Want to Block Common Passwords? Sorry, That is Patented - <AUTHOR> http://xato.net/passwords/want-to-block-common-passwords-sorry-that-is-patented/ <comment><USER2> We really need to start naming and shaming the people willing to have their names listed on frivolous patents like this, and not just their employers. If you're listed as an inventor on an unethical patent, you have violated the implicit moral code of technologists and positioned yourself in opposition to progress.

Michael Stephen Brown and Herbert Anthony Little: you are not good people.

<comment><USER3> _We really need to start naming and shaming the people willing to have their names listed on frivolous patents like this, and not just their employers. If you're listed as an inventor on an unethical patent, you have violated the implicit moral code of technologists and positioned yourself in opposition to progress._

<http://paulgraham.com/6631327.html>

Paul's patent would seem frivolous now, but it wasn't then. By applying for a patent, did he position himself in opposition to progress? Seems doubtful.

Here's another example: <http://www.google.com/patents/US5204966> This patent was filed in 1990. I was two years old. The internet hardly existed then. Was this patent frivolous? Should these inventors be punished according to your ethics?

So what's our criteria for a frivolous patent? Perhaps "(a) it was filed since 2010, and (b) it covers some well-known technique." Yet that's completely arbitrary. Punishing someone for violating an arbitrary moral code is a recipe for evil.

<comment><USER4> This brings up the problem of patent terms. At least in software, the ordinary term of a patent is obviously much too long. Even granting a ten-year monopoly would be onerous in this business; twenty is absurd - the technological landscape can change completely in that time.

<comment><USER5> Devil's advocate: by allowing software patents, that might tend to _force_ technological change. You need to invent a new landscape if the current landscape is illegal or onerous to operate in.

For the record, software patents annoy me and I don't think they should be allowed.

<comment><USER6> But the patents are so general in scope that they tend to preempt any technological change.

What benefit is there in inventing a better mousetrap if the very idea of causing inconvenience to vermin has been patented, and the only people beating a path to your door are verm^H^H^H^H patent lawyers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a couple of solutions (neither are "good" if you're worried about being sued to oblivion ) :

1) Don't publicize how you reject passwords (this, obviously, won't work for open source). You can reject with a generic "please choose a different one" or something similar. Just vague enough to not directly show that you're reading off a list of bad passwords.

2) Ignore the patent.

I'm a fan of 2, but fighting a troll alone is most definitely not an option. If I do get sued, perhaps I can contact all other people who were also sued (since trolls tend to fire shotgun lawsuits to see which ones buckle) and fight back together to try and get the patent invalidated.

Meanwhile, I can write to congress (have all the others do the same) and wait for it to have no effect whatsoever since, obviously, we all know that what really kills American jobs is those damn immigrants /sarcasm.

<comment><USER8> Yea it's a pretty ridiculous state we're in. Fortunately this patent was probably filed defensively by RIM, but the moment they decide in the next 20 years that a branch could be more profitable by firing their employees and siphoning some intellectual property into a litigious happy NPE, then any group rejecting user passwords that look like p@ssword will be in violation until the year 2031

<comment><USER9> This would be the company that was once known tongue-in-cheek as "Lawsuits In Motion".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Patents: Meant to encourage innovation, and now destroying it. Is there anything lawyers touch these days that doesn't get irrevocably corrupted? Law was supposed to protect rights and clarify correct behavior, not become a profit center for parasites.

<comment><USER6> It was always like this. The main way to become wealthy in ancient times was through lawsuits. As soon as well meaning intentions are put into legal words, they can be subverted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This has been posted here before, and I exchanged a couple of messages in the comments section with the author to clarify some misconceptions. If you read the claims (as everyone always should but nobody ever does), most of the patents he mentions are actually pretty "decent", some of which are discussed in the comments.

<comment><USER12> Are any of those patents not algorithm, hence math, patents? Or, is your argument that certain types of math patents are "decent" and should be allowed? Because they're not (at least in theory), according to judicial precedent; in practice, courts seem to have difficulty knowing math when they see it.

<comment><USER11> Your views are rooted in one of the more common misconceptions about so-called software patents: None of them are algorithm patents, because you cannot patent algorithms. What is patented is the application of certain algorithms to solve a practical, real world problem. The algorithms involved are not covered, and can freely be used for other purposes.

In this case, that happens to be preventing poor passwords. That is a concrete, real-world problem, requiring practical solutions, which these patents purport to provide (probably) novel, non-obvious variations of. For example, one of the less "decent" patents uses (what seem to be) bloom filters to track and test for poor passwords. This does not mean all uses of bloom filters are covered by it. The claims specifically cover the method of using bloom filters to test for bad passwords.

Really, it becomes clear what is covered when you simply read the claims.

<comment><USER12> Mathematical equations representing (approximate) solutions to physics problems are patentable, then? Let's turn the clocks back to 1900 and figure out where we'd be technologically if every such "invention" had a 20-year period of exclusivity.

<comment><USER11> No, the application of those equations to practical problems is patentable. A physics problem is not necessarily practical (2 frictionless spheres in a vacuum are rolling towards each other...), but practical mechanical problems necessarily have a physical aspect and frequently rely on results of solving mathematical formulae. A patent on a mechanical solution may very well include the solution of such equations, and always have. Funny, doesn't look to me like the mechanical industry is stuck in the 1700s.

Edit: An early example of a mechanical "algorithm" patent - <http://www.google.com/patents/US3765263>

<comment><USER12> That patent is the sort of thing you're tasked with building in a mech-e class, or as an abstract problem in a physics class. If it's patentable, then one could say that the purpose of physics and engineering training is to build things, patent them, and live off of the royalties, rather than to create products people want to buy, competing in an open market.

The premise of your argument relies on the vague notion of what's a "practical" problem and what's not. I don't think that's any more tenable than any other defense of the current patent system I've ever seen. It's all vague, and exchanges like this are pushing me to a more extreme position that all patents are bogus, rather than granting that some "math" patents are connected to specific practical problems and thus patentable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would there be any obvious problems with defend-it-or-lose-it laws around patents, like there already are around trademarks? Seems like it would kill the submarine-patent market entirely, and would discourage companies from bothering to file for patents they didn't plan on vigorously defending (I could imagine drug companies continuing to file; software companies, not so much).

I don't tend to hear this suggested in patent-reform discussions, though, so I assume there's a reason not to go this route.

<comment><USER14> Unless I'm mistaken, it certainly wouldn't stop patent trolls, who buy/keep patents precisely so they can use them. The only thing it would stop is companies holding patents for defensive reasons, who have no intention of actively pursuing patent violators but who patent their ideas in-case they are sued by a patent troll with a similar idea/patent. Google claims to follow this in terms of open source projects[1].

[1]:<http://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/>

<comment><USER15> But "defend it or lose it" means going after _all_ infringers, which patent trolls certainly don't do. They are currently very selective about enforcing their patents, choosing to assert where they will win.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure it's completely practical, but this would have some interesting interactions with obviousness -- if you need to sue half the industry, it may say something about the obviousness of the patent itself.

<comment><USER17> Hindsight is 20/20. Everything is obvious, once someone already paves the way to the solution.

This is why, in principle, there is the "prior art" clause. It's just not enforced well enough in the software realm--but the mechanism to prevent patenting something widely known _a posteriori_ does technically exist.

<comment><USER8> Well the non-obvious requirement of patents to be granted in the first place is defined such that experts in the field would not come up with it in response to the problem it solves. This is not the case with most software patents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's a patent our there for just about any conceivable thing in computing. I'm pretty sure commenting on HN articles is patented and we're in violation right now. It's so ridiculous. No can ever really do anything with most of them (except maybe troll companies with deep pockets or if you're building a phone). I remember that 5 years ago when building a company people would still ask whether you had patents. I don't think they still do, but those are just my impressions.

<comment><USER19> Oh they do. But now that's by the typically less sophisticated investors, in my experience anyway.

<comment><USER20> Like Google? <http://www.behav.io/> (recent IP/engineer acquisition).

"Nadav holds multiple patents in areas of social mobile networking, machine learning, network algorithms, and sensor technologies. His work has been featured in both academic and popular press (Technology Review, Businessweek.com, Wall Street Journal, Wired UK, and The Associated Press, among others), and received awards of recognition (including Best and Distinguished Paper awards, Knight News Challenge, SXSW Accelerator, IPSN Extreme Sensing Competition, and three Google Research Awards)."

<comment><USER21> But at least these seem to be patents that did require some effort, were novelties at the time and appear to be useful – otherwise that list of awards would be a list of awards you don't want to receive.

There is nothing wrong with patenting truly new, truly sensible solutions to actual problems, in my opinion. The problematic patents are the trivial ones that currently swamp the software industry.

