CAD Is a Lie: Generative Design to the Rescue - <AUTHOR> http://lineshapespace.com/generative-design/ <comment><USER2> Note: This is an Autodesk blog marketing an Autodesk product.

The funny thing is it leaves parametric modeling completely out of the discussion. That is, modeling based on pre-designed components that the end user then configures and lays out per the design intent.

This amplifies the productivity of a person doing the modeling quite a bit.

Granted, this works only in areas with fairly well understood problem and solution spaces and is a bit different than the approach described in the article.

Just to point out it's not a review article in general, but a marketing piece.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but the vision of the article is bob on. This is how things are going to be (source: usually being right)

<comment><USER4> Of course it's right. But will it be right in 2 years or 25?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> That white thing is a Frisbee, but it's only a little line. How the heck did it know?

There's a joke, it goes like this: A physicist, an engineer and a guru were asked what, in their opinion, is the greatest miracle in nature.

The physicist said it was quantum entanglement.

The engineer said he most admired the way human hands are articulated.

The guru said "the thermos".

Why the thermos, the guru was asked, of all things in nature?

"It keeps warm things warm and cold things cold", the guru said. "That little bottle! How does it _know_?"

</comment><comment><USER6> Well yes and no.

This tech is SUPER cool. It can find strength / weight combinations that are very difficult to arrive at via the standard analytic means. That's worth a lot in some contexts.

However, these structures do not map well to existing manufacturing. They do map extremely well to additive manufacturing, of which ordinary 3D printing is a core component.

CAD continues to segment:

The very high end of CAD is serving the major vertical markets, and typically what happens there is tech like this will get licensed, reverse engineered, duplicated, whatever and integrated into a greater whole ecosystem that goes well beyond geometry create.

Middle, or ordinary CAD, is being used for all sorts of stuff, and people don't mind a bit longer workflow, or missing out on some features. They want an effective tool at a great price, and their access to manufacturing tends to be as mainstream as the CAD is.

On the low end, CAD is being used for maker / hobby tasks, and a whole lot of experimental type work. This tech is something to come out of that, and it's currently being supplied to the mid or mainstream CAD market by a vendor looking to move up and own more of the stack.

Whether that's successful or not remains to be seen. There is a lot of legacy data, operations, systems that just can't be ripped out. Users of those systems may well adopt this feature in whatever system it's present in, and simply move the resulting geometry to the larger system, perhaps automate doing that too, and move on.

<comment><USER7> The article briefly touches on the manufacturing issue: "lets designers describe the forces that act on an object and then lets computers go off and make it. These forces can be structural loads or even manufacturing methods."

<comment><USER6> It does, and not the scale of things, this is early, with really great advances to come. New manufacturing methods will help too. Additive is very well matched.

I'm watching this closely. Additive, weaving, composites, nano scale, all are converging into a space that looks a lot more organic than what we do for the most part today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> AIs may routinely design things in the future, but it'll be a while. Before that happens, people will be doing CAD in VR. VR is going to be a much bigger force for change in the CAD industry than AI for the next few years.

I think anyone who has used an HTC Vive or Oculus Touch will agree that VR with tracked controllers is an order of magnitude improvement over monitor+mouse+keyboard for both viewing and creating three dimensional objects.

<comment><USER9> I'm quite curious myself. Although, working at a place where we have 3D video walls with head tracking for quite some time you still can call me a sceptic.

We only use them for presentations, the reason imo is that mechanical CAD modeling is really not just about creating 3D representations. An engineer works on math, tables (excel is big in engineering), enterprise resource management systems (you look up available material, prices, etc.), PIM software and of course the browser. You switch between them a lot. As far I can tell, the resolution of both Oculus and HTC Vive isn't suited for editing larger texts or tables efficiently.

Time (or better the VR industry) will solve this issue, but even then I'd argue many engineers prefer hand drawn sketches to support their thinking or for communicating ideas with their colleagues.

While I'm sceptic concerning the use of VR for every day engineering, I believe it will be fantastic to let non-engineers explore designs. Like a production worker analyzing a design for assembly friendliness, where he can take apart the design without learning the right mouse-keyboard interactions or get used to a 3d motion controllers. Which, from my experience, is a huge barrier to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm interested in the future of CAD. Here's a link to implicitCAD[0], a constraint-solving CAD written in Haskell. There's interesting discussion; apparently what the author was trying to was proven by academic research to be Very Hard. Research he hadn't yet read!

I've never done CAD, so I have nothing to contribute. I enjoyed the article!

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9248174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9248174)

<comment><USER6> Constraint solvers and geometry kernels are big, very expensive, beasts of software. They have grown over the decades, bit by bit, research yielding new approaches, as well as empirical, "Hey, I couldn't make this." use cases contributing to a very smart body of code with millions of man hours in it.

Setting this tech aside, I would still classify CAD as an unsolved problem space. Even advanced kernels can and do fail, or generate erroneous geometry on what one would think is a common, or simple use case.

That said, we are getting really good at basic geometry now. Those basic cases are much fewer and far between with most users just seeing robust operation now. It's taken many years for this to happen, marking time at the dawn of affordable solid modeling CAD in the mid 90's.

Now, it's about getting computers to do what people can do, and that's infer intent as we do with our minds eye and analytic skill. It's also continuing to be about feature create, and that's all about how to boil down the UX of shape and intent description to the system. Also quite challenging.

This kind of thing, as a branch in the "what's possible with CAD?" tree is pretty damn exciting! There are going to be a whole class of great use cases for this in the near future.

Bear in mind, old feature create means and methods almost never die. They get sidelined, used less, whatever, but they continue to exist because there continue to be use cases they are excellent for.

A lot of people think, "replace" when the real questions should be, "Add to, and what new things can we do?"

<comment><USER11> CAD will never be a solved problem space because ultimately it's the wrong problem space.

The name of the blog shows why. The CAD problem space is an extension of "lines" as the design medium. It's implicitly premised on humans in the loop and creating human interpretible as a precursor to the artifact. There's an intermediate step that isn't strictly necessary and the CAD problem lives in that intermediate step.

To put it another way, if I want a widget and I have the GCode and a 3D printer I'm pretty much done. I've bypassed the CAD space and more importantly it doesn't matter whether the GCode was generated via a DWG at some point or a computer program generated it directly without human intervention after searching through a million images from the internet.

That kind of approach, however, is a problem for companies like Autodesk because without humans in the loop their product lines are obsolescent and Wall Street unhappy with management. The CAD industry depends on continuous rather than quantum change, because the obvious quantum change eliminates seats and with it per seat revenue models.

<comment><USER12> You're talking about a very simple widget. Autodesk is used by a huge number of companies for simple 2D drawings and complex systems.

You can't give your client a back of the napkin, hand sketched drawing in every case. You won't get your GCode without being able to see a drawing of what you're trying to manufacture. CAD beats out hand drawn sketches in almost every situation when it comes to manufacturing.

<comment><USER11> When a computer can generate instructions to automatically fabricate the artifact, there is no client. There's simply a user. Autodesk's business is selling to people whose business requires the expert-client relationship.

That step is as necessary as an 80 column punch card entry team.

<comment><USER6> We are a very long way from this.

You are correct in that rule based design works, but we don't really have AI yet. We have AI like systems, but they currently do not perform at the level needed to be a serious replacement.

Someday, maybe. It's going to be an awful long time.

For now, say the next 20 years, it's going to be about making CAD accessible to more people and integrating it with other systems. Right now, today, when that is done, the payoffs are huge, but so are the investments.

<comment><USER11> I'm advocating precedent based design, not rule based. The Acropolis masons didn't have rules, they had examples.

BTW, I have found it really hard to get out of the habit of thinking about the production of artifacts in terms of contemporary practice...to think of design as a place where middlemen lurk. But in reality, a homeowner's first choice is, to a first approximation, building sans plans or permits.

