Humans Caused a Major Shift in Earth's Ecosystems 6,000 Years Ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/humans-caused-major-shift-earths-ecosystems-6000-years-ago-180957566/?no-ist <comment><USER2> I just happened to be reading The Emigrants' guide to Oregon and California. It was the guide that the Donner party used to take a short cut.

The book doesn't embellish. (The Donner party took one sentence out of that guide, and made a mistake.)

My reason for posting here is when the author was describing California; it was almost like reading fiction. The amount of wildlife was staggering. We were all told about the Bufflo, but there were so much more wildlife. Wildlife that we destroyed. One sentence really got to me. It stated, 'Salmon are 10 lbs. to 60 lbs.' I thought 60 lbs--it must be an exaggeration, but I think it's true.

<comment><USER3> > Wildlife that we destroyed.

Who is "we"? I didn't do any of the destruction. Did you?

<comment><USER4> This comment is symptomatic of a lot of modern-day problems, especially in U.S. "We" are a society, a community. "You" don't exist alone. You couldn't exist without the benefits from human societies you live in. It's hypocritical and immoral to take the benefits of those societies, and then to disclaim participation in actions that society takes (or has taken), which are in part responsible for those benefits. American individualism is all well and good, but it gets carried way too far. For America is also a single society, and members of a society can't rationally accept the benefits of that society while disclaiming all participation in the actions that produced those benefits.

I'm not saying "you" destroyed any wildlife. What I am saying is that (if you're American) you are reaping the benefits of a society that exists as it does because it dominated a continent, destroying much of the existing landscape and natural inhabitants. There is some level of responsibility that individuals have for prior actions taken by their society. Surely not as great a responsibility as if you'd done the actions yourself, or approved of the actions at the time they were taken. But some level of responsibility nonetheless (and when adding up the small responsibility of each current member the responsibility to do something as a group to rectify past wrongs may become quite large indeed).

<comment><USER5> > What I am saying is that (if you're American) you are reaping the benefits > of a society that exists as it does because it dominated a continent, > destroying much of the existing landscape and natural inhabitants.

 _Every_ society on Earth exists as it does because it destroyed much of the previously existing landscape and natural inhabitants, most definitely including the Native American societies. If you read Over the Edge of the World, a fascinating book about Magellan's voyage around the globe, you'll find that as he traveled the straits at the southern tip of South America -- the most miserable, cold, dreary, and awful environment that could be imagined -- he met a miserable and starving aboriginal tribe: a tribe that, it turns out, had been pushed all the way to the tip of Tierra del Fuego by succeeding waves of "native" migration across the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska. The sin of the United States is not original with the United States: it is the sin of every society.

> But some level of responsibility nonetheless (and when adding up the small > responsibility of each current member the responsibility to do something as > a group to rectify past wrongs may become quite large indeed).

You could smuggle an elephant inside that parenthetical clause. For starters, how specifically is one to "rectify past wrongs" that were committed against people who have been dead for hundreds of years? And are the remnants of those societies that still exist today also obliged to "rectify past wrongs" against the people _they_ aggressed on even farther in the past?

<comment><USER6> I think you're blowing the comment put of proportion by deliberately interpreting a very qualified statement in an extreme and maximalist way.

The poster dodnt say every wrong against everyone and everything ever has to be rectified. There are many concrete and affordable steps we can take to remediate much of the damage our societies have done and are doing to each other and the environment. I agree with the poster that we have an obligation to take as many of those steps as we feel we can afford.

<comment><USER5> I'm not going to just sign on to an arbitrary promise like that, though. In the United States the people who talk about remediating what our societies have done, etc., have proposed things like massive and unending wealth transfers, unequal enforcement of the law, explicitly segregationist race- based government systems, and even secession. For that reason I am disinclined to just take someone talking about this subject at their word and say "sure, whatever you want."

<comment><USER6> Not everybody talking about remediating past wrongs are proposing or endorsing such extreme measures, or not in an extreme way. What's frustrating is that moderate or conservative (small 'c') voices have been essentially silent on the matter leaving the field disproportionately open to more extreme advocacy. Those who are in favour of more moderate steps should advocate them and not use other people's disproportionate views as an excuse for throwing their hands in the air and giving up on the whole subject completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> there's a creationism joke brewing somewhere right now

<comment><USER8> It actually seems to have a tight tie-in to theistic evolution: Genesis 1-2 was a metaphor for the advent of agriculture.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, do you have a reference for that?

I've always found Genesis to be a beautiful poetic passage though I've never read it as having an alternate meaning.

<comment><USER8> Not really, it's just an idea. But it's at about the right time (6kya) to transition between evolutionary and biblical history. Both are about a transition from living off the land to tilling the soil, and the rise of civilization. If you can figure out how moral responsibility ties in, you have yourself a pretty theory, if not a rock-solid one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe it had something to do with the "6,000-year-old temple with sacrificial altars discovered in Ukraine"?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10753820](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10753820)

<comment><USER6> In the sense that agriculture, as well as triggering the ecological changes discussed in this report also allowed the formation of dense populations capable of building structures like that, yes.</comment></comment>


Benchmark: Java, Python, PHP, C, JavaScript, Swift, Ruby, Perl, Go, Lua, Rust - <AUTHOR> http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org <comment><USER2> Years ago i was naive enough to believe these benchmarks. Now i know these are Potemkin-village level stunts and political maneuvering by language activists and staff of that site. If you really want actual benchmarking you have to do it yourself and read the .asm output for comparison. Another caveat is that some languages are genuinely faster in one hyperoptimized case(even faster than C) but fail horribly when things go more complicated and abstraction creep makes them much slower in most cases.

<comment><USER3> You provided zero evidence for your claim. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but so far you have only made an assertion.

If you think some language is misrepresented in that benchmark, you can submit your own solution.

<comment><USER4> The problem is subjective and thus more difficult to provide evidence for.

I don't think the parent doubts the runtimes or is claiming that the code for his pet language wasn't written properly and therefore the site is a sham. The issue is: what is reasonable code?

Benchmarks invariably become a game of massaging the code to produce the optimal assembly. And that's the problem. The reason that we invented higher level languages was so we could stop thinking about assembly. The point of most higher level languages is not to optimize CPU cycles, but to optimize human brain cycles. If we only cared about speed (and not at all about development time), we would just write all code in assembly.

I am not particularly interested in how fast meticulously fine tuned code in a given language runs. I have no doubt that, given enough time, an excellent programmer can finely craft a block of code to run very fast in any half decent language. And this site is evidence of that.

What I want to know, and what benchmarks never show, is which languages make writing performant code simple, idiomatic, and natural. Which languages give me good performance, without having to really work for it?

This is an amazing site, but it is a stretch to think that it compares languages. It compares programmers and their implementations. The implementations are more like their own art form, like Chess or something.

<comment><USER3> Have you looked at the winning submissions code? Every single one I saw (not all of them) was just a straightforward implementation of the algorithm / solution. I don't see much weirdness.

<comment><USER4> Yes. For example I noticed the typescript one. The implementation is straightforward, yes, but it is just plain javascript. It doesn't need TSC at all. So why call it typescript? If you're going to say it is typescript at least use types, no?

Or the ruby ones. Not much like ruby I have ever seen. It's not particularly difficult to write C code that can be easily called from ruby which is why I guess most ruby programmers wouldn't bother to write code like this in ruby. If you want C, just write C!

I think all the implementations are straightforward as implementations. But few are the most idiomatic way to express the alogorithm in that language.

<comment><USER5> Specifically which "typescript one"? (Currently 15 typescript programs are shown.)

Specifically which "ruby ones"? (Currently 37 programs are shown.)

>> the most idiomatic way <<

One person's idiomatic is another person's idiotic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey, the benchmark game got a new website (at some point in the several years since I looked at it last)! Almost simplistic, but nice to read.

As someone that works predominantly in a language long considered passé (Perl), I always kinda relish seeing that it is still faster than Python and Ruby for many problems. As Python and Ruby have gotten faster, I'd sort of assumed they were both notably and clearly faster than Perl, by now, but that's not the case though the difference is now quite small and probably debatable.

<comment><USER7> Python was never really designed for speed. It was designed for simplicity and clarity of behaviour. The beauty of the age we live in is that we have such a broad array of tools to apply to different problems. Performance is often not the problem that needs solving, but when it is, you've got many options too!

