Crack WPA/WPA2 Wi-Fi Routers with Aircrack-Ng and Hashcat - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brannondorsey/wifi-cracking <comment><USER3> I'm not sure why this is amazing enough to make the first page but W/E it's HN :). Just so less informed are aware, this has been feasible for maybe 7 years (since GPU calculation became possible).

Just so nobody freaks out, this is cracking weak passwords, not broken WPA.

I have myself cracked countless WiFi passwords when security testing. It's easy if the passwords are bad, which is maybe 90% of the time for home networks and 60% for businesses. The attack is completely passive if you don't want to be noticed, and with a cheap dish you can pickup both ends of the handshakes from up to around a quarter mile away (line of sight).

<comment><USER4> Can someone define what is considered a weak vs strong password now for WiFi? The only guides I found online are years old.

Is 10 characters considered weak for mixed case letters, numbers, plus punctuation now?

<comment><USER5> To do this formally, you need to consider information entropy. This is all about how you generated your password. 10 characters of totally random mixed case, numbers and punctuation gives about 60 bits of entropy which is strong enough.

HOWEVER, that calculation only works if all 10 characters were generated uniformly and randomly. Humans are terrible at this. Now, maybe your trick for turning words into safe passwords is great, but there is no way to be sure. Sadly, remembering 10 random characters is hard.

Luckily, easy to remember and strong passwords are possible. The system I would recommend is diceware: www.diceware.com

<comment><USER6> There was a nice comic/picture of this. I tend to follow it. Basically using 3-4 short words as a phrase instead of random characters. You can toss special characters inbetween/before/after. They are also much easier to remember. Password "FoolMeOnce!ShameOnMe" for example.

<comment><USER7> For completeness sake, this is probably the comic you are referencing: [https://xkcd.com/936/](https://xkcd.com/936/)

<comment><USER8>
        curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/first20hours/google-10000-english/master/google-10000-english-no-swears.txt | shuf | head -n 4 | tr '\n' ' '; echo
        mine wear vacation mostly

log2(10^16) = 53 bits of entropy or 300 years if your attacker can do a million guesses per second (the link says 1000 keys per second, but that's on the CPU).

You could also use `cat /usr/share/dict/words` instead of the `curl`, which is a much larger word list, but you get impractical passwords like "globular cellulose's malnutrition's dangling".

<comment><USER9> Careful, shuf is not cryptographically safe by default! You need to pass --random-source=/dev/urandom to get a proper RNG.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Rand...](https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Random- sources.html)

<comment><USER8> Why does shuf implement its own random number generator? Why isn't /dev/urandom the default?

[https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate- rando...](https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate-random- numbers/)

<comment><USER9> shuf is not a crypto tool, and the GNU coreutils are written to be cross- platform, even where /dev/urandom doesn't exist, or is unreliable. That's my guess, at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I attempted to do this once and it turned out to be monumentally difficult. I got as far as setting up a bootable kali thumb drive before getting stopped in my tracks by hardware incompatibilities and unexpected behaviors and errors. These articles make it sounds a LOT easier than it is. I was very disappointed because I was really excited about it.

<comment><USER11> I beg to differ. I was doing this at 15 or 16 years old in 2006 when it was still called backtrack. So long as you had a mainstream laptop, the most difficult part was buying a compatible wireless card.

To note, the extent of my technical abilities at that time wasn't much beyond being able to install a mainstream linux distribution or write a simple program in C.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I used Backtrack to show my brother that his big complex password didn't mean anything if he was using WEP (this was quite a while ago).

On a pretty standard laptop (intel chipset/CPU/GPU/Wireless) it booted right up with no effort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 4,733,979 out of the 14,344,391 passwords (33%) in the rockyou.txt dictionary file used for cracking in this guide are too short to be WPA2 passwords, which have a minimum length of 8 characters. Are aircrack and/or hashcat smart enough to not bother hashing those short passwords?

<comment><USER14> 5 million hashes only take a few seconds for wpa2 anyway... Less than two for this system: [https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a27...](https://gist.github.com/epixoip/a83d38f412b4737e99bbef804a270c40)

<comment><USER15> They don't touch it in this tutorial but typically you don't check just whats in your dictionary. You also use a set of rules to manipulate your dictionary that massively increases the number of hashes to perform. Those 5 million entries quickly passes tens of billions hashes that need to be run. These initial entries might be too short like OP pointed out, but after the rules are applied it might generate many entries that will be long enough to spend time hashing.

The keyspace for WPA is huge and the hash speed is still relatively slow, even with an extremely high end system like you linked to the quality of the initial dictionary is really important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there anything novel in there? On a first sight it seems just like a guide done hundred times before...

<comment><USER17> Nope. This is an ancient attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I had the idea a long time ago to make a dd-wrt image which would automatically crack the vulnerable routers within distance, detect the model, and install a compatible version of itself in order to spread virally and create a mesh network. I'm not going to pursue it because it probably breaks a lot of laws, but I'm still curious if it would have been possible. Does anyone know if this is actually feasible? Maybe the radios can't handle that sort of thing?

<comment><USER19> Did you mean this?

[http://gizmodo.com/264050/slurpr-wi-fi-box-sucks-up-six- sign...](http://gizmodo.com/264050/slurpr-wi-fi-box-sucks-up-six-signals-for- super-broadband)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> wifite2[1] is a wrapper tool that does all this automatically.

Not trying to say that easier is better, in this case. Just wanted to show this tool for those who don't know it.

[1] - [https://github.com/derv82/wifite2](https://github.com/derv82/wifite2)

edit: added wifite initially, replaced it with wifite2

</comment><comment><USER21> To the script kiddies out there who read this: Do not try this on others wifi. It is a crime in the USA to crack network routers. Although the chance of you getting caught is low, better be safe than sorry.

<comment><USER22> It is possible to catch 4 way handshakes completely passively. You're not hacking into anything, simply observing.

It's not illegal to receive signals on an unlicensed band with stock equipment

<comment><USER23> > _It 's not illegal to receive signals on an unlicensed band with stock > equipment_

But my neighbors would still be pretty miffed, and would likely have legal recourse, if I passively captured their EM emissions in the 390-700nm band through their bedroom windows at night on a regular basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The deauthentication packet looks interesting. Does that mean, that I could annoy the hell out of my neighbors by constantly forcing all of their devices to reconnect?

</comment><comment><USER25> How long does the cracking process take? I remember WEP only taking 10 minutes using aircrack-ng in BackTrace... I imagine this takes substantially longer.

<comment><USER26> It's not viable for those random 12-ish digit passwords most ISPs will use.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, which is why it is sometimes weirdly _safer_ to not change your SSID - <USER2> cracker can assume that someone who figured out how to change the broadcast name could've also changed the WiFi password... often to something much less secure.

<comment><USER28> SSID is used for password hashing, so better change it from default to avoid rainbow tables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just fyi if you are using Kali the rockyou list is already in /usr/share/wordlists.

Also to reduce the size of the pcap file, you may want filter it for EAPOL packets only:

tshark -r input.pacp -R "eapol || wlan.fc.type_subtype == 0x08" -w small.pcap

</comment><comment><USER30> The DSL provider in my area sets up customer's wireless networks with their home or mobile phone number as the password. If you know that number or can look it up in public records then you're in. If you can't find it maybe use a dictionary pertaining to the area code of phone numbers and then you're in. When the protocol changes to something more secure, the ISP's customer will still be as insecure as they always were.

<comment><USER31> That's not as bad as deriving password and SSID (Provider-$generated_number) from the MAC address, it didn't take much for somebody to reverse the algorithm from the bootloader and make various programs to calculate the few possible password from SSID

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can someone help me understand why, from a technical perspective, it is necessary to capture the handshake?

<comment><USER33> The handshake contains the encrypted password. The idea is to reverse this encryption to obtain the plaintext password.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does this only crack single word passwords? If my password was two common dictionary words or a common word plus a single number, would this try that possibility?

<comment><AUTHOR> Using a wordlist with aircrack-ng seems to only try the literal passwords in the dictionary. If you use naive-hashcat, a series of dictionary, rule, combination, and brute-force attacks will be used. I recommend reading up on the hashcat wiki ([https://hashcat.net/wiki/](https://hashcat.net/wiki/)) to learn how to conduct your own custom hashing attacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Honestly, why reinvent the wheel. Use Wifite2 with a proper password list and done.

<comment><USER36> the proper password list part really is the challenge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Anyone tried Apple's Airport drivers and Linux on VirtualBox?

</comment><comment><USER38> most people don't change password on their routers anymore</comment>


John Carmack: Functional programming in C++ (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_programming_in_C.php <comment><USER2> In case you missed it, John discussed his functional programming adventures in Haskell at QuakeCon 2013... well worth a listen.

 _" So what I set out to do was take the original Wolfenstein 3D, and re- implement it in Haskell."_

[...]

 _" I've got a few conclusions coming from it. One of them is that, there's still the question about static vs dynamic. I know that there was a survey just coming out recently where the majority of programmers are still really not behind static typing. I know that there's the two orthogonal axes about whether types are strong or weak, and whether it's static or dynamic. I come down really pretty firmly, all my experience continues to push me towards this way, that strong, static typing has really significant benefits. Sometimes it's not comfortable, sometimes you have to build up a tight scaffolding to do something that should be really easy, but there are real, strong wins to it."_

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M#t=4876](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uooh0Y9fC_M#t=4876)

(Starts at approximately 1:21:16 in case the direct link doesn't work correctly.)

