Hollywood's support For SESTA is about filtering the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180318/00493539444/hollywoods-behind-the-scenes-support-sesta-is-all-about-filtering-internet.shtml <comment><USER2> The problem now is that it's not only the traditional media companies that support this, it's google, twitter, facebook and the like.

They are big enough that they can eat the cost of censorship and don't care if they become worse services, so long as no new services arise to take their place. And with laws like this in place they never will.

The single biggest hurdle I found to building a distributed search engine was the various illegal materials all over the world. Be it insults to religion, hate speech, copyrighted material, child pornography, all need to be copied onto a local machine to be indexed and categorized. In most countries this would lead the police to come knocking. Any case will (probably) eventually be ruled to be legal, but the average user will never be able to deal with the case since they will probably go bankrupt long before a victory.

Even the people who set out to run a system like tor, knowing full well what the risks are, as a form of mild civil disobedience eventually fold [0].

[0] [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/5394ax/the- operat...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/5394ax/the-operators)

<comment><USER3> > ... copyrighted material...

Isn't the majority (if not the whole) of the web copywrited? It seems like part of the reason why Google has monopoly over search is because search by crawling and indexing is fundamentally illegal. It also seems like the reason they're not prosecuted is because they're so big and useful that no website owner minds that their site is crawled by Google, even though most of them set Terms and Conditions in place that forbid crawling, scraping, or otherwise automated compilation of information from their site. It's a double standard.

<comment><USER4> Yes, almost everything on the web is copyrighted with the exception of content from governments that do not copyright content that they create and material that is out of copyright.

It is unclear that crawling and indexing are a violation of copyright. A library card catalog does not violate the copyright of the material it indexes. If you don't want to be indexed, you can just put the appropriate entry in robots.txt and all the major search engines will comply.

Caches are on shakier ground and archives like the IA are on shakier ground yet. Pretty much everyone turns a blind eye however because it's useful and again you can always opt out with robots.txt.

<comment><USER5> The real problem is that a large majority of sites do permissions by bot, whitelisting only google and possibly bing while excluding all others.

Further if you actually try to crawl a website you'll find yourself blackholed by a lot of websites pretty quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet," > said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. > "Period." (2009)[1]

Later also CEO Sony Entertainment, and COB Snapchat.

> At a breakfast cohosted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications > at Syracuse University and The New Yorker Thursday, Lynton wasn't just > trying for a laugh: He complained the Internet has "created this notion that > anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It's as if the stores > on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, > 'Give it to me now,' and if you don't give it to them for free, they'll > steal it."

> Lynton tried out another simile. Referring to the Obama administration's > goal to spread broadband access without, he said, regulating piracy, Lynton > compared it with building highway systems without speed limits or driver's > licenses. "We do need rules of the road,"

US society is composed of many little overlapping subcultures. With diverse views. Often with major groupthink and filter bubbles. And some stable for decades.

[1] [http://wwd.com/business-news/media/memo-pad-uniqlo-nabs- deyn...](http://wwd.com/business-news/media/memo-pad-uniqlo-nabs-deyn-bad- internet-classic-martha-2136751/)

<comment><USER7> This guy sounds like one of the most dangerous people on earth.

<comment><USER8> He sounds like anyone else whose culture and livelihood is threatened. If/when the current tech culture is severely undermined by change most people on this board will sound like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Every rock you lift up in looking at where SESTA 's support has come from, you magically find Hollywood people scurrying quietly around. We've already noted that much of the initial support for SESTA came from a group whose then board chair was a top lobbyist for News Corp.. And, as we reported last month, after a whole bunch of people we spoke to suggested that much of the support for SESTA was being driven by former top News Corp. lobbyist, Rick Lane, we noticed that a group of people who went around Capitol Hill telling Congress to support SESTA publicly thanked their "partner" Rick Lane for showing them around._

 _In other words, it 's not just Hollywood seeing a bill that gets them what it wants and suddenly speaking up in favor of it... this is Hollywood helping to make this bill happen in the first place as part of its ongoing effort to remake the internet away from being a communications medium for everyone, and into a broadcast/gatekeeper dominated medium where it gets to act as the gatekeeper._

Full on attack on the internet and people's right to share content and ideas, basically an attack on people's 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'.

Tie this in with the Marriott person fired for 'liking' a post on accident, or on purpose really, that was driven by China not wanting the company to recognize Tibet, and China's large investments in Hollywood and Hollywood's appeasement of those aims, and you have a scary situation where internet content and thoughts could be regulated by people in more authoritarian regimes around the world.

Hollywood used to spread ideas of liberty, living a good life and democracy, now we have them actively exploiting side issues for their aim of content filtering, and we have other countries dictating what free people can do with the internet, full on attack on freedoms and a strike against progress and the idea of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'.

<comment><USER10> > Hollywood used to spread ideas of liberty and living a good life, now we > have them actively exploiting side issues for their aim of content > filtering, and we have other countries dictating what free people can do > with the internet, full on attack.

Hollywood was never so nice

<comment><USER9> Question: without Hollywood movies/tv, do you think the West would be looked upon and desired to come here as much?

Hollywood can explain tough society situations through a conduit story that can lessen people's biases when it is a fictional story. It can help understanding and has been a huge part of the American Dream marketing that makes people want to come to the US and contribute.

Entertainment and education are two of the things the US attracts people with besides opportunity. Part of that opportunity is built by Hollywood or at least the perception of it.

Movies and TV are an escape but also show what it is like to live others lives or come away enlightened, maybe not so much with the consolidated companies of today but back in the day for sure.

Take a look at the history of United Artists and Charlie Chaplin influence for a take on this [1].

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/feb/23/film](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/feb/23/film)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "this is Hollywood helping to make this bill happen in the first place as part of its ongoing effort to remake the internet away from being a communications medium for everyone, and into a broadcast/gatekeeper dominated medium where it gets to act as the gatekeeper."

Agreed. People have been saying this for years.

It isn't just hollywood. The news media, the political elites, NGOs, etc are supporting this for the same reason. It's also the reason for the attacks against social media and the push against net neutrality.

Instead of the internet/social media/search engines/etc being a medium where people proactively communicate and look for things that interest them. These corporatists and politicians want the internet to be a medium of broadcast where they choose what you see and how you communicate.

It's been a going on for years. Look at how google now filters search and how youtube pushes their content. Look at all the content being removed from reddit. And soon ISPs will start throttling content they disagree with.

The people with money and power want this so it'll continue to happen. And they aren't doing it all at once. They are doing it in stages. Each iteration, there is more censorship. Us mere mortals can't do anything about it. Sadly, it's happening all over the world now. Europe, Russia, China, etc are all turning the internet from a medium of open and free communication to a broadcasting platform.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well... This is one reason why tech literacy is so critically important. As long as it's a privileged few in the grand scheme of things who can add things to the Internet, it makes it that much easier to control.

It's why many countries are so fond of regulating manufacturing. When you strip access to the means of production from the everyman and lock it behind regulatory barriers, it's far easier to control what can and can't be done.

Not a pitch for any ideology. Merely an observation.

<comment><USER13> Reads well as a pitch for tech literacy, which I wholeheartedly support!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Man, you (Americans) are having the time of your life in regards of Internet freedom. Net neutrality went down, SESTA, CLOUD...

And you're just about to enter a trade war with China! Talk about a shot in the foot...

I'm not saying that everywhere else is nice, i.e. Deep Learning is barely legal for commercial use in Europe with GPDR!

But man, the weather is not nice...

<comment><USER15> > I'm not saying that everywhere else is nice, i.e. Deep Learning is barely > legal for commercial use in Europe with GPDR!

Wasn't aware of that. What is the reason for it? To protect consumer privacy?

<comment><USER14> GPDR has a clause that requires companies that uses data from the EU to explain exactly how they used the data and how the algorithm reach the conclusion it did. Deep Learning is currently a black box where you train it and it knows what to do, but we can't explain exactly how it did it.

[https://www.kdnuggets.com/2018/03/gdpr-machine-learning- ille...](https://www.kdnuggets.com/2018/03/gdpr-machine-learning-illegal.html)

edit:typo

<comment><USER16> That's assuming that the explanation that decision came from a neural network isn't enough. Same way you wouldn't have to explain the physics of a coin toss if you'd use that as decision maker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here are _' sex trafficking hollywood'_ (newest) search links for NYT, WaPo, WSJ, and LA Times.[1]

At present, there's zilch. WSJ focuses on plaintiff attorneys.[2] :) LA Times seems to only have an editorial[3], which swipes at big tech, but is surprisingly competent.