<comment><USER6> I'm not disparaging Python (or Ruby). Merely taking small pleasures where I find them. I work in Perl because of a huge array of existing code in Perl, not because I hate Python or Ruby (I've built stuff in Python and Ruby, too, and like them both).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So PHP is faster on most of those test than python or ruby ? I'm I missing something ? I thought everyone hating PHP ( also) because it was slow.

<comment><USER9> No, PHP is actually really fast. Especially HHVM[1] which is crazy fast.

[1] - [http://hhvm.com](http://hhvm.com)

<comment><USER10> Ever since PHP 7, there's not much difference anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any benchmark that includes a JVM language always makes me look for a disclaimer that they allowed for proper JIT/warming time by running the benchmark a few times in the same VM instance before collecting the numbers. I may have missed it in this article, but I didn't see it.

Yes, startup time is a concern with the JVM, but that's not what it's built for - it's meant for long-runnning repeatable code paths.

<comment><USER12> He doesn't do warmups for JITted languages.

<comment><USER13> ...which means the measurements are meaningless. They will include the time to analyse the hot paths and then compile them.

<comment><USER5> They _will_ include a few tenths of a second.

Note the timings are seconds and tens-of-seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see that the point of this site is supposed to be that a change in implementation (keeping the language itself held constant) greater affect on performance than rewriting in another language.

My problem with this site it makes poor support of that claim. The data is hidden behind loads of links, and none of the data is visualized at all. Even a few simple bar charts, keeping the hierarchy of the site otherwise unchanged would vastly aid comprehension. The points being made would come across much more easily.

This sort of data is the poster child for visualization, yet this site relegates the data to tables of numbers.

<comment><USER5> What on the website tells you _that_ is the point?

>> Even a few simple bar charts <<

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which- programs-...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programs-are- fastest.html)

>> would vastly aid comprehension. <<

Is it possible that you are just wrong?

Is it possible that simple bar charts do not aid comprehension but encourage thoughtless instant conclusions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Go vs JavaScript lineup is quite stunning. Go destroys Node.js in memory usage and performance on every test except regex-redux (edge case?).

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=go&lang2=node)

<comment><USER15> > The Go vs JavaScript lineup is quite stunning. Go destroys Node.js in memory > usage and performance on every test except regex-redux (edge case?).

Why would it be stunning that a programming language compiled to assembler can beat a broken-by-design interpreted language which doesn't even have integers or arrays? The stunning part is that the people behind node.js have managed to get that much performance.

<comment><USER12> That's not a very fair or accurate description. JavaScript implementations use a JIT which is different than what people usually mean by interpreted. Types can be inferred without explicit type declarations. JavaScript has Array and integer semantics can also be inferred.

<comment><USER16> Also JS has received many times the investment of Go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ruby's fastest time for pidigits was 3.14, haha.

</comment><comment><USER18> With this new revision this great benchmark got less useful.

Why can't I compare:

      Lua vs LuaGIT

      PHP5 vs PHP7 vs HHVM vs Hack

      Perl5 vs Perl6

      GNU GCC vs Intel C vs CLANG

This new rule "one implementation per language" is so stupid!!!

@debian: change it back

<comment><USER5> _" If you're interested in something not shown on the benchmarks game website then please take the program source code and the measurement scripts and publish your own measurements."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anybody know why Go binary-trees is so much slower than Java's?

<comment><USER20> Binary-trees is allocation bottlenecked, and Java has bump pointer allocation where Go has slow allocation. The root cause being that Go's GC is non-moving so it can't do bump pointer allocation without fragmentation, so it has to do a whole bunch of computation to find a place for each node.

<comment><USER19> I see, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, I expected Erlang to score better, considering the claims of Elixir community how fast it is... compared to Ruby. OTOH maybe that tells more about Ruby.

<comment><USER22> Erlang makes no claims about being fast in these sorts of tests. They aren't using what it was designed to do.

Also some languages like, Ruby, do really well on some of these tests because the C-code underneath has been written well (example regexes are just as fast under ruby as they are anywhere else because the underlying C-library kicks ass though I forget the name of it).

<comment><USER23> You're probably thinking of PCRE, although Ruby actually uses Onigmo: [https://github.com/k-takata/Onigmo](https://github.com/k-takata/Onigmo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> where's D-lang? it would be interesting to compare D with C, C++, and Rust

<comment><USER25> Good luck on seeing D on that site. There seems to be a active war between the sites maintainer and D. There used to be D benchmarks on the old site and people tries to release new code to the site, but for some reason the current maintainer has a issue with D.

And he thinks its no unfair that D is not resented when a lot of people look at his site and think: "If your not here as a language, then the language must be bad".

Good luck on changing his mindset because i have seen topics going back years regarding D not being there.

If you want a more impartial benchmark set:

[https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks](https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks)

And where is D on those tests ;)

<comment><USER5> > There seems to be a active war between the sites maintainer and D.

No.

> There used to be D benchmarks on the old site

Back in early 2008.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080730204710/http://shootout.al...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080730204710/http://shootout.alioth.debian.org:80/gp4/)

Look how many other language implementations were also shown back then and have not been shown since.

> … for some reason the current maintainer has a issue with D

No.

> Good luck on changing his mindset…

Make the measurements you want to see and publish them for everyone else to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I readed python was slow, but i had no idea it was relativly That slow!

</comment><comment><USER27> they should have included luajit it's almost a dropin replacement for most projects

<comment><USER28> It was included in the past [0]. It was removed to simplify the process and due to a "one implementation per language" rule.

[0]: [http://i.imgur.com/0xxOfVm.png](http://i.imgur.com/0xxOfVm.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> No Scala anymore?

<comment><USER5> No success getting programs updated for newer versions -- so, no Scala anymore, done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> No Lisp? :-(

<comment><USER31> They used to have Lisp & Clojure. No idea why it's been removed. Some is still accessible:

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/lisp.html](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/lisp.html)

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/clojure.html](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/clojure.html)

<comment><USER5> >> No idea why it's been removed. <<

Lisp hasn't been removed.

(Clojure has. So's Scala.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If you're a competent programmer, one should be able to make any _real-world_ task take about the same time in any two languages.

Therefore, any large-margin differences are benchmarking the programmer not the technology.

<comment><USER33> > _one should be able to make any real-world task take about the same time in > any two languages._

I don't think that's a practical claim. Interpreted or JIT compiled languages depend on the interpreter or VM. JavaScript has become much faster over time as JavaScript VMs have improved, independent of the details of any particular JavaScript program. Ruby has become faster over time for the same reason. I've seen Ruby programs I've written speed up significantly without any significant code changes when I moved from an older to a newer version of Ruby.</comment></comment>


As packages get hidden in pkg.go.dev, Go communit aim to keep godoc.org alive - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/ <comment><USER2> Already posted here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22241357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22241357)</comment>


Intro to Computer Science and Programming (no experience required) - <AUTHOR> http://academicearth.org/courses/introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming <comment><USER2> If you're going to work your way through this, it's probably better to go to the MIT site for the class. In addition to the lecture videos, it has the problem sets and a list of readings.

[http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and- Compute...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer- Science/6-00Fall-2008/CourseHome/index.htm)

<comment><USER3> Pretty soon you'll be able to find all of these in an easy to work through sequence, so that you won't have to track PDFs, the course calender, video etc. Instead, it'll be like Lesson 1 - step 1: video, step 2: transcript, step 3: discussion board (much like HN where best responses get voted up/karma points etc.); step 4: problems, step 5: solutions, step 6: discussion board, step 7: test (to assess knowledge) etc. We actually have over 120 courses built out on NIXTY now and probably 20-30 of those are EE/CS courses.

I've actually been trying to figure out how to bring up the idea of a p2p CS university/program. Kind of like a HN University. The goal would be for people to be able to easily take courses and interact w/others around all things CS.

One of the beautiful things about computer science is it seems less and less dependent upon degrees as predictors of success. We believe that this is where most fields will go in the future. People pointing to references from trusted others, work examples etc. will prove to be better predictors than degrees. Consequently, we are investing a fair amount towards using the CS curriculum as a type of pilot project.

If you are passionate about this kind of thing and want to help out, shoot me an email at glen at nixty dot com. (p.s. really trying not to make this sound like an infomercial for NIXTY. just trying to be clear about what we are doing and our plans. thanks).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would also suggest: <http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs1120/>

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://udemy.com/> actually has a lot more courses than academic earth does.

