Soma Water Filters Are Worthless - <AUTHOR> http://tylermw.com/soma-water-filters-are-worthless-how-i-used-r-to-win-an-argument-with-my-wife/ <comment><USER3> Many years ago, I had an argument kind of like this with my mom about the difference between decaf Diet Coke and plain Diet Coke. Since she was the Mathemetician in the family, I let her design the double-blind taste test.

When I could conclusively tell the difference every time, she was flabbergasted. But she did finally believe me that there actually was a taste difference between them, at least there was for me. So, she stopped trying to get me to drink decaf.

<comment><USER4> That people exist who drink _decaf_ _diet_ sodas boggles the mind.

Why not drink carbonated water at that point? Or just water, you know.

Or drink real soda in moderation.

<comment><USER5> A general drink typically has— a) a certain taste b) a certain mouthfeel (due to the CO2 in case of sodas) c) caffeine and / or other substances

People might want some or all of the above.

For eg. I sometimes drink decaf Starbucks blended drinks at night because I don't want to mess with my sleep cycle but I like their taste.

<comment><USER6> Decaf still has caffeine. Maybe not enough to affect you personally, but pay closer attention and maybe it does.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, switching to decaf coffee still set off my addiction, just not as strongly as full strength. It still has something like 10% as much as normal coffee. I can still detect the slight high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe I didn't do a good job scanning the comments, but I'm surprised nobody (not even the article) mentions the NSF certification body.

Taste is important but very subjective. I don't buy a water filter unless it shows up as certified by NSF[1].

A few years ago I almost fell for a "water purification system" on Amazon, with stellar reviews that was supposed to filter out everything. With a baby on the way I figured it was worth the price tag. Good thing I did my research. The water filtration system was not certified or verified by anybody.

edit:

Same thing applies to humidifiers, air cleaners, air conditioners, etc. Don't buy unless it has been certified[2].

[1] [http://info.nsf.org/Certified/DWTU/](http://info.nsf.org/Certified/DWTU/)

[2] [http://ahamverifide.org/](http://ahamverifide.org/)

<comment><USER9> Thanks!!! Safety above taste seems obvious for a water filter.

<comment><USER10> Tap water has more stringent safety standards than bottled. So unless you live in flint, then safety shouldn't really be an issue.

<comment><USER11> Not just Flint.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/pittsburgh-tries-to-avoid- becom...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/pittsburgh-tries-to-avoid-becoming-the- next-flint-1493550002)

"A total of seven U.S. water systems, which each serve more than 100,000 people, had lead concentrations above the federal action level of 15 parts per billion in recent months, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. They include Portland, Ore., and Providence, R.I., which both exceeded the limit at least one other time in the past five years."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apparently the author is married to a water filter, but at least she's stylish.

> This experiment was inspired by an argument with my wife, a stylish but > atrocious water filter, and the explosion of start-ups attempting to turn > everything you purchase into a subscription service.

<comment><USER13> Aren't we all just complicated water filters given a particular perspective?

<comment><USER12> i'm rethinking my whole life now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very nice setup, but he didn't show he couldn't tell the difference between tap and the Soma water.

A biased subject who can pick out both untreated water and Soma-filtered water from the other variants could lie about that, and claim that untreated water and Soma water taste the same.

As a thought experiment, assume the variants are plain water, orange juice, and beer. A biased subject could easily claim orange juice and water taste the same and look the same, and are easily distinguished from beer.

Also, but minor: this is about taste. Such experiments typically are done in the dark, to rule out an effect of how the water looks on taste judgments.

<comment><USER15> If you think he's lying he could have made up the entire blog post too... :P

But more seriously, how would you suggest designing an experiment that worked even with liars determined to thwart it?

<comment><USER16> You don't need biased subjects to have ambiguous results. Suppose for instance all people from group A can taste chlorine at 20ppm, and below that threshold, those individuals have no perceived chlorine taste. Individuals from group B can taste chlorine only at 80ppm and above. If the tap water has chlorine starting at 100ppm and the filter removed half (as stated in the article) then we would have water at 100ppm and 50ppm. Some observers would perceive a difference and some would not. If the Pur filter removed 90% of chlorine, then individuals in both groups would perceive a difference in taste.

To point, this experiment depends on your taste preferences, as the author has stated that there is a physical difference in the makeup of the water samples after filtration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why was Soma so hard to distinguish from Bottled? Article seems to gloss over this point?

<comment><USER18> It wasn't and I think that's the point. Essentially soma was hard to distinguish from tap water, which OP had said tasted chlorinated, given that soma was supposed to filter and improve tap water it was failing to meet its stated objective.

<comment><USER19> He says he can differentiate tap v bottled.

He also says he can _not_ differentiate tap v soma.

So the difference between soma and bottled should be obvious (or there is some other factor in play), but it's clearly not.

Obviously taste is not commutative, but there's something fishy here regardless.

<comment><USER20> For further reading: The Difference Between "Significant" and "Not Significant" is not Itself Statistically Significant (Gelman and Sterns, 2006): [http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/sign...](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/signif4.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I recently did a similar blind taste-test for mineral waters vs my tap water: [https://www.gwern.net/Tea#water-experiment](https://www.gwern.net/Tea#water- experiment)

I used a lazy susan to implement randomization/blinding, and an interesting Bayesian variant on best-arm finding to try to optimize sample selection. I found my tap water is weakly in the middle and perhaps 1 or 2 mineral waters were better, but not strongly so.

The results are not quite comparable to OP because I designed it in terms of deciding which in a pair tasted better, not whether I could guess which was which correctly.

</comment><comment><USER22> Eh, I get the author is being sarcastic, but for someone who buys water filters for their looks, his Soma jug looks just like a slightly plump version of Brita. (What's wrong with Brita, anyway?)

<comment><USER23> in stereotypical gender role parlance, it does not pass the "wife test".

also filters are overly expensive and useless. issues that the fancy filter only aggravates, so...

<comment><USER24> The WAF [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife_acceptance_factor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It may be worth noting that if your water is only chlorinated with chlorine (and not chloramine, which is quite common now as well), leaving it in the fridge overnight can allow some of the chlorine to evaporate, making your water taste better even without a filter.

In this case he allowed both his tap water and filtered water to cool overnight, which would tend to understate the taste difference between freshly pulled tap water and freshly filtered water (if that filter effectively removes chlorine).

</comment><comment><USER26> Fun little article, but I find the overall premise a bit weird. I always thought of water filters as something that you use to remove harmful things in the water, not improve the taste. Filtered water may taste different, possibly even better, but that's not the goal when I use one.

<comment><USER27> I have lived in cities where the tap water, to me, was undrinkably gross tasting. It was probably just fine to drink, but I found myself drinking less water than I should because of the taste. A Brita filter helped a lot.

Edit: and not all cities I've lived in are that way. In my current city the tap water is just fine.

<comment><USER28> The two times I've made major moves in my life I thought the new water tasted awful. In both cases I acclimated and the water was tasteless within a month or two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The part I find interesting is the 100% success rate between bottled and tap, which is something bottled water drinkers insist is true (being able to taste the difference, that is), but are often told is just in their heads.

<comment><USER30> I live in south Texas, where the water is quite hard, and therefore somewhat bitter. There's no mistaking the difference. I've always described bottled water as being more pure; to me it has no taste (as it should), and filters seem to do a decent job of masking that taste out.

<comment><USER31> Why do you think water should have no taste? Good water should has minerals and those have lots of flavors.

<comment><USER30> I think it's because the "bad" taste of water (bitter, sour, or kind of metallic) in the areas where I live is so very strong, that "good" water is tasteless to me by comparison. I'm sure there's something there, but it's really subtle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have a Soma water filter... their filters used to work well and quickly, then they "improved" them and it takes 10 minutes to fill the pitcher. Yeah.. i'm probably gonna toss the top soon and just enjoy the glass pitcher

</comment><comment><USER33> "Initially I thought just to buy a Brita, but Brita filters always seemed like something you'd shove in your dorm room mini-fridge and not display on your kitchen counter."

This is a pretty abrupt context switch after coming from the article on stereotypes, trailer homes and rural folk that's on the front page right now.

</comment><comment><USER34> > this point I just decided to throw the pitcher into the fridge (cold water > masks poor taste) and use it for a few weeks to see if there were any > changes.

if chlorine was the actual cause of the bad taste, wouldn't the water "aired out" the chlorine after a hour or so?

</comment><comment><USER35> > First, I filled all the pitchers the previous night

Chlorine evaporates. If he's worried about chlorine taste this step - <USER2> the jug to sit overnight - will fix it.

</comment><comment><USER36> I have a Soma pitcher and PUR pitcher at home (I drink enough water to need both). They taste about the same to me.

<comment><USER37> Why not a reverse osmosis system? Not terribly difficult to maintain and they are much better than a single carbon filter at removing impurities and improving the taste.

<comment><USER38> I didn't even know these existed until reading your comment. Finally, a new topic to obsessively research :) The last one was indoor air quality and air filters. It sounds kinda lame but it's a really fascinating topic (with a very scammy industry attached to it).