I've formed an impression of the big press, NYT et al, in contrast to say industrial/professional media, that even when they manage to get facts right, they pervasively manage miss the point. It reminds me of coverage of unfamiliar foreign cultures, after the local foreign bureau has closed. Context, and reality check, and insight, and clue, all become unavailable. Even here, even dealing with their familiar political DC subculture.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/search/sex%20trafficking%20hollywood...](https://www.nytimes.com/search/sex%20trafficking%20hollywood/newest) [https://www.washingtonpost.com/newssearch/?query=sex%20traff...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/newssearch/?query=sex%20trafficking%20hollywood&sort=Date&datefilter=All%20Since%202005) [https://www.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=sex%20traffick...](https://www.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=sex%20trafficking%20hollywood) [http://www.latimes.com/search/?q=sex+trafficking+hollywood](http://www.latimes.com/search/?q=sex+trafficking+hollywood) [2] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/political-sex-trafficking- explo...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/political-sex-trafficking- exploitation-1520035315) [3] [http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed- sex-traffick...](http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-sex- trafficking-online-20180306-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> All we can hope for is every stockholder of UGC companies like Facebook and Twitter wind up getting sued under this law. Otherwise this law will be arbitrarily applied to only select companies.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is a rather wild conspiracy theory. Note that the lobbyist in question no longer works for News Corp. Lobbyists are basically defined as "opinion for money", so the reverse should also be true: when you no longer pay them, it's unlikely they'll continue to work for you.

The connection becomes even more tenuous when you realize that News Corp isn't actually "Hollywood". Yes, they used to own 21th Century Fox, but that was sold last year.

Instead of trying to find some sinister motivation underlying people's actions, it may be more useful to actually listen to them. It seems entirely believable that people privy to the details of human trafficking and sexual exploitation develop rather strong opinions on the subject. That conviction may lead them to advocating policies you may disagree with, especially when they see companies turning a blind eye to obvious underage sex trafficking on their platforms.

So do engage with their arguments and make a better case. But don't belittle their concerns with hamfisted conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER19> > obvious underage sex trafficking on their platforms.

Where and how does this happen? Do you have data? Can you cite a single instance of a pedophile ring was using open platforms in an "obvious" fashion to promote their product - as opposed to darknet/secret forums that don't care about SESTA? In the unlikely cases where it does happen, how do you think the majority of sex-service consumers would react to being offered underage sex?

This seems to be a classic example of using a fringe issue - online pedophiles - to justify a major encroachment against civil liberties. In this case driven by a puritanical position that in fact wants to declare war against all forms of prostitution.

With the only practical effect of waging war against the prostitutes themselves by denying them access to online platforms and pushing them straight into the hands of organized human trafficking rings. The consumers will not stop demanding sex services and they will get them somehow.

Here what sexworkers themselves have to say about it: [http://www.new.swopusa.org/2018/03/02/house-passing-of- misle...](http://www.new.swopusa.org/2018/03/02/house-passing-of-misleading- fosta-bill-causes-country-wide-outrage/)

<comment><USER18> "Backpage" was the name I believe. The was plenty of evidence of their collaboration, including the rewording of ads to make it less obvious how young, exactly, the girls on offer were.

Note that even though my comment above received the full ire of HN, I do not necessarily support this legislation. I just think the article's game of 7-degrees-of-seperation and guilt by association are fundamentally weak arguments.</comment></comment></comment>


Dell Sells RSA to Private Equity Firm for $2B - <AUTHOR> https://www.darkreading.com/risk/dell-sells-rsa-to-private-equity-firm-for-$21b/d/d-id/1337078 <comment><USER2> Never forget that RSA is the company that sold out the security of all its customers for a $10M payment from the NSA. [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security- rsa/exclusiv...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security- rsa/exclusive-secret-contract-tied-nsa-and-security-industry-pioneer- idUSBRE9BJ1C220131220?irpc=932)

<comment><USER3> 10M Wow, that's cheap AF!

<comment> blaser-waffle "Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show."

10MM was also 1/3 of the revenue of that division; that's a big chunk. No reason to think they'd stop that cashflow

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Private equity firms increasingly are setting their sights on the security industry due to its rapid and steady growth."

I do not trust private equity to main the standards necessary for quality and trustworthy security.

<comment><USER5> I do, for the sole reason that at the end of (almost) every private equity deal is an exit, and in order for the company to be sold at a higher price than it was bought, it still has to be good/better at what it is supposed to be doing. Also, from my experience for these sorts of Tech deals, the level of due diligence conducted before an exit by potential buyers can be extensive, so I doubt they'd let the security parts of a security business go bad.

<comment><USER6> > in order for the company to be sold at a higher price than it was bought, it > still has to be good/better at what it is supposed to be doing

As someone who has worked for PE owned companies I can confidently say that unless you consider the thing they're "supposed to be doing" to be reflecting profit on the books, you're wrong.

The PE owners of companies I worked for pushed EBITDA over anything else and as a result our product became a leaning Jenga tower of half finished functionality combined with unfulfilled promises to customers. Foundational systems were completely neglected in favor of whatever kept costs low and increased closed ARR focused deals. We sold for many times our previous valuation and not one person I spoke to in the company itself or our customer base felt the product was better, all agreed it was worse.

<comment><USER7> 100% in agreement. Same exact experience.

The expectation is 30% YoY growth with 30% margins. At any cost. No excuses.

Your entire company, all of your software, your assets, your people? You're a single line in a spreadsheet. You're a stock certificate. An asset. Raise the value or be fired.

What's that? You care about your employees? They're working 14-hour days? You need more people. Go ahead, give all the perks you want. 30 Over 30, baby. I don't care how you hit the number. Just do it or you're fired.

Oh wait, you can't hit these crazy numbers given the staff? Boo hoo. Fired.

Your product is falling apart and you're plugging holes in a dam to prevent churn? Boo boo. Keep doing it.

We're out in five years anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A reminder that RSA was "Security Dynamics" before they bought "RSA" and renamed themselves. Their main line of business was hardware tokens, which were infamously implicated in a compromise by overseas attackers that coined the term "Advanced Persistent Threat". RSA diversified into multi-factor authentication tools for servers and then a bunch of random enterprise security gadgets.

Companies like Duo and Okta ate RSA's lunch; their original core business is now a commodity. RSA's relevance in the industry is greatly diminished.

<comment><USER9> Also the key stupidity that made all this possible is a lesson worth remembering after RSA is forgotten.

The RSA tokens are essentially a random number plus form factor. It isn't necessary for the manufacturer to know what the number inside each token is, let alone to store that after the product ships.

But of course it's tempting to do so as a convenience for your customers. Once you set off down this slippery slope you're a dead man walking.

A FIDO token likewise is a random number plus (somewhat more complicated) form factor. If anybody makes RSA's mistake it has the exact same consequences (big hole in your security for whoever knows the number). Hopefully the decisions in FIDO to eliminate conveniences for knowing the magic number, plus RSA's example has been enough that nobody is dumb enough but we shall see.

<comment><USER10> Apparently Yubico knows the seeds written into their devices, else the OTP auth (against their servers) [0] woulndn't work OOTB, no?

[0]: [https://demo.yubico.com/otp/verify](https://demo.yubico.com/otp/verify)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 2.1B is the same price EMC paid to take RSA private in 2006. Zero increase in value in 13 years...

[https://corporate.delltechnologies.com/en- us/newsroom/announ...](https://corporate.delltechnologies.com/en- us/newsroom/announcements/2006/09/09182006-4605.htm)

<comment><USER12> It's not zero. 2.1B was in 2006 dollars. 14 years of cumulative inflation would add up to almost 2.7B in 2020 dollars.

<comment><USER13> They could have literally put 2.1B in a savings account in 2006 and made more money.

<comment><USER14> Presumably the company is profitable and it could very well have racked up quite a substantial return in dividends despite not increasing in value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dell has always felt like a financial engineering firm rather than computer firm. Even in the 80s and 90s they made their money through holding the customer's money, putting unsold product on trucks parked in the street (counts as shipped), having suppliers hold inventory in trucks on their loading docks (supplier has to fund it as Dell hasn't received it until they take it off the truck) and of course the last couple of decades of back and forth going private - going public

<comment><USER16> Good article where I can read more about this?

<comment><USER15> I'm talking about 40 years of reading articles about Dell; perhaps some old magazines from the 80s may not be online too, but: likely if you use a useful search engine* to look up things like "dell negative cost of capital" or "dell minus 11 days receivables", "dell just in time inventory supplier trucks" etc you can probably look up some of their much-lauded "innovations". I believe the "put assembled product into trucks and drive them through the gate" was a one-time act to meet one quarter's goals, but don't remember exactly, though surely it would have been after they went public (the first time).

* Google used to be the obvious "useful search engine" when all others were terrible, but these days they emphasize recency and celebrity to the point where their search engine is almost useless in looking up old articles.

<comment><USER17> A search using 'millionshort.com' (mentioned here yesterday) and your 1st suggested search string found this 1998 story - 'Inside Dell Computer Corporation: Managing Working Capital':

[https://www.strategy-business.com/article/9571](https://www.strategy- business.com/article/9571)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has "private equity firm" in a sentence ever been followed by good news? Why do they seem to mess things up so badly?

<comment><USER19> I suspect this is a case of when it all goes well or at least not badly that it is simply normal and a case of 'not newsworthy'.

Yes, a lot of bad things happen in the world, but don't forget that a lot of good or just OK happens and never gets reported because it is just normal.

<comment><USER20> The issue is that the overwhelming incentive for these sorts of buyouts is towards very short-term decisions leading up to a sale. If things line up correctly, this can have good results, but usually it involves compromising the product, long-term business, cutting corners, etc. People on places like HN are especially wary of this sort of thing because a lot of us are tech professionals who end up in the trenches first hand when those corners get cut. This is especially dangerous in the realm of security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Last time information is available, RSA generated about $1 billion in revenue. Very hard to believe that RSA is worth 50% of annual revenue - that's a great ROI.

