Security questions are salt - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2012/08/security-questions-are-salt.html

<comment><USER2> Paraphrasing a great comment on this idea from the Schneier thread (sorry, I can't find it):

"Hi, I need to make a change to my account."

"All right, ma'am, I'll have you just answer this security question first: What is the make of your first car?"

 _sigh_ "So, look, this is going to sound really stupid, but for these questions I always use random words, and I lost the paper where I wrote them down... I'm really sorry, I just don't remember what they are. It's not a real car make, if that helps, it's just some random nonsense words."

"Uh, let me just talk to my supervisor." [hold] "What can I help you with today?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Same comment that I left there.

If multiple sites use the same security question, they will contain the same answer. Therefore if one site has been compromised, someone could use it to login as you at another site.

To fix that you need to add the site itself to the data to hash.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand why people are trying to come up with such complex solutions to Password and Security Question retrieval when portable and open source solutions, like Keepass[1][2] exist.

Just store your "random" Security Question answers alongside the login credentials - they'll be encrypted safely.

\--

[1] <http://www.keepass.info/>

[2] <http://www.keepassx.org/>

<comment><USER5> The advantage of these systems is that you recreate them using nothing but basic, generally available tools and your memory.

Keepass, on the other hand, is useless unless you have the database file with you.

<comment><USER4> So store it in Dropbox and have a copy on a USB Key you carry with you (along with a portable version[1] of Keepass)

Also, on the same subject, it's the "all you need is your memory" bit that makes me smile. If you could rely on your memory then why would you need to have these hashing functions in the first place? (:

[1] <http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/keepass_portable/>

<comment><USER5> _So store it in Dropbox and have a copy on a USB Key you carry with you (along with a portable version[1] of Keepass)_

If I'm at a cybercafe somewhere, there's a high degree of probability that it won't let me just run some untrusted binary from my USB stick or the web.

Also, carrying an USB stick still defeats the point of being able to recreate them with _nothing_. I've lost more than one USB stick in my life.

 _Also, on the same subject, it's the "all you need is your memory" bit that makes me smile. If you could rely on your memory then why would you need to have these hashing functions in the first place? (:_

If you can't rely on your memory, how will you know the master password to open the Keepass container?

Simply put, it's hard to remember a password for each and every site, but it's easy enough to remember a single algorithm (plus a master password) for all of them.

<comment><USER6> > If I'm at a cybercafe somewhere, there's a high degree of probability that > it won't let me just run some untrusted binary from my USB stick or the web.

1\. You shouldn't be typing in high value passwords at <random cyber-cafe>.

2\. You can get KeyPassDroid for your smartphone.

3\. writing your master-password down somewhere may be useful to your next of kin.

<comment><USER5> 1\. I don't use this system for high value passwords - I have only four or five of those and I can memorize them (and keep a written down copy in a safe place).

2\. I don't have a smartphone

3\. Not really, due to (1).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And now you don't remember if you used an uppercase, or where you put spaces, or where you put a dash, or whether you used 1st or 'first', and then you're screwed, because for the hash you need you input to be byte-for-byte the same.

Password management is _not_ a technical problem. All these 'solutions' to passwords being 'insecure' massively miss the point - which is that people just forget things, especially when they need to remember dozens or hundreds of them. Use a password manager and get rid of these nonsensical hacks.

</comment><comment><USER8> The simplest solution I've had is to keep a notebook where I for every page I write down the security questions and my answer. This is done because I have a bad memory, not as an attempt to salt, but it is a good point that we should try to answer these questions differently every time.

This is used for the few times where I have to do password recovery / phone support, I just grab the book.

For normal password usage I use automated hashing system in Firefox.

<comment><USER9> I write down the security questions/answers in the "notes" field in LastPass. Books burn down, LastPass doesn't.

<comment><USER8> Over the last 15 years I've had 3 hard drive failures and 0 burned houses.

ymmv

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You've updated to make it easier to say over the phone, but it doesn't help for being asked over the phone. Can you trust the person you're talking with to accurately say "What is the make of your first car?", or might they read "What was your first car?" or similar. Even if you specify to them over the phone "please read the question word for word", maybe their system is one with a few built-in standard questions, and all they see on their screen is "first car".

<comment><USER9> Why bother generating a hash based on your password and secret question? Just pick five random words and store those in your password manager as well, along with the question.

        # gsort -R /usr/share/dict/words | head -n 2
        inductory
        thingstead

"What was the make and model of your first car" - turns out, I was driving a brand new Inductory Thingstead, and changing the minute details of the secret question (or me changing the password) won't affect anything.

(One potential downside is having to tell an operator that your car was a "trichroic somatopsychic", which would just take extra time to spell out, unless they see the answer in plaintext.)

<comment><USER11> I want my password store to be able to generate these for me. Then it would a variation on "correct horse battery stable".

> unless they see the answer in plaintext

I think they do.

<comment><USER9> That might actually be an interesting feature add-on.

<http://i.imgur.com/9LYi9.png>

<comment><USER11> And to avoid being faced with trying to explain how your mother was born to a ... rather eccentric family, it would be cool if it could generate something that's plausibly a family name, pet name, car, mascot, teacher's name etc.

Good thing about security questions is that they don't have to stand up to offline attacks, so a few tens of thousands of options for each might well be sufficient.

<comment><USER9> An option for names could be a pretty good choice, but after that, the number of options could balloon. Mascot, pet's name, car brand, street name, TV show, city, etc., etc. You won't catch every edge case.

If I'm talking to someone on the phone and giving them my secret answer, I doubt they're going to be giving me the third degree about why my mother's maiden name is "antireligious electrocardiograph", especially if the computer accepts it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It really sucks that we have to go to such lengths to make the services we use that are "secured to industry standards" un-hackable.

I die a little inside every time some site emails me my own password.

<comment><USER13> MSDN emailed me my password once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> FTR, some EU countries have viewed standard security questions (e.g. date of birth) as not being sufficent protection for personal data, and hence it could be illegal to store personal data that way.

If you're in the EU, and are storing personal data, you are _legally required_ to protect it. Think carefully about how you set up your EU based web app.

Example: In Ireland it's probably against the Data Protection Acts to use a date of birth/mother's maiden name as a 'security question' for personal data. (cf. [http://www.dataprotection.ie/viewprint.asp?DocID=1212&St...](http://www.dataprotection.ie/viewprint.asp?DocID=1212&StartDate=1+January+2012) [http://www.dataprotection.ie/viewdoc.asp?DocID=1062&m=f](http://www.dataprotection.ie/viewdoc.asp?DocID=1062&m=f) )

</comment><comment><USER15> The worst is when they use security questions that have answers that change like "what is the first name of your best friend?"

<comment><USER9> I still can't get back into my very first e-mail account. How the hell do I know who I loved most in sixth grade? I got a different crush every monday, and was convinced we were made for each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This changes the situation from "What was that password again?" to "What algorithm did I use for this site?", and given that I'm already pissed off at having forgotten my password, the likelihood of my remembering this goes down significantly. Which makes me even more pissed-off.

IOW: When designing a scheme like this, the fact that you'll be angry when trying to actually use it at some point in the future becomes an important design constraint.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't understand how this would solve the problem that security questions are trying to solve. Basically, you just want something that you remember and/or infer easily in case you forget your password. If you use a passphrase as a salt to build a hash along with your security question then you are not really solving the problem. You still will have to remember the passphrase in order to build the hash. What if you forget it? Therefore you really haven't solved the problem. For what's it worth I don't believe in security questions and agree that they can be inferred by a reasonably motivated person with rather ease. There is no silver bullet, but it is probably way less risky to just allow password reset by confirmation codes to cell phones.

</comment><comment><USER18> Security questions are basically passwords and thus suffer from the same issues.

I'd a neat (imo) idea for this, though not everyone agreed: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4349116></comment>


Benchmarking HipHopVM against PHP 5.3 on Ubuntu 12.04  - <AUTHOR> http://www.leaseweblabs.com/2013/09/benchmarking-hiphopvm-php-5-3-ubuntu-12-04/

<comment><USER2> Almost all of these benchmarks are very poor-- they're microbenchmarks, and many focus on numeric performance. HHVM is focused on executing giant, complex web apps (Facebook) quickly-- not executing code like `for ($i = 0; $i < $runCount; ++$i);` quickly.</comment>


Improving Equity Compensation at Coinbase - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@barmstrong/improving-equity-compensation-at-coinbase-8749979409c3 <comment><USER2> That's awesome, glad to see Coinbase leading the charge on employee equity! We've just implemented something similar at Amplitude as well.

The 90 day exercise window is one of the biggest "gotchas" of equity compensation, especially for employees who are new to startups. Extending it to 7 years allows the company get far enough along towards liquidity so the employee knows more about whether it's worth it to exercise as well as not forcing them to come up with a lot of cash on short notice. Really glad to see Coinbase taking a stand for fairer compensation for employees.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if this encourages startups to give less options, since they can be exercised so far in the future? If they know that a certain percentage of their options won't be exercised or will be relinquished, it makes ownership issues much simpler so wouldn't that incentivize giving smaller equity grants?