<comment><USER6> First, there are things like buildings and infrastructure, and there are mechanical parts, devices, etc...

By example could work for some things today. Often, template or start parts are the basis for those. And that's been going on, like you say, for some time. We don't actually need CAD to do that, though we do have a high communications burden without it. We could invest in those comms, dumbing down a lot of stuff too.

But, there is no way in hell that sweet spot can replace design and engineering. The liabilities alone keep it off the table, and the problem space is absolutely huge too.

As another person here said, "not in my lifetime."

You know, I worked with some people who build yachts. Lots of old world skill in that building. They can, if desired, just build a nice boat with nothing more than the tools and materials in the shop.

They bought CAD from me that day, and the owner expressed what you are here too.

Turns out, good design and engineering makes better boats in both the subjective sense and objective performance, physics sense. And communication allows for faster, less error prone boats too.

You are describing a distant, potential future. We have no where near the level of tech, not development as people needed to actualize that.

CAD is part of that journey. With it, advanced products, structures, etc... are all possible, but the work involved is still insane.

I've seen and been a part of the development of systems that do this, and even on trivial parts there is a whole lot to be accounted for.

The bars we have in place, that differentiate engineering from design, permits to build, geological studies and other various impact studies all regulate the building of things that people depend on and that they must trust.

We have those in place for really good reasons, and one of those is the fact that we just don't have mastery as a species. Not yet.

All I here is, "dang, it costs money to do it right", and "why can't I just copy my neighbor?"

The answer lies in the complexity of the world and the dynamics of the people here in it.

Nice vision, but good luck with that.

For now, I suspect the more productive answer is to continue making CAD smarter and more accessible to ordinary people. We don't yet live in a Lego brick world, and I suspect human creativity will drive that being the case for the forseeable future.

<comment><USER11> There's a great deal of cultural and economic history attached to yachts.

So lets look at web pages. An end user with no technical training in networking, graphics engines, operating systems etc. can generate sophisticated artifacts with minimal input from a computer. Sure, it's not a "yacht" but its functional.

I've been in AEC for almost 30 years. I've built, designed, and regulated buildings through three recessions. What has kept software from eating design is the economics of piece work. There's no way to scale except linearly and the cyclic nature of the industry puts a natural cap on that.

Typist used to be a career.

<comment><USER6> I've had that same dialog and result across a wide variety of diciplines. The yacht people came to mind from the comments here.

I'm not really going to equate Web pages in the way you are attempting. The parallels are far too coarse and fail to be inclusive enough to make for meaningful discussion.

The idea of, it's worked before, so do it again is a good idea. But there are a lot of limits to doing that safely that are just not being considered here.

In a vacuum, "I need this thing", or even, "this building" doing that can make sense. I know a guy who has applied roughly these kinds of ideas to things like parking garages. My experience is more electromechanical, but there are strong parallels.

I will agree we may be closer on the AEC side of things. Design can often be less of a factor, but there still is all the analysis and verification on significant structures. For minor league things, are we not mostly there? A lot can be done without CAD and that's fine.

I will argue effective CAD can still improve on many of those cases. Making CAD accessible still seems to me the better path, and that's due to the fact that we really can't responsibly ignore the process.

CAD is a whole lot more than making plans, or defining shapes. There is descriptive and analytic geometry, two cases made difficult to employ on some CAD systems that were simplified to maximize more common use cases. Engineers and designers, who understand how and why one would use geometric methods, pay easily for capable CAD software that delivers great returns to all involved.

I also helped with a FAB, where everyone involved wanted to improve on the reams of paper drawings needed to communicate the work. There also needed to be a means to communicate variances from the plan too. Stuff happens, and is it cheaper to go with it, or rip it out and do over?

I modeled the whole FAB, and output the result as a 3D view, measure, section, etc... dataset. The guys could go on site, locate themselves and then see the work, to scale, measure, etc... they could also send back differences and errors in 2D and get fresh models to work from.

And we took a TON of cost out of that one. Pre construction bids were much closer to realities, there was far less error, far less overall comms between everyone, etc... I've been on a few other projects that are similar and can't say much. There are a few people in the world out there who are applying a lot more of the mechanical CAD capabilities with great results.

Because that was done in CAD, I have a ton of options. It's a great template for another FAB. I could add rules and constraints and limits to enhance that too. I have, as an exercise and now know I could make an 80 percent fab start model... the dataset is proprietary, so no sharing, but recent advances in CAD API options as well as how and what parametrics and rules can be input bring a lot to the table.

Yeah, making prtery stuff is a distraction. Management and culture problem. We have an education problem too. The things I mention here are mature, work well, but just not taught to the degree they should be. There is huge industry inertia holding things back in the AEC space that does not exist in the same degree in, say mechanical and entertainment. Entertainment and games have few human impacts, and we do see computational means being applied. Some of that has trickled into mechanical too. More will come.

And, it's not so practical to express these things in a purely computational way. Honestly, the barrier to entry on that is even higher! If you dislike vendor pricing on CAD, the sticker shock on those kinds of datasets will be brutal. Open ones won't be trusted, they will need to be evaluated, and closed ones will work, be supported, liability compliant, etc...

Even the basic input to a computational type system will need to be a sort of CAD, due to the difficulty we have in communication geometry, sans visual means. Should that system result in something viable, nobody would ethically bill with it, until after a professional does an analysis.

You mentioned scaling... well, applying high end CAD to stuff like this, and doing it the way the mechanical people have done it for years can scale! It's the CAD that can bring the scale to the table. It's been going on for years and we ate at the point of digitally simulating entire vehicles, factories, etc... and that stuff brings us better, faster, less expensive things and the automation needed to make them too.

2D rats nest drawings are going away. Delivering robust 4d and 3d to people is pretty awesome and a smaller planning, design, compliance, engineering group can do the work of many people and across multiple projects too.

Honestly, I think a lot of what you are getting at exists, and CAD enables it. Human input can be distilled down to a Web page. Design rules, template parts, intent and other compute driven inferences take people out of the equation now too.

In the mechanical case, the ongoing changes continue to add a lot of value. It's not just a business model. If anything, the AEC side of things could learn a few things from the mechanical people, who by the way, do take liberally from appropriate AEC ways and means where they make sense.

Both teams could benefit from software ways and means, and I know of at least one new, free to use on your phone or computer cloud type CAD tool doing exactly that.

There is a really ugly gap between small CAD, low complexity, and major efforts involving a lot of integrated systems.

Design reuse in this space holds a lot of value potential. It absolutely will not displace high end, real CAD (Siemens, Dassault), but could very well dominate a lot of the market, should it end up out there, possible for mortals to use, etc...

On a vendor specific note, Auto desk finally sees this and is building some nice stuff. They may be like AMD, always a bit behind for failing to build when others did, but maybe not. We shall see over the next 10 years.

The position of drafter or CAD jockey is on the decline. CAD will eventually settle into something most people can and want to do.

Maybe reaching that point will also mean enough days and expertise being captured to take steps in the direction you find appealing. It's gonna be a bit of a wait...

<comment><USER11> The AEC side is limited by economics. An architect's business is one project at a time. Landing and completing a project only has indirect long term value as marketing.

Everything is a one off because every piece of land is unique if for no other reason.

Or more realistically, when the client doesn't pay but says, "but you've still got the design" it misses the fact that AEC designs have no value for some other site. It isn't that AEC is full of idiots that can learn from the world of product engineering. The circumstances are radically different because real-property is different from chattels and goods.

Anyway, relative to a multi-core CPU, buildings are dumb simple. And people in the loop makes the hard part of projects, managing and coordinating humans, worse. In particular because piece work means that success equates to a backlog. So each person has one and backlogs are not conducive to quick response to changes or commitment to deadlines.

<comment><USER6> Indeed.

However, it's my observation that a very significant economic gain is there to be had with a better, up front investment. Not just drawings and models. Intent.