<comment><USER3> I used to think that way too. I've met programmers who still don't write unit tests and are not test driven and remain brilliant. Carmack is one of these guys. I think the static / strong typing thing works well with them because they never developed the practices. If you're test-driven, you're basically building up your own, domain specific compiler as you go not having to play by a language-specific static type systems rules. Dynamic typing make writing code this way really easy. Static typing doesn't. In the end I want the types of my system to work they way my system needs to. I could care less about the type system of merely a language (as applied to my system). And types are just one way to enforce correctness.

Lately I find with languages in the Lisp family, these other types of tools feel much more productive, easier to reason about and flexible to me than type systems. When I believed in static typing I felt very busy, but I was mostly spending my time making the compiler happy, rather than the other way around.

<comment><USER4> Except that to perform the level of checks that a compiler does with a good type system, you would have to write a large amount of tests. Code is a liability, and testing code is no exception.

Writing tests in static languages is still required. You just have to write a smaller amount of them. What's more, type checking is enforced in a more systematic way. With tests, you have to rely on people to write them. If a type system is well designed, people will use it to model their code, and the type checking is done automatically.

What's more, types should not be reduced to the type checking phase. Types are a way to provide a high level model/structure. You still need this if you are working in a medium/large project. With static types, this model have nicer semantics, and is more useful.

<comment><USER3> Ok try this: Go model a square and a rectangle in your favorite statically typed language. You will find that square extends rectangle and setting the length on a square also sets the width. So far so good? So if I have a collection of rectangles which contains an unknown number of squares of which I set the width on each of them. You can't answer the question as to whether the result is correct or not. And I have just destroyed your type system's purpose by using polymoronism, expectoration and dispossession, the three- legged stool of static typing OO, with a very simple and well-defined domain subset of geometry.

Of course it's contrived but since I've been programming (which is longer than I care to say here, because it really dates me) this is basically where I'm at with static type systems. AS long as I've spent with them I find they're not as useful as they should be. I haven't tried Haskell (I probably should) but I'm getting too much done with dynamic languages, especially Lisps, to look back right now. Too much power to look away. Tschau!

<comment><USER5> > Go model a square and a rectangle in your favorite statically typed > language. Okay.

        data Shape = Square Int | Rectangle Int Int deriving (Show)

> You will find that square extends rectangle and setting the length on a > square also sets the width. Why? I don't really see a need for square to > extend a rectangle.

> So if I have a collection of rectangles which contains an unknown number of > squares of which I set the width on each of them. Like this?

        > let unknowns = [(5,4),(3,2),(4,4)]
        > let toShape (x,y) = if x == y then Square x else Rectangle x y
        > map toShape unknowns
        [Rectangle 5 4,Rectangle 3 2,Square 4]

Tomorrow I'll see if I can make this type-safe by using dependent typing as shown in: [0][1][2]

This was easily solvable in my staticly typed language as you can see. In something like Idris I could have very easily encoded the toShape function the the type signature.

0: [http://www.alfredodinapoli.com/posts/2014-10-13-fun-with- dep...](http://www.alfredodinapoli.com/posts/2014-10-13-fun-with-dependent- types-in-haskell.html) 1: [https://www.fpcomplete.com/user/konn/prove-your- haskell-for-...](https://www.fpcomplete.com/user/konn/prove-your-haskell-for- great-safety/dependent-types-in-haskell) 2: [http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2014-08-25-dep-types- part-...](http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/posts/2014-08-25-dep-types-part-1.html)

<comment><USER3> > I don't really see a need for square to extend a rectangle.

Except that a square is-a rectangle! Especially in terms of geometry. So you should be able to use this isomorphism in a type system as a perfect isomorphic mapping this is the entire purpose of the Liskov Substitution Principle. But the polymorphic result doesn't work polymorphically in a way that helps people reason about how the system works. It does things that are "correct" from a LSP and static typing system POV, but isn't helpful.

<comment><USER6> > Except that a square is-a rectangle! Especially in terms of geometry.

The thing in geometry that is called a "square" which is a special case of the thing in geometry which is called a "rectangle" is an immutable object whose side lengths and other features are _part of its defining identity_.

Modeling this relationship works perfectly fine in an OO language -- but squares and rectangles of this type are immutable objects.

A _mutable_ square with operations which mutate the side lengths while preserving squareness is _not_ a special case of a _mutable_ rectangle with operations which mutate side lengths while preserving rectangleness without also preserving aspect ratio.

The analytical problem here is mistakenly assuming an is-a relationship that applies to immutable entities in geometry applies to mutable objects whose mutation operations are defined in such a way that the is-a relationship does not logically hold.

> So you should be able to use this isomorphism in a type system as a perfect > isomorphic mapping this is the entire purpose of the Liskov Substitution > Principle.

Actually, the entire purpose of the Liskov Substitution Principle is to provide an analytical basis for excluding mistakes like subclassing a mutable "Rectangle" class for a mutable "Square" class with operations that aren't consistent with an is-a relationship simply because of an intuition about an is-a relationship between squares and rectangles in geometry which doesn't actually hold when you analyze the operations on the particular entities you are modelling (which are outside of the geometric definitions of squares and rectangle.) The LSP _defines_ what can and cannot be a subclass, and it rules out the kind of mutable square to mutable rectangle relationship you have proposed in this thread.

<comment><USER3> If LSP defines this why do people keep modeling things this way? More importantly, why do all the type systems let me create models this way. They have one job: to help me with correctness. Looks like that failed. So you see my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> C++14 can be a nice functional programming language, coupling algorithms, lambdas, automatic memory management and secure data structures like std::vector and std::string instead of bare bones C like data types.

It is even possible to do pattern matching,

[http://www.stroustrup.com/OpenPatternMatching.pdf](http://www.stroustrup.com/OpenPatternMatching.pdf)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkDS6hmU-w8&list=PLoswmertKw...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkDS6hmU-w8&list=PLoswmertKw4d_lDpZGLXz8nXCIa4NuHyy)

So it can be a nice language when we have control over the codebase.

However, the biggest problem is being able to do so in the industry at large. I am willing to bet that most C++ code in the wild is done in a pre-C++98 style, with developers unaware of what came afterwards.

Specially bad in those companies where getting any software upgraded is a pain of bureaucracy.

</comment><comment><USER8> Slightly off-topic: Does anyone know what happened to AltDevBlog? It's been gone for 2.5 months now.

<comment><USER8> I dug into it a bit, and based on what I found on Twitter, the site crashed hard and the owner hasn't gotten to recovering the data yet. (He mentioned possibly having to pull it from Archive.org.)

<comment><USER9> Hope it does come back was some golden posts there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is a personal anecdote.

I recently tried to make a lambda function in C++ call itself. My first approach didn't work, because the variables were captured by reference, causing my program to crash (the enclosing scope had disappeared when my recursive lambda function was called). I easily tracked down that problem. But this generated a second problem: without using "capturing by reference", I couldn't make the lambda function refer to itself!

Of course, I looked around on the internet, and I found [1], which actually shows the insane amount of hacking required to make a lambda function call itself. And in the end, this solution didn't even work for me.

So, concluding, I think we're a long way from "functional programming in C++".

[1] [http://cpptruths.blogspot.nl/2013/10/creating-recursive- lamb...](http://cpptruths.blogspot.nl/2013/10/creating-recursive-lambdas- and.html)

<comment><USER11> Having a lambda call itself seems like self-serving functional wankery to me. Lambdas in C++ are nothing but unnamed classes with an () operator. They're blobs of captured values (or references), made immutable by default, that happen to have a function associated with them. If you want to recurse, give the damn thing a name, or rewrite the body in an iterative form.

<comment><USER12> _unnamed classes with an () operator_

They do have a name, but unfortunately it's just a compiler-generated one that's not known beforehand. And you would think that because the body of the lambda is really inside an operator(), 'this' could naturally be used to refer to the lambda itself, but alas, it doesn't work:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14531993/can-lambda- funct...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14531993/can-lambda-functions-be- recursive)

This is one thing about lambdas that I think the standards folks messed up. Having a lambda call itself might not be such a compelling use case, but it comes from the more general fact that a lambda cannot refer to itself, even though there isn't any reason preventing it from doing so; e.g. being able to pass itself ('this') as a parameter to some other function can be very useful.

<comment><USER13> You're asking for a persistent first class function; write it like one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You can take a horse to the water but you cannot make him drink. (强扭的瓜不甜).

</comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3896404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3896404)

</comment><comment><USER16> It would be interesting to hear what John Carmack has to say about functional reactive programming, as that is meant to have it strengths especially in game programming.

<comment><USER5> It probably hasn't been proven enough for him to deem worth of his time. I don't say that condescendingly, but he seems to have a pretty pragmatic approach to trying out new stuff. Unsurprising, given how busy he inevitably is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there any trascript of that speech? Or shownotes? Or at least a link list?</comment>


Exploring the architecture of gentrification - <AUTHOR> https://www.texasobserver.org/gentrification-architecture/ <comment><USER2> All those buildings look great to me. Architecture needs to move forward. Simply emulating what we built 100 years ago is not the right way forward. We use different materials, have different living expectations, etc. And this is coming from someone who loves old houses!