For comparison, Imperva, with revenue of ~$300 million annually in 2018 was bought by Thoma Bravo for $2 billion. I have a hard time believing Imperva is worth the same as RSA.

<comment><USER22> Must be consulting revenue vs subscription (or similar)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> For whatever it is worth, I work for an SI that sells SAASPASS IAM that also includes MFA solutions and our only churn customers are those using RSA SecurID. I assume this will accelerate, but I suppose that will be obvious in a year or two from now. Of the MFA vendors out there RSA will have to invest to keep up pace with other vendors. Let's see if the new owners are willing to do that.

</comment><comment><USER24> I worry with news like this that the PEF has a plan to sue some people after the buy out. I wonder if they have anything that could be used to go after groups?

<comment><USER25> The important patents are long-expired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm reading this as RSA is deprecated.

<comment><USER27> This is referring to RSA the company, not RSA the public key cryptosystem (both created Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman)

<comment><USER26> That's what I meant, RSA (the company) is cancelled.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Chronicle, a new Alphabet business dedicated to cybersecurity - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/chronicle-blog/give-good-the-advantage-75ab2c242e45 <comment><USER2> > Security threats are growing faster than security teams and budgets can keep > up, and there's already a huge talent shortage.

Can anyone here speak to the "there's already a huge talent shortage" part of this article? Specifically, security is a field I'd _love_ to work in, but I honestly don't see a ton of job postings and I'm unsure as to how one might transition from say a role as a full-stack web developer into a security job.

For example, here's are some things I've been doing as I'm considering a move into a security-focused role:

\- Following the industry (podcasts ala Sans mainly)

\- Reading books on hacking (currently "The Shellcoder's Handbook")

\- Reviewing my comp sci basics (x86 assembly + reading K&R "The C Programming Language")

\- Dabbling in some hacking exercises ([https://ropemporium.com](https://ropemporium.com) and [https://canyouhack.us/](https://canyouhack.us/))

Mainly asking because I see statements like the above regarding the shortage of security talent all the time, yet I can't find a lot of guidance either for exactly how one can get started in this field.

[edit]: List formatting

<comment><USER3> Based on my experience, there is a huge talent shortage, especially outside of the Bay Area. I'm not a security person myself, but my team tried to hire a security person multiple times.

You'll often find people that have experience running automated scans, filling up compliance paperwork, setting up firewalls and SIEM tools, etc. but don't know how to deal with source code or mitigation. At the other end of the spectrum, there's a small number of people who can review code and write tools, exploits, etc. but hate the bureaucratic work. In the middle, which is the kind of person that a startup or small company would want to hire, there is an even tinier number of candidates.

The kinds of things you are doing sound great. Perhaps try to participate in bug bounties, too. One reason you don't see a ton of job postings is that many companies don't know yet they need them. :-) Also, a lot of recruiting might just happen through word-of-mouth or in an outbound fashion. In my limited interactions, I found that the security community can sometimes work like a club or a society, more than in other tech circles.

<comment><USER4> >but don't know how to deal with source code or mitigation

actually I have noticed this and so we are spinning up a security consulting practice in 2018 looking to address this gap (staffed with experienced developers or former developers). Time will tell if this is a workable approach..

<comment><USER5> That would be awesome. IME people care about security in principle, but no one really knows how to write secure software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems a bit odd to me that this company grew out of X, as I was under the impression that projects in the "Moonshot Factory" were more ambitious. From what I gather, this sounds mostly like an analytics org for enterprise, not something that might change the world (e.g. Waymo, Loon, Project Ara).

Perhaps X is taking on less radical projects than I imagined. Would love to hear others' viewpoints on this as well, though.

<comment><USER3> Mike Wiacek was the manager of the Google team that worked on APT and nation state attacks in the wake of Aurora. Think of the Gmail notices about state- sponsored attacks on your account, which required new detection tools and technologies. I doubt you'll find many groups with the same experience and expertise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The blog post from Astro Teller (of X) subtitled "Cybersecurity needs a moonshot":

[https://blog.x.company/graduation-day-introducing- chronicle-...](https://blog.x.company/graduation-day-introducing- chronicle-318d34b80cce)

</comment><comment><USER8> Wonder how Google project zero will interact? Google has found Spectre, Meltdown, Broadpwn, Cloudbleed and Heartbleed and makes sense to leverage for but hope does not change from sharing?

Hope just use for branding and not try to directly monetize.

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone who ran a security firm. Results are much difficult to show/prove in a security firm. Running a development agency, we can break down the project into tasks and the stackholder can review each step from our worklog. Usually, they are happy with the result. I've found the best way to run a development agency is not hire in range of 400-500 developers. This has some trade offs like some devs are not happy when we switch them from project 1 to project 10 just because stackholder lost interest or their funding dried up.

</comment><comment><USER10> First of all, interesting! Second, this is some sort of security information and event management (SIEM)? At least this is what it looks like from the brief description put online.

</comment><comment><USER11> How does this relate to CrowdStrike -- funded in large part by Google Capital?

</comment><comment> g-b-r The gist is probably "[...] Storage — in far greater amounts [...] over years" (of data that Alphabet might not yet have had access to)

</comment><comment><USER12> doesn't really look like _Chronicle_ provides anything that is already covered by _Elasticbeam_ (which compared to Chronicle has been on the market since 3+ years and works exceptionally well).

disclosure: I have no affiliation with either one but wonder why Google/Alphabet would be _that_ late to the party and offer nothing that isn't already out there. __yawn __

<comment><USER13> It's possible that they launched without doing any market research or competitive analysis but doesn't it seem more likely that the minimal information available now isn't the sum total of what they're planning?

<comment><USER12> I hope so for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess this is the new fad now, "Apply ML models to data you already have"?

<comment><USER13> That's like saying it was a fad to "apply software to your existing business" or "move business you already have to the web".

Sure, that was in vogue at times and some people wasted a lot of money but that over-summarization doesn't give you an accurate understanding of what actually happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I hope I got it wrong, really. But Google has big (and small) corporate clients using the full GSuite..and a sister company selling "consulting" to the same companies? "It seems like you have some security issues, it's great that I have this friend who can fix them for you before you get hacked" Isn't that some sort of conflict of interest for any other industry? Wouldn't selling protection from unknown threats IRL classify as something neither ethical nor legal?...

<comment><USER16> > Wouldn't selling protection from unknown threats IRL classify as something > neither ethical nor legal?...

Hiring private security or bodyguards is not considered unethical or illegal. Installing alarm systems is not unethical. Am I misunderstanding this?

Google already sells consulting to cloud customers, this seems perfectly natural and I'm not sure how you avoid it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm guessing they're going to have some naming disputes with the various newspapers that use Chronicle in their name (like the Houston Chronicle, the 3rd largest paper by Sunday distribution according to wiki and the primary paper for a city of 2.5million people) and the Chronicle of Higher Education - a go-to source of news and information for much of higher ed.

I don't think any of them claim sole ownership of the word 'Chronicle', but I'd imagine there will be some "this will be too confusing" back-and-forth.</comment>


Diffractive Deep Neural Network Identifies Objects at the Speed of Light - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hackster.io/diffractive-deep-neural-network-identifies-objects-at-the-speed-of-light-c10a7c4dd1b4 <comment><USER2> I don't quite understand what is meant by "speed of light" here? Is that because they are using Photonic IC's? Even then, is it techically correct to use the term "Speed of Light"?</comment>


Cost of False Positives - <AUTHOR> http://laughingmeme.org/2011/07/23/cost-of-false-positives/ <comment><USER2> Many years ago, I used to work on grants from the Postal Service. The goal was to read addresses and sort mail automatically. The metric we wanted to minimize was 10*E+R , where "E" is the fraction of errors (where the system returns an incorrect answer), and "R" is the fraction of rejects (where the system doesn't give an answer). The thinking was that it is 10x more expensive to send the letter to a wrong address, than to reject it outright and have it processed by a human. This includes the cost of customer service, anguish, bad reputation, etc., and not just the cost of delivery and re-routing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Honestly I don't care - I just want to be able to use ipad in a tweet without getting tons of offers and occasionally look at the trending topics without wading through a ton of spam.

<comment><USER4> Sure, until you accidentally tweet something that the overzealous spam filters get you banned. Then you might care.

<comment><USER3> No. Just don't show that particular tweet to me.

No need to ban them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I see Twitter getting beaten up a lot for not deleting the spammers faster. Etsy gets beaten up for not deleting the "resellers" faster. Flickr used to get yelled at for not catching the photo stealers or porn spammers faster.

"It's so fucking easy, they're right over there, here, let me show them to you, what's your problem?"

This comes from not understanding the cost benefit ratio of false positives in identifying abuse of a social site at scale.

Imagine you've got a near perfect model for detecting spammers on Twitter. Say, Joe's perfectly reasonable model of "20+ tweets that matched '^@[\w]+ <http://'"> >> <https://twitter.com/#!/joestump/status/94845660163088384>. Joe is (presumably hyperbolically) claiming 99% accuracy for his model. And for the moment we'll imagine he is right. Even at 99% accuracy, that means this algorithm is going to be incorrectly flagging roughly 2 million tweets per day as spam that are actually perfectly legitimate.