It's entirely possible to package up a ton of stuff that can be used to assemble a project, and when that's done, those packages can drive all the info needed by the contractors each day, if desired. This technique was applied to a major airport we probably both know, and it was done on mechanical CAD for those reasons. The bid was more accurate, and the project ran much closer to on time and on materials.

Buildings are sort of dumb and sort of simple too. Of course, in the one time, forward create kind of way, sure. It's just a pile of simple geometry. On the other hand, if one actually wants to move up a level, add intent, build in design rule checks, etc... suddenly, you've got a class of buildings possible, those buildings largely derived from set pieces, with the real design effort being more centered on the unique aspects of a given site.

Couple this with a bid process that is driven off that same intent, and doing prospective designs starts to change. Not only do they get a realistic idea of the design outcome, but they get bids, materials, etc... that are closer to real, and derived from a team with a history of doing that.

I never classified anyone as idiots. I see it more like being too conservative. Happens in mechanical spaces too.

It's just process pieces that are laying around waiting for people to make better use of them. Many are fat 'n happy, so they don't. Others, particularly in the strategic project space, really are looking for better ways to get things done, and done on time and on budget.

Real property has it's own set of requirements to deal with, but in the end, they are just requirements. Employing more of what the tools can do really can have an impact. I've been a part of a couple of those, and the results were pretty impressive. Coordinating those humans, once you've got a dataset that is live, real time, able to iterate based on variances that just happen with property, doesn't look a whole lot different from that same process in the product space.

Manufacturing, and the product space in general, struggles with this same thing, and there have been significant improvements in overall communications in the last 10 years that are just now really starting to see wider use. All electronic shops are here now. 10 years ago, there were a few, and some concept places, but most everybody was slogging through the piles of paper and high latency, high labor means and methods. Ugly stuff.

Today, it's possible for a CAD dataset to drive all of it. And parts of that are still ugly, but improving. AEC can do this too. Again, it's being done by a few progressive groups out there, and that's direct experience. I happened to be one of the Mechanical CAD guys willing to work with them and translate techniques, and understand their scenario, language, requirements, etc...

Hey, this also ties in with boats...

So, when a yacht gets made, it's custom. They do ungodly hacks during actual construction. The less up front planning and visualization work they do, the more hacks there are. "Just make it fit, and send the result back to engineering..." Fine. Each boat ships with a document set that basically attempts to detail what happened and why. Tons of books.

One artifact of the CAD process was planning more of those hacks away. Another was packaging up core bits where intent can be well defined. And the docs were derived from all that, then more lightly marked up. All electronic, with a paper back up, just because the sea. The sea is toxic. But, it cost a lot less to do just a little bit more up front.

Forward 5-6 years, I ended up in a scenario where it worked the same way with a building. (I have a dataset of a library in SF that I helped figure out how to work on.) They got their site study docs, and then drove the CAD from there, building in options, expressing intent, etc... On the prospect walk through, they were able to make real time changes and sell that deal. Potent stuff. I heard a lot about "client didn't pay" and being able to work directly with them, real time, can change that equation. And each project, sold or not, does produce a lot of great stuff that can be used on future ones too. One example might be that parking garage I mentioned. Property varies a lot. However, it is possible to build a parking structure with a lot of flexibility and design rule checks that can fit into a lot of scenarios. Worst case, it's an 80 percent basis, for the 20 percent real work of dealing with that particular site.

When site construction began, a computer went to live there and all the coordination, handling of problems, documenting variances, distribution of materials, measure, etc... happened on it. Sometimes drawings got output, maybe for the more device toxic tasks (and that gets tossed when work is done), and a lot of people read 3D data and worked from it directly on a laptop or pad. Walk on site, pull up model, expose the relevant bits, compare, measure, do.

When the building is done? Computer stays there. It's the living record of the thing.

Employing these means can yield the ability for doing more than one project at a time too, or at the least, more projects, faster, with fewer people.

Right now, cars, airplanes and other big things also have those living records too.

What I'm trying to get at here is the clusterfuck of CAD (and it's often just that) has a lot to do with how connected and fluid and accessible the data is to people. When the people can work from the data, and that data is derived from the model and the intent in that model, a whole lot of that clusterfuck goes away.

I think, after having this very interesting chat, the desire to realize a more compute oriented approach has some elements in common with just making the CAD more widely and directly usable by most people, not just CAD people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find the article a little off...

The generative design it is showing has nothing to do with AI, it is just pretty advanced math, maybe with some heuristic, maybe not completely deterministic, but I would have an hard time calling it AI.

Other than this, I enjoy the read.

<comment><USER7> The article doesn't mention AI.

<comment><USER13> This is a quote from the article:

> "This is the computer becoming creative and able to generate ideas that > people help to develop. Beyond creativity, the sea change is the computer's > ability to learn."

<comment><USER14> Then goes on to talk about how it would use machine learning to develop heuristic methods that could perform shallow design evaluations with much less computation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looking at the antennae, I'm unconvinced of the claim that the second is better [though I'm not saying it isn't] because it's not clear how suitable it is as a spacecraft component. The older design looks like it would be easier to store for liftoff (in a cylinder); require a simpler deployment strategy (a linear actuator); and be less likely to poke a hole in a spacesuit during extra vehicular activity. Not that I'm claiming it was for manned spacecraft. Yet that's the sort of corner case where it makes sense to lift an omnidirectional antenna. A point and shoot parabola is the general case.

Parabolas fold and unfold well even when constructed from many parts because a lot of the parts are the same sku. The older design follows this idea by unfolding with a twist. The new antenna looks like it has more parts that are one off and looks like it depends on all of them deploying "just so" (i.e. it looks finicky). Again, the new design may actually be better. But without understanding the mission requirements, signal strength alone does not make the claim reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very interesting. It appears to generate a voroni mesh to resolve the structural forces. I can't tell from looking at this to what extent the overall shape is predefined by the requirements or generated by aerodynamic effects though.

The next step would be for it to interpret concept sketches. Anyone who has worked for a design firm will know that most of the people there are interpreting and documenting the concept sketches of a few senior designers. They never write a detailed list of requirements as it's much quicker to sketch what you want to achieve and describe the sketches in conversation with your staff than to try and describe it in writing. Designers are visual people and hate having to write documentation.

Clients write briefs, the brief for a skyscraper will probably stretch to a few thousand pages. But, as programmers will know too, you have to take some licence in interpreting them as they often contain a lot of contradictions.

</comment><comment><USER16> Dreamcatcher sounds interesting - and in some sense, a return to older workflows. A friend worked at an F1 team at a point when they were transitioning from 2D draughting to parametric 3D CAD - One of the big issues was that in the prior setup, the designers would often draw bearing surfaces & forces on them, and the envelope - leaving the detail to the pattern makers.

Whilst fast, this suffered from the varying skills of the pattern makers, and that they were all approaching or well past retirement age, with no prospect of new blood.

The longer term benefits of the 3D CAD workflow took a while to realise, as it got mired in a lot of implementation detail that would previously have been deferred.

</comment><comment><USER17> This, but for software UI/UX. Anyone want to put me out of a job?

<comment><USER18> It's already difficult enough for humans to understand humans, so I wouldn't worry too much about this. What I do expect is that the least sophisticated parts of jobs like conversion optimisation will eventually become largely automated. Humans would still input the constraints, but the machine generates the inputs for a multivariate test, measures results, decides which variant performs best and rolls it out to all users.