Do you use a reverse osmosis system? Any recommendations?

<comment><USER39> Did you settle on an air filter? The obviously scammy industry always turned me off every time I looked in to them.

<comment><USER38> I did. Ended up going with a 'Rabbit Air Minus A2', which I think mostly uses components from a popular Korean brand (can't remember the name). Good customer service too; they've been pretty accommodating given I'm in Australia.

With air filters, although there's a lot of 'magic beans' out there, it really just comes down to having good quality _physical_ filters (usually multiple ones in sequence, like particle, hepa and carbon) and a decent 'clean air delivery rate' (CADR) given the size of the room.

Heck, you can make a reasonable homemade air filter (that has measurable effects on air quality) by strapping a large HEPA filter to a box fan (although be aware that this could have safety issues re: fire hazard). Steer clear of anything that puts O2 into the air that's anywhere near EPA approved 'safe' levels (which are probably still too high).

Some folks use O2 generators for mould remediation when the house is unoccupied and subsequently ventilated (known as 'ozone shock treatment'). However, I think even this is a potentially dangerous practice as O2 will react with other things in the room as well (e.g. furniture varnish), potentially releasing volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) into the air.

When I get back from work I'll try and dig up a really good review site I stumbled across. It's one of those gems where the author is clearly just really really into air quality, and who has a very good nose for BS 'science'.

EDIT: Oh, also, another good option to deal with some VOCs (like benzene) are certain kinds of houseplants. NASA studied this so there's a fairly credible list of plants to choose from: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Clean_Air_Study)

EDIT2: Also, assuming you don't live near a major highway or something, one of the best things you can do to improve your indoor air quality is open a few windows and blinds. EPA studies suggest indoor air quality is usually far worse than outdoor air quality. And opening blinds lets more sunlight in, which will retard mould growth. And it's all free. Free!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> When does Soma sue this guy? This seems like a risky article to me. Whether or not they have a case, doesn't matter. They can make life miserable.

</comment><comment><USER41> You aren't going to be married long.

</comment><comment><USER42> This was an All in the Family episode. For whatever reason, Gloria can;t tell the difference in taste between Coke, Pepsi, and RC but Meathead can.

</comment><comment><USER43> "HOW I USED R TO WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH MY WIFE"

</comment><comment><USER44> I prefer a Berkey myself.

<comment><USER45> But do you have the evidence

<comment><USER44> Yes. I tasted the water and I liked it.

<comment><USER18> Sample size of 1 works for me. In all seriousness though in issues of personal taste as long as you are happy with your decision then it's the correct one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "...a practice pioneered in the 90s by "8 CDs For A Penny!" Columbia House"

LOL. Try 1950s. I love how Millennials think everything was "pioneered" in the 90s and 2000s.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how much efficiency and productivity hours are lost to stupid preconceptions like "Brita isnt something you put on a kitchen counter".

<comment><USER47> Aesthetics matter and make us happier. It also signals things about yourself regardless of if you mean to signal it or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Soma sent out a really self-congratulatory marketing email on Black Friday a few years back, telling people, "Don't buy a Soma today." gushing about living in the moment and enjoying time with friends and family instead of shopping.

I wrote back and asked if they were so serious about that message, why didn't they take the Buy button off their website?

Shockingly, no response.

<comment><USER49> _I wrote back and asked if they were so serious about that message, why didn 't they take the Buy button off their website?_

If you can't readily answer that for yourself, I wouldn't have replied to you, either.

<comment><USER48> Send a stupid email get a stupid reply.</comment></comment></comment>


The Future of Aging Just Might Be in Margaritaville - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/14/magazine/tech-design-longevity-margaritaville.html <comment><USER2> I wonder how many people think about longevity...for me that is less so about living to 100+ but more about doing as much as I can now to make sure old age is not filled with chronic illness. I'm a "millennial" and already very mindful of lifestyle choices that I hope help maximize my longevity i.e. fasting, low carb, exercise, no drugs, no smoking, less alcohol.

<comment><USER3> Low carb connected with longevity? I heard the opposite - vegan diet is good for longevity. Am I wrong?

Edit: One article that supports my view (I found it in my bookmarks, there might be better) [https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/the- optima...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/the-optimal- diet.html?ref=opinion&_r=0moc.semityn.www)

<comment> andrey-g Vegan studies don't control for a lot of conflating factors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I may be in that demographic, but I prefer to be around young people (I volunteer a lot with youth). Being around nothing but old people all day would make me old and depressed. I prefer to be around the future not the past.

<comment><USER5> I would think most peoples ideal is to live in healthy natural commmunities with a diverse age range to get wisdom and tradition from the old and energy and new ideas from the young.

<comment><USER6> What's so special about tradition? Just because something has been done many times in the past doesn't mean that it's useful, worthwhile, or right.

<comment><USER7> Well, tradition is typically things that have been _successful_ many times in the past!

The hard part is to recognize if the reasons for the previous success still apply in the modern world. See "Chesterton's Fence".

<comment><USER8> The tricky part is distinguishing between things that are _successful_ and things that just haven't _obviously failed_. Tradition might not always be the best of all possible guides here, as it tends to be a collection of things whose primary commendation is that they didn't immediately cause a society to fail.

<comment><USER9> > [tradition] tends to be a collection of things whose primary commendation is > that they didn't immediately cause a society to fail.

Not at all. Traditions become traditions over long periods of time. Thus, they tend to be collections of things that haven't caused a societal failure in the last several hundred years, which is a much better record than not causing immediate failure.

<comment><USER8> I have a friend who rarely uses crosswalks. He tends to walk into traffic while shouting "Plot armor!". He has yet to be run over, so this has an excellent track record. Yet I suspect it just might be other than the greatest of all possible ideas, despite the lack of demonstrated failures.

(Yes, this is absurd. Yes, I've told him this is clearly a bad idea. Yes, it's actually true.)

Which is to say one should be cautious of survivorship biases and the role of context. Judging traditions as successful based on a limited context where they haven't obviously failed both ignores the situation upon which they may depend and other scenarios where precisely those might have failed. Like the other people who have tried what my friend has and been rendered into chunky salsa for it.

<comment><USER10> this story is hilarious and infuriating at the same time, I hope no other people will get hurt because of that bs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If a even a small fraction of the effort spent on trying and failing to cope with the realities of degenerative aging was spent on the current crop of plausible approaches to build medical biotechnologies that can reverse degenerative aging, then the world would be a much better place.

Aging has an monstrously high economic cost, and is probably the only area of medicine in which the ratio of that cost to the amount spent on R&D to try to reduce that cost is vanishingly small.

<comment><USER12> Probably assume it will simply delay the inevitable.

<comment><USER13> Death is inevitable, senescence is not. There is not reason to believe that humans can't live in the bodies of healthy twenty year olds until they're killed in an accident or the universe runs out of usable negentropy.

<comment><USER12> That would change everything. We'd no longer be able to have kids. Otherwise, have to deal with severe overpopulation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Being old for our generation will be awesome. I'll just play Starcraft all day with other geezers.

<comment><USER15> When your apm dips under 100 though, it probably won't be as fun. Think chess blitz matches

<comment><USER16> But you'll be fine on NA servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Another thing we should try is learning to not be afraid of death. If we aren't afraid of death, then getting old is not such a big deal.

Atheists have no reason to fear death, because then there is nothing.

Religious people only have to fear death if they are living in a way they know is wrong.

So, best bet is to live consistent with the majority of lasting world religions, and either there is nothing or there is blissful afterlife. Plus, the present life will be better, too. Win, win!

<comment><USER18> >Atheists have no reason to fear death, because then there is nothing.

Well, I'm not afraid of being dead. I sure do like being alive though, and would prefer that to continue!

<comment><USER17> Once you are dead you won't be aware life is no longer continuing. The only sticking point is the time leading up to death when one's fear of death makes them miserable. If the person can do away with the fear then they'll maximize their happy moments in the short time we have in this world.

Since death is inevitable due to the eventual heat death of the universe, then from an operations research perspective it makes much more sense to focus effort on getting rid of the fear of death than trying to end death itself.

<comment><USER19> > Since death is inevitable due to the eventual heat death of the universe, > then from an operations research perspective it makes much more sense to > focus effort on getting rid of the fear of death than trying to end death > itself.

I don't think that's true from a global optimization perspective. If you're trying to maximize contented moments, it makes sense to spend time thinking about how to extend life (assuming you're talking about the number of happy moments for people who are currently alive), even if those moments still must eventually cease. Because trillions of years of happy moments is a lot more than 80-100 years of happy moments. Only if you're trying to minimize unhappy moments does removing fear of death become a better goal.

However, from a local optimization perspective, since there is little anyone can individually do about their medium term probability of death, I agree that figuring out how to cope with and minimize that fear is probably the best strategy.

<comment><USER17> Right, I mean from the individual's perspective, since why should the individual care about optimizing an aggregate the individual will never experience?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I might consider such a community, but 55 is way too early for me. More like 70 or later.

