Apple Removes Green Electronics Certification From Products - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2012/07/06/apple-removes-green-electronics-certification-from-products/ <comment><USER5> Gruber ranted about the iFixit's blog article on the difficulty of recycling the new Retina MacBook Pro on at least a couple podcasts - the implication being that the iFixit guy didn't really know what he was talking about with regards to the recycling element.

Let's see if he comes forth with a mea culpa, now that Apple is as much as admitting that their newer models just aren't easily recyclable - <USER2> why else would they be pulling the EPEAT certification from their products?

<comment><USER6> I think Gruber's response was pretty compelling: Apple will recycle any PC/Mac/Phone/iPod at their store or by mail free of charge. <http://www.apple.com/recycling/>

<comment><USER5> Following your link, I see that Apple contracts with "Sims Recycling Solutions" to recycle their computers.

Here's what Sims has to say about the new Apple Systems:

""Sealed units [like the iPad] make it difficult to remove the batteries," Steve Skurnac, president of SIMS Recycling Solutions, said in a statement. "From a recycler's point of view, the hazardous components [like batteries] need to be easily separated or removed.""

If Apple is contracting with third parties to recycle systems, and those third parties don't know how to recycle the glass with an adhesive on it - <USER3> there is an issue. [Edit - In their interview, iFixit called out in particular the difficulty separating the battery from the Retina MacBook Pro case - <USER4> same concern of the President of Apple's recycling company. [http://ifixit.org/2884/apple-ditches-green-standard-cuts- off...](http://ifixit.org/2884/apple-ditches-green-standard-cuts-off-federal- agencies-from-apple-products/)]

I just think Gruber (a podcast that I listen to, so it's clear where my biases lay) should have given a bit more credibility to Kyle Wiens. The iFixit guys know a lot about the material elements of hardware, and he did take the time to contact people in the recycling industry before making his comments.

<comment><USER7> I find this sealed argument a bit strange.

In most cities there are shops that will replace cracked screens, do basic damage repair etc on iPads, iPods, iPhones etc. They seem to manage just fine with the units being glued.

I am guessing the issue is purely a cost one.

<comment><USER8> When replacing a part the glue poses no issue. But recycling a part is different. The glue that is bonded to the glass etc can be difficult to remove, as is claimed above. Full removal is necessary to ensure the recycled product is not contaminated.

Moving beyond that, this raises the cost of recycling the glass, which in turn raises the cost of buying the recycled glass. This makes it a less attractive deal to manufacturers than new glass, thus giving companies less incentive to process the glass with glue.

<comment><USER9> All things considered, who really cares about the glass. Glass is not toxic. Throw it in a landfill. The batteries are what you want to get, that's where the nasty stuff is. And what kind of glue are we talking about? Something so strong that you can't pry it apart? Seems kind of unlikely, but I don't know. I'd imagine something more like a semi-flexible rubber cement.

<comment><USER10> I believe the batteries are the big problem. With respect to the glue, ifixit reports:

 _Electronics recyclers need to take out hazardous components such as batteries before sending computers through their shredders, because batteries can catch fire when punctured._

 _When we originally tore down the Retina MacBook Pro, we could not separate the battery from the upper case. The next day, after a lot of elbow grease, we were finally able to get them apart—but in the process punctured the battery, leaking hazardous goo all over._

They are fairly practiced at taking things apart, including delicate and glued-together equipment, so I'd conclude that it is a fairly strong and difficult to work with glue.

see: [http://ifixit.org/2884/apple-ditches-green-standard-cuts- off...](http://ifixit.org/2884/apple-ditches-green-standard-cuts-off-federal- agencies-from-apple-products/)

Also see their teardown for a description of their initial, failed attempt to detach the batteries:

[http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Retina- Di...](http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Retina-Display- Mid-2012-Teardown/9462/3#s36209)

<comment><USER11> iFixit evaluates for repairability, not for recyclability.

For example, on [http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-with-Retina- Displ...](http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-with-Retina-Display- Teardown/9462/1#s36209) they state " To complicate matters further, the TrackPad cable lies underneath the battery. Attempting to pry the battery off the upper case could easily sever the fragile cable, which would be bad." That is of no concern when recycling the device.

So, is there a problem recycling these new devices? I would guess so, but I do not rule out that there is a simple process to separate these parts, e.g. by heating them to a certain temperature, putting them in a microwave just long enough, or by taking apart the battery before removing it from the glass. A dedicated recycler could use some specialist procedure for recycling these things. I do doubt that that would be economically feasible, though. The amount of glass involved is just too small.

Also, chances are that that will lead to lower degree of recycling, just as white glass can be recycled better than green or brown glass, and as car windshields, being layered with some plastic, can be recycled, but likely not into new car windshields.

<comment><USER12> > by heating them to a certain temperature, putting them in a microwave just > long enough

Are you kidding? You want to do that to a Lithium ion battery?

<comment><USER11> Why not, as long as that 'certain temperature' is well below the temperature at which the battery spontaneously ignites? Also, for recycling, one could deplete the battery before trying to separate its container from the other parts.

I still think these things will get recycled into low-quality stuff such as concrete filler, but as I said, I do not rule out that there is a relatively easy way to separate the parts that iFixit does not know about.

<comment><USER12> That would work fine in a lab, but is way too expensive for recycling.

Those ovens with accurate temperature control and very expensive, and pretty small. And manually hooking up each battery to a discharging station is far too complicated to do in bulk.

You don't need to recycle anything at all as "concrete filler" sand works just fine.

<comment><USER11> Yes, sand works fine, but there are at least two reasons to use other stuff:

\- to give the concrete a different look

\- to get rid of junk aka recycle stuff that does not have other uses.

Some links: <http://www.concreteideas.com/recycled-glass-in-concrete>, <http://www.jnphillips.com/greenshield.asp>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I had a look at EPEAT. It is possible that Apple just doesn't want them as a design partner.

There are thousands of design tradeoffs to be made in a laptop. Is EPEAT willing to update and republish their rules every time a manufacturer finds a better solution that doesn't comply with the rules? The guidelines seem to track well with 2000 era PCs and cell phones.

From what I can see (EPEAT does not make their guidelines available without payment, there may have been something useful in their Resources section, but I'm finding broken links to third party file sharing sites) they have a set of categories that are required and some that are optional. By how many optionals you meet you get a bronze, silver, or gold rating. Apple marketing can't tolerate anything but a gold.

The guidelines I see don't have flexibility to them. For instance, if you can reduce your glass consumption by 50% by gluing it to something that can acceptably be chucked into the glass recycler, that may be a better environmental decision, but it may also be forbidden by EPEAT.

EPEAT says things need to be taken apart with "common tools". Does the pentalobular screw head count? I doubt it. Even if Apple sends pentalobular screwdrivers with each pallet of computers to the recycler it doesn't count for EPEAT.

<comment><USER14> Uh,

 _" It is possible that.."_ , _"I see don't"_... _"may be a better ... decision"_... _"The guidelines I see"_... _"I doubt it"_

Your claims are a long stream of unsupported speculation.

Rather than speculate, we can consult the article. The article mentions that the guidelines were developed with Apple's input. The article sources a couple people who noted that the recent MacBook Pro was mostly unrecycleable.

And the "something" which the screen was glued to is the _battery_ and given that batteries are major source of toxic waste, it is hard to imagine how a smaller battery or screen might be a desirable trade-off for the battery's toxic ingredients entering the environment.

Edit: re-reading the article, the situation is that the screen is glued to the case and the battery is glued to the case. Effectively the same result: '"If the battery is glued to the case it means you can't recycle the case and you can't recycle the battery," Frisbee said.'

<comment><USER13> I'm not inclined to consider the article as especially authoritative. It is mostly echoes from blog posts collected into a story.

 _…guidelines were developed with Apple's input…_ In what year? Half a decade ago? A decade? You can not simultaneously innovate better manufacturing and make things the same old way.

People need to stop being in a glue tizzy. I'm sure that in a recycling context the glue can be undone with either heat or a chisel. And remember that Apple has a plan in place to replace those batteries.

I suspect the story we are not seeing is that EPEAT is not willing to update the standard fast enough to adapt to modern manufacturing. And they probably shouldn't. Apple will be secretive until release, and EPEAT should take some time to think about things. Those just aren't going to work together.

<comment><USER15> "I'm sure that in a recycling context the glue can be undone with either heat or a chisel."

Every decision impacting recycling has to be viewed with labor costs factored in.

Virtually every recycling victory we've seen in the corporate sector in the past decade or two is due to efforts to make the recycling process cheap enough that the loss is negligible (and in the best cases, recycling is even profitable).

Nobody is saying that gluing things together makes them completely unrecyclable, but that glue could _easily_ be the difference between a recycling company actually recycling parts vs throwing them in the landfill due to increased costs blowing the economics of recycling out of whack (if cost of recycling is significantly larger than cost of throwing item in the landfill, the item is almost certainly going in the landfill).

This is exactly the situation EPEAT was set up (as mentioned, with Apple's input) to watchdog over, and Apple is clearly now putting spectacular hardware design above any green/recycling factors. Whether or not that is a terrible thing is a personal choice to make, but you seem kind of fanboyish in your efforts to pretend like Apple's decision is somehow EPEAT's fault.

