Show HN: My weekend project - Codestagram - <AUTHOR> http://codestagram.com/

<comment><USER3> I would love this idea, if it was limited to 10-20 lines. The forced conciseness of it would make devs focus on brief concepts and structure, rather than complex methods. It would end up being like Dribble rather than Gist/PasteBin, and be a great place to browse for techniques I hadn't previously encountered. Think about how fun it would be to scan through an Instagram style list of stuff like this:

############~C~#############

      if ((1?1:var)/2) {
          /* it's floating point */
      } else {
          /* it's an integer */
      }

#######~Objective-C~########

      + (NSString *) append:(id) first, ...
      {
          NSString * result = @"";
          id eachArg;
          va_list alist;

          if(first)
          {
              result = [result stringByAppendingString:first];
              va_start(alist, first);
              while (eachArg = va_arg(alist, id))
                  result = [result stringByAppendingString:eachArg];
              va_end(alist);
          }

          return result;
      }

#########~PHP~##############

      $object = new StdClass;
      $object->foo = 'bar';
      echo json_encode($object);

############################

I know they aren't the best example, but I would love to be able to scan through a list of small code snippets (by language) that demonstrate concepts. On the plus side, it would be an easier way to show some competence in a language (for future employers) than having to do massive contributions to open source projects (don't have that much free time). _The thing that makes or breaks this project is a smallish limit on lines._ Without it, you are just another Gist/Pastebin, without the benefits of the wide user base and additional features. I have _zero_ desire to chill at night and scan through a bunch of random 100+ line snippets that I have no context for, but I _love_ goofing around on Stackoverflow, looking at fancy code snippets

<comment><USER4> Quick question: wouldn't 1?1:var always return 1?

<comment><USER3> Nope. Having '1' as the condition in the ternary operator, causes 'var' to never be evaluated (to avoid accidental operations with getters and such), but the compiler allows the 'var' to affect if the '1' is treated as a float or an int. Here's a breakdown:

if var is a float...

      (1?1:var)/2

...becomes...

      (1.0/2)

...which equals 0.5 and is considered _true_ when evaluated. But if var is an int...

      (1?1:var)/2

...becomes...

      (1/2)

...which equals 0 and is considered _false_ when evaluated

<comment><USER5> Is that part of the spec for coercions, or is it exploiting a typical compiler's behavior? It certainly doesn't appear to be a required way to process that statement (optimizations could remove the 'if' portion entirely), unless it is actually required of the compiler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a nice novelty, but it certainly won't ever usurp Gists. I'm not sure that it was intended to. However, there is one aspect of the site that really irks me: the wood grain background. For whatever reason, this style has become really pervasive among "hacked-together" sites. Moreover, it sucks. The site would be better served with a geometric pattern, or no background at all.

<comment><USER7> Could you elaborate on why the wood grain background sucks?

I'm working on a project and I'm considering using a wood grain background for a specific UX, but I'm not a designer and have been postponing making any decisions about it.

<comment><USER6> The organic pattern and light color are somewhat distracting. It also doesn't seem thematically consistant, and sort of belies the idea of a modern site focused on programming.

Most of all, I just get this visceral sense that wood grain is sort of distasteful, and that plain backgrounds are more aesthetically pleasing.

<http://cl.ly/image/3R392H2g371t>

<comment><USER7> Hm. I've been thinking about going with a darker wood. (And it _is_ thematically consistent in my case, since my goal is to evoke the sense of an old, well-kept bookcase; the project has nothing to do with programming beyond, well, the fact that I'm coding it.)

I'll think about it. I'll pass it through people with actual skill at UX first, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So ACE editor + GitHub API + Commenting and Liking. It's a very, very simple concept. I think mainly what it has going for it is the limited barrier to entry. I'm just not sure what the long term sustainability is. Mainly its lacking the personal network aspect. I have no way of finding the developers I'm following on GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER9> I see it more akin to Dribbble than Instagram. You could also introduce 'rebound' - which is improving/optimizing/add your personal touch to the 'shot' (uploaded image, or code in this case).

I'm actually going to try and redesign this as my case study for this weekend, thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER10> Codepen.io and CSSDeck.com are the Dribbbles of code.

<comment><USER11> Those are both focused exclusively on the web though. It would be cool to have something like those but for a wider community; there's more to programming than HTML/CSS/JS.

<comment><USER10> Great point, my bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you want to hipster it up, you can convert the code to punchcards.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not sure I understand. Is it just a pasteboard?

<comment><USER14> No! It is a retro-text media social network for rockstar ninja coders.

Facebook is going to buy it for 50 million dollars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would benefit from a "copy" button. When I highlight the code snippet, I also got the line numbers with it. Would be a hassle for large codestagrams

</comment><comment><USER16> It'd be cooler if you could evaluate the expressions. I saw an API for save evaluation of user's code somewhere on reddit the other day, that might help

</comment><comment><USER17> So many solutions, so few problems :/

</comment><comment><USER18> Don't see the difference with github gists...

<comment><USER19> It's like github gists and instagram at the same time, because it let's you apply "filters" to your code (which are color palettes).

It's a funny idea, I like it!

<comment><USER20> I don't think that some of the commenters here got that... lol

<comment><USER21> When I saw this post I thought to myself "Code with colour filters applied?" When I clicked through it turns out it is just grey on grey so I can easily see why some wouldn't get it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Awesome, but I can't delete my comments or posts. D:

Also I think a great purpose for this would be to highlight particular bits of code/changes found in git, even if it is just a part of a gist.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice Idea - I had developed <http://www.Codeshelve.com> sometime back - <USER2> want to check that out.

</comment><comment><USER24> Really nice weekend project.

Only one column layout isn't the best idea for such site. Maybe 3 thumbnail in a row would be better?

</comment><comment><USER25> This is similar to <https://snipt.net>

</comment><comment><USER26> Really interesting idea, could become something big for the opensource community.

</comment><comment><USER27> I got the feeling that this got to the frontpage mostly because of the name.

</comment><comment><USER28> where are the cross-processing filters? Where's the vignette button?

</comment><comment><USER29> This project is missing one major, necessary feature: direct submission from your IDE/editor of choice. Creating a write-enabled API is probably the first step towards that.

<comment><USER30> Or just use Github's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I also had a similar weekend project, but specific to Java, <http://javasnips.com/>

</comment><comment><USER32> Nice job Abe, keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER33> No Objective-C?</comment>


The Moral Costs of Cats - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/moral-cost-of-cats-180960505/ <comment><USER2> It's also important to note for this discussion that dogs and cats account for around a quarter of emissions from animal agriculture: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2017/08/02/whats- yo...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2017/08/02/whats-your-dogs- carbon-pawprint/#4fa09f5613a6)

As obligate carnivores it is difficult to decrease the overall footprint of a cat. Pet ownership may be one of the biggest components to one's personal carbon footprint. I'm often dismayed by friends and colleagues my age who use environmental arguments for why they won't have children, yet own multiple animals.

<comment><AUTHOR> Joe Rogan had a hilarious but accurate piece on cat owners who are vegan for moral reasons but feed their cats canned cat food. The very same vegans are in your face about "animal rights".

People take positions for a variety of emotional reasons - in-group, virtue signaling, etc - and then choose their rationalizations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The data needs to be sampled in many different location types, the problems discussed can easily be framed as solutions in areas with a lot of animals labelled in the "vermin" category.</comment>


Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 and 808 Processors - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/7925/qualcomms-snapdragon-808810-20nm-highend-64bit-socs-with-lte-category-67-support-in-2015 <comment><USER2> Very disappointed about this generation of processors from Qualcomm. It seems like they were caught off-guard by the introduction of an ARMv8 processor by Apple last year, and soon after they scrambled to release an ARMv8 chip - _any_ ARMv8 chip, so they don't look like they're as behind as they really are.

That's how they announced the Cortex A53-based chip as soon as possible early this year (that one was probably already planned, since they use stock ARM CPU's at the mid-range), and now a Cortex A57-based one, even though they licensed the ARMv8 architecture a few years ago, and they were _supposed to_ ship Krait's successor 2 years after its introduction, which would be right about now, and before ARM's own stock designs. What's the point of buying the architecture license, if ARM itself can outcompete you, and forces you to buy their stock CPU designs anyway?

The only explanation is that they were trying to milk Krait for at least 3-3.5 years, before they were planning to launch their own ARMv8-based Krait successor. Apple seems to have screwed their plans, and forced them to buy Cortex A57 for the high-end.

I'm even less impressed with the GPU. The high-end one by the looks of it will probably score around 200 Gflops, while Nvidia's mobile Kepler is already over 300. And the 4k support and "live HDR" for video? Please, that's old news. Everything about these chips screams "rushed" and "repackaged" (even their names).