<comment><USER3> Great resource.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a wonderful world we live in that this sort of stuff is free.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this the new SICP?

<comment><USER8> no, this is a course that's mostly for non-CS majors who want to learn some programming for their research (e.g., computational biologists, economists, physicists).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> academicearth.org. Really nice resource. Bookmarked.</comment>


Samsung teases a new Windows 8 notebook with brushed metal design  - <AUTHOR> http://www.the4cast.com/news/samsung-teases-a-new-windows-8-notebook-with-brushed-metal-design-and-rounded-edges/ <comment><USER2> Spammy rewrite and spam submission of an article about a youtube video:

<http://youtu.be/sk8hNsdwbFM></comment>


Show HN: Use encrypted passwords in shell scripts signed with your SSH key - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ahnick/encpass.sh <comment><USER2> I just use pass[0] from the command line.

pass show whatever-key | password-hungry-command -

[0] - [https://www.passwordstore.org/](https://www.passwordstore.org/)

<comment><USER3> I use pass in combination with direnv[0] to load secrets into project directories as environment variables.

[0] - [https://direnv.net](https://direnv.net)

<comment><USER2> I use a shell.nix[0] file for this.

That way I can install dependencies and all that too as well as vars and aliases.

[0] - [https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#sec-nix- shell](https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#sec-nix-shell)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I did something similar where you could send GitHubers encrypted messages only they could decrypt via their SSH public key that GitHub makes available: [https://github.com/rockymadden/github- crypt](https://github.com/rockymadden/github-crypt)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a cool idea. It would be neat to have some way of sending that to the githubber builtin to the tool. Maybe send an email to the githubber if they have an email published or maybe just post it to a gist that then you can send them the link to?

<comment><USER4> I love that idea! I think you could use the anonymous gist API. Have the tool output to stdout/pbcopy the gist URL that was created upon encrypt and similarly have it accept a gist URL to decrypt. Nothing to send on either side beyond the URL.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately creation of automated gists via the API is soon to be deprecated.

[https://github.com/blog/2503-deprecation-notice-removing- ano...](https://github.com/blog/2503-deprecation-notice-removing-anonymous- gist-creation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's like a reverse gpg-agent. But I trust gpg to provide SSH keys more than random script to use SSH keys to provide encryption.

A random article with explanation: [https://ryanlue.com/posts/2017-06-29-gpg- for-ssh-auth](https://ryanlue.com/posts/2017-06-29-gpg-for-ssh-auth)

Edit: Yeah, the quoting is missing. The password with backslashes, spaces or other interesting bits will fail.

<comment><USER7> I understand the point you are trying to make, but a RSA key is a RSA key.

The only benefit of gpg here is for things longer than a password. The script is encrypting the password directly with the RSA key. The performance and security will be weaker on things much longer than a password.

<comment><USER8> > I understand the point you are trying to make, but a RSA key is a RSA key.

Not really. [http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs310/lectures/26_rsa_slides_handou...](http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs310/lectures/26_rsa_slides_handouts.pdf)

[https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/papers/RSA- survey.pdf](https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/papers/RSA-survey.pdf)

Some of the vulnerable systems that have been attacked this way basically were built on the premise than an RSA key is an RSA key. But an RSA implementation that's secure for one purpose might not be secure for another purpose, for example with malleability.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleability_%28cryptography%2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleability_%28cryptography%29#Example_malleable_cryptosystems)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What problem does this solve?

I'm not sure I understand why you would re-use your default ssh public key rather than just generate a dedicated rsa key. Because this uses OpenSSL it won't work with an ssh keyring for passphrase or hardware token management, I'm not sure I understand what using a key in ~/.ssh brings to the table.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since, by default ssh private and public keys get stored in the .ssh folder under the user's home folder, then it is convenient to leverage the already existing keys rather than having to generate new keys. (Of course you can also use different keys as well if you would like) You just include the script in your existing scripts you have and it works.

This is meant to be a simple solution to needing to store your password in plaintext within a shell script. For example, you might have shell scripts that you create for quick duties like downloading or uploading some asset from a server. Typically sysadmins or developers might just store this in plaintext. The problem is later on they may forget that they stored it in plaintext and the script gets passed around and now you have credentials leaking all over the place. Also, works well for crowded environments where shoulder surfers might be present

<comment><USER9> Leveraging that existing key is a downright _anti_ -feature though. You should try to minimize the scope controlled by any given key.

You already lean heavily on OpenSSL, so it doesn't make a lot of sense why you wouldn't just generate a dedicated key with a `openssl genrsa -out .spiffytool/private.pem`

<comment><USER10> I couldn't agree more. I don't even use the default ssh key, I have separate keys for separate servers. Even separate keys for separate github repos.

<comment><USER11> > Even separate keys for separate github repos

How does that work? You have no keys in your account itself and use Deploy keys with write access?

<comment><USER10> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've made a very similar thing: [https://www.remotepassword.com](https://www.remotepassword.com)

Works on both Windows and Linux but the passwords are stored online (GPG encrypted). The main idea was to be able to revoke a password if a machine has been compromised.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting idea. Kind of a simpler HashiCorp Vault service offered as a SaaS. I guess you would also be competing somewhat with any cloud provider that offers secrets management, but they are probably going to be more expensive and not as focused on this use case. The closest thing I could find to this is [https://secrethub.io/](https://secrethub.io/), but looks like they are in private beta still.

The only downside I can really see here is clients are dependent on remotepassword.com being secure. (which is inherent in any SaaS model) For example, if remotepassword.com was compromised then all passwords could be deleted rendering downstream scripts dependent on those secrets temporarily inoperable and of course someone could start logging the password inputs on the website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This tool looks really easy to use. So easy that it's likely to be used by people who aren't very security-savvy. Of course it would be overkill to try to educate everybody about everything, but I think it would be prudent for the README to mention the risk of passwords showing up in ps output.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you provide an example of this? How would the password show up in ps output?

<comment><USER14> . ./encpass.sh

password=$(get_password)

watch whatever.sh --pass=$password & # I'm using encpass.sh - security is magic pixie dust, therefore password is secured!

ps f # oh look, there's "watch whatever.sh --pass=hunter2"

<comment><AUTHOR> I see, so basically if you invoke another process from within the script you are using the decrypted password AND you pass the decrypted password to that process, then it would be visible to ps. That makes sense as you are passing the decrypted password as an argument to the other process. This is similar to doing something like...

echo "password" | whatever.sh

To prevent this from happening the other process should just source encpass.sh directly. I think it is probably worth mentioning this in the README as I could see someone doing that inadvertently. Thanks for the example.

<comment><USER14> Echo is a builtin; you won't see _that_ in the process list (not sure this method doesn't have a different weakness).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's true. It would show up in your command history though. Even though it's probably not readable by anyone else except root, it's still probably not a good idea to have it persisted to disk.

<comment><USER14> If it's inside a script, it won't go into command history, either.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I was just giving an example of passing it into a script. Similarly, if encpass.sh is included in whatever.sh script the password won't show up in ps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You may want to use "openssl passwd -table" for reading password.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there a security benefit to using this?

<comment><USER15> No. It's just convenient, because it takes care of confirmation, prompts, and disabling echo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, thanks for the recommendation. It would certainly be simpler to maintain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use secret-tool in shell scripts and I open my keyring on login.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is secret-tool a linux only program? Where is the source for it maintained? (I was having trouble finding it) Do you use this as your main password manager too? Any thoughts on how this compares to pass?

<comment><AUTHOR> In response to myself, it looks like this is a gnome project and the source can be found here -> [https://git.gnome.org/browse/libsecret/tree/tool](https://git.gnome.org/browse/libsecret/tree/tool). So I guess it can be used anywhere that gnome is supported.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Finding dirty XTC with machine learning - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=be.harmreduction.pillscanner <comment><AUTHOR> I created a reverse image search for a harm reduction group as a side project. Many people don't test their MDMA, this at least makes it easier to search for past lab results. It's not a replacement for a chemical test.

It was my first project getting into machine learning.

It's made with 2 models, a Retinanet model for localization and a triplet loss model for generating image embeddings.

Those are then compared in an Annoy database and voila.

Feedback is appreciated. Thanks</comment>


Silicon Valley Roused By Secession Call - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/us/silicon-valley-roused-by-secession-call.html

<comment><USER2> I can't believe this isn't satire. To me it exemplifies the exponentially growing hubris emanating from Silicon Valley -- namely, that the products being built are more significant than the people who use them. Saying that what's been built so far could replace the rest of society without a problem is this logic taken to its absurd extreme.