</comment><comment><USER4> I like how this only kicks in after two years. That seems like a great compromise in terms of the employee getting initial options right after the cliff, but getting additional benefits after the extra year.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Most companies allow only 90 days for employees to purchase stock after they > leave the company.

This is somewhat disingenuous because it neglects to mention that the 90 day exercise window is typically the result of a company offering employees incentive stock options (ISOs). A 90 day exercise window is required by the rules associated with ISOs. Startups can't change the law.

When a company allows exercise after 90 days, the options become non-qualified stock options (NQSOs), and those are subject to different tax treatment.

In reality, the favorable tax treatment of ISOs often doesn't benefit startup employees, so there's an argument to be made that startups should just offer NQSOs anyway, but that's neither here nor there.

The big lie is that extending the exercise window has a high probability of being meaningful. Yes, it's true that companies are taking longer to deliver liquidity, but a lot of companies simply aren't going to deliver liquidity, _ever_. For those that do, in today's market, where valuations skyrocket early and late-stage investors trade valuation for significant downside protections, many employees will find that their equity isn't as valuable as they expected.

If a startup really wanted to stand out and reward employees differently, it would look at alternative approaches, such as bonuses and profit sharing plans, including profit sharing plans that contribute to a 401k. I think a lot of people who are not new to the game would be attracted by alternative structures and incidentally, these would probably do a lot more for retention.

<comment><USER6> > If a startup really wanted to stand out and reward employees differently, it > would look at alternative approaches, such as bonuses and profit sharing > plans, including profit sharing plans that contribute to a 401k.

Or just create optional liquidity with funding rounds. At least it should the norm when the founders are selling some of their stock and taking money off the table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does the tax treatment change if you exercise > 90 days after leaving?

From what I understand, options may be treated as NQSOs rather than ISOs if exercised >90 days after the employee leaves. (source: [http://blog.samaltman.com/employee- equity](http://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity))

<comment><AUTHOR> They'll be NSOs, same for Pinterest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As t→∞ an option becomes indistinguishable from its underlyer, why don't they give RSUs? Taxes?

<comment><USER9> Yes: taxes.

<comment><USER8> So are the taxes also worse if you increase the exercise window? Is it more tax efficient to issue 100 year stock options vs RSU?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I appreciate the intention behind this, and would probably be grateful to have it available from my current employer (or any other employer for whom I've worked > 2 years), I shudder at the tax implications of exercising options whose strike price is as much as _9 years_ below the fair-market value.

Hello, AMT...

<comment><USER11> Well shouldn't sv employees be lobbying their congressmen and senators for tax breaks for employee share schemes.

Take a leaf from Obamas play book set up a group in every company to lobby for this

<comment><USER12> They did that already in the 80s, they're called Incentive Stock Options

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really like all the effort startups are putting into making employee equity more valuable, so awesome job here Coinbase! However, I was disappointed by the headline because I'm always hoping to see someone come up with a solution to the current cultural problem of employee equity's diminishing perceived value.

I've thought a lot about it myself and have yet to come up with a solution, but I really feel like it will cause major problems if equity is progressively treated more and more like a near zero value lottery ticket.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is really great. It really sucks to exercise only to have your stock repeatedly crammed away into oblivion to make room for people who swoop in at the end and take all the value you have created and pocket it.

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't the issue the exercise price instead of the time window?

Wouldn't it be more effective to keep the time window to 90 days and have the exercise price be under $1 in total?

<comment><USER16> Strike prices aren't set arbitrarily, they're set based on 3rd party valuations of the value of the stock at the time of the option grant. Failing to follow these rules can have huge negative consequences for both companies and employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's no market in Coinbase stock. They haven't done an IPO, and it's not likely that they will. It's a Bitcoin company, after all.

Meanwhile, more info about the Mt. Gox collapse is coming out now that Mark Karpeles has been arrested and is in interrogation.[1] "The police are also investigating whether Karpeles consolidated customer and corporate funds in a bank account held by the company and embezzled around ¥1.1 billion, funneling funds to an account of an affiliate company and for personal use."

[1] [http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/08/04/national/crime-l...](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/08/04/national/crime- legal/mt-gox-ran-money-six-months-going-bust/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Only for new employees? Is this a backhanded way to try to push early employees out? Why not roll this out for all employees at once instead of generating management-induced divisions?

<comment><USER16> Because management can't unilaterally rewrite old contracts.

Note that they say "Coinbase is considering additional options to provide similar benefits to existing employees."

<comment><USER19> What is stopping management from asking employees' permission to rewrite their contracts in this way? If the employees say sure! (why would you decline?) then is there a problem?

<comment><USER20> It may require regranting a new strike price. I have no idea what their cap table looks like, but assume old employees have options with a strike price of $0.10 and new employees are being given a strike of $1.00 (each based on the 409A valuation of the company at the time of grant). It may not be possible to change the old grants without updating the strike price or causing serious tax issues for current employees (to remain compliant as ISOs, the strike must be >= the 409A as of the grant date... failing to do that led to the stock options backdating issues of the 2000s).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does this change anything? If I don't have $20,000 90 days after I quit, why do you think I'll have $20,000 7 years later?

<comment><USER22> Well presumably you'd exercise at some kind of liquidity event so you can borrow the money for a short period of time. Lots of people will lend you $20k if more than that is coming back soon. Of course if they haven't excited in 7 years then you still have the problem but at least then you'll have a clearer idea of whether the company is going to be valuable and if it's worth excising.

<comment><USER23> No need to borrow money if the stock is liquid, you can perform a 'sell to cover' transaction, in which your options are exercised and enough of your stock options are sold to pay for that at the same time. Any broker can handle that without a loan required.</comment></comment></comment>


GCR decoding on the fly - <AUTHOR> http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/gcr-decoding/index.php

<comment><USER2> It's always nice to see just how far people have taken the C64's extremely limited hardware; one thing that's surprising to many is that the floppy drive contains a CPU identical to the one in the main unit.

The rest of his site is very interesting too - I think some of his other articles have made it onto HN before. I like that he has a series of articles on obfuscated programming:

[http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/obfuscation.php](http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/obfuscation.php)

...and below that, another series titled "sane programming":

[http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/index.php](http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/index.php)

His demos are worth watching too.

<comment><USER3> "one thing that's surprising to many is that the floppy drive contains a CPU identical to the one in the main unit."

I don't know of other applications but there has been a Mandelbrot program that used the processor in the floppy as a co-processor.

The C64 has a 6510 processor and the 1541 floppy has a 6502. As far as I remember the only difference are 4 additional IO ports that the 6510 has and that the C64 uses for (memory) bank switching. So for computational purposes the processors are identical.

<comment><USER4> 8 IO ports. The C64 uses 4 of them for bank switching, and 3 of them to control the tape drive.

I seem to remember the 1541 can work with a 6510 too. And the C64 might possibly work with a 6502 too as long as you hardwire the right pins to +5 or ground to get the default memory banks (but the tape drive will be inaccessible).

The 1541 also contains two IO chips - the 6522 VIA that are almost compatible with the 6526 CIA chips in the C64 to the extent that you can "repair" a C64 by pulling the IO chips from the disk drive. I did that as a temporary measure once or twice. They are pin compatible, but the 6522 lacks the real time clock of the 6526, but pretty much no software ever uses the realtime clock (the 6522 have timers instead).

The 1541 really is a pretty complete computer. A lot of the early Commodore designs (and others) really foreshadow modern designs where everything has steadily moved to more CPUs again, unlike typical early PCs that burdened the main CPU too much (one of the reasons - in addition to the OS - that the Amigas felt so responsive even when compared against PCs with faster CPUs).

A few years before it came on the market, people would've paid good money for a device like that to use it as a computer rather than a disk drive...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best part of the site is his piano rendition of the Martin Galway soundtrack of a c64 videogame called "parallax" \-- check it out.

<comment><USER4> I have it on my music player. It could do with better recording quality, but it's great anyway..</comment></comment>


TrussFab: Fabricating Sturdy Large-Scale Structures on Desktop 3D Printers - <AUTHOR> https://hpi.de/en/baudisch/projects/trussfab.html <comment><USER2> How do they join the bottoms of the bottles? They seem to be prejoined in the dome timelapse.

<comment><USER3> Good question! Had to look it up in the paper, and it turns out they use wood screws.

Either regular ones using a long screwdriver through one of the bottle's mouths, or more specialized double-ended screws (with two points) that let you grab the bottles and counter-rotate them to drive in the screw in both bottoms.

Neat, I hadn't thought the bottoms of PET bottles had enough material to make this work, I would have expected bolts with nuts, i.e. more metal-to-metal in the fasteners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These would be cool to sell on etsy.