Accept that you prefer computers that are now actively non-recyclable and move on.

<comment><USER13> That's 40 cents worth of scrap aluminum. I'm not seeing a plausible argument for labor rates making it landfill.

<comment><USER12> It's far too dangerous to put either heat or a chisel anywhere near a Lithium ion battery.

So, yes, it's completely unrecyclable.

<comment><USER13> Depending on the chemistry lithium ion batteries are safe to up to 400°F or more. Surely the manufacturing engineers pick a thermo adhesive with a melting point between the maximum operating temperature and the maximum safe storage temperature.

Think about the iPad 2 screen glue. Glass glued in place, but a hair dryer is more than enough heat to release the glue.

<comment><USER12> "Depending on the chemistry" is not a valid answer when recycling something - they don't have time to lookup the specs of each battery.

[http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/lithium_ion_safet...](http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/lithium_ion_safety_concerns) says maximum temperature of 265°F, which is very very close to the temperature needed to melt the glue (250°F, for low temperature glues, and 380F for high temperature glue - which is very close to even your 400° number.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just for clarification purposes: EPEAT certification requires certain standards that make the machines easy to disassemble and recycle using common tools.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd like to see more info about this. If true, it's very disappointing, but I could also see it being a case where government regulation has failed to keep up with a changing industry. It _may_ be just as possible to recycle an Apple product today as last year, but I won't believe Apple, I won't believe Gruber, and I won't believe the first guy at the WSJ who is "grabbing a scoop".

As is typical in the media, I'm left with very few trustworthy sources.

<comment><USER18> As the story itself says, Apple offers recycling programs. I don't particularly care about the ease with which I could disassemble my own laptop, since I'm never going to do that, and as long as Apple is willing to recycle the machine for me I'm happy.

<comment><USER19> According to what NatGeo and a few others dug up (literally) Apple hardly recycles anything. The glue alone makes recycling an impossible task. They ship most of it off in containers to be sold in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, where the lower castes and children strip out the precious metals by burning or cooking (highly toxic, but easiest way to remove the glue) or scraping the components by hand. The plastic and glass remnants are dumped in available spaces.

And before anyone says the glue is a new thing, _try_ to take apart a PSU from a Powerbook.

<comment><USER20> Do you have a link? If you're right I'm really bummed.

edit: I can't really find details on apple's site and I'm tired. This site [1] discusses apple's recycling, though since it isn't apple proper I'm not sure it's authoritative. The relevant details appear to be:

       Apple's recycler for non-Apple product recycling is WeRecycle!, a certified
       e-Steward.  Certified e-Stewards are recyclers who have been audited by an
       accredited auditor, and found to be conforming to the rigorous e-Stewards
       standard.
       If you are using Apple's trade-in system, this is a different vendor, called
       Power-On. Power-On is not an e-Steward (and they don't disclose their
       recycling partner), so this trade-in program therefore does not benefit from
       independent auditing to high standards.

       However, Apple has a very strong policy regarding responsible recycling of
       e-waste, stating that all e-waste collected in their programs is handled in
       the same region in which it is collected (and therefore not exported to
       developing countries). They prohibit use of prison labor for recycling, as
       well as incineration and landfilling of e-waste.

So that sound reasonable, but it would be much better if there were a direct statement on Apple's site.

[1] [http://www.electronicstakeback.com/how-to-recycle- electronic...](http://www.electronicstakeback.com/how-to-recycle- electronics/manufacturer-takeback-programs/apples-takeback-program/)

<comment><USER19> Look up e-waste in general and you'll find more than enough to read..

The difficulty is always in chasing these companies around following every step and verifying they actually do as they claim. Typically, unfortunately, and especially where expenses without profits are concerned, they don't.

The other problem is now they've made the product this much _more_ difficult to recycle and far more toxic. _Somehow_ , however it happens, huge volumes of Apple's incredibly popular products continue to end up discarded in places where they should not be, and when the "recyclers" get them, the glue, especially the glued batteries and glass, will be a big nasty problem.

NatGeo has done a few programs, and this larger feature discusses the big picture: [http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/high-tech- trash/ca...](http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/01/high-tech- trash/carroll-text)

This photo gets a lot of circulation when the topic of e-waste comes up, largely because of the recognizable brand. [http://marketingheart.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/waste- chin...](http://marketingheart.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/waste-china.jpg) To be fair nobody knows how the keyboard got there. But it makes a point, it's there, what happens next..?

<comment><USER7> We aren't talking about e-waste in general.

We are talking specifically about Apple. What evidence do you have that Apple is knowingly letting children be exposed to toxic materials. It's a HUGE claim to make.

<comment><USER21> Aside from e-waste, "Apple is knowingly letting children be exposed to toxic materials" was established with the iPhone screen cleaning story, where hexyl hydride, which evaporates faster than alcohol but is extremely toxic, had to be used to shave mere seconds off the assembly line speed.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/07/chinese- workers-...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/07/chinese-workers- sickness-hexane-apple-iphone)

The Apple factories are notorious for hiring underage workers.

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-20032074-247.html>

These findings have been covered in Apple's shareholder report, so it's not like they can be contested.

[http://education-for- solidarity.blogspot.com/2012/01/apple-r...](http://education-for- solidarity.blogspot.com/2012/01/apple-report-reveals-child-labour.html)

> Apple found more than 91 children working at its suppliers last year, nine > times as many as the previous year, according to its annual report on its > manufacturers.

> The US company has also acknowledged for the first time that 137 workers > were poisoned at a Chinese firm making its products and said less than a > third of the facilities it audited were complying with its code on working > hours.

<comment><USER18> There's no such thing as an "Apple factory". Apple doesn't own factories. And Foxconn makes products for more companies than just Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My recollection is that Apple has not compared very favorable with their competitors in this respect for a while now. And now that their products are becoming increasingly difficult to repair/disassemble, perhaps the strategy is to bail now rather than face even poorer ratings in the future?

<comment><USER23> Even without structural changes, the new Apple has never been environmentally friendly. They "design for the dump" and bring out new versions every year, and quickly obsolete old versions.

<comment><USER24> In my personal experience, Mac computers tend to last much longer than their Windows counterparts. For example, my parents continued to use a Mac SE they bought in 1989 until about 2005, and I know several people who continue to use 8–10 year-old Mac laptops. My last two Mac laptops have each lasted 4–5 years, and the one I'm typing on is still going strong.

I don't think a reasonable evidence-backed case can be made for your implication that Mac laptops are designed to be obsolete more quickly than, e.g., HP, Dell, or Toshiba laptops.

<comment><USER25> "I don't think a reasonable evidence-backed case can be made for your implication that Mac laptops are designed to be obsolete more quickly than, e.g., HP, Dell, or Toshiba laptops."

Just more obsolete than all the laptops that can be serviced and upgraded without the same restrictions. I wouldn't go lumping all of the models from all of those makers and settling for a blanket statement like that because that reads false just by picking one model that passes the conditionals, just one per any given maker.

In the end it is a choice and some will try to sugar coat that choice with whatever makes them feel better about it.

But if you have to imagine a given brand tops the lot because you "don't think a reasonable evidence-backed case can be made", when it clearly can, that speaks lots about brand engadgement from your part as a customer and not much else to the merit of that brand, and stand for the ethics behind it.

<comment><USER26> There are piles of evidence that Apple's computers have a longer useful life than a typical PC if you look for it. For instance, comparing measures of installed base vs market share. Here are a couple of links. If you put some time into it, you can find more going back to the 80s and 90s:

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/03/mac-os-x-north- american...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/03/mac-os-x-north-american- installed-base-almost-11/)

[http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/9E601E8E-2AC...](http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/9E601E8E-2ACC-4866-A91B-3371D1688E00.html) (cmd-f for "Mac vs PC Life Span")

<comment><USER25> By your own provided links, and some third party information on the subject it should be considered that;

The second hand market for such a highly valued brand is a factor that improves real product life cycle. Also, access to said premium priced devices and user brand entanglement tend to slant device usage past its prime.

Pc's (mostly corporate windows machines) tend to be cycled at higher rates, and that has to do with finantial arrangements linked to fiscal incentives. This data will slant any analisys that doesn't account for this specific motivation.

I was just showing how the premise presented by the poster didn't hold up if only one single model per poster referenced brand showed positive.

So, machines that can be serviced and upgraded without the same restrictions, in comparison, will have expanded usage life cycle. This is parallel to your provided information but doesn't become mute by its introduction, it does however make good thinking points on the amount of waste we currently produce...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm sure our handy friends in Africa will find a way to pry even Retina MacBooks apart with their bare hands.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well, I have more respect for Apple now, and still none for Greenpeace.</comment>


Promising thousands of U.S. jobs, Foxconn offshored 155 to Mexico - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-usa-exclusive/exclusive-promising-thousands-of-u-s-jobs-foxconn-offshored-155-to-mexico-idUSKCN1T52ZA <comment><USER2> I'm not sure that this is news. No one who saw the deal expected it to pan out. While the town could certainly use the manufacturing, shouldn't the money and training breaks come after commitments are reached? The US could use more manufacturing of any kind to help fill the gap for low skilled workers, as I'm sure most US workers would be capable of being trained up, but this doesn't seem like the right to be of deal. Remember all the hubbub about picking winners and losers with Solyndra? Doesn't that seem like a small deal now when we consider the only reason US solar manufacturing lost out was maybe dumping by Chinese companies with finding directly from the Chinese government? I really hope that the new discovery of rare earth minerals Japan find pans out to break the stranglehold China currently possesses on it.