Think The Grid [1] mashed up with Multi-armed Bandid Experiments [2]

[1] [https://thegrid.io](https://thegrid.io)

[2] [http://analytics.blogspot.nl/2013/01/multi-armed-bandit- expe...](http://analytics.blogspot.nl/2013/01/multi-armed-bandit- experiments.html)

<comment><USER17> This is exactly what I was thinking about. Some way to tell a goal and the constraints to the computer and then have the computer run multivariate tests on generated UI's to optimize for the goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a CAD technician I was very aware that the purpose of a drawing was to communicate the requirements to the fabricator i.e. documentation.</comment>


Medium abruptly cancels membership programs of 21 subscription publishers - <AUTHOR> http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/medium-abruptly-cancels-the-membership-programs-of-its-21-remaining-publisher-partners/ <comment><USER2> Hitting random paywalls was why I stopped clicking Medium links. Some of the stuff on there was interesting to read, but not enough worth paying for.</comment>


News Inside: A print publication that will be distributed in prisons - <AUTHOR> https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/03/28/introducing-news-inside <comment><USER2> And down the procrastination from work rabbit hole I go... A lot of the reporting on this organizations site is fascinating and very well done, by prisoners themselves too.

</comment><comment><USER3> "So I know the frustrations of a hungry mind in prison."

I did too. I subscribed to more than 30 different magazines, and devoured each issue. Then, I passed them on to other inmates.

</comment><comment><USER4> \- Shiv combat: slice or stab ?

\- Turn that gloomy 'death' row into a peppy 'fresh' row

\- How to tell he's into you

\- World's most daring escapes

\- Will it fit? The complete guide to stuffing contraband up your butt

<comment><USER5> I find it interesting the topics that otherwise smart people feel empowered to broadcast their ignorance about while actively rejecting the opportunity to learn something beyond the archetypes they seem sure are sufficient

<comment><USER6> I'm fairly sure he meant it as a joke to be funny, not a serious critique of the article.</comment></comment></comment>


Guelph family lives like it's 1986 - <AUTHOR> http://www.torontosun.com/2013/08/31/guelph-family-lives-like-its-1986 <comment><USER2> This is retarded. They are holding up their kids development to make a point; especially the older one. So while his classmates are whizzing around the internet, this kid has to work that much harder...

If they want to do this correctly, they should be providing dial-up and a 133MHZ computer for their 5 year old (they probably have an AOL cd kicking around too; lord knows they still sell their dial-up).

...I'm so pissed off I can't even put together a proper response to this.

The fact of the matter is that if your kids aren't looking up from their iphones, that's a parenting issue, not a technology one.</comment>


Interview with Demoscener "kb" of Farbrausch - <AUTHOR> http://6octaves.blogspot.com/2014/07/interview-with-demoscener-kb-farbrausch.html <comment><USER2> Farbrausch has stood out to me for a long time as one of the strongest demo groups. They consistently produce demos that are not just technically impressive but really beautiful as well. I highly recommend checking out their back catalog if you haven't seen their work.

Another group I highly recommend is Andromeda Software Development. They are less about "check out these cool techniques" and more about putting together a cohesive, music-video-like experience. I've heard different perspectives on whether that's a good thing, but irrespective of where you come down on that they produce some demos that are really enjoyable to watch.

<comment><USER3> As this is my personal opinion, please take it with a big grain of salt - ASD's Lifeforce is the new benchmark for demo effectiveness. It is just so _beautiful_.

When I first saw Farbrausch's Debris I thought it was a bit boring. After all, it's repetitive. The soundtrack is like some cheap industrial techno, and the demo itself doesn't really show off that much.... Until you realise that the whole thing is less than 200kB. An amazing feat.

There is just one experience more profound the demoscene has given me. It must have been no later than 1995 or 1996, or about the time when the Amiga and PC groups had just discovered 3D toroids, vector castles and phong shading in general. Half of the demos shown in the party had some kind of floating/rotating phongs-shaded toroid, and about a third sported a zoom- in/zoom-out view of a castle. It got pretty dull, pretty fast.

And then finally Byterapers showed off how to outdo everyone by using the same effects with better timing. On C-64. Jaw, meet floor.

<comment><USER4> _ASD 's Lifeforce is the new benchmark for demo effectiveness_

Wow, pretty good. I haven't followed games and the demoscene in the last few years, so modern graphics always impress me a lot.

My favorite demo is Sonnet by Threestate: [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3282](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3282)

<comment><USER5> As the coder of Sonnet that's wonderful to hear, 13 years after its original release! :)

<comment><USER6> Oh my god! You're sagacity of threestate?! I'm swooning! "melrose space" is my all-time favourite demo! To this day, I still watch it regularly, I love it so much. (As well as the other 3s ones -- like enjoying a favourite album.) Thank you!

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=162](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=162)

[http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=65](http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=65)

<comment><USER5> Good to hear! I never thought people would still be looking at these things such a long time after the fact but I guess that's the internet for you :)

Btw, the things we released as threestate were a clear testament to how important design is (and more accurately in this case, the design of Steven) when you're doing demos. Before that, some of us (me, sarix, inopia) did a bunch of releases as Quad that were also fairly impressive technically but had no design and...pretty much nobody cared.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I can't tell you how much pleasure all those demos have given me over the years, so the opportunity to thank someone directly is really satisfying to me. Thanks again. :)

I recognise your/those names from other releases (like quad, and haujobb). And like you said, others may have been more impressive technically, but it's the threestate ones that have always stuck with me, for that amazingly perfect (IMNSHO) combination of technical impressiveness, visuals, and audio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty much from the moment that I became interested in the demoscene about 12 years ago, Farbrausch has been my favorite group. It was something about 64k intros that intrigued me. Even in 2002, a 3" floppy held almost no data, but you can fit 20 or so of these amazing things on one.

<comment><USER8> How much of modern demos is in the system libraries? Like, if you didn't have D3D or OGL but had to write code that drew at the per-pixel level, how much larger would these demos have to be?

<comment><USER9> I did the math for you and it comes down to about 8.6MiB on my Linux system.

An OpenGL application that displays a triangle links to these libs:

libc.so.6 libdl.so.2 libdrm.so.2 libgcc_s.so.1 libglapi.so.0 libGL.so.1 libm.so.6 libpthread.so.0 librt.so.1 libSDL2-2.0.so.0 libstdc++.so.6 libX11.so.6 libX11-xcb.so.1 libXau.so.6 libxcb-dri2.so.0 libxcb-dri3.so.0 libxcb-glx.so.0 libxcb-present.so.0 libxcb.so.1 libxcb-sync.so.1 libXdamage.so.1 libXdmcp.so.6 libXext.so.6 libXfixes.so.3 libxshmfence.so.1 libXxf86vm.so.1

Now to be fair, we'll only count those we directly link against:

ibSDL2-2.0.so.0 libstdc++.so.6 libGL.so.1 libdl.so.2 libc.so.6 libgcc_c.so.1 libm.so.6

These few turn out to be the biggest in our bunch, totalling to 5.5MiB.

So there you have it, by linking a minimal graphics demo on Linux, you are implicitly linking to about 5.5MiB of direct system libs and 8.6MiB of indirect system libs. These numbers will vary wildly for other OS, but I guess the DirectX stuff would be larger.

<comment><USER8> Neat! Although if you were just writing to a framebuffer you would probably use much less code. OTOH, the graphics drivers are doing the rasterizing right?

<comment><USER10> No, the GPU is doing the rasterizing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the Farbrausch members is currently making a crowd-funded game. The trailer looks quite promising:

[http://www.duangle.com/nowhere](http://www.duangle.com/nowhere)

<comment><USER11> Actually, your timing is really fortuitous: Just yesterday, the aforementioned Farbrausch member/NOWHERE developer posted a progress report[1] for the game. Somewhere near the end, he mentions that they had to delay the game's Steam Early Access release to finish a few things, that they had factored the release into this month's revenues, and that they are now borrowing money to pay the rent on their home (the developer and artist are married).

Please check the game out and do consider supporting Paniq (apparently Patreon[2] is the most convenient way to do this). There really could be no better time for a small bit of exposure!