I'm guessing you could get the connectors mass produced pretty easily?

Is there anywhere to get empty botttles in bulk?

</comment><comment><USER5> I have an idea that I haven't tried yet. 3D print hollow joints that, for example, connect wood panels into a book case. Then fill the hollow spaces in the 3D printed joints with concrete.

<comment><USER6> That has potential, though it may be hard to find a shape that's open enough to get concrete packed into, while still wrapping around the panels effectively (and you'd want to use a concrete with fibers mixed in to help with shear[1]). It might be possible to use epoxy resin instead.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber- reinforced_concrete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-reinforced_concrete)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would love to make a few of these connectors on my laser cutter. Seems like I will have to look carefully for source files...

</comment><comment><USER8> This is incredible. Make sure to watch the video to get a sense of just how rigid these things are!

</comment><comment><USER9> That is sweet</comment>


Ask HN: Why experts discourage using masks to combat Covid? - <AUTHOR> This is something that has been baffling me for a while. Typically the argument seems to be in the line of "There is no evidence of benefits for using masks". This, of course to me sounds like a very carefully crafted claim. It is never "there is evidence of no benefit of using masks" and definitely not "there is evidence of masks causing harm" So, what is the actual reason for the dislike from experts? I can think of couple of possible reasons:
1. Experts are afraid that people use masks as a kind of "get out of jail" -card and start doing stupid things if experts say masks make you safer, thus discounting any benefit gained by using them in the first place. 2. Experts are afraid that widespread usage of masks causes  supply issues for health care workers where they are needed more. 3. Governments are worried that making masks socially acceptable cause trouble for their facial recognition dystopian dreams.
Or something else. Can anyone ELI5? <comment><USER2> People suggest wearing masks for two reasons.

1) To stop the wearing being infected by other people.

2) To stop an infected wearer spreading their infection to other people.

Experts recommend against masks because:

When correctly put on, and worn, and taken off there's some protective value to masks if they're combined with all the other PPE.

Correctly putting on PPE, and correctly taking it off, is hard. Healthcare providers employ staff to act as "spotters" or "dofficers". This person's main job is to help people put on and take off PPE.

If you're wearing a mask by itself you get almost no benefit. You lose all benefit if you're putting it on wrong, or taking it of wrong, or wearing it wrong.

As well as that we see that masks increase risky behaviour. People wearing masks feel that they don't need to maintain 2 metres social distance. It's hard to speak through a mask and it's hard to hear someone talk through a mask so people both speak louder (generating more droplets) and move closer (increasing the risk of contamination).

People who advocate against masks look at the evidence which shows marginal benefits from mask wearing and they look at all the things which reduce or negate those benefits and they say that the balance tips away from wearing masks.

Whether you wear a mask or not you need to keep 2 meters away from people, so what does wearing a mask get you?

</comment><comment><USER3> The Economist has some pretty good articles that it made free, in relation to Covid. One of them is this:

[https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2020/04/11/...](https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2020/04/11/should-the-public-wear-masks-to-slow-the-spread-of-sars- cov-2)

</comment><comment><USER4> It depends on the type of mask and the goal.

(1) _Using mask to protect oneself from covid-19 in public spaces._ Experts don't see this working effectively. Doctors and nurses don't use masks outside the infectious zones in hospital either. Using mask properly and donning and undonnign it is hard. Men have to trim their beards and the mask must have clip that goes around nose etc. You want N95 mask if possible, and it's hard to breath trough it so people leave gaps so that breathing is easier. Old people just can't breathe trough N95 outside. It's too tiring.

(2) _Using mask to protect others from covid-19_. This is where mask can be helpful in widespread use. It slows down or catches most droplets. Just cheap surgical mask or just a scarf can be enough (remember: surgical masks protect the patient in surgery from those wearing it, not other way around). Additional benefit is that covering your face prevents you from touching it.

<comment><USER3> > You want N95 mask if possible

See the article I linked below - it seems N95 isn't that much better at stopping Covid and expecting your ordinary folk to properly secure it isn't that sensible.

> Experts don't see this working effectively

A source on this would be nice.

<comment><USER4> > See the article I linked below - it seems N95 isn't that much better at > stopping Covid and expecting your ordinary folk to properly secure it isn't > that sensible.

It seems that you write the message I was trying to get across back to me.

<comment><USER3> Not really, there's a difference between saying "surgical masks have their downsides in how they're worn" and "surgical masks aren't effective enough, you want N95s, which have downsides in how they're worn". You explicitly stated that N95 is prefferable and that's what I was commenting against.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From what I have seen it appears to be mostly 2 with perhaps a bit of 1.

There may be no evidence of wearing masks causing harm _to the wearer_ , but there is ample evidence of excessive demand for masks leading to health workers not having adequate protection. That, along with "no evidence of masks preventing infection in the general public" is enough, I think, to justify the current expert opinion.

I would not normally be wearing a mask outside at the moment because there is no compelling medical reason, as far as I can see. As long as you maintain distance and wash hands, etc. However, I _do_ wear a mask outside because I live in a country where an unmasked foreigner causes "concern" to some. So I mask up for social reasons.

</comment><comment><USER6> __Not an expert, and have no idea what I am talking about __

My understanding is that it is a variant of 1. Masks probably do help, but the general population would not use them correctly. Anecdotally, I saw this a lot going to the grocery store yesterday. For example, people were constantly fidgeting with their masks and removing the masks to talk to other people.

<comment><USER7> You know why this is BS, cause you can easily train people to properly use a mask. And maybe if the government would have trained people through PSA early on, on how to properly use a mask, change gloves, etc. this pandemic wouldn't be nearly as bad as it is. Instead they told everyone, hey everything is fine, just wash your hands and don't touch your face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think initially it was because they didn't want masks to disappear from the market causing a shortage for hospital workers that 100% need them.

From what I've read, its also early on so there weren't a lot of studies about how to prevent.

</comment><comment><USER9> The Dutch prime minister just made a statement on this, and he's using your argument 1. He's afraid it will decrease social distancing and make people with mild symptoms go outside, because they think they are protected.</comment>


Invite HN: TeamPostgreSQL beta - <AUTHOR>

I lurk around here all the time and respect the opinion of people here a great deal. I also know that some guys here are big PostgreSQL users, making this particularly relevant to you, though non-Postgres users are also very welcome.
I would like to invite you to try out an early beta of a product I have spent the last months building: TeamPostgreSQL.
In short, the product provides very user-friendly web access to PostgreSQL databases.
It is ideal if you need to share one or more databases across a development team or a larger organization, f.ex. when testers, managers or other non-technical people need to peek in the database or even modify data, run scripts etc.
The beta is available here:
http://www.teampostgresql.com/beta.html
Currently Windows, Mac OS X and Ubuntu/Fedora Linux are supported, let me know if you need it for other platforms
Needless to say I will be very thankful for any feedback you are able to provide. <comment><USER2> This looks like a very nice front-end-

Right now we're using a combination of navicat and pg_admin for administration, particularly adhoc queries for reporting, so this looks nlike a nice alternative.

I'm a little confused, however. It seems like it's a web-product (Snappy, web- based interface), but you're still offering downloads. If I were to guess, I'd imagine that the download is for the server install?

What are the requirements? Also, I know it's a nit, but if possible, it's nice if you can provide packages for the Linux platforms, rather than just a .sh script. It makes it easier to standardize do upgrades.

Do you have any estimates on release pricing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the confusion, this is definitely one of the points we should make clear.

You are right, it is a web application and the download is the web server with the webapp on it. The common use case is that you would put the server on the organization's intranet so people can access the application using their browsers.

Requirements for the server are fairly pedestrian: ~150 MB disk space, something like 200 MB free memory. All dependencies are bundled with the server so you should not have to install anything on the side.

Point taken about Linux packages, we will definitely provide them, as well as simple archive downloads.

We haven't thought about pricing yet except that we don't want it to be some super-exclusive-enterprisey offering :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am getting great commentary back - I cleverly included the option to send feedback directly from the application, and then foolishly forgot to include a field for the user's email address, so I can't respond directly :)

I will try to pick up on those comments here in the thread, particularly support issues:

> When first starting up TeamPostgreSQL with the "Start TeamPostgreSQL" > Windows start menu option, I am given no indication that I should connect to > it with a web browser on localhost:8080. I was able to figure this out by > inspecting the process, but I did not notice any information being presented > to me about this previously.

Of course. We will log this in the server window when it starts up. Note that the installer should have added a desktop link which opens your browser on the right address.

> There doesn't seem to be any way to view the full text of a long column, > like a varchar(255). The first bit of the text is shown, followed by an > ellipsis, but I don't know how to view the rest of the data.

Right. For now you have to select the row and click the 'edit' button, that will bring up controls to view the full content of these fields. Of course this control should be available when browsing the rows - will fix that.