Lack of focused activities are also a factor in wasting away

</comment><comment><USER21> Is good to be learn avoiding a disease, but humans immortality is bad. Lets my body is then later the energy, food, scientific experiment, whatever, rather than being locked in one room all the time. Human is not an endangered species.</comment>


Covid-19 progression: Sweden vs. Finland - <AUTHOR> https://covid19.fixedprecision.com/countrystats?country=Sweden&country2=Finland&percapita=true <comment><USER2> Country with aggressive mitigation efforts versus a county with limited mitigation. Exactly what you would expect.

It was a known trade off made by the Swedish government. Freedom and functioning society was valued more than the difference in mortality. If the majority of people in Sweden are ok with it then it isn't a problem.

I've read nothing about how Sweden's public feels about it. Will be interesting to learn.</comment>


Innocent woman arrested in false-positive in facial recognition system in Brazil - <AUTHOR> An innocent woman was arrested today (while working in an informal job without any personally identifiable documentation) in Rio de Janeiro. The automated facial recognition systems (FRS) identified her as another woman, wanted for murder - it turns out the actual criminal is _already in jail_ and the police organization operating the FRS wasn't informed about it yet due to delays between the systems.
This is the second day of operation of the system, according to the press. However, a restricted version of the same FRS was used for 15 days during the Carnaval festivities with no alarming failures and reportedly resulted in a few arrests.
It has now been deployed in 25 locations in Copacabana. (Anedoctally, I live here and can't tell you where they are - the equipment, cameras, etc. must be well hidden, or I'm terrible at spotting them).
Source, in Portuguese:
"Facial recognition fails in its second day and innocent woman confused with criminal is arrested" https://oglobo.globo.com/rio/reconhecimento-facial-falha-em-segundo-dia-mulher-inocente-confundida-com-criminosa-ja-presa-23798913
Related previous submission (with zero comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19074434 <comment><USER2> And in other news, 25% of all stranger identifications by human eyewitnesses also were found to be erroneous.[1]

[1] [https://californiainnocenceproject.org/issues-we- face/eyewit...](https://californiainnocenceproject.org/issues-we- face/eyewitness-identification/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that automated systems applied to the same task will (eventually) beat human performance by a lot, but there are 2 issues that make this less relevant in this case.

The first is one relates to this application of facial recognition targeting poor people. This woman had no documentation on her. I'd wager this is really common in Brazil. How could she possibly prove she is _NOT_ the person the software with 99.999..% accuracy says she is?

If the actual criminal wasn't already in jail, would she be set free in the same day she was arrested?

The second issue is perhaps more universal to other automations, but certainly potentializes the first one, dealing with _scale_. Human cops can't check every person they see against the entire database of wanted people.

25% of false-positives from every cop is a hell of a lot less than 0.00001% of an automated system when applied to every crowd, everywhere, all the time.

<comment><USER3> For the first issue, carry your documents. I've been taught that since I first got my ID at 12yo.

My understanding is that the automation is to verify people who are needed by law, right? They don't voluntarily hear a beep and go into the jail. There are police officers that still have to arrest them and check their documents.

The situation is so bad in Rio that society simply will have to deal with any deficiencies in the automated system. It will still be better than the current reality.

The fact that police officers are probably not giving people of color enough flexibility in situations like these is beyond the scope of the automation system.

EDIT: Carrying your documents is not a popular opinion among the US audience, I understand. Still, I find it very reasonable and I think the situation that happened to this woman is being blown out of proportion.

<comment><USER4> The US tries not to be a papers please police state where it's a crime not to carry papers with you and present them on demand. We consider systems like that to be totalitarian and despotic based on our past experiences observing and waging war against hostile oppressive nations with such systems.

<comment><USER5> > We consider systems like that to be totalitarian

Who is "we"? Non-citizens of the USA are required to carry their immigration status documents with them, [1] and checkpoints within the 100-mile border zone (where 2/3 of the population lives [2]) are one place where they must be presented. If you are a US citizen without proof, and are stopped, and the official thinks you are lying, I believe you are going to have A Bad Day.

[1] [https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/immigrants- right...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/immigrants-rights-and- detention/your-rights-border-zone)

[2] [https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border- zone](https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone)

<comment><USER6> Well, in most cases "we" means the permanent legal inhabitants, not tourists. Legislation is not created by tourists.

<comment><USER7> Permanent legal residents are required to carry their IDs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As long as biometrics alone are the basis for an arrest, we'll see more and more of this. I'm curious what the accuracy score for the biometric source "evidence" was on which she was arrested, and what the match score was between her face and the source evidence.

<comment><USER3> She wasn't arrested. She was detained and taken to the police station and her family brought her documents to prove she wasn't the other woman they were after.

<comment><USER9> Being detained is in the same category as being arrested. She was forcibly taken into custody only to be released without any form of compensation for lost time.

In many countries people can be held for significant amounts of time without being formally charged with any crime.

<comment><USER3> Similar category but very different outcomes, rights, etc.

[https://criminal-law.freeadvice.com/criminal- law/arrests_and...](https://criminal-law.freeadvice.com/criminal- law/arrests_and_searches/arrest-detention.htm)

<comment><USER10> You're making a pedantic argument and backing it up with a link specific to the US court system. What the US supreme court says had no bearing in Brazil.

<comment><USER3> No, I'm not. The Brazilian supreme court says pretty much the same thing.

<comment><USER11> I feel you're missing the point entirely: to the person who was forcibly taken into custody by police and likely didn't have a clear and confident understanding of their rights (a fair assumption for the general populace, I'd say), it doesn't matter what you call it.

<comment><USER3> Of course it's upsetting. I don't think anyone is making the case that it's just a regular day and you shouldn't complain. The automation system needs to improve, that's blatantly obvious. And the police officers need to learn to work with it.

This is what happened (detention): "I was working and the police arrived. They confounded me with someone else they were looking for and I had to go to the police station and prove I wasn't that person. What a day".

Not this (arrest): ""I was working and the police arrived. They confounded me with someone else they were looking for and I had to go to the police station and prove I wasn't that person. They still didn't believe me and I'm in a jail cell waiting for a judge to hear my case. I don't think I'll be home for a few days".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ainar-g I severely dislike public facial recognition systems, but wouldn't it basically be the same if a police officer mistook her for someone else based on a sketch or a composite? The scale is obviously different though.

<comment><USER8> Human cops don't have implicit faith in the accuracy of their human colleagues. But if a __COMPUTER __lists you as a biometric match for a person of interest /suspect, then clearly you did _something_...

<comment><USER12> Right. Many people believe that computers can't make mistakes. It might not be true, but you'll still have a harder time convincing them that despite the computer identifying you, the computer is mistaken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pardon my ignorance, but isn't this a human rights issue ? Can the UN or other organizations not question the governments who are in such a rush to enforce these system regardless of all the evidence that it isn't reliable yet.

<comment><USER14> Yes it is.

But under the current authoritarian Brazilian president "human rights" has been demonized.

Rio de Janeiro's Governor has advocated for snipers to shoot-to-kill people identified as criminals in the favelas. It's horrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not concerned with false positives. That's something the legal system can expect and handle properly. My issue with this kind of technology is the potential for abuse by incumbent powers. What happens when the government starts using this to track whistleblowers?

</comment><comment><USER16> In Brazil simply being preto can get you in trouble with military police, can only imagine it has gotten much worse with bolzonaro

</comment><comment><USER17> There's a first, wrong person apprehended</comment>


Show HN: Curated daily digest of jobs, products and articles for Product Designers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/productdesignerdaily <comment><AUTHOR> Product Designer Daily is my latest side project experiment. Each day I hand- curate a list of jobs, products, and articles for product designers.

I'd love to hear your feedback!

<comment><USER2> Such a great idea!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man!</comment></comment></comment>


Hosting a Website on IPFS - <AUTHOR> https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmdPtC3T7Kcu9iJg6hYzLBWR5XCDcYMY7HV685E3kH3EcS/2015/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-ipfs/ <comment><USER2> If they wish for wide adoption, it really needs a simple frontend so that anybody can publish.</comment>


The price of love? Losing two of your closest friends - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/15/price-love-close-friends-relationship

<comment><USER2> Hell hath no fury than a woman scorned :-(</comment>


Can we stop AI outsmarting humanity? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/28/can-we-stop-robots-outsmarting-humanity-artificial-intelligence-singularity <comment><USER2> Why do these articles always try to imply that AI has an individual consciousness? Are journalists seriously this dry for content nowadays?

It's funny how it's always about the negative side with these articles, too. Like, couldn't AI outsmart us by showing the Human race that the answer is Love and not War?

Why does AI has to be this terminator-like mazohist every time?

Makes me wonder if these writers take time to reflect on the garbage they are writing.</comment>


Robot Scientist: the best job ever? - <AUTHOR> http://snaptalent.com/ads/80 Trevor's ad for anybots. <comment><USER2> Sigh...I emailed Trevor last year about my desire to work there but never heard back from him. Now that I'm going to Stanford's ME grad program this fall maybe I can weasel my way into some other robotics startup...