<comment><USER3> Anand stated in a previous article that Chinese customers were basically demanding 64-bit 4 or 8-core SoCs, just to tick checkboxes on a spec sheet.

Of course it's pretty well established that 2 fast/wide cores (like Apple and Qualcomm's in-house designs) are better for current mobile software than 4 or 8 slower ones. And Android doesn't take any advantage of ARMv8 right now.

Another sad example of marketing trumping engineering reality.

<comment><USER4> I think games that use take advantage of high parallelism would do better on the 8 core devices. We just don't see much of that kind of game in the mobile market.

<comment><USER5> We don't see that on the _desktop_ market.

<comment><USER6> We also don't see many 8 core chips on the desktop market. Chicken and egg problem.

Very few people have the incentive or funds to get either the hyperthreaded i7s (which don't _really_ have 4 cores), the 8 core Xeons or the 8 core AMD high end parts.

<comment><USER5> Very few games can even use two threads to full capacity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing you may have missed from CES that these chips enable is the ultrasound pen. I think this is freakin cool technology!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQwmS126YX0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQwmS126YX0)

<comment><USER8> I am sure I am the only one who thought "Gee, why is Broadcom selling a sonic screwdriver?" :-)

That said, I'm curious how they expect this to work, although I expect in typical Broadcom fashion there will be no way to get information on it :-(

<comment><USER9> Even bigger news should be the fact that Qualcomm == Broadcom in your estimation :)

<comment><USER8> Sigh. Its true. I'm guessing they sit in the same set of neurons or something. When I'm reading about modems and RF gear I always read it as Qualcomm but for CPUs I tend transliterate Qualcomm into Broadcom way to frequently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> AnandTech as a nice, more informative article: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/7925/qualcomms- snapdragon-8088...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/7925/qualcomms- snapdragon-808810-20nm-highend-64bit-socs-with-lte-category-67-support- in-2015)

<comment><USER11> Thanks! We changed it.

<comment><USER12> If you're going to be changing the linked articles in submissions regularly now, you should change the site to automatically mark comments which were in response to an article which is no longer the linked article.

<comment><USER11> > regularly now

We've always made these changes regularly. The only new thing is that we've been commenting about it, hopefully making things a little clearer than before.

We're not closed to implementing something to reduce the intelligibility gap you're talking about. But it would have to be very simple, i.e. unobtrusive and fit in with the existing design. If anyone knows a simple way to do it, please email it to firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Step back for a minute and realize how astonishing these devices are. As someone who was in the semiconductor industry in the late 80s and 90s I am just blown away.

We are putting magic on chips

<comment><USER14> what were some of the cutting edge specs like back then?

<comment><USER15> Like for like? I was programming on Acorn Archimedes 310s back in 1987: an ARM 2 clocked at 8 MHz. The memory and video controllers were discrete chips. Acorn claimed that their ARM 2's pipeline design let it run integer operations at the same speed as a 20 - 25 MHz 386.

IIRC it only had 23 instructions, making it the most pure RISC design to be available off the shelf.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> TD-Linux That's a lot of die area for video decoding! It's substantially larger than their entire set of CPUs.

I've got a feeling that full-hardware video decoding is going to die off, having worked on it myself. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to leave so much silicon idle most of the time, when you could just accelerate a more general purpose processor or GPU to have very wide integer paths.

</comment><comment><USER16> These chips look pretty cool. That's quite a bit of power in one package.

On a side note - for a press release it seemed kind of casual: "And because the only thing sadder than a selfie is a selfie that cannot be shared, remember you can upload these high-res images and HDR videos faster with the Snapdragon processor's 4th generation 4G LTE solution."

<comment><USER17> The link is for a corporate blog post, not the official presser (which is linked at the bottom). The blog site appears to be aiming towards consumers than the press release, which is as formal as any other tech release.

EDIT: Mod has changed URL to Anandtech review from original link

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anyone knows the expected price points of the various versions?

</comment><comment><USER19> I am still waiting for the public release of their NPUs :)</comment>


The iState of the Union - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2242492/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I get it. Is the point that Jobs is a better leader than Obama? Or more charismatic? Or that if Obama accomplished as much as Jobs, people would like him more?

I can understand responding emotionally to this article. But it isn't funny, because there isn't a detectable premise.

</comment><comment><USER3> Drones already kind of look like they were built by Apple:

[http://www.richard- seaman.com/Aircraft/AirShows/Nellis2006/H...](http://www.richard- seaman.com/Aircraft/AirShows/Nellis2006/Highlights/Predator2006.jpg)

A few too many dangling peripherals though; if it were really Apple all that stuff would be flush with the surface.

</comment><comment><USER4> If only the President had as one-sided an audience as Steve Jobs does.</comment>


Facebook Paid Hundreds of Contractors to Transcribe Users' Audio - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/facebook-paid-hundreds-of-contractors-to-transcribe-users-audio <comment><USER2> > The company said the users who were affected chose the option in Facebook's > Messenger app to have their voice chats transcribed. The contractors were > checking whether Facebook's artificial intelligence correctly interpreted > the messages, which were anonymized.

Where exactly is this setting? I've looked through Facebook's settings and Messenger's settings, but this option is rarer than a cheap white truffle. Does anyone know?

<comment><USER3> [https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger- app/2271207603094031](https://www.facebook.com/help/messenger- app/2271207603094031)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Unlike previous articles about tech-companies-listening-to-user-audio, this is over voice transcription rather than smart speaker QA.

Facebook _does_ have a smart speaker (Portal) with voice commands ([https://portal.facebook.com/help/2149102838698668/](https://portal.facebook.com/help/2149102838698668/)) but that isn't mentioned in the article.

</comment><comment><USER4> Paywall Workaround: [https://outline.com/pyzYAB](https://outline.com/pyzYAB)

</comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one who see's a problem with them actively working to convert a non-indexable data source into indexable and searchable one?

</comment><comment><USER6> Is it from WhatsApp audio conversations? Or just random recordings through the apps - which Zuckerberg denied before?

<comment><USER7> RTFA - "The company said the users who were affected chose the option in Facebook's Messenger app to have their voice chats transcribed. The contractors were checking whether Facebook's artificial intelligence correctly interpreted the messages, which were anonymized."

<comment><USER8> This sounds totally reasonable to me? Low quality machine learning algorithm needs human labellers?

<comment><USER9> But why sample on realworld data from non-employees?

<comment><USER8> Huh? Because that's the product you're trying to improve!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it fair to wonder why they are using people when automagical Ai transcription should do this for them like the man from Google/deepmind/amazon/IBM/Microsoft said? Or is FAIRs really not up to much?

<comment><USER11> Not exactly sure what you're asking, but all tech companies hire people to transcribe audio precisely to gather data to train ML models to do transcription.

<comment><USER12> Is there a reason that these ML models are being hoarded as "secret sauce" when, for these companies, all the rivals they're concerned about _also_ have all the resources required to build one that's nearly as good? It feels strange that we've got six different tech giants that have all independently spent tons of capital building up the training data required to sell people smart speakers/mobile speech control/etc. with these ML models, without any of them entering into cross-licensing agreements.

It seems like it'd make a lot more sense for Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. to all pool their training data in an "industry working group" to build and license out one "best" model, the way that IWGs are formed to build and license out e.g. AV codecs.

<comment><USER7> > "to all pool their training data"

The press would skewer them alive and politicians will have a field day about tech companies violating privacy and sharing data.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lessig: It's Time to Demolish the FCC - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/id/176809 <comment><USER2> I support your idea, Mr. Lessig, but good luck with that.

The people working for the FCC have much more political pull and much more incentive to lobby (it's their jobs on the line) than any third party do- gooder. It will take a huge publicity campaign before the costs of doing nothing outweigh the benefit for a given Congress person.

You can always add a new bureaucracy, but it is hard to take away an old one. That's the incentive structure in a bureaucratic democracy.

</comment><comment> old-gregg Yeah, we already allowed FDA to look the other way in order to "boost innovation" which resulted in virtual disappearance of fruit and vegetables from nearly all American grocery stores, they got replaced by engineered tasteless cheap biomass that only visually resembles the originals. Some Americans I know haven't ever tasted a tomato in their life. We even pushed EU using our WTO muscle to force-feed them genetically modified bananas (even though they really preferred the real thing) to support our suffering enterprises. I recommend "The Blessed Unrest" as an introductory reading on what happens when you let enterprises to get too creative.

Do you know that it is FCC that keeps you from being eaten alive by your friendly cable company? It's FCC who has been forcing them to open up and free us from those retarded cable boxes. It is FCC who is fighting the war against cable morons to eventually allow us simply hook up our computers and watch Hi- def unencrypted TV.