</comment><comment><USER3> As far as I can tell, this article doesn't belong on Hacker News.

<comment><USER4> As far as I can tell, neither does your comment.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam > or off-topic, flag it.</comment></comment>


Our Version Of Facebook Events - <AUTHOR> http://chillweek.com/home Better oversight for discovering events in your city. Easy way to know which events are popular. <comment><USER2> Please pick a different color

<comment><AUTHOR> What's wrong with the color?</comment></comment>


Urban Coyotes - <AUTHOR> http://pruned.blogspot.com/2010/11/gps-coyotes.html <comment><USER2> Roaming the streets at night? Feh!

I live in a western suburb of Chicago and we've got 'em walking down the sidewalks in mid-afternoon. Much more civilized!

<http://tinyurl.com/25ykr6e> [picasaweb.google.com]

<comment><USER3> uhhh... that might be a coyote, but it looks more like a fox to me.

<comment><USER4> It's either a small coyote or a large fox. Either way he looks pretty well fed to me; I guess this form of pest control is working ?

<comment><USER5> Well, there has been a massive decrease in the roadrunner population.

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry, I forgot to mention the large anvil on a rope hanging just out of frame.

Now that you mention it, it does kind of look more like a fox than a coyote. Considering the coyotes we _do_ have running around town are all mangy and beat up:

<http://triblocal.com/wheaton/files/2010/09/IMG_2845.jpg>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> what could go wrong?</comment>


Show HN: KeyCombiner – Organize, learn, and practice keyboard shortcuts - <AUTHOR> https://keycombiner.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

I spent much of my social distancing free time on a new web application to organize, learn, and practice keyboard shortcuts.

Before KeyCombiner, I had a Notion database of all keyboard shortcuts that I use. This was already a nice way to identify inconsistencies and change shortcuts in some applications so that I could use the same combinations as often as possible.

However, a generic database is tedious to maintain. KeyCombiner makes it very easy to create a collection with all your shortcuts by allowing to import from a growing list of public collections. Just select what you want and import to a personal collection.

In addition, KeyCombiner provides value on top of these personal and public collections. There are interactive training features to learn new shortcuts and to improve your skills with the ones you already know. During these trainings, KeyCombiner gathers detailed statistics, even recording the number of milliseconds you take for a specific key combination. It uses this data to calculate confidence values for each keyboard shortcut in your personal collections so you can quickly see where you are taking too long or frequently make mistakes.

I made this because I believe that typing proficiency is important for a software engineer. In fact, I love that a part of our job has to do with manual skills. Improving these physical skills is a nice change from learning new technologies and tools.

During developing and testing KeyCombiner, I have learned many new keyboard shortcuts and gotten a lot faster with some that I already knew. For example, I was frequently making mistakes when typing ctrl+x/c/v because I was using my pointer finger for all of them. KeyCombiner highlighted this problem that I have since eliminated.

I would love some feedback. At this point, it is completely free to use. I do have some hopes to be able to make a paid plan eventually, but the core features will always be free.</comment>


On the Merits of QUIC for HTTP - <AUTHOR> http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2017/04/on-merits-of-quic-for-http.html <comment><USER2> In the anticipation of a QUIC and HTTP over QUIC standard I'm wondering if HTTP/2 will only be an interim protocol, which will be around for 2-5years, but will no longer have a benefit after that.

I mean HTTP/1[.1] will basically be around forever, since it's super easy to implement, works without encryption and is supported everywhere (dozens of libraries available). HTTP/2 however is already hard to implement compared to that - it needs an ALPN-ready TLS library, and flow control and multiplexing is not easy. If it also has less benefit than QUIC (which will also be hard to implement), then it's questionable why one should still implement and deploy it in the future.</comment>


It's not as hard to build a startup in New York City as you've heard - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/10/forget-silicon-valley-for-a-startup-try-nyc-instead.html

<comment><USER2> I wished. The place is full of hot girls. That's really good motivation for mot young (straight) guys.

My guess, too much fun can get distracting, hence NYC startups will be less successful than SV ones. (SV is the most boring place in the world, after Reno Nevada).

<comment><USER3> I have been wondering whether enjoying life has anything to do with startup failure. I can imagine programming 12 hour days in Reno, but in Las Vegas?

Is there a huge difference between how people work in the Valley, which seems like a suburban wasteland, and 10 miles away in San Fransisco, which seems like one of the most amazing places in the world.

<comment><USER4> The idea that people hack or create startups because they have nothing more interesting to do is pretty laughable. Many people who could retire from work entirely (and move to a tropical island) find it extremely compelling. That should tell you something, even if you don't feel the same way.

<comment><USER3> Maybe we don't understand each other. I love hacking. But, it is harder, at least for me, to work all day and late into the night if there is something more interesting to do. I think it is harder to work the hours many startups require if there are distractions.

I think that if I was rich, I would absolutely not be eager to work 12 hour days again. I remember Paul Graham citing his aversion to having to work too damn hard for years and years as the primary reason he did not launch a second startup. Philip Greenspun seems to agree.

The point of all of this is to make a great deal of money. Find me a coal miner who showed up to work the day after winning the lottery.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What are the main weaknesses of Python as a programming language? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-main-weaknesses-of-Python-as-a-programming-language

<comment><USER2> That, although, turing complete it is not always the right choice. This weakness is common to all programming languages.

Forgetting this and getting into technological pissing wars is a common weakness of programmers and people who fancy themselves programmers but mostly just write blog posts and lurk forums.

<comment><USER3> What's a lurk forum?</comment></comment>


Tim Draper wants California to split into 6 states - <AUTHOR> http://www.policymic.com/articles/77547/this-venture-capitalist-wants-california-to-split-into-six-states-here-s-why-he-s-right

<comment><USER2> I have always been a fan of the idea of splitting up California: More senators means more people looking out for my interests (relatively). I'm always jealous of those little states who have 2 senators, but are smaller than San Diego county: Alaska, Wyoming, etc.

Shoot, Puerto Rico's population is bigger than 22 states, and those Puerto- rican US citizens don't even have senators.

How to split up California's assets and debts is a big issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea has merit, but I suspect that the real reason is that rich VCs in the Valley don't want their tax dollars going to the rest of the state.

<comment><USER3> And that the Republicans would like to gerrymander the electoral college like they have the House.</comment></comment></comment>


George Lucas Stole Chewbacca, But It's Okay - <AUTHOR> http://binarybonsai.com/2010/09/18/george-lucas-stole-chewbacca-but-its-okay/

<comment><USER3> I saw Star Wars on TV recently - god it looks awesome, especially the early desert scene with red sand and gold c3po. Of course, it's probably because they adjusted the colour in later releases (a few times), but still. The added stuff looks gimmicky and unnecessary.

Chewbacca is an awesome name. I happened to need to burp while reading the article, and you know how I made it sound.

Although I'm sure the article is right about the sequence of early artwork and so on, it seems that the final creature was determined entirely at the end, by the practical matter of the guy wearing it, and that it needed to be friendly looking. He _does_ look like a dog. All that remains from earlier is 1. ape- like; 2. bandolier

But he's right about chewie being a non-character. He's great, but just colour. It's unfortunate that there's no real relationship with Han - <USER2> 'talk", but there's no sense of anything there. While "side-kicks" were common (eg. watson, tonto, robin), there was always some friendship or connection, or even just meaningful cooperation, which isn't present with Chewie.

<comment><USER4> I'm still waiting for an explanation why Lando was wearing Han's clothes at the end of Empire Strikes Back. I love the original movies, not the newer 'enhanced' versions. I thought the fact that they used miniature models gave it a more vivid textural look that the CGI can't match.

I also love burping the Chewbacca call. Chewie is just Han's sub-altern. Although, I thought they did have meaningful cooperation though, the way Han could understand him and you could sense their familiarity with one another.

<comment><USER3> TIL subaltern. It's true they were familiar, but it was just more colour (including funny lines like "fly casual"), and didn't have any effect (or did it? was there any point where they acted on info conveyed, and we saw the result, or it meant something to the plot? Even Han telling Chewie what to do? Maybe there was.)

Also, it's harder to show a relationship when only one side speaks - maybe if I thought of it more as a man-dog relation (a subaltern)? But it's still possible to influence the plot, eg lassie.

<comment><USER4> I guess I saw that one way conversation as an example that Han knew Chewie very, very well, even being able to understand his completely foreign language. But I guess it's still so nostalgic to me that I try to explain any faults. :(

<comment><USER3> Don't worry, nostalgia or not, the whole thing still looks and feels amazing (IMHO). It's very easy pick apart a movie, and there's very little point in doing so. I think I might try to interpret it in your way. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker Publishes 2TB of Data from Cayman National Bank - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/DDoSecrets/status/1195899716653010945 <comment><USER2> After watching The laundromat, I think it's big news.