<comment><USER3> Companies are generally very open to collaborate with universities. I've been on both sides of this for robotics -- doing research at CMU and doing research at robotics companies.

The best approach would be to troll available grants, pick something that you think would be fun to work on, and work on a proposal with a company.

Some grants are really easy to get, like SBIRs. Some are designed for collaboration between universities and companies, like STTRs.

If you're a self-funded student, you should seriously consider working on whatever you find most interesting, and dedicating serious time to it. Inferior alternatives include focusing on classes and splitting time among a few projects. The ideal grade in a class is the minimal grade needed to pass. That means you're actually spending time on research.

Contact companies you think might be interested, and ask what they'd like to see made. Treat it like market research, and not a sales pitch. Don't even ask about a job. Making good things is all you need to do to get a good job.

Proposal writing is also a good way to practice both technical writing and product design.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for the excellent suggestions! I've been working on bigger DoD contracts at my current job, so I'm pretty oblivious to the small company/university grant process.

Since I'm entering Stanford with the intent to obtain a terminal Master's, I'm not sure how much research I'll be allowed or encouraged to participate in. Continuing for my Doctorate is certainly still an option, but I think I'm leaning towards getting my Master's and finding/founding some small company to work with.

Any other insight you have into my situation would be appreciated!

<comment><USER3> If you don't want to do pure research for more than a few years, don't bother with a PhD. Building real things is more valuable. If you happen to be researching something very related to the real world, like some farm robot or robo soccer, you can trust a PhD will demand enough practical and operational skills to be useful even if you don't continue doing research.

Big defense projects are very, very different than SBIRs and STTRs.

Most importantly: you don't need permission to do cool work. It would be better to add a semester and do research than to just do coursework. I can't stress this enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They should totally have apprenticeships, it results in cheaper labor with more focus on your technologies in the long run. Take Zoho for example, they recruit kids who are still in high school to become programmers for them.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is slightly off-topic, but is there no way (yet?) to browse jobs on snaptalent? I can't even get their widget to load in my browser on sites that have it, for some reason (Firefox and Opera on Linux).

<comment><USER6> Sites like Monster are plagued by hordes of pizza-delivery boys who apply for programming jobs because all they have to do is click a button. I think the whole idea behind Snaptalent is that jobs ads only appear to targeted audiences, so the delivery boys never see them unless the delivery boys read news.yc.

<comment><USER5> Ah, thanks. The widget is working for me now on blogs that use it, so it's less of an issue now anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interested? Of course I am! Talented enough? Doubtful :(</comment>


China fires up next-generation neutron-science facility - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/china-fires-up-next-generation-neutron-science-facility-1.22976 <comment><USER2> Time to beef up on security before their top scientists start disappearing.

<comment><USER3> I don't get it, wouldn't building this be pointless after the Sophon interference jinxed everything?

<comment><USER4> Neutrons are neutral, Sophons are charged particles, so this should be OK. Now if it unfolds into lower dimensions, all bets are off.</comment></comment></comment>


Realtek RTL836x series of Ethernet switch ICs has a 8051 hidden inside - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175701730819895296 <comment><USER2> This is rather misleading. The RTL8366 pictured in the tweet doesn't have an 8051 in it which is why it's absent from the datasheet. I don't see anything in this thread that contradicts this. The RTL8367 does have an 8051 in it, and it is covered in the datasheet. As near as I can tell this entire claim is based on reading a RTL8366 datasheet when the part in question was a RTL8367.

I'm not seeing anything nefarious here at all, the RTL8367 is designed for 'smart switches', the 8051 is there to run the webUI. In general, 8051s are _everywhere_, it's one of the most used IP cores in the world. I'd bet the average household has a a few dozen of them in various devises.

EDIT: Looking through some older tweets from the same author, I think the claim is based on pinout similarities between the RTL8366 and the RTL8367. My guess would be that these two parts are the same die and the RTL8366 parts are the ones where a defect was found in the CPU core which would be a likely source of manufacturing defects.

<comment><USER3> It's not always a binning thing.

I've used similar parts, like bluetooth transceivers, where there are two SKUs: one is a cheaper commodity part and comes with built-in firmware.

The other more expensive part allows for modifiable firmware (and, thus, exposes the processor inside). My cynical POV is that the chipmaker knows they'll be spending more internally on SDK development/support and field rep time. So that needs to be recaptured in the cost of the part.

<comment><USER4> It is expensive to tape out a different chip. As 8051 originally was about 50000 transistors that's peanuts nowadays.

Likely cheaper to manufacture a single chip and do market segmentation via software than manufacture two if the savings are measly (let's assume 16nm process) 1/500 mm^2 per chip.

<comment><USER2> It's not so much the 'core' as the memory. For example it looks like the RTL8367 has 16KB of program memory, 32KB of data memory, 256bytes of SRAM and a 12KB nic buffer. These memory cells will make up the bulk of the transistors in the 8051 part of the chip and tend to be points of manufacturing failure. In many cases the chip would be designed with more memory than it needs under the assumption there will always be a few failures. So if you need 16KB, you design in 18KB and turn off the rows/banks that fail or test as the worst. If too many fail you sell it as next memory size down, or in this case you zap a couple fuses and sell it as the part without an MCU on board. Of course this doesn't always work, sometimes you need more of the non-perfect parts than you have to fill orders so you just zap the fuses anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tweet has been deleted (URL 404s). Internet archive has some but not all of the thread [https://web.archive.org/web/20190922094616/https://twitter.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190922094616/https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175701730819895296)

<comment><USER6> [https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175767033360740352](https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175767033360740352)

<comment><USER7> I've seen this hatred towards HN before on Twitter and I don't really get it. HN is one of the most polite places on the internet, including Twitter.

<comment><USER8> Having made (what I thought were polite) comments on Reddit only to get down- voted into oblivion, I agree that HN has one of the most thoughtful and respectful communities I've participated in.

<comment><USER9> In my experience, it's pretty easy to misjudge the expected overall level and style of politeness in a given social space. Many people were raised with the idea of politeness being a safe default, but in some spaces being _too_ polite can come off as aloof or condescending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's even some existing code to manipulate the firmware:

[http://arny.tjps.eu/OpenWrt/EasyBox904xDSL/oem-firmware- info...](http://arny.tjps.eu/OpenWrt/EasyBox904xDSL/oem-firmware- info/research/)

And

[https://github.com/uwehermann/easybox-904-xdsl- firmware/blob...](https://github.com/uwehermann/easybox-904-xdsl- firmware/blob/master/package/infineon- utilities/feeds/ifx_feeds_uboot/open_uboot/src.904dsl/drivers/net/vr9_sw.c)

<comment><USER11> not really

>SMI SLAVE FOR EXTERNAL CPU

your links talk about external programming of smart switches, you could do this 10 years ago with RTL3866

[https://hackaday.com/2010/05/26/unlocking-the-crippled- poten...](https://hackaday.com/2010/05/26/unlocking-the-crippled-potential-of- an-unmanaged-switch/)

[http://spritesmods.com/?art=rtl8366sb](http://spritesmods.com/?art=rtl8366sb)

or 15 years ago with RTL8309sb

[https://web.archive.org/web/20061118184321/http://pupa.da.ru...](https://web.archive.org/web/20061118184321/http://pupa.da.ru/avrsw/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow! I just went back some 20+ years ago going through 8051 instruction set while at the University. It's amazing how versatile and useful it still is.

</comment><comment><USER13> A lot of devices use these simple microprocessors to do general management and talk to low speed buses

I remember in the times of region locked DVD players, some device hacks targeted the same processor inside the DVD player unit (I'm talking about the IDE/SATA drive, not the whole player)

</comment><comment><USER14> I actually have a switch (TP-Link TL-SG105E "Easy Smart") that runs a whole Web UI on that built in CPU. It's quite neat, as the switch is 20$ yet has some "smart"-esque features :)

</comment><comment><USER15> A reply in the twitter thread makes the most sense to me: "Interesting! I can imagine this being used to generate & monitor traffic for factory test." That would make verification much easier and also explain why it's undocumented. Of course if there's a way for testers to use it, there's potentially a way for others to use it as well.

<comment><USER16> why would you need an 8051 to do an internal testing, though? and why would make it easier to test?

<comment><USER15> I see it like debug statements in code. If the only access you have to a function is from the inputs and returns, it's difficult to see where the issue lies when the return value is wrong. Having an internally accessible layer of I/O lets you bypass certain areas or get values at different steps to determine root cause. Could be useful for firmware testing, fixing ones that fail a normal test, and RMA's.

You would want to leave the circuitry in place for production because it's largely unnoticeable and changing it could introduce bugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Context - these two twitter threads: [https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175692789171884032](https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175692789171884032)

 _> so apparently most unmanaged switches have a 8051 connected to the switch fabric inside. would it occur to you that pretty much any switch on your network could be monitoring or injecting traffic? sure would not to me_

[https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175692567150653440](https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/1175692567150653440)

 _> i wasn't previously aware that it's possible (it does makes sense i guess? doing switching entirely in gateware is more risky), and it's an absolutely incredible placement for a near-undetectable implant_

</comment><comment><USER7> Honest, tangentially related question from someone unfamiliar with the field:

Why are we still using old 80xx chips in embedded applications? Expired patents? Existing toolchain? Inertia?

