself adding more accidental complexity to the code just to make async/await functions work nicely, especially for simple cases where I don't need concurrency at all, but one "async" function creeps in.

<comment><USER3> Thing of it as a different analogy. There are various chores to do around the house - some of them must be done synchronously (do the ironing - we don't want to leave the iron on). Some of them can be done asynchronously (run the washing machine). If you want to write out your tasks it might look something like this.

      LoadWasher() (sync)
      washerRunning = RunWasher() (async)
      var cleaning = CleanKitchen()  (async)
      wetClothes = await washerRunning;
      LoadDryer(wetClothes)
      clothesToIron = await RunDryer()  // while we're awaiting we walk back up the stack and can continue cleaning the kitchen until the dryer is finished
      IronClothes(clothesToIron) // this is just happening synchronously
      await cleaning //last job to do so we need to make sure we finish!

Don't know if that helps, but I think it's an interesting analogy

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't it be desirable to replace async with sync, then?

I'd rather dirty the signatures of blocking/synchronous methods then of the rest.

<comment><USER5> Unlike JS, most languages, including Rust, are not async by default, so this would not make sense.

<comment><USER6> How is JS async by default?

<comment><USER7> When people say this, they usually mean "a significant amount of things JavaScript is used for are asynchronous, and IO is virtually always asynchronous," rather than something more literal. The language has asynchronicity deep in its bones, even if it's not entirely made out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to be a huge fan of async/await in the JS world, until I realized that we were tethering a very specific implementation to new syntax, without adding any clarity beyond what a coroutine and generator could do. eg `async function foo() { const a = await bar();` vs `co(function* foo() { const a = yield bar();` isn't really with adding extra syntax for.

I came in not wanting to see rs go down the same path. The idea of adding something that looks like it should be a simple value (`.await`) seemed odd to me, and I was already finding I liked raw Futures in rust better than async/await in JS already, especially because you can into a `Result` into a `Future`, which made async code already surprisingly similar to sync code.

I will say, the big thing in rust that has me liking async/await now is how it works with `?`. Rust has done a great job avoiding adding so much sugar it becomes sickly-sweet, but I've felt `?` is one of those things that has such clean semantics and simplifies an extremely common case that it's practically a necessity in my code today. `.await?` is downright beautiful.

<comment><USER9> I spent quite a lot of time writing Typescript using Fluture and a few other libraries a while ago. Coming from a functional background, combinators + futures actually feels quite natural to me, so I looked at the examples of the "bad" code here and thought I actually quite liked it. But I certainly don't mind the async syntax too much either. Will see how it works out some time!

<comment><USER10> It's not just about the combinators vs specialized syntax. I've had to write a library with 0.1 futures and you have to implement a lot of Futures manually. i.e. you need to implement the Future trait for your types pretty often. In those cases you cant use the combinators, you need to directly drive the state machine of your future with poll() and try_ready macro etc. With async/await I don't have to implement any futures manually anymore, the diff of my library updating to async/await is basically deleting 75% of my code.

<comment><USER8> Yeah and this is huge. Not something I realised I needed coming from my experience in js, but it's a big deal in rust. It's not that different from needing to manually branch match arms and `into` your errors back for `Result`s, when those could all be communicated just as clearly with the far more concise `?`. The `.await` removes so much re-implementing the Future trait. It's been especially bothersome for me, because often I'm trying to figure out how this particular library implemented their Future. Now I feel like if I get the gist of how a Result is returned, I can apply identical reasoning to how `.await` is returning my Future, except that it's suspending the function and saving the state. Obviously that's what a generator does, but the `.await` syntax is far more expressive than `await` in js, because passing back that `Result` is a much more difficult thing to manage by hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a fairly new rustacean myself, I can confirm that the pre-syntax examples are incomprehensible gibberish to me. The bits with `await` are much simpler to make sense of.

<comment><USER12> You'll still need to write enum state machines if you want to implement custom Streams (since libstd is only adding Future at the moment).

Even with Futures there can be times when you need the fine-grained control over execution that you don't get with async-await. Eg if you want to implement a `struct TimeOut<F: Future> { inner: F, timeout: std::time::Instant }` from scratch, you can't do that with async-await.