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who expected to find some things to agree with in this article, it was terrible. Just dripping with vague insinuations about how everything is always terrible and probably racist and ugly, but brought nothing at all of substance. It was a remarkably terrible piece of writing. There is probably a lot of great articles that would be written on this subject, but this wasn't one of them. Don't bother reading it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Crying gentrification is just one more way the housing crisis is exacerbated by folks that already got theirs. We need to build denser period.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm as much Stop Building Ugly Condos as the next resident in my reviv(ing) corner of the rust belt... but honestly, with the exception of maybe one photo, none of these are horribly objectionable or out of step with the existing architecture. Crying wolf anyone?</comment>


Appeals to Consequences - <AUTHOR> https://www.jefftk.com/p/appeals-to-consequences <comment><USER3> A culture that is consistently truthful will develop a substantial advantage over one that isn't; over time they will have better information and make better decisions. The example in the article is a really good example of the problem with the fallacy - they couldn't come up with something that makes sense. The ends are unjustifiable; money is being routed to a charity that is ineffective at saving drowning puppies. There are presumably charities that can save 200 puppies for $1.2 million that should be getting the money instead. People who could save puppies for $1,000/puppy will not bother trying because they will think they are inefficient.

The argument in the original (Jessica Taylor) argument rests heavily on the idea that there is nobody who could do better out there. In a world of 7 billion people that is a bad assumption. And that is the problem with lies - we have the technical capability to solve a dizzying array of problems the the point where and the major challenge is working out what the problems are then prioritising improving our handling of them.

There needs to be an appeal to consequences example that makes more sense for the argument to start. The consequences of lying about capability in a world with highly refined knowledge, research and development systems are substantially greater than the short term consequences of this particular example. Suppressing facts will not help save puppies, it will numb the response.

</comment><comment><USER4> The fundamental problem with the appeal to consequences argument is that it's a willingness to hide or ignore the truth, or outright lie.

I've said before that I think the ends _do_ justify the means (consequentialism), but you should be extremely skeptical of "ends justify the means" arguments because people rarely look at the complete consequences. If you're willing to hide or ignore the truth, or lie, then I'm extremely skeptical that your motivations are actually prosocial, and I'm skeptical that the results will actually be good.

<comment><USER5> The general problem with "ends justify the means" arguments, as I see it, is not as much completeness of the consequences, but rather the risk analysis. A lot of "ends justify the means" points of view involve doing certain harm now for uncertain good in the future. Like "lets execute a few thousand class traitors today, so we can build a socialist paradise tomorrow" or "lets lower the taxes for the rich and in a few years the wealth will trickle down". At this point it is kinda hard to be a consistent consequentialist. How certain do you have to be about the paradise of tomorrow to justify an execution today?

<comment><USER6> But our theory says that the good outcome is certain!

/s

The problem is that true believers in the correctness of their theory are _horrible_ at risk analysis, because they assign 100% probability to the success of their program.

<comment><USER5> Consider a variation on the trolley problem. Just like always, there are two track branches and a switch. On the main track, there are five people, on the side track there is one person. But this time things are a tiny bit different. The trolley driver is braking. And the five people on the main track are a few hundred yards down the track, so maybe the trolley will be able to stop before it runs them over. But not. But there is a chance. The one person on the side track, on the other hand, is right here, there is no chance in hell they live if you pull the switch. So what do you do? How do you even reason about something like this?

<comment><USER6> To me, it's really simple. I don't throw the switch. I trust the five people to _get off the %^$#@ tracks_ before the trolley gets there. And I trust the trolley driver to get on the horn to alert the five people that they'd better start doing so without delay.

<comment><USER5> In the problem, the people are tied down to the tracks. Or possibly glued. Or to make it even more horrifying, riveted :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In which the author presents an appeal-to-consequences argument against taking a hard line against accepting appeal-to-consequences arguments.

At least that is self-consistent, while an appeal-to-consequences argument against accepting appeal-to-consequences arguments would not be. But what sort of argument against accepting appeal-to-consequences arguments would be self- consistent?

After rolling that one around for a while, I would tentatively suggest that it is _self-serving_ appeal-to-consequences arguments that we should be most suspicious of, while genuinely _greater-good_ ones deserve consideration.

That did not take long to 'go meta.' Maybe it is a sign that this, like many other ethics issues, is resistant to doctrinaire solutions, which is pretty much where the author ends up.

<comment><USER8> The fallacy of appealing to consequences is not "you should do this thing because it has better consequences" (that's Consequentialism) but instead the clearly false "you should think this thing because if it were true that would be good". Here I'm responding to Taylor's broader use of it, where she's also including the idea that if saying X would have bad consequences you should avoid saying X.

Examples:

* Consequentialism: we should evaluate vaccines based on the effect they have on people

* Appeal to Consequences: it would be horrible if vaccines were actually net-negative, so they can't be

* Taylor's extended Appeal to Consequences: see the post

<comment><USER9> It seems that the "extended" appeals to consequences, per the post, -is- consequentialism.

Consequentialism: evaluate X based on its consequences

Extended: evaluate X, where X is the verb "to speak", based on its consequences

Appeal to Consequences: evaluate X based on desired consequences rather than predicted consequences

Am I misunderstanding?

<comment><USER8> You're not misunderstanding. Taylor is arguing, from a consequentialist perspective, that trying to evaluate the consequences of speaking counterintuitively leads to bad outcomes and so we shouldn't do it. This is a consequentialist argument, but a bit of an ironic one!

My post is responding by saying that it's important to have some situations where you can speak fully freely, but there are also times when you really do need to consider what might happen in response to your words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Consequences are at the foundation of why we have ethics at all. All normative arguments are appeals to consequences when you look closely enough. The practical differences emerge from where and how far into the future you look for the consequences.

(The discussion seems ill-founded to me, without a lot more qualification on exactly which consequences one is looking to.)

<comment><USER8> You're describing Consequentialism ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism)), which is a popular view, especially among technically minded people, but there are also other widely held views that work differently:

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

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

<comment><USER11> I think the parent poster's claim (if I may put words in their mouth) is that, despite the protestations of these other schools of thought, the only reason their rulesets/virtues exist are because of the general case consequences of those rulesets and virtues. They may not explicitly denote their appeal to consequences, but those ethical systems would not exist in their given forms of the actions they proscribe actions did not have consequences.

For example, a virtue ethicist might claim that honesty is a virtue, and thus we should try to be honest. But why is honesty a virtue? I'm not familiar with how virtue ethics deals with infinite regress. However, whatever the philosopher might claim, the real answer is because we evolved in a context where dishonesty was punished. This punishment shaped our sociological and neural landscapes such that we have a dim view of dishonesty in others. The virtue ethicist dresses that up one way, the deontologist might dress it up another, but the actual fact is that the human view of honesty arose from the consequences.

<comment><USER6> At least one virtue ethics system can answer the "why" without infinite regress - the Judeo-Christian one. Honesty is a virtue because God is not a liar. That is, the virtues are virtues because they correspond to the character of God.

Now, you could try to turn that into an infinite regress by asking where God's character comes from. But within that system, God is self-existent - <USER2> doesn't come from anywhere, he has no cause. (You can disagree with the system, but within the logic of the system, the problem doesn't exist.)

And one nit: Honesty is a virtue because _dis_ honesty so often rewards the dishonest at the expense of everyone else. I don't think it's because dishonesty was punished, it's that _others_ suffered when someone was dishonest. Those others got the idea that dishonesty was a bad thing, because they were on the receiving end of the consequences.

<comment><USER10> Because of damnation, eh? Appeals to a higher power usually come with an afterlife, for consequences.

<comment><USER6> Yes, you can make a consequentialist argument within that system. But you can _also_ make a recursion-free virtue-based argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 'Appeals to consequences' as used by Quinn are a fallacy because the decisions rest on the desirability and emotional judgement of the consequence. That's an obvious fallacy we can agree in the context of business.

There are more ways to evaluate consequences than their emotional viability. Taking a teological stance or a protection from death stance can lead to nailing the puppy charity to the wall on exactly how much of a lie is necessary to prevent death of puppies, the truth, people's bank accounts and the charity itself.

Using the appeal to consequences fallacy to disregard an entire category of philosophical thought is a bit silly.

</comment><comment><USER13> > How do we leave open the possibility of the first two outcomes while > avoiding the third?

It seems to me if the first outcome is true, then the third outcome is unavoidable

<comment><USER14> You seem to be demonstrating how miscommunication is very easy in the example shown!

In the example, the idea is that there is one new drug that was shown to be unsafe, but that there is a risk that the results will be misinterpreted to suggest that lots of other drugs are unsafe too. If the communication is handled well, then use of the new drug will never start, and people can continue to use other drugs which are safe.

> then the third outcome is unavoidable

Alternatively, if you mean that incorrect and misleading headlines are unavoidable... then yes, that is a persistent problem, agreed.

<comment><USER13> If you develop a new vaccine, and if you confirm through repeated tests that it causes elevated levels of autism, then yes, you can now say "vaccines can cause autism."

Or rather, in order to now claim that vaccines don't cause autism you will need to say "rigorously tested vaccines don't cause autism"</comment></comment></comment>


Alibaba is investing huge sums in AI research and resources - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610219/inside-the-chinese-lab-that-plans-to-rewire-the-world-with-ai/ <comment><USER2> > More impressive still, all this happens successfully in the middle of a > crowded, noisy station. Each kiosk has to figure out who is speaking to it; > zero in on that person's voice within the crowd; transcribe the incoming > speech; parse its meaning; and compare the person's face against a massive > database of photos—all within a few seconds.