It's hard to believe we couldn't do better, cheaper and more power efficient solutions with all the tricks we've learned in those almost 40 years.

<comment><USER17> The core is simple, small, cheap or even free, requires few resources, has plenty of tool support, is well-understood and well-documented, and is easy to debug and deploy. The 8051 is perfectly sufficient for many simple embedded applications that only require an 8-bit micro.

It's the instruction set that has been retained, not the silicon design. The variants these days are more power-efficient and powerful in terms of MIPS and peripherals, and have indeed benefited from years of R&D.

<comment><USER7> But is a ISA that wasn't designed for embedded really that well suited for it?

And if the silicon design is new, we are not benefiting all the much from decades of battle testing, right?

I can't imagine how a clean, embedded first 32bit ISA design wouldn't be more appropriate.

<comment><USER18> > But is a ISA that wasn't designed for embedded really that well suited for > it?

But 8051 _was_ designed for embedded:

> The Intel MCS-51 (commonly termed 8051) is a single chip microcontroller > (MCU) series developed by Intel in 1980 for use in embedded systems

(wikipedia)

> I can't imagine how a clean, embedded first 32bit ISA design wouldn't be > more appropriate

I guess we'll see how riscv will develop.

<comment><USER7> Ah, I didn't know that. I thought it was a repurposed chip. That makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's fun when you find the firmware on periferals like this.

Did you know the processor in the b43 network cards use this really weird architecture developed by the company that made the backplane? It also doesn't actually handle the radio baseband, that's done entirely in hardware (If my reading of the firmware is correct.) Which makes me wonder why having more open source WiFi card firmware is rare, I guess it still handles calibration and some other things that you could use to intentionally make the card misbehave but it's a lot more limited than I expected.

</comment><comment> non-entity A few weeks back, I was working on trying to patch a BSD driver for another Realtek product (a wireless network adapter) and their were a handful of comments / source reference mentioning "8051". I assumed this to be the microcontroller and, out of curiosity, attempted to disassemble the provided firmware binaries, sadly to no avail.

Does realtek publish their documentation on products publicly? I found it interesting that the author of the tweet has, for example, a pinout.

<comment><USER20> No, they don't, and they usually don't answer to emails asking for it. You may be lucky finding it at pudn.com or other datasheet-sharing websites, but not officially from them.

<comment><USER21> It's common with a lot of Chinese companies; they won't answer requests for datasheets, yet you can find them "leaked" elsewhere and they're not really bothered by it.

I suspect it's more of a "we're not interested in answering your questions, which you will certainly have if we give you a datasheet directly" than any real concern over IP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This post is gone.

Tweets make bad HN posts; not only because they disappear, but they're too short to have all the details, they don't capture a whole conversation, when they do it's disjointed and in pieces, people jump to conclusions, etc.

<comment><USER23> Also I got pinged by like a dozen different HN bots, because each time any of them tweets a link, Twitter thinks it's a quote-tweet and sends a notification. Annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Old D-Link DGS-1008D switches with Vitesse chipsets also have a built-in 8051 for firmware (but only 8KB SPI flash loaded into 8KB of embedded RAM, so pretty useless). I think it's mostly used for the cable test when powering on the switch.

</comment><comment><USER25> Can somebody please explain what the big deal about it is, if it's even true?

<comment><USER26> It's a documented part, the OP was just confusing two different parts/part revisions.

The paranoid would say "it's a hidden backdoor for running shady code". However, anyone with even a passing interest in embedded computing would recognize that it's designed to store and run official firmware; nothing shady or underhanded about it.

So in short, in this particular instance it's much ado about nothing.

<comment><USER27> The hardware doesn't care what it was designed for; it does what it's told. It is extremely plausible that capabilities which exist for testing purposes can _also_ be exploited for running malware.

<comment><USER26> Correct, but the implication in the tweet was that it was secretly embedded by the manufacturer for nefarious purposes. The Twitter OP jumped to paranoid conclusions in part because of their obvious lack of understanding of even simple embedded hardware concepts.

You can kill someone with a hammer, but that doesn't mean the hammer was designed for killing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There is one mentioned an z80 as well.

</comment><comment><USER29> Tweet deleted. She tweeted "nonconsensually submitted to the orange website" hahaha.

<comment><USER30> > _Tweet deleted. She tweeted "nonconsensually submitted to the orange > website" hahaha._

And this is why people avoid this site....</comment></comment>


Elm - Routing - SASS Boilerplate - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jasalo/elm-routing-sass-boilerplate <comment><AUTHOR> Just used this folder structure on a recent project. Hope you guys like it!</comment>


WTF, Amazon. What The (Price) Fix? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonlim.ca/2012/06/wtf-amazon/

<comment><USER2> He did not bother to note that one is a Macmillan edition, one is Transworld (a UK publisher). The Macmillan one is now $9.99, Transworld is $9.49. I can't account for his higher price, unless Macmillan lowered it, since Macmillan as publisher sets the price, not Amazon.

<comment><USER3> Hi there, OP here.

You are right, I did not notice that they were different publishers. However, I would just like to point out that the prices you are seeing are still not the one I am seeing.

One of the commenters on my blog (and one on Reddit) mentioned that they were $0.50 apart now, and that is not the case for myself, as I still see a $3.13 difference in prices!

The Tor Books version is far and away better on the eyes due to the font, but from what I can tell, they are the exact same book.

<comment><USER4> Font is a ridiculous differentiator anyway. Can you not change that on your Kindle? I mean... the book itself is just text.

<comment><USER3> Funny enough I just tested it out - it seems to be using a different _type_ of serif font, or it's just smaller.

Either way, I can adjust it (and I'm kinda dumb to not have noticed it before) so there goes the differentiation I guess?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There seems to be two issues here being conflated as one (judging by the follow-up/updates):

1.) Two different items - because the same item is being offered by two different sellers. The $9 is Amazon's main one, the $12 is Macmillan's own specified price (note the "Sold by Macmillan" in that entry).

2.) Prices on the same item (identified by ASIN) do change at Amazon: sellers can change their prices, even to ridiculous lengths such as this from last year: <http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358> . In the retail part of Amazon, Kindle books are treated in much the same way as physical items, so the same flexibility of pricing is offered. Physical goods have cost of holding stock and 90-day-invoicing cycles, hence pricing seem to fluctuate based on that 90 day window and items still on hand at payment day. Kindle ebooks, less so, but there's still A/B testing to consider.

Online, especially for non-physical items are tending to have fluctuating prices, trying to find the ideal price to maximise profits.

One of my friends recommends <http://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/> for price watching items on Amazon. I tend to keep an eye on the Lego-focused variant over at <http://brickset.com/buy/uk/amazon/> \-- price watching is proving to be an interesting cottage-industry.

Clearing cookies / incognito mode triggers re-selecting a different bucket - that's why you are seeing different pricing. So, if you want, clear cookies over and over, find the lowest price, and buy right there and then.

Interestingly, the counter-intuitive strategy of increasing price can sometimes actually reap more sales. So having the lowest price isn't always the most optimal strategy.

I've had worse price differentials with British Airways. Go directly to the site for a flight and I get one price. Go to Expedia pick the same flight, get redirected straight through to the same page as before and the exact flight is £200 cheaper.

<comment><USER3> > Online, especially for non-physical items are tending to have fluctuating > prices, trying to find the ideal price to maximise profits.

Unfortunately, yep.

Like you, if I ever buy anything online such as a flight, I will check every possible site and pick the lowest, clearing my cookies all along the way to ensure that they aren't messing around with it.

I really wish they didn't do that! I'd love to see a study on this behaviour's effect on sales though.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any cool ideas for an M.S. thesis involving WebGL? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all! I have to write a masters thesis and I want to use WebGL as my main technology.
It's such a new technology.
I was wondering if anyone had any cool ideas for a thesis involving webGL?
My first instinct is to write a game but I am but one person.
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> You are right, a game would be a tonne of code. Massive encouragement on the WebGL, btw, 3D made me feel like a kid again. Here is a project I have always wanted to do: given a wire-frame, simulate the resulting minimum soapfilm surface algorithmicaly. I believe that maximizes the fun/LOC ratio. You might look at Javelin, btw, a ClojureScript lib.

</comment><comment><USER3> A good example of the creative flexibility that GL allows: [http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of- light](http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light)

<comment><AUTHOR> That game looks really cool. Very original idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe master thesis work differently from where you are...but I think any thesis should start with defining your research problem, and working from their to define the tools you will use to investigate the problem.

Picking the tools first is backwards.

In any case, I think compiling C++ to javascript/webgl using emcscripten is an interesting space, and surely there are a lot of open problems in this area.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the tech could play a major part of your research especially if it's as new as WebGL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Off the top of my head:

Make a 3d website.