Take, for example, passages like "Uber and Airbnb challenge the regulatory state personified by Washington" \-- which I guess is intended to imply that the state is personified best by its role in regulating taxis and hotels? As if Silicon Valley has a workable alternative to infrastructure, energy, the justice system, police, hospitals, primary education, and the rest of the $4 tr federal budget.

I laughed the most at "The Quantified Self movement helps people self-measure and opt out of the health care system." Yes, because measuring your heart rate while waiting in line at Peet's does wonders for people with chronic illnesses.

And, of course, Srinivasan's suggestion that people who sneer at his "frontier" must also "hate technology". No, I just hate when people assume it will inevitably solve all problems. If society at large begins to "backlash" to Silicon Valley, it's for that very reason.

</comment><comment><USER3> What would the constitution look like?

</comment><comment><USER4> The Vietnam war was managed by technocrats - look how well that turned out.

Libertarian ideals are a step removed from anarchy, and all fine in theory - but extremely naive because as one gets older, you (hopefully) begin to understand the flawed nature of humanity better. I can see how getting older makes people more conservative, or at least susceptible to conservative thinking - I on the other hand am becoming more of a anarchic Marxist. Not because such ideologies are achievable in the real world, but because the utility of their theory sheds light on the bad side of capitalism and Western society that gets swept under the carpet (cue Noam Chomsky soundbite...) I just wish "conservatives" would live up to their lofty ever so repeated ideals, instead of being the utter hypocrites they are (along with the liberal hypocrites)

To create a anarcho-socialist Marxist paradise, or even a libertarian one, the members of the community would have to be spiritually advanced enough such that non-parts of the community (i.e. government and regulations, etc) wouldn't be needed to step in to maintain balance - the system (community of people) would be self-regulating. Libertarians like to think they'd be self- regulating, but how many of them slavishly bow to the God (invisible hand) of the market? The market won't regulate human emotions, like greed and fear - the market is very easily manipulated by the sociopathic as the last few years have shown. Libertarianism could not have done jack to correct what they have wrought lately. Perhaps society is too big now - a small libertarian community might be achievable, but humanity is too interconnected now.

I recently read some stuff on behavioral economics - it looks like economists are wising up and realizing most non-economists are not sociopaths, unlike them. So a proper understanding of economics requires an understanding of human psychology and how it, and especially psychopathology, are primary factors in economic systems. I just spent the last 4 years of my life being manipulated by a bona fide sociopath, who manipulated me into building him a company, then forced me out just as money actually started rolling in... so take that into account when evaluating my current stance.

It is said engineers don't really begin to understand that non-engineers don't think like engineers until their 30s - I can certainly attest to that. Or maybe I'm just more autistic or whatnot. But after I dropped acid for the first time I started to grok how working as a US DoD defense contractor was a waste of time. If all the engineers working for the industrial-military complex said "fuck you", what would happen? You think politicians have any useful skills? The problem with engineers is that we are so enamored of thinking up and building stuff, that asking ourselves "why are the larger, more nebulous consequences of this? How are the people in charge going to profit from this?" gets lost sometimes - IT is addictive in some sense, or at least that mode of thinking.

So to wrap up this essay, which didn't start out as one (I am just winging it), speeches like the one mentioned in the article are fine as exhortations to try and improve society, but to opt out entirely is not going to work unless that new society that is created figures out how to deal with the dark side of humanity - the greed, the sociopaths, and the garden variety drama that goes on between people (even engineers). To do that is going to require an understanding of empathy, and a better understanding of humankind (in a spiritual sense) that I wouldn't expect the average 20 something person in IT to grasp. Right now regulation of society is supposed to be the purpose of government, but it is now obvious the hypocrisy, inefficiency, and stupidity is too much to ignore anymore. But you can't get rid of government until you solve the problems it is supposed to regulate. Perhaps governments, or other such things like feudalism, are instead an emergent property of a system? An emergent property based on factors like the psychological relationship between individuals, which is defined by social customs and other anthropological like things?

To ask one's self "who is John Galt?" is a good thing, but you also have to remember Galt was creating a community and that relationships between people shouldn't be based on economics. It always seems to get lost in the noise that one aspect of John Galt's society was that it would be populated by people with integrity, not the rent seeking parasites living off of income from capital gains. You can't live with integrity if you are primarily concerned with maximizing your economic status, because that, in theory, requires you to act like a sociopath.

The first step I would propose instead would be to figure out how to ensure manipulative authoritarians are not elected to high office and how to weed out the sociopathic from high finance (hell, all of society entirely). Once that is accomplished, we'll be farther along towards the ideals the "Average" person (or guilt ridden Western white middle class liberal, if you prefer) likes to espouse.</comment>


DVD player found in Tesla car in May crash: Florida officials - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-autopilot-dvd-idUSKCN0ZH5BW <comment><USER2> This highlights Google's stance in driver assistance vs driver replacement. They specifically noted in their first test cards that they had employees use, which were modified regular street cars, that the people quickly treated them as completely autonomous even when they were warned not to. For example, rooting around in the back-seat looking for a charger to the laptop they had with them while the car drove itself.

Google decided that if people were going to treat it that way, they needed to design it that way, and now their autonomous cards don't have steering wheels, just a big button to tell the car to try to safely pull off the road and stop. You'll necessarily be a bit more stringent in your tests and capabilities if you opt for an approach that buts all the responsibility on what you design, and not the passenger.

I agree with this, so I've been somewhat leery of Tesla's auto-pilot feature. While sad, I can't say I'm entirely surprised by the accident. Our own nature makes us very unreliable for regular driving and assisted driving in many of the same ways. Removing people from the active driving process is ultimately the better solution, but it takes time to get it right.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tesla needs to take responsibility for negligently releasing a feature they knew was going to be abused. Its shocking to me how they still have this feature enabled when it has proven to kill.

I hope they are punished within the full extent of the law. A car is not a web application that can be pushed updates at the whim of the developer. They've known about the limitations of the feature, in that its sensors can't even approximate the complete bounding box of the car, do not have sufficient resolution and are thus limited by hardware, not software. It's not "beta", it is alpha quality and should never be in the hands of customers in uncontrolled situations let alone on the open road.

We are all subjected to risk with this feature, regardless if we have agreed to it or not. It's not just the owner of the Tesla who is in danger but anyone else on the road as well.

I personally have witnessed Tesla drivers doing their makeup, eating, and even sleeping in their car on my commute on 101S and 280S in the morning. Contrast that to those who drive recklessly, weaving in and out of traffic. For some reason, these cars seem to attract a certain kind of person who thinks they are above the law.

At the minimum, Tesla drivers should be required to carry high risk insurance on their vehicles. Its only a matter of time before it kills or seriously injures someone other than the driver.

<comment><USER2> > Tesla needs to take responsibility for negligently releasing a feature they > knew was going to be abused.

I can release a car without any autonomous features, should I take responsibility for the people that I know will eventually use it in an inappropriate manner, such as while intoxicated, sleep deprived, on medication, or just without paying attention?

> Its shocking to me how they still have this feature enabled when it has > proven to kill.

Driving cars has proven to kill, even when you follow all the directions correctly. Some things can't be avoided.

Nothing about this is any different than cruise control. In both cases you are supposed to still be paying attention and take over in the case of situations the assist feature can't handle. Cruise control just handles less.

This will be a problem until we make the cars completely autonomous, with enough safety assurance. Until then, if we don't want to allow assistance features this advanced, we need to take legal action not against Tesla, but to create laws that are very explicit in what is and is not allowed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The link points to an older article now, for some reason.