<comment><USER22> That's one of the issues though. Which patents are the "truly new" ones and which are the "trivial ones"? It seems like many software patents seem obvious in hindsight, a few years down the road, but they were not obvious at the time of invention.

<comment><USER21> This is of course true, although there are really some rather trivial ones even at the time of invention (or already outdated at the time of filing).

Maybe it would be helpful to adapt the protection period (20 years, IIRC) to the rate of innovation in the industry?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How about "keeping bad things from happening"? That's only one level of abstraction up from that. Could be lucrative.

<comment><USER24> How about a "Facility for preventing disasters."[1]

[1]<http://www.google.com/patents/EP0279864B1>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The "passwd" program on page 282 of the first edition of Wall & Schwartz "Programming Perl", copyright 1990, would appear to constitute prior art to most of these claims.

</comment><comment><USER26> Large companies patent everything that they use that doesn't have a patent already. Better to have a patent for entry of text in to a form using a keyboard than to pay a troll later.

But it is also mutually ensured destruction for fights between big companies. You can't sue me for a billion dollars because you are infringing on 2 patents for every on of yours I am infringing. Apple vs Samsung was an example of this.

<comment><USER27> Here's an example going back to the 80's when IBM shook down Sun[1]:

>> Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

[1] <http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there a common repository of patent troll claims? It would be nice to have a list of things to avoid, with workarounds where possible.

<comment><USER29> I'd stay away from looking up things you might infringe. You will be liable for treble damages and most of the trivial things are probably patented by somebody (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treble_damages>).

<comment><USER7> This feels counter-intuitive to me. I understand why patents are tainted by these, but how am I supposed to know if I'm not infringing if I don't research the idea before shipping out? Shouldn't there be a way to make sure at least it's sufficiently different to make sure I'm not repeating something?

<comment><USER26> Your lawyer or a consultant does a technology audit. I used to do these on behalf of VCS on young startups to ensure they had not infringed on a patent that would put the investment at risk.

<comment><USER11> Fascinating! Any comments on how difficult/easy you found it to do a thorough search, and how often you found patents that you thought to be risks?

<comment><USER26> At the time it was hard. There wasn't Google Patent search which is really useful for checking these things.

Basically I would look at what patents the fledgling startup had filed. Make sure they didn't suck, and that there wasn't lots of prior art.

You can be a start up and get bought for nothing more than a single patent that someone wants, so making sure the patents you have are not going to fall down when a bigger company wants them was important.

Often I would also be checking who beat the company to what ever they were doing, and then check those people's patent portfolio.

We didn't worry much about things like the Fat32 patent, we worried about things like hey, this isn't a real innovation these guys just read this other guys thesis paper and knocked it off. (Like Nick at Summly did)

From there a VC could decide if they were going to double down or cut their losses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This site is completely unreadable at least on my iPad, why is tweeting and Facebooking more important than the content!?

</comment><comment><USER31> Surely you could just do it anyway, because there's no way a patent like that would hold up in court if they tried to sue you. I realise though that obviously it shouldn't happen in the first place, and doing it anyway could incur legal costs.

<comment><USER32> Do you have the money for the legal counsel required to take it to court? If you do, what about Joe and his new startup, he might just go for the suggested settlement.

<comment><USER31> The fact that it would cost any money at all is completely ludicrous, any judge with any basic concept of logic can see that it's an obvious development of technology and therefore can't be patented. You shouldn't have to hire a lawyer to prove that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What about using a bloom filter of common passwords? It would prevent some safe passwords from being used, but otherwise would allow for disallowing unsafe passwords without holding a dictionary of them, potentially avoiding existing patents.

</comment><comment><USER34> We shouldn't be able to patent any idea just by running it on a "processor and memory".

I'm convinced that trademark and copyright gives us all the IP tools we need. Patents can get f'ed.

</comment><comment><USER35> Oh great, now I have to remove this common and obvious functionality from all the web sites I have any input to.

<comment><USER36> good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This one in especially good:

 _Specifying a set of forbidden passwords_

How can one spend time and money for this?

</comment><comment><USER38> Is there a go-to password list, if you still want to go ahead and use it?

<comment><USER39> You'd probably set a chron with crack or John the Ripper which would come with a small password list and do some common permutations and then lock accounts. Ars Technica mentioned a RockYou.com password list that is now the go to list for serious cracking. I think it would be hard to enforce this patent for sysadmins who implement their own system.</comment></comment>


2008 vs. 2013: Reverse-Engineering the Redesign of Kadavy.net - <AUTHOR> http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/reverse-engineering-redesign/

<comment><USER2> I always love these redesign post-analysis. I think it's one of the best ways to learn design, especially reading the intentions behind "the purpose" of the design.

That said, I feel it's a little odd that the profile picture on top is unaligned with the rest of the content. No other content is pushed to the left like that so I'm not sure what the purpose of that was...

<comment><USER3> I did a write-up on my website redesign. <http://www.ri.id.au/posts/a-personal-brand-to-be-proud-of> It's a less technical reflection than Kadavy's, but it's always interesting to have insight into another designer's thinking.

<comment><USER4> Looks good! I love those short lines of text ;)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Good type's the way to go.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vatican launches $110 'click to pray' wearable rosary - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/16/vatican-click-to-pray-wearable-rosary/ <comment><USER2> I thought from the headline that this was going to involve paying someone else to pray the rosary for you, or else just clicking and having it count as having prayed a rosary.

But it looks like it's more like a gamified app to teach people this prayer (albeit at pretty high cost and risk of obsolescence).

I think it's interesting that in parts of Buddhism there _is_ a sort of substitute for personally reading or reciting religious texts such as sutras and mantras: the prayer wheel and the prayer flag, where just having a copy of the text move is considered to generate some kind of spiritual merit or benefit. I'm not sure how universal this is in Buddhism or what the differences are between personal recitation and, say, turning a prayer wheel.

<comment><USER3> My grandfather is a Buddhist and told me he saw solar powered versions of those prayer wheels while he was in Asia as a tourist souvenir. I like the idea of having a solar powered machine do the praying for you ;)

<comment><USER4> Let's just hope all this spiritual automation doesn't lead to a "Nine Billion Names of God"-style ending.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Press 'F' to pay respects.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting juxtaposition between generic tech companies/apps that have stupidly lofty goals like changing the world, and this app that has the lofty goal of world peace.

<comment><USER7> Not to be cynical, but as the first sentence in the article suggests, I think the goal is really more aligned with "attracting tech-savvy youngsters to the Catholic Church".</comment></comment>


US Patent 1591905A: Artificial animal - <AUTHOR> https://patents.google.com/patent/US1591905A/en <comment><USER2> This is not about the artificial animal you might expect to see on HN, nevertheless it is a patent for "Toy figures with self-moving parts, with or without movement of the toy as a whole imitating natural actions, e.g. catching a mouse by a cat, the kicking of an animal".

I found the aspect of putting insects inside of the figure to create movement of the limbs very interesting.

The patent is actually expired if anyone wishes to work on it.</comment>


Ask HN: Any useful tips for writing in Emacs? - <AUTHOR>

I'm using org-mode to write outline an essay in Emacs and I was wondering if anyone has nifty tips for writing long-form essays and prose in Emacs <comment><USER2> I bound fly spell to ctrl-; to bring up a list of the misspellings and cycle from the first through the rest for misspelling closest to the cursor.

That means if I'm typing and I don't realize the misspelling until the next sentence, I can correct it _WITHOUT moving the cursor_. Once you do this, you can't go back!

<comment><USER3> Great idea. Would you like to share the code, please?

<comment><AUTHOR> I implemented the suggestion with this code in my .emacs file:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-<;>") 'ispell-word)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can move paragraphs around with M-<up> and M-<down>. It also works on headlines/plain lists.

Just discovered this yesterday and wish I had known about it earlier.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do you use org-mode?[1] It's perfect for outlining and managing lots of information. Once you've written your paper, you can easily export it to HTML, PDF (through LaTeX) or plain text to be copied into a Word document, if that's the way you swing.

[1] [http://orgmode.org/](http://orgmode.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Auto-fill-mode and follow-mode are useful. If you write Unicode characters (and don't have a mac) C-x 8 <Enter> is useful, too (tab completion!).</comment>


Ultrasound Tracking Could Be Used to Deanonymize Tor Users - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ultrasound-tracking-could-be-used-to-deanonymize-tor-users/ <comment><USER2> This is mostly an awareness article that summarizes previously deployed techniques, and illustrates a situation where those techniques can cause maximum harm.