Make a game (Easier then it sounds)

Make a scripting language that compiles to WebGL.

Good luck!

<comment><USER6> > Make a 3d website.

It might be interesting to make a 3d interface for HN. Articles with more activity float in the foreground, and articles with less activity float in the background.

Or articles with comments from people you score highly float out more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've seen some examples of WebGL being applied to medical image visualization, but my gut tells me this area is still ripe for contributions.

<comment><USER8> I'm really interested in seeing some of those examples. If you don't remember the links, can you point me in the general direction?

<comment><USER7> Here's one example, from a research institute where I studied years ago: [http://www.imaging.robarts.ca/~dcantor/](http://www.imaging.robarts.ca/~dcantor/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You might also ask this question on the WebGL Developers Google Group:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/webgl-dev- list](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/webgl-dev-list)

</comment><comment><USER10> Take a look at acko.net for some inspiration!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks yall for the ideas!!

Some good stuff to think about.</comment>


WHOIS for Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://servletsuite.blogspot.com/2011/07/whois-for-twitter.html

<comment><USER2> So this is basically a front end for the Google social graph API?</comment>


The Importance of Engineering "Motivation" Into Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23354/page1/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. So the internet could already be a super-intelligent entity but it's decided it doesn't want any more progress, so it gives us pictures of kittens, and twitter. Sounds plausible.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty much it, it got bored and made YouTube, filling it with distracting videos so it would have something to do</comment></comment>


Jeff Jarvis on Why Google Came to an Agreement with Verizon - <AUTHOR> http://thefastertimes.com/mediaandtech/2010/08/10/the-google-verizon-agreement-why-did-google-do-it/

<comment><USER2> This whole thing reminds me of "Animal Farm". "Four legs good. Two legs better."

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://act.boldprogressives.org/cms/sign/google_evil/>, as an alternative to a boycott of Gmail.

<comment><USER4> Why not not just boycott verizon. It's not like the others have agree to this yet. If I was a small telco (hey t-mobile) I'd be doing my best to position myself as the open internet experience TM.

<comment><USER5> verizon + android = open source. that's exactly what vzw is doing by partnering with goog so much. WE know its bullshit especially when put next to this deal, but considering what a household phrase "open source" has become over the last 2-3 years, it's a valuable marketing foothold now and vzw isn't stupid.</comment></comment></comment>


Lawmakers ask US intelligence chief to investigate TikTok - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/24/tiktok-lamakers-national-security-threat/ <comment><USER2> > But the lawmakers say because TikTok is owned by a Beijing-based company, it > could be compelled by the Chinese government to turn over user data — such > as location data, cookies, metadata and more — even if it's stored on > servers it owns in the United States.

An analogy: To protect data from potential acquirement by the US government, EU should shut out Google from Europe? This doesn't make sense and is completely political. Watching politicians trying to gain brownie points and _sound like they care_ while not actually doing anything useful hurts my eyes.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure which laws they're basing this on, but it's not unusual to see countries differently. For example UK's DPA allows storing data in countries with similar protection guarantees. I would expect that doesn't include China, but does include Germany.

US will have more or less trust in each country.

<comment><USER4> > I'm not sure which laws they're basing this on, but it's not unusual to see > countries differently. For example UK's DPA allows storing data in countries > with similar protection guarantees. I would expect that doesn't include > China, but does include Germany.

It's not the ICO that sets that rule, it's the GDPR (and prior to that, the Data Protection Directive)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find it very intriguing and fascinating the market penetration speed tiktok had:

\- developed in 200 days

\- launched in September 2016 in China

\- launched in September 2017 internationally

\- in November 2017 it's parent company spends up to $1 billion to acquire musical.ly.

\- it presently has over 500 million MAU users (I think it has them for over a year now, but I'm on mobile and can't find a source for this claim)

How do you think it's possible for an app appearing seemingly out of the blue to move so fast in such a crowded and mature market like social media?

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

<comment><USER6> > How do you think it's possible for an app appearing seemingly out of the > blue to move so fast in such a crowded and mature market like social media?

Has anyone in this thread actually spent time watching Tim Tok videos and using the app?

It's completely addictive, the content and dynamics of the app are _great_. It's a really solid product and it's not confusing why all the kids like it.

I mean I am totally open to the idea that there's lots more going on and it's a nuanced situation. But let's start with the basic facts, it's not confusing why it's a giant hit.

<comment><USER7> TikTok is the first app where AI is the product. [https://a16z.com/2018/12/03/when-ai-is-the-product-the- rise-...](https://a16z.com/2018/12/03/when-ai-is-the-product-the-rise-of-ai- based-consumer-apps/)

<comment><USER8> What's the Chinese Govt response to social media engament optimizing/addictive apps been?

Do they recognize the dangers? Is there a digital well being movement happening?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are some interesting results if you check the Google Analytics ID of TikTok.

They seem to also manage a somewhat sizable portfolio of gambling sites, sites selling knockoff Sports Jerseys, and adult videotube sites.

I am counting about 45 sites right now for UA-75850242.

Many Chinese sites seem to operate like this. I believe Huawei has about 500 completely unrelated sites.

A sort of SFW "soft core" example of this would be yoma202.com [1] which is also used to manage huaweimarine.com. Please note that Huawei and Huawei Marine separated about 6 months ago technically.

[1] [http://yoma202.com](http://yoma202.com)

<comment><USER10> That doesn't actually mean anything. Every large site will have it's UA number copied by random spammers, often in Russia.

I've never figured out the motivation, but I've seen it a number of times.

<comment><USER9> I think you make a valid point that also is the most plausible argument I've heard. Except though if I do this exercise for USA sites, I don't see the same thing. My guess though is that the USA sites are maybe just more aggressive about filing abuse claims to the registrar?

<comment><USER11> late to this discussion, but in terms of using Google Analytics, you can whitelist specific domains if someone is copying your UA code and sending your instance data. Most implementations are set up this way from the start so you don't even need to notice someone is attempting to poison your data.

One of the reasons this is done is to generate referrer spam, which is a really niche way to get the analysts who are looking at the data in GA to see their ads. I'm sure there are other reasons folks do this, perhaps there's a UA- code factor into PageRank/Google rankings that spammers picked up on, I can think of a lot of other creative reasons.

That said, it's pretty curious that there are a lot of sites using it, you might do well to see if you can intercept some mobile app data to see if any other apps are also using the UA tag of TikTok.

There are other things you could look at in terms of how they implement the actual tracking in GA, if the tracking calls look pretty similar but aren't just a carbon copy, it could be more intentional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Forget the national security concerns (though they could well be valid, would not be surprised if so) ... what about the potential for child exploitation? The softporn/borderline actual porn that children are allowed to post of themselves to be viewed by anybody? It amazes me that very little has been said about this in the mainstream press. Just do a YouTube search for "hottest tiktok videos" and convince yourself that child predators aren't using this platform. Some YouTuber did a big "expose" of this a while back and had his video deleted (and then reinstated?), typical YouTube drama etc. but it was quite eye opening. I would never allow my children anywhere near such a platform.

<comment><USER3> Is there a reason this gives different impression than "hottest vine videos"? Was vine curated differently?

<comment><USER12> I think a huge part of it is that music videos in general are highly sexualised. Vine isn't about just music videos, you can post whatever. TikTok is specifically for music videos, so kids will see popular music videos where celebs are scantily dressed or whatever, and then emulate it. And then other kids come along and see what their friends are posting and want to do it too, and the cycle just continues. Add to that the fact it isn't US based (and so probably isn't moderated as heavily) and you get what we have now.

edit: confused by the down votes. Not sure what is being disagreed with? Miley cyrus wearing so little you can see her bum cheeks is what I'd consider sexualised. Maybe you don't? Do you think it's okay for 12 year olds to be posting that on TikTok? Am I just a prude?

<comment><USER13> I saw nothing remarkable at all for your search term.

<comment><USER12> Well, it isn't something I search regularly so perhaps not accurate. Or perhaps YouTube has started removing some videos? I remember seeing a lot of fuss made about this in the YouTube community about a year ago. At work now and not really keen to add that search to my history, but might see if anything has changed later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > the lawmakers asked the acting director of national intelligence Joseph > Maguire if the app maker could be compelled to turn Americans' data over to > the Chinese authorities.

> Both Schumer and Cotton warn that TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, is > "still required to adhere" to Chinese law.

I'm surprised if there are many TikTok users in the US.

What is the draw of that app? The description on Wikipedia says is it is for "markets outside China" but all the content I see upvoted on reddit appears to be from China. Do they just take the popular videos from China's version (that the West has never seen) and inject them into TikTok, making TikTok appear to be popular/high quality?

<comment><USER15> >>I'm surprised if there are many TikTok users in the US.

Tiktok is

#1 in social category in US on Google Play.

#1 in Entertainment in US on Apple App Store.

Does that surprise you?

<comment><USER14> I'm not surprised, and I don't think many people look to those rankings as good proxies for innovative software.