Although I will always be curious why countries are letting those small, insignificant islands and countries manage all this wealth, and why they're trusted to do it. This can't be secure or safe. I'm curious about the diplomacy and the political implications of this.

What if their office get robbed? What if the island gets attacked? What if one of those shady bank defaults? What if one of the people who manage it suddenly die? I mean apparently there is a long list of why it's risky, and I don't understand how this is even legal at all. How do you wire all this money to such a small place, and how can they trust so few people to hide so much money? I have so many questions.

<comment><USER3> A recent piece in The Guardian argues that South Dakota and other US states are actually becoming the go-to place to store anonymously your illicit cash and make sure that your heirs can inherit it without taxes forever: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great- amer...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-american-tax- haven-why-the-super-rich-love-south-dakota-trust-laws)

Partly because the US has compelled other countries to provide more transparency without joining that transparency organization itself.

"Congress responded with the Financial Assets Tax Compliance Act (Fatca), forcing foreign financial institutions to tell the US government about any American-owned assets on their books. Department of Justice investigations were savage: UBS paid a $780m fine, and its rival Credit Suisse paid $2.6bn, while Wegelin, Switzerland's oldest bank, collapsed altogether under the strain. The amount of US-owned money in the country plunged, with Credit Suisse losing 85% of its American customers.

The rest of the world, inspired by this example, created a global agreement called the Common Reporting Standard (CRS). Under CRS, countries agreed to exchange information on the assets of each other's citizens kept in each other's banks. The tax-evading appeal of places like Jersey, the Bahamas and Liechtenstein evaporated almost immediately, since you could no longer hide your wealth there.

How was a rich person to protect his wealth from the government in this scary new transparent world? Fortunately, there was a loophole. CRS had been created by lots of countries together, and they all committed to telling each other their financial secrets. But the US was not part of CRS, and its own system – Fatca – only gathers information from foreign countries; it does not send information back to them. This loophole was unintentional, but vast: keep your money in Switzerland, and the world knows about it; put it in the US and, if you were clever about it, no one need ever find out. The US was on its way to becoming a truly world-class tax haven."

<comment><USER4> > place to store anonymously your illicit cash

What if I just want a place to anonymously store my legally gained cash?

Unfortunately, it seems the normal people lost their privacy nowadays at the expense of the criminals and the "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" argument has taken a stronghold in the financial sector.

<comment><USER5> Because the social contract of most countries is that your legally gained cash is to be taxed in one form or another and thus has to be known by the tax authorities?

You can argue that your assets are to be private to the general public but some countries do not have that assumption (Norway comes to mind).

<comment><USER4> By "legally gained cash" I mean that taxes have already been paid for it.

<comment><USER6> It's a trust but verify thing I believe. If the cash is anonymized, how can they know if the owner of this cash did in fact pay their taxes on it? Either they blindly trust everyone to properly declare all of their income, or they need to have some form of traceability.

<comment><USER4> So everyone is assumed to be a criminal until proven otherwise?

<comment><USER7> How else do you propose taxation is assured? Blind trust?

<comment><USER8> Tax assets not transactions.

Land ownership is registered for good public purposes which does not unreasonably destroy privacy concerns - it's usually obvious who (person or business) controls the land anyway (who should a tenant pay the rent to? who gets to decide if you can be a tenant?) and it gives people a great deal of confidence that they know that whoever is recorded in the government land registry as having a right to sell the property actually has that right. The common law approach of having to hold a series of documents that identify a continuous line of owners going back to some unconfirmable initial grant by a long dead king is not in the interest of the purchaser of the land.

Moreover, the market distortions taxing land (as the primary source of government income) will have are generally positive. A person can no longer buy a house in the hope that the land it sits on will double in value. They can only buy a house in the hope that they are capable of making a profit out of it; the land purchase merely gives them the right to improve it.

The same advantages may be visible for taxation of share holdings: instead of simply trying to profit from someone else's actions, you would buy shares because you think the dividends will exceed other income sources for the same purchase. It may be legitimate to have anonymous share holdings which require active detective work, so it's possible this would be an unreasonable invasion of privacy.

<comment><USER9> > Tax assets not transactions.

I know I've said that we shouldn't do public policy by taxes but taxing wealth instead of income probably isn't easy. We can tax income because one person's income is another person's expense if I understand how this works.

<comment><USER10> Reminds me of annecdote of old tax policies on things like silverware and the difficulty in believing and searches from one austere preacher who anomalously for his station didn't own a single set. And others like the tax on windows which lead to boarding up of windows in slums and became derided as a tax on light and air.

The answer seems to be that how well it works varies heavily on what the asset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Strangely under-reported is that the same hacker is offering up to 100k to others who perform similar acts of hacktivism:

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5agy/phineas-fisher- off...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5agy/phineas-fisher-offers- dollar100000-bounty-for-hacks-against-banks-and-oil-companies)

<comment><USER12> So this activist has somehow profited from his "hacktivism" and he wants to spread his wealth to other activists?

<comment><USER13> Or possibly someone who became wealthy in the software/opsec industry who believes what they do is for the good of humanity. To a person with a net worth of 100MM+ 100k would not be significant.

The funds didn't necessarily come from the hacktivism.

Edit: Given the bounty is paid in bitcoin, somewhat more likely the funds are donations/fees from hacking. Not likely it came from funds deposited to an exchange (traceable account). Could also be someone who was mining in 2009 (and not from the hacking itself).

<comment><USER14> Or possibly the payment is offered in bitcoin because that's how anyone "performing similar acts of hacktivism" would want to be paid?

<comment><USER13> Yes. That's what the edit (from a few minutes after the original post) says.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pastebin with translated guide on how they hacked the bank:

[https://pastebin.com/8rXhtqgr](https://pastebin.com/8rXhtqgr)

<comment><USER16> It doesn't tell you how they infiltrated to begin with so that they can sniff cookies and keystrokes. But my guess is they phished an employee.

Edit: I missed that part,sorry.

<comment><USER17> I thought it was pretty clear. They had already developed a Sonic Wall VPN exploit. They used zmap to scan for vulnerable devices then grepped the hostnames for "bank". When they exploited the VPN it gave them the whole network.

>In this case, on the other hand, it was the same Windows domain passwords that were used to authenticate against the VPN, so I could get a good user password, including that of the domain admin. Now I had full access to his network

<comment><USER18> To me, the scary part about this is: After Equifax, this is another big hack... and practically, it's one layer of defense and that's it. Shellshock, one password, everything's fucked. And yes, expletives are appropriate there. The rest is largely access maintenance, keyloggers and execution.

That's scary. Maybe I'll need to badger my boss about a serious pentest of everything.

<comment><USER16> Dude, forget a pentest, have a security architect look things over. Simple segmentation and endpoint firewall witha good edr might have stopped this. Everyone misses the basics, a lot of networks were pieced together 10+ years ago when people were not as security conscious as they are now.

<comment><USER19> Our first pen test, before I took over as CTO... We had a JSON file with admin credentials on a shared drive. IT company needed it there so some tool could log in as admin and do some robot work.

Fired them, and good riddance. But... STUPID SIMPLE things can get overlooked for years until you have someone else come in and test.

+1 for pentests.

<comment><USER20> So after firing the vendor, who on your side got fired for allowing it in the first place?

<comment><USER16> Why would anyone get fired, explicit approval and imppicit incompetence should be handled differently. If pentests get people fired, no one wants a pentest. Refusing to accept and resolve pentest results can be fireable but a pentest is suppose to help you improve what you have already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I had a quick peak at the web server log, it's tiny. The typical legitimate egress from this network is likely somewhere well under 1gb/day, yet somehow these people managed to upload at least 2TB without being noticed

In a well-maintained network an upload like this should have paged someone as it was happening, probably sometime in the first 5-10 minutes. Say your outbound pipe was 100mbit, if it is pegged for 15 minutes I can't see any reason why a small installation like this wouldn't want to know they've just spat out 11GB of data for some unknown reason

Even divvying things up over 14 days (per the age of the data), its still around 6GB/day. This should have shown up in a monitoring graph somewhere, or triggered a page

<comment><USER22> Maybe. Do we know how they exfiltrated it? They may have done it in a rate- limited fashion.

<comment><USER23> Or had someone local to just put it all on usb

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> magnet of the torrent since the site seems to be overloaded: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5b1b0092848d0b8e2f08d825111264c4818a2df3

</comment><comment><USER25> A .torrent file hosted by the Internet Archive, since DDOSecret is apparently being DDOSed: [https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://data.ddosecrets.com/fi...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://data.ddosecrets.com/file/Sherwood/Sherwood.torrent)

<comment><USER26> This size of dataset does seem to me like a good case of why the current torrent format is lacking. Many people might be interested in generally seeding for this torrent, and maybe pulling some of the files. But few are actually going to download the full 2TB. At the moment, I can select individual files to download and seed, ignoring the rest, but I cannot say "download what I want, and then seed random blocks up to a size of X GB." It's quite conceivable that in a few months, the bigger, less "popular" files will be very hard to come by.