If you've never run a social software site (which Joe of course has, but for the folks who haven't) let me tell you: these kinds of false positives are expensive.

They're really expensive. They burn your most precious resources when running a startup: good will, and time. Your support staff has to address the issues (while people are yelling at them), your engineers are in the database mucking about with columns, until they finally break down about build an unbanning tool which inevitably doesn't scale to really massive attacks, or new interesting attack vectors, which means you're either back monkeying with the live databases or you've now got a team of engineers dedicated just to building tools to remediate false positives. And now you're burning engineer cycles, engineering motivation (cleaning up mistakes sucks), staff satisfaction AND community good will. That's the definition of expensive.

And this is all a TON of work.

And while this is all going down you've got another part of your company dedicated to making creating new accounts AS EASY AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE. Which means when you do find and nuke a real spammer, they're back in minutes. So now you're waging asymmetric warfare AGAINST YOURSELF.

Fine, fine, fine whatever. You'll build a better model. You know, this is a social site, we'll use social signals. People can click and say "This is spam" and then when, I don't know, 10 people say a tweet is spam, we'll delete it and ban that account. But you know, people are fuckwits, and people are confused, and people are unpredictable and the scope of human activity at scale is amazingly wide and vast and deep, so a simple additive, easy to explain, fundamentally fair model isn't going to work. (protip: if you're site is growing quickly, make sure to use variables for those threshold numbers, otherwise you might DOS yourself)

But you're smart, so now you've got a machine learning model, that's feeding social signals into a real time engine, that's bubbling up the top 0.01% of suspicious cases (and btw if you've gotten this far, you're really really good, and you're probably wasting your time on whatever silly sheep poking/nerd herding site you're working on, so call me, I've got something more meaningful for you to do), and in at least Twitter's case we're now talking about a mere 200,000 potential spam tweets to be manually reviewed daily.

How many people do you need to review 200k spam tweets per day? How many desks do they need? Are you doing to do that in house or are you going to outsource it? And if you outsource it, how are you going to explain the cultural peculiarities of your community, because while your product might have gone global, you're still your own funky nation of behavior, and some things that look strange (say, retweeting every mention of your own name >> <https://twitter.com/#!/davemcclure>) are actual part of your community norm.

And if you don't explain those peculiarities, how long do you think it is until this small army you've assembled to review 200k tweets a day, gets tired, makes a mistake and accidentally deletes one of your social network hub early adopter types (because the sad truth is early adopters are outliers in the data, and they look funny).

And what do you think the operational cost of making that mistake is? (see also: fakesters >> <http://www.google.com/search?q=fakesters>)

Also, whats your data recovery strategy look like on a per account basis?

There are solutions. Some of them are straightforward. Many of them aren't. None of them are as easy as you think they are unless you've been there. And I'm happy to talk to you about them over a beer, but just posting them on a blog, well that would be telling other people's secrets. And they already have a really hard job.

A much more cogent blog post by Bruce Schneier from 2006, on Data Mining for Terrorists >> [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_fo...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_for.html) really drills into this problem from a theoretical model. (where "for Terrorists" is to be taken in the "finding Terrorists" sense and not in the "for Dummies" sense)

The topic has been on my mind lately, as Twitter recently banned my account by accident, along with a number of other very early accounts >> [http://laughingmeme.org/2011/06/02/sorry-we-did-something- wr...](http://laughingmeme.org/2011/06/02/sorry-we-did-something-wrong- twitter-on-suspending-my-account/), but never acknowledged it. And at Etsy last week we had an adaptive process go rogue and ban a tiny number of early adopters, an issue we posted about on our status blog >> [http://etsystatus.com/2011/07/20/some-accounts-mistakenly- de...](http://etsystatus.com/2011/07/20/some-accounts-mistakenly- deactivated/), and in the forums >> [http://www.etsy.com/teams/7716/announcements/discuss/8723148...](http://www.etsy.com/teams/7716/announcements/discuss/8723148/page/1/). In both cases there was a full recovery of all the account data and state.

>> Added double characters where the links were. Page is loading slowly.

<comment><USER6> How about algorithmically sequestering suspicious tweets? Reclaiming a tweet and making it live again would involve something like captcha and would have to be done by the person who made the original "false" tweet.

That way you are doing the scalable stuff. And you have crowd-sourced (back to the original tweeter) the burden of identifying what is real.

<comment><USER7> Chinese bulk human powered captcha solvers are stupid cheap. $.00139/ea in units of 1k [1]

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475191></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I run an API and client on the same server? - <AUTHOR> Forgive my ignorance, I only work with an internal API at work and I interface with it on different servers via authentication.
I found this repo (https://github.com/miguelgrinberg/REST-tutorial) and the code creates a Python server for delivering a REST API. It looks like the client is designed to run on the same server this API would be on.
So, what are your recommendations? I want to release some apps this year, and two of them rely on an API that I will learn how to write. <comment><USER2> It's fine to do that, just compose them in a way where it wouldn't matter if it were another server.

That way it's easier to migrate off later, if needed, and easier to scale as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, okay. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> rest-server.py uses the flask framework which just happens to default to localhost:5000. You can run it on any IP address or domain, see [http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.10/deploying/#deployment](http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.10/deploying/#deployment)

Questions of the kind "how to I do X in programming language Y" are better answered on stackoverflow.

<comment><AUTHOR> SO was actually my initial thought, but I seem to get a bunch of downvotes on those kinds of questions, and comments telling me to go to some other StackExchange site to ask that question.

Thanks for your response though!</comment></comment>


The FBI's secret biometrics database they don't want you to see - <AUTHOR> https://www.rt.com/usa/343981-fbi-secret-biometric-database/ <comment><USER2> Why not just have an identity service that's available to anyone with permission with the obvious side effect that law enforcement has access to it with court order. The government is going to collect it, companies are collecting it, states offer a shitty version of it.</comment>


The Rise and Fall of PC Platforms  - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-personal-computing

<comment><USER2> The article is not questioning the dominance of the current desktop computing paradigm. It is to illuminate the speed at which computing platforms can be displaced.

 _The metric that matters is usage, obviously almost everyone has a PC and since most PCs sold in the last 5 years are capable to satisfying users without an upgrade, the fact that PCs are still selling in such a high volume doesn't bode well for the doomsday predictions by number-twisting bloggers._

PC sales have not been contributing much to the bottom lines of HP, Dell etc for many years now.

In business, profit matters. Usage is indirectly useful if it leads to profits. This is the fundamental difference between the Apple and Google worldviews.

The tl;dr summary is that computer makers have to sell many more PCs to come close to what Apple is making from the sale of each iPhone or iPad.

</comment><comment><USER3> Horrible graphics.

First, the stacked data scaled to a constant upper line creates the false impression that PCs are going away, but actually the total market for computing is exploding.

Second, in the line charts, it's very difficult to discern which line is for which products.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think it is appropriate to have the smartphones and tablets as a %market share competing against desktop platforms such as mac/pc. For one, while in general people either own a mac xor a pc, people in general don't own a smartphone xor a desktop (I assume).

The graphs at the beginning showing sales seem to be the least misleading in this case, and don't show the sudden drop in sales which existed for other older systems such as Amiga, atari, etc. In this sense it seems pcs are still going steady with a nearly saturated market, and people are now adopting both a smartphone and a desktop.

At least, that is my interpretation from a single graph, presumably other opinions exist.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, though I wish he had cited sources for his data. Also be sure to note that the vertical axis is a log scale, and that a more complete version of the chart is at the very bottom of the post.

I'd be interested to see the historical sales figures on the server side as well, given the oft-cited dominance of Linux in server environments.

<comment><USER6> It would also be interesting to see figures for the number of machines _in use_ by OS, instead of just sales by year. People replace their phones much more frequently than they do their PCs, but that doesn't mean they don't want their PCs or think that they can replace them with Android/iOS devices...

<comment><USER7> I agree, my current computer is three-to-four years old and I still use it on a daily basis. I've been through three phones in that amount of time. According to that logic I prefer my phone 3-to-1 over my computer yet if I had to choose I would drop the phone over the computer without thinking twice.

Plus, do the numbers account for saturation of the marketplace? PCs have been around for quite a while, Android and iOS have a much shorter lifespan with sales that have not peaked. I ask because I didn't read the article fully since I tend to avoid pronouncements such as "this thing here is dead!" we get every couple of months. Talk to me when PC sales have been trending seriously downward for five-to-ten years and then we can discuss the death of the platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uggh. All this is is another reminder about how close Commodore Business Machines was in the mid-late 80's at revolutionizing the PC industry and how they then dorked it up inexplicably.

Not seeing a whole lot of "falling" in the current PC industry, but then again a lot of companies in the early 80's were on top of the world.

</comment><comment><USER9> Seems to me the upward trending platforms are all qualitatively different from the crashed ones in that they're not crystallized the way those earlier, more console-type ones were. So this visualization doesn't seem particularly illuminating to me.

</comment><comment><USER10> Fall of PC platforms? I don't see any fall there, really, however much Horace wants it to be true.