Link moved to here: [http://www.reuters.com/article/tesla-autopilot-dvd- idUSL1N19...](http://www.reuters.com/article/tesla-autopilot-dvd- idUSL1N19N19C)</comment>


Replacing the Office Chair with an Exercise Ball - <AUTHOR> http://baron.vc/replacing-the-office-chair-with-an-exercise-ball/ <comment><USER3> I have used an exercise ball instead of a chair for the past year or so and really like it. I tend to have a lot of nervous energy, and being able to bounce on the ball while still seated at my desk help a lot, without having to get up, walk around, and getting too distracted from what I am doing. A couple of caveats, though: 1) You really do look pretty silly, especially if you bounce 2) Some people develop lower back problems when using a ball for long periods; be careful! 3) Office mates always seem to like stealing it and kicking it down the hallway (which is actually a lot of fun, but also annoying) and 3) If you had beans for dinner, beware, the ball tends to amplify sounds from down there :)

<comment><USER4> I've also used exercise balls for a couple years now -- at home, and at the former office. You'll find that your core muscles (abdominal, in particular) tone up significantly, with almost no apparent effort. The inherent instability of sitting on what's essentially a balloon benefits more than just your posture. All those small adjustments you unconsciously make to maintain balance work muscles that you don't often get to work otherwise, and with a wider range of motion than pretty much all the traditional exercises that target those muscles offer, too. It's some of the best "passive exercise" available.

As for the concerns about being made fun of or judged or whatever, mentioned several places in this discussion, someone's judging you says more about them than it does you.

And, yes, they do tend to have a resonant effect on certain reverberative sounds...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jim: "And how much is that?" Dwight: "It's only 25 bucks" Jim: "ooookay."

[http://www.tbs.com/video/index/#/all-video/shows/the- office/...](http://www.tbs.com/video/index/#/all-video/shows/the- office/158347)

</comment><comment><USER6> I was at a startup from Jan-July '06 and we had several kicking around. I switched to the ball there at the startup and learned to love it. Shortly after, I replaced my home computer chair with a ball as well.

Like anything, they can be misused, and it's a matter of personal preference. I also have a laptop that doesn't fit very well on my computer desk, so when I'm on it, I'm usually lounging in a recliner or on the sofa at home.

The thing I love most about the ball is that I can get up, roll it back a bit, sit back down on it, then do a full-body arched-back stretch, then roll back up onto the ball, scoot it up to the desk, and keep working. I find myself doing that at least once an hour, and it always brings a boost. At my office (no balls allowed... heh) I end up having to run up and down a flight of stairs or do something else to get that boost. It takes a lot less time with an exercise ball, and I can keep focused.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can highly recommend a standing-desk arrangement, at least when compared to a _very_ cheap office chair.

You need two things to keep with it for more than a few days: a good anti- fatigue surface to stand on, and a taller-than-average chair so that you can alternate sitting and standing.

<comment><USER8> what makes a surface anti-fatigue?

<comment><USER7> [http://housewares.about.com/od/kitchenwareaccessories/bb/ant...](http://housewares.about.com/od/kitchenwareaccessories/bb/antifatiguemats.htm)

<comment><USER9> [http://www.amazon.com/Big-Time-Toys- Llc-10300-B/dp/B00007BKU...](http://www.amazon.com/Big-Time-Toys- Llc-10300-B/dp/B00007BKUN/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and- games&qid=1257158246&sr=1-1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've found that the biggest problem with using an exercise ball is that everyone asks you why you are sitting on an exercise ball. That and it is fun to kick.

<comment><USER11> Yes, it's just not worth it to be of "those" people. Whatever benefits it gets, its just hard to take someone seriously when their sitting on a giant inflatable fucking ball.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> i had an attny buddy that wanted to use an exercise ball instead of an office chair. ultimately he got made fun of by so many people that he ended up not doing it. i can see startup people using it, but very few will do so in a more professional office setting.

however, i do like the idea of alternative desk arrangements though. i've seen several people with a desk that can be lifted up so that you can stand and work when you want. then there's the treadmill desks which are pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER13> An exercise ball is tough because it demands dynamic balance. You really work out your abs. You can't slouch because you'll fall off. I tried it for a couple months and gave it up. If you are seriously considering using an exercise ball, get a puncture-resistant one from a company like Fitter First (that guarantees against explosive decompression).

<comment><USER14> _guarantees against explosive decompression_

I will forever associate exercise-ball chairs with the hilarious moment when, in the middle of one of Leo Laporte's podcasts, there was this BANG sound off- mic and he went off the air for a few seconds. Then we heard his voice, a bit distant, as he explained that he was picking himself up off the floor because his chair had just exploded.

Of course, if you land wrong after such an incident it won't be quite so funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> An exercise ball is a good idea but I would not count on using one as a permanent replacement. My ideal situation would be an alternation between an office chair, like an aeron, and a stable, four-legged cushioned chair (the kind that is usually on the other side of the desk in an office).

At home, I switch between an office chair and a piano bench. You don't need a backless chair to sit upright and not slouch. However, an unstable surface (like a chair with rollers, or an exercise ball) can be distracting and requires more energy to maintain an upright posture.

So: a bench or a stable chair for posture, and an aeron or similar when your back gets tired. An exercise ball to mix it up would be cool too.

</comment><comment><USER16> I tried sitting on a ball at home some time ago, but after a couple of hours on it, my back is on fire. It did not go away after about a week of trying, so I gave up.

<comment><USER17> This concern and the one about developing back problems are both great reasons to ease into using an exercise/yoga/stability ball as your primary chair. When people ask me about it, I recommend they start out with 20-30 minutes and slowly work their way up from there.

It's also important to get a ball of the right size (they typically are available in 10cm increments, with 55-75cm being the more common sizes). Look for charts online for sizing info, and then make sure it is inflated enough that when you're sitting on it the angle of your knees is 90 degrees.

While this change has helped my posture, increased my core strength and more, I think my next change is going to be for a treadmill desk so that I can increase the number of calories I burn throughout the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought the general recommendation is to use such "exercise chairs" only for short periods of time, not all the time. I also used to have one and gave it up.

</comment><comment><USER19> I tried a ball but found the lack of air circulation made the backs of my legs sweat uncomfortably. Went back to my Steeelcase Leap. It's not mesh like the Aeron, but the cushion was a lot better than sitting directly on rubber all day.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to know the ages of the people commenting that they loved / hated it.

<comment><USER21> I'm 27 and used one at home for a long time. I really loved it and the only reason I stopped was that I got a hole in it. In general, it's not as comfortable as an Aeron, but it has a pretty high comfort to cost ratio.

That being said, since it was at home I was never on it as long as I would have been at work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> An academic at my university has a ball in his office he goes to sit on when he has something to think about. I think I'd prefer this to sitting on the ball at a computer - I just can't imagine taking myself seriously if I did that.

<comment><USER23> You're a _human_. Everything you do is idiosyncratic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Our office, too, went through the Ball phase a couple of years ago. 80% of the office had one. In the end though not a single person stuck with it and the office was ball-free in less than a year.

Personally I found that I slouched MORE when using the ball because I could no longer lean back against a backrest. So when I got tired towards the end of the day I'd lean on the table instead. Result: Upper back pain. The other thing that annoyed me was being unable to shift my legs around at all - <USER2> BOTH have to be flat on the floor in front of you. No crossing one leg or changing the angle of you knee joints or anything like that.

<comment><USER25> I tried this at home and had similar results. For the first week I thought, "hey, this is great!" Then one day I was particularly tired and could barely stay on the thing. My upper back actually started spasming from the strain. I kept the ball but don't use it as a chair any more, though it's still fun to roll around on sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's all about programming in bed, while lying down.

<comment><USER27> I have never been able to achieve this. Where do you place your laptop? It's most comfortable for me when my laptop is on my stomach and my back is propped up but even then my neck is strained. How have you been able to make this position work?

<comment><USER28> You can make laptop stands for the bed like this from wood <http://bedzine.com/blog/bed-furniture/laptop-stand-for-bed/> buy them online [http://www.badbacks.com.au/shop/product/1897/223/laptop- laid...](http://www.badbacks.com.au/shop/product/1897/223/laptop- laidback-v3-lightweight-portable-laptop-table) , or even make an experimental one from cardboard [http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/05/build-a-sturdy- cardboar...](http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/05/build-a-sturdy-cardboard- laptop-stand/)</comment></comment></comment>


Colliding neutron stars falsify some theories of gravity - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/colliding-neutron-stars-decapitate-zombie-theory-of-gravity/ <comment><USER4> There were indirect proofs that the speed of gravity is close to the speed of light since at least 1980-es, based on the 1974 discovery of a pulsar in the binary system (1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for Hulse and Taylor) and the measurements and analysis of that data:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/04/28/why-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/04/28/why- does-gravity-move-at-the-speed-of-light)

"we have constrained the speed of gravity to be equal to the speed of light with a measurement error of only 0.2%!"