That's (maybe the) one thing I think IPFS gets really right: full availability of the whole dataset, regardless of the popularity of the individual blocks. There were some BEPs about that IIRC, but they never got anywhere. I always figured archive.org and similar collection hosters would be interested in this sort of thing, so that people can just "donate 1 TB to archive.org" or such.

<comment><USER27> I agree with what you're saying, although there is not really a reason why this can't be done with BT client-side. It's just that, AFAIK, no torrent client supports this.

BT will, by default, prefer to download the least popular blocks. Client-side just needs a setting to "stop downloading after X blocks", divide your 1TB by the block size, and that's how many blocks you need to download to get 1TB.

I will add though, unfortunately with this torrent (at least the one that I am attempting to download), simply seeding a certain number of blocks is not very helpful. The files are mostly in a few giant zip files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is going to be swept under the rug faster than Epstein, assuming it even surfaces in the mainstream press at all. Lots of rich people run their stuff through the Cayman Islands, probably more than through Panama. So far, as far as I can tell, no mention in the US. The entire front pages of major national newspapers (WaPo and NYTimes) are dedicated to their single-minded mission of telling everyone that orange man is bad.

<comment><USER29> Regrettably the media needs to publish what gets the most clicks; unfortunately what gets the most clicks these days is partisan stories that gets readers riled up.

That Panama leak story was also quickly "forgotten" by the MSM.

<comment><USER30> Are you blaming the media for getting people what they want?

As long as people demand the click-bait only the ones that provide such content will survive. Let's thank our luck that it is not Infowars style clickbait, so some resemblance of sanity still remains.

FWIW the Panama papers have had a noticeable impact, especially where it matters most, clawing money back

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

<comment><USER31> >Are you blaming the media for getting people what they want?

Media is not inherently profitable, it's a loss leader whose ultimate product is influence and the manufacture of consent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From what I read the hack was not sophisticated at all. If they had decent endpoint protection this would not have happened. Maybe they disabled defender after the initial access and privesc because defender blocks Get-Keystrokes and other things in empire,even with significant modification.

Anyway, I don't care about the hacktivism and propaganda (don't really get it -- tbh,rich people bad/corrupt?) But would very much be interested in any post-incident analysis of what happend.

But here's what stands out to me: they're talking about using empire and hvnc. Empire is by design detectable,you could use the techniques in empire in your own malware though. Most rats and bots (take trickbot) let you sniff key strokes, run commands,etc... So I guess they used psexec or winrm to access the hosts(no vlan segmentation or firewall on endpoints!?). I ask all this because the specific MO is significantly different than what is seen with criminal actors and crimeware(like Carbank which She mentions). And to me, it does corroborate the story that this was likely an independent hacker motivated by hacktivism as opposed to a bigger conspiracy to burn some group and plant false records in the leak (which could still less likely be the case)

Very exciting,righteous hack.

I think overall, the bank cheaped out on IT and paid big time for it.

<comment><USER32> Here's the thing. While most people on HN tend to be in the global top performers when it comes to IT, the vast majority of businesses are simply ripe, low hanging fruit just waiting to be breached, and almost every time it is because of a failure of management to understand the importance of those things. Way too many 60 year old men who barely know how to use a computer are at the top of orgs, and are stuck in the janitorial cost sink fallacy of IT. I also put a lot of this on the heads of IT directors or senior sysadmins, who are failing to convey the importance of the matter to those C-levels in terms they understand.

I have learned this the hard way, having started up an MSP at one point and done a lot of contracting to help orgs unfuck their infra, I have seen it all first hand, from 5-30 person lawfirms to fortune 500 oil companies to unicorn startups. I have been the senior sysadmin who failed to convey things in a way the got through C-level thick skulls, and most of my career trajectory has been angled towards keeping up with the sysadmin transition to devops while learning how to fill that gap so I don't repeat those mistakes. I've failed multiple times, but each one is a lesson I learn from and try to apply to the next place, and sometimes C-levels literally just don't care and can't be reached, and nothing happens till a major breach or lawsuit costs lots of money.

To me, this is the importance of the CTO/CIO roles. The problem is, again, the vast majority of America isn't SV. I would say ~%80 of companies I saw didn't even have those roles, and if they had someone in that role but without the title (like IT director), they often didn't have a seat on the board or any real influence with the C's. I have also seen those roles taken by people who should be in other positions but enjoy the "C" title too much, to the detriment of the org.

Sorry, this got kind of ranty, but it's an issue I obsess over in trying to find better solutions for. Basically I'm learning how to hack management instead of computers these days.

<comment><USER33> > I also put a lot of this on the heads of IT directors or senior sysadmins, > who are failing to convey the importance of the matter to those C-levels in > terms they understand.

Why? Understanding the risks involved before making a decision is the responsibility of executives. If they calculate that the risks are minimal and crackers prove them wrong by causing damage to the tune of millions, they have only themselves to blame.

How many times have people explained the need for things to be done properly, only for proper infrastructure to be written off as too costly and unnecessary? The fact is they are taking a calculated risk: they get to spend less on information security by _assuming_ nothing bad will happen. Claiming that it's the fault of system administrators is just yet another power move: scapegoating in order to avoid responsibility.

They make the decisions and should face the consequences.

<comment><USER32> I'm torn on this one, because for years I took your position... but there were numerable times I saw directors/seniors fail to convey that information in an understandable way when the C's might have been open to it when presented differently. There are certain cases were the C's don't listen at all, and theres not much that can be done, but there are also cases where the C's just haven't been presented the information properly.

This is why I am increasingly putting importance on the skills of the Director or CTO/CIO position, because they need to be the kind of person who can handle the board/meeting room but still understand the tech enough to a) not be fooled or lied to and b) understand the real business risks and weigh them properly while overseeing the implementation of solutions.

So I understand and am sympathetic to your point, but I think there is a lot more nuance there. Yes, ultimately the buck stops at the C's, but as the sysadmin who has failed to talk to them well, I still feel like we could do a much better job on our end. This is why I think a lot of more senior devs/ops types of people could do extremely well in the C positions if they got their MBA and had a C-level mentor. Trying to do the opposite, where you try to tech-ize a traditional MBA C-type fails much more often in my opinion, but, that's who dominates those positions. I see market opportunity!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is there a forum/IM where someone has already found out any interesting parts? I am unable to download 2TB of data

<comment><USER35> You don't have to download the entire folder. Some parts are less than 10 GB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> _To these people [the very rich], taxes are costs. And costs are there to be reduced, ideally to zero._ [1]

[1] [https://www.cumex-files.com/en/](https://www.cumex-files.com/en/)

</comment><comment><USER37> A news article on it with more info and the full HackBack: [https://unicornriot.ninja/2019/massive-hack-strikes- offshore...](https://unicornriot.ninja/2019/massive-hack-strikes-offshore- cayman-national-bank-and-trust/)

<comment><USER38> Another related article: [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5agy/phineas- fisher-off...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5agy/phineas-fisher- offers-dollar100000-bounty-for-hacks-against-banks-and-oil-companies).

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> English translation here [https://pastebin.com/8rXhtqgr](https://pastebin.com/8rXhtqgr)

really great content!

</comment><comment><USER40> I've read the Pastebin and I wonder, where did they send the 200k to be able to cash them out without getting in trouble? I've always assumed that diverting electronic money is relatively easy, the hard part is to convert it to a physical or untraceable form without getting caught; I assume the receiving bank would have kept a record of the incoming transfer and what happened with that money afterwards.

<comment><USER41> Plenty of people on the darkweb allow for flushing of bank transfers to untraceable crypto currencies. Typical scenario: use an unknown (homeless, hacked account whatever) person to register bank account, send money to bank account, withdraw in cash or use digital service to convert to cryptocurrency. Money is gone and owner of bank account might not even know and can probably not be held responsible. The reason the hacker got caught was because he made invalid SWIFT transactions to accounts in Mexico and someone found out the reported errors and checked other transactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This will have as much of an effect as the panama papers: other than some journalists involved in reporting it getting killed, nothing will change.

<comment><USER43> Supposedly the hacker distributed the money to various good causes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> So what? People with billions don't get in trouble, as evidenced by the 2008 financial scam, er, I mean "crisis".

The kind of people who get in trouble is a mom stealing a pair of socks from Walmart. That, they will throw the book at. Hiding or stealing billions? No prob.

</comment><comment><USER45> If someone could tell me what country ownes the Tbills in the caymans ([https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt](https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt)), i'd really appreciate it.

</comment><comment><USER46> You know it's a good, firey HN debate when you have to scroll down about 3/4 of the page to find the 1st comment thats not a child, chained off the top comment! :)

</comment><comment><USER47> Oh good, I forgot my account number. Can someone DM it to me?

</comment><comment><USER48> The read up is very interesting but I don't understand the Sonic Wall VPN exploit and how they planted the keylogger in the first place.

Was it an inside job?

</comment><comment><USER49> Oooh Cayman islands, that one must be juicy

</comment><comment><USER50> Like a Mr Robot sub plot

</comment><comment><USER51> Where could I download!

<comment><USER52> Search through twitter, there is a torrent as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Reading this, it all seems so doable. Banks must indeed be getting hacked on a daily basis, it's just that they hide it so well!

</comment><comment><USER54> Oops.