[1] [http://blog.duangle.com/2014/07/nowhere-progress-report- its-...](http://blog.duangle.com/2014/07/nowhere-progress-report-its-going- great.html)

[2] [http://www.patreon.com/duangle](http://www.patreon.com/duangle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The entire series of interviews on the site is very interesting. Nice to see a variety of perspectives on the demoscene.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's a really neat article on the math for animation: [http://acko.net/blog/animate-your-way-to- glory/](http://acko.net/blog/animate-your-way-to-glory/)

Sort of revealed to me how some of this stuff works in a very easy-to- understand way, along with great visualisations.

</comment><comment><USER13> I still miss the old days of Ascii art, demos were around back then, probably what killed the ascii art scene.

<comment><USER12> Ascii art is still alive and well. [http://tmdc.scene.org/](http://tmdc.scene.org/) I've done this compo twice and it's a ton of fun. Plus it's really easy to get started.

<comment><USER13> Wow, I didn't realize. I was in s0ap for a little while from 96-97 but hadn't checked it out in years. Thanks for providing the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is anyone aware of a demoscene in the US? I'd be really interested in seeing that.

<comment><USER15> Here's the NVidia one that just happened a few months ago: [http://nv.scene.org/2014/about/](http://nv.scene.org/2014/about/)

The winners were also screened in SF at CODAME.

<comment><USER16> The invtro to the NVScene party this year was very stylish and featured music from Dune/Orange: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYOBq4NLjtY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYOBq4NLjtY)

<comment><USER7> The one for NVScene 2008 kicked ass. It's about as close as you can get to color intoxication (which is the rough translation of "farbrausch").

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The old demoscene was great.

It is still cool to see what demos the groups pull off nowadays, but we are far far away from C64, Spectrum, Amiga and Atari, PC days, doing algorithms considered impossible in such hardware.

<comment><USER3> > _algorithms considered impossible in such hardware_

The show-off factor is still alive and kicking. Check out the utterly impossible Cubase-64 by Mahoney: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDrqBYkco-Y](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDrqBYkco-Y)

Once you've collected yourself and accepted that the thing really was done in real-time, read the full description how the impossible was made possible: [http://www.livet.se/mahoney/c64-files/Cubase64_White_Paper_b...](http://www.livet.se/mahoney/c64-files/Cubase64_White_Paper_by_Pex_Mahoney_Tufvesson.pdf)

That thing is like extremely well done stage magic. You _know_ you're being fooled and mislead, you may even know exactly how it's done - and you still can't but admire the flawless execution.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for pointing this out, it is great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's probably not rated as one of their best, but I've always loved "fr025 - The Popular Demo".

Beautifully done, search it on Youtube.

</comment><comment><USER19> someone should interview Smash. Legend.

[http://directtovideo.wordpress.com](http://directtovideo.wordpress.com)

<comment><USER20> [http://6octaves.blogspot.jp/2013/10/interview-with- demoscene...](http://6octaves.blogspot.jp/2013/10/interview-with-demoscener- smash.html)</comment></comment>


AFrame Demo, Proof of Concept for VR in the Web - <AUTHOR> http://wehur.herokuapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> This guy made it. It's not public yet. [https://github.com/jeregrine](https://github.com/jeregrine)

Here's a guy that does VR stuff on the side [https://github.com/sorianog](https://github.com/sorianog)</comment>


Optimus Dashboard Bootstrap Admin Template - <AUTHOR> http://wrapbootstrap.com/preview/WB0016FX5

<comment><USER2> great template</comment>


The Strange Rites of Celebrity - <AUTHOR> https://www.sapiens.org/culture/jesse-eisenberg-anthropology/ <comment><USER2> What really annoys celebrities is when you have no idea who they are and don't care.

<comment><USER3> Some may find it refreshing not to have people elevate them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > What anthropology teaches you is that there is equal value to different > cultural perspectives. And that is the best thing you can learn as an actor.

Mr. Eisenberg, if you can apply this to a white supremacist or a pedophile as readily as to a primitive cannibal or an ancient pharaoh, my respect. But you may want to keep quiet about it for the sake of your career.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article uses the word "power" a lot when it really means "status"</comment>


Mobile developer? Understand sources of network latency - <AUTHOR> http://www.research.att.com/articles/featured_stories/2011_03/201102_Energy_efficient

<comment><AUTHOR> For mobile-web developers, there's not much you can do directly to influence how the browser behaves (the browser devs on the other hand, can do a lot better). But for native devs, there are some good, actionable recommendations on there.</comment>


EU requests Google delete Street View images after 6 months - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/news/eu-requests-google-delete-street-view-images-after-6-months-20100226/

<comment><USER2> I think it would be better to just remove the people altogether. Taking photographs in pairs (and possibly using a small radar gun as well) makes it pretty easy to derive 3d, and Google Earth etc. is steadily getting more 3d of ordinary buildings. Texture mapping the street view photographs onto the 3d models of houses is surely not far behind, and 'editing out' people and cars automatically becomes practical.

Yes, this does need a huge amount of computing power. And some of that task can be farmed out. Imagine that when someone uses a Nexus One with their 'goggles' app, the phone does some primitive analysis of the scene as data comes in from the camera, then uploads the results to Google Earth's servers, allowing them to refine their models.

But I've always believed that Google were playing the long, long game with Google Earth. I can see it being a platform for everything from 3d games to real-time analysis of census or business data.</comment>


Wizard School - <AUTHOR> http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/07/wizard-school.html# <comment><USER2> I liked the part where he talks about "Folding Languages" because I very recently understood the "tree-of-closures compiler" technique to do exactly that: write code that writes code... I used to think macros were the most powerful and only way to do that, but now I know closures is where it's at.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why can't the world be like this?</comment>


Ask HN: Is anybody working on open protocol like SMTP to replace Twitter? - <AUTHOR>

Twitter has scaling needs because it has reached beyond the scale of SMS and they are trying to store all the tweets. SMS networks don't have any scaling needs. Why aren't we thinking of SMS/SMTP/bittorrent like protocol to replace twitter? <comment><USER2>
      > Twitter has scaling needs because it has reached beyond
      > the scale of SMS and they are trying to store all the
      > tweets. SMS networks don't have any scaling needs.

There is no particular reason why storage of short messages would be difficult to scale. Certainly it requires fewer resources than storing an equivalent number of emails, which is a problem long-solved by large email providers.

      > Why aren't we thinking of SMS/SMTP/bittorrent like
      > protocol to replace twitter?

There are already multiple protocols which would work well for a Twitter clone, XMPP and OStatus being the most prominent.

      > Ask HN: Is anybody working on open protocol like
      > SMTP/torrent to kill Twitter?

If you actually want to destroy Twitter, then your first challenge is to identify something you can do better, then convince hundreds of millions of people that their lives will be improved by migrating to your service.

The fact that you think Bittorrent would be an appropriate technical implementation of a short-message site, plus the use of "kill" in the title, makes me think that you do not have anywhere near the technical or business skills required to actually implement a competitive alternative to Twitter.</comment>


The Emergence of the Concept of an "Antipsychotic" Drug (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4118918/ <comment><USER2> There definitely is a strong focus in psychiatry to just "throw stuff and see if it sticks", rather than actually understanding the mental pathways patients go towards.

I got diagnosed with bipolar-like symptoms and was initially given anti- psychotics. Nothin'. Then, lithium - lost most of my creativity and any sense of passion (for what that's worth). Now, clozapine. All very, very different medicines where I honestly don't see an end to the spaghetti slinging. It doesn't help that wen trying to bring up things that would lead to discussions of thought structure that could lead to legitimate treatment usually has the buck sent to pyschologist, which then sends it back.

The only way I've found to actually get a discussion going on related to brain/thought structure is through taking part in research programs. Those guys don't like to share their findings until after the study or individual participation is done, though. It's a long process, but hopefully it's worth it.