At the risk of sounding cynical, what is more impressive is that even if the kiosk either mis-identifies a voice or zeroes-in on the wrong person or mis- transcribes the incoming speech or parses incorrectly or cannot compare a person face or unable to connect to the database or identification takes more than a minute - no one will ever ever hear about it. The person complaining might get some points from his social score or go to jail.

But, we will get an article from MIT making it sound like everything works flawlessly.

<comment><USER3> It is probably a prototype system. That said, this is the way you make progress: you build something, and see if it performs well enough, meeting people's needs.

Andrew Ng had a great demo of detecting one voice in a party environment in one of his old classes. It was a matlab/octave one-liner.

Here in the US, we have had some fine successes by organizations like DARPA 'going long' and taking funding risks. Now the Chinese are doing the same.

<comment><USER4> DARPA and friends should go long. But it would be nice if journalists didn't act like problems were completely solved the first time they see a prototype. That kind of hype is how you get AI winter.

<comment><USER5> How do we disincentivise clickbait?

<comment><USER6> Stop clicking? Teach others to do the same.

<comment><USER5> That's what I'm doing, but I don't expect it to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's funny in a disturbing way. NSA and Google use technology in an oppressive way and everyone is up in arms. China develops oppressive technology and journalists cannot stop singing their praise.

<comment><USER8> I think it's pretty clear people have been up in arms about population monitoring in both the US and China. In fact, if anything, we've been MORE critical of China.

Here is the fundamental problem in a nutshell:

The governments of China and the US simply don't care what we think.

That's the problem we need to solve.

<comment><USER7> In America, we can do something about it through many avenues. In China, you get 'disappeared' for trying to do something about it. A bit of a difference.

<comment><USER9> House of cards is a pretty accurate depiction of U.S. politics,there are many avenues for one to be "disappeared" in America too. It's not so much different

<comment><USER10> "Down with N! Down with Winnie the pooh. "

Made it past the censors. I guess there are _some_ differences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Chinese AI "rewiring" the world is a terrifying notion, as I'm sure by mandatory design, China's version of Asimov's laws would basically put obeisance to the party and big daddy XI as their primary tenets.

<comment><USER12> As opposed to Trump and the US' "national interests", that have already caused untold pain in the world?

<comment><USER13> There are no heroes here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does the shanghai subway now require IDs to use? That doesn't sound right, they do spot checks for sure but...foreigners use it also.

And you don't need to buy a ticket if your RF transit card is filled up, so the point of the kiosk checking ID via facial recognition is even weirder. Maybe they setup that condition for expository reasons? There is no way kiosks are going to screen everyone during rush hour, even if they work perfectly.

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure this is only a prototype in a single location. When I took the subway yesterday, I didn't see any face recognition anywhere. Then again I haven't recharged my transportation card in half a year, so maybe they now require ID for that. If they do, foreigners are probably identified by their passport.

<comment><USER14> They might be, but face recognition isn't going to work for that. Is this another case of foreigners waiting in line while Chinese get to use the kiosks (as when taking the train)?

I find the subway so annoying in china. It worked well until they started those damn security checkpoints, after that I just couldn't justify taking it rather than a taxi.

<comment><USER16> > security checkpoints

The points where bags are scanned? It is annoying. It is a security farce. It does only take a few tens of seconds, less than a minute. Unless in peak hours, then perhaps a minute more, where taxis would take 4x to 5x to take where the subway puts you.

<comment><USER14> It depends on the station, but liangmaqiao Beijing can have waits up to 30 minutes, sometimes even an hour. The lines can be crazy crazy long in ways that can only happen in china.

Of course, traffic will make taxis slower. But it always seemed to work out faster for me unless I had to leave at peak peak, and Beijing traffic makes shanghai's look reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is the history repeating, or it just rhymes? :) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer)

</comment><comment><USER18> If China won't respect human rights, I would support moving away from them as a trade partner. There are other producers with more liberty for their people.

<comment><USER19> People do not view China as a trade partner.

Instead, China is viewed as an opportunity (to be exploited).

Apple, Dell, IBM, everyone, used them as cheap labor to get manufacturing costs down. So that they can sell that sweet iPhone for $1000, and make $800 in profits. Apple stock goes up. Your 401k is more valuable.

Then, there are more iPhone users in China, than there are in the United States. Apple can make more money selling services (music, apps, subscriptions) to them, than they do in the United States. Do you want to take away this sweet money tree from Apple?

Walmart views China as a cheap manufacturer. You can buy more plastic trinkets for less. So you spend more money, to buy more things. Win for you. Win for Walmart. Walmart stock goes up. Your 401k is more valuable.

If you want to kill the lucrative trade partnership with China, then you had better give a good explanation to all the people with their cushy 401k, why their retirement accounts are tanking.

The trade with China, may suck for the blue collar class, but it is very lucrative for the investor class. And for you, your 401k gets a nice bounce, so that you too, can get a share of the profits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's funny how many times that article mentions something that a Chinese company is doing that is basically a copy of what a US company has already done. And the only reasons the Chinese company is able to even be close is that China essentially bans US tech companies from participating in their economy, and probably because the government conducts espionage on their behalf.

This is a huge deal, and even though steel tariffs aren't a great solution, I at least appreciate that our government is treating China's behavior as a real threat.

<comment><USER21> I'm afraid the steel tariffs sabotage US trade and relation with allies more than China. Most steel imports don't come from China [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2018/mar/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2018/mar/08/angus-king/does-much-steel-does-us-import-china/)

<comment><USER20> Let me quote myself from the post you replied to:

"steel tariffs aren't a great solution"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is any modern computer reading comprehension service available online?

<comment><USER22> BiDAF - Bi-directional Attention Flow Demo by Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence [http://allgood.cs.washington.edu:1995](http://allgood.cs.washington.edu:1995)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Linux distro do you - <AUTHOR> Title was supposed to be "Ask HN: What Linux distro do you <3, and why do you prefer it over alternatives?" but HN is paranoid about HTML I guess? Anyway, can't even edit it to replace "<3" with "love", sorry about that.<p>There's a huge amount of variety, but I imagine there's only a handful of really popular distros. And I'm having a hard time finding a listing of the pros/cons of each, relative to each other, from the horse's mouth. So, without trying to call you a horse, I'm hoping you can tell me from your personal experience why you prefer the distro you use vs. others you've rejected. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I love NixOS because it lets me configure my whole computer with a configuration file that's a functional program and because it ensures the atomicity of configuration changes and software upgrades.

[http://nixos.org/nixos/about.html](http://nixos.org/nixos/about.html)

In my view, it really is a fundamental improvement and represents the state- of-the-art in OS distribution. Nix, the package manager, also works on other distributions and Mac, and operates in a totally self-contained way. It also lets non-root users install packages for themselves.

NixOS doesn't have a graphical installer or anything like that though, so at the moment it's for enthusiasts. But there are tons of packages and they are easy to make and change. And the community is friendly and smart.

I've been using it since spring 2015 with few problems, and I absolutely love it... it's basically made me like computers again. I run it on my Dell laptop and on an Amazon VPS, sharing parts of the configuration via Git so that all the vhosts are available on localhost too.

I also sync the main configuration file with my brother/cofounder so our laptops work the same aside from our own user configs. For example, he might create a new service that depends on some packages, changes some configs, opens a port, adds a new Unix user, etc etc, and when I pull his changes from git and run nixos-rebuild, all of those changes are applied to my computer seamlessly and atomically.

</comment><comment><USER3> Arch, finally a distro that is stable BECAUSE it's cutting edge.

You're running just about the latest of everything, and you pick and choose everything you want to run. It becomes easy to try every window manager and desktop environment, because they are all there (and up to date!).

<comment><USER4> Arch is fantastic, but you need to know a bit of what you're doing. It isn't as user friendly as Ubuntu or others, but it does allow you the most freedom via not getting in your way. Also, pacman/yaourt are the best package managers I have used.

<comment><USER5> pacman is the reason I've been using arch for ~6 years for personal use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It depends on what you want, and why you're asking.

Personally, I use Ubuntu 14.04 LTS because it worked straight away, gives me nearly everything I want, and just gets out of the way and lets me work.

Ask yourself why you care? How will it improve your life? How will it help you get more done?

How much time you'll waste tinkering?

</comment><comment><USER7> Arch. Of course arch. Just like everybody else. Or rather, not like everybody else. That's the whole point of arch. The wiki is a godsend, the AUR is excellent, the system is simple, and all the distro-specific tooling is incredibly well designed, to the point that I can forgive adopting systemd as a default. Besides, you can always change it.

I also run i3 as my desktop interface, and hats off to those guys, it is amazing. You should check it out, if you're into tile-based window managers, and good design, without the horror of configuring dwm.

</comment><comment><USER8> I use Ubuntu on my laptop. I've found that I typically don't need the latest and greatest versions of various software, and have been happy with 12.04 LTS. I suspect that my next version will be 16.04 LTS. I value the Long Term Support releases because I can stick with the same system for several years and still get security updates. At this point in my life / career, I'm not nearly as interested in with tinkering and tweaking things and would rather have something that generally works and is stable.

I've toyed with the idea of going with CentOS on a desktop, but I think that release cycle may be a little too slow. Ubuntu's LTS every two years gives me the opportunity to upgrade sooner if there's a compelling reason (e.g., Docker support).