> I get this error: gzip: sfx_archive.tar.gz: not in gzip format

I have changed the compression of the Linux packages, hopefully that fixes this problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> The exact URL to connect to when the server is running is:

<http://localhost:8080/teampostgresql>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We've been using postgresql for several years, and have used a wide range of tools from EMS, Navicat, PG Lightning, pgadmin, etc, and would love to provide you with some feedback, unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an easy way to download and install this beta. Something like a tar.gz of the files would work fine, the ubuntu install won't work on our gentoo box, and the fedora link is down, and I try my best to avoid installing anything on my local machine. As soon as I can download something that's installable I'm sure we'll have some very valuable feedback for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I concur about the need for a simple archive for the download. Our installer creation process makes it easy to make installers for the different platforms, so we defaulted to those.

I will definitely make sure that simple archives are provided as alternatives to the installers. For now I fixed the link to the Fedora installer. (It doesn't do anything except copy a bunch of files making the case for simple archives even stronger)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't actually try it out since I don't have a PostgreSQL installation handy, but from the (two) screenshots, it looks like a great product.

I'd suggest you put more screenshots & maybe a demo to help people like me get a better idea of what the product is about before downloading. If you can make this work with other database vendors, that will be really exciting.

<comment><AUTHOR> It comes bundled with a sample database, so you can still try it out even without a PostgreSQL database available.

Also, thanks for the suggestions. I will definitely expand the website with more information - this is just an early release for a limited audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks very cool on first glance. I'll be sure to check it out in the (near) future. Any price estimates when it comes out of beta?

Also, offtopic: your header image links to <http://www.teampostgresql.com/home.html> which gives a 404.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hope to hear your feedback. As I just now posted in another response we haven't settled on any price, except that it should not be some super exclusive thing for corporate whales :). Fixed the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks nice... What does this have that phppgadmin doesn't? I take it that this is a commercial project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the positive comment.

Good question, phppgadmin is the main competition and also the inspiration.

First of all, TeamPostgreSQL is team-oriented. This is expressed both in terms of features (ability to share SQL snippets and scripts - "hey Joe, go run the 'get latest orders' query on preproduction1") and in terms of user interface design (friendly and responsive versus heavy and complex).

This is the key to positioning it as a team platform, the fact that non- techies such as testers and support staff will feel perfectly comfortable peeking and poking the database.

Other than that we believe it is an overall incremental improvement over phppgadmin in the areas where they overlap, f.ex. with a 100% AJAX interface and a lot of productivity features such as 'quick query' (type a phrase, f.ex. a customer id and hit enter, it searches every row of every table in the database).

We hope that this will be attractive enough that people will pay for it (so yes, commercial project).

I'd love to hear your honest opinion: Is this enticing? Would you consider it over phppgadmin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, it's already better looking than pgAdmin III and I doubt it would make me force-quit my browser when the VPN drops like pgAdmin makes me, so... I might be motivated enough to try it. Does it go on the DB server itself, or does it matter?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can put it on any server that can reach the database over the network.</comment></comment>


Americans have become much less positive about tech companies' impact - <AUTHOR> https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/29/americans-have-become-much-less-positive-about-tech-companies-impact-on-the-u-s/ <comment><USER2> That tends to happen when the media is flooded with negative PR against you for an extended period of time.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's almost like the more you learn about th em and their predatory business models, the less you trust them.</comment>


San Francisco, the City That Apps Built, or Destroyed - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/san-francisco-city-apps-built-or-destroyed/587389/ <comment><USER2> > the market in Marin has appreciated, but it's remarkably removed from San > Francisco and Silicon Valley because public transportation there is limited.

Who could imagine that how important public transportation is? </snark></comment>


LinkedIn violated data protection by using 18M email addresses of non-members - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/24/linkedin-ireland-data-protection/ <comment><USER2> I am 99% sure LinkedIN used my IP address to match with my second floor neighbor, despite their claims that they would never use IP address as a connection data point.

I was sharing my wifi for a brief period with my neighbors on the second floor. My neighbor had a new room mate. The guy was from another country. He didn't work in the same industry I do. I didn't have any of his contact information anywhere on any of my devices, and afaik, vice versa. We had no formal contact in any fashion, monetary or electronic communication or any other kind of contact other than passing each other in the hall. I didn't even know his name. He's just one of millions of people who live in my region.

Yet they suggested him as a possible contact.

If they weren't using IP address, they were using black magic.

edit: to clarify, i forgot to mention that i had no linkedin connection to my neighbor, afaik he didn't have a linkedin account, he definitely doesn't have one currently. He was sort of a luddite, barely used his computer, and i don't believe we ever emailed each other, or even had each other's email, I just searched my mail and have record of any.

And I very much doubt my neighbor had any obviously traceable connection with the roomate anyway, at most a phone number and received rent through cash or check.

<comment><USER3> That's creepy. Different topic: I think the biggest connection business is whatsapp. If a person does not use whatsapp but a friend of that person does, whatsapp knows the person's phone number anyway. If >= 2 whatsapp users have that person's phone number stored with the same name in the contact list, whatsapp even knows the person's name (and other information). With that information they can accurately identify the person's facebook profile. Horror!

<comment><USER4> And then you add [1] this - Facebooks ability to access WhatsApps files on iOS from any other app in their "family".

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18479567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18479567)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > What we also don't really know here — the DPC doesn't really address it — is > where LinkedIn obtained those 18 million email addresses, and any other > related data, in the first place.

Well, one such source of email addresses was me.

When I joined it more than 10 years ago, I was not as privacy aware as I am today. So, upon joining, I uploaded my address book to connect to people who already had a LinkedIn account.

I shortly after realized that they abused it. They sent an invite email to every person that was not on their platform.

I only got to know about it becasue one of my university professors sent me an email saying that she was not interested in joining yet another network. I had to apologize, because I did not expect that to happen.

To this day, LinkedIn still uses that information to suggest new connections to me and to prompt me to invite people that are still not on their platform.

In retrospect, it was a stupid move to upload my address book, but I'm sure I am not the only one that made that mistake, and probably many people still do nowadays.

<comment><USER6> It wasn't stupid of you, not your fault LinkedIn literally impersonated you. The mail it sent out all those years ago was written in your name and as though you had actively crafted and sent it. Anyone who knows your name could have impersonated you. Don't worry about doing something wrong.

A quick google suggests linkedin was sued and reached a class action settlement in exchange for the practice.

<comment><USER7> You can be almost certain that LinkedIn knew it was illegal when they did it, and accurately calculated that the fine they would receive (if any) would be much lower than the value derived from increased membership. In fact they would be stupid not to in winner-takes-all markets like social media.

Silicon Valley has a phrase for such flagrantly unethical practice, it is called "growth hacking".

<comment><USER8> To gratuitously quote Fight Club:

"It was my job to apply The Formula™. [...] Take the number of vehicles in the field, A. Multiply it by the probable rate of failure, B. Then multiply it by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> LinkedIn is one of the worse dark-pattern based business out there. Their whole business model is based on making connections between people, however unwanted they are.

They use any means necessary to get your contact list and abuse it to spam your contacts with dubious marketing ploys and unverifiable claims (someone looked you up! you're missing on new jobs opportunities!).

Liars.

I've resisted creating an account so far but the pressure to conform is there as you basically "don't exist" without a profile that lazy HR managers can look up.

<comment><USER10> Reminds me of that mobile popup I always get that tells me to download their mobile app when I'm viewing Linkedin on a mobile phone and I can't move on unless I press something.

<comment><USER11> Reddit is almost unusable on mobile browsers because of this.

<comment><USER12> You can use [https://old.reddit.com](https://old.reddit.com) .

<comment><USER13> Or [https://i.reddit.com](https://i.reddit.com) for a faster mobile view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I don't get is why Jeff Weiner and Reid Hoffman are never held accountable for their blatant disregard for user privacy despite many lawsuits over the years. Why is their reputation still so in tact even when Zuck/Sandberg's is hurting over the exact same privacy violations? Why is Reid Hoffman today selling a book on "blitzscaling" which is all about achieving hypergrowth at all cost? Could you imagine how tone deaf it would be if it was Zuckerberg who authored that and not Hoffman?

<comment><USER15> > Why is their reputation still so in tact even when Zuck/Sandberg's is > hurting over the exact same privacy violations?

I have no idea, but the cynic in me says "because Facebook forms a bigger threat to media organizations".

<comment><USER16> LinkedIn is also less "sexy" to cover for the media than Facebook. Nobody cares about LinkedIn news, especially in middle America, but Facebook is popular everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just go to the "people you may know" page and you'll see dozens of shadow profiles of people who clearly don't have LinkedIn accounts. Mine shows relatives who I know don't have accounts — but whose contact info was scraped by LinkedIn during my dumber years when I opted into their "help us connect you by linking your account" bullshit.

Is there a way to request they remove this data? I sure don't know how.

<comment><USER18> From linkedin.com/settings I clicked sync contacts, which took me to this url: [https://www.linkedin.com/mynetwork/settings/manage- syncing](https://www.linkedin.com/mynetwork/settings/manage-syncing)

There you will find an an option to "remove all."