The metric that matters is usage, obviously almost everyone has a PC and since most PCs sold in the last 5 years are capable to satisfying users without an upgrade, the fact that PCs are still selling in such a high volume doesn't bode well for the doomsday predictions by number-twisting bloggers.

For example, take the mobile vs. desktop browsing metric from StatCounter.

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww- monthly-2010...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww- monthly-201012-201112)

The mobile share is barely inching up to 8% over the whole of 2011. That doesn't really show a fall of PC unless it's a headline from a site that has a reputation of twisting statistics to push its agenda.

<comment><USER11> I also don't understand how he has PC has as its own category of data, yet separates out PCs such as the TRS-80.

I can't look it up in Wikipedia, but I don't recall how the TRS-80 or other Tandy machines would not be categorized as PCs, even if they also carry the label of micro-computer.

This comes off as another tired attempt to write yet another "The Death of" article that are common to talking heads.

Except for older people who never had a chance to acquire the basic intuition to operate a PC, I'm not aware of anyone who does not own a PC and at least one or many other non-PC devices.

I think it is best said that the PC market has simply matured.

<comment><USER12> "PC" in this sense refers specifically to the hardware platform descended from the IBM-PC, and traditionally running some variant of DOS or Windows.</comment></comment></comment>


Vapor 3.0.0 released - Swift web framework - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@codevapor/vapor-3-0-0-released-8356fa619a5d <comment><USER2> This is pretty exciting. Fully non-blocking based on SwiftNIO and using Codable throughout (for Parsing and serializing content from HTTP messages, creating database models, and rendering views according to the release notes) are the headline features for me. I had a quick look at the new documentation as well and it looks excellent.

When Swift was first released as open source the potential for using it server-side felt really intriguing, it's great to see how far along the community has come in such a fairly short time!

</comment><comment><USER3> I've built a handful of projects using vapor and it's been a great experience so far. Their slack is a great place for getting help and just talking with the community. Can't wait to use 3.0 now.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure this is great software and as quick as anyone needs, but their empty body plaintext benchmark leaves a bad taste. It's not just that with an empty body the results are even less relevant than typical "Hello World" benchmarks. It's the other frameworks that they picked:

In their own benchmark, Vapor is about as quick Gin, written in Go.

Looking at Techempower's latest web framework comparison [0], we see that Gin reaches only 27% the requests per second of the quickest tested framework, and 28% of the quickest framework written in Go.

[0] [http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r15&hw=p...](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r15&hw=ph&test=plaintext&l=sg)

<comment><USER5> To be fair, the entry for Go that is 3x faster than Gin isn't a framework, it's just an http handling library. But it's clear their benchmarks are not complete enough to be useful; it's unfortunate that Techempower's vapor tests are broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Swift is a brilliant environment. Always good to see more adoption for it.

[http://swift.org](http://swift.org)

I simplify it as an easier Rust that comes with an official REPL.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do you need a Mac to use this? The getting started guide says you need Xcode.

<comment><USER6> Ubuntu LTS is a first-class citizen for Swift, and some Linux distros have unofficial packages. It includes a cli application like many other frameworks do.</comment></comment>


Who is hiring AND offers 4+ weeks of vacation? - <AUTHOR>

I would "never" work for a company that only offers 10 days of vacation.  Please post links of companies offering 4+ weeks of vacation each year.  Here are two that I know of.
https://careers.blackbirdtech.com
http://woti.com/benefits.cfm <comment><USER2> _I would "never" work for a company that only offers 10 days of vacation_

That drastically reduces the number of companies you could work for. I have never had a problem with the number of vacation days. If you need more, just take unpaid days. If company A offers 4 weeks of vacation and company B offers 2 weeks, assuming everything else is equal, try to negotiate 4% more in pay to compensate for 1 paycheck's worth of unpaid vacation. I have always been able to negotiate at least 10% more than the initial offer for every job I took. This more than makes up for any lack of vacation days. I vacation a lot (e.g. 1 week Caribbean cruise, 4 days in Cancun, 5 days in Puerto Rico, 1 month in Philippines, 1 week Caribbean cruise again, Vegas for New Years, and a 3rd 1 week Caribbean Cruise within a 365 day period at a company that just offered 2 weeks paid vacation) and I just take unpaid days.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you. I created this thread because I keep hearing about companies that offer "unlimited vacation time" that ends up being under 15 days per year because of employee fear. Also, I am not looking for a job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In most of the EU 4 weeks is quite on the lower end. I have 28 days and I have friends who have 32-35 days/year (working days). This is one of the great benefits about living in Europe :).

</comment><comment><USER4> Mozilla Corporation. We're global, we're hiring, we offer four weeks PTO plus your birthday.

<http://www.mozilla.org/careers>

<comment><USER5> How does someone without any experience with web technologies, but with several years of experience with embedded systems programming, transition to a position that requires the array of skills listed in those job postings? This isn't directed only at mozilla, but all job postings that look for candidates with a very specific skill set.

<comment><USER4> The first answer that comes to mind is that our products are open source, and nothing gets our attention like fixing real bugs in our products. You can start with easy ones and learn at your own pace, with the help of other Mozilla developers as you need it. That also gives you a chance to evaluate the work you'd be doing as well as our community before you apply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To be honest going into job interviews with a sense of entitlement about paid vacation time would probably reflect poorly with potential employers.

We offer 3 weeks (fairly generous for Canada), but I would be extremely put off by a candidate who wanted to discuss vacation time first and foremost.

<comment><USER7> I would say that's _extremely common_ in Canada. Not sure what's worse, having a sense of entitlement as an employee, or thinking what you offer is above average as an employer.

Snarkiness aside..I have mixed feelings about your first point. Entitlement sucks, 100% agree with you there. Flip side, vacation is awesome on so many levels, I feel that there genuinely should be a push for more vacation time.

<comment><USER6> I'm actually a pretty big fan of the Netflix model - take as much as you need so long as you can get the job done. We just haven't worked out the logistics of that kind of thing yet.

Let's be honest, though. Technology work is highly team-based... it's not the company so much as your team that will be aggravated by excessive vacation time. I suspect that if we offered that type of model people would actually take LESS vacation - I don't have data to support this hypothesis, but I already know that most people don't actually use up their full allotment in a given year (in general, not just at our company).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I applied recently to Server Density (but was rejected). What attracted me was their job description offering "unlimited" vacation. But you actually get a bonus if you take _more_ than 5 weeks. I thought that was a good way to make sure people actually use their vacation time.

[http://blog.boxedice.com/2011/08/19/our-holiday-vacation- pol...](http://blog.boxedice.com/2011/08/19/our-holiday-vacation-policy- unlimited-with-bonuses/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I know Netflix has instated a flex vacation policy -- take as long as you need, but you have to get the job done first.

It depends on where you are looking to work? If you're looking to sign on with a startup hiring their first 5 employees, then you're against the odds. Most big American companies are the same way.

In all, it will depend on how good you are and how essential you are to the company. For the first year of employment at a 150 person firm, you may have to make do with 10 days. However, if your role is crucial to the company, negotiating 4 weeks of vacation should be easy.

As it stands right now, unless you're a god among men in your trade, you are replaceable, simply because they haven't hired you or even fallen in love with you in the interview process. I'd apply to a mid sized company you want to work for, and negotiate up for vacation. Everything's negotiable in hiring.

<comment><USER3> Flexible vacation sounds a lot like flexible salary, in my opinion. How do I know how much is reasonable? Also, how do you determine when the job is done, unless you have a very detailed to do list for the year? My job is never done, otherwise I'd be fired. Also, I hear people mentioning "taking 4 weeks in a row" as something quite rare.

<comment><USER10> from friends who have "unlimited" vacation situations I think it can turn into a bit of a guilt trip. Like, if you want to look good, you take very little. That being said, not sure if that's company culture or just workaholic friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The American Legacy Foundation in DC. Excellent pay, excellent benefits, and an excellent cause. Among other things, they are responsible for "The Truth" anti-smoking ad campaign.

I'm pretty sure they're looking for a python developer right now.

<http://www.legacyforhealth.org/>

</comment><comment><USER12> Australia. Our economy is booming and unemployment is arguably the lowest in the developed world. Plus the USD is on parity with the Aussie dollar. If you can get down here, do it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Pretty sure most large banks start at 4 weeks. But I just quit one, and I'd take 0 vacation days not to work there again (aka, surely this can't be the only thing you care about).

</comment><comment><USER13> This will be the shortest thread in HN history...

On serious note, I'm really not aware of a single one. I heard some

<comment><USER9> A similar point: I've never actually met someone who has 4 weeks of vacation to actually use all 4. Generally, when you work up to the point at a BigCo where you can command a larger vacation, it's hard to remove yourself from the day-to-day practices of work.

Plus, America has an embedded culture of trying to "outwork the competition" in everything we do, from sports, to academics, to the workplace.

It stems from the postwar era of growth where human hours logged in an office were the only drivers of progress. Obviously the world is different now, with the advent of the internet, but old habits die hard.

<comment><USER7> From what I understand, a company which allows employees to accumulate large pools of timeoff tend to have very unpleasant liabilities on their balance sheet. It is, I believe, a very serious liability (regardless of where you live, all places have very strict rules about it).