I do web development at a consultancy (lots of different projects in a variety of languages / environments) and have in the past been able to do a pretty decent job isolating different client applications while running them locally. However, these days I'm moving more to Vagrant for some of the heavier applications and likely to Docker for some of the lighter ones.

</comment><comment><USER9> It doesn't matter what distro you use. You don't want to be friends people that judge you based on your distro of choice. At the end of the day, just pick the one that is easiest to set up on your hardware. For me that is Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER10> I settled on Debian after years of switching between Gentoo and Slackware. Debian suits my needs best. Easy to update and fast on my old machinery.

</comment><comment><USER11> Debian, run them on VPS for small websites, testing. Backups.

I love the package tool, apt-get and apt-cache search to find what I need.

</comment><comment><USER4> I went Ubuntu -> Crunchbang (r.i.p.) -> Arch, with a short stint trying out Gentoo. Arch is my favorite, but that is largely because I am a control freak when it comes to my system.

Ubuntu is nice if you have never used Linux. There is a wealth of resources out there that assume you are using Ubuntu for your distro, it offers a lot of default options that let you do things without worrying about them (like network configurations or mounting of file systems), and it is incredibly stable. However, changing or removing certain aspects can prove difficult. If you start to deviate from the things they give you, or the things available in the Ubuntu app marketplace (or whatever it is now), then you will probably experience some friction. Or, if you are a developer and want to run with the latest updates for that compiler that made it finally not terrible, you are going to be waiting a while until it moves into the ubuntu-stable repository (and mixing experimental/testing/stable is risky, if you aren't sure what you're doing).

Arch is the other side of that coin. If you want something that just got released, Arch will probably have it, either in the standard repos, or the AUR. And pacman/yaourt are some of the best package managers I have used. And making changes to your system is easy, as there is very little that gets in your way (systemd is perhaps the only thing to worry about). And for any changes you do want to make, the Arch Wiki is an absolutely fantastic resource (this is true in general, for most distros). All this comes with a price, as you have to manually do a lot of stuff. You have to install your window manager or desktop environment; you have to manage or set up your network connections (and there are a few programs to choose from); you have to write your own xinitrc (if you want), set up your session manage, everything. A base Arch install gives you the coreutils, and little else. For some people, who want to control everything their computer does for one reason or another, this is perfect. For others, this is maddening (I assume).

Most distros exist somewhere on that spectrum of usability and control, with Ubuntu on one end and Arch (and to a further extent, Gentoo) on the other. I have spent hours upon hours learning about my system and what I can do with/to it using Arch. It is fun for me, but I don't think that is for everybody. Its up to you to decide what you want.

(Protip: install to a virtual machine or a throwaway machine before making the full switch. Even with Ubuntu its much easier to break your system than Windows or OS X)

</comment><comment><USER12> Fedora currently, but planning to switch to Arch soon because Fedora comes with a lot of stuff that i simply don't need/want such as the constantly running tools for automatic bug reporting.

</comment><comment><USER13> Ubuntu, because it's the only one that really works out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ubuntu because I'm not ready for Arch yet.

</comment><comment><USER15> A flavor of Ubuntu (usually Lu or Xu) or Manjaro.

For a portable OS (and may switch to it as main linux OS) I really like Porteus.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ubuntu - for getting things done. Arch - to satisfy the desire for bleeding edge

</comment><comment><USER17> Ubuntu

</comment><comment><USER18> Elementary OS</comment>


The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/the-avengers-why-pirates-failed-to-prevent-a-box-office-record-120508/ <comment><USER2> A thing to note is that it was a CAM recording of the film that was leaked.

I have only ever watched one cam recording of a movie before. I think it was 'The Illusionist.' I was at a friends house, he slapped it on. The color saturation was wrong, the sound was like mono and the camera appeared slightly off so the very top or bottom of the screen was cut off. It wasn't completely unwatchable but it spoiled the movie. Its like watching a film through a neighbours window.. crap.

Piracy has far more effect on DVD sales. This is for 4 reasons. The price of DVD's, the inconvenience of going out and getting the DVD, the bullshit adverts and unskipable junk before the film and the menu which takes 20 seconds to display before you can press PLAY.

If there was a DVD quality recording of the avengers I think it would have easily had 5x more downloads, probably 10x. However, realistically the cinema is an experience. If you enjoy the cinema you are going to watch a film like this at the cinema - then maybe download it. I am firmly of the opinion that if you make a blockbuster film, whether it leaks or not it will do well.

<comment><USER3> Imagine how much money they could make if they released a 1080p HD version online, globally, 4 weeks at most after the launch in cinemas, and for a price of $5.

That may or may not kill the cinemas in the long term, depending on how hard they fight to become more competitive and unique compared to watching the movie at home, but it would definitely not hurt the studios and movie makers. If anything, they stand to make a lot more money on average for every released movie.

<comment><USER4> 720p or 480p would be more realistic; the bandwidth costs for serving 1080p would chew through that $5 pretty quickly. (Assuming reasonable video bitrates) Besides, a very large chunk of consumers own machines that cannot handle 1080p.

Before you scream bloody murder, remember DVDs are only 480p.

<comment><USER5> Let's assume that a 1080p movie encoded for streaming using H.264 ends up at 8GB (a generous overestimate for most movies). At entry-level datacenter pricing of $0.10/GB, bandwidth costs will leave $4.20 for the rest of the supply chain.

<comment><USER6> $0.10/GB is way more than market rates for bandwidth. Dedicated server hosters such as 100TB.com charge about $200 for 100TB, ie. $2/TB or 0.2 cents /GB, resulting in a grand total of 1.6 cents for a 8GB movie stream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Torrentfreak's articles seem to get better and better. They note the ways in which piracy is hurting films (foreign sales) and show some numbers indicating that in the US it doesn't appear to be hurting sales much at all. While obviously torrentfreak can't ever be considered objective in regards to piracy, they seem to be getting closer each time.

Back on topic then, Does anyone have the background necessary to know if someone (anyone) is working towards disrupting the complicated publishing mess that keeps films from being available overseas for so long.

<comment><USER8> I am perplexed by your comment about overseas release dates. There has been an absolutely massive compression in release dates in the past 5 years. Most obvious blockbusters are now globally released, and the spread for smaller films has also been contracting.

Avengers was released overseas _prior_ to the US release. A film like The Descendants was released 4 weeks early in NY/LA, and then foreign releases were only 6 weeks after the US release. That is insanely fast for a movie that could potentially have never made it out of NY/LA.

<comment><USER9> Japan still lags behind the US for most big-ticket films. Avengers won't open here until 2012/08/17, more than three months after the US release date. [1] That's a month ahead of the projected blu-ray release of the film though.

It's really hit and miss, but most of the more major films lag by two to three months.

1 - [http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A2%E3%83%99%E3%83%B3%E3%...](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A2%E3%83%99%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B8%E3%83%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%82%BA_\(2012%E5%B9%B4%E3%81%AE%E6%98%A0%E7%94%BB\))

<comment><USER10> Japan probably has one of the lowest piracy rates, so they don't seem to be forced to release earlier there. Japan's own media is even more backwards, most of their media never gets international releases although there is a big fansub scene. They don't seem to need the money.

<comment><USER11> > They don't seem to need the money.

Oh no, they DO need the money, believe me. Most of their productions take years to just break even, and some never do. The reason why they are not actively pursuing international releases is linked to the way Japanese do business. Most of these media companies are very traditional and do not understand the opportunities outside of Japan. And even if they did, they'd need to get the approval of an old 社長 to proceed with such plans. This happens very rarely. They are missing a huge market.

<comment><USER10> I know. That sentence was of course sarcastic ;). It's a shame too, because a lot of their media has that special charm and its artistic value is sometimes quite high IMO (especially in the anime department).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage_

The direct impact of cam releases might very well be negligible. The bigger problem for the studios is that if word gets out that a blockbuster movie fails the expectations of its potential audience. That probability is much higher if there are CAMs available before the theatrical release.

So, to minimize losses caused by piracy, make your movie not suck.

<comment><USER13> > So, to minimize losses caused by piracy, make your movie not suck.

Yes, but it doesn't work exactly like that. s/not suck/profitable.

This just means that instead of taking chances on a film which is a big risk (think Inception), we will simply see more and more super hero movies and more and more sequels. There is much less of a margin of error when people are downloading things.

I think there's little or no room for a "Requiem for a Dream" type of film in the coming years. Maybe kickstarter will have to be the avenue to make movies like that.

<comment><USER14> Inception wasn't that big a risk. Nolan had proved he could do ideas (Memento), he'd proved he could do big budget (two Batman films) and he was willing to stick major stars in it (including arguably the biggest star on the planet). They then backed that up with a $100m advertising budget.

In many ways it was an art house sci-fi film but in many others it did everything by the book for a big budget movie (proven track record, stars, special effects and action then hype it to the hilt).

You're right that the pattern is towards the more conservative but I'm not sure that Inception was a massively out there move.

Requiem for a Dream is a completely different beast and shows the other way you can do it even now. That was a cheap film - £5m or so. Adjust for inflation and you get maybe double that, which is still less than 5% of the budget of the Avengers.

That sort of film can be funded by smaller production companies, by larger studios (often as vanity / credibility projects - Schindler's List was seen that way when it was signed off though I doubt the studio will admit that now) and in a host of other ways. I can certainly see large studios funding things like that almost as part of an incubator model - giving new directors who seem promising a stage to show what they can do before they let them loose on something larger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For me it usually comes down to the 'is it worth it?' Avengers was worth it - you knew it was going to be great in 3D, explosions, cinema sound, Iron Man, etc. Whilst I begrudged paying £16 (~$26 US) for me and the girlfriend (before even thinking about drinks / popcorn) we were always going to see it in the cinema.