Telecom industry is prone to "natural monopolies". How many cable companies do you have to choose from? How about landline phone lines? Someone needs to watch these assholes.

<comment><USER3> What I would give to have real fruit again. I don't think many Americans realize what they are missing out on when it comes to food (especially fruit).

<comment> old-gregg I know. I live in Texas and my wife after years of eating American biomass decided to start a garden and grow our own. Didn't work: the seeds they sell everywhere are altered junk: the results are a little better (after all the soil is real) but due to genetic modification everything still grows too fast and too big, devoid, of course, of any taste.

Corporate innovation at work.</comment></comment></comment>


Tesla Will Demonstrate Full Self-Driving Capabilities This Month - sahin-boydas https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-more-seamless-navigate-autopilot <comment><AUTHOR> The original article title is somewhat less clickbait: "Introducing a More Seamless Navigate on Autopilot"

<comment><USER2> It also seems fully wrong as far as I can tell - Telsa will not demo full self driving this month and have not said they will. Unless I missed something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Given recently revealed vulnerabilities to the Tesla autopilot [1],for example, the adversarial markers that can cause the car to change lane, is it responsible for Tesla to go even further toward self driving without some way to mitigate such vulnerabilities first?

[1] [https://keenlab.tencent.com/en/2019/03/29/Tencent-Keen- Secur...](https://keenlab.tencent.com/en/2019/03/29/Tencent-Keen-Security-Lab- Experimental-Security-Research-of-Tesla-Autopilot/)

<comment><USER4> The driver is required to keep their hands on the wheel and be ready to take over control in a split second, have you missed the memo? /s

The current development state of AP would make a nice MS thesis on a quality university, but is at least a decade from production; that is if the cameras- only-based concept works at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just a demo of marginal improvements to juice investors, no true demonstration of a major technological advance. Where is the coast2coast demo?

<comment> sahin-boydas Coast to cost is a classic early Elon musk promise but this one is a great step too

</comment></comment><comment> sahin-boydas [http://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release- details/tesla...](http://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release- details/tesla-host-autonomy-investor-day)

<comment> sahin-boydas Some more links

[https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/04/tesla-woos-wall-street- an...](https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/04/tesla-woos-wall-street-and-drivers- with-autonomous-vehicle-fanfare/)</comment></comment>


Banks too big to fail, now even biggerer - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/09/too_bigger_to_f_1.html

<comment><USER2> Having bigger banks is not necessarily all bad. One of the reasons the Canadian financial system was rocked to a lesser extent than the rest of the world's is because our banking industry is dominated by a handful of big stable players. So their growth strategies recognize that they can't possibly take huge market share away from competitors. Instead, they focus on taking less risky gambles that will provide sustainable growth and minimize the risk of losing existing market share. The American banking sector seems to have a lot more competition but the competition breeds some idiotic pissing matches as each player jockeys for a better position while the opportunity exists.

All this said, Canadian banks are notorious for being super conservative due to the lack of competition. During good economic times, this can be bad because they're less willing to say, provide small business loans.

EDIT: was looking for marketshare stats and came across this article: <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124268900278332309.html> The top 5 banks in Canada have 85% of the banking assets.

<comment><USER3> Interesting take on why Canadian banks are doing well. I had heard a different take earlier this year. I read they were doing well because the Canadian gov did not deregulate to allow them to take the types of risks that banks, investment banks, and insurers have done in the U.S.

<comment><USER2> Yes, that was also part of it. There was a period of time when the Canadian banks wanted to merge to form even bigger banks and reduce competition further. The Liberal government during the 1990s and early 2000s prevented two mergers that would have seen 4 of the top 5 banks merged into 2 companies. Then they went a step further and said they would not approve any mergers until a proper framework was in place for proving that a given merger would not a) unnecessarily concentrate economic power, b) reduce competition, and c) practically limit the government's ability to regulate the new entity.

The Finance Minister at the time, Paul Martin, was the same man who brought Canada's spiralling deficit under control during the 1990s by helping to break a promise to cut a federal sales tax and cutting social program spending. He was a big factor in getting the Liberal party into majority governments between 1993 and 2003 even though he pretty much hated the Prime Minister of the time. Ironically enough, when the Prime Minister Jean Chretien decided to give up the reigns of power to Paul Martin, Canadians were pissed at the Liberals for a corruption scandal that saw tax payer money funnelled to various businesses in Quebec to promote the concept of a united Canada. Remember that in 1995, Quebec was 1% of the popular vote away from being in favour of separating from Canada; so close of a call that France had lined up in support for recognizing Quebec as a country while the Clinton administration lined up against it. Anyways, Paul Martin was popular enough that he won the election in 2003 but with a minority government, which in a parliamentary system means that the opposing parties can essentially gang up on the ruling party and force another election.

This happened in early 2006, when Canadians had a chance to hear the details of how tens of millions of dollars were spent on putting Canadian flags on things like the F1 race in Montreal. They decided to vote in the Conservatives of Stephen Harper, but with a minority government, and we've been ruled by them ever since. I brought up all of these details because funny enough, one of the things the Conservatives wanted to do was push through the same financial deregulation reform that had happened south of our border. Unfortunately, having a minority government they could not do that. The Canadian banks were pushing the government to allow them more freedom and the government was simply waiting for a chance, one that they did not get because even after calling another election prematurely when they thought they had a chance to win big time, they got another minority mandate from the people.

So you could say that Canadians were a bit lucky. A two-bit scandal involving tens of millions of dollars of tax payer money spent to pay for propaganda in the 1990s to help avoid the fracture of our country had the indirect effect of ensuring that our legislation could not "catch up" to the rest of the westernized world. And all the while Stephen Harper has been essentially counting his blessings because he knew that his government would have pushed through the banking deregulation reforms in 2006. That's why it makes me laugh when he goes on CNN or to Wall Street to boast about our banks. He wanted to change the rules he's now praising.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's simply not true or as simple to say that Canada hasn't fallen into the same issues as other institutions because of regulation. Yes, consolidation was denied but investment banks were part of retail banks long ago.

Megan McArdle has a good post on this: [http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/canadia...](http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/canadian_exceptionism.php)

<comment><USER2> It is a good article, but I'd say a more precise word for Canadian banks is that they're skeptical, rather than Conservative. I think skepticism helps to define Canadians. We were skeptical enough to not join the Americans in leaving the monarchy. The difference between skepticism and conservatism is being open to the possibility of change. Here's where I think regulation did come into play. While the Canadian banks were and are skeptical, I think they had had enough proof by the mid 1990s that the American style of banking was the future, that they were willing to change. It's the rationale for the merger requests to the Liberals in the 1990s. They wanted to be big enough to play with the big boys down south. That meant playing the same style of game. I think we dodged a bullet.

I'm be no means a Liberal fan boy, and for the life of me, I can't understand why Paul Martin _didn't_ let the mergers to happen. No doubt his social circle of friends would have been coaxing him to do just that (can you tell I'm a bit cynical when it comes to politicians?). But read some of the accounts of the merger situation, from more than 10 years ago, like this one: [http://188.8.131.52/search?q=cache:FlhuiCh6d7sJ:www.thecana...](http://126.96.36.199/search?q=cache:FlhuiCh6d7sJ:www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm) For those trying to downplay the role the government had, the proof is in some library archives. Just read it. Here's a juicy tidbit:

 _Banking and government sources both say Martin did his utmost to be diplomatic. He did not want to appear to have made up his mind, given that the federal competition bureau would not deliver its report on the mergers for almost two weeks, but he also wanted to prepare the banker for bad news. Like everything else arising from this year's ill-fated bank mergers, however, this meeting between two of the most powerful figures in Canadian finance went off the rails fairly fast. For weeks, Cleghorn's fuse had been growing shorter as his frustration mounted over Canadians' inability to understand the bankers' point of view. In response to Martin's evasiveness, something apparently snapped. Cleghorn asked straight out whether the Royal's merger with the Bank of Montreal, and the Toronto Dominion Bank's copycat arrangement with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, were going to be allowed to proceed. "No," Martin said simply. Cleghorn, according to both banking and federal government sources, said something along the lines of "No, but . . . ?" or "Unless what?" Martin repeated his first answer. "No."

This was when the usually composed banker lost it, according to government officials. Watching a year's work sacrificed to what the bankers see as political expediency and parochialism was apparently too much to swallow. His face grew red and he pounded the table, while giving the minister an earful.