</comment><comment><USER55> Consider this holocaust survivor.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/16/holocaust- surviv...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/16/holocaust-survivor-was- not-a-tax-cheat-judge-rules/)

His family is murdered by Nazis but he escapes to the UK. He sets up offshore funds in the event something like the holocaust happens again, but the tax authorities go after him.

This is one of many reasons for people to set up offshore accounts that have nothing to do with illegal activities.

How many people like this has this person hurt?

Where does this belief in the infallibility of the tax man come from?

<comment><USER56> > How many people like this has this person hurt?

Could be for an holocaust fund, Bezos secret birthday party fund or for your new 4k TV it's all the same, pay your taxes, then do whatever you want with your money. It really isn't that complex.

<comment><USER55> You seem to be conflating people keeping money in offshore accounts with cheating on taxes. Some people who have offshore accounts probably cheat. Other people are not cheating. The referenced person was not cheating, and, not that he needed it, he had a very good reason for having the offshore accounts.

Hacking in and publicizing peoples offshore account information hurts both groups. It's irresponsible. It hurts people who pay their taxes and are not doing anything wrong. If a government went in and, without any due process, started convicting people just because they had an offshore account, we would not be praising that government.</comment></comment></comment>


Universal Basic Income is a neoliberal plot to make you poorer - <AUTHOR> https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/universal-basic-income-is-a-neoliberal-plot-to-make-you-poorer/ <comment><USER2> I think it is wrong to solve this problem by a state issued UBI. It puts people at a disadvantage. Instead, we should give people the means of production, empower them to rely on themselves.

Instead of UBI, self reliance should be maximized at all levels - personal, family, city and state. For example, a community of people that have enough land at their disposal can be self sufficient. They don't need UBI because they have something better than that - the power to provide for themselves. At a larger scale, a city might organize as to maximize self sufficiency, reducing imports and dependence on external factors. This can be achieved by investing in green energy, local industry, education and so on. New technologies such as 3d printing, agro-bots, self driving cars, drones and solar panels would contribute a long way towards self sufficiency.

Not to mention that in a community where most adults are unemployed, they still have work to do - child care, education, food preparation, cleaning, house building and repair, medical care and many other tasks can be achieved by a community without external help - and generate lots of jobs. When corporations don't give us jobs, we can work for ourselves. That job is always ours. We just need to have access to the means of work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am not for Basic Income. I think it is a bad idea. But, you aren't likely to win people over by calling it _a neoliberal plot._

</comment><comment><USER4> So the main reason to be against UBI is that people is not smart enough to manage the income for themselves, but the states and governments can do it better.

That sounds very much like some dictatorial regimes at both right and left extremes.</comment>


The Twitter Platform's Inflection Point - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/04/the-twitter-platform.html <comment><USER2> I was recently in NYC visiting the NY chapter of Hacker and founders. I was really surprised at how excited people still were about twitter. The buzz at the meetup was all about twitter and Foursquare.

It's been about 6 months since I heard people at the H&F SV meetups be really excited about twitter. And, while, we're starting to add features on <http://newsley.com> to include what people are tweeting about a specific stock ticker, that's not really the main impetus of our business. It's more of a value add.

A lot more of the buzz that I hear around the Valley is moble apps. iPhone, iPad, android, especially mobile Geo. That's what the cool kids seem to be doing. Any ideas on why that's different?

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a good observation, and as a recent Twit I look forward to the evolution of the platform. Did anyone else feel cheapened at the end of the article that made it sound like a plug for Chirp?</comment>


Computer Science and Metaphysics: A Cross-Fertilization [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://mally.stanford.edu/Papers/cs-metaphysics.pdf <comment><USER2> As far as I know, the verification of metaphysical axioms is limited to telling if they are consistent (which I guess this could help with) and telling whether or not they conform the reader's preexisting notions. We already know that most of our preexisting notions about the world are wrong, so doesn't that make metaphysics a version of math that's biased _against_ having the right axioms? Mathematicians are biased very slightly towards choosing axioms that are representative of some truth because of cross- pollination with physics but otherwise make no claims, but it seems to me that philosophers who study metaphysics purport to be studying something other than "just math."

<comment><USER3> You believe in scientism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _downloading yet another pdf he promises himself he will read in the future..._

</comment><comment><USER5> Terrible abstract. Trying to lure people by being vague is a no go. Red flag for quackery.</comment>


Process Dependency Graphs in Houdini - <AUTHOR> https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/whats-new-17_5/ <comment><AUTHOR> About to go to sleep but will gladly respond to any questions about Houdini in the morning. H doesn't usually seem to get much interest at HN, but I think it is currently one of the ultimate hacker playgrounds myself! At least PDG might be worth a closer look more broadly than just for VFX?</comment>


The brain thinks in Lisp parse trees - <AUTHOR> http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr07/4982 <comment><USER2> The title is not an accurate depiction of Numenta's "Heirarchical Temporal Memories". "HTMs" are not recurrent neural networks either.

I don't like how this guy (Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm and Handspring) claims to have figured out the fundamental algorithm being used in the cortex without any research or data. His book "On Intelligence" is next in my reading queue and maybe I'll be convinced after I read it... not counting on it though.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is a recurrent neural network a "Lisp parse tree"?

<comment><USER4> Or a hierarchy a Lisp parse tree? Its great to see people thinking beyond procedural languages but there is a lot more to computer science than Lisp.

<comment><USER5> Besides, the code is in C++, not lisp (unfortunately).

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed very unfortunate. From numenta's website descriptions of nupic (the C++ HTM implementation), one can immediately shout Greenspun's Tenth Rule.

What motivated my wild comparison of HTMs and Lisp is:

\- HTMs do not distinguish program and data.

\- HTMs are fractal like a Lisp parse tree: sameness of structure at any level.

\- HTMs program themselves from input, analogous to Lisp programs' ability to change themselves at run time.

Whether the brain actually uses HTMs or not: as far as I know (as a researcher in neuroscience), the HTM structure fits a simplified description of cortex microarchitecture. As Hawkins says, the field of neuromorphic engineering and computation is in its infancy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A man who can hear Wi-Fi wherever he walks (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429952-300-the-man-who-can-hear-wi-fi-wherever-he-walks/ <comment><USER2> I thought from the headline it might be a case of hearing broadband modems (I tend to be able to hear when my home one is more/less active) but this is more involved and is genuinely listening to the WiFi (my modem noises are not really the WiFi itself).

Reminds me of a visualisation project from several years back: [https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/02/visualizing- wifi/](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/02/visualizing-wifi/)</comment>


Why Procrastinators Procrastinate - <AUTHOR> http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html <comment><USER2> I have lots of remarks, but this is not a psychology essay. The most important part: the style is brilliant and adequate.

</comment><comment><USER3> This hits the spot in so many ways! Just trying to finish reading all of it now...

</comment><comment><USER4> ::sigh:: so painful to read.</comment>


Dart website down due to invalid DNS - <AUTHOR> https://dartlang.org/ <comment><USER2> www.dartlang.org works

<comment><USER3> Weird, I thought they would both point to the same place.

<comment><USER4> the www-record is a CNAME to firebas (which means firebase can change the eventual A record), the root record isn't because you can't* use a CNAME at the root.</comment></comment></comment>


Solidarity against online harassment - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/solidarity-against-online-harassment <comment><USER2> I see three different top-level comments suggesting that this post is an oblique announcement of some kind of censorship or banning system being developed for the Tor software. It is clearly nothing of the sort, and Tor developers value the system far too much to try to shoehorn a backdoor into it. Respond to it for what it is - a statement of social principles.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't say "clearly". They make reference to doing something about harassment but give no outline what that might be. The post is tagged feminism. Believe it or not, not everyone supports this type of feminism. I'm not comfortable with Tor being so overtly political.

<comment><USER4> You mean some people are uncomfortable in having their place in the social pecking order challenged? News at 11.

<comment><USER3> No. First of all you're being pretty rude. Secondly, I don't want ANY pecking order in Tor. They should just focus on making privacy tools and leave the unrelated political messaging aside.

<comment><USER5> You are posting an unpopular position, and are going to get flamed for it by people who won't articulate why they think you're wrong.

For what it's worth, I think you're right about the common-carrier argument. If that's not the argument you're making, disregard my support.

A lot of these folks, in their reasonable zeal to prevent somebody on the internet having their feelings hurt or being made to feel scared, are ignoring the global costs to their chosen fuck-you-got-mine strategies of selective communications. A minority would be even happy to let, say, a misogynist with a cure for cancer be panned or banned irrespective of their other positive qualities. They can be hard to reason with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really hope this blog is only talking about Tor the community and not Tor the technology. I'm pretty sure it's impossible to ban people who are harassing others without storing some identity information, which completely defeats the purpose of Tor.

<comment> 0x5f3759df-i I don't think this is anything other than a public condemnation of the people who use anonymity to harass people.

>This declaration is not the last word, but a beginning: We will not tolerate harassment of our people. We are working within our community to devise ways to concretely support people who suffer from online harassment; this statement is part of that discussion. We hope it will contribute to the larger public conversation about online harassment and we encourage other organizations to sign on to it or write one of their own.