<comment><USER19> Once synced it is game over...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Now all LinkedIn has to do is apologize and work with regulators to make sure this never happens again... thus ensuring no future competitor will have it as easy as they did.

<comment><USER21> If someone abuses people to get ahead, the answer isn't to allow others abuse people in the same way, in the name of fairness.

<comment><USER22> No, the answer is to meaningfully punish that business so that it costs them more than they gained by abusing it.

LinkedIn should be burned to the ground, frankly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I naively installed the app on my phone, which gave them my phone number. Then I started getting cold calls from people who paid to have access to my number through LinkedIn. I never entered my number anywhere, however the cold callers repeatedly told me they got my information from LinkedIn.

<comment><USER24> To be fair, they could just be saying LinkedIn because it's easier than saying they bought the number from some shady middlemen, and people are less likely to react negatively to it. Unless you used a unique number _only_ for LinkedIn, the number could have been shared by anyone (even your telco).

<comment><USER25> _they could just be saying LinkedIn because it 's easier than saying they bought the number from some shady middlemen_

What's the difference?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I guess we'd never found out without GDPR. This is why big corporations require regulation because a single user will never win this fight.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wish people would remember that LinkedIn is an evil platform created entirely by dark patterns whenever they idolize Reid Hoffman as some sort of business genius.

</comment><comment><USER28> Of course they did. In an industry full of shady characters, LinkedIn is among the worst. They're proof that dark patterns and other nasty tactics are profitable, and also that if you make enough money, people in the valley will look past how you made it. The fact that Hoffman is enthusiastically welcomed in polite society says something not great about Silicon Valley ethics.

</comment><comment><USER29> Unrelated but I'd like take this opportunity to write that the "switch to our app" popup on the LinkedIn mobile site is super annoying. It shows up every time I open the site on mobile browser. On several occasions in attempts of closing the popup I've accidentally clicked on advertisements (Promoted posts) or 'liked' someone's post. And then you see more such promoted posts as they think you like them. If anyone from LinkedIn team is reading this - I do not want to install your app. Please store that flag in the cookie.

<comment><USER30> Li is aware. "Install our app" nag is by design, and is now part of the pantheon of user hostile web de-facto standards.

<comment><USER31> Its a typical user engagement trick. If you install the app then you have a constant advert on your home screen and they have the ability to constantly spam you with reengagement notifications

<comment><USER32> And they get far more access to your information than they would in a browser.

<comment><USER33> Plus no opportunity to block ads + trackers, etc. in the embedded chromium- based browser.

<comment><USER34> First thing I do when I click on a link on LinkedIn is to open the context/share menu and press "open in Safari".

Hopefully if enough people do this it will make it clear in their analytics that nobody wants their shitty knockoff browser.

The worst is that it's using deprecated APIs on iOS that make it several times slower than Safari.

<comment><USER32> It's still using UIWebView?!

<comment><USER34> It's a lot slower so I assume so. It's definitely not a Safari View Controller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Having deleted my account months ago, I still keep receiving an email about one particular guy (who I don't know) wanting to become part of my network. I tried their unsubscribe link multiple times, to no avail. First I just didn't want to have an account anymore, now I hate them.

</comment><comment><USER36> They have deliberately slowed the mobile website and then give notification to switch to app. So they can steal the contacts.

</comment><comment><USER37> People are talking about how they have a LinkedIn account and how creepy it is when LinkedIn suggests Facebook friends who don't have LinkedIn accounts, but obscure that information in some way. You think you're sending a friend (who you mistakenly believe already has a LinkedIn account) a connection request, but really LinkedIn has tricked you into spamming your own friends on LinkedIn's behalf. This is obviously bad, but I've seen much worse.

I first made a LinkedIn account a few years ago because I got an email that my sister wanted to connect on LinkedIn. I'm not into social networks at all, but in the interest of family bonds I clicked the link to make an account and "connect" with her.

So I made the account, and the link in the email must've been set up to automatically connect our accounts. But a few days later she emails me that she got my LinkedIn request via email, but she hadn't yet made an account, and as soon as she made one she'd add me. So this was a tricky spamming strategy in which no one started out with an account, but neither party was aware of that.

TL;DR LinkedIn knew my sister's email address, my email address, and our connection, and basically tricked both of us into thinking that the other person was already on LinkedIn and wanted to connect. That's a step beyond what people are talking about here, and is IMO seriously sketchy, unprofessional, and messed up. I don't think they kept up this practice for very long, but it's so over the top and beyond the pale that I'm surprised it didn't result in lawsuits and the entire company being tarnished for decades. Obviously they've tarnished their name in plenty of other ways, but the fact that no one talks about this particular practice makes me wonder what other awful stuff they do that most people don't know about.

</comment><comment><USER38> It is time for the American government to step up consumer protection.

</comment><comment><USER39> LinkedIn's growth, much like Facebook's, can mostly be attributed to the use of its "contact importer," which seems to have been where the 18M email addresses came from. Generally speaking, you should read the fine print when using such "features".

I do see an issue with part of this complaint: storing _hashed_ emails and uploading those to use for targeted advertisements. The general consensus seems to be that even under the draconian rues of the GDPR, a _hash_ of an email is not personally identifiable and therefore that data would not be subject to the GDPR. It appears that the DPC overstepped their bounds on that specific aspect of the investigation.

<comment><USER40> An email hash can be used to identify an individual and so would very much be in the scope of GDPR, the same as any other number used to identify an individual. Curious why you think that would not be the case. It seems to fall squarely into Article 4's definition of personal data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've gotten suggestions to people who have only been on an email chain whom I've never directly emailed with before. In my opinion that goes too far.

</comment><comment><USER42> Now I know why I was getting messages from these pricks. I tried to login and had no account. Scum.

<comment><USER43> I confirm Linkedin is a vector for spam, the way they handle and publish your email address: I use a dedicated, unique email address for my account, and systematically start receiving unsollicited emails and spam a few days after.

I now have the habit to register a new email address every few months on Linkedin, to track the issue. It's clear and easy to prove that the new email address is used by spammers after a short time. One of the main reasons is probably because once you are connected to someone, he/she can access your profile contact details including email and phone number. My guess is there are bots scraping the contacts to populate their spam databases.

I'm sure most, if not all users of Linkedin don't realize this issue, as they generally register using a non-dedicated email address, preventing them to check the origin of the spam leak.

<comment><USER44> > One of the main reasons is probably because once you are connected to > someone, he/she can access your profile contact details including email and > phone number. My guess is there are bots scraping the contacts to populate > their spam databases.

I'd expect this is the case; I have a LinkedIn account with a dedicated email for name reservations purposes, but do not accept any connections, and have yet to receive any spam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm constantly alarmed by the recommended matches on LinkedIn. I'm also torn by the business community's insistence that this site is a necessary part of networking and any of its practices are therefore beyond scrutiny.

And no, you did not match me to my second cousin "based on my profile." Unless you mean "based on your email address, which is already included in the massive social graph of all address book connections we've harvested from people who know you."

If you have to mislead your users about how you're finding potential connections, maybe you shouldn't be doing that thing in the background, or maybe you shouldn't be so focused on aggressively pushing those connections.

</comment><comment><USER46> I deleted my linkedin account many years ago but still get mysterious messages saying that I appeared in n searches (n being 2 or other random number)

</comment><comment><USER47> This doesn't surprise me. They went out of their way uploading my contacts without my permission even after declining multiple times, over multiple phone and app versions, as well as adding my connections to my phone contacts... I can't tell if they're stupid or evil.

</comment><comment> S-E-P I wonder how long they can do these sneaky things that they've been accused of before someone (or more appropriately, something) brings the long arm of the law into this.

Litigation could be a possible avenue. Cut off the serpant's head and all that.

</comment><comment><USER48> So the "X wants to connect with you on LinkedIn" mails are not a virus but actually from LinkedIn?

I'm getting these without having a LinkedIn account, where X is someone I had emailed with earlier.

</comment><comment><USER49> accurate description of LinkedIn by Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick [https://youtu.be/xmo8-Bh98fw?t=270](https://youtu.be/xmo8-Bh98fw?t=270)

<comment><USER50> Funny because on their home landing page, there is a gallery of people. The one at top, second from left, is a dead ringer for Blake Lively. I wonder if that spawned the question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I thought US had discovered and was thinking, here come the "crippling 1.2 million fine" :) but maybe EU will make them think twice. 2%-4% of their revenue does send a message.

<comment><USER52> Aren't some of those GDPR fines based on the parent companies revenue too?

<comment><USER51> Not sure but if I had to guess, not. They are incorporated on their own so that corp suffers the fine. Linkedin must be making over $1 billion a year...so it will bite and EU can repeat on future violations

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> While we're on the topic of annoying LinkedIn behaviors. They periodically "generate" fake useless notifications to get you to click on the bell icon.