For once in his life, Martin remained ice-cool. As Cleghorn gave vent to his complaints, all the finance minister said was: "John, you're not listening to me." Sources close to Martin say he repeated this phrase several times before Cleghorn calmed down._

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose it really depends on how you define what the "American style of banking" is and what the causes of the economic collapse were. For instance, if Canada had allowed for the mergers, would they be in an even stronger position today (given that it wasn't so much size that has prevented them from failing)? After all the failures of the banks in the US weren't so much the result of mergers as they were of mispriced portfolio assets - driven in large part by the combination of ratings agencies, loosening requirements at Fannie and Freddie (of which Canada doesn't have an equivalent), etc.. Clearly regulations were different and I don't think though that it's fair to blame this on any given style of banking or even deregulation for that matter.

You may find this article interesting as well: [http://causesofthecrisis.blogspot.com/2009/09/three-myths- ab...](http://causesofthecrisis.blogspot.com/2009/09/three-myths-about-crisis- bonuses.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is biggerer a word?

<comment><USER3> According to the Farrelly brothers, dumberer is a word, so I guess we can include biggerer as well ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bigger share of the total != bigger.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason that they're considered too big to fail is the % of the market they represent and to a lesser extent the actual dollar numbers. This being said I think you'll find that if you look at both the actual numbers and percentages they have been growing in a number of metrics especially after the consolidation/failure of those like Bear Stearns and Merrill.</comment></comment>


Doctor in New York City Is Sick with Ebola - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/24/nyregion/craig-spencer-is-tested-for-ebola-virus-at-bellevue-hospital-in-new-york-city.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=LedeSum&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> The smart thing would be for aid agencies that send workers to these hot spots to pay for their employees to stay in a nice quite "resort" somewhere for a month on their return for them to relax and as a thankyou for their efforts. And to deflect growing negative public opinion about the risks returning aid workers pose. Needless to say the "resort" could have daily health checks and minimal contact between people but could otherwise be quite pleasant.

<comment><USER3> That strategy certainly worked for the Venetians. Merchant ships had to chill off shore for 40 days before unloading their cargo to make sure no one harbored deadly diseases. Hence the quarter in quarantine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _" People infected with Ebola cannot spread the disease until they begin to display symptoms, and it cannot be spread through the air. As people become sicker, the viral load in the body builds, and they become more and more contagious."_

This is sort of misleading in this context, unfortunately. The WHO considers (sustained presence) within 1 meter of EBV carrier to be ~physical exposure. The young doctor appears to have been on a NYC subway within 12 hours of having a fever of 103. Creating a potential group of exposures that may be un- traceable.

Maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong. But this would be highly unfortunate if these reports are correct. Presumably the uber driver is also in this group now, but records should be able to provide some data on that one much easier.

<comment><USER5> Many signs point to the viral load not being highly infectious at the beginning. Duncan was sent back to his home by the hospital and lived with his fiance who was taking care of him for two days before being readmitted. She wore no PPE yet appears to be uninfected. If sitting next to someone infected on a bus or subway is enough to pass it on, there would be a million cases in West Africa by now, not 10K. It appears to be primarily caregivers at the later stages of the disease, and the custom of kissing corpses that appear to be spreading the disease because the viral load is extreme at that stage. This doesn't mean that the potential contacts of this person should not be traced or that it was good idea for him to go bowling, but the sky isn't falling just yet.

<comment><USER6> Ebola can spread only after a person begins to show symptoms. And that takes ~21 days. Or putting it straight, for it to spread from one person to another it would take 21 days of period in between getting infected and spreading it to others.

Though the growth of number of patients with Ebola is definitely exponential. Please note it takes 21 days for the each multiplication to happen. It started in March and has been been spreading since, 10K is pretty large for a 7 month period.

>>but the sky isn't falling just yet.

In things like this you won't know when the sky will start falling apart. And generally when that happens its already too late, and you would be staring at a pretty big damage.

No body knows how many people have been infected, or will be infected in the next multiplication.

Which is why WHO suspects ~1.4 million could get infected by January. By then it would be too late.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The doctor should have known better than to go to a bowling alley soon after he returned. Whether or not he was contagious now they have to perform contact tracing and disinfect the place.

<comment><USER8> Not to mention riding the subway. Good luck doing contact tracing with that. I'm not saying he was contagious. I hope he wasn't.

Was the bowling alley public subway trip really a must-do thing, for someone who had just directly worked with ebola patients? Could this kind of thinking not be part of the training for this kind of work, I wonder?

<comment><USER9> I think discipline is the bigger issue than awareness. Even someone who absolutely knows better can end up thinking that the bad thing can't happen to them.

<comment><USER10> Yup.

In my experience with experts I'd say _especially_ someone who "knows better" can end up thinking that the bad thing can't happen to them right up until they, in a fit of being human, have an oops and it does.

<comment><USER11> Yeah. I hate this 'holier than thou' attitude that some folks on this thread are displaying. We are all human, and we all do stupid things based on our psychology. The best we can do is create systems to help guard against our own mistakes.

<comment><USER12> "The best we can do is create systems to help guard against our own mistakes."

Like enforced isolation of some kind? The thing that people have been asking for since the beginning, but is a bad idea for some reason that nobody can explain?

<comment><USER13> Perhaps it's illegal to imprison people who have committed no crime, on the guess that because they were interacting with people who had a disease, they might have it too.

Also, in this case and many like it, imprisoning this man would have been much more expensive than simply testing him for the disease.

There you go; one reason it's a bad idea to imprison someone you think might be carrying ebola is that you can just test their blood and know for sure if they are. Seems a lot cheaper and better all round than imprisoning people.

<comment><USER14> Quarantine is not imprisonment, and is certainly not illegal. In fact, it is customary if you, for example, sail a boat from one country to another.

The point here is that it's not clear that there's a reason to enforce a quarantine- yet. But if it becomes clear, then we need to have the balls to do it.

<comment><USER15> Detaining people against their will is the definition of imprisonment.

While not illegal there should be comprehensive legal safeguards around it. And, if it's not illegal, what are the laws that regulate quarantine in the US?

<comment><USER9> CDC has a bunch of information about this:

[http://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/index.html](http://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/index.html)

The sub pages are lengthy and cite specific laws and so on.

Skimming, CDC has broad authority to detain travelers and states and local health departments usually have the power to enforce a quarantine (with violation of the quarantine being a misdemeanor).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Before judging this man for going bowling etc., we should bear in mind that he caught Ebola working for Doctors without Borders in Guinea. I would guess that without workers like him, the risk to Americans and others outside Africa, would be much higher, since the disease would be spreading much faster within Africa. Hopefully he recovers and we can improve travel policies if necessary.

<comment><USER17> To borrow an idea from math, "doing good" isn't a commutative, infections and diseases are. Have some respect for others and slow your roll before going out during the 21 day post exposure window.

It's a bit like saying, "Hey I've saved lives over here so I have earned the right to be irresponsible over here". Because you know, karma balances out. No, the world doesn't work like that. And you aren't doing any good propagating this idea either because it encourages this privileged way of thinking.

As much as this guy isn't being vilified (and say what you want about the government spinning its story of ebola being hard to transmit), lets think clearly and rationally. He knew the risks that he could possibly be infected and decided to endanger others when he could have easily stayed home or gone anywhere to a more isolated environment (upstate NY is calling). It is well known symptoms generally show up by the 10th day. Today is his day 10.

It's very interesting that the government has locked down this guys apartment, yet if you need contact with bodily fluids to contract the disease why quarantine the apartment and surroundings? Could it be that droplets are a transmission method as many people are starting to suspect. Sneezing and coughing may spread these droplets to the floors and walls? And if that is the case, what about other objects that come in contact with saliva and other fluids like utensils, door handles, glasses...

<comment><USER18> I thought it was well known that ebola can be spread through any bodily fluids and that this includes droplets from coughing and sneezing. What they don't yet know is whether ebola is 'airborne' \- i.e. dried droplets that can float in air as is the case with measles for example.

<comment><USER19> > I thought it was well known that ebola can be spread through any bodily > fluids and that this includes droplets from coughing and sneezing. What they > don't yet know is whether ebola is 'airborne' \- i.e. dried droplets that > can float in air as is the case with measles for example.

I would suggest to everyone: Don't comment on questions like this one (how Ebola spreads) unless you know for certain what you are saying and can back it up. We have complete saturation of rumors and bad information; adding to it won't improve the situation.

I don't mean to criticize the commenter above; they just happened to have the top-most comment of this kind.

EDIT: What a strong signal of over-reaction when a post that says you should know what you are talking about, on HN, is modded down. (I don't care how it's modded, it's just depressing to see this response here.)

EDIT: The same applies to my other post, which asks serious, legitimate questions in a non-offensive way. How sad.