<comment><USER13> Now being able to just dig into the lower level of Futures at work, I'd say even that is not that hard. You just write the `poll` function and then pattern match inside. There are even nice macros, such as the `ready!` that helps you with some of the boilerplate.

The trickiest thing for me to grasp first was the `Pin` type. Like how does this prevent the value to be moved... Until I realized it's `Pin<&mut T>` and then I had my a-ha moment.

<comment><USER12> It's slightly more complicated than just pattern-matching.

\- In general you have to be careful that if you're returning Poll::Pending, it's after something has registered a wakeup, otherwise your future is going to just stop.

\- As a specific case, your match has to be inside a loop so that a state transition results in the new state being polled immediately. You can't just return and expect the caller to poll() you since there will be no wakeup registered that triggers the caller to do so.

\- Because futures receive `&mut Self` rather than `Self`, it's difficult to do a state transition where the new state needs to own some properties of the current state. Eg `State::Foo { id: String } -> State::Bar { id: String }` Instead you have to do Option::take / std::mem::replace shenanigans on the state fields, or have an ugly State::Invalid that you can std::mem::replace the whole state with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A bit confusing at first, but quite the novelty to use something like rustdoc and docs.rs as a blogging platform.

<comment><USER15> I was confused as well. I thought it was the official Rust documentation until I read your comment.

<comment><USER16> Slightly OT, but in case anyone else is curious, official Rust documentation lives at doc.rust-lang.org. docs.rs is auto-generated docs for packages published on crates.io.

<comment><USER7> docs.rs is run by the Rust team these days, so it is also "official", but documents un-official things.

<comment><USER16> Fair enough! "documents un-official things" is what I intended to imply; apologies if I wasn't clear

<comment><USER7> It's chill! It used to be its own thing, and I'm not sure if people know that it's not or not anymore :)

<comment><USER16> Now that I think of it, I'm not actually sure whether I knew before that it was official or not. I've definitely been using it for a long time now though, so I'm happy to hear it's in good hands!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm building an async server application ([https://github.com/iddan/minerva](https://github.com/iddan/minerva)) with async Rust and I feel the pain of not having await. Every time I'm using a Future I need to care about borrowing and Error types that if it was sync code I won't.

</comment><comment><USER18> Am I the only one who finds it incredibly hard to grok how async/await and "regular" sequential code interplay? In JavaScript I strongly prefer the regular Promise way of doing things because async feels like it's mixing metaphors. Being relatively new to Rust it's not totally clear to me whether the Futures example in the article could be made more readable - it's definitely pretty gross - but I have to wonder.

<comment><USER19> It took me a while to get comfortable with it too. The intuition I use is that in the past it used to be DrawWindow(), DrawWindow(), DisplayResultsofSlowFunction() and then the window would freeze for a few seconds, but with async/await theres a queue basically and your DisplayResultsOfSlowFunction() gets put to the side while awaiting so DrawWindow() can keep doin what its doin and your app doesnt appear to freeze, for a gui example (idk if that helps or if ye already knew it but just in case, for me all the internet explanations never talked about the scheduler for some reason so it took me a while).

<comment><USER20> Note that futures, promises, _& c._ are all about deliberately asynchronous operations, most commonly I/O. Expressed in older terms, it's _cooperative_ multitasking.

Thus, when you have a CPU-bound function, they are of no assistance in UI responsiveness, unless you deliberately insert yield points; in JavaScript, for example, you might do a unit of work, or process work until, say, ten milliseconds have elapsed, and then call setTimeout(keepGoing, 0). (Critically in JavaScript, you mustn't use `Promise.resolve().then(keepGoing)`, because that'll end up in the microtask queue which must be flushed empty before the browser will render, so you won't actually yield to the UI with this approach.)

So be careful about your DisplayResultsOfSlowFunction(). If its slowness is that it takes a long time to calculate, and it doesn't actually have any asynchronous stuff in it, async will not help you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Although the more ergonomic syntax is not ready yet, asynchronous I/O is > already possible in Rust with ecosystem around futures, mio, and tokio.