Compare that to a film that doesn't excite me (or most of the general population), and all of a sudden I'd rather wait for the movie on Netflix or whatever, because then £16 is better spent on a takeaway and watching from home.

I know films are different strokes for different folks, but the cinema is _really_ overpriced if you're in the 'shall we / shan't we' category, so I can understand people just thinking - I'll pirate it and save the money (or spend it on dinner) and watch from the comfort of my home - the risk to reward is so much lower.

I'm not saying that's right - just with the cost as it is you need a great (or mass appeal) product to get bums on seats. Or you have lower the cost in cinemas and make going to the cinema the experience ("we can choose a film when we get there") rather than people just going to see something in particular.

EDIT: Regardless, great article on TF ;-)

<comment><USER16> > you knew it was going to be great in 3D

Quick off-topic question. Is the 3d version worth it here? Usually most 3d films is 3d just because, but make no real good use of it. But being 3d just adds an extra unnecessary eye strain.

This is why I watched the Avengers on 2d. But is this one of those rare movies (like avatar) where the 3d version is actually better? If so, I might go back and watch it again.

<comment><USER17> I saw it in 3D yesterday (begrudgingly, as I hate 3D, but the theater I went to only showed it in 3D). The 3D is used to pretty good effect for the most part (ie: it's not 20 minutes of normal footage and then a gratuitous 3D shot of something being waved at you), and I found that about an hour into the movie, I didn't notice it.

What I thought was odd was that there were things in 3D that were just part of the background (like there was literally a scene or two where the railing on a walkway was jutting out in 3D).

If you've already seen it in 2D, I really don't think you missed out; but if you liked the movie (and I thought it was very very good) and were going to see it again anyway, the 3D doesn't ruin the experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _that there is a detrimental effect on international box office figures. The researchers attribute this impact to the wide release gaps_

Damn right. It makes sense that if you release a film in Europe 6 months after the USA that there will be more piracy in Europe. Why should we have to wait? There is a simple solution: Release films at the same time/day. This is an example of piracy making things better for the consumer, and this sort of market-correcting piracy should be encouraged.

<comment><USER19> It's a hangover from the 'old days' where those lower down the release date list got 'hand me down' film reels.

Reels are one of the last major costs for film distributors, and even in the face of piracy they would rather cut costs there, than put there risk onto their own shoulders and produce more reels. They are scared of being stuck with a flop movie, and many theatres in the UK and elsewhere outside of the USofA won't commit to buying reels without seeing USA box-office turnout first. The delay is here, and until we have digital projecting, I'm not sure how it will be solved

<comment><USER20> What year is this? I was sure the world had long since moved on to entirely digital projection. I for one can't remember the last time I saw the "end-of- reel" spots on a movie in the cinema.

Are reel projectors actually widely used still?

<comment> excuse-me Yes reel projectors are still used - even at some multiplexes. The reason there are no end of reel dots is that the changeover is now electronic and is coded into the sound track but most places now have full film reels and single projectors anyway to reduce the staffing requirements so there is no changeover.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If I may play Devil's Advocate. I can understand why Distributors, movie companies, etc go so far in pushing anti piracy. Not necessarily just because of the fact that it hurts profits (although by a minor fraction), but also because it's only logical to do so. If movie companies were to one day come out and say that they are ok with people pirating their movies, who's to say that it won't increase the number of people attempting to pirate the movies since you would not be punished. In this case the act of making pirating taboo and portraying it as anti social behavior helps in minimizing the acceptance that pirating is OK by mass advertising(Although this technique may not effective, but I haven't read enough to get a sense that it doesn't work). Although they take extreme measures, it's that fear of getting caught that helps in maintaining their profits which make their share holders happy.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm pretty sure I know exactly when the film companies will abandon the current business model for movies (theatres plus DVDs) and switch primarily to online pay-per-view-like scheme, with DVDs going out pretty much immediately and theatres surviving, but slowly fading.

It will happen as soon as the first studio realizes and takes advantage of the fact that with such a scheme you a) can charge for the same movie over and over again, and b) you can greatly improve the feedback on how popular which movies are, which could use an update/sequel and which should be left to die. This is something we in the Web business take for granted, but in the movies they are still too ingrained in the old ways that they don't see the benefits and effects of online distribution. But they will, mind you; not all at once, but as soon as it proves itself they'll jump on the bandwagon.

</comment><comment><USER23> The people that should be scared by piracy are those that aren't making really high quality, possible cult films. If you're making the next Jennifer Aniston movie, which replicates tens of others then people won't be motivated to go to the cinema, some may pirate it and others may buy it on DVD just for something to watch but you can't dedicate a huge following to go watch it in the cinema.

The Avengers got people to go in mass groups and those people told other friends to watch it.

<comment> excuse-me That's the industry's real concern - that the majority of nice people will pirate movies.

As long as it's a few kids downloading copies of the latest blockbuster they aren't too worried - these people are guaranteed to go to see every blockbuster anyway - and will go with large numbers of their friends - and go multiple times. That's why the piracy of this kind of movie doesn't hurt US ticket sales.

But when nice respectable couples decide to download the movie rather than making the trip out, paying babysitters, etc then the industry has to worry. All it's nice middle of the road mid budget movies that it can't pay for with fast food tie-ins or theme park rides and had to rely on DVD sales for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'll be honest, I downloaded the CAM version and it was crap to me, and someone had mentioned it was a great movie, so I went to the theater to see it because I didn't want to miss out.

I think the guy who released that CAM might have been doing the movie studio a favor because it might have made the next guy feel like he didn't need to do his own upload which might have been better.

If there was a good version available when I went to pirate it, I wouldn't have dragged myself to the theater.

I wanted to buy a large popcorn and soda with my cash when I got in there, but I only had $12 so I had to put it on the card.

I just wish they would release stuff on Amazon or iTunes (although I hate that program) the same day as it comes out.

Anyway, I spend way too much money on Amazon videos.

</comment><comment><USER25> Fatuous.

A cam'd version of The Avengers is not a market substitute for seeing the movie in a theater. Of the movies you could possibly consider this way, The Avengers is among the _least_ amenable to substitution via cam'd copies.

All the widely-available torrents of The Avengers are cam'd or equivalent. There aren't screeners circulating.

A DVD rip _is_ a near-perfect substitute for a DVD (or a streamed version of the movie, or whatever).

Nearly 50% of the revenue from motion pictures happens after the theater release, most of it DVDs.

Think what you want to think about torrenting movies, but it should bother you when sites like Torrentfreak insult your intelligence.

<comment><USER26> I don't think you read the entire article, which explained everything you said here quite clearly.

<comment><USER27> Entire article? He didn't even read the bold teaser, evidently. That was, indeed, the entire point of the article.

There are a few sites that tptacek will insta-contrarian on HN. Torrentfreak is one of them. You know the xkcd comic about someone is wrong on the internet? Substitute "being wrong" for "generating rageviews with libertarian nerds" and that is tptacek.

 _"Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie's profits, it's really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage."_

<comment><USER25> I read the entire article; my point is that it doesn't say anything. Did anyone think Avengers cams were what Hollywood is truly concerned about with BitTorrent?

<comment><USER28> > Did anyone think Avengers cams were what Hollywood is truly concerned about > with BitTorrent?

They use night vision goggles & special cameras to locate people recording movies, and charge people with serious federal crimes for the act (the kind where you can get 3 years in prison) via a law enacted in 2005 [1]. Those huge, ugly brown spots you see flash on the screen? They exist to track cam pirates. They can also use audio distortions to pinpoint the exact seat the person is in to help them further narrow down the suspects.

Hollywood has a very odd way of showing a lack of true concern about cams.

[1] FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT AND COPYRIGHT ACT OF 2005 - <http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/pl109-9.html>

<comment><USER26> I'm really curious about the technology behind the brown spots and the audio distortions. Can you cite your source for this stuff so I can read up on it?

<comment><USER28> TorrentFreak has articles on the tech itself, but they don't go into a lot of detail. I suspect the exact workings are secret.

EDIT: Link = [https://torrentfreak.com/movie-spy-cameras-attack-the- dying-...](https://torrentfreak.com/movie-spy-cameras-attack-the-dying-art-of- camcorder-piracy-120426/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The most mind boggling thing I've seen big studios do is block some trailers, promo videos or music videos in countries other than the US/UK/Canada or whatever their main market is. Why in the world would you ever do that?

It makes absolutely no sense - they're blocking people in other countries from getting to know their new movie/single, which means those potential cinema goers and DVD/CD buyers either forget about it or go to torrent sites to get it, so when the movie/single is finally released, few people care about it.

One of the stupidest thing I've ever seen, for sure...

<comment><USER30> > _"Why in the world would you ever do that?"_

Because the distribution rights probably belong to someone else in said countries. It's the same reason why some songs are available on iTunes in the US but curiously missing elsewhere.