</comment><comment><USER54> wob: (waste of bandwidth) in the final analysis very, very few people really care. me included. however, too many folks want to bust amazon's chops because of what alexa might hear while awaiting the wake word. you don't even want to think about what your cell phone carrier [and to a great extent your phone manufacturer] knows about you. p.s. i personally believe this behavior has gotten much worse under linkedin's new owner.

</comment><comment><USER55> Welp. Guess that's the last little push I needed to go close my LinkedIn account. Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER56> Has anybody closed their LinkedIn account and do you miss it? I keep procrastinating to do it myself.

<comment><USER34> Despite all of this bullshit, LinkedIn can be a good tool for finding opportunities if used correctly.

You just need to make sure your privacy settings are bulletproof and don't give out more information than they need to.

<comment><USER56> That's the thing, I don't know if I can trust their privacy settings.

<comment><USER34> True, but at least you can begin with making sure _trusted_ privacy settings (the ones provided by your OS) are set correctly.

You can also not install their app and use their website in a browser with an ad blocker and in private browsing mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> _we also identified one further area where we could improve data privacy for non-members_

And what about members? It's utterly horrifying that a professional has to sell themselves on glorified social media and all its nefarious practices just to give themselves a change on the job market.

<comment><USER58> > And what about members?

Presumably, they agreed to this.

> It's utterly horrifying that a professional has to sell themselves on > glorified social media and all its nefarious practices just to give > themselves a change on the job market.

I would say that's a gravely mistaken belief.

<comment><USER57> Arguably, you have no choice in a lot of such matters, so any agreement is by submission. If "the" popular platform is X, and you're not using it, you're missing out. And it isn't far fetched to consider instances where choice of any kind isn't applicable.

> I would say that's a gravely mistaken belief.

Plenty of companies appear to use third-party recruitment services, which entails you giving your personal, identifiable information to a third-party instead of going directly to said company. LinkedIn being one of such third- parties, indirectly or otherwise. The observation that trends like LinkedIn are a imposed reality is in no way a mistake.

<comment><USER58> > If "the" popular platform is X, and you're not using it, you're missing out.

Missing out on _what_? What good opportunity comes through LinkedIn? By my account, nobody actually likes LinkedIn and nobody takes it serious. Nobody will hold not using it against you.

> Plenty of companies appear to use third-party recruitment services, which > entails you giving your personal, identifiable information to a third-party > instead of going directly to said company. LinkedIn being one of such third- > parties, indirectly or otherwise. The observation that trends like LinkedIn > are a imposed reality is in no way a mistake.

That's not what I replied to. You said "It's utterly horrifying that a professional has to sell themselves on glorified social media". You don't have to do that. Believing that is a mistake and only helps LinkedIn achieve more dominance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I received automatically spam from them years ago: growth hacking.</comment>


What people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/04/what-people-in-1900-thought-the-year-2000-would-look-like/ <comment><USER2> This is relevant:

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/j1/stranger_than_history/)

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/j6/why_is_the_future_so_absurd/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/j6/why_is_the_future_so_absurd/)

>When people look at historical changes and think "I could have predicted X" or "You could have predicted X if you looked at factors 1, 2, and 3"; then they forget that people did not, in fact, predict X, perhaps because they were distracted by factors 4 through 117. People read history books, see coherent narratives, and think that's how Time works. Underestimating the surprise of the present, they overestimate the predictability of the future.

>People seem to imagine futures that are minimally counterintuitive, with one or two interesting changes to make a good story...

...

>Suppose I told you that I knew for a fact that the following statements were true:

>If you paint yourself a certain exact color between blue and green, it will reverse the force of gravity on you and cause you to fall upward.

>In the future, the sky will be filled by billions of floating black spheres. Each sphere will be larger than all the zeppelins that have ever existed put together. If you offer a sphere money, it will lower a male prostitute out of the sky on a bungee cord.

>Your grandchildren will think it is not just foolish, but evil, to put thieves in jail instead of spanking them.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a bit of a stretch to call these predictions of the year 2000 from 1900. In reality, these were likely just a fun way to put cartoons on cigar boxes in order to get people to buy the next in the set. I don't think 1900's Parisians really believed in a future of whale-powered busses and people riding super- sized sea-horses.

<comment><USER4> Yep, seems more like pure fiction without even much effort put into it, just that some things turned out semi-true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find the first set of pictures the most interesting, because they all display various forms of what we would think of as _automation_ \-- machines to do house cleaning, farming, barbering, grooming -- but none of them actually automate anything. The floors do not clean themselves, nor do the tractors navigate their own course. All of the machines are still controlled by levers and pedals. The barber is still required to cut hair, although his efforts seem magnified. The housewife still must carefully control the cleaning machine, perhaps saving some elbow grease but not very much in the way of leisure time.

A century ago, we thought that machines were going to be multipliers of the effectiveness of human effort. Now, it seems clear that they will inevitably replace it.

<comment><USER6> Actually floor do clean themselves with a Roomba, and while they aren't ubiquitous yet driverless tractors do exist.

Also washing machines are pretty much automatic. The human intervention is now limited to "put clothes inside and push a button" which does bring a lot of free time in exchange, compared to the time where housewives had to do all the laundry manually.

<comment><USER7> I think you misunderstood ender7's comment. The robots in the _drawings_ of the article don't work automatically, while the robots of today cerntainly do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> An example of "you don't know what you don't know". I.e. the digital revolution was impossible to predict, as it was impossible to imagine; "digital" is not an apparent extension of anything familiar to an inhabitant of 1900.

That said, I've seen versions of this article many times before, and it has always felt a bit like blog-spam, since they all just link to the source images and add (un)funny captions.

<comment><USER9> They may not get the details right (being impossible to predict as noted) but they do tend to get the generalities right (like instant worldwide visual personal communications, cheap fast travel, instant long-shelf-life foods).

Underdiscussed is how many predictions are entirely possible (like hotels on the moon, total eradication of vermin) but we don't because we're not interested after all or see untenable consequences (space travel is boring for the cost, disruption food chain is devastating).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I still find it amazing that we went from first flight 1903 and 65 years later landed on the moon.

My great aunt remembered the first motorcar to arrive at her village, and lived to fly across the Atlantic in a jetliner.

<comment><USER11> I always find that comparison disingenuous as flight has nothing to do with rocketry. I think it might be less exciting but more instructive to talk about time between first submarines (keeping humans alive in a hostile environment) to spacecraft.

<comment><USER10> Rocketry grew out of the aviation industry, not the submarine industry.

<comment><USER12> The principles of rocketry were powering fireworks and guns a long time before they were powering flight. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is interesting to see how back then people were watching the future as a continuity of their time.

That is why I am very septic about predictions of the future, even if some become true alone, it is quite impossible to grasp how a future society might look as a whole.

<comment><USER14> This is tangential, but...

We had a futurist from Intel visit our small startup about two years ago for a future planning/predicting exercise. I think we were not the correct audience for these exercises though, due to the small size of our company.

What I learned from the exercise was that companies as large and influential as Intel don't have to follow market trends or predict "how things will be" because they are not subjects of some natural market--they _define_ the market.

It seemed crazy to me to have exercises planning 20+ years into the future, but Intel necessarily has to do this due to the size of the ship they're piloting.

<comment><USER15> That's a really good point. I think of earlier incarnations of Microsoft the same way.

Bill Gates' stated Vision decades ago was "a computer on every desktop" and he helped (led?) us there to the point where we now take it for granted. The sheer audaciousness of the original Vision is amazing considering the cost, size, etc of what computers were then. Whatever the (often valid) criticism is today, they helped define and expand our industry in a way that shouldn't be overlooked.

Not many companies _hope_ to do that, let alone accomplish it.

<comment><USER16> But on the other hand Bill Gates and Microsoft were blindsided by the Internet.

<comment><USER17> Bill Gates wrote a book in 1995 entitled "The Road Ahead" that barely mentioned the Internet and especially the World Wide Web. Microsoft was definitely behind the ball on the Internet revolution.

<comment><USER18> And weirdly they tried to swing back forcefully because not long after the web started to become a thing, Gates touted .Net everywhere, even though it was long before .Net actually shipped. IIRC, longhorn, even Xp was supposed to be fully based on networked object components, like Java RMI.

And.. win95 plus (or was it 98?) had an html/javascript based active desktop that is conceptually similar to current web paradigms and UX.

The world DNA evolves weirdly.

<comment><USER19> Yes! ActiveDesktop! I used to have my tripod based homepage on my ActiveDesktop and I would watch the hit counter everyday (heh, vanity metrics).

Also, Microsoft tried to train everyone about the concept of hyperlinks - Explorer in Win98 used to open files with a single click (and it was highlighted and underlines like hyperlinks too). Too bad the concept didn't catch on.

And in the book The Road Ahead, I recall Bill Gates describing something like Google Docs/Office Online too.