It's a lot like reward points. The initial programs didn't have expiry...after years, auditors warned them that they had billions in liabilities in unclaimed points.

In my experience, any company that gets a serious CFO or some outside accounting/auditing, is going to rectify their vacation problem pretty quickly

<comment><USER14> This happened at my previous job. They forced everyone to burn down the vacation time from their previous limit of 280 hours to 120. After that they instituted policies with a maximum of 180.

The issue is that it was _impossible_ to take vacation time. Even on vacation I was working 3 hours every day and during the normal workweek was 60-75 hours without overtime or rewarding the extra time.

Frankly, I think that the company should just have a bucket for PTO and put it in the bank and earn interest on it. The liability should be backed by actual dollars so it's not a serious financial risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Every company in every country in Europe.

</comment><comment><USER16> Mount Sinai Hospital/School of Medicine -- NYC

</comment><comment><USER17> poor workaholics ... get help!</comment>


Ask HN: How to motivate a non-technical cofounder - <AUTHOR>

I've been building a basic CRM system for a specific industry that my co-founder and I have experience in. The problem is that he feels bad because I've been doing all the work developing the site. I've showed him earlier threads on HN about what non-technical co-founders can do to help out but I can't seem to motivate him to the point where he's just as excited about our software as I am. I'm counting on him to handle the sales/marketing part of the business once we launch while I continue developing and adding new features, I'm just worried he's not going to be enthusiastic enough to acquire customers.<p>There's plenty for him to do right now, but I still found myself putting together a list of potential leads the other day. How can I motivate him to get started on the business tasks like building lead lists and other non technical things? <comment><USER2> It's his job to figure out how he can help. He's supposed be a self-starting entrepreneurial animal right?

There's absolutely always something that can be done. Even if it only moves you forward 0.01% it's still worth doing. Even if he needs to learn a new skill so he can help more that's what he should be doing.

That said, it can be hard. The early days are usually very tech heavy. It's not reasonable to expect that he's really creating 50% of the value right now. But he can put in a roughly equal amount of effort.

</comment><comment><USER3> Personally, I'd have a serious discussion with him. I am a non-technical co- founder, and I can't stop finding things to do.

Some pain now might save you a lot of pain later.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to talk with him and I've been trying to send him all kinds of articles about startups and entrepreneur advice. I can tell he's just beginning to get interested in startups, whereas i've been following startups for a few years now. I'm trying to ignite that spark in him...he's just a little behind

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It could be that he looks at all the things that need to be done, goes "Aw crap. Where do I even start?" and then gets frustrated and overwhelmed, leading to inaction and the subsequent guilt over inaction.

In the non-profit I run, I find that I have to come up with a list of things that need to get done; then I sit down with my board members and volunteers and we prioritize and then divvy out tasks. It takes some time, and my board members are still not particularly good at taking action when needed, though they're getting a lot better), but all of our stuff ends up getting done more or less where/when it should.

The other possibility is that he realizes he's in way over his head and wants to go back to something safer/less demanding.

It seems like you're pretty loyal to this fellow and that you want to keep him around. The thing to do, I think, would be to give him a more concrete sense of direction and see how he responds to that. If he doesn't respond well, then it might be time to have a frank discussion with him and to search for someone else to fill that role.

</comment><comment><USER5> Honestly, if you have to motivate him to do work why would you want him as a cofounder? He should be self motivated. All successful business people are.

I'm currently building a website with a designer. If he wants credit, he has to do some work. It should be the same way for your cofounder. In life it's 90% effort and 10% luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want him as a co-founder because we came up with the idea together and I'm not going to be able to do everything by myself. He has an accounting degree so he will be dealing with all the financial aspects of the business too

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, the accounting degree is solving a problem that you won't, unfortunately, have unless your partner becomes motivated and productive quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He doesn't really want to start and grow a company.</comment>


11 Foot 8 – The Can-opener Bridge - <AUTHOR> http://11foot8.com/ <comment><USER2> The Sidney Harbor Tunnel had a similar problem. They came up with an elaborate but successful solution.[1] There are detectors and huge flashing warning signs that light up. Then, there's the last-chance sign. At the entrance to the tunnel, pumps force a curtain of water straight down across the entire roadway. Then a powerful laser system projects a giant octagonal red STOP sign onto the water curtain, filling the entire height of the tunnel opening. That's in addition to the six red traffic lights, flashing red Xs above each lane, and a big STOP with a flashing frame above the tunnel mouth.

That was expensive, but after someone wedged an oversized truck into the tunnel, blocking it for three weeks, it was worth it. Gets tripped about 18 times a year.

[1] [https://youtu.be/pRKA7m-tbqM](https://youtu.be/pRKA7m-tbqM)

<comment><USER3> Why cant they put a swinging bar at the tunnel height some distance before the tunnel? The bar knocks the top of the truck and wakes up whoever is driving to the fact that the truck is too tall.

<comment><USER4> Or a wedge barrier: [https://eci-illinois.com/wedge-barrier-versus-medium- size-tr...](https://eci-illinois.com/wedge-barrier-versus-medium-size-truck- wedge-barrier-wins/)

<comment><USER5> i think the point is to prevent damage to trucks, not to completely destroy them

<comment><USER4> For a major tunnel like this, you'd rather prevent damage / long-term obstruction of the tunnel.

<comment><USER6> A technology meant to kill suicide bombers might be a little much for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What's beautiful about the 11 Foot 8 bridge is that quietly it's been a constant in my life. I distinctly remember watching the videos over a decade ago on this YT Channel: [https://www.youtube.com/user/yovo68](https://www.youtube.com/user/yovo68)

There's an element of schadenfreude that's so compelling in watching ordinary situations go terribly wrong.

<comment><USER7> They even added another 8 inches, but the trucks still hits it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPt4ijPFzc8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPt4ijPFzc8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So far the best solution I've seen to this sort of thing (other than building a taller bridge) is the waterfall approach. Probably a bit spensie for some rando railroad bridge but it's clever nonetheless.

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1008464/Amazing...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1008464/Amazing- water-curtain-Stop-sign.html)

<comment><USER9> I've often seen large gates with hanging chains at the maximal height just before low bridges and tunnels. Wouldn't that also be pretty efficient, reliable and not requiring any maintenance? I suppose having an obstacle spring in front of you would be even more likely to make you stop, but if you're still going when some chains hit the top of your vehicle you deserve to have your license suspended anyway.

<comment><USER10> The trouble with 11foot8 in particular is that it's right on the intersection, so through traffic passing by the bridge without going under it would hit the chains as well.

<comment><USER11> But that bridge in Australia isn't on an intersection. There's plenty of room for a hanging bar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They ought to make it _lower_ , so it's most obvious that a truck won't fit. Make it no more than 2metres, whatever that is in American, so that only cars can go through.

<comment><USER13> This is America. People have pickup trucks that have been raised to a height above 2m (about 6'6" in American)

<comment><USER12> And thus the presumably unstoppable forces meets the immovable object.

<comment><USER14> Is the goal to reduce crashes or increase them?

<comment><USER12> The goal is to protect the bridge behind the barrier.

<comment><USER15> Is it? Shouldn't the goal be to protect the driver?

<comment> globular-toast If the goal was to protect the driver then the bridge would be removed. The bridge carries a railway so many more lives are at stake if it's damaged.

<comment><USER14> Sure more lives are at stake, but I think the probability of physical harm to them is pretty low because

a) The bridge has been hit tons of times, and I don't think anyone in a train has been hurt yet.

b) The bridge is probably a lot stronger than the truck, so while the bridge may take damage and need to be repaired, the damage is probably not enough to harm train traffic.

c) If the bridge is damaged enough to harm train traffic, there's probably not a train coming immediately; any on-route trains can be likely stopped before they reach the bridge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Boston is home to any number of bridges that trucks don't fit under, most famously on Storrow Drive.

Rating truck/bridge interactions has become a bit of a past time on universalhub:

[https://www.universalhub.com/storrow](https://www.universalhub.com/storrow)

Every year when college students move back in and out, the powers that be put up illuminated construction signs _everywhere_ to try to keep the number of rental trucks on roads they shouldn't be to a minimum. They're mostly successful.

<comment><USER17> I drove a box truck (most often Penske/Ryder rentals just like the ones you see in this video) around most of the nation for a job when I was younger. The only two cities I had real trouble with clearances were Boston and Chicago. New York City was also a pain but for different and obvious reasons.

I suspect if it hasn't happened yet a decent commercial software solution would be to produce an app that took OSM and overlay all of the bridges with clearances in major cities into it so that you could route around them after entering your height. I specifically remember doing a lot of reversing back up streets in Chicago because nothing like that existed at the time (this was in the early 2010s).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How about something counter-intuitive: _lower_ the limit? There is a built-in hard limit imposed by the structure itself. Set the marked limit to something well short of that, like 8 feet. Then add very obvious soft barriers like light swinging bars to indicate the lower boundary. That would encourage anyone driving anything that might actually hit the hard limit to take an alternate route. (Of course, that means there actually needs to be a realistic alternate route.)