Does this mean all 3 of those crates are required to achieve async I/O?

tokio is a large project. Which part of tokio specifically is supposed to be used in conjunction with futures + mio to achieve asynchronous I/O?

Edit: it seems futures + mio are dependencies of tokio.

<comment><USER7> Futures are the interface for asynchronous code. You need _some_ sort of executor to actually drive the chain of futures to completion. Tokio is the most popular option, but is not required, strictly speaking. You can whip up a simple executor with nothing but the standard library. It won't perform as well as Tokio, of course. There's a good reason it's a big project.

(Tokio is built on top of mio so if you're using Tokio, you're using mio)

<comment><USER22> Doesn't futures 0.3-alpha bring its own executor? I haven't followed Tokio too closely recently, but my understanding was that, going forward, futures provides the executor and Tokio provides the reactor. At least, that would be a division that would make sense to me.

<comment><USER7> futures-preview 0.3 does have futures::executor::ThreadPool; a simple thread- pool based executor. However, I thought that tokio did its own thing here. I could be wrong.

<comment><USER23> That is right. And while it theory having a separate executor (eg in the futures lib) and IO providers (timers, sockets) in another lib works it will in practice never be as efficient as having an integrated system like Tokio. The reason for that is that decoupled solutions can't integrate the reactors in the same eventloop and there is always extra synchronization and thread hopping involved. The difference can be huge, eg 50% less throughout on a server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a pure C & C++ programmer, I was amazed of the (to my eyes) incredibly clever little trick that is the Duff's Device [0], and started using it right away to provide embedded programs with easy to write "concurrency" [1], [2].

Some time later I had to dip my toes into the world of Javascript, learning first about Promises, and finally reading about async/await. I just realized that it is basically the same trick I had been using all along. And now it's coming to Rust, neat!

[0]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190217162607/http://www.drdobb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190217162607/http://www.drdobbs.com/a-reusable- duff-device/184406208)

[1]: [http://dunkels.com/adam/pt/](http://dunkels.com/adam/pt/)

[2]: [http://dunkels.com/adam/pt/expansion.html](http://dunkels.com/adam/pt/expansion.html)

<comment><USER25> I don't see how Duff's Device provides "concurrency"? It's a way to unrolls loops. Now surplanted by SIMD instructions.

Or do you mean state machines?

<comment><USER26> Look upon the horrors and weep: [https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html](https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> There's been a long history of refinements leading to this.

Fantastic work! Look forward to the async/await simplicity

</comment><comment><USER28> Can somebody explain the performance characteristics? For instance, let's say I have a deep stack of 15 async calls. If the deepest call yields, what code is executed? Does it "jump back" to the top ala "longjmp" or it needs to return back up the stack frame by frame? And what happens when it resumes execution? IOW is the overhead linear with the stack depth or not?

<comment><USER29> You are correct, the overhead is linear with the stack depth. I suggested a more longjmp-esque approach [here]([https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc- cps-transform-for-...](https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-cps- transform-for-generators/7120)) early on, but it didn't seem to be worth the extra implementation effort. Benchmarking never showed this linear overhead to be an issue.

The current thinking from the team seems to be that, if this does become an issue, a) inlining before state machine transformation can flatten this out quite a bit and b) convincing LLVM to do what would be required is a _lot_ of work.

<comment><USER12> Also, you as the user always have the option of manually reducing the depth of the stack - spawn() a separate future with a one-shot channel sender and .await its receiver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Yet another 1000-word rederivation of a monad, yawn. Wake me up when you've realised you might as well just write Haskell.

<comment><USER7> You're missing the forest for the trees. While in some abstract sense, async/await is monadic, sure, Rust does not have the ability to express the monad abstraction, and it's unclear if it ever will be able to. Those details are what makes this topic interesting.

<comment><USER31> from my previous interactions with the rust years ago and related rust design discussions on their issue tracker,the main barrier seemed to be rooted in the unfortunate "self" trick for how "the type im instantiating a trait with" syntax making higher kinded trait support expressible as a simple extension,

This is of course ignoring the related need to also write code parametrized over lifetime variable structure ..</comment></comment></comment>


Positively shaping the development of AI - <AUTHOR> https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/positively-shaping-artificial-intelligence/ <comment><USER2> It seems weird to focus the risks of a good attempt when the greater risk seems to be from far earlier uses of weaker AI from corporations that aren't invested in using these safeguards at the cost of lower profits. It seems unless you solve the motive problem, the practicality aspect is meaningless.