They just show what's popular, not what's hip. Being part of the borg is not enviable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> OT: The other day in one of Europe's biggest consumer electronics retail chain (MediaMarkt):

Why does Huawei has 3x more showroom space than all other smartphones manufacturers together, right in front of the entrance and this in _every_ MediaMarkt? No other brand has such a setup.

The US is the only country trying to interfere and seeing potential and bigger threats.

<comment><USER17> > _Why does Huawei has 3x more showroom space than all other smartphones > manufacturers together, right in front of the entrance and this in every > MediaMarkt?_

Where have you seen this? I bought a phone at MediaMarkt yesterday in NRW and I haven't seen anything close to what you describe. I would put them head-to- head with Samsung, which sounds reasonable for a brand this big. But "3x more showroom that all other manufacturers together" feels a bit too much.</comment></comment>


Going With The Flow: Google's Secret Switch To The Next Wave Of Networking - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/04/going-with-the-flow-google/ <comment><USER2> There is literally no equipment available in the market that does what these Google's switches do. Cisco, Juniper, et al, protecting their technology and investments into switching over the last 30 years, just didn't have the balls to kill their old lines by doing this wholeheartedly.

Essentially, they have spent the last 20 yrs building their software which runs on Motorola, MIPS, PowerPC, etc., running arcane switching protocols - not always interoperably even. And these 'software-less' switches can be made by almost anyone, since the software is their secret sauce.

Think of it as going from Minicomputers, which were custom boxes which had custom hw/sw from a few vendors, to PCs, which have an 'open' design and are designed for interoperability.

That's what OpenFlow does to the switching/networking ecosystem.

And since none of the incumbents want to commit hara-kiri, a few startups are trying to do this, Nicira, BigSwitch, etc. Many others have OpenFlow compatible switches, but nowhere near the scale that Google would need in their datacenters.

Brilliant stuff. And I'd love to see Cisco die because of this - they've kept the industry back for long enough.

<comment><USER3> I'm nothing like a network engineer. But is the centralization described in this article a good thing for the Internet as a whole?

I can see that within an organization's internal network, they can assess the importance of different communications, and route accordingly. So on the internal side, it's potentially a big win.

But across the globe, who can assign the priority of traffic accurately and impartially? And isn't the decentralized nature of the current architecture an important feature, because of the way it can route around problems (be they technical or regulatory) of its own accord, without requiring a higher authority to tell it how (and thus without being susceptible to the agenda of that authority)?

<comment><USER4> The point is that the switch is programmable. You can implement the centralised behaviour. You can implement decentralised one. You can implement anything you want.

<comment><USER3> Do there exist heuristics for decentralized traffic handling that this is able to support, but cannot be implemented through traditional approaches?

<comment><USER5> The idea is to build a globally consistant view of the network. Currently, each node builds up its own view of the global state and routes based on this. Sure, distributed protocols allow us to share this information, but it's not guaranteed that the state will be accurate a few hops away.

OpenFlow allows an entity to keep a global consistant state, and calculate the rules by which each of the nodes should forward. This logically centralised control can then enable higher utilisation of the network. Think about traffic reports on the radio -- If you are driving and know that there is a bottleneck on one highway, then you can take an alternative route.

EDIT: I use "Global" in this context for within an AS, not necessarily internet-wide.

<comment><USER6> Is that analogy necessarily parallel to networking? The radio station communicates with an entire city. The traffic jam only affects traffic within X miles of the bottle neck. I can imagine a car radio that automatically stitches to a local radio station that only broadcasts traffic jams that are relevant to cars in that area, eliminating the need for a larger centralized station.

<comment><USER5> Well, I think any analogy starts to fall apart when you look too closely. But you've got the right idea. Sure, there's no reason you couldn't distribute it out further. I used the word 'entity' above in an attempt to imply that it could be "one large radio station" or "a group of smaller radio stations"--the point is that the decision-making is abstracted out to somewhere else.

Note also the use of "logically centralized", not "physically centralized".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note that the openflow protocol has been implemented in Haskell by Galois and Yale - <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/nettle-openflow> \- and you can also configure openflow networks - <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/nettle- netkit> / <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/nettle-frp>

</comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting that this is now the insurgent, because in some sense, this looks like networking done the _old_ way, the telco way: centralised provisioning, aiming for 100% utilisation, etc. The kind of thing that cisco et all were originally the small rebels against.

<comment><USER9> I was thinking the exact same thing. Google controls their own network, so they can implement a centrally-managed, circuit-based networking scheme.

Telephone networks tend to use these (on a scheme called SS7[1]) because in most countries, the telephone networks were built by monopolies. It was possible to develop the entire network as a single system and thus to obtain very high efficiencies for certain use cases.

Google goes a step further. What they seem to have done is married circuit- based networking with batch planning. The network itself is circuit based -- rather than each packet "finding" its own way, it can be routed end-to-end by a central plan. But the decision of what to move when can also be planned. Note the reference to "simulating a load". That's similar to what mainframe batch planning achieves.

As usual, everything old is new again.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7>

<comment><USER10> Lol interesting I will have to share this with some of my old school Telco mates :-)

So whats next Google reinvents x.400 and x.500 (not the special needs version LDAP)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The basic idea of OpenFlow is getting the manufacturers to split between making good software and good hardware. If you make great hardware you can continue to operate, someone else will control the forwarding decisions. If you want to make good software, you can use someone else's hardware.

There will be a shakeup because telling the hardware manufacturers their software isn't good enough isn't a great way to start that conversation, but it's inevitable. They will insist that the software is like that for a reason, and to do so is saying the last twenty years of development has been done the wrong way.

I think it's highly interesting. I went to school for computer science but found computer networking very interesting. There seems to be a certain level of dismissal in the complexity of networking by people who write applications. Writing a one line java socket that connects to another TCP port is trivial, but the details are tedious. The same way we forget how difficult it is to get phone calls to work because the end result is simple - phones ring.

OpenFlow will need to reinvent the wheel unless the existing hardware manufacturers decide to give them a head start, which is unlikely. If it's open source it will evolve quickly, however. There are many difficult decisions and engineering problems to solve, which I suppose is a good sign.

</comment><comment><USER12> Google wants to make switching hardware a commodity product. Right now most switching software does not interoperate, at least not on a level Google wants.

Because of this if you want the latest and greatest features from Cisco you have to run all Cisco. Or Juniper. You can't just buy 10 Cisco switches and 10 Juniper switches and all run the same operating system. Compare this to PC hardware where I could buy any combination and install any OS I want.

<comment><USER13> The hardware is commodity, but you've centralized the software/logic. Is this really a net win on a global scale? (It's obviously a net win at the micro level, or else Google wouldn't use it)

<comment><USER5> The protocol doesn't force this centralization to be physical, just logical -- Hyperflow[1] is one example of how a physically distributed control plane can be created.

[1] [http://static.usenix.org/event/inm10/tech/full_papers/Tootoo...](http://static.usenix.org/event/inm10/tech/full_papers/Tootoonchian.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> OpenFlow is really the coolest thing to happen to internet infrastructure in a long time. Just look at this video from Stanford where they route a wireless video stream simultaneously over WiFi and WiMAX. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov1DZYINg3Y> This technology is really imperative if wireless networks want to cope with the increased traffic from all mobile devices. How cool will it be when, having a video call, your iPhone naturally switches from the cellular network to your home WiFi when you get home. Or event better splits the traffic over both networks.

<comment><USER15> _How cool will it be when, having a video call, your iPhone naturally switches from the cellular network to your home WiFi when you get home._

It might be technically cool in the video, but my cellphone contract costs more than my broadband one and the connection is more stable too. I don't want to pay a phone company while they get to freeload on my ISP contract, and I don't want my phonecalls dropping out when my broadband does.

<comment><USER16> If you're paying AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint per GB, and you're getting 250GB/month from Comcast on your home connection, yeah, you're going to want your iPhone to intelligently switch to the "cheapest" connection available at the time of data usage (if roaming between connections is possible).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I found the licensing interesting:

 _License

Copyright (c) 2008 The Board of Trustees of The Leland Stanford Junior University

We are making the OpenFlow specification and associated documentation (Software) available for public use and benefit with the expectation that others will use, modify and enhance the Software and contribute those enhancements back to the community. However, since we would like to make the Software available for broadest use, with as few restrictions as possible permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this Software to deal in the Software under the copyrights without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

The name and trademarks of copyright holder(s) may NOT be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to the Software or any derivatives without specific, written prior permission._

It seems they're rolling their own license, as opposed to adopting any of the other open licensing schemes out there. Any thoughts why they might do this?

<comment><USER18> It is legally identical to the MIT license. The prefactory clause is purely hortatory.

<comment><USER17> It does appear to be largely identical. Is it not common practice to include the name of the MIT license with the distribution, as is the case with the GPL and Apache licenses?