Key word is "declaration". I don't think this will effect the tor technology in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> what was nature of the harassment that they were getting that warranted such a strong response?

</comment><comment><USER3> What exactly does this mean? Are there new centralized control mechanisms in the works for Tor? This seems like a really bad idea TBH. I don't want my privacy tools to come with some strangely ambiguous "political" feeling sentiment. Focus is the key to success and this doesn't seem like it.

</comment><comment><USER8> What movement is being used to harass whom again?

</comment><comment><USER9> Just gonna leave this here: [https://twitter.com/fucktyler/status/285670822264307712](https://twitter.com/fucktyler/status/285670822264307712)

I can't wait until this outrage culture fad is over and we can collectively move on to more interesting things.

<comment><USER10> You can't walk away from threats to be shot.

<comment><USER11> Who was threatening to shoot who?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is this tagged with "feminism"? I'm really uncomfortable with that. I don't want ideology (of any kind) in my technology.

<comment><USER13> >I don't want ideology (of any kind) in my technology.

That too is an ideology, and it's not a trivial one.

<comment><USER12> Thinking about it, I'll concede that it is an ideology. One I'm proud to hold and I think is very tech friendly and progressive. I'll restate it: I think tech should be tech. I don't want privacy tools to contain censorship mechanisms because I believe in free speech.

<comment><USER14> So, just more food for thought: this ideology (that it's bad to look at your tech through a feminist lens, or any other random social lens) tends to be a conservative force, not a progressive one.

Tech has to be built for _someone_. You build for people you (probably) assume have eyes and ears and hands and written language and a financial system and a predictable reward mechanism and a notion of privacy and on and on and on. The only thing that makes a product "good" or "bad" is its interaction with a massive stack of assumptions you're making about the user.

But you only know like 0.000002% of the possible users of your product. So really you're extrapolating wildly from a tiny set of clues about your user, based on signals sent to you by your culture. (Where "culture" is just the set of stuff that filters through to you about the people around you who you don't know personally.) And that culture holds some people to be more "normal" than others. Consider (as just some examples) that test subjects start to see a crowd as half women when it's much less than half. A movie poster with women on it is intended only for women; a poster with men on it is for everyone. A movie poster with only black people is intended only for black people; a poster with white people is for everyone ...

So the product you build is based on a dirty signal -- it incorporates a massive stack of assumptions about the user, derived from a culture that you know is lying to you about what a normal person is. If you build for your internal idea of a "normal" user, letting tech be tech, then you reinforce whatever happened to be handed to you without realizing you're doing it. That's why this is a conservative ideology.

"Feminism" in this context is a progressive tool -- it's a way to look at your product with fresh eyes. How do anonymity tools look if we assume that all users are equally important, focusing on the experience of men vs. women? Huh, it seems that the user base includes a significant number of men who are hateful toward women, and that has a big impact on who participates in anonymous forums and how men and women experience them. Now we have a lot of different options for dealing with that (censorship being only one, and obviously not one the Tor project would choose). Before we* used this lens, our only option was to ignore it and preserve the status quo.

Other "-isms" are just other tools. Anything that your culture cares too much or too little about -- and therefore tends to lie to you about -- is a possible lens to learn about users you're ignoring, because your mental model of "normal" doesn't match reality.

(* Note I'm not at all affiliated with Tor, just using "we" generally here.)

<comment><USER15> I agree with what you're saying, but I'm skeptical about how "significant" the "number of men who are hateful toward women" really is. It's hard to tell a troll from a misogynist. I've seen a lot of assumptions that because the victim is female, and the harassment contains sexist language, that the harasser is therefore a misogynist. Or that the harassment is _because_ the victim is female (as opposed to something she said). But when the troll's intent is to offend, obviously he will use language to that effect.

<comment><USER16> It sounds like you think that trolls are not hateful towards women because they don't 'mean' the hateful things they say and do. I disagree - I don't care what you 'really believe', if you do and say hateful things towards someone then you are hateful to them and you should be counted in the group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't be too quick to dismiss this harassment as part of the gamergate-style nonsense that has been going on as of late. This type of thing is typical of the frat boy intelligence community. It's considered the height of their tradecraft to anonymously harass opponents with facile mockery and threats. Recall the FBI's campaign against Dr. Martin Luther King: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter- dr...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin- luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance)

<comment><USER18> I'm pretty sure it's just more of this slapfight:

[http://pando.com/2014/11/14/tor-smear/](http://pando.com/2014/11/14/tor- smear/)

<comment><USER19> Having just read that article, and also having just learned about Tor's funding - is there any independent/third party summary of this news?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _We have decided that it is not enough for us to work to protect the world from snoops and censors; we must also stand up to protect one another from harassment._

And with that, they've moved from being a dumb pipe to being a force for censorship. Way to go folks. :(

The big problem we see with the internet, and basically any sort of truly open point-to-point communication system that is truly unbiased, is that means that people are able to talk to whomever they want.

True, free, and open communication, with all that that implies.

Personally, I think the only technological solution to this is to make it expensive enough to send messages that people won't just go and harass for the lulz. One could even imagine a system where, perhaps using some kind of bitcoin analogue, additional traffic to a user becomes increasingly "expensive" unless given specific rebates by the recipient--in effect, the more messages a user gets, the more expensive it is to message them, unless they give you permission to do so.

As for non-tech solutions, people need to come to terms with the fact that others may say terrible and hurtful things to them, and they need to have the fortitude to deal with it or ignore it (and that's not easy, but it's essential if you want to be a responsible adult that encourages freedom in today's world).

<comment><USER14> _And with that, they 've moved from being a dumb pipe to being a force for censorship._

This has nothing to do with censorship. It doesn't attempt to make harassment impossible or illegal. It's a social strategy: you can choose to harass people online, or you can choose to be friends with the Tor developers, but you can't do both.

For that matter, harassment is _also_ a social strategy to discourage unwanted activity: you can choose to be a high-profile woman online, or you can choose not to have tons of strangers hate you, but you can't do both. So if this Tor statement somehow _was_ censorship, harassment would be censorship as well.

And so would lots of other things people do every day. We're social animals; we do things to encourage or discourage social participation that we like or don't like. If you have stinky shoes, we stand farther away. If you say shitty things to women, you can't be friends with the Tor developers. It's not censorship, it's freedom of choice.

 _people need to come to terms with the fact that others may say terrible and hurtful things to them, and they need to have the fortitude to deal with it or ignore it_

If you need people to do that, you have a problem, because it is not going to happen. No snark here: if your plan for encouraging freedom depends on people not walking away from harassment, it is an unworkable plan.

If you walk into a bar and everyone shouts terrible things at you, you are not going to "deal with it or ignore it"; you are going to leave. Right now big parts of the internet are like that for (e.g.) women: a bar they walk into, get terrible things shouted at them, and leave.

The Tor devs here are saying, metaphorically, "hey, cut it out, man. You're making this bar suck for everyone." To me, that's a responsible way to encourage freedom in today's world, and more people should do the same.

<comment><USER5> The Tor devs are saying "Hey, somebody has been harassing one of our members, and _we 're going to do something about it, concretely, and we write tools, but that's not enough_." So, a casual reading suggests that they are intending to do something beyond mere blogging to help their friend. Such an action, unless it's just counter-harassment, could well be censorship. That's how I read their post. And no, it's not a good thing that their friend is being harassed.

Basically, as I read it, their post was either feel-good me-too blog support, or it was a declaration of intent to do _something_ , the nature of the problem in turn suggesting censorship or mechanisms for censorship.

The whole "If you need people to have thick skins, well, that's a problem" attitude just isn't supported by the tech we're working with.

Fact: It is possible to send a direct message from one person to another without any significant intermediary (via email, twitter, etc.). _This is freakin ' awesome_.

Fact: Some percentage of communications sent will be negative or offensive.

Fact: We can either stop offensive communications in transit, or we can ignore them at receipt. We can't stop them being transmitted without creating a mechanism for immediate _de facto_ censorship (hell, consider shadowbans in HN for an example of this).

Fact: If we choose to stop offensive communications in transit, we are enabling the stopping of _any_ communications in transit. The same software that lets us drop messages that say "kill all women"\--or some other ghastly comment--is the same software that lets us drop messages that say "save all women". To pretend otherwise is willfully ignorant.

So, it follows (to me, at any rate) that the only way to prevent the installation of such apparatus is to handle discarding messages at the point of reception--and that means being able to ignore or filter out things we disagree with _without_ calling for some central authority to protect us.

I even suggested a nice area of exploration for decentralized handling of that kind of spamming, but nobody cares about that--they just disagree with something else and flag to the bottom of the page. There's your system in action, by the way.</comment></comment></comment>


University of Phoenix Enrollment Down by 42% - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackeducation.com/2011/01/14/university-of-phoenix-enrollment-down-by-42/ <comment><USER2> University of Phoenix was part of a trend that took advantage of the rigid nature of traditional academia and actually customized educational programs around working adults schedule. The problem is they charged outrageous rates for their service.

(The most telling fact in the article is that University of Phoenix still increased their revenue even with this drop)

But with accredited online universities like Western Governors University gaining traction and traditional schools realizing they need adult students University of Phoenix (and others) have lost their unique advantage. Which means a dramatic drop in students.