For background, a HN submission a year ago about these kinds of ads linking to phones, from Ars Technica [1], which some choice comments being one naming such an ad company [2] while a different subthread explores another [3][4].

Prior art in this space includes the work of Boris Smus [5], who then went on to develop the guest pairing mode for Chromecast using this technique. There have been other efforts over the years, some before, but certainly after, and of course the use of sound to transmit digital information is an old trick that makes modems possible, but in those days the lines didn't have the bandwidth to carry ultrasound.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10562207](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10562207) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563384) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563369](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563369) [4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10563031) [5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10562787](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10562787)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait what? How can a webpage play a sound if my speakers are muted? How do they bypass the little sound notification on my tabs?

>If the Tor user has his phone somewhere nearby and if certain types of apps are on his phone, then his mobile device will ping back one or more advertisers with details about his device, so the advertiser can build an advertising profile on the user, linking his computer with his phone.

This is pretty contrived...

<comment><USER4> > How can a webpage play a sound if my speakers are muted?

Well it can't obviously, but lots of people (although maybe not the types of people who use tor) browse the internet with their speakers on and active. Most people don't unmute their speakers just before they're about to listen to something.

> How do they bypass the little sound notification on my tabs?

Admittedly they probably can't, but are you sure you're going to notice a flicker as a short sound is played and then stops?

I think the most contrived part is your mobile being always-on/always listening, given that you're likely to notice this due to reduced battery life. But given that certain hardware now has support for always-on keyword detection, you can see a future when this could happen.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, there was a BBC article about always-on audio detector apps. Describing an Android proof-of-concept app: "The battery drain during our experiments was minimal and, using wi-fi, there was no data plan spike."

[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549)

<comment><USER6> They don't give much information on what "minimal" battery drain means. I'm skeptical. Keeping an app running in the background and keeping a stream of audio data piped into it to be processed on the CPU is not cheap. Google has a dedicated DSP on phones to do hotword detection (among other things), and IIRC that's not exposed to unprivileged apps. Hell, even iOS needs to be charging to get "hey siri" support (not sure about now; it was like this in previous versions, though).

Either way, it doesn't sound like that's what the article describes: they're talking about collecting and sending all audio wholesale. Sending that much audio data over 3g or LTE would be expensive (transcoding it to decrease payload would be expensive, too), and would surely be noticeable looking at data usage charts.

> using wi-fi, there was no data plan spike

Uh, yeah. Because it's using wifi. Phones are on wifi far less often than you'd imagine.

It's certainly possible, but it's just not plausible.

<comment><USER4> You're right, the article is talking about seems to be talking about sending the audio wholesale, which would be cheaper from a CPU perspective, but sending the data would probably be noticeable both from a data use and battery perspective.

Having said that, quite a few people have their phones connected to wifi at home, which could mitigate these issues due to both less conspicuous data and power usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >If the Tor user has his phone somewhere nearby and if certain types of apps are on his phone, then his mobile device will ping back...

Surely the user would have had to approve microphone access for the app first, and it'd better have a good excuse.

Even then, does e.g. iOS allow backgrounded apps to listen in on the microphone ? Pretty sure only Siri has that level of privilege.

Has this whole ultrasound beacon thing taken off in the ad world ? Seems to (thankfully) require quite active user involvement to be able to work.

<comment><USER8> Amazon echo just earned it's name.

<comment><USER9> And I'm not sure there is anything stopping a Tap from listening without you knowing.

<comment><USER10> Any device that is listening all the time can be storing and sending anything you said. How would you know if it's encrypted?

There has GOT TO BE a better way. Such as a filter made by independent manufacturers that opens the sound channel only when you say a specific phrase such as "OK Google" and closes it when you press a button or stop speaking. And an indicator would be visible when it's actually listening.

The question is, how to prevent collusion with the independent filter companies? There has to be SOME WAY to open source hardware and prevent companies from essentially performing their own _interdiction_ on it:

[https://www.google.com/amp/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/201...](https://www.google.com/amp/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2013/12/29/5253226/nsa- cia-fbi-laptop-usb-plant-spy?client=safari)

<comment><USER11> _How would you know if it 's encrypted?_

If outbound traffic levels are the same when you're using it as when you're not, it's probably bugging you? Of course a smarter arrangement would reschedule traffic to coincide with use...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brian-armstrong If you're interested in trying a little data passing in ultrasonic in your browser, try my creation [https://quiet.github.io/quiet- js/](https://quiet.github.io/quiet-js/)

This generally doesn't work in mobile, though, or at least reception doean't. Also, neither desktop nor mobile Safari can do mic access, and firefox's mic won't pick up ultrasonic. So try desktop Chrome :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Another reason to browse with the Mute Tab add-on enabled:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/mute- tab/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/mute-tab/)

All tabs default to muted, and you can selectively un-mute tabs or whitelist sites as needed.

I've certainly appreciated the default state of pages being muted.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for that link, added to my list of "Plugins I didn't know I wanted until I saw them" :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How is javascript playing ultrasound _not_ seen as an attack on the user?

In what world is that _ever_ a sane thing to do?

<comment><USER15> I can think of plausible use-cases: e.g. wireless data communication with devices that aren't networked.

I've got scuba-diving computers that need special cables to sync with my PC: if they could sync with nothing more than a webpage and speakers, that would be pretty neat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What frequency are these apps using? I haven't looked it up but I doubt most computer speakers go above 15Khz (why would they?) A young person should be able to hear really high but audible tones and an adult would rapidly lose the ability. If this is not the case it would make sense to set a limit on the tones such a device can send and receive.

On the other hand there might be legitimate uses for such tech so maybe better to have it as a security option to send and receive ultrasound per individual, i.e. if I can't hear above 10khz maybe I can set my audio to not send or receive above that without app specific permission

<comment> brian-armstrong It's not exactly that straightforward. In general any modern audio equipment will run up to 20kHz since that's generally accepted as the range of human hearing. From what I can tell, the lowpass filters built in to equipment (eg antialiasing on ADC/DAC) attenuates starting at 19 or 20 kHz. But these are realized as low order physical filters, meaning they roll off slowly, so you'd have to start attenuating at something much lower to truly remove the 18-20 range. That would introduce distortion where the rolloff starts, which you probably don't want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A bit of an edge case this. I know for me I mute my speakers permanently when using TOR in-case I encounter a shock page like Lemon Party or Goatse

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

<comment><USER18> This hosts file is updated regularly to help prevent accidentally stumbling upon (shock|malicious|etc) style sites: [http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts)

Been using it for a few months now and have found it invaluable.

<comment><USER17> Oh thanks for that! Does TOR honor the hosts file, specifically Tor Browser Bundle? I haven't tried.

<comment><USER19> [https://hackaday.io/project/12985-multisite- homeofficehacker...](https://hackaday.io/project/12985-multisite- homeofficehackerspace-automation)

I don't believe so but my change in the Linux resolver daemon does honor the hosts file for all .onion entries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Time to start selling speakers with bandpass filters built in. It's the new tape over the camera.

<comment><USER7> Technically lowpass :)

<comment><USER20> Ahh but what about _sub_ sonic messages? Slow datarate to be sure but definitely possible.

If there's any monkey business going on with my audio, I want it in the range where I can hear it!

<comment><USER21> Do you mean messages sent over _infrasound_ (less than ~20 Hz)? That would typically not work, because most speakers cannot produce infrasound and most microphones don't pick up frequencies that low

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those looking for an app which uses this technique (so called data-over- audio technology) look no further than Chirp

[https://www.chirp.io/](https://www.chirp.io/)

        Enhance your products by integrating with Chirp™
        - the world's most trusted data-over-audio technology
        used by the leading brands in more than 90 countries

</comment><comment><USER22> I read about a lot of you security people talking about the difference between a physical switch turning off your wifi vs a software switch, does anything like that apply to this?

<comment><USER17> A physical switch is for surety and peace of mind, whereas a software switch you have to be careful, because I don't trust my machine's OS to keep the speakers muted, no matter how much the chain of trust has not been compromised, there's always a weak link somewhere. Physical switches or death.

<comment><USER23> > A physical switch is for surety and peace of mind

Theoretically, there's no reason to trust a physical switch more than a software switch, unless you've opened the computer and verified that the physical switch breaks all circuits to all wifi radios. The physical switch could merely control software, or it might control one connection to one radio but not others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> TorBrowser has Javascript disabled by default, doesn't that mean you have to first 'trick' targets into visiting the webpage, and then trick them into turning on js?

<comment><USER25> I wonder if bgsound [1] attribute is still honored by modern browsers.

It's IE-specific, though, so won't work in a Tor browser.