<comment><USER19> " it's not practical here. There are many overheight trucks that have to be able to drive right up to the bridge and turn onto Peabody St. in order to deliver supplies to several restaurants. Making Peabody St inaccessible from Gregson St would make the restaurant owners and the delivery drivers very unhappy." [1]

at the end of the it seems most of the trucks are often Rental Trucks drive by people that likely should not be driving a large truck in the first place. In the US you do not need a CDL or special endorsement to rent many of these UHaul type trucks since they do not have Air Brakes, all you need is a normal operators license.

[1][http://11foot8.com/11foot8-faq/](http://11foot8.com/11foot8-faq/)

<comment><USER20> I think the parent comment may be suggesting to low the limit on the bridge even more, like adding a wall to the underside of it, so that it's obvious nothing higher than normal cars or perhaps a large van would fit.

Then again, maybe a large portion of the crashes are from people who forget they're driving a truck, so that might just make the carnage worse...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My all-time favorite picture for this situation is:

       ON THE ROAD TO SUCCESS,
       THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/c7fpl6/on_the_road_to...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/c7fpl6/on_the_road_to_success_there_are_no_shortcuts/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Sadly its the 12 foot 4 Bridge now, and its snacks are much lighter.

</comment><comment><USER23> Another one from Melbourne, Aus

[https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com/](https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> What is so special about this bridge? Why do people drive under it without checking their height? You wouldn't normally think you can just drive under any bridge, would you?

It doesn't even look like a very low bridge. Why do people approach it without a care in the world at full speed?

My vehicle is only 2m tall and I still do take a quick look at height signs as I approach them.

<comment><USER25> According to the Wikipedia article [0], the bridge is very old and does not meet current clearance standards:

> It was designed in the 1920s, and opened in 1940, with a clearance for > vehicles of 11 feet 8 inches (3.56 m). This was a standard height at the > time it opened. The standard clearance, since 1973, has a minimum height of > 14 feet (4.3 m), which is 2 feet 4 inches (0.71 m) higher than the bridge as > built.

I imagine most trucks are built to be just under 14 feet so that fitting under bridges is not usually an issue.

Another thing I've noticed watching some of these videos is that most of the accidents are rental trucks. Presumably many of these drivers have never driven a truck in their lives and ignore clearance warnings out of habit.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk_Southern–Gregson_Stree...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk_Southern–Gregson_Street_Overpass)

<comment><USER26> I ruined the top of a rental truck. It wasn't bridge it was a tree overhanging the street. Partly because the tree was not directly overhead like a bridge I didn't notice it was too low and all I was trying to do is park the truck so I was going slow but yea, smashed the top of the truck. Truck Rental company says it happens at least one a month.

[https://photos.app.goo.gl/Q6QS9Uy3HNijYXEt7](https://photos.app.goo.gl/Q6QS9Uy3HNijYXEt7)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This problem is already solved. The steel beam rakes off any overheight bits allowing the trucks to pass through.

<comment><USER28> Thank you so much for this. Very well delivered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The maximum standard height for a vehicle is 4 metres in Europe. All E-routes in Europe require that bridges and tunnels can clear at least 4 metres, otherwise they cannot get designated with the E-route. Is there a similar concept of safe routes for lorries and buses in the US?

<comment><USER30> Interstates?

<comment><USER29> Do they have a requirement for bridge/tunnel heights? I recall an American trucker telling me that such a requirement did not exist in the US, but he could have been mistaken.

<comment><USER19> America is a collection of thousands of jurisdictions that all have authority based on who is paying for the road.

Interstates are controlled by the Federal Highway Commission and must meet Federal Highway standards as the federal government generally pays for them

State Routes are controlled by State Regulations

County Routes are controlled by County Regulations

City Routes are controlled by City Regulations

There is zero standard that is applied universally. This is is viewed by some as a negative personally I prefer the federalist system over a central authority

Most State and Federal routes do have Minimum Heights, though exceptions can be made, one thing we often see in the US not remeasuring the surface, there have been more than a few time where the height is reported as X but that measurement was decades old and several resurfacing layers had been added to the real height is lower. Or the road pitches to one side and someone measured the highest side not the low side

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why not place an arch before the bridge that will impact but not damage vehicles going through? This exists in the entrance to most parking garages.

Edit: like this [https://www.jpsiteexperts.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/cle...](https://www.jpsiteexperts.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/04/clearance-bars-7-1024x7681.jpg)

<comment><USER32> Placing an obstacle between the bridge and the intersection would be fairly pointless, because once you hit it, it would be too late to stop before hitting the bridge.

(EDIT: in addition, a hanging warning sign would have to be suspended from something. My guess is any such structure would need to be made very sturdy and expensive, or else it would just get knocked down and increase the hazard to pedestrians and property when somebody hits the sign at significant speed.)

Placing the obstacle anywhere else would impede vehicles that aren't trying to go under the bridge.

<comment><USER33> Look at the video. Such a structure already exists. There is a yellow beam meant to protect the bridge right in front of it. It probably does most of the can openjng to spare the bridge

<comment><USER32> The parent commenter asked for something that would "impact but not damage" vehicles, and the protective beam undoubtedly fails at that purpose.

<comment><USER33> There's an intersection right before the bridge - the beam is already at the "warning" location to protect the bridge. Bridge strikes arent' cheap and train companies HATE closing bridges for any reason (including replacing them).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> You have to wonder how much it would cost to dig that out two feet and solve the problem. Likely a lot less than the annual capital destruction.

<comment><USER32> That's answered by the FAQ: [http://11foot8.com/11foot8-faq/](http://11foot8.com/11foot8-faq/)

> Can't the road be lowered?

> That would be prohibitively expensive because a sewer main runs just a few > feet below the road bed. That sewer main also dates back about a hundred > years and, again, at the time there were no real standards for minimum > clearance for railroad underpasses.

<comment><USER34> Ah ok, thank you for clarifying that. So that leaves the next best option: remove it from all navigation systems, that way at least the route will be only used by locals familiar with the situation and all other traffic would automatically detour around it.

<comment><USER35> Alternatively, mark it as a classified military base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Slightly related, a now famous bus/car trap in Stockholm that became a short documentary: [https://www.svtplay.se/video/17480166/sparviddshinder](https://www.svtplay.se/video/17480166/sparviddshinder) (only in Swedish, but should be viewable globally)

<comment><USER37> With english subtitles: [https://vimeo.com/425030709](https://vimeo.com/425030709)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> There's also an excellent sub for this and many other "can openers" as well as assorted "cans" getting opened -

[https://old.reddit.com/r/11foot8/](https://old.reddit.com/r/11foot8/)

</comment><comment><USER39> I used to work really close to where this bridge is at my last job and many of my coworkers had worked in offices even closer previously. Supposedly, every time there was a crash people would rush to observe what happened even though it was a fairly common occurrence.

The bridge is located in a kinda odd space to do construction. While I imagine it's possible to retrofit or dig it to be deeper, it likely would have been really inconvenient to the adjacent businesses.

<comment><USER40> They actually raised the bridge another 8 inches recently. The 11foot8 channel covered a lot of the work being done and stuff.... and the 12foot4 bridge still gets new victims from time to time, just less often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I live a block away from a can-opener bridge. We haven't had anything since quarantine, but there's usually two or three trucks a year that get stuck in it. We had one week where there were two trucks and a bus.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/9hbbbr1xl53e8u3/77EFF5A4-D593-4FB8...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/9hbbbr1xl53e8u3/77EFF5A4-D593-4FB8-A925-7B40DDDC1863.jpeg?dl=0)

<comment><USER42> my favorite was the RV that went through... slowed way down, decided he was good... just fit, but then the A/C on the end got caught and popped off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'd hate to be a truck rental company near that thing.

Random weekend movers peeling the tops off your fleet.

I'd have free-take-one warning maps with a big red X at the checkout counter.

<comment><USER44> IME, typically damage to the roof of rental trucks is not covered by standard insurance.

I briefly worked for a Budget in Canada once upon a time and they always reminded people not to take the truck through a drive thru.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> For the greater good they should install something that makes a lot of noise but doesn't damage the car say 5m before before the hard hit. Maybe fine $100 per soft hit to pay for it? They can say well we've just saved you a lot more!

<comment><USER46> They have flashing lights that go off if your vehicle is too tall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I love the sub reddit too

[https://www.reddit.com/r/11foot8/](https://www.reddit.com/r/11foot8/)

</comment><comment><USER48> Someone pls tell me why they are not suspending a light swinging plank 11'8" above the ground at some point ahead of the bridge.

<comment><USER49> Because it's right after an intersection

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Does anyone know their method (and how it has evolved over the years) for detecting a crash from the raw feed?

<comment><USER42> Not 100% on this but I think I remember reading that they just look at the audio and then look at the video near the sharp peaks

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is what I love about the Internet. "Feed the Canopener" links to his Patreon. Hahahaha.

</comment><comment><USER52> Make every truck stop before it's able to pass under.

</comment><comment><USER53> Durham represent!

</comment><comment><USER54> Why dont they make the road dip down a smidge?

<comment><USER55> Water and sewer pipes run under that road I heard.

They ended up raising the bridge 8".

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> How quaint, naming a web site in the 21st century after those atavistic imperial units.

</comment><comment><USER57> Still not high enough. They raised it another 8 inches to make it an even 12ft not too long ago, but evidently that _still_ not enough.