But this one now is the first direct and so precise measurement that there is no more wiggle room for those who needed it for their hypotheses.

Written in 2016 in the article I've linked:

"The best results, at the present time, tell us that the speed of gravity is between 2.993 × 10^8 and 3.003 × 10^8 meters per second, which is an amazing confirmation of General Relativity and a terrible difficulty for alternative theories of gravity that don't reduce to General Relativity!"

Now in 2017 also confirmed by the direct observation. The Einstein's General Relativity (1915) is more than 100 years old.

Those who designed all the detectors for the gravitational waves were sure decades ago. There were already enough consensus even then that allowed that long work, after all, it's all based on the 1915 theory confirmed in many different ways since. But it's so nice that now we have the real direct measurements of the gravitational waves and the EM signals together. It's really something comparable to the first use of the telescope 400 years ago.

<comment><USER5> As as result of the recent detection gravity is now known to update at the speed of light to within ~0.0000000000000001%, if I'm not mistaken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found the writing in this article cutesy and incomprehensible, but the subject matter sounds very interesting. Are there any more lucidly written descriptions of this work? The actual paper is hard to understand.

<comment><USER7> Yup. [http://backreaction.blogspot.in/2017/10/new-gravitational- wa...](http://backreaction.blogspot.in/2017/10/new-gravitational-wave- detection-with.html)

<comment><USER8> This is why I love HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is also a recent hypothesis that doesn't require anything 'dark'

> It is shown that reduction of the gravitational mass of the system due to > emitting gravitational waves leads to a repulsive gravitational force that > diminishes with time but never disappears. This repulsive force may be > related to the observed expansion of the Universe.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01541](https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01541)

Published in MNRAS [https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw1517](https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw1517)

In their other work they try to explain the EM-drive as a crude detector of high-frequency (GHz range) gravitational wave background.

<comment><USER10> Sounds kooky. But... the Royal Astronomical Society is publishing it?

<comment><USER9> The math in the original article is more or less solid, no errors were found since publication in 2016.

The EM-drive idea is an attempt at an experiment to prove/disprove that the math has any relation to the reality.

edit: inventing undetectable dark this or dark that sounds way more kookier than this.

<comment><USER4> From the 1608.01541 (2016) paper you linked:

"We hope that our theoretical prediction about _decreasing acceleration_ of the Universe can be verified by observations."

But the observations actually see the opposite, the _increasing acceleration_ , verified enough that five years before that paper, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was for that discovery of the increasing acceleration, based on the measurements of Ia supernovae:

[https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/20...](https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2011/press.html)

"What will be the final destiny of the Universe? Probably it will end in ice, if we are to believe this year's Nobel Laureates in Physics. They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Laureates themselves."

<comment><USER9> I'm not a scientist. I can only post links and say "let's see, this might have some merit".

The authors (or at least N. Gorkavyi) recently (12th Sep) announced a new paper (literally "it's in print" whatever that means) that as far as I understand tackles the question.

A crude translation of the announcement:

> In the second article, (in print) we show that the reverse process - <USER2> > of the black holes by consumption of high-frequency gravitational waves - <USER3> > the cause of the currently observed increasing acceleration of the expansion > of the Universe. We have even got the correct value of the cosmological > constant, solving the problem which is about a hundred years old.

Might be the hope that you quoted was about surviving long enough to witness the acceleration to cease increasing.

edit: spelling

<comment><USER4> Looking at who cited the paper you gave, I've found only one, and there is actually one rebuttal of the paper that cited the former:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.00799](https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.00799)

The authors of the rebuttal of that paper write:

"Since those early years, a discussion took place on the different geodesics that can be written using local or non-local coordinates. Large accounts were published on this debate [10, 12–14].

Two sort of claims are recurring. _Ignoring previous literature, there is a long list of scholars who pretend having discovered repulsion._ They are listed in [10, 12–14]. The other concerns the attribution of physical consequences in the local environment of the falling body. For dismantling the latter claim, we follow the analysis by Cavalleri and Spinelli [15, 16]."

"It is a coordinate effect appearing to an observer at a remote distance from the black hole and when coordinate time is employed. Repulsion has no bearing and relation to the local physics of the black hole, and moreover it cannot be held responsible for accelerating outgoing particles. Thereby, the energy boost of cosmic rays cannot be produced by repulsion."

The rebutted paper doesn't have the same topic as the one you cite, so it doesn't have to mean too much or anything. But it hints about the way the "repulsion" claims can be problematic:

"The main shortcoming of [17] is the assumption that repulsion, type i), is a physical effect and not just a coordinate effect. In other words, repulsion is only present when coordinate time is adopted and cannot explain phenomena local to the source, and ruled by proper time."

However the lack of other responses to the paper you cite is so big at the moment that I don't expect much of it. Is there any response to the paper you cite, by any scientist, that you are aware of?

But I see that the guy is productive, and produced dubious papers before, so much that he doesn't list them himself but that could be found:

[http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005AAS...206.4904G](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005AAS...206.4904G)

The Pioneer anomaly is currently considered solved,

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

and definitely not the way he attempted to do, just like now he mentions then "a total energy of relic high-frequency gravitational radiation in our Universe" etc.

So I'm not holding my breath for his next paper.

Edit: thanks for the link to his Russian blog. It seems even weirder than I could imagine, I haven't tried Google translate, but just looking, it appears that in one post he first writes about the EM drive stuff and only then he mentions that he apparently solved all the cosmological problems? Wow, he has his priorities. A typical troll, the way I see him.

<comment><USER9> NASA ADS (link is ugly and is at the arxiv page) lists three citations.

Of those, 1608.02882 (and also 1608.07136v1 which is not listed there) are a straight attempt at rebuttal, by the same author, the other two I didn't read yet.

As far as I understand, which is not much, that attempt was found not well founded.

At this point I can only suggest somehow searching for discussions that appeared back then in 2016. I don't think there was any formal (as in a published article) rebuttal of this rebuttal, only a summary in Gorkavyi's blog, which is in Russian and too complex for me to translate[1]

I'd wait for more papers from the original authors, in the hope that they would generate more discussion. One has to take the academia's inertia into account - someone who wrote a couple of dozen papers on dark stuff is understandably reluctant to even mention and thus acknowledge a competing hypothesis.

1\. [https://don-beaver.livejournal.com/176937.html](https://don- beaver.livejournal.com/176937.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "If the Universe were your local neighborhood, dark matter is the family that communicates with everyone, even other family members, only by changing the name of their WiFi network."

Ha! There are a couple of other gems in the article. Entertaining and educational.

<comment><USER12> That's actually pretty horrible. Gotta be honest.

HN has enough people who could design a protocol and hardware to do exactly that with wifi. HN can't adequately explain dark matter, except to say it is a placeholder and to define how we observe the effect. Anything more than that is conjecture and anyone who says otherwise is a dirty rotten liar.

Really.

I hate the name Dark Matter. It's a horrible name.

But, someone here understands electromagnetism well enough, pulse signaling, electronics, binary, spectrums, radio, whatever. They could build some sort of mesh network to do exactly that. They could probably build it with COTS and do it for pretty cheap - and write you a damned good paper.

Don't have a damned clue what Dark Matter really is. Nope.

Edit: Hell, now that I think about it, someone here would probably set that up on like their ham radio stuff at 600 baud just for fun and make it all operate out of terminal.

That's a compliment, really. There'd be a Show HN and someone would tell them it had an Emacs shortcut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >The light and the gravitational waves travel along the direct line of sight to us, curling around the gravity wells of intervening galaxies along the way. As a result, the initial burst of light and gravitational waves hid a little gem: the time difference between the arrival of the gravitational waves and the light. All 1.7 seconds of it.

I'm not clear on this part. Was the light slower by 1.7 seconds because it interacted with intervening matter?

<comment><USER4> At the moment, the researches don't believe that the light was slower, but that it took that much time for the electromagnetic "flash" to be produced, compared to some specific point in the signal observed by the gravitational waves detectors. The later signal is not a point-like but a long signal which gets stronger as the stars get closer and closer to one another and then it disappears once there are no two stars anymore.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/10/17/why-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/10/17/why- neutron-stars-not-black-holes-show-the-future-of-gravitational-wave- astronomy/)

"It's anticipated that these two speeds are exactly equal, and the delay of the light signal comes from the fact that the light-producing reactions in the neutron star take a second or two to reach the surface."