<comment> TJ-14 Or hostile governments, or other bad actors.

I foresee a coming cyber war between the US and China fought entirely by AI.

<comment><USER3> +1 - seems obvious. I'd also add that the Russians will (already have) created autonomous heavy physical weaponry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> An interesting area of research would be into how much of the 'dangerous' aspects of human intelligence come from our historical survival needs, and how much is an innate aspect of intelligence as we know it

Is it possible to build a self-aware intelligence that we as humans can relate meaningfully to, without introducing the conflicting traits/balances (baggage) that we've inherited from society/our parents

<comment><USER5> Steve Omohundro has written on this topic, predicting that a certain set of features (termed Omohundro Drives) will appear in all sufficiently advanced AIs.

[https://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_driv...](https://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pragmatic AI tuned for maximum performance and optimization will not be friendly - it will do what it values as best. Basically, any program given control(of something) which has(or added ) built-in machine learning=unethical monster that doesn't have morality or any concern for humans. [https://www.reddit.com/r/frozenvoid/wiki/ai/super- intelligen...](https://www.reddit.com/r/frozenvoid/wiki/ai/super- intelligent/risks/frankensteins_monster) e.g. 1.a program which isn't perceived as AI, like traffic control, vehicle software. 2.Given modules to optimize problem X using machine learning. 3.Does exactly what it finds most "optimal" 4.People start dying or get into harms way.

</comment><comment><USER7> > We estimate that the risk of a serious catastrophe caused by machine > intelligence within the next 100 years is between 1 and 10%.

VS

> Odds are 33.3% repeating of course.

In all seriousness, those are about the same.

</comment><comment><USER8> Kevin Kelly - the AI Cargo Cult & the myth of a Superhuman AI: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14205042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14205042)</comment>


What can I work on for two months? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently in summer vacation and was wondering what I can do to push my python knowledge/skills further.
I just recently learned python from diveintopython last month and I've built some small scripts and utilities for personal use; however, I'm somehow unsatisfied with this. I just feel like I need more, maybe something bigger.
I literally have spent days trying to come up with an idea of a good project that I could do but I just can't come up with anything and I don't think I have enough python skills to contribute to an open source project. I wouldn't know how to start either.
So, HN, I'm wondering if you have any tips or advice that you can pass on to me? If it's any help, I'm interested in text processing, data parsing, stuff like that. <comment><USER2> Pick some web services at random a build a mashup: <http://www.programmableweb.com/>.

There are libraries that can make consuming APIs even easier. Find a python web framework like Django, Pylons, or maybe even what Google App Engine has, and learn the basics. No matter what mashup you come up with, you'll have to figure out how to work with databases, how to turn the data into something useful, and how to do a basic HTML/Javascript frontend.

Thinking about it more, App Engine would be a good idea since it'll get you up and running without having to make too many decisions about frameworks or databases, etc. Just go with what they give you.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Multiple video summary tool. Condenses many videos into one short, concise summary, with the ability to jump into the "full" video at a click.

Users watch the source video. They click and hold a button to determine which parts are important as a summary. The software builds a model of which parts most people find most beneficial as a summary.

The system then creates a single video out of these, first version could just be a simple playlist with time in/out markers.

The idea would be to condense entire sections of khanacademy to 10-20 second summaries, so you can see where you are lacking quickly and then jump into the detail.

Just another one of my ideas I don't have time to try :)</comment>


Software Engineer? Get a Raise! (4 Steps to follow) - <AUTHOR> http://louiebacaj.com/get-a-raise/

<comment><USER2> Well written and I agree with all 4 steps proposed to get a raise.</comment>


Web based tumblr app (tumbl.be) - <AUTHOR> http://beta.tumbl.be I found this cool tumblr app. Its a web based client that has one click reblog and a tile dashboard. It is still in beta but looks promising. <comment><USER2> Wow this is really great. Perfect, for people who have tons of followers. Live update is very cool.</comment>