<comment><USER29> So why don't they push the distributors to release the stuff at the same time? It's their content, it's not the distributor who complains about piracy and lost sales, the studios can just kick them out if they're not making any sales... Besides, there are many countries where they have literally no presence whatsoever and it's like they're actively trying to prevent it from building up (unlike Microsoft, which just let people pirate their stuff, then came in and said "actually, you need to pay for that" - in reference to Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, where they successfully converted many companies and government agencies from pirates to paying customers)...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nice post, he fails to mention that the camcorder version may have _increased_ ticket sales. I know people who have watched a torrent of a movie to see if it was worth the $10 - $20 it costs to see it in the theater.

So of the 100,000 people who downloaded it, it would be interesting to poll how many went to see it after seeing that it was a decent movie.

</comment><comment><USER32> I watched the CAM recording over the weekend(before this I had no desire at all to see the Avengers) and decided it was worth actually seeing in a theater. I think that's what a lot of people use CAM recordings for. To sample a movie before spending the money to see it in theaters.

</comment><comment><USER33> > anti-camcording technologies [[http://torrentfreak.com/movie-spy-cameras- > attack-the-dying-a...](http://torrentfreak.com/movie-spy-cameras-attack-the- > dying-art-of-camcorder-piracy-120426/)]

This is largely off-topic but I was wondering if there are any other popular anti-camcording technologies?

Also could a large IR lamp facing the viewers (or aimed at screen) be used to disrupt the usage of camcorders? This will be additionally beneficial as a large part of the world requires heating solutions during significant part of the year.

<comment><USER34> At the avengers screening I saw at midnight, it was like an oven in the theatre. That's not the best idea with a room full of comic book nerds. In theory, as long as the lamp is as bright as the movie it would make the movies really dim for anybody recording it.

<comment><USER33> Didn't know that idea is already used, I was just throwing a possibility!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "This means that roughly 100,000 Americans have downloaded a copy online through BitTorrent. Now, IF all these people bought a movie ticket instead then box office revenue would be just 0.5% higher."

Even though I agree with most points in this article, the 0.5% is a bit off. When a "pirate" (yarghh) decides to download a movie, they usually end up watching it with friends and/or family - not just by themselves..

Still, if you really care about a movie, you would watch it in a cinema instead of watching a bad "CAM" version.

<comment><USER36> The point is that the stated 0.5% is an upper bound, so even if _none_ of them also bought a ticket, as you speculated (and I find it very unlikely that this is the case), they would still only make up a 0.5% difference in the box office revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I believe pirating does affect ticket sales but really only for the lower budget/less anticipated movies. I tend to bucket all the movies I want to watch into 3 categories: go the movies, dollar theater, and download. The less I truly want to see the movie the lower down the bucket list it goes.

So yeah a movie like the Avengers which for me and probably most others will definitely be in the top bucket won't be affected much by pirating. Can't say the same for say Madagascar 3.

</comment><comment><USER38> Even one lost customer to piracy justifies in the minds of RIAA/MPAA the spending millions on lobbying, creating draconian laws, and using the Government as their muscle.

</comment><comment><USER39> Because Aardman stop-motion animation has a niche fanbase? :)</comment>


A review of the Blackphone, the Android for the paranoid - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/06/exclusive-a-review-of-the-blackphone-the-android-for-the-paranoid/ <comment><USER2> Why does the blackphone lack a physical switch for

* the microphone

* the GPS chip (or if not possible, the GPS antenna)

* the GSM chip (or if not possible, the GSM antennae)

* the camera(s)

I have talked to the Silent Circle people at MWC in barcelona and they acknowledged the current security issue with the closed source, black box baseband. This first blackphone is of course just a first step.

However, physical switches could help against certain attack scenarios.

<comment><USER3> Mike switch alone would go a long way. It would also make a great marketing point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This has a closed source baseband that was also not designed by the company producing the phone. The baseband is pretty much guaranteed to be backdoored by your favorite state security agency, so why get this over any other Android phone?

<comment><USER5> I remember getting the OpenMoko phone and pretty sure this was an issue way back then

<comment><USER6> It always was an issue and still will be for a long time. Neo900 project takes another way to neutralize the modem - by sandboxing and monitoring its activity. This alone probably makes it much more secure and privacy-friendly than Blackphone.

<comment><USER7> [http://neo900.org/faq#privacy](http://neo900.org/faq#privacy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing I hate about Android phones these days are the opt-out sync features. All my data is synced to a magical location, and once synced they can never be erased. If you make a single mistake, then all your data has been essentially stolen.

For example, I created a 'Samsung account' to try out the heart rate monitor on S5. I didn't know that if I create an account like that, the phone instantly uploads (syncs) my pictures, contacts etc. to a server somewhere. Sure, maybe that was mentioned in the long EULAs, but it's not practical to read through all the EULAs everytime I crete an account.

In addition, the 'Samsung account sync' app was installed on default, so I didn't even get to accept the app (or even read what access rights it had).

<comment><USER9> Is Apple any better on this? I'm thinking that my next phone is going to be an iPhone because of the regular updates over Android, but is it as hard to stay away from iCloud and not accidentally send everything there?

<comment><USER10> From my experience, iOS rather asks twice than not at all. I have yet to detect a sharing feature where the intentions are not clear. Also, every privacy related access is prompted separately, a freshly installed app has no permissions on anything - so it's usually a non issue when installing apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> not to be a bummer, but it doesn't seem like anything special was done with this special purpose hardware. why go to the trouble to engineer and advertise this as a piece of security enhancing hardware when it's really just "PrivOS"? also, any plans on open sourcing "PrivOS"?

did I miss something in the writeup? OSS modem firmware, OS wifi chipset, _anything_ hardware or firmware related?

<comment><USER12> You're missing the fact that this can be sold (at an outrageous markup) to large enterprises and government agencies because it looks secure/private.

Beyond that, it provides _literally nothing_ that you can't install for free on any Android device. I could make you an equally "secure" or "private" device for $300 and an hour's time.

<comment><USER13> > Beyond that, it provides literally nothing that you can't install for free > on any Android device. I could make you an equally "secure" or "private" > device for $300 and an hour's time.

Yeah, this was my takeaway from the article. They even link to the Google Play store entries for the software that comes packaged on the phone. Missed opportunity, I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "We found that Blackphone lives up to its privacy hype."

In all fairness I wouldn't say Ars Technica, good though some of their coverage is, are really the people to determine this.

Especially in an article in which at no point do they ask "where's the source?".

<comment><USER15> On the other hand, how could they skip this topic in an article about a "privacy" phone?

If find the trustworthy value of a phone is about equal to the privacy leak bounty. If each customer trusts the phone with, say $300 worth of information, then that should be a hell of a big bounty.

So Ars Technica should have talked about "where's the source" and "how much is the bounty".

<comment><USER14> Not all information has a monetary value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> See also the OnePlus One with Cyanogenmod 11, $299 unlocked, but for now can't be purchased without an invite.

CM11 hardening: [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible- hardenin...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening- android-security-and-privacy)

<comment><USER12> The most crucial step in that recipe is using a device without a GSM baseband. That rules out anything sold as a 'phone,' such as the OnePlus One.

<comment><USER17> I think that's possibly overkill. Provided the baseband processor is independent of the apps processor, communicates over a managed bus (usb, high speed serial, dedicated dual-port ram), instead of having direct access to main system memory, and the apps processor has the ability to power it up and down at will, you're in a pretty good state _and_ you can still hop on a cellular voice or data network when you want to.

This scenario is true of plenty of smartphones shipping today, but of course it's not something that manufacturers advertise and it's potentially difficult to verify.

One should probably also be concerned about wifi firmware, though smartphone wifi is almost exclusively connected via sdio and not able to directly affect main memory.

The biggest concern in systems where baseband and wifi radios are not-too- deeply integrated is driver bugs where input from those subsystems is overly- trusted or not adequately validated -- of course solid drivers should never trust the hardware, even if not actively malicious, it can be horribly buggy.

<comment><USER18> Which phones have this memory architecture vs. dma?

<comment><USER2> I know no recent LTE baseband phones that have this isolation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> No mention of the baseband source code. Unless everything running on the phone is open source, there cannot be a guarantee of privacy.

<comment><USER20> If i understand it correctly there is no open source baseband available because of various patented technologies and it is imposible to create one. But why not treat the baseband as part of insecure transit network? I'd like to see phone where voice data and text messages would be securely encrypted before sending to baseband chip and securely decrypted on the other side. I think there would be great demand for such device but i don't see any in existence. Am i missing something?

<comment><USER21> I think its because the baseband processor can access the microphone, screen and RAM semi-directly so its pointless having any encryption when you can just "key log" the screen as the user inputs the message. Please someone correct me.

(I posted a sort of question below along these lines but not yet had a response)

<comment><USER22> Basically, baseband can read the RAM. If you can ram dump you can do virtually anything, including get encryption keys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This phone seems like a better option for people worried about privacy [http://www.cryptophone.de/en/company/news/gsmk-introduces- ne...](http://www.cryptophone.de/en/company/news/gsmk-introduces-new- groundbreaking-secure-mobile-phone/)

"Baseband firewall: Based upon three years of cutting-edge research in baseband processor security, the new patent-pending GSMK CryptoPhone Baseband Firewall™ offers unique protection against over-the-air attacks with constant monitoring of baseband processor activity, baseband attack detection, and automated initiation of countermeasures. A global first, the CryptoPhone 500's Baseband Firewall provides a revolutionary line of defence against over-the- air attacks not available on any other product."

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm really getting tired of writers who keep casually equating those who value their own privacy to those who are suffering from paranoia. It implies that people are mentally unstable just for wanting privacy.