[1]: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/bg...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/bgsound)

<comment><USER26> <audio> and a few other HTML5 sound capable tags don't require JS enabled IIRC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm thinking perhaps browsers should ask for speaker permissions, much like they already do for microphones and cameras.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there an ultrasound scanner out there?

<comment><USER29> Do you mean something that simply listens for sound in those frequencies or decodes known signals as well? The latter would be pretty interesting to walk around dense urban and shopping centers with.

<comment><USER28> Yes, the latter. If this attack is possible ultrasound driving ought to be possible too.

<comment><USER30> Look for realtime analysis software (RTA) or spectrum analyzer software, typically used for setting up audio systems or analyzing noise sources. One example is RoomEQ wizard. Audacity can do it in non-realtime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Are cheapo mic and speakers even capable of operating at those frequencies?

<comment> brian-armstrong Absolutely. 20kHz, from an electrical engineering perspective, isn't really a wide bandwidth. You might get some fairly strong distortion but almost always it will still work, unless we're talking about something like a piezo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Now I just need to install this toggle switch on my phone...</comment>


Could a marathon ever be run in under two hours? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12933932

<comment><USER2> _"I'm 60. If I've got my figures right, I'll live at least 20 years, so I believe in the next 20 years we will see the first sub two-hour marathon," London Marathon race director Dave Bedford says._

Wishful thinking? How does his lifespan affect the probability of the 2-hour mark being broken?</comment>


Why does Julia use native machine integer arithmetic? - <AUTHOR> http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/faq/#why-does-julia-use-native-machine-integer-arithmetic <comment><USER2> Most hardware architectures have a trap or condition set upon integer overflow, eg. x86 has the 'jo' instruction to jump if the overflow flag is set after an integer operation. Unfortunately, these are not exposed by C, so there's no _portable_ way to access them, as long as you're writing the interpreter in C. This is one of the big advantages of compiling to LLVM or directly to the hardware; LLVM provides the llvm.*.with.overflow intrinsics to access the overflow flag of the hardware, which lets you do bigints at basically zero overhead.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you pay for design lessons? - <AUTHOR> I am an experienced UI/UX designer and was thinking of opening a service posting web design video tutorials, source files, tips, one-on-one help etc to monthly subscribers.<p>Is this something you would be interested in? And if so at what price point would you feel comfortable paying? <comment><USER2> Just a caution: people who "would buy" generally greatly outnumber people who buy. You might want to try advertising your product like it exists and tally up serious inquiries. It's easy to rattle off things you "would do," a bit more effort to actually do them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Valid point - I wanted to use this as more of a gauge and then take the next steps.

<comment><USER3> It can't even be used as a gauge.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree. I am reading a lot of good feedback here. Maybe these people won't buy but they are offering up a great deal of advice, ideas and more that are helpful in starting the process.

<comment><USER3> Feedback is great, but I wouldn't rely on any potential sales numbers you gather without first getting commitments in writing, or even a deposit. Someone saying they will buy is a lot different than doing. A friend of mine recently had less 10 commitments out of 100 come through with cash, and that was with written commitments-- they basically said "then sue me."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would consider paying for an in-person tutorial/workshop, probably not for a newsletter. There's already Hack Design which I subscribe to but never find the time to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> In-person is a good idea but too hard to scale in my opinion. I would really be looking for students who WANT to learn rather than students who just sign up to poke around and never use it.

<comment><USER5> I think the problem with a newsletter of design lessons is that there is too much game in town already, so it becomes harder and harder to pick and choose (except for people who know who you are, if you think there's a good market for that then by all means go for it.) Lessons tailored to feedback on the customer's already designed product, however, is something I'm yet to see. And it ensures you get people who WANT to learn, since they even built something already and tried their best. You could start doing it yourself, but if you think from the get go of a domain and brand, you can easily scale by creating a marketplace for this kind of instruction down the road. And really, I think personal lessons coupled with design critique is a sorely needed service, and would set you apart.

As the GP said, I also already subscribe to Hack Design but I've had the first lesson, the Objectified documentary, open here for weeks now. I'm yet to take the time to go past that. I'm busy designing and building my app. Sneak into the MVP builders' workflow and help them, and I think you're gonna find the best customers in as much as you're looking for people who are self-motivated and wanting to learn. There's just not enough time for everything we want to do. Take the time to filter the chaff out of the enormous amount of material for learning design out there, and pick the best stuff that I need __right now __, as per the horrendous mistakes I made on my app, and I'll pay you premium for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Only if it is really increasing my personal learning curve.

1\. I want to try stuff my own.

2\. Then I want an expert to step in.

3\. The expert should teach me how to improve the stuff I already started.

4\. And now the important part: I need to understand why/what makes it better.

5\. Teach my how to "think" like a pro.

There is a gazillion of tutorials and stuff out, but what I am missing the most is fixing the gap between what is going on in my head vs. what is going on in the head of the teacher.

<comment><USER7> This might help the OP come up with a hybrid approach. Create tutorial videos, blog posts, whatever that have lessons with exercises. Publish them for free. People pay for you to take time reviewing their work and then meeting with them over Skype for feedback and personal instruction. Hmmm. I guess that doesn't scale too well either. You would have to charge $100+ an hour to make any money. Maybe you charge a small monthly amount for access to all content. I dunno. Actually speaking to the person with experience is key, but their time is so valuable that it stops being affordable enough for people that need it.

<comment><USER5> Consider that the OP creates a marketplace for such services. He can funnel in enough customers that someone offering services in his marketplace can easily find $100/h gigs to fill their whole working day. He can scout out great talent who would be more than happy to make anything close to $800 a day, or half that much for that matter.

<comment><USER7> I like it. I know multiple people who would love to be able to pick up work like this on a light day. Everyone should be teaching their craft to some degree, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would probably pay for the one-on-one help part. In particular, anything along the line of professional review of my own designs would be something I would pay for. I wouldn't pay for generic design advice from tutorials etc, as these kind of things are often a lot of work to really use and it's difficult to know if you've learned anything or used them correctly - plus there are very good ones available for free already.

I'm not sure how you'd be able to charge for this - if you charge consulting rates for one-on-one then only expect a few large companies/startups to sign up - and these guys would probably just hire a design consultant directly. If you went for a cheap offering, you'd need to keep the advice very short and shallow so as to cover enough people to make a living wage - and shallow design advice is not that helpful.

<comment><USER9> One-on-one reviews are tremendously valuable, and I suspect not only large companies would buy them for consulting rates.

Consider a startup product on the finish line, which lacks polish because non of the makers is a professional designer. If they are like me, they do notice that the overall design is not professional/engaging/appealing enough, but are themselves not able to identify why exactly, and what to do about it. Thats where professional designers are sorely needed.

Me in that situation would not hesitate to pay you, say $600 (in european circumstances) to sit with me for 4 hours interactively, you giving advice and me tweaking the css/svg (the harder stuff for homework), provided

a) I am convinced you know you skills

b) You are able to communicate effectively with a non-designer

c) You could concentrate on the low hanging fruit: Limited effort which still improves my design significantly. It won't perfect, and doesn't have to be.

Note that for all of these points you would have to gain my trust, which is in itself a lot of work. Without that, I might still give it a try, but I would only willing to pay you throwaway money. But gaining my trust doesn't have to be one-on-one though, a good blog or your tutorials could do.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something I really want to get into. Consulting. However, I regret not having blogged sooner about my skills/expertise so it is definitely something I need to do in order to build up credibility outside of my network.

Appreciate the reply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd be willing to pay for a book (E or physical). I'm not a big video fan. Probably $40-60.

Not sure what I'd pay for one on one. If you were willing to look at _my_ code and evaluate, I'd be more interested. Rather than something 'lecture' style. You could then do future posts/tutorials via my one on one. "This was the original code, it was good but XYZ was lacking. So we did THIS. Here is a before/after shot, etc".

</comment><comment><USER11> Very interested, but would have to be in-depth to be able to compete with all the free stuff on the web. For example, I'd pay for a tutorial that walks me through the design of a complete website app from start to finish, if it has video even better. Also, please don't exclusively make it subscription based. I'm willing to pay 30 - 50 dollars up front to learn something in depth (it's similar to paying for an e-book) than to subscribe monthly for something I may not have time to go back to. Offer both options.

If you do go through this, please dedicate a large portion of time on your workflow and tools. Not enough programming, design books do this. For example, when I learned Python and Django it took me a while to figure out VirtualEnv existed and things like Vagrant etc.

Put up a landing page and ask users to leave their email, it will help you gauge interest.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> I would pay for lessons in the context of design critique. Meaning, I have (attempted) to design something, you offer harsh critique bracketed by tailored lessons. I think you'd have a good market since a lot of devs try their hand at designing their apps.