<comment><USER4> This (above) comment has no citations and the one you are responding to (GP) is substantially correct.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15588056](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15588056)

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4113787/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4113787/)

 _Ebola and Marburg viruses are the sole members of the genus Filovirus in the family Filoviridae. There has been considerable media attention and fear generated by outbreaks of filoviruses because they can cause a severe viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF) syndrome that has a rapid onset and high mortality. Although they are not naturally transmitted by aerosol, they are highly infectious as respirable particles under laboratory conditions. For these and other reasons, filoviruses are classified as category A biological weapons. However, there is very little data from animal studies with aerosolized filoviruses. Animal models of filovirus exposure are not well characterized, and there are discrepancies between these models and what has been observed in human outbreaks. Building on published results from aerosol studies, as well as a review of the history, epidemiology, and disease course of naturally occurring outbreaks, we offer an aerobiologist 's perspective on the threat posed by aerosolized filoviruses."_

or

 _Our study has shown that Lake Victoria marburgvirus (MARV) and Zaire ebolavirus (ZEBOV) can survive for long periods in different liquid media and can also be recovered from plastic and glass surfaces at low temperatures for over 3 weeks. The decay rates of ZEBOV and Reston ebolavirus (REBOV) plus MARV within a dynamic aerosol were calculated. ZEBOV and MARV had similar decay rates, whilst REBOV showed significantly better survival within an aerosol. "_

Reston is not Ebola, but a close relative.

<comment><USER19> What you posted is from good sources and is interesting, but I'm not sure it's conclusive or helps. They are two studies/reports of possibly many and I don't know their credibility or if they represent consensus or fringe, good science or bad. Also, they require expertise to interpret and draw conclusions from.

We're not qualified to perform our own analysis; what we need are conclusive analyses from experts about the scientific consensus and range of possibilities.

<comment><USER20> So we should all be quiet and listen for the experts to give us guidance? Sounds like the antithesis of hacker culture to me. It also sounds like horribly bad advice based on large establishments' historical propensity (categorically) to act from what they know, fail to react to changing environments, and cover up what might make them look bad.

Yes, this is all dangerous thinking. Yes, this is acting from one's gut, rather than waiting on the data. But when it's my life on the line, I'm going to err on the side of caution. When death is on the other side of the decision, I'm going to be a little more skeptical of other people's certainty.

<comment><USER19> > when it's my life on the line

The risk to your life hasn't changed, unless you are writing from West Africa. I would be happy to make a bet with anyone on HN that they will not contract Ebola (assuming they are not posting from West Africa), and that the flu will kill far more Americans this year.

Let's be honest; people are acting on fear. It's very compelling to people in the moment, but I think we all know better and know that it's how people make dumb decisions for themselves and do very bad things to others. The person who stays calm when everyone else is panicking is much safer.

Fear is dangerous and contagious -- much more so than Ebola, because fear can spread over HN. Don't follow the herd; set the example for those around you.

<comment><USER20> I'm not speaking specifically about the risk to my life, but in the effect that potential outcomes have on evaluating risk. The flu argument you make is a common example thrown around in this conversation, but it's not an accurate comparison. What is the mortality rate of the flu versus ebola? When I assess risks related to ebola, I tend to favor a more cautious approach, because the mortality rate is so high.

This is part of a popular meme that is showing up on the news. They ask questions like, "True or false, _you_ are more likely to die from ebola than the flu." The mark replies "true", and a doctor (medical doctor, not a statistician) is quoted explaining that "You're actually more likely to die from the flu." This could not be more incorrect.

Mortality rates for diseases like the flu (or any disease) are not homogenous for all members of the population. It's not like a roll of the dice. You simply cannot extrapolate an individual's odds from the broad population mortality rate for the flu (or any disease). It is extremely unlikely that _I_ will die from the flu. I am a middle-aged male in good health and fitness. My chances of dying from the flu are extremely low. The reason the flu kills so many americans is because it is so prevalent. It could be said that flu kills so many precisely because it is so non-lethal. This allows it to fly under our radar and infect people who are at risk. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't take action to prevent the spread of influenza, I'm arguing that the flu presents a different set of problems.

My chances of contracting ebola are also extremely low, but if I do, my chances of dying from it are very high. Across the board (all ages and classes), the mortality rate for ebola are much higher than the flu. Unfortunately, we don't have a strong grasp on ebola mortality rates in the west, because we haven't (thankfully) experienced an outbreak. Even in develping countries, the mortality rate varies widely [1].

I agree that we shouldn't let fear run away with our sensibility, but when dealing with a highly infectious disease [2] with a remarkably high mortality rate, we should be cautious. If not fully quarantined, a period of sensible precaution is a reasonable expectation. When the sun is at its strongest we're advised to wear sunscreen and limit our exposure. When an individual spends time with ebola patients, they should be advised to avoid situations where they would expose a large number of people to the pathogen. Flying, taking public transit, and participating in sports are all activities that put you in direct or indirect contact with large numbers of people. This seems like an unreasonble amount of risk to me.

1: [http://www.npr.org/2014/10/23/358363535/why-do-ebola- mortali...](http://www.npr.org/2014/10/23/358363535/why-do-ebola-mortality- rates-vary-so-widely)

2: Even though ebola must spread through bodily fluids, it is extremely infectious. A small amount of the virus can infect you.

<comment><USER19> > What is the mortality rate of the flu versus ebola? When I assess risks > related to ebola, I tend to favor a more cautious approach, because the > mortality rate is so high.

I think that raises a several good points. A few considerations:

1) The 'proper' way to evaluate risk, as I understand it, is (likelihood * cost). A 10% chance you'll lose $100 costs you $10 each time you take that risk, over time.

2) I agree that some costs are so high that the math works poorly even with low likelihoods. A 1% chance of death is far too high a risk to take, unless there is some high payoff such as saving someone else's life -- a risk the infected doctor and nurse took.

3) The cost of Ebola is that high, but the likelihood is so infinitesimally low that it's still not worth worrying about. You'll add more life years exercising or simply reducing other risks with the same time spent thinking about Ebola. It's a complete waste of time (I realize the irony of writing that! :) ).

4) There are many more equally deadly and far more likely risks for healthy middle-aged people: Lightening strikes, natural gas explosions, being shot in the head, carbon monoxide poisoning, food poisoning (of certain kinds), other contagious and non-contagious diseases, etc.

5) > When an individual spends time with ebola patients, they should be advised to avoid situations where they would expose a large number of people to the pathogen ... This seems like an unreasonble amount of risk to me.

Generally I agree that we should minimize risks, but again I'm not sure there is one here:

* It's very possible that it's very safe. Nobody in the United States (in fairness, that we yet know of) has contracted Ebola in this manner from the infected 3, though two of them spent much time around others. Also, wouldn't Ebola be rampant in the hospital where the infected nurse worked, if this was a risk? Wouldn't it be rampant among medical staff in W. Africa, given the prevalence in their environment (higher than flu in those facilities)? * HIV spreads via bodily fluids but we don't quarantine the infected or their caregivers. However when HIV first become known, people were afraid to be near the infected (resulting in a lot of discrimination). I think we should not repeat that mistake. * I would guess that hospital workers encounter many contagious, deadly diseases, yet nobody worries about those spreading.

People want to treat Ebola differently despite many similar and much greater risks. That's why I believe it's fear and not real risk that drives it.

Anyway, I'm approaching redundancy. Good talking to you!

<comment><USER4> _That 's why I believe it's fear and not real risk that drives it._

What other BSL-4 pathogen are you referencing here? Or are you suggesting BSL-4 is an unappropriate classification? Maybe you think the scientific and biosafety community erred when they created the BSL-4 designation?

There is plenty of research out there that documents the objectibe risk.

There is very little research that documents supports a strategy of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".

People don't need to panic.

But that's entirely seperate from lack of comprehension of the actual risks involved. After all, you can't solve problems you don't admit to having.

Trying to deal with a BSL-4 pathogen with BSL-2 safety gear is a fools errand. We might not havy any better options, especially in backcountry settings, but lets not pretend its "not risky".

In densely populated urban areas those risks are simply not tolerable. They are not tolerable for two reasons: (1) we can do better; and (2) the technology that allows for (1) makes the risks of not doing (1) more problematic.

Technology allows us to isolate patients; but it also allows non-isolated patients to spread the pathogen further/faster. People with hemoraggic fever don't walk 1000Ks or cross continents on their own power. They only do so by using technology.

It makes sense that the appropriate technology be dedicated to helping contain these bio-hazards and to compassionately care for the afflicted.

But seriously, what do we have to gain by sticking our heads in the sand? It seems this is a cynical strategy by people who don't want to "get their hands dirty"? Mayb we can continue to provide false confidence to 'volunteers' to go to africa and do our dirty work for us?