Shame that in their clinginess to IP made them unpopular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My 2 cents:

\- Tech predictions tend to be incremental. Back then things were made of levers and pulleys, so all the tech predictions are solutions to problems using this particular hammer. In our time, it's an app. Would anyone pre 1950 have predicted that just about everything is going to be turned into numbers? Even our mechanical stuff like servos and combustion engines are controlled by calculating machines. At the same time, you tend to think you're at a fundamental level, wherever you are: who here doesn't think that information science (algorithms, Shannon limits, calculability) are fundamental advances that will continue to be relevant forever? Well, 100 years ago people also thought they'd figured it out and that we were just about to finish physics. Then quantum and relativity came about and turned everything over. (Heck, the Romans thought they'd figured it out.)

\- A rather major revolution during the last 100 years is in materials. This changes what just about everything is made of, what can be made, and what it costs to make. Also strangely unappreciated.

\- Aesthetics are hard to predict. People in the pics are wearing similar clothes and living in similar style houses to the illustrators. Ultimately economics and social memes open up various kinds of aesthetics, but it's still very hard to say what people will think is nice. Look at flat UI. We can have skeumorphic, but for some reason we stopped that.

\- Similarly, moral opinions change. Our view of execution has changed. Homophobia is now wrong. Premarital sex is easier to get. There's a whole load of atheists out in the open. Seahorse racing is considered animal cruelty.

\- Economics has changed enormously. Both the theory and the demographics. Keynes was years from writing the Consequences of the Peace. Friedman was not born yet. Most people don't have servants. Automation did happen with washing machines and dishwashers. Still waiting for a thing that folds and stacks clothes.

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting enough, novelist E.M. Forster anticipated the Internet as well as other trends in his 1907 story "The Machine Stops"[1]. Note the Forster describes _qualities_ of modern internet discussion with eerie precision as well as predicting a world wide network with poor-quality video resolution.

[1] [http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html](http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Made me think about this talk by Neal Stephenson: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM)

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the link, great talk!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What I find really curious is that how, at every decade, we were living in "modern" times. We were living in "modern times" in 1950's, in the 1970's, in the 90's and now in 2015. It means that we are living in "recent times" with "recent discoveries", but does it mean anything?

Other thing I have found curious is when people ask things like, "Ghosts? Do you believe ghosts in 2015?", no really, what do we know about ghosts not existing, in 2015 that we don't know in 1900? It is as if people assume that, since we have been searching for things like this for 100s of years, and we haven't found them, they should not exist at all. People seem to assume that we are standing in a room where we can see the bounding walls, when in reality we are standing in a mist with very limited visibility and we have no idea where the walls are...

Periods like 'a year' is just an arbitrary time span. It which is big from human perspective. A 100 year span is big in terms of human existence. It might be a blink of an eye for another being which experience time differently. So I think It is a fallacy to attribute such time periods some kind of absolute size, and make assumptions on that basis..

<comment><USER25> Are you feeling okay? Did you just get back from Colorado or something?

<comment><USER24> He he..I am fine. Thanks for asking. I am from India. That is another thing I have found curious. Somehow, in online discussions, people always assume that you are from US.

And my comment does not mean that I believe ghosts exists, if that is what you meant by the Colorado thing....

<comment><USER26> Weed. The answer is weed.

<comment><USER27> Don't discount hypoxia!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> somewhat offtopic.. back to the future: part II marty travels to October 21, 2015. It's pretty hilarious to see the scenery they depict:

      * hoverboards
      * flying cars
      * flying advertisements
      * hologram advertisements
      * autolacing shoes
      * autofitting/drying jackets
      * robot bartenders

You know, for a 30 year guess (produced in 1985), they weren't far off.. we have

      * Robot cars
      * all sorts of automated beverage stations
      * VR making a comeback (just wait for FB to sell some VR ads)

I'm sure the other stuff is just around the corner :)

<comment><USER29> You missed the one they got really right, because it looks so natural: flat- screen tv.

<comment><USER30> I find it interesting, that instead of on-demand-TV they solved the problem of missing TV-shows by showing multiple shows on one screen.

Actually my family had cable TV and a Grundig television in the early nineties with such a function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think they are being too harsh about the "cavorting with marine animals" comments. We actually do have scuba gear these days and we do a lot of things underwater that would have been fantastical at that time. We do have submarines, diving gear, deep sea diving equipment, etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> Just want to mention Jules Verne.

Some of the stuff[0] he wrote felt scaringly accurate even though the exact implementations differed quite a bit.

[0] :"Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" from 1870 was one of my childhood favourites.

</comment><comment><USER33> So this is interesting to me because of the concept of futurism in general.

People in 1900 were thinking about the future, and what it would be like. They were seeing significant technological progress on that timescale, and wondering what would happen next.

In contrast, I would guess that most people living in 1800 wouldn't imagine the world of 1900 much different from their own, though we also saw dramatic changes in that time with the industrial revolution in full swing.

So futurism itself is a relatively new thing.

</comment><comment><USER34> This illustration style can often be seen in British pubs. These are not really visionary works, this is art deco to bring more fun and cheers when you are having your pint. I am sure Washington Post author stripped out all sexual jokes typical to this genre from this series. Glad to see there were nice coincidences and point precise predictions though. By the way - this one from the same series predicts design of contemporary public trains in China [http://www.studiolum.com/wang/hu/postcard/100years/en- lan-20...](http://www.studiolum.com/wang/hu/postcard/100years/en- lan-2000/30.jpg) UPD: Skype -> [http://media.techeblog.com/images/en-l- an-2000.jpg;](http://media.techeblog.com/images/en-l-an-2000.jpg;) Home nuclear reactor (not quite yet) - [http://c8.alamy.com/comp/BA1DXG/future- vision-in-the-year-20...](http://c8.alamy.com/comp/BA1DXG/future-vision-in- the-year-2000-heating-with-radium-colour-lithograph-BA1DXG.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER35> Is this really what "people in 1900" thought? It looks to me (and the article says so) that it is what _artists_ thought. Although interesting, I think it is worth noting that most artists are not technologists today, presumably weren't in 1900, and so can't really represent the best, or even in general (as the general public don't consist of mostly artists), of what we think about what the future holds.

</comment><comment><USER36> Google phrase "en l'an 2000" [https://www.google.sk/search?q=en+lan+2000&tbm=isch](https://www.google.sk/search?q=en+lan+2000&tbm=isch)

</comment><comment><USER37> More accurate than people in 50's thought about 2000

</comment><comment><USER38> Most of these are pretty insane and don't reflect an improvement in utility of any existing technology in any meaningful way, or if they do then they seem to defy a pretty basic understanding of physics. Who made these predictions? I feel like I could come up with a much better prediction for 2115 than have been made here about 2000, but I've also got a better understanding of technology than the general population.

Since I'm criticizing the predictions made by others, I might as well throw my predictions for 2115 out there as well:

\- Oil industry will still exist, but in a very limited fashion and will be highly regulated.

\- Oil will mostly be replaced by advanced battery, solar, and fusion energy. Batteries will be designed to be more durable and longer lasting to cope with the pollutive nature of disposable batteries.

\- Air travel will be less common due to increased counter-terrorism measures that no one asked for.

\- Ground based travel and transport will be mostly automated due to its massive success in reducing accidents while at the same time increasing vehicle speed substantially (automation has allowed for better coordination between vehicles, eliminating traffic jams and slow drivers)

\- Improvements in energy tech have also improved travel distances between charges, further incentivizing land based travel, which is now considered more safe than air travel.

\- Greater divide in socioeconomic statuses - the middle class is almost non- existent, however living conditions for the lower class have also improved as a result of automation and increased government aid.

\- Automation is everywhere. Transportation, food services, factories. Most blue collar jobs now revolve around maintaining and creating automata, while white collar jobs remain a human task, however, work in those jobs relies heavily on computers and robotic assistance.

\- Drones patrol the skies performing all sorts of tasks. The night sky in the will look similar to a busy highway at night.

\- We've cracked certain functions of the human brain. Gaining knowledge on a subject is now based on what your interest is, not your mental ability. Schools still exist, but their focus is on enabling children to discover their passion. Some find it earlier than others, and once you do you can opt to become an expert in that field.

\- Death will be a choice for those with money - albeit you won't get to choose to keep your body. We're capable of repairing large portions of the human body with synthetic parts, however we haven't solved aging. Death will either be final, or you can choose to be synthesized into a virtual world - however those alternative endings are commercial and require a paid subscription to maintain.

\- Wealthier people are generally more beautiful thanks to advancements in gene editing.

\- Tension caused by war is increasing as the US continues to automate its war efforts.

I could go on for a while, but I think most of the things here aren't too outlandish. At the very least most of them would be possible if you have money. Just my two cents though. I'm interested to hear what others think.