<comment><USER12> Good idea. This would be easy to sell as a package too - "For only $X, I will prepare a detailed feedback report on your site, and provide Y hours of training tailored to your needs".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You should check out The Skool (<http://theskoolrocks.com/>) with Jose Caballer. He's the host of the This Week in Web Design podcast and former creator of The Groop design agency in LA. He has conferences as well as weekly group calls and one-on-one help, along with all the tutorials. You might be able to get some background on the pricing, although he caters more towards professionals looking to improve their career rather than strict tutorials of how to design better. But it's a good starting point. Also, you need to see how much value you can add compared to a DIY subscription to something like Treehouse or Lynda.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am cheap and so are many other consumers of your product. That said, I have probably spent a few hundred bucks last year on online education (mainly codeschool and peepcode). The stuff I've paid for has the following feature ... some part of the education is given away for free. For other parts of more advanced parts, there is a fee. I guess this is a variant on the fremium model. This is how you get my hard earned cash :)

Regarding a price point ... I don't have a huge hesitation dropping $5 or 10 for a 1 hour screencast. More than that makes me think.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. It seems peepcode is just video lessons - signup, review and try your best at it. I'm looking to actually make a community here where I put up video lessons but also interact with my students to help them become better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why not just set up a skillshare class and find out exactly what people want directly? They would take care of the distribution for you, and so you can just figure out the content of the experiment.

<comment><USER16> This is what I was going to suggest. There are already other people offering courses on UI/UX there, as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would. Make it like Railscasts and charge similarly and I would subscribe today. I would suggest very concrete lessons designed around a specific task. 5-10 minute lessons with a comments section and source code on github. Make it where I can login using my github account.. I would follow the railscast pricing model as well. Free + a Pro plan. Railscast's system is awesome. I would follow what has been proven successful. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you - much appreciated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Check out <http://teamtreehouse.com/> as a basic business model that's similar and works.

</comment><comment><USER19> I (a web developer) wouldn't. There's so much free info online I couldn't imagine paying for it.

Also, I'm not convinced good UI/UX can be taught.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that there is an abundance of information online. Its that abundance that took me YEARS to fully grasp design and get to where I am now.

I am confident I can help others learn design much faster than trying to sort through all of the tutorials and tips online (which is a ton of trial and error).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I already do:

<http://nathanbarry.com/webapps/> <https://peepcode.com/products/design- bundle>

<comment><AUTHOR> How is peepcode working for you? Can you tell me more about how it has benefited you (if it has)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Your work is pretty amazing. I would suggest a freemium model where you give away a basic tutorial and sell the video/source/1on1. Definitely interested!

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed - I plan to give away some free content and help in order to build trust and a community. Thanks for the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would (developer) but it would have to be for a price that I wouldn't think twice about, 4.99 or 9.99 maybe per month.

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe the railscast model could work for you.

The only issue I see is there is an inundation of YouTube tutorials in this area.

</comment><comment><USER24> In-person, or one-on-one via Skype or e-mail - yes. Just online materials or newsletters - no.

</comment><comment><USER25> After seeing your work, I can safely say I wouldn't mind paying you to teach me design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you - I'd love to help others and teach them what I've learned / built up over the years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> No, sorry. I try to learn by observation and as a developer that's enough for me.</comment>


Symantec to Split into Two Companies - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/symantec-to-split-into-two/

<comment><USER2> Interesting that they're basically unwinding the acquisition of Veritas from 2004 by splitting up into two companies.

The only difference is that $11B has disappeared from the combined companies market cap in 10 years.

<comment><USER3> I know people who worked at symantec before, during, and after the merger, abd apparently the merger really ruined the symantec corporate culture. I heard veritas promoted a ton of people to VP level right before the merger so they could "have more voice" or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And they would like to nominate Oracle, IBM and Microsoft to take this challenge within the next 24 hours ...

<comment><USER5> IBM did split already. Maybe you've heard of Lenovo?

<comment><USER6> That is incorrect. IBM sold parts of its hardware business, along with employees and IP rights, to Lenovo. Years ago, IBM also sold its ThinkPad brand to Lenovo. The two companies are not exactly related to one another.

<comment><USER7> Everything with IBM it's some strange act of financial engineering.

Everyone who worked in the PC division of IBM essentially worked for Lenovo one day. They used the same people, processes, part numbers, etc for many years. Lexmark was the same story a few years earlier.

The only change was that the IBM account exec that plays golf with your CEO didn't give as shit about PCs anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Who'll be the first to split and then announce that they're unsplitting, or that it was a mistake?

</comment><comment><USER9> EMC not keen on being separated from VMware, [http://www.crn.com/news/storage/300074366/emc-files-muted- re...](http://www.crn.com/news/storage/300074366/emc-files-muted-response-to- activist-investor-push-for-emc-vmware-split.htm)

<comment><USER10> Splitting EMC and VMware doesn't make as much sense as eBay/PayPal or HP/HP, since EMC and VMware have pretty much identical customer bases. HP Consumer and HP Enterprise have of course mutually exclusive customer bases, and eBay and PayPal have some overlap but not much.

EMC is basically the brand name of VMware's storage products.

<comment><USER11> " HP Consumer and HP Enterprise have of course mutually exclusive customer bases"

I would have thought there was a lot of overlap. Don't people who have HP Laptops/Desktops and Printers also have HP Servers?

<comment><USER7> There is, except that there it's no money in PCs anymore, and print is a low/no growth business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With all of these split happening in such a cluster - there is likely some economic, tax, financial or other environmental reason stimulating such activity. Anyone care to hazard a guess what it might be?

</comment><comment><USER12> ... Because security and information management is totally unrelated.

<comment><USER13> IM means Products like Netbackup and Backup Exec, Enterprise vault. Which are extreemly different than security.

<comment><USER12> Extremely? You don't think things like backups, enterprise storage etc has any need for security mechanisms as well as information security management (policy, access control etc)?

If you do, we live on very different worlds.</comment></comment></comment>


Was Diogenes a "Troll"? - <AUTHOR> https://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_diogenes.html <comment><USER2> Diogenes is one of my favorite wandering philosophers, along with Nasreddin, and legendary characters from Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

In a way, they did "troll" the societies where they travelled, by living beyond their value systems, flaunting their freedom and mocking what people take seriously.

I'd prefer the term "wise fools".

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

They were not trolls who take pleasure in mockery. Their way of life and thought have something to teach us, and people through history have loved these characters, as we can see from the stories we continue to tell about them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was not asking if they really were trolls, but would the be shunned as trolls on the modern day forums by people who did not understand them?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would Diogenes be considered a troll if he appeared one day on Hacker News or Reddit? I mean, look at the stuff he did!

"He showed his rejection of "normal" ideas about human decency by eating in the street, masturbating in the marketplace, urinating on those who insulted him, defecating in the theatre, and pointing at people with his middle finger. He was a self-appointed public scold whose mission was to demonstrate to the ancient Greeks that civilization is regressive."

<comment><USER3> He also rightfully rejected the illusion of supremacy by the higher classes, called out the political classes for being liars, and reminded scholars that it's a good idea to check yourself against the world sometimes.

You could find no more respectable a wielder of the yardstick of civilization than good ol' Diogenes. It takes a man who knows what savagery lies beneath to appreciate just how little we are separated from the beasts around us.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I agree. so imagine him here, in this ne "public Square". How do you think he would act?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> just-juan-post Sounds more like a neckbeard / incel.

> He lived in Corinth for the rest of his life, which he devoted to preaching > the doctrines of virtuous self-control.

Witty, smart, undesirable, revolting for all but his quick mind.</comment>


So You Think You Can Program an Elevator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mshang/python-elevator-challenge/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER3> Very similar immediately playable JavaScript version.

[http://play.elevatorsaga.com/](http://play.elevatorsaga.com/)

Which I'm now closing as I lost too much time to this the first time I saw it.

<comment><USER4> This is fantastic. Are there other good programming challenge / games like this? I'd love to see a collection of other similar games.

<comment><USER5> Robocode is another one: [http://robocode.sourceforge.net/](http://robocode.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER6> I spent way too much time with Robocode a few years back. Those advanced "surfing" bots some people built though... It was quite disheartening having not the slightest bit of a chance as a novice programmer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is both cool and disappointing. I'm sure this is more challenging than it looks, and it's cool to see emergent complexity from a (seemingly) simply set of conditions to satisfy.

However, the reason I think about elevator programming isn't to make an elevator behave the way they do today. It's to make an elevator behave _better_ than they do today.

For example:

* I don't want an elevator to close and reopen its doors on the same floor. That's horrible user experience.