Why do we need to play this charade? Lets just give these people the tools they need (including time, money , and gear) and properly de-brief them and the public about the risks and what is at stake from either mistakes or inaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Many signs point to the viral load not being highly infectious at the beginning. Duncan was sent back to his home by the hospital and lived with his fiance who was taking care of him for two days before being readmitted. She wore no PPE yet appears to be uninfected. If sitting next to someone infected on a bus or subway is enough to pass it on, there would be a million cases in West Africa by now, not 10K. It appears to be primarily caregivers at the later stages of the disease, and the custom of kissing corpses that appear to be spreading the disease because the viral load is extreme at that stage. This doesn't mean that the potential contacts of this person should not be traced or that it was good idea for him to go bowling, but the sky isn't falling just yet." wfjackson [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8501792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8501792)

Please look at this first

<comment><USER12> People move through the stages at different rates with a high variance. That's still pretty scary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Based on the timeline, he had to have contracted Ebola pretty much the day he left.

That seems pretty unusual, isn't it? How long was he there, a couple months?

"Symptoms usually occur within eight to 10 days of infection and Dr. Spencer had been home nine days when he reported feeling ill." That's not including travel time local and international.

That's a tight schedule!

<comment><USER23> That's just the average. It can be over 42 days.

<comment><USER24> Got a source for that?

<comment><USER4> "Background: 21 days has been regarded as the appropriate quarantine period for holding individuals potentially exposed to Ebola Virus (EV) to reduce risk of contagion. There does not appear to be a systematic discussion of the basis for this period.

Methods: The prior estimates for incubation time to EV were examined, along with data on the first 9 months of the current outbreak. These provided estimates of the distribution of incubation times.

Results: A 21 day period for quarantine may result in the release of individuals with a 0.2 – 12% risk of release prior to full opportunity for the incubation to proceed. It is suggested that a detailed cost-benefit assessment, including considering full transmission risks, needs to occur in order to determine the appropriate quarantine period for potentially exposed individuals."

[http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/on-the- quarantine...](http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/on-the-quarantine- period-for-ebola-virus/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> He was a passenger in an Uber. It doesn't sound like they've made any effort to ensure the vehicle was cleaned.

[http://blog.uber.com/nyc-statement](http://blog.uber.com/nyc-statement)

</comment><comment><USER26> How about "Doctor Returning From Guinea..." to more accurately reflect the geographic relationship instead of creating a bomb of a headline as if some random, yet-unknown vector resulted in Ebola in New York.

<comment><USER27> Why does it matter who he was? The title is pretty accurate.

<comment><USER26> Where they just returned from makes the news highly generic, unsurprising, and it drops off the main page rapidly instead of being an attention grabber. Even the article that is linked to says "Doctor..." which at least leads me to believe that the just returned from treating someone. This is not incredibly surprising news, but if someone who just happened to be in New York with no obvious connection to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa caught Ebola, that would be pretty obviously significant since there might be someone who was unidentified and contagious in New York recently, suggesting that an outbreak could flare up in New York. News that misleads wastes time and makes money, but not my money.

<comment><USER28> Of course it's being spread from a region with an ev outbreak. That's how it works. The news is that it has now officially spread to the US and there is potential of more cases popping up soon since he wasn't quarintined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Do location-based services work in the NYC subway? I suppose you could also infer locations and transfers based on train schedules and tower handoff times upon emerging from stations. I mean, if there is a 21-day gestation period between infection time and the ability to retransmit the disease, it seems like it would be worthwhile/possible to look into.

Apologies for the cliche 'use technology to solve all the problems' HN comment.

<comment><USER25> Not the underground tunnels. Some of the stations have service, but not most.

<comment><USER30> But you should be able to infer location from the gaps. If someone was at station A, then disappears and 2 minutes later is recorded at station be, it should be possible to know they took the train between those two stations.

<comment><USER25> Yup. There's ample data from metrocards and security cameras to follow his route. The more difficult challenge would be finding everyone he had come in contact with on those trains since data granularity of which cars he took would likely be unspecific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This response is poor risk management. I'm not sure the risk is significant: What is the chance that someone else will get infected? Higher than the many other risks we face every day?

What is higher risk?: 1) Going to the Ebola zone in W. Africa (EDIT: And taking the proper precautions to protect yourself), 2) Walking as a pedestrian on NY streets, or 3) Sharing a subway car with someone who has been in the Ebola zone?

There are around 3 cases of Ebola in the United States. I expect most of the resultant suffering will be because the public reaction is causing us to divert resources from where they could do more good (including West Africa).

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not afraid of Ebola as much as the "experts" who keep intentionally misleading us about Ebola. I don't know why they do it, and that scares me. But it's very obvious that it's intentional.

See the first three sources I found about Ebola transmission in sweat: [http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/ebola-ask-well- spre...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/ebola-ask-well-spread- public-transit/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0) (claims that sweat doesn't contain Ebola) [http://www.afro.who.int/en/clusters-a- programmes/dpc/epidemi...](http://www.afro.who.int/en/clusters-a- programmes/dpc/epidemic-a-pandemic-alert-and-response/epr- highlights/3648-frequently-asked-questions-on-ebola-hemorrhagic-fever.html) (claims that Ebola can be transmitted through sweat) [http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/qas.html](http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/transmission/qas.html) (hard to tell whether they think sweat is a transmission mechanism or not... they define "body fluids" twice, once including sweat and another excluding it)

I also heard on NPR that sweat contained a lot of the virus (don't have a reference handy).

Real experts don't shoot their mouth off with false assurances about a disease we don't know much about. The "hard to catch Ebola" mantra was going on long after that was discredited[1]. These aren't experts, they have some kind of agenda, and I'm not sure what it is. For some, it's probably just being on TV. For others, it's to feel smug about how the ignorant masses under them are panicking irrationally. As for the rest, probably political.

Again, I'm not panicking about Ebola. We'll have a few isolated cases in the West. It will remain in Africa in all of the hot zone countries until we have a vaccine. And hopefully that happens before it spreads to Nigeria, India, Brazil, or other areas where it might be hard to control.

I am not panicking. I am just mad at the irresponsibility of these "experts" we keep hearing from.

[1] No references here, but I think everyone remembers that the first story was that, unless you were engaging in some unsanitary funeral practices deep in an African village, it was impossible to catch. After doctors began to catch it, the story changed to be that they don't have enough resources to protect themselves. Then several Western doctors got infected while in hospitals in Western countries (Spain and the US at least), and the story changed into something about how the protocols will protect us, but were just not followed properly these few times (despite not knowing the specific protocol violations that lead to infection).

</comment><comment><USER25> NYCs Ebola Patient Visited:

-Harlem

-An Uber car

-The High Line

-A restaurant

-A Train

-Jogged 3 miles

-L Train

-1 Train

-The Gutter

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow, this moron went bowling and took a taxi.

Unbelievable.</comment>


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<comment><AUTHOR> Dear friends on Hacker News,

DO NOT worry about the 1000 person limit. We'll release more codes if we need to. You are all welcome :). I'm a huge fan of HN. Just please enjoy the course - we spent a lot of time convincing the Founder Institute to release these videos and I hope you like them.

Best, Gagan Biyani

Co-Founder of Udemy gaganATudemyDOTcom

</comment><comment><USER2> Spoiler alert, that password is "readwriteweb"

First of all I was going to complain that I couldent get in. I was going to reply as an angry raging code monkey and demand a password. Then I kept reading. =\

The first 1000 readers that use the code "readwriteweb" will get access to the course materials, which is currently available by invitation-only.

</comment><comment><USER2> First off I feel as though I dont know much about how a startup works yet. Im trying to learn so I could eventually launch something in the future.

Watching the first video "Holy shit , my idea sucks" around the 15:30 mark or if you look at the slides, its slide 11, the guy says that an idea "Must be NEW or BETTER".

How true is that? Why MUST it be (only) one of those two?

I was reading one of 37 signals books' "Rework" and they said their model was not to make something new or better, but to simplify. They admit there are better applications out there, jam packed with more features but they found that to be to cumbersom.

If someone from YCombinator watched these videos first before starting up their idea(s), would they be where they are right now? How informative would someone suggest these videos are that has some experience in the Startup field?

<comment><USER3> Simple would be "better" I guess.

<comment><USER2> In that case the word better is relative in both the presenters point of view and 37signals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's great way for udemy to acquire 1000 more users! Provide some free course, 10% of those 1000 will buy several paid courses, each one ~ $100.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why are they limiting it to only a 1000 people?

<comment><USER6> It also forced me to go register without reading anything about the course and site, because only 1000 invites were available, and HN just linked it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a time limit on these courses - i.e. after x amount of time will content access be disabled in exchange for payment?