<comment><USER3> It may also be a function of the first couple generations of students from UoP finding out their expensive degrees carry fantastically little weight in hiring decisions.

I know several UoP graduates who have found themselves without any additional employability, no improvement in salary and a huge student debt to pay off.

<comment><USER4> That's also not unusual for bioscience Phd's from land grant universities, english majors from small liberal arts colleges, or recent Master of Architecture graduates from the Ivy League.

If the measure of education is that it provides vocational opportunity, then all we can shut down all higher education except the nursing programs in the community colleges.

<comment><USER5> It would be nice to see some statistics, but I suspect that an english major from a small liberal arts college is actually significantly more valuable. Of course it isn't going to get you a job _using_ the English major, but it qualifies you for the generic HR screen of "4-year college degree from a respectable institution", which opens up a tier of jobs not available with just a high-school diploma. The unemployment rates and average incomes of people with 4-year liberal-arts degrees are certainly _much_ better than those with just high-school diplomas. Is the same true of UoP degree holders? I'm not sure, but my guess is that UoP degrees don't pass as many HR screens, especially at large companies, at least for now.

<comment><USER4> To the extent to which a degree is used to signify socio-economic status (which I believe to be substantial and to which the higher earning potential correlates), then it would be surprising if Phoenix graduates are seen as less desirable than those from less accessible schools. Phoenix tuition, is not the $37,000 a year that the Rollins Colleges of the world charge, and that is what a significant part of what those degrees signify. [[http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best- colleges/...](http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best- colleges/winter-park-fl/rollins-college-1515)]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There was a really interesting Frontline Documentary - College Inc - <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/> that covered the University of Phoneix in depth.

<comment><USER7> This was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this. For-profit colleges could be a viable venture if they were partly liable for the loans students must take to attend. That would align their profit motives with the success of students and investors.

Right now it's a pyramid scheme about to bust. Banks, and by virtue of lender of last resort, the government end up swallowing this debt.

<comment><USER6> I'm far from an expert in this area but one aspect of the situation that I hadn't realized was that federal student loans aren't dischargeable through bankruptcy?

Does that put the onus back on the students who borrowed so much money?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While this doesn't speak for all its graduates I have met two of their products. One quite young, early thirties, one much older, early sixties. Both had the maturity and view on life of someone, well...who didn't go to university.

Is a degree from university of Phoenix taken serious by employers?

<comment><USER9> "Both had the maturity and view on life of someone, well...who didn't go to university"

I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean here. What maturity and "view" would this be? A lack of "getting drunk at the frat house and banging some sorostitutes" stories?

But in all seriousness, I'd like to know what kind of "maturity" and "view" spending 4 years at a constant party would grant someone, that is somehow superior to the ~12 and ~42 years of actual real world experience that the people you cited likely had?

<comment><USER8> I seem to have offended some readers and I apologize for that.

Personally I come form a different background (eastern Europe) and at the time i went to university it meant working your ass off on projects and papers, working for professors that seemed unreasonable and obtuse and building relationships with colleagues and professors.

That time did give us a certain maturity and taught as an approach to people and work. Little did we know, the people we ended up working with were even more unreasonable and narrow-minded.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are three categories of college degrees, when it comes to helping you advance your career:

1\. A small set of elite schools: Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech. Having Harvard on your resume will always stand out. "Harvard, huh? Certainly worth a look at what else he/she has done."

2\. A school that happens to match with the hiring person -- you happened to attend whatever state school or private college that the hiring person went to or knows well. This is basically nepotism.

3\. Everything else. UoP is most likely to end in this bucket.

</comment><comment><USER4> Disclosure: My spouse teaches online for Phoenix.

Phoenix's success and also a source of criticism is due to its liberal admissions policy and therefore it accepts students who might not be considered fully prepared for college level courses by other institutions. People can legitimately come down on both sides of such an enrollment policy, on the one hand, it can be argued that it deprecates the value of a college diploma while on the other it can be argued that the enrollment policy provides access to capable people who would otherwise be denied.

With nearly half a million students and a liberal admissions policy, there are a lot of poor performing students. It is statistically inevitable. But I would suspect that the least prepared students are not much worse than those major US universities admit _on athletic scholarship_ based on their meeting the NCAA's minimum qualifications. Like the major universities, financial gain is the reason Phoenix admits such students.

Like any school, a student's education is dependent on a number of factors. One thing Phoenix deserves credit for is the size of the classes and the emphasis on discussion. Even within mandatory freshman classes, class size is typically twenty students or less and meaningful participation in these discussions is 25-30% of the grade by university policy. Unlike many prestigious public universities, Phoenix doesn't create 200+ student classrooms and does not allow faculty to structure courses in a way which discourages open discussion. In terms of class structure, Phoenix is akin to a small liberal arts college, and that has real educational value.

Technologically, classroom communication uses is entirely disconnected - basically NNTP style newsgroups with a web front end available and most of Phoenix's classrooms are relatively low tech and emphasize reading and writing rather than streaming live video and chat. Importantly, this offers the financial advantage of reduced overhead for the University, and improves access for students with limited bandwidth.

As a publicly traded company, there is no doubt that Phoenix is in the business of selling degrees - but then again, the marketplace also plays a meaningful role in establishing the price of a Harvard degree, and the recent movement into online education by public universities is no less motivated by the bottom line.

While reduction in costs is one reason public universities are moving into online education, the real driver in many cases is increased fees. Online education offers public universities the opportunity to attract more student's from out of state which translates directly into higher tuition. But more tellingly, it is not uncommon for public universities to charge out of state rates to all online students regardless - including those who would qualify for in-state tuition rates on the bricks and mortar campus.

Because Phoenix's online faculty is largely adjunct, they can handle declines in enrollment more readily than their public university based competition, and because they don't try to compete based on cutting edge high bandwidth classrooms, their technology costs are relatively low. That's why they have been able to maintain revenues.

<comment><USER7> Has your spouse seen this video? If not please watch it. I would be curious if you could debunk/shed more light on some of the issues it raises: <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/view/>

My concern about for-profit education is that its interest is focused more on the investor and less on the student outcomes. Students are admitted fairly easily and loans from for-profit banks in addition to any federal funding create what looks like a ponzi scheme taking advantage of people's aspirations. Once the pool of gullible students are dried up the scheme busts and the tax payers are the ones holding the bag.

<comment><USER11> >My concern about for-profit [services] is that its interest is focused more on the investor and less on the [customer].

Funny how elsewhere the profit motive aligns suppliers' actions to the demands of their extant and would-be customers, since to do otherwise would be to go out of business. Perhaps the issue here is that multiple levels of taxpayer subsidies yields a system of perverse incentives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's a good & accredited online university for CS courses?

<comment><USER13> I've heard some good things about UIUC's online program [1]. My spouse took some graduate level electrical engineering classes at Columbia's online program [2] and had a mixed experience. Some of the classes were really good, but in some cases the adjunct profs weren't very dedicated to teaching; then again, failure to maintain quality control on professional instruction is a problem at lots of reputable schools.

[1] <http://www.online.uillinois.edu/> [2] <http://www.cvn.columbia.edu/>

<comment><USER12> Thanks! I found this as well, not CS, but close enough: [http://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/BachelorinIST_CourseList.shtm...](http://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/BachelorinIST_CourseList.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Rightfully so, you can get a better education with google search.

<comment><USER15> You can get a better education than at any University in the world through self-instruction. But not everyone has such skills, nor does that make it any easier to prove to others that you hold such knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how many saw academicearth.com as a viable substitute. It's great for the random "looks interesting" courses, but a diploma, accredited or not, is at least a tangible demonstration of completion.

</comment><comment><USER17> A source told me there is a law that has been passed preventing sales people to earn a commission from consumers they enroll them into schools. That maybe another reason.

</comment><comment><USER18> Good.</comment>


Market Correction? Try Perma-Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/08/market_correction_try_perma-cr.html

<comment><USER2> Now throw untenable amounts of debt, peak oil, declining demographics, etc. into the mix.

It's really chaotic. On one hand you have fossil fuel depletion and upwards demand pressure on other natural resources having this massively inflationary effect on the cost of energy and raw materials. On other other hand you have the massively deflationary effect of technology: IT making tons of human jobs obsolete, rapid prototyping, robotics, manufacturing automation, cheap multifunction devices that do everything, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think he says anything new that's particularly useful and everything useful said is particularly old. His major arguments against "propping up" were made even as TARP was debated and were used to justify creating a resolution authority that would provide a "bridge to bankruptcy" for ailing banks so they could be liquidated in an orderly manner.

The post doesn't make me very confident in his analytic ability, though, since he speaks of the financial system as if it were one big thing, rather than lots of smaller interlocking things that few (no?) people understand in its totality or connections.</comment>


Taxi StartUp Offers Unlimited Rides For 48 Euros Per Month - <AUTHOR> http://nichegeek.com/taxi_offers_unlimited_rides_for_48_euros_per_month

<comment><AUTHOR> An interesting opportunity for the application of software. Locating the nearest free taxi to a pick-up point and combining customer routes would minimise costs and thus maximise the funds available to pass on to the taxi owners/drivers while still turning in a profit.</comment>