* All the interesting problems arise when there are multiple elevators servicing the same set of floors. So let's control more than one elevator at the same time.

* If the elevator is on the ground floor, and has downward calls on both the 1st and 20th floors, then it is likely more efficient to service the 1st floor first rather than bypassing them just so you can keep travelling in the same direction.

I'd like to see a version of this that, rather than enforcing arbitrary rules, just has a lot of series of inputs and lets people compete to service those inputs in the shortest number of steps.

<comment><USER8> THIS.

However, the criterion you're optimizing for is still unclear. Should it be: a) the total number of steps the elevator takes b) the average number of steps each user has to wait c) the maximum number of steps each user has to wait d) the 90th percentile of user waiting steps

Note: here, I'm counting the steps spent waiting for an elevator as well as the steps spent in the elevator till the destination as the same, but presumably you'd want to count steps spent inside the elevator as costlier, further complicating matters.

And this not even considering what happens if your algorithm answers 20 calls, without going to any destination floors, when the elevator capacity is only 10 people.

That's what makes this such an interesting problem.

<comment><USER9> This can be accomplished in a gamified way: Game harness simulates people comming to an elevator, pressing destination button and waiting for some time (some wait longer, some wait shorter, should also depend on distance) before giving up and taking stairs. The elevator could or could not know about it's capacity. Assigning "price", optionally differentiated by input/output floors, to passenger, result would be €/time or €/level. Level - <USER2> sequence of passengers.

Interesting thing here is that "price" does not have to depend on distance. Taking passengers travelling short distances might look cost effective, but that could have negative effect on number of people going to a 20th floor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This was was posed as the the first homework assignment in my first undergrad CS class (15 years ago). I don't think a single person managed to do it.

It's a classic example of a problem that you think is appropriate to throw at new programmers but find out it goes terribly wrong because the hard part is designing a suitable state machine first. If you just start coding without a full model that covers all the edge cases, it quickly degenerates to a mess of ad-hoc heuristics and spaghetti.

<comment><USER11> Same exact thing, about 16 years ago for me. He presented it (I think) to see who procrastinated on the project, knowing it'd take way longer than it sounded.

<comment><USER12> Same as me, 16 years as well. Was this kind of assignment in vogue at the time, discussed between professors / grad students at academic conferences?

My assignment involved writing assembly on some virtual machine with a weird byte/word size and dozens of addressing modes, as well as a (virtual) tape device. I think it was called CUSP but I can't find any references for it now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A project during my graduate work was to solve this problem. You can read my write up, which includes pseudo-code for the best algorithm I found[1].

Long story short: a simple, rules-based algorithm defeated my best efforts at having multiple elevators working together to coordinate their action.

[1]: [https://clarkmoody.com/Moody_AgentBasedElevatorControl.pdf](https://clarkmoody.com/Moody_AgentBasedElevatorControl.pdf)

<comment><USER14> This looks really funny. Is it a spoiler if I haven't done the posted link yet? If so I'll read it later :)

<comment><USER13> Not related to the posted link, so no spoilers :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Then there is the alternative system where you do not request UP or DOWN but you request the floor, otherwise known as destination dispatch [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destination_dispatch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destination_dispatch)

which introduces a whole new set of complexity.

<comment><USER16> I think I read once that when elevators still had operators, larger buildings would have one or more dispatch agents in the lobby that would line people up at the appropriate elevator for the range of floors they intended to visit.

<comment><USER17> Taller buildings with complex and highly trafficked elevators still do this only using electronics. Employees swipe their badges at a podium which reads what floor they work on and indicates which elevator they should proceed to. The system can intelligently schedule the elevator for that person to use knowing where their destination is.

<comment><USER18> I'm in a building with a mere nine floors that has such a system (the only buttons in the elevators themselves are door open, door close and alarm). I imagine that the technology will increasingly appear in the smaller buildings as their elevators are built or refurbished.

<comment><USER19> What if you need to visit someone on another floor?

<comment><USER18> There's touchscreens in the lift lobbies where you can select an override floor before scanning your pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I was teaching assistant at University for Real Time Safety Critical Systems class this was one of the star assignments in the class.

Instead of writing just a dummy program we built an actual elevator using servo motors and asked students to code using different logic

1\. Single elevator 2\. Double elevator 2\. Double elevator with various kinds of optimizations (reduce the energy used v/s reduce the time for each passenger).

All had to be done using embedded C on an ATMEGA processor.

Then we let students do the exact same coding using Esterel where you essentially represent everything as the state diagram.

It was so much fun for bother teachers as well as students because when you deal with real hardware suddenly the scope of problems goes beyond merely getting the logic right.

</comment><comment><USER21> Over a phone interview with Segment.io, I was asked to program an elevator controller. It was described to perform like an HTTP server would handle requests... They were getting confused when I started writing code for a state machine. Glad I got a job offer somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER22> On the topic of elevators, opening this link will cause you to (happily) lose an hour of productivity: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uh_N1O3E4E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uh_N1O3E4E)

<comment><USER23> thx.

An elevator once dropped me one and a half floors with open doors (both, floor station and cabin doors). I think the cable slipped over the transport wheel. Felt funny in the stomach, but we all kept standing when we hit the end-stop in the pit. "safest way of travel" huh!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> [http://codelift.org/](http://codelift.org/) is an elevator challenge a friend of mine[0] built that'll throw scenarios of various numbers of floors and elevators at you.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=silvamerica](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=silvamerica)

</comment><comment><USER25> I have a pet theory that Sim Tower came out of someone playing around with elevator algorithms for fun and then turning that into a game.

<comment><USER26> Not a theory, reality. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower#Gameplay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower#Gameplay)

<comment><USER27> Awesome, my favorite game when I was younger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> No, I never did really. Programming an elevator sounds very tedious, but it never sounded very hard. Elevators are heavy equipment, and there are edge cases around safety near heavy equipment: I'd rather not have to learn those first-hand.

However, I do think this is a great exercise for people new to programming. It's a common enough scenario that most people can recite 80% of the requirements of an elevator from memory.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's an old legend in the construction world that the fastest way to reduce complaints about slow elevators in an office building is to add mirrors to the doors & hallways. The tenants (allegedly) spend so much time looking at themselves that they'll overlook an inefficient elevator system

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice. To the author, is there anyway to change the simulation to try programming 2 elevators in the same shaft ( [http://www.thyssenkruppelevator.co.uk/new- installation/eleva...](http://www.thyssenkruppelevator.co.uk/new- installation/elevators/passenger-elevators/twin/) ) or Double-decker elevators ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double- deck_elevator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-deck_elevator) )?

Because, you know, I really have no work I need to accomplish this year...

</comment><comment><USER31> I've always wanted to see the option to deselect a floor if you press a button twice. Is there a good reason why this doesn't happen?

<comment><USER32> One thought comes to mind. What if the button light is not working? Hit the N button once, and you are on your way to floor N. But if the light is busted, you would hit the light again, and now you have deselected your destination. I think button presses should be indempotent for this reason alone.

<comment><USER33> This is why the standard practice of picking up the elevator phone and requesting a floor cancellation exists.

<comment><USER34> Seriously? Has anybody reading this ever done this? It seems to me that by the time the operator picks up and you tell them what you're trying to do and what elevator you are on it would be too late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is a lot like an assignment for my operating systems class to introduce threads/lock (each elevator and rider is a thread).

[https://users.cs.duke.edu/~chase/cps310/lab3-elevator.html](https://users.cs.duke.edu/~chase/cps310/lab3-elevator.html)

<comment><USER36> Nice! They shoot for automated grading. I wish I had that when I was a TA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This was one of my white board exercises during the interview for my current job. I found it interesting because it seems very easy when the question is asked but it allows for a lot of communication between the interviewer and interviewee as the edge cases are fleshed out.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think traffic signal optimization would be another neat game.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is great! Many times I've thought it would be cool to develop a programming logic harness for elevator logic, but I've never come close to starting.

I think many developers have been waiting for an elevator thinking "Damn this thing is DUMB! I could do a way better job coding the logic for this..." Can finally test it out.

</comment><comment><USER40> Elevators are a great exercise to get people started in writing organized programs. My university's introductory assembly class had us do it in ARM, and it really taught me a lot about being structured. I'm happy to see this sort of stuff on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER41> Wow, how thoughts can be materialised easily. I was thinking about elevator simulation for the past year, but didn't get into implementing anything.. Think this is a good challenge for me to start doing this. Nice!

</comment><comment><USER42> This post reminded me of this classic Apple //c commercial:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3rKBw5ZNL4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3rKBw5ZNL4)

</comment><comment><USER43> Usually elevators are controlled by PLCs which can be programmed using ladder.