One would think they would've looked more closely at the traffic on that road and adjusted it accordingly.

It's also really silly to have a sign indicating that too large vehicles must turn, which most drivers won't read/see in time, and practically force them to crash into the bridge, instead of having some sort of 'bumpers' ahead of the bridge for those vehicles to bump into first (I've seen those at entrances of parking lots that have both above ground and underground parking).

<comment><USER24> You make it sound like it's normal that people would expect that they can drive into a bridge without checking the height first - as if it's the bridge's fault for being too low. Why don't the drivers check?

<comment><USER34> Because they're not used to driving trucks. Modern light weight cargo vehicles accelerate and brake as though they are personal cars. Spend an hour or two behind the wheel of one and you're liable to forget that you have this huge box behind you that extends well over the height of the cab, the part that is in your immediate field of view. It takes some serious situational awareness to keep that at the front of your thoughts when driving an unfamiliar vehicle on unfamiliar roads.

The basic assumption people make is that the roads they know or that are indicated by their navigator are the roads that they can drive on. I don't recall even if my navigator has a way of setting the vehicle height, I should check that.

<comment><USER24> Isn't the first and last thing anyone driving a tall vehicle is told that they should check the height of bridges before going under them?

<comment><USER34> Absolutely. And then you do it for a couple of hours concentrating on the road and driving the car between the lines nicely widthwise and you'll forget it when you need it most.

I've done a lot of driving, some of it boxtrucks and larger and when you switch vehicles it is a thing that you need to remind yourself of _constantly_. The easiest solution would be to dig that road out to standard depth, the next best would be to drop it from all navigation systems so that at least people that do not know about it won't try to use it.

<comment><USER58> Somewhat related to this is the problem of children being left in hot/cold cars accidentally.

When our son was very young (< 2 years old), my girlfriend/wife was usually the one to take him to daycare in the morning. Occasionally she would have to leave for work early or was running late and would ask me to take him instead. This seemed to me to be a perfect storm to have him left behind in the car when I went to work: not used to having him there, I might drive directly to work "on autopilot" and get out and leave him asleep in his car seat.

I often wondered if this was at the heart of kids being left in hot cars.

Anyway, I forced myself to get into the habit of always turning around and checking that the car seat was empty before getting out the car, every single time, just in case.

Of course, it never happened, but I can see how easy it is to forget stuff like this when you're simply not used to doing it.

<comment><USER59> That's exactly why it happens so often. Most of us live (well, until recently lived) lives of quiet routine, and a quiet child in the back seat is surprisingly easy to overlook when that's not your routine.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Richard Feynman - The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgaw9qe7DEE

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the amazing videos I have seen in my life. Learned a lot from it. Its amazing how a scientist such as Richard Feynman talks about his father for being the reason were he stands now!</comment>


How I hacked my sleep - <AUTHOR> http://blog.yannick.io/misc/2013/09/12/how-i-hacked-my-sleep.html <comment><USER2> An interesting presentation from Alex Koppel is available online on the subject:

video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jQRuSjVeu0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jQRuSjVeu0) slidedeck: [http://fr.slideshare.net/koppel/sleep-rulu- presentation](http://fr.slideshare.net/koppel/sleep-rulu-presentation)

HTH.

</comment><comment><USER3> Light is important. As little as 0.5 lux shining under your Door could be enough to suppress your pituitary from releasing hormones, if it is otherwise dark in your room and the duration is longer than an hour. You actually have a whole other set of receptors that aren't involved in vision but instead signal your pituitary. Also, getting light during the day is part of this signaling as well. The strongest reaction is from 470nm light, but there is some effect from ~500nm to ~450nm. (To me, 470nm light looks like the really deep blue sky on a perfectly cloudless day.)

Don't just depend on f.lux! You're probably still shining the wrong kind of light directly into your eyes. I put on blue blocking glasses an hour after sundown, but it's just best to limit your screen use at night. (There's a pair of $8 Uvex safety goggles that do a good job with blue light. They still let in a little green, however.)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is what my Basis band keeps telling me to do; it's surprisingly difficult (especially so over the holidays).

If you're going to do this, you need your significant other to agree that it's important and join in, which probably means (for owlish programmers living with larkish partners) picking a regular sleep schedule that comes completely unnaturally to you. :(

</comment><comment><USER5> 1\. Use the word "hacked" incorrectly in the title 2\. Write a one-phrase blog post 3\. Submit to Hacker News 4\. ...

<comment><USER6> 1\. do not understand a joke 2. Comment on HN to tell that to the world 3. Think the poster is the blog owner

<comment><USER7> 1\. Author must be a very funny guy. 2. Commenting is part of the HN concept. 3. Author is super smart too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow HN. So much sleep. Very zzz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My supposed hack is using [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.sweetlygeek...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.sweetlygeek.sleepytime) to calculate the best time to wake up.

</comment><comment><USER9> Go to bed at 4am, wake up at 12pm. I like this system.

<comment><USER3> If you don't control light in your bedroom or correctly use a quality blindfold, research shows you could still be trashing your sleep related hormones. From 6 to 12, you have a lot of daylight to block, and just a little bit is enough to mess with you. Also, your body was designed for a year-round average of 12 hours of reduced light.

I've considered a similar schedule. Lots of potential drawbacks to it.</comment></comment>


San Francisco May Pay Dearly for Renaming Army Street (1995) - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/San-Francisco-May-Pay-Dearly-For-Renaming-Army-3047978.php <comment><USER2> Fun anecdote about the unintended consequences.

<comment><USER3> ... especially considering the recent revelations about corruption in SF Public Works:

[https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/Corru...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/Corruption- investigation-means-ethics-training-15102957.php)</comment></comment>


Amazon, not the developer, will set app prices for its Android App store - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-android-app-store-pricing-2011-1

<comment><USER2> to me, it's just more proof amazon will be working with telco to lock-in android devices to their market, exclusively.</comment>


The Paris attacks did not take place - <AUTHOR> http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/11/paris-attack-place-151122121442263.html <comment><USER3> This is a bad article really. After reading it I'm none the wiser as to what 'hyperreality' and 'simulacra' actually mean in this context. I can make guesses, but the author doesn't explain his central concepts and fails to build a case around them. Am I wrong to expect much clear writing and a developed argument from a university professor? Or is the price of admission to this article a familiarity with Baudrillard's work?

<comment><USER4> It's post-modernism. The author doesn't know what it means, and if he's a fan of Wittgenstein he'd probably argue that there's no point in even looking for meaning in it.

<comment><USER5> "To challenge and to cope with this paradoxical state of things, we need a paradoxical way of thinking; since the world drifts into delirium, we must adopt a delirious point of view. We must no longer assume any principle of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm."

Great idea, Baudrillard. Reality has become confusing, therefore, let's act like retards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Media necessarily presents an abstraction of reality to the viewer. However, the pervasive and distributed nature of information gathering and dissemination in the Internet age opens that abstraction up to people in a way that simply wasn't possible when all media was "black boxes" (television, radio, newspaper, etc.) Media now encompasses people uploading footage to Youtube from their phones in the middle of a war zone.

The premise of Baudrillard's argument as I understand it - that the model of reality created by media is useless fiction and propaganda, which must, one assumes, be rejected out of hand as postmodernists seem to want to do - <USER2> possibly become more tenuous over time. Although some would (and do) assert that the fabrication of reality by corporate and government interests has only exploded exponentially and become even more pervasive, and that the appearance of fine-grained truth presented by social media is, itself, only a more elaborate set of lies.

This phenomenon, by which reality is described through abstractions and attempts at narrative, is everywhere - and it's arguably unavoidable, given that the very nature of human consciousness is a post-hoc hallucination generated by the unreliable narrator that is the brain. Should science dismiss all of its theories as incredulous nonsense because its models are falsifiable? Of course not, because even imperfect models can be useful. What exactly are we to be left with, if we must reject abstraction? We cannot reject it, we are it.

It is likely true, however, that for many people the rest of the world exists primarily in the form of a set of packaged narratives or curated experiences presented on an electronic screen or a device. There is also possibly a discussion worth having on the ever-shifting definitions of "war" and "terrorism" and just and unjust conflict in the modern age, because to an extent, the arbiters of these definitions exist as ghosts in the machine.

Unfortunately, I had to wade through the cesspool of comments in the linked article and the Wikipedia page on Jean Beaudrillard to even get a superficial idea of what it was even talking about. The degree of contempt this article appears to have for the lay reader only makes it likely most of the discussion around it is going to be complaints about how difficult it is to understand.

</comment><comment><USER7> I believe there is a difference between hyperbole and outright falsities. No excellence of academia redeems a statement like "The Paris attacks did not take place." I'd argue that any kind of academic appreciation of these false statements, in postmodern reflections on hyper-reality, say more about the hyper-reality that academia seems to dwell in, particularly in the non- technical sciences like sociology and philosophy. For reasons of lack of rigor, it's easier for these specious "worldly" reflections to dwell in the non-technical sciences, than lets say Chemistry, Biology, Math or Physics. Need I say more about how I feel on the (dis)merits of this article...

</comment><comment><USER8> A dumb but legitimate philosophical reflection. The only interesting and surprising thing about this article is Al Jazeera choosing an exceptionally disingenuous title.</comment>