<comment><USER39> Those were paintings made for cigar boxes. Of course they are not supposed to be accurate. They are jokes, visions of the future in the same way that Idiocracy is a vision of the future. (Okay, that might be a sensitive topic for some, since there actually are people who do take that movie seriously for some weird reason, including believing its basic premise to have any basis in reality.)

Of course Idiocracy reflects some of the beliefs about how we think the future might be, but in the service of creating a fantastical, entertaining and funny picture the image of the future it draws is also deliberately grotesque and weird and as much about the present as it is about what we belief the future to be.

I don't think those paintings are all the different. They should not be taking as a really serious attempt to predict the future, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> the attachable wings is an interesting one. I wonder if in the year 3000 we'll be able to fly around in the sky with a device as small as a small band you wear around your ankles and wrists. Michio Kaku says one day we can do this in the future.

to be able to fly around will be an pinnacle of our achievement as humanity.</comment>


Show HN: Auto-generated quiz questions from DBPedia - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/n1try/linkeddata-trivia <comment><USER2> Nice! Certainly results in a much cleaner question. Do you think you could briefly sum up how it's formatting the question if not by NLP? ie. how does it turn: 'john smith was born in abc, usa' into 'what is the birthplace of john smith?'

<comment><AUTHOR> With Linked Data you always have triples of the form (subject, predicate, object). E.g. (dbr:John_Smith dbo:birthPlace dbr:Abc) and (dbr:John_Smith rdfs:label "John Smith"). dbr:Abc and dbo:birthPlace again are the subject of other triples, including a triple with (dbo:birthPlace rdfs:label "birth place") (available in multiple languages) and one with (dbr:Abc rdfs:label "Abc, Germany"). By retreiving the labels for the properties (predicates) and objects, I can simply form a question and the answer options. Currently every question is built naively in the form "What is the <propertyLabel> of <entityLabel>?".

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is it really infinite, without any repetition?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, to be precise it's not infinite and not guaranteed to be free of repetition. However, DBPedia holds ~15 million entities corresponding to Wikipedia articles. Although only a fraction of those can be used for quiz questions (many don't have labels or their potential quiz answers don't have labels etc.), the chance to get a duplicate is still pretty low.</comment></comment>


Being bored is good for children – and adults. This is why - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/being-bored-is-good-for-children-and-adults-this-is-why <comment><USER2> Does adding things like "this is why" to titles actually inclease CTRs? I find it terribly annoying.</comment>


First Time - <AUTHOR> http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20141212.html <comment><USER2> I wish it were a bit more verbose on the terms and their use. What does he mean by phase "term" and frequency "term"? "Term" -> "error"? And if so why the frequency would set to a relative error of ~25ppm? (Is it measuring the local clock frequency skew, while showing a near zero corrected phase error?)...

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't tell if "Of-by-one errors" is a clever joke or a typo.

<comment><USER4> It's both :) ! It's a typo that is built into the clever joke (to help tell the joke)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Follow-up posts here: [http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/index.html](http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/index.html)

And the actual project: [https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed](https://github.com/bsdphk/Ntimed)

<comment><USER5> Why did someone downvote this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A previous discussion of ntimed here : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781435](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8781435)</comment>


Y Combinator Shattered My Robot Loving Dreams - <AUTHOR> http://launchpadtoys.com/blog/2011/08/y-combinator-shattered-my-robot-loving-dreams/

<comment><USER2> In other words: software will replace robots when there's no need to have an actual robot, just software. Erm, yes.

When your iPhone can assemble a car, do the dishes, or _actually explore_ Mars, let me know.

<comment><USER3> It's not necessarily just software that has killed robots. For instance why have a robot to wash the dishes the same way as a human, when you can just pile them into a dishwasher and be done with it?

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing you don't have four kids. Sometimes, when the dishes have piled up on the counter above the dishwasher, I think a domestic robot would be amazing.

But then I teach my kids "character" by making them wash the dishes they couldn't bother to put in the dishwater.

Really, there are still any places robots can be helpful that software isn't appropriate for. I do think the human-looking robot is DOA, with task-specific robots taking the place they were given by scifi authors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Software is incredibly powerful, but it the robotic revolution is still coming. Obviously software cannot explicitly deal with physical objects as easily as a robot can. I mean, you can have software that will find you the cheapest maid service out there and send them to your door while your at work, but the software can't clean your house.

Robots are taking much longer then we first thought because the problems are much harder then we first thought (pg talks about this is one of his essays on AI).

As of right now, humanoid-consumer viable robots are too weird, slow and clumsy to be of real value. Look up some willow garage (google-backed) on youtube for what I mean. But certainly within my lifetime, we will have something that will be able to fold your clothes, do the dishes and cook you breakfast, all before you get out of bed.

It may be nothing like what the writer was thinking of back in the 80's. I could see a set of robotic arms mounted on the ceiling in the kitchen, which could cook, clean, and then get out of the way, resulting in no awkward robot- human interactions. I don't know what the technology will be, but it will be coming.

</comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps all of us have our own idea of why, exactly, we found The Jetsons' Rosie useful and appealing. For myself, the appeal is removing the need for a human to do any sort of physical grunt work to perform a task.

With software, I still have to open a browser tab and punch in dates, times, and locations on a webpage. I still have to physically go to the grocery store [1] and redeem the coupons I've purchased.

How about software that takes my email exchange, extracts the agreed-upon travel dates, books the cheapest ticket, and automatically prints out my boarding pass? Ah, it was all software until the printer - robot.

Or something that mines the types of foods and groceries I like, orders them for me, and delivers them to my doorstep? As a grocery store manager, I might want a robot to pick the products off the shelf and transport them to the customer.

I can't Babelfish a conversation I'm trying to have with a friend. I want those translators that they have on Star Trek. Hardware. Hardware which runs software, sure, but how am I supposed to translate Chinese using Babelfish on my cell phone?

I still have to physically scrub and place the dishes from the kitchen sink into the dishwasher. Hell, I even have trouble getting them from my desk to the sink!

So I say let's have more robots! But not robots that substitute for human interaction, but robots that keep us from the monotony of everyday tasks.

[1] [http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster- wallac...](http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallace- kenyon.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> for someone that thinks they are creating the future of toys, this is incredibly shortsighted. This post shows a lack of vision. Why would I even want to go to hipmunk, when a robot will get the ticket, pack my bags, make sure they are at the airport where they need to be, and all I'll have to do is board a plane. Aisle50, i don't want just deals, I want someone to either pick them up or deliver them, put them away, and automate this process for me every week.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, and there are many cases where a robot will remember to do such things for me before I will even think about it (artificial intelligence) whereas I may forget to book my ticket, or I may look in my refrigerator at dinner time just to see it is empty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this one's a bit of a stretch.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there a sense in which software is what is holding back robots? We have all watched pretty cool robots in videos rolling around, walk on two legs, etc. What we need is awesome AI to put in the existing hardware. Any experts want to chime in?

<comment><USER11> I don't claim to be an expert, but from what I've seen there's a typically a huge gulf between the software and hardware.

Until recently, it's been difficult to put a lot of CPU on a mobile robot, so the software developer really has to be a programmer with an embedded systems mindset. For instance, the Arduino is a relatively recent phenomenon, and that's seriously under-powered if you're interested in high-level planning, or vision. But the GumStix or BeagleBoard look interesting, since there's a pretty accessible tool-chain available.

On the hobbyist front, most of the people setting out to build (for instance) humanoid robot kits have a lot of fun with getting the hardware together, but realize that dabbling in software really doesn't get you very far.

For the software-mindset hobbyists (like me), it's a lot more practical to do robot experiments virtually - since as soon as one gets out the soldering iron, the whole weekend disappears instantly.

"Hardware is tough", and (unlike software) iterating the design/plan is extremely time-consuming. OTOH, once a few decent platforms appear (in the $1000 ballpark), I guess software people will swarm in and push things into exponential mode, rather than what seems like linear mode right now.

<comment><USER12> I recently bought a TurtleBot (turtlebot.com), a ~$1,000 robot with a netbook, kinect, gyro, and roomba. The TurtleBot platform combined with the Robot Operating System (ros.org) - a popular, open-source robot framework - is an affordable way to test out and learn many cutting edge robotic algorithms like room mapping and navigation. It even supports telepresence.

I consider myself software oriented too, and recommend it to others who are looking at going beyond a basic microcontroller based robot, but without all the soldering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> best collection of software < having an assistant that does everything + the software.

In the future, why do it yourself, if you can delegate it to a robot and focus on more important things.

</comment><comment><USER14> so maybe it is so. but humans will get API and will act like machine. (until maybe they are replaced by better machine, or parts that make them human are removed.). DNA is machine anyway.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm still waiting for my android powered android.

</comment><comment><USER16> Where has this guy been for the past 20 years? I was child of the 80's, and a teen of the 90's. And it has been pretty clear to me for a long time that the concept of cyberspace and virtual reality would be the eventual endpoint of the computer revolution. Robots always were a 60's thing, even in the 80's.</comment>