<comment><AUTHOR> No - not for free courses. This course is meant to be free forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> great way of finding out whether you have the xfactor :)</comment>


Universe slowly dying as old stars fade faster than new ones are born - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/10/universe-slowly-dying-gama-old-stars-fade-faster-than-new-ones-born

<comment><USER2> This is sad, I thought we were going to live forever :-(.

<comment><USER3> Red and brown dwarfs will live till the end of the universe, so there is plenty of free energy to use till then.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Tell us how to improve VentureBeat! - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2007/10/22/take-venturebeat-survey-win-an-iphone/ Hi, Eric Eldon here with VentureBeat. I'd like to get feedback from everyone on what we could do better. And, of course, what we're doing well. Please leave comments here (and take the survey on the site, linked, if you consider yourself a regular reader). <comment><USER2> You already occupy a place on my iGoogle page, so I definitely like the site.

My suggestion: VentureBeat podcasts.

Long in depth interviews with entrepreneurs and investors. No one has filled the gap that VentureVoice left in my iPod. Text is okay, but it's not nearly as good for interviews.

<comment><USER3> Another vote for podcasts! I love your articles and I'm confident you could easily create superb podcasts as well!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please let us know where we can improve (and what we're already doing well). Feel free to leave comments here, or take the survey linked to, above.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd go for a layout re-design. There's simply too much unrelated content on each page. Instead, have a layout that focuses on your daily posts - the heart of venturebeat!

More specifically, reduce the number of columns of content. With four columns it's almost impossible to scan for interesting stories.

-Zaid</comment>


The Roman 'Brexit': how life in Britain changed after 409 AD - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-10-roman-brexit-life-britain-ad.html <comment><USER2> The direction of history is not always towards progress. One of the reasons why I think people felt like it was safe to make a protest vote for Brexit is because in general things have gone very well for the Western world for the last fifty years. It doesn't feel that risky to throw a wrench (spanner?) into the works.

<comment><USER3> Not only have we collectively forgotten WWII, we've forgotten that we've forgotten.

We all take the post-WWII political order and prosperity for granted. I studied International Politics in undergraduate school at the end of the 1990s in the U.S., when all the institutions (foreign and domestic) were pretty much the same. My European history professor recounted first-hand stories from interwar period France and Hungary. A few years later 9/11 happened and _everything_ changed, even our perspective on history. I have no doubt that curriculums have also changed considerably, and along with them all the unstated perspectives and opinions that weren't (and can't be) adequately articulated in text.

The sad part is that rising working-class unrest with the new international order had been presaged in academia for decades. Industry began moving out of Western Europe and the U.S. to Asia in the 1970s, accelerating in the 1980s. Economists were telling policy makers the whole time that the West would need to prepare for the economic and social changes. Only Germany appears to have taken this seriously, though perhaps their industrial programs were predominately driven by domestic dynamics absent elsewhere in the West.

<comment><USER4> > rising working-class unrest

Brexit and Trump is primarily a cultural war, not a class war. While the "poor have risen to overthrow the yoke of oppressive elites" story was perfectly plausible thing to believe in the months after those votes, people have taken a much closer look at this premise and it is simply not supported by the data.

Those voters are not poor and haven't had their jobs taken by immigrants (or have even had much contact with immigrants). Their "anxiety" is not over something they've lost, but something they fear losing, which is their dominant social status.

I know this is common refrain, but IMHO, people want this to be true because it offers a nice simple little solution - more taxes, more redistribution. Acknowledging that this is a cultural war is quite uncomfortable, because there really isn't any solution.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existent...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/existential- anxiety-not-poverty-motivates-trump-support/558674/)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-w...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white- working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771/)

<comment><USER3> Class and culture are inextricably linked.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Great Society legislation only happened because working- and middle- whites felt comfortable with their economic security.[1][2] The loss of well-paying blue collar industrial jobs may have been partly compensated with cheap domestic goods.[3] But nothing has compensated for the loss of jobs that one could reasonably expect to last for decades, if not for one's entire working life. You're not going to give on cultural issues if you feel that you're losing on the economic front. Quite the contrary, you're going to become extremely defensive and even cynical.

I'm not excusing racism and prejudice. Quite the opposite--I'm saying that it never left, its expression in popular politics only temporarily diminished.

[1] It helped that the poster children for Great Society legislation were, literally, white Appalachian children.

[2] I'm sure the same could be said for immigration in the U.K. It was tolerated or even affirmed by a working class who felt economically secure. Once they felt threatened economically by immigration, and as memories of the Empire faded along with a sense of intrinsic superiority, relatively dormant ethnic animus returned to the fore.

[3] As conservatives infamously argued during the 2016 election; that quality of life has remained undiminished or has even improved, notwithstanding stagnant wages, by pointing to A/C and refrigerator ownership rates. That's true to an extent but largely irrelevant to how people perceive equity and fairness.

<comment><USER5> Another point on this line is W.E.B. DuBois' "Black Reconstruction in America", wherein he writes extensively on how post-civil war racist discourse was designed to not only persist discrimination of blacks, but to also convince poor whites that blacks were the problem, and not the rich white capitalists that were _actually_ screwing them over. So its fascinating that we see, amidst a climate of economic, social, and political uncertainty, exactly that tactic return in the election of Trump, who convinces the white working class that "he's a straight shooter", "he tells it like is", and my favorite, "he's honest" (paraphrasing CNN Presidential Election night coverage, interviewing Trump voters after his win) and pandering latent racist biases, while guaranteeing further entrenchment of the standing politico- economic order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Connecting this to Brexit is really distasteful and misleading.

The Roman Empire no longer had the will or material to support Britain and left them to their own devices against they're will. They had no political or military systems in place to replace the Roman support.

None of this has any correlation with today.

<comment><USER5> Not even reasonable to say we're even discussing the same people given the descendants of the people who lived under Roman rule are more indirectly attested to by way of the Welsh, which was the last bastion of Celtic autonomy south of Hadrian's Wall. The modern Englishman is not really related to those Celtic people but is a descendant of the Anglo-Saxon invaders mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Silly comparison. Brexit is nothing like when the Romans abandoned Britain. If you want to look anywhere for an example of the "Dark Ages" post Roman Britain is the best example of it. I don't think that will be the case in the post Brexit UK.

<comment><USER3> The Dark Ages never lacked for philosophical or scientific advances. What really defines the Dark Ages is a splintered Europe lacking a relatively cohesive identity and political structure by which ideas and goods could more freely travel. The speed of exchange is what accelerated advancement.[1]

The real question is whether and to what extent do shared identity and political structures matter in the Information Age. We're about to find out, not just in Brexit but as conservatives everywhere systematically dismantle the post-WWII order.

[1] If it accelerated at all. Again, the Dark Ages seem muddy because there's no singular historical narrative that can be articulated. Because we don't articulate a narrative, we tend to assume the period lacked an historical arc, and in particular lacked an arc of progression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm an outsider, but I read that there was a feeling of a democracy deficit happening.</comment>


In my book, Sun's officially dead now - <AUTHOR>

They've been dying for quite some time, but now they've EOL'd all their workstations, save 1 single socket Intel box.  Somehow I suspect it's only there b/c it was the only one released in 2008.
Note that this is without ever coming through on their promises to let their AMD boxes handle quad-core CPUs (requiring that they just release a firmware upgrade).
How's anyone supposed to develop for their stuff?  How can anyone in the scientific/research community even try now?  Why release SPARCs when you don't provide a way to dev for them?  Why even maintain Solaris?
It's like they just gave up.  Well, I guess a body will atrophy to death when it doesn't have a brain to keep it going. <comment><USER2> Just out of curiosity...when was the last time _you_ bought a Sun workstation? If you did, was it SPARC or AMD-based?

Heck, when was the last time you bought any desktop system instead of a laptop for development or science work? Sun's hardware is very cool, but desktop machines that neither dirt-cheap nor monster gaming systems are a hard sell these days.

On the other hand, if you want to develop software that targets the SPARC ISA -- and there are lots of reasons to do so -- you can easily pick up an entry- level config of a 1U SPARC server, and rack it up wherever you like.

<comment><AUTHOR> AMD, the only sparcs available were obscenely slow IIIis.

Without workstations, how's anyone going to dev for solaris? It's not known for its hardware support of non-sun hardware.

I've been in an office with a rackmount in it. The rack is huge and it's _loud_. They used to just shove the guts of their servers into a desktop box and call them workstations. But I guess that's too much for them now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Until they return to profitability, it makes some sense to streamline their product line. Although they've narrowed it down to a single workstation, it still comes in different configurations and options.