If you know a bit about boolean algebra, it is easy to learn ladder and program an elevator the real way. :)

</comment><comment><USER44> Someone should make a real contest (maybe a Kaggle contest), with real data and all. With well-chosen metrics I think it could be a lot of fun and a great success.

</comment><comment><USER45> Maybe an elevator but I very much doubt a Wonkavator!

<comment><USER15> I actually wonder how the space and time complexity of the algorithm would increase as the number of possible dimensions of travel increases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> They've removed the elevator buttons inside the carriage at my work; now one can only select a single floor from outside the elevator.

<comment><USER47> The buttons are still there, just hidden under a cover. If not your building has a serious fire safety problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I can't exactly remember why I found it, but there is a book about this very topic! _Elevator Traffic Handbook_ , by Gina Barney

</comment><comment><USER49> Good challenge. I've thought myself many times what would be elevator logic, and it's not trivial.

</comment><comment><USER38> This would be fun as an html5 game. I'm not sure how you'd enter the logic though.

</comment><comment><USER50> Elevator and vending machine are two good examples for learning about state machine.

</comment><comment><USER51> Funny they refer to it as "business logic."

</comment><comment><USER52> what no elevator recall?

</comment><comment><USER53> >So You Think You Can Program an Elevator

No, especially not in practice. I would never proclaim to have such a belief unless it was my job to do so. Even then, I wouldn't be convinced I was doing a good job of it. The amount of unforeseen complexity in most systems is no joke.</comment>


Meet the parents who won't let their children study literature - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/02/meet-the-parents-who-wont-let-their-children-study-literature/?utm_term=.c1735a0de4d1 <comment><USER2> I'm sorry about expressing an unpopular opinion here, however I can't help but see this as a good thing.

First, degrees cost a lot of money and they have to be paid back, in full, with interest, by the borrower (which is the student in most cases).

Second, there has been a wild upswing in the last 30 years toward humanities majors, and either no growth or even a decline in STEM majors. (Source: [http://2378nh2nfow32gm3mb25krmuyy.wpengine.netdna- cdn.com/wp...](http://2378nh2nfow32gm3mb25krmuyy.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/11/EducationTabarrok.png), whole article at [http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/col...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/college- has-been-oversold.html))

Third, there is absolutely no reason why a person can't major in something that prepares them to do well in today's increasingly automated economy, _then_ study the humanities on their own after they have a secure job. (This is a little autobiographical, but I majored in Molecular Biology, worked for awhile, then started working in software. Now I read _a lot_ on my own! In fact, I think it's pretty normal for people in technical fields to branch out into other things as they get older...)

Given all of that, I think that these parents are generally doing their kids a favor here. There are so many people already buried under student loan debt they have no hope of repaying because they didn't choose wisely when they were just starting out.</comment>


How NY Times can save itself - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/10/how-the-new-york-times-nyt-can-save-itself

<comment><USER2> 8\. Stop making visitors register.</comment>


Apple Store employees trying to unionize - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/166763/some-apple-store-workers-are-talking-u-word-thats-union <comment><USER3> Good on them. I think the demonising of unions has been one of the stupidest things to come out of the neo-liberal era.

EDIT: Knew I'd get downvoted. Seriously though, why is it a bad thing for employees to bargain collectively in order to get the best deal? To me it just demonstrates the market working. i.e. people achieving "economies of scale" (to bastardise the term) in negotiations with powerful employers.

<comment><USER4> A large contingent (here and in general) are "supply-side", pro-management, laissez faire, no/low/fair/flat tax supporting, anti-socialist types.

It comes with the territory that they'd also be almost certifiably Libertarian, which as a system would work perfectly if it weren't for the people.

<comment><USER5> The sad part is that the word "Libertarian" used to mean someone that was in favour of equality and socialism. Someone who was actually liberal.

<comment><USER6> I've never heard about the change of meaning in this word. Could you provide a source for that fact?

<comment><USER7> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism> says, in part,

 _The first person to describe himself as a libertarian was Joseph Déjacque, an early French anarchist communist. The word stems from the French word libertaire, and was used to evade the French ban on anarchist publications. In this tradition, the term "libertarianism" in "libertarian socialism" is generally used as a synonym for anarchism, which some say is the original meaning of the term; hence "libertarian socialism" is equivalent to "socialist anarchism" to these scholars. In the context of the European socialist movement, libertarian has conventionally been used to describe those who opposed state socialism, such as Mikhail Bakunin. In the United States, the movement most commonly called libertarianism follows a capitalist philosophy; the term libertarian socialism therefore strikes many Americans as a contradiction in terms._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The standard tactic employed by McDonald's is that if employees ever manage to actually get past the hurdles and get the official vote to unionize, the location of the unionized McDonald's is instantly and permanently shut down.

<comment><USER9> Source? This sounds like a potential exploit for other businesses.

<comment><USER8> I read it originally in "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser

<http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/toronto_13feb98.html>

Starbucks employs other strategies:

[http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/04/are-starbucks-and- wh...](http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/04/are-starbucks-and-whole-foods- union-busting)

Other companies do less obscene variations like instead of a layoff of unionized workers: move the factory just beyond the 2 hour commute so most entrenched employees will be forced to make their own decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not directly related to this, but I made my first ever visit to an Apple Store last Sunday.

For some reason I was expecting a quiet boutique shop, but ended up wading through a sea of people. The vast majority were waiting around to fidget with demo units and kill time, while the few store employees were literally working non-stop.

I'm not a crowd person, just walking around for a few minutes was stressful enough for me - I can't even imagine what it's like to actually work there all day while wearing a smile.

<comment><USER11> It's... really stressful. I had coworkers who still have dreams about it, years later.

<comment><USER12> Are you talking about your experience during the Falluja campaign or working at a retail store?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Modern unions seem to be worried more about "fair wages" (where fair is determined by the union) than preventing employee abuse. The fact of the matter is that there is choice in employment, _especially_ if you are employable enough to be hired by Apple Retail. What is happening here is effectively the same as if Apple Retail, Best Buy, etc banded together to demand "fair wages" (as determined by them). In free markets (i.e. _not_ what unions were initially designed for), unions provide excess leverage to employees that force companies into unfairly paying employees more than they are worth (and I feel this is a large cause of the U.S. auto market crash).

</comment><comment><USER14> This will never happen. Apple retail has one of the most selective hiring processes of any company on the planet. Would you endure 4 interviews across 6 months to sell shirts? Neither would most people but thats SOP at Apple. Yes, they probably aren't paid as well as others in their industry(especially given the $7,000/ft^2 the stores average) but it would take a lot more abuse than they put up with now before the Apple store is unionized.

<comment> brown9-2 Do you have a source on the interviewing process for the retail store? Sounds interesting.

<comment><USER14> I just wrote up my experience in trying to get a job with the Apple store: [http://1every.blogspot.com/2011/05/employment-process-at- app...](http://1every.blogspot.com/2011/05/employment-process-at-apple-store- or.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've often wondered why, if corporations are subject to antitrust/anticollusion regulations, why unions aren't too. In both cases an entity or entities seek to gain sufficient clout such that the market no longer functions efficiently. Why should, say, the Boeing Machinist's Union or the UAE be allowed to monopolize the labor market of their respective corporations? Is it because there's a subtle difference between these instances?

<comment><USER5> Because unions protect the worker from being abused. The power balance is heavily in favour of management who can fire workers on a whim.

Also, the market isn't efficient. If you look at any large corporation, the amount of bureaucracy is crippling sometimes (of course some unions turn into bureaucracies which also hurts).

<comment><USER16> If the large corporation is such a bureaucracy, a start-up somewhere will come eat their lunch. The theory of natural market monopolies is a historical fallacy. Only with the government's assistance does a monopoly exist (such as a union, central bank, regulatory rights, etc). <http://mises.org/daily/5266/The-Myth-of-Natural-Monopoly>

<comment><USER17> As the userbase here tends towards software-based startups, people often forget that there are many markets where becoming a seller requires very large initial capital.

<comment><USER16> If the competition is as slow and profitable as you say, I promise investors will want a piece of that action -- and the entrepreneur will make it happen. There's no reason a deal can't be structured.. unless, it's illegal of course :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As someone who's worked retail and fast food, I think those types of locations are past-due for some serious labor effort. Those kinds of jobs have atrocious pay and - from what I could tell - required working overtime to pay one's bills (supposing you were living on under 12K/year) if you weren't a supervisor.

Personally, I think if you work (around) 40 hours per week, you should be paid a living wage. That's going to vary based on location, but you shouldn't have to work more than 50 hours per week just to pay your (uber-frugal) bills.

Well, that's my opinion on the matter.