These days, I'm finding that stronger treatment comes from understanding and paying attention to "the map is not the territory". It's incredibly effective, but it has the adverse effect of "thinking too much". :)

<comment><USER3> Many people's psychiatric conditions are related to being exhausted: substandard thyroid function (low t3 activity), excessive amounts of dietary seed oils, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The NIMH has a nice blog post that says patients do much better when they are taken off "antipsychotic" medication sooner rather than later.

"Director's Blog: Antipsychotics: Taking the Long View" \- [http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/antipsychotics-t...](http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/antipsychotics- taking-the-long-view.shtml)</comment>


So much for the Russian threat: Putin slashes defense spending - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2017/03/19/so-much-for-the-russian-threat-putin-slashes-defense-spending-while-trump-plans-massive-buildup/ <comment><USER2> The "Russian threat" isn't backed by the size of their military. It's backed 1) by nuclear deterrence and 2) their large and deep network of diplomatic and political relations.

Russia could have taken over Crimea with a couple of tanks, and some minimal army they could at least theoretically assemble were Ukraine to, alone, respond. They basically did take Crimea with just a couple of tanks.

Within Russia's traditional sphere of influence, it's understood by everybody that no Western power would ever directly challenge them. That understanding largely rests on the nuclear deterrence and the desire to avoid direct military conflict between nuclear powers.

Russia's flex in the Middle East is largely made possible by their political relationships, kept intact by the fact that China has focused on Africa, rather than the Middle East, when filling the power vacuum left by the dissolution of the USSR.

Russian military spending was always principally intended to solve domestic political problems. Much more so than in the U.S. The reduction is good for the Russian citizenry. It's largely irrelevant in terms of their international strategic posture.

</comment><comment><USER3> So Russia is slashing its military budget. But no reason to despair. Putin's good buddy Trump is planning on getting rid of the economic sanctions, and doing everything possible to help get Russia's economy growing. So soon Russia will be able to get back to its modernization program.

And Trump's stated reason for all this? It's so that Russia can use new nuclear sub's and other weapons to help us fight Isis.

</comment><comment><USER4> That had a very weird tone.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. I would rather have a more credible news source than leftwingbreitbart.com, but as the article notes this news item is not getting any coverage from the mainstream media...</comment></comment>


Black holes DON'T delete information: We could someday peer into them - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3023793/Black-holes-DON-T-delete-information-Scientist-claims-someday-peer-elusive-structures.html <comment><USER2> No link to the journal article, and absolutely no real content in the awful summary. Consider finding a better news outlet than dailymail.</comment>


CrunchFund? Unethical Ventures? Pig Pile Partners? - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20110902/crunchfund-unethical-ventures-pigpile-partners-no-matter-what-you-call-it-its-business-as-usual-in-silicon-valley/

<comment><USER2> All the tweets I've seen this morning state that Arrington has resigned from TC. But of course that's not at all accurate, as Swisher points out; all he did was change jobs from editor to writer. Somehow I don't see that diminishing Mike's level of control.

I do agree with Swisher, having more than one interaction with Arrington, that this is not a Good Thing.</comment>


Google+ Tips and Tricks - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cUjZ_7rlAmKRDVB6GXId73h_eUdXGKdjtSff0svbaz0/edit?hl=en_US

<comment><USER2> Well at least we can learn how to use it, by heart, instead of refreshing the "We've temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon." page :)</comment>


Autistic Teen Picks First Two NCAA Rounds Perfectly - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/sports/Autistic-Teen-Picks-First-Two-NCAA-Rounds-Perfectly-88916437.html <comment> jim-greer Shouldn't the title say autistic teen and his older brother _claim_ he picked a perfect bracket? There's no record of it from before the tournament started.

"CBSSports.com can not confirm Alex's entry -- the company doesn't track entries to their Bracket Manager program."

</comment><comment><USER2> My collection of infinite monkeys almost hammered out a perfect manuscript for Hamlet last night. Unfortunately, they messed up Hamlet's monologue in Act 3 Scene 1: "To be or not to be, that is the question. Cornell is going to kick the crap out of Wisconsin."

</comment><comment><USER3> The article misquotes the odds of picking the first two rounds correctly. 1 in 13,460,000 is the historical odds of picking the first 2 rounds correctly if you always picked the top seed in each game.

In other words: think of the tournament's seeding as a bracket filled out by the NCAA itself. There's only a 1 in 13 million chance that it will be right through the first 2 rounds.

What this kid did is amazing. Its more than the inevitable result of enough random guesses.

<comment><USER4> Hrm, hang on a second. That actually makes it sound substantially less impressive. There are five million people playing this year on ESPN alone. Even if we assume that only a quarter of them have guesses that are as predictive as the seed numbers, that would mean we'd only have to go a decade or so before we'd get a situation like this.

<comment><USER3> ESPN is a great example. This year no one predicted even the first round correctly, much less the first two. In fact, only 3 people out of 5 million got only one game wrong _in the first round._

The main problem with your logic is that most people make the same choices. For example, only 1% of ESPN brackets had Cornell surviving the first 2 rounds this year, while 73% thought Kansas would make the championship.

To my knowledge, no one on ESPN.com has ever predicted all 65 games in the first 2 rounds correctly.

<comment><USER4> > The main problem with your logic is that most people make the same choices.

You are right, my analysis is terrible. Boom, inferiority admitted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> His picks are not random events; therefore, you cannot calculate the odds of his picking the 48 winners so easily. Did he also pick the play-in winner (Arkansas Pine Bluff)? I doubt it. This could be a hoax unless he registered his picks at the start, and where he could not change them. Perhaps we've all been had.

</comment><comment><USER6> The odds of winning the lottery are highly improbable yet every almost every week someone wins it.

That said if he is that good reliably, there is lots of money to be made on sports betting.

<comment><USER3> The lottery is a poor, if often used, comparison for the odds involved in picking the NCAA tournament correctly. Picking 2 rounds of the NCAA tournament perfectly is orders of magnitude harder than picking the winning lottery numbers.

For starters, in the lottery:

1) No selection (number) is better than another. i.e., the winners are random

2) Each round has no effect on the next

3) The conditions of the experiment will not change

The NCAA tournament is the opposite:

1) Some selections (teams) are clearly better than others. Furthermore, the tournament is structured to give the best teams the best chances of winning.

i.e., selection is not random.

2) Each round limits the possible outcomes of the next. To have a chance of picking Round 2 correctly, you must have already aced Round 1.

3) Each game can be affected by an unlimited number of variables. For instance, if John Wall gets hurt it would alter the chances of a Kentucky national championship. More subtly, so could a delayed flight.

Even picking the correct lottery numbers twice in a row is not a fair comparison, because the results of the first experiment have no bearing on the second.

<comment><USER6> Non-random events are generally a lot easier guess correctly at than random events. This is why people will do things like card count or use weighted dice / coins with two heads / tails, etc. This is also why SSL keys are generated from random data rather than weighted data.

I'd love to play the lottery if I knew certain balls were weighted more heavily than others.

If you think non-random events are difficult to predict, give me your longitude and latitude and I'll predict with in five minutes what time the sun will rise tomorrow. Want to bet $1000 against?

The real reason the it is more difficult is because the odds randomly are 1 in 4 billion for the first round, where as a lottery like the 6/49 is 1 in 13,983,816. However, the NCAA is not completely random, it would be difficult to discern what the real odds are but the fact that many players are within a couple games should give you some clue to the decrease in odds given the extra information.

If 100 million brackets are filled out and the realistic odds are 1 in 1.5 billion (given the extra information) then someone should fill out a perfect bracket every 15 years. If you look at the prizes being offered for a correct bracket, it should give you some indication as to the greatly reduced odds that one actually faces. If the odds are really 2^48 for a correct 2 round bracket then it would stand to reason that you could offer a 1 trillion dollar prize for a correct bracket with a ticket price of $1 and still have a house margin of 99.64%

100 - ((1 / ((2^48) / 1 trillion)) * 100) = 99.644

This simply isn't the case. (My math may be way off, I was never a stats major)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Purdue is +6000 to win the tournament btw.