<http://www.sun.com/desktop/workstation/ultra24/index.xml>

<comment><AUTHOR> If they're going to sell x86 workstations, at least sell some more powerful than the macintosh I can buy down the street.

They've been shoving COTS motherboards into x86 boxes for a few years now, how about keeping up with the idea of some computational ooomph?

Seriously, what's a reasonable computer scientist supposed to use these days? I'd rather not spend a day a week fixing/maintaining a linux box for its own problems, or for tracking down the new compatible binaries, or begging for help on undocumented software on mailing lists.

<comment><USER4> Just use Ubuntu, things pretty much work. For any reasonably sized project there is someone else who has already made it work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does that mean for Java if you are right?

<comment><USER6> It dies. Thank god.

Face it: Java played its part in the Theatre. It dragged people onto GC and provided a simpler C++. It was the logical halfway-path to Lisp. Now, it looks aged, bloated and bad. Note how few fruitful/succesful Java projects there are out there compared to other languages...

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure how you're defining "fruitful/successful projects", but the impression I get is that there are mountains of Java business logic in the wild... It's practically the new Cobol, and it will be just as hard to kill.</comment></comment></comment>


Ledger's Advanced Side Channel Analysis Repository - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Ledger-Donjon/lascar <comment><USER2> I recently learned about side channel attacks on ChaCha20, and all other ARX ciphers.

ChaCha20 and its kin are of course resistant to timing side channels by their nature. Without thinking about it I had assumed they would resist other forms of side channel too (cache, power, EM, etc). ChaCha20 performs the exact same operations every time, regardless of its inputs. And the mixing should eventually lead to an even mixture of flip-flopping towards the middle of the cipher. So, how could it be exposed to any side channel?

Well apparently it's still weak to power (and EM by proxy) analysis: [https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1021](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1021)

I haven't had the time or inclination to study the paper in depth. But if understood it correctly, the very act of accessing memory exposes the data being accessed. Even if the power difference between accessing, say 0xaf and 0x30 is so infinitesimal, it's apparently enough to correlate with power analysis and crack keys.

Quite amazing.

<comment><USER3> It can be easy to forget because we all sort of mentally accept it, but ChaCha20 is length preserving, and so is trivially vulnerable to by far the simplest network side channel: size based traffic analysis. AES-GCM is too, in the same way, but AES-CBC was actually a /little/ better because it's padded to the nearest block which provides a small measure of length hiding.

Imagine you're a state authority who wants to know who is looking at what on the internet. It's pretty easy to fingerprint websites and webpages by size; the pattern of HTML, images, video, and CSS, is highly unique. There are published papers doing this against Google Maps tiles, and Netflix movies. It's very very practical. It's utterly feasible for authorities to build these fingerprint DBs, and to fingerprint any traffic they have visibility of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Riscure also made a high quality side channel analysis toolkit - JIsca[1]. It is written in Julia and can be easily integrated with Chip Whisperer.

[1] [https://github.com/Riscure/Jlsca](https://github.com/Riscure/Jlsca)

<comment><USER5> Lascar is about to be officially integrated in ChipWhisperer [https://github.com/newaetech/chipwhisperer/blob/cw5dev/softw...](https://github.com/newaetech/chipwhisperer/blob/cw5dev/software/jupyter/In_Progress/Lascar.ipynb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Okay I'm feeling left out here. I've no idea what this is. Can anyone please explain what is this and what is its use?

<comment><USER7> For those wondering what is a side-channel attack : here is a definition from Wikipedia :

In computer security, a side-channel attack is any attack based on information gained from the implementation of a computer system, rather than weaknesses in the implemented algorithm itself (e.g. cryptanalysis and software bugs). Timing information, power consumption, electromagnetic leaks or even sound can provide an extra source of information, which can be exploited.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side- channel_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-channel_attack)

<comment><USER8> The easiest to understand example of this is bypassing a naive login prompt:

If the function to test a password that has been entered stops as soon as there is a wrong character, it's trivial to write a program to send it a modified password each run and see how long it takes to come back. If it takes slightly longer than last time, then you have one more character correct. Iterate until you have the complete password.

It's one cheesy thing that Hollywood does that at least worked at some point in the past, ie. the hacker that uses a program to crack a password one character at a time (preferably as the clock ticks down to some impending disaster)

<comment><USER9> Sorry for my skepticism, but even in old systems, wouldn't such a time would be too small to measure even by a program on the same computer? and I imagine that having a preemptive scheduler makes things even more complicated.

It's hard to imagine the attack you describe being viable.

<comment><USER10> My understanding of timing attacks is that they can be used when you can trigger the code path thousands of times quickly. This gives you execution time averages and distributions. Also, they're typically used against cryptographic hash functions which are more expensive than just a string compare.

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

<comment><USER9> But if you use cryptographic hash functions, then you can't do the timing attack described because any one character change changes the whole hash.

<comment><USER11> Not for cracking a password perhaps, but imagine you have a system that looks at a MAC'd ciphertext. You want the system to attempt to decrypt a malicious ciphertext you've generated, but it won't until you have passed its MAC check.

With a timing attack, you can iterate the bytes of the MAC, itself probably based on a cryptographic hash like HMAC(sha256), until you get something that gets to the second stage.

You reduce MAC-forging complexity from 2 to the power of the number of MAC bits, to 256 times the number of bytes in the MAC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, this is the first time I've heard of side channel analysis and I'm super impressed by the creativity involved in these attacks.

Based on reading a couple wikipedia articles, is it correct to say that most of these attacks require access to the device that you're trying to crack?

<comment><USER2> > is it correct to say that most of these attacks require access to the device > that you're trying to crack?

Some, yes. A classic example of a side channel attack that doesn't require physical access:

An authentication server which naively compares passwords (or even their hashes). Say they just `if (request.password != expected_password) return Error.403`. This type of naive comparison which will use memcmp or something similar creates a timing side channel. This happens because it compares the passwords one byte at a time, and returns early as soon as it finds a mismatched byte. So the length of time the server spends authenticating the passwords is dependent on how many bytes the passwords have in common. i.e. "password" != "deadbeef" takes 1 comparison, whereas "password" != "peadbeef" takes 2 comparisons.

So an attacker can submit 256 requests to the server, cycling through every possible first byte. Whichever request takes the longest tells the attacker what the first byte of the password is. So they fix the first byte, and then repeat 256 times for the second password. And so forth until the password is cracked.

This takes only O(N) time to crack, where N is the length of the password.

Though this is a simple example, it ends up being a very common attack vector. And as noted, this can be performed remotely.

(In practice things are a bit more complicated, but make attacks like this no less of a threat. You first need to determine the password length (easy, same timing side channel). And then you probably need to submit several times more requests per password attempt so you can average out the "noise" of request times. Rate limiting, etc ameliorate attacks, but are no excuse for not using constant-time algorithms.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this an attack that can be mitigated by a firmware update?

<comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side- channel_attack#Countermea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side- channel_attack#Countermeasures) might be of interest especially this part:

"In the case of timing attacks against targets whose computation times are quantized into discrete clock cycle counts, an effective countermeasure against is to design the software to be isochronous, that is to run in an exactly constant amount of time, independently of secret values. This makes timing attacks impossible.[14] Such countermeasures can be difficult to implement in practice, since even individual instructions can have variable timing on some CPUs."</comment></comment>


YouTube Korea no longer allows users to create accounts, upload videos and post comments - <AUTHOR> http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/04/youtube-korea-respects-privacy.html <comment><USER2> I'm not generally in favor of speech-limiting legislation to protect the powerful from the people but if it results in comments getting turned off on Youtube, well, every cloud has a silver lining. Who do I have to donate to to get stupidly overreaching and almost certainly unconstitutional legislation passed in the US?

<comment><AUTHOR> you have it backwards, they are protecting the people from the government which passed a law requiring the use of real information to link accounts

<comment><USER3> I think the joke is that suppressive, unconstitutional legislation is acceptable if a side effect is that people can't comment on YouTube -- a site which is notorious for its low signal to noise ratio.

<comment><USER4> Is there really signal on YouTube? I thought you could use the comments as cryptographically secure random noise.

<comment><USER5> With a good hash function, that would work! English text has about 2.5 bits of entropy per letter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The state of many nations (China, North Korea) is quite scary. Anonymity is a requirement if the people are to be given free speech (without fear of their government -- although people should never fear their government).

<comment><USER7> Just an FYI this is South Korea.

<comment><USER6> yeah, thanks. i suppose that's why we're all taught to read closely. scary to see things like this coming from south korea as well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If this is misinformation, this blogger could end up in jail...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=560587>

</comment><comment><USER9> free speech != responsible speech</comment>