<comment><USER19> No, not that I have seen. It's only called the MIT license because MIT used it for their software (X, Athena, etc). The BSD license is a similar situation; it doesn't say BSD in it anywhere, it's only called that because it was used by BSD. Plus these days, neither of those licenses are overseen by who named them - vs the Apache and GNU GPL which have version numbers and caretakers, if you will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "In the user-facing network you also need every packet to arrive intact — customers would be pretty unhappy if a key sentence in a document or e-mail was dropped."

Why bother trying to illustrate with examples, if you're gonna write things like that?

<comment><USER21> It's arguably accurate; a UDP text-based protocol _could_ drop that key sentence. Nonetheless, it's wired. What did you expect?

<comment><USER22> Accurate for maybe a text-based talk client, but you wouldn't use UDP for docs or email. I expected more from Steven Levy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We used to run routing on commodity computers - then came hardware routers because you could do things faster when you specialized. Now we are back to writing new software routers to run on commodity hardware because hardware is now fast enough. Is that right? Looks like [http://blog.gardeviance.org/2012/03/tens-graphs-on- organisat...](http://blog.gardeviance.org/2012/03/tens-graphs-on- organisational-warfare.html)

<comment><USER24> Sort of but not really... openflow keeps the specialized network hardware, in the form of switching fabrics etc, but allows for a common set of programming instructions to be applied, so routing decisions can be made based on simple rules in the hardware, or exported to a computer to decide routing (for the packet or flow) without needing the computer itself to process all the traffic. This is different than using a computer with N ethernet cards, where all the data had to be marshalled around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nick McKeown's OpenNetworking Summit 2011 presentation entitled "How SDN will Shape Networking"[1] explains very well the abstraction of ideas that Software-Defined Networking provides. OpenFlow is a protocol which implements the idea of SDN.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9-K5O_qYgA>

</comment><comment><USER25> The article uses the analogy of road traffic congestion being defeated by autonomous vehicles with swarm-like intelligence enabled by centralised computing. Which is interesting.

</comment><comment><USER26> This also implies that Google has private fiber between their data centers, right?

<comment><USER27> I think this is fairly common. We had this at Bank of America too; our own non-Internet IP-based network. It even did multicast, almost.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, but did BoA buy actual fiber in the ground? You can have your own non- Internet IP network easily if you lease dedicated physical circuits from telcos. (This is how the military does it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I like that Google is working on both sides of the car traffic analogy.

</comment><comment><USER29> They can probably extend this system (judging purely by the analogy since I am not a network guy) to their self driving cars one day. One would think that a similar mechanism would be needed to manage traffic.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps. I would propose that the application of this paradigm to traffic flows would have each intersection making the decisions for the drivers. A car says "I'm heading to east 42nd", and the intersection says "Sure, go left."

Furthermore, traffic controller(s) would constantly gather information about traffic conditions from each intersection, and tell them how to direct the traffic to optimise road usage.

This way, the traffic controller knows everything about the optimal way traffic should flow, and it only has to make decisions based on the number of intersections rather than the number of cars. If you consider that one intersection could have tens of thousands of cars per day, that provides a huge saving in computation.

This differs from the analogy in the article; Intersection = Router, Car = Packet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Probably a stupid question: Does OpenFlow possibly change my home network setup in the future too? Or for a small bussiness? Coffee shops etc.

<comment><USER31> There's hasn't been much research in this direction, but there are probably potential uses for OpenFlow in home networks. For example, apps or devices could use OpenFlow to give your router advice about how to handle their traffic, e.g. firewall or QoS rules. There's already an OpenFlow implementation for WRT54G routers, so it wouldn't be too hard to experiment with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> so openflow is an alternative to ipv4/v6 ?

<comment><USER14> No. The idea behind OpenFlow is having simple routers which only implement basic switching capabilities in hardware. The complex routing rules can then be set in software which allows for much easier and more capable traffic routing. It also allows more innovation in this part of the infrastructure which has traditionally been very resistant to it because of the incumbent players. You can, for example, experiment with new routing protocols without having to do a firmware or even hardware upgrade.

<comment><USER33> @mgw, thanks for your insightful comments.

Traditionally the argument has been specialized hardware doing function X, will be faster (but not customizable, upgradable) compared to doing function X in software on commodity hardware (slow but upgradable).

And fpga were pointed out as somewhere in the middle ( some hw customization using sw)

What are your thoughts on the argument that by using commodity hw & implementing routing algos, etc in sw, will be more flexible but _slower_.

Is there a significant performance/speed cost when you implement core networking features in sw ?

<comment><USER14> Specialized hardware will be faster than software for a long time. OpenFlow ist smart enough to go around this problem. The routing still takes place in specialized hardware and is therefore just as fast as in a standard device.

The routing layer in hardware acts on a set of cached rules which are very simple. Simplified, you can imagine them to be of the form Matching Rule -> Routing Action. The matching rule selects by the packet fields such as source port or destination IP. The routing actions could be "forward to port" or "drop packet". All of this is just as fast as in every other commodity router.

What is special in OpenFlow is another possibility for the "routing action" field (or for unmatched packets): You can send certain packets up into the software level, to the OpenFlow controller. This can be a centralized server and the logic is implemented in software. The software decides about the routing of these kinds of packets and sends the answer back to the router. Here the rule is cached again and from now on the routing for this is as fast as for all the other packets.

This last bit is the only part which is slower compared to commodity routers. A really great solution in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What's the benefit of keeping the data plane on the cisco/junpier hardware? #ports per box?

In my naivety, I'd expect the main benefits of openflow to be on the WAN links, so you could get away with 6 or so ports in a PC-like chassis running software routing, with dumb local switches?

What am I missing?

<comment><USER2> #ports/box or more accurately, #ports/rack unit & gigabits of throughput/rack unit.

The switching hardware is ASIC based and super optimized with CAM based switching on VLAN tags, destination addresses, etc. 1U switch could have 36 ports @ 1Gbps, and needs to switch 36Gbps within the switch, and perhaps 10Gbps upstream.

So line rate switching of 36Gbps+ in 1U, possible today only with ASICs, typically from Broadcom.

<comment><USER34> So openflow is useful within a cabinet?

I was thinking you could have have "dumb box, many ports" and "smart box, few ports". Each cab needs one of the former, but you could get away with not many of the latter?

<comment><USER2> OpenFlow is useful _across_ cabinets.

Cisco/Juniper boxes were smart, many ports, but smart only within each box. That is you had to configure each one individually. As in you could do static provisioning with a single tool across multiple boxes, but on the order of minutes between changes. If you had to create a VLAN with ten boxes, across 5 different racks, you would be spending quite a bit of time doing that, since you would need to find spare VLANs that are unused across the fabric, configure all the switches in between, etc.

Now with OpenFlow, all the switches are controlled by the central controller. And flow configuration is dynamic - ie you don't need to fiddle with individual configs, when the flows start, the controller is queried, and if there's an appropriate flow setup on the controller, it will be implemented, with local free VLANs, etc.

Basically the entire fabric becomes as dynamic & smart as the controller, instead of each switch being smart and static.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Finally a real world use case for active networks.

I built a proof of concept for soemthing like this for my master thesis - 2000.

I wish it had occurred to me that unlike the user being in control (in active networks), the network operator could be in control.

Anyhoo ...

</comment><comment><USER36> Anyone seen any router speed metrics for this? They are absent in the article, and I can't tell if that's just Wired or whether OpenFlow is still not fast enough.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sounds like most of the OpenFlow concept is a no-brainer improvement, but when they talk about using it for centralized control, that is worrisome.

<comment><USER38> Think "centralized control over all the routers and other devices that make up a company's global network" (as opposed to hundreds/thousands of routers all making their own decisions)

This is not about Dr. Evil-style centralized control of the whole Internet.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hello, World - <AUTHOR> People always talk about coding "Hello, World!" as a rite of initiation in a new programming language, but some folks have more elaborate programs/algorithms that they implement when learning a new language as a benchmark for their language learning (https://www.xavierllora.net/2014/03/22/yet-another-cga-implementation-now-in-haskell./) What is the program you always code in a new language to test how much you've learned? <comment><USER2> The program "Hello World" isn't anything to do with learning the language, it's about:

* How do I create a program?

* How do I store a program?

* How do I run a program?

* How do I get the program to output something?

So your first statement seems to miss the mark.

To answer your question, if I'm learning a new language it's usually because I have a specific problem to solve, so I write "Hello World", and then start to grow the program into what I need. I don't have a toy problem to implement as a test.

Probably not the answer you wanted.

<comment><AUTHOR> * How do I create a program (in this language)?

* How do I store a program?

* How do I run a program (in this language)?

* How do I get the program to output something (in this language)? You don't run C programs by calling python a.c, you run them by first compiling and then running the result. And yeah, I put the link there to illustrate what I was talking about, and it's not about why and how you learn a new programming language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's usually either: arbitrary like Advent of Code or Project Euler to see what it's like using the new language for sorts of things I know how I'd do in ones I normally use; or start/port my latest project idea. Most often the back-end to some web app that does something specific or perhaps a library to see how far a bad type system can go (e.g. typesafe SQL queries in Java vs Kotlin or F#).</comment>