A lot about this event was modeled even before this observation, and there will now be more attempts to make more precise models that better match what was measured. And the best is, these models will be evaluated by the next, planned observations.

<comment><USER14> The same process, but in a different scenario, was observed in supernova 1987a:

"Approximately two to three hours before the visible light from SN 1987A reached Earth, a burst of neutrinos was observed at three separate neutrino observatories. This is likely due to neutrino emission, which occurs simultaneously with core collapse, but preceding the emission of visible light. Transmission of visible light is a slower process that occurs only after the shock wave reaches the stellar surface."

This result set a pretty strong upper bound on the neutrino mass because it must be small enough that, across the 168,000 light year distance from the LMC to us, the neutrinos kept their lead on the photons emitted a few hours later.

A neutron star is much smaller, the process is much faster, and the event happened much further away, so the constraints on the difference in speed between the gravitational waves and photons should be even more tightly constrained in this event.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Odd that the title here has been edited to _not match_ the source when usually titles are edited to match the source. If ars uses a click bait title why should HN fix it?

<comment><USER16> Ars Technica articles get two headlines. After A/B testing for a bit it settles on the more popular one. It's possible that was the other title that showed up on this article.

<comment><USER17> For something like an article title one could even try A/B/C/D/E testing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> But how do we know that light and gravitational wave were emitted exactly at one moment? It is not obvious for me.

<comment><USER19> What is your resolution on "one moment"? At the second-or-so level, we'd think that they _weren 't_ emitted at the same moment, as the gravity waves come from the orbiting stars before they collide with each other, i.e., mostly prior to the collision.

However, relative to a prediction that they should be separated by over a year, they arrived simultaneously.

You might wonder whether perhaps we correlated the gravity waves from one event with the light from another; this is counterindicated by the fact that the gravity waves match theoretical predictions about colliding neutron stars, and the resulting light data we gather matched theories about what colliding neutron stars might look like, an event never before witnessed. The coincidence of these two factors makes it rather likely these events are connected, in another spectacular triumph of theory predicting events that we've never seen before. I don't know that the popular press articles captured or explained this aspect very well, but I think it is part of why the astronomy community got so excited about this. Only part; there's plenty to be excited about in this event! It may well be the most exciting single astronomical event in my lifetime, because there were just so many bits that came together all at once for the first time.

<comment><USER18> Yes, I know that coincidence of two such events is highly unlikely, but to "compare" paths of gravitons and photons we need to imagine how much time divides 2 emission events. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Perhaps it isn't very important but it's still interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good. Space Time Quantification (STQ) theory predicts and justify the existence of dark matter particles. It can also predict and justify how all elementary particles react with each other. It provides the equivalent of a mendlejev table for elementary particles. These are conclusion based on the single premice that space measurement is quantified by a unit a. See [http://www.scirp.org/journal/Articles.aspx?searchCode=August...](http://www.scirp.org/journal/Articles.aspx?searchCode=Auguste++Meessen&searchField=authors_complete&page=1&SKID=0)

</comment><comment><USER21> It sounds more like a confirmation of GR. Mass-energy tells spacetime how to curve through gravity, and spacetime tells light where to travel.

<comment><USER22> Yes, the article even has a section where they straight up say "Einstein was right".

The title of the article "Colliding neutron stars falsify some theories of gravity" is accurate, but the theories of gravity that it falsifies isn't the popular mainstream one (Einstein's) that, let's face it, we've all been secretly hoping to take down. Instead, it falsifies some of the new challenger (MOND) theories.

I, for one, welcome our continuing Einsteinian Relativistic overlord theories of gravity (at least when it comes to dark matter)

<comment><USER23> > ...the popular mainstream one (Einstein's) that, let's face it, we've all > been secretly hoping to take down.

Please ELI5 what benefits follow from taking down the GR-based gravity theory?

<comment><USER21> Well I for one hope there's a loop hole for FTL. Absolutely all evidence currently points to c as a hard limit.

<comment><USER24> Not a loop hole, but possibly a worm hole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Dark matter disproven, wow this is amazing. This is literally one of the most important shake ups in modern astrophysics.

<comment><USER26> You seem to have read the article backwards. It's saying that it falsifies certain modified gravity theories (including TeVeS and STVG), not that it falsifies dark matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Clickbait title, but interesting article.

I Am Not a Physicist, so I need a real one to explain why I'm wrong, but I've thought for a while the cleanest explanation for dark matter is

1\. The universe is inside a black hole.

2\. Dark matter is matter which is outside the black hole, which explains why it has mass but no other observable properties.

<comment><USER28> > The universe is inside a black hole.

This is trivially true, btw. The Schwarzschild radius of the observable universe is less than the presumed plausible size of the universe as a whole. Or alternatively, a "black hole" is a region of space that nothing can escape, not even light, and ongoing and accelerating spatial inflation causes that to be true on an even smaller scale -- most of the universe is unreachable by light emitted today.

> Dark matter is matter which is outside the black hole, which explains why it > has mass but no other observable properties

Except that it interacts as if it was superimposed over objects in this universe, not from outside of it.

<comment><USER29> If the universe is inside a black hole what's outside the black hole?

<comment><USER30> Our part of the universe*... The presumption is that neutron stars are the results of gravity overcoming nuclear forces, and black holes are the results of some other force being overcome, and therefore our visible universe is the inside of a greater collapse... Or the explosive eventual death of a black holes...

It's a novel idea, but it's just turtles all the way down

<comment><USER28> No, that's not really what I'm saying. A black hole is a just a region that light can't escape from. It is entirely possible for the inside of the black hole to be composed of normal, everyday matter, non-singularity matter. The Schwartzchild radius scales linearly with mass, an unusual relationship that means that for any density the O(r^3) volume will eventually be overtaken by the O(r) Schwartzchild radius.

<comment><USER31> I think you mean the O(r^3) Schwartzchild radius will eventually overtake the radius r?

<comment><USER28> Yes, thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I'm Leaving Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://www.dp.cx/blog/why-i-m-leaving-reddit.html#.UPWzlKGjcag <comment><USER2> great story bro

Now, seriously, when you post your own content, deep down it's always more about self-promotion than something that interests the community. You post because you're afraid no one else will do it - you just did the same here on HN. It's frowned upon in most places, not because it means you're a spammer bastard, but because it's so hard to draw the line: if every company started posting their own stuff it would fill the boards with trash.

I've done it too, but have started refraining from posting my own stuff because of that. If I'm allowed, everyone should be, and I don't think that's a good idea.

<comment><USER3> I think the focus of HN and Reddit should be to surface content that is interesting to HN or to the subreddit. The rest of things like user karma, etc are(and should be) secondary in pursuit of the primary objective of the site - surface relevant content. This does not mean that excessive or repetitive submissions should be tolerated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just make a new account. One of the things I advise people is to not use your personal account in reddit. But do use your business account in a savy manner by:

\- participating in the discussion on subjects related to your business/product.

\- not posting links to your content until a minimum amount of Karma is achieved.

\- not linking to your own facebook/twitter pages unless someone asks to.

\- using related discussions to explain how a given problem might be fixed, offering options, and mentioning that you provide one of those options.

This also applies to HN, but do realize that the community here is more tight knit and more focused on learning than many other places. So you can make a post of how your product is awesome (in a technical manner) and people will appreciate the content and participate in the discussion.

But! Reddit is not generally a place where you find people like HN members. The average there is more about passing time, and hanging out. Though particular sub-reddits have their own culture, you will should expect the typical group of trolls (sometimes, the moderators are the trolls).

If you plan to post to a specific sub-reddit, then contact the moderators before posting, and get to know them. I always, always do this and have never been perma-banned. The way to do it is to introduce yourself in a friendly manner and ask for their blessing. Explain to them the who/what/how/why/when if what your are doing. Let them know that you dont want to spam the community but want to take part in it. Thus, imparting your knowledge about the domain with the insight gained from providing a product in the market is something that is valuable for the community at large.

You will also need a good sense of humor and a flame suit.

</comment><comment><USER5> He posts the links he submitted, but not links to the reddit submissions (such as [http://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/lf5f1/google_i...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/lf5f1/google_investing_in_residential_solar_power/) ), and there is no link to the submission in r/reportthespammers where they discuss him.

I find that suspicious.