</comment><comment><USER19> Speaking as a "convert"... Apple deserves a union.

</comment><comment><USER20> > It's certainly not an optimum time for unionizing. The economy is stalling

So, the employees are un-American?

<comment><USER21> Given the context of the paragraph, I think its more likely the author is coming from a PR standpoint. I think they probably meant: the public isn't really behind unions because they've been demonized and are shrinking, and that problem is exacerbated because the economy is stalling.

"It's certainly not an optimum time for unionizing. The economy is stalling, and the percentage of private-industry, non-farm workers belonging to unions was slightly less than 7 percent in 2010 (versus 34 percent in the late 1940s), according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. And, of course, unions have been demonized ever since the Reagan Administration.

Still, I'm a big believer in the rights of workers to attempt to form unions, so good luck to the folks behind the ARWU. They're going to need it."

<comment> brown9-2 It's a very odd point for the author to be making in the first place - <USER2> Apple Store employees would have been better off attempting to unionize 30 years ago?

<comment><USER22> Apple would probably have faced more PR backlash from the public if they had attempted to quash a union then. It's a reasonable point to say that unionizing now is more difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Angry members of generation Y acting like angry members of generation Y?

<comment><USER5> What does that even mean? Are you trying to say they're acting as if they're privileged?</comment></comment>


Myers Diff Algorithm – Code and Interactive Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://blog.robertelder.org/diff-algorithm/ <comment><USER2> I don't want a diff algorithm that finds the mathematically smallest edit distance, I want one that preserves meaningful chunks of code. I never delete the closing } from one function and then the entire function following it except its last }.

<comment><USER3> This is a bit of a holy grail, that in practice isn't actually that important. [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/523307/semantic-diff- uti...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/523307/semantic-diff-utilities) has a good overview of some of the possibilities.

Makes for amazing demos. Might some day be what we are all using. My hopes have been dampened severely by how long this has taken to make any head way. (And, honestly, it couples your diff tool to the rest of your tool chain rather heavily. I can see why it has a hard time taking off.)

<comment><USER4> As a newbie to how diff-ing is done in production, does git use vanilla edit- distance diffing too?

<comment><USER5> Git uses Myers diff, but recently added some heuristics to "shift" the hunks in semantically meaningful ways. See [https://github.com/mhagger/diff-slider- tools](https://github.com/mhagger/diff-slider-tools) for the experiments that led to this feature.

It also supports a few other diff algorithms: `--patience` and `--histogram`, but in my experience they produce the same output as Myers in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another explanation of Myers diff algorithm that I found interesting: [https://blog.jcoglan.com/2017/02/12/the-myers-diff- algorithm...](https://blog.jcoglan.com/2017/02/12/the-myers-diff-algorithm- part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER7> My God that code is terrifying. It looks like output from a code obfuscator.

<comment><USER8> Pretty sure this is the same Eugene Myers I had worked with a bit in the past -- he's the kind of guy who took, "Wow, this looks complicated," or "I'm having a hard time following this," as the highest sort of compliment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This algorithm is actually really useful in genomic sequencing - daily usage for me right now. Cool to see it pop up here, although I think it's less generally useful than other edit distance methods.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow! this is a very beautiful code and website

\- single letter variables, as in the rest of mathematics

\- succinct without being obfuscated

\- the _whole_ thing fits on your screen without need to scroll (no dependences, no hidden pieces)

\- the complex algorithm is clarified in the text below, breaking it into smaller parts and explaining each one in detail

\- comprehensive examples, figures and references

This is truly a model of exposition.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems like this would have been super useful when I was creating a Levenshtein transition effect: [https://jsfiddle.net/kdqost0z/2/](https://jsfiddle.net/kdqost0z/2/)

Not that efficiency really matters much for my use-case!

</comment><comment><USER12> I always thought finding the optimal diff (from the user perspective) was an NP Complete problem.

<comment><USER13> I would expect that to be an _unsolvable_ problem, because there will be plenty of cases where not all users agree on what is the optimal diff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wweereee

</comment><comment><USER3> Haven't read it yet. Curious about the implication of the title. Expecting article to be that it could be asymptotically faster, but practically slower. :) (That probably says more about how I choose to read headlines than anything else.)

Edit: Read the article now. Incredibly happy to see that the implication was on purpose. :)</comment>


JSBin a super sweet online HTML and JavaScript editor - <AUTHOR> http://jsbin.com/

<comment><USER4> Hi, I'm the author of jsbin (launched back in 2008) and version 3 is in the works: <http://jsbin.com/3/> (though just an open beta).

Interesting feedback in the comments here, just wanted to address some of them:

"where it contains infinite loops" - v3 now strips JavaScript by default, and binds ctrl+enter to run the output with JS. You can optionally enable live JS rendering now too.

"cmd+1/2/3" - v3 has 5 panels now so it takes over even more keys, and although I coded it up, I'm kinda with you that I don't like that I'm expecting to get to a tab rather than a paenl - yet sometimes I like being able to control which panels. I'm considering other shortcuts - <USER2> optionally disable panel shortcuts (or opt-in?) - but equally open to feedback: <http://github.com/remy/jsbin/issues>

"tabs" + "stupid auto-formatting" - that's down to CodeMirror being used - <USER3> a long while ago I wrote a textarea version of the editor (which kicks in if you're viewing on Android, iPad, etc) - again, this might be a opt-in preference, but I use CM to ensure far reaching IE support because JSBin is primarily a teaching tool, and if a developer is stuck in IE7/8 they need to replicate the bug in that version of IE in jsbin (which is why I can't use ACE, et al).

"ubuntu bugs" - I need to get an Ubuntu virtual machine and check this out - I've heard of a few people having problems in similar environments so I should really check it out.

Anyway, cheers for the feedback (albeit inadvertently :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I experimented with making a live updating HTML editor before, and one of the biggest problems with it is that sometimes your code will go through an intermediate stage, while you're typing it, where it contains infinite loops.

Now, if you could use JS.js¹ to sandbox the javascript in a webworker so that it never blocks the editor, and kill+reload every time you enter a key, well _that_ would be cool.

1: <http://tatiyants.com/introducing-js-js/>

</comment><comment><USER6> JSBin has without a doubt the most annoying and invasive coding interface I've ever used. I find myself often copy/pasting directly from a text editor to avoid the stupid auto-formatting.

That said, its easy customization and lack of script bloat means that it's more portable (Opera on Mint kills any bloated script).

</comment><comment><USER7> Pressing tab is buggy. It assumes that tab means "indent" when in fact maybe you just want to insert a tab.

</comment><comment><USER8> How does this compare with <http://plunker.no.de>? It is also open source (on github) and seems to have been inspired by JSBin.

</comment><comment><USER9> You can see the next release of JSBin at <http://jsbin.com/3/> lots of nice improvements.

</comment><comment><USER10> I frequently use Cmd+1/2/3 to jump to my pinned tabs in Chrome. JS Bin overwrites these with its own shortcuts. Terrible bit of UI/UX.

<comment><USER11> I think most people don't use either shortcut, but that the ones who would use jsbin's shortcut are likely to use the browser shortcut. So it's not a great feature. I wouldn't call it _terrible_ because it's only a problem for a small fraction of users.

Ace Editor is much worse, in that it overrides the Cmd+L key, on sites that have merely embedded it. <https://github.com/ajaxorg/ace/issues/210> At least with JSBin, you might be able to get used to its overriding by noticing that you're on JSBin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Been a while since I looked at JSBin, looks like it's had some nice improvements. I really like the realtime preview and the linting of your JS while you edit.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why this over jsfiddle?

<comment><USER14> I like jsfiddle, too (and jsdo.it). One nice thing about jsbin though is that it is open source (on github).

However, I don't know about others, but at the moment jsbin.com doesn't work at all for me (chrome beta, ubuntu) - can't see any text I type, just blank white on the bottom 90% of the screen. It does work in firefox.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your workplace policy on divulging account passwords to IT? - <AUTHOR> This is an 'asking for a friend' situation, with the friend in question being pressured by their company's IT department to divulge their password (so as to facilitate updates more easily). This person is relatively high up in the company, and handles IP that is both valuable and sensitive.
My advice to them was that in the absence of a company-wide directive that absolved them of any and all repercussions from the sharing of their password they shouldn't give it up.
However, I wondered how other companies (big and small) handled this. What's your experience? <comment><USER2> IT should have a system of roles and permissions that allows administrators to log in as other user if necessary to install updates or reset passwords. This access should be logged and ideally periodically audited by a 3rd party. Sharing a password is dangerous because it is impossible to determine who used the password to perform a malicious act.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, much appreciated.</comment></comment>