Even in jest, it's insulting and increasingly out of touch in our post-Snowden world to keep calling privacy-minded people paranoid and I wish people would knock it off.

</comment><comment><USER25> If the phone's software is not free (as in freedom), are Silent Circle's assurances of security and privacy any more meaningful than Google's 'don't be evil'?

</comment><comment><USER21> For my own understanding on the issue with a closed source baseband. Is it analogous to having a network card in every desktop computer that can directly access the screen, keyboard and microphone and therefore compromise all interaction with the phone regardless of tunnelled networks?

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if they fixed the broken-since-introduction Android Always-on VPN support?

</comment><comment><USER27> I work in the corrections industry and need a device that is the polar opposite.

</comment><comment><USER28> missed a beat, should have been called "Paranoid Android".

<comment><USER29> "Paranoid Android" is already a thing - [http://paranoidandroid.co/](http://paranoidandroid.co/).

<comment><USER30> Call it Marvin, and let people make their own connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It doesn't look like it does well in benchmarking either. You sure this isn't an advertisement for the iPhone 5S?

<comment><USER32> It's not trying to do well in the benchmarks, so no surprise there really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just a two word review: Shit sandwich. #TapIntoAmerica</comment>


Patch adds multiplayer support to XCOM - <AUTHOR> http://www.destructoid.com/x-com-gets-multiplayer-thanks-to-a-fan-patch-179453.phtml

<comment><USER2> Oh man. I just heard the sound of a UFO door opening but I can't see anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a game crying out for a mobile port (iPhone / Android / iPad port)... Please, someone?

</comment><comment><USER4> great patch, one the best games in history</comment>


Why Iris Murdoch Matters - <AUTHOR> https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/innumerable-intentions-and-charms-on-gary-brownings-why-iris-murdoch-matters/ <comment><USER2> I read "Severed head" some time ago - if I read another Murdoch, which one should it be?

<comment><USER3> I really enjoyed Henry and Cato. The professor for my honors humanities sequence in undergrad was an Iris Murdoch specialist, and that's how I was introduced to her work.

<comment><USER2> Sounds interesting from the summary - added to my Goodreads list.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you index large unknown files? - <AUTHOR> I want to index about a terabyte of unknown data. I'd like to be able to get emails, usernames, phonenumbers, etc out of it using regexes or some other technique. Is anyone able to point me in the right direction? I was looking at using elasticsearch as it seems like the best atm. <comment><USER2> For tabular data, I recommend using Duckling [1] which is a regex-based approach to data classification and it supports multiple languages. If you only need English, then Stanford CoreNLP's SUTime [2] will also work. You can extend either tool with your own regexes.

For documents, I recommend using Apache Tika which will do a decent job out of the box to extract the raw text. The raw text can then by indexed in ES. In my experience, it is the best tool for detecting a document's type. It is not necessarily the best tool for extracting text depending on the document type. For example, it is better to use a paid solution for OCR PDFs if you can afford it. However it is often good enough and very easy to use.

If you need to extract tabular data from documents, then that is a much harder problem and you are on the cutting-edge of NLP/ML research. One tool available in Stanford CoreNLP that may help is SPIED [3]. If the tool isn't exactly what you need, then I would recommend using the paper as a starting point for literature review.

1\. [https://github.com/facebookincubator/duckling](https://github.com/facebookincubator/duckling)

2\. [https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/sutime.html](https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/sutime.html)

3\. [https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/patternslearning.html](https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/patternslearning.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm doubtful that ElasticSearch, out of the box, is going to do much in the way of getting you want you want. It's fine for building an inverted text index and letting you query it, but that assumes you have some ability to parse the data and submit it for indexing. If the data is truly "unknown" then your problem is how to get it into ES in the first place. And that would be true whether you used ES, Solr or just native Lucene.

Do you know if the data is at least in a text format? If it is, you could code up a job to walk through the data and extract usernames, phone numbers, etc. Something like OpenNLP would probably work well for you. If you want something a little fancier, like NER with automatic entity linking, you could use Apache Stanbol.

Keep in mind though, none of these tools are magic and none have human level AGI. You probably won't get 100% perfect matching for every single entity you care about. This is especially so using the pre-trained models. To get the best results, you'll need to human label some training data (a subset of your original data) and train your own model using the labeled data.

Once you're able to match all your various entities, then you might want to stick them in ES, Solr, etc. so you can do convenient queries - depending on what your use case is.

Note that if your data isn't in text to begin with (eg, if it's Word docs, PDF, etc.) you might be able to use Tika to extract the content as the first step in your processing pipeline.</comment>


Why I regret getting straight A's in college - <AUTHOR> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/12/04/twentysomething-why-i-regret-getting-straight-as-in-college/

<comment><USER2> If you have to study 100 hrs a week and you're not going to MIT, you're doing something really wrong. And unless its a technical field, no one's going to care what your GPA is. There just isn't enough demand for English lit majors to need GPA as a differentiator.

To have the dedication to study 100 hours a week voluntarily for anything, really shows you picked the wrong major. With that sort of dedication you could excel at anything, even something you're not naturally gifted at.

</comment><comment><USER3> Regarding her points:

      1.  No one has ever asked about my GPA.

If college is your terminal degree and you know you will never apply for a higher degree, that might make sense.

      2.  I didn't sleep.

One would hope that not getting straight A's wouldn't induce sleep, but instead would free up time to do more fun/cool/enlightening things. You'd still be sleep deprived.

      3.  I've forgotten 95% of it.

Not sure that college is designed to impart information.

      4.  I didn't have time for people.
      5.  Work experience is more valuable.

These two seem reasonable.

<comment><USER4> Her point 2 claims she studied 100 hours a week to keep those grades, and averaged 3 to 5 hours of sleep a night. She probably hit diminishing returns well before the 100 hours, and would probably have benefited from doing other things and sleeping more. One or two nights without much sleep is OK, but doing that for an extended portion of time is unsustainable.

<comment><USER5> Re: she/her

The article was written by Jon Morrow, not Penelope Trunk...

Jon is actually an amazing guy. Here's another sample of his writing:

<http://www.copyblogger.com/fight-for-your-ideas/></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News Star (iOS App) - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news/id514166419

<comment><USER2> Wow! It's really pretty...

I wish you could login/vote/comment on stories, but I'm sure you plan to add them in future versions. Also, an iPad version would be nice too :)

<comment><USER3> Agreed -- I use the news:yc app, but if you add voting/commenting, this would totally replace that as my go-to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I dont have an iphone to try it out, but looks really good!</comment>


Mouse Speak - <AUTHOR> http://www.pubnub.com/blog/mouse-speak

<comment><USER2> Yet another site that doesn't fully function on (the rapidly growing number of) touchscreen devices. I'm still getting my head around what changes no mouse and no hover is going to demand to typical web practices,

Nice idea, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> HN needs this

(edit: just kidding. But you should try it, it's fun.)</comment>


Ask HN: Do the monthly 'Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?' posts get anyone hired? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Yes. For a long time, they were the most effective recruiting vector at Matasano.

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that I am asking about the 'Who wants to be hired?' posts, not 'Who is hiring?' posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes - at Webflow I believe 4 of us were hired from the who wants to be hired / who's hiring posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It helped me find two places that I'm interviewing with. Will update once the results are in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to clarify, they found you via a 'Who wants to be hired?' post, not a 'Who is hiring?' post?

<comment><USER4> I misread the post. Good catch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes. This was the post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4994554](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4994554). Wrote them an email, was hired a week later and still work there.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a 'Who is hiring?' post, not a 'Who wants to be hired?' post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes. We had several strong candidates reply to our postings on the "Who's Hiring" and made a great hire about 10 months ago. That team member is still with the company and is providing great value!

<comment><AUTHOR> I am asking about the 'Who wants to be hired?' posts, not the 'Who is hiring?' posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> hopefully, at least I am being seriously considered. We shall see.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to clarify, you were found via a 'Who wants to be hired?' post, not a 'Who is hiring?' post?

</comment></comment><comment> saiko-chriskun yes.

</comment><comment><USER10> no

</comment><comment><USER11> No.

</comment><comment><USER12> yes

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to make sure we're clear, you found a position via a 'Who wants to be hired?' post, not a 'Who is hiring?' post?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> no.

</comment><comment><USER14> It might have to do with where you're located, but no. The several that I applied for wouldn't even interview me because I apparently wasn't well versed in their stack (despite being well educated, solid experience, proven track- record, and a strong will).

I would totally attribute it to being _just me_ , but in the last month I've received offers from Amazon, the DoD, Intel, and a few smaller shops in my area.

It's funny too, because I see the same companies _continually_ posting the same ads month after month in the "Who's Hiring" posts, so they must have a fairly strong bias against false positives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, which also matches my experience, but I was actually asking about the 'Who wants to be hired?' posts, not the 'Who is hiring?' posts.</comment></comment>


How the One Laptop per Child Program Imploded - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/the-one-laptop-per-child-program-was-supposed-to-revolutionize-the-developing-world-then-it-3e4cf8fb8832 <comment><USER2> I noticed the OLPC laptops at Canada Computers in Scarborough Ontario a couple months ago. I'm guessing there are still warehouses with remaining stock around, and I'm definitely surprised about that.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Of the remaining [kids], they mostly used it to go on the internet. This was not something that the machine was really designed for."

Even in the western world if you hand someone a computer that doesn't have internet access they'll probably just turn it off and go do something else.</comment>