> _I'll be leaving my account, but I won't be back._

Okay, but his user page shows a 404: <http://www.reddit.com/user/gms8994>

Maybe that's what usually happens to shadowbanned users; I have no idea.

edit: I can still see at least some of his submissions - [http://www.reddit.com/r/Celebs/new/?count=125&after=t3_1...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Celebs/new/?count=125&after=t3_16f2z9) \- <http://i.imgur.com/pL4bs.png>

edit 2: trevorj brings up a good point: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062850>

<comment><USER6> Here's the link to RTS - [http://www.reddit.com/r/reportthespammers/comments/xwrf7/ove...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reportthespammers/comments/xwrf7/overview_for_gms8994_proudgreenhomecom/), no discussion there at all. Just a karma count of +3/-2

<comment><USER5> Interesting. It was submitted five months ago, but he was still posting four days ago.

<comment><USER6> My guess is that it had nothing to do with that subreddit and more to do with individual people clicking "report" on the links he submitted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why didn't they just contact you first and _ask_ you about the behavior, expressing their concern? Did they contact you at all? How did you respond?

That's not covered in this article. And it seems crazy to me that they would vote to shadowban you without attempting to talk to you at least a little. Is that what happened? If so, that's nuts.

<comment><USER8> I think it's worse than just "they didn't ask". They don't even care if a moderator vouches for you.

A week or so ago, it was pointed out to me that ircmaxell was also banned from reddit - I think it was a shadowban as well, since his username still appears as the submitter on some items, rather than "[deleted]" - because he was submitting too many links to his own blog.

Now, this isn't just some average blogger. Anthony is a very well known PHP developer - by which I mean he develops PHP, not just _in_ PHP, and has voting rights regarding the direction the language takes. (Please don't hold that against him, Jeff.)

While I'm sure he was posting a lot of submissions for his own site, it was really great stuff. The first I really heard of him was due to a series of articles he and another developer wrote as a guide to understanding the internals of PHP with directions on what various C code was and how it hung together. It wasn't spam, at least not by any definition I care to recognize.

This didn't matter. Quality didn't matter. Apparently, one of the moderators to /r/php even went to bat for him with the admins, asking that the ban be lifted. The admins didn't care.

Meanwhile, many people submit a lot of content they also made themselves - memes. If you want to make a bunch of advice animal image macros and upload them to imgur, that's fine. If you write a five part dive into the guts of PHP's internals, you're banned.

It's funny too, because maybe I'm remembering incorrectly since it's been so long, but I seem to recall early reddit specifically saying that it was cool to submit your own stuff, and even encouraging it. Now, there's some sort ratio of yours-to-others content that you need to keep in balance, otherwise you're marked a spammer, regardless of how good your own content happens to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hackers News has the same thing, called hellbanning.

<comment><USER10> IIRC, HN's hellbanning is actually worse. In order to not immediately tip off people who are hellbanned that it happened, hellbanned users see hellbanned content in line with everything else, but no one else sees it. This way it still gets votes, comments, etc. (albeit at a slower rate).

<comment><USER11> How do I figure out if I've been hellbanned?

<comment><USER12> Usually, view your account with a browser in incognito mode and look at your comments. I do it every now and again, just to make sure.

Also, addlepate, you've been hellbanned:

        addlepate 8 days ago | link [dead]

        Are you sure about all that? I never get votes or replies. Also, as implemented,
        HN's hellbanning is quite obvious when it happens.

Clearly not _that_ obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You seem like a decent guy based on this brief wayback machine history: [http://web.archive.org/web/20110907072017/http://www.reddit....](http://web.archive.org/web/20110907072017/http://www.reddit.com/user/gms8994)

My guess is that you posted too many links like the pop mech link, which had an auto playing video the first time I visited before a cookie was set saying I'd seen it (I'm guess they do this because I didn't see it again)

Links like that are extremely annoying and the quickest way to express it is to hit the 'report' link.

</comment><comment><USER14> Doesn't add up. You don't get banned from Reddit simply by being added to the /r/reportthespammers subreddit, and there's no way he would know that the vote was 2 to 3.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can see the up/down votes for a post. It's available via the API, and the Reddit Enhancement Suite.

<comment><USER5> That's just people who happened to vote on a particular submission in a particular subreddit. This is not Alexis Ohanian personally clicking a "I agree to shadowban gms8994".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let alone what his posting habits may be, this management behavior is atrocious. If someone came to my desk and presented me with ideas to moderate a community that related to these hellbanned/shadowbanned methodologies, I'd flip my lid. It's cowardly, plain and simple. It reminds me of some cruel school yard tactics that bettered no one. If someone is harming the community (spamming), then ban them blatantly. Stand up to it and stand by your decision to do so. Don't hide behind a cowardly veil of secretly isolating the person. So childish and weak…

</comment><comment><USER16> This post has been taken off the frontpage. Deliciously ironic.

<comment><USER13> Self-pity never goes over well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems like a telling omission that he doesn't say whether his former employers compensated him for posting about them.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think hellbanning/shadowbanning is the worst thing ever, and needs to be exterminated. If you don't want someone part of the community, then ban them. Shadow banning just seems to passive aggresive.

<comment><USER5> Hell/shadowbanning _works_.

If you ban someone, they just re-register, and you have to hunt them down again.

If you close registration, your site slowly withers away.

If you verify registrations one at a time, your time slowly withers away.

If you charge for registration, you better be SomethingAwful or MetaFilter, or your site will _rapidly_ wither away.

I've had to mod a few communities here and there, and while I admit that I'm not particularly good at it, it has definitely taught me that it's mostly a thankless slog.

<comment><USER18> If you shadow ban someone, they will just re-register. I was shadow banned here a few months ago. I re-registered. It did nothing to deter me. What I actually did to deserve the shadow ban I have no idea. Maybe I disagreed with the wrong person?

All it did was make me lose a bit of respect for the people who moderate this place. If the mod had actually sent me a message telling me why I was banned, I could have at least learned from it.

<comment><USER5> > * If you shadow ban someone, they will just re-register.*

An ideal shadow-ban makes it difficult to realize you're shadow-banned.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Linux rig for data mining and machine learning - <AUTHOR>

Here's the scenario: if you were asked to build out three Linux machines that would be used together in a cluster to perform data mining and machine learning tasks, with the occasional mapreduce job thrown in, how would you spec the machines out?  What distro would you use?  Any must have software installs?
With regards to the hardware, what is your preference for manufacturer?  How much would you expect to pay per machine?
Your thoughts and suggestions are appreciated! <comment><USER2> I hate to say it, I'm not sure you have the necessary skills required to actually do what you're looking to do if these are the types of questions you have. A better question might be _"what are good resources to read to get into datamining and machine learning"_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or even better, I'll ask a guidance counselor for Linux advice. She'll know the answer. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You have a requirement, now you need a specification, until you can specify the needs accurately it is impossible to design a solution. So now you need to ask questions regarding the algorithms that will be used, what hardware can they be run on, CPUs, GPUs? What size are the datasets? What sort of speed is needed? What constraints are there, such as cost? Etc. As for hardware manufacturers, you might look at Supermicro and Appro, it really depends on your needs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree with your point. I am working on this in parallel with the hardware spec because my main financial stakeholder is pushing to create the project budget.

<comment><USER3> Is there any possibility that the project could be split into 2 parts, an R&D part, which you can specify a development machine for and a production part which can be specified separately once you have sufficient data? If not then you could search for mailing lists and newsgroups that deal with the algorithms you are using and ask for advice and some real world data on what other people are using to tackle similar problems. Also you might find relevant data in published papers, try searching ACM, IEEE and Springer.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really good point, thanks! It may be easier to get funding for the R&D portion as a POC for the overall endeavor. Well worth asking at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Use AWS until you have a reasonable grasp of your dataset and real requirements. Then buy whatever provides the best bang for your buck, in terms of servers. That will probably mean getting 6 mid-range servers, rather than the three servers with the absolute fastest CPU/most memory available. Use either RedHat (CentOS) or Debian, and you'll almost certainly be using Hadoop. Dell servers are fine, although you can sometimes save significantly by going with something like Supermicro servers from Newegg. In terms of cost, you'll want to order the bulk of your servers' memory from a third-party, not have it included in the build.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent, thank you! Since I use AWS now for other stuff, this approach makes the most sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A former employer of mine in the financial sector used Scalable Informatics[1] and Dell[2] servers for that sort of thing.

1- <http://scalableinformatics.com/>

2- <http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-cloud-servers>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll take a look at these.</comment></comment>