<comment><USER7> or 60/1.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Python virtual environment, but backed by Docker - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/se7entyse7en/pydockenv <comment><USER2> I've tried going the docker environment path before but always hit a roadblock at the actual development stage. VSCode has no idea about your env because it's effectively non-local. So you lose auto-complete, linting etc.

How well does pydocenv handle those kind of issues?

<comment><AUTHOR> First of all, thanks for your interest!

> VSCode has no idea about your env because it's effectively non-local.

This is an issue that I'm aware of, and I actually didn't think about a possible solution yet. Currently, it is in a VERY early stage, but I wanted to share it to get feedback from the community and how much interest the project could raise.

The only things that I thought were adding support for example for aliasing of some commands such as running `flake8` will actually call `flake8` inside the container. But it's still very fuzzy in my head.

<comment><USER3> Not sure how hard this would be, instead of running "flake8 blabla", one can run "docker run bla bla". Or even docker exec bla bla if you have the container already running. And by "you run" I mean vscode does that for you, via an extension.

<comment><USER4> This is almost exactly how Pycharm works with testing/auto complete/coverage.

It has support to use a a particular interpreter, specific virtual env, or it lets you say "my interpreter is inside this docker container", which is even allowed to be on a remote host (although I've always used docker running locally).

<comment><USER5> I find using pycharm with remote docker painful. If you need unusual docker arguments not included in the pycharm Gui, it sucks.

They did a good job but it doesn't seem complete yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't follow how this relates to docker. Does running the pydocenv command modify dependencies stored in the Dockerfile (or a file that pydocenv references within a "pip install -r ___" command inside the Dockerfile)?

It seems interesting, in that I respect any library (eg pyenv or pipenv) that tries to solve the issue with pip has compared to npm or cargo, where the installation of a library isn't coupled to the dependency tracking. I just can't see from the examples how this is preferable to changing a requirements.txt file and then rebuilding the docker image

<comment><AUTHOR> When I have some time I could try adding a `How does it work` section.

Under the hood the creation of an environment corresponds to the creation of a docker container (that's how it relates to docker). The docker container is built starting from a the official python docker images as you can see here [https://github.com/se7entyse7en/pydockenv/blob/master/pydock...](https://github.com/se7entyse7en/pydockenv/blob/master/pydockenv/commands/pydockenv.py#L32).

The activation of the environment corresponds to the start of the container. Hence inside the container, you don't have (don't need) to have any virtual env as the isolation is already provided by the container itself.

Every time you install a dependency, this is actually installed inside the container.

<comment><USER7> Once I get my environment set up just the way I want in the container how do give it to someone else or make another one?

Seems wild to pass around the actual container rather than an image that spawns your environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> To share your environment with someone else you can run `pydockenv save` (see here: [https://github.com/se7entyse7en/pydockenv/blob/master/pydock...](https://github.com/se7entyse7en/pydockenv/blob/master/pydockenv/commands/pydockenv.py#L98)). I'm sorry that any example is present in the README so far.

Under the hood, a new docker image is saved from the container corresponding to the currently active environment. A `*.tar.gz` file is created with the image the can be now loaded using `pydockenv load`.

Alternatively, you could push that image to Dockerhub for example and pull it from somewhere else. The problem is that currently there's no mechanism to make it recognize to `pydockenv`, but I'm also planning to add the possibility to create an environment from a user-defined image.

Using `pydockenv save` will ensure that the environment you'll share will be exactly the same. An alternative that I'm also planning to implement is to use a `toml` file that will simply create a new environment from it. Obviously, in your running container, there could be something not captured in the original `toml` file if you, for example, installed something manually inside the container.

But again, it's really in early stage, so all these feedbacks are really welcome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Personally, I use LXC (via LXD) and Emacs's TRAMP. Tramp is smart enough to run development tools (like flake8) on the remote, and I get a full OS to play with, with isolation.

</comment><comment> rich-tea What I've wanted for a while now is to be able to run a single jupyter server but have many kernels running inside different containers. It's possible to have the kernels in different virtualenvs. I wonder if I could achieve that with this.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been using and maintaining a set of Python images targeted at doing builds and packaging for a while now:

[https://github.com/insightfulsystems/alpine- python](https://github.com/insightfulsystems/alpine-python)

(There is also an Ubuntu variant, but it isn't fully multiarch yet)

This kind of thing is really useful when you have to build and deploy more modern/well-known versions of Python than what ships with your distribution, but I also use them as virtualenv replacements (although the workflow is different, since you have to derive a new image for each project)

</comment><comment><USER10> That looks pretty cool! My immediate use for it would be in replacing tox.

It's a lot of downloading, but "docker pull python:3.7.3-alpine3.8" is far more reliable and simple than building from source. Especially for someone who just wants to test out a small contribution to a library.

<comment><USER11> Seems like someone is indeed compiling: [https://github.com/docker- library/python/blob/65b5603fdf177c...](https://github.com/docker- library/python/blob/65b5603fdf177c6d90df6ea6f3bd6e23839c63a4/3.7/alpine3.8/Dockerfile)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Personally, I use Nix to create my Python virtual environments. That gets the isolation, replicability, and deployability that the author wants, without the heavyweight infrastructure of Docker.

<comment><USER13> Got a show HN ?

<comment><USER14> Here's a post by tweag.io about using Nix to manage dependencies of Jupyter notebooks: [https://www.tweag.io/posts/2019-02-28-jupyter- with.html](https://www.tweag.io/posts/2019-02-28-jupyter-with.html)

<comment><USER13> Awesome! Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why has Italy been spared mass terror attacks in recent years? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/23/why-has-italy-been-spared-mass-terror-attacks-in-recent-years <comment><AUTHOR> Based on the law enforcement comments, doesn't seem like encryption plays much of a factor. Its just good old fashioned police work.

<comment><USER2> The article doesn't really tell us whether encryption is a factor. The suspects may not be using encryption, or the encryption used might be secretly circumvented by Italian authorities, right?</comment></comment>


Triplebyte (YC S15) raises $3M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/28/triplebyte-3m/ <comment><USER2> As someone who went through the process of Triplebyte (which ended up not working out because of my visa situation), I have nothing but good to say about them. The interview questions were great: straight on point and no trickery that tries to measure some "ability to ask questions and clarify requirement". The interviewer didn't get bored half way of the interview (and actually do try to understand what you're doing). The process was quick, Harj was very responsive in answering questions and resolving any issue.

Technical-wise, I like the idea of having multiple questions of different types to choose from: I live half way in Lisp land so recursion isn't a problem to me. But I don't do much concurrency except actor model so a lot of programmers will do better than me in writing thread-safe code etc. I think it also helps that they do enough interviews to pick out good problems: it's generic enough to be solved by (reasonable) general knowledge of programming. Too often I've seen interviewer in companies forgetting that algorithm is much like puzzle: you look like genius if you've seen it before, and an idiot if you haven't.

Rationally speaking, as a recruiting firm their incentives align with the candidate. But Triplebyte seems to optimize their automate/basic filter and process enough to deal and treat every candidate with reasonable effort from their part. Normally, it gets really annoying real quick when you realize that the interviewer is looking for any excuse to cross you off the list -- which unfortunately happens way too often.

I hope they will be able to scale it up. If I ever be able to get back to the US, I can imagine using them from both sides of the funnel.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have to say that as an employer TripleByte's quality of candidates and the way they interacted with us has been absolutely amazing.

Many recruiters try to throw candidates at us to see what sticks so we end up rejecting a lot of candidates, but I think with TripleByte we proceeded with on-site's in almost 100% of the cases.

<comment><USER4> It would be nice if YC had a site (similar to triplebyte) searchable and sortable highlighting their startups, what they do and so on. For example I didn't know about your company until I read your profile. I would probably take a closer look if I knew you were a YC company.

<comment><USER5> Inside YC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have never been shattered like I was by my triplebyte interview. Twenty years of programming and they can tell I'm not a programmer in twenty minutes.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are csv files so much larger than xml files? - <AUTHOR>

I have an XML file that I regularly convert to CSV as additional data gets added. Something that I find curious is that the XML file is roughly one half the size of the CSV, even though the XML has many, many more characters due to the tags. What gives? Could it have to do with the type of encoding? <comment><USER2> The only thing i can think of is that your csv is probably automatically converted to utf8, or utf16, whereas your xml is an iso-8859-1 ? There is no other reason thinkable. CSV is one of the most (byte)efficient formats out there, even in comparison to json or compressed xml

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you post an example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Example is coming from Prosper.com data. In addition to the XML, an XML to CSV jar converter is provided. The size after conversion is 3x that of the original XML--which just seems odd to me.

<comment><USER3> I'd be happy to take a look if you could send me an example of an XML file and its conversion to CSV.</comment></comment></comment>


What is the origin of the word 'quiz'? - <AUTHOR> https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/what-is-the-origin-of-the-word-quiz/ <comment><USER2> The article doesn't go into much detail nor even explore all the possible etymologies. My copy of the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the meaning of 'quiz' may be associated with the word 'inquisitive'.

Another theory is that 'quiz' derived from Latin "qui es?" meaning "who are you", the first question in oral exams in Latin in old grammar schools ([https://www.etymonline.com/word/quiz](https://www.etymonline.com/word/quiz))

It's quite interesting how many equally plausible theories can be made to explain certain words.

<comment><USER3> Give. The context & usage "inquisitive" or "inquisition" as roots seem the most plausible.

Though inquest and inquire seem to be related - especially in the latter case meaning "to question".

Possibly it's a slang corruption of all of them too. Language is strange.</comment></comment>


What Was Your First Coding Language? - <AUTHOR> http://www.flatplanetmedia.com/what-was-your-first-coding-language.html

<comment><USER2> QBasic on MS-DOS some time during the 80s followed by C in 92-93 right after downloading the SLS Linux distribution off a BBS. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Started with C, then javascript, then php. Now Im learning python but always go back to php.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I always go back to php too...I think there are more of us than people care to admit! ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Basic on a Matra-Hachette 'Alice' and on a Thomson T07/70

</comment><comment><USER5> My first language was Logo, then QBasic, then turbo C

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not familiar with Logo...

<comment><USER6> It's similar to LISP - but without the parens

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Basic...on the Commodore 64.

</comment><comment><USER6> Qbasic on MS-DOS 5</comment>


OGame.org python library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alaingilbert/pyogame

<comment><AUTHOR> I've just open sourced an old library that I created some years ago that helped me cheating at <http://ogame.org/> !

I refactored it before to make it public. I think the code is kinda clean, so if you have any comment or if you would have done something differently, let me know ! I want to learn the best python practices :)

Don't be shy to fork it and make pull requests.

</comment><comment><USER2> For a bit I was thinking this was a game played via getting the python library and calling functions in the interpreter.

<comment><AUTHOR> aha I see ! That's what I thought.

If you don't know the game, chances are that you'll not understand what the purpose of this lib ^^</comment></comment>


Handwriting to LaTeX - <AUTHOR> https://webdemo.myscript.com/views/math/index.html <comment><USER2> An O becomes a T

Are you using a point cloud or gesture recognition based on some math and not ML? I've used these and have notices similar difficulty. Looking at migrating to Google Draw Now / Doodle TF model.</comment>


A Crisis Merely Postponed - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/opinion/the-debt-crisis-merely-postponed.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> This is from 2011.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Still no real movement.</comment></comment>


NSA Leaders Split on Giving Amnesty to Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nsa-leaders-split-on-giving-amnesty-to-snowden/

<comment><USER2> While I don't hold out much hope for this, it's refreshing to see that it's actually being discussed seriously within the NSA. Here's hoping!

</comment><comment><USER3> "GEN. ALEXANDER: I do. I think people have to be held accountable for their actions. …"

Sure, how about your lying to congress?</comment>


UK government now leaking documents about itself - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base <comment><USER2> Well, here is my theory. Could well be missing something, or a hell of a lot, but here goes....

First thing is that my impression has been that the Independent has so far been pretty much parroting the Guardian articles. Now, I read this article as a "good spying" article. Its there for the government and GCHQ to show that spying is good, or had a good side. From a British security POV, if we believe the terror threat, this article actually shows spying as useful or worth while, and to Brits, good. Arabs wont like it, but to those who matter to the UK and US, I assume they know, and comply. Well, don't want to be bombed back to the stone age or be invaded, right?

Next, why the Independent, and not the Murdoch Times, Telegraph (Known in the UK as the Torygraph), or one of the tabloids? Well, the story needs the weight of a proper newspaper, so that's the tabloids out. That leaves the broadsheets. Pro conservative papers are too obvious, so that leaves the Independent.

Looks to me like a divide and rule thing. So far, the Independent and Guardian have been in step. Now we have the Guardian pushing "bad spying" and the Independent is the "good spying" advocate. The two step has been split.

I say the Independent has been used and somewhere along the line, we will see what they got for it.

<comment><USER3> Lots of circumstantial evidence supports this view. Apart from the specific focus of the story being a "positive" use of spying, the use of distorting phrases like "the Snowden controversy" and "the arrest of Mr. Miranda" (who was "illegally" detained, not arrested) are suspicious.

Also, it comes almost immediately after the government became aware of what was leaked (thanks to David Miranda). Not knowing this put them at a severe disadvantage before, as they were constantly a step behind and being continually caught lying was ruining their credibility. As others have noted, "was contained in the leaked documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden" are weasel words of the highest order, and the linked article by the Guardian is clearly calling this out.

It's easy to picture a narrative where the government wishes to ham up the "national security risk" posed by these leaks, which they couldn't do effectively when they didn't know what was in them. Intercept David Miranda to find out, cherry pick some information that sounds important but non- threatening to UK nationals, and leak it to The Independent in exchange for a sympathetic story. This also explains even the nonsensical "destroyed hard drives" affair - they weren't trying to delete the data, they wanted to make a big show of "trying" to.

<comment><USER4> I think in an interview with David and Glenn, Glenn had said that what they could have taken from David either couldn't be decrypted or was the type of information that wouldn't change a thing in terms of Glenn's journalism and the flow of leaks.

<comment><USER3> That's not inconsistent with what we've seen - they don't neccesarily need to have decrypted it to deduce some of what it contains. All it would take is a reference to a deleted folder somewhere in the filesystem named "Middle East Listing Posts" or some other piece of carelessness to have enough info to leak somethng like this. As for disturbing the flow of Glenn Greenwald's journalism, insofar as it has not already done that by provoking the linked article, it's possible Greenwald wasn't planning to discuss these particular listening posts at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note very carefully: "contained in the leaked documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden".

Now, that doesn't say the documents came from Snowden, only that it was contained in them. They're both likely telling the truth when Snowden says 'it wasn't from me!' and the Indy says they've not been duped. We know that the UK government has just gotten hold of these documents, but we don't know whether there's anyone sympathetic to the cause mixed in there.

There's a lot of facets to this and care is needed from both sides of the fence, but there's no love loss between The Guardian and The Independent. Maybe The Indie has been told one thing off the record that might have a nugget of truth that's been paired down by Chinese whispers, we just don't know. The Guardian is probably sanitising what they publish after what happened with Wikileaks (no one ever took blame, the password was published by them after assurances it was temporary), and would prefer another firefighting exercise.

Upshot is, The Indie revealed another piece of the puzzle in the reach of the surveillance culture that's being built.

<comment> grey-area _Upshot is, The Indie revealed another piece of the puzzle in the reach of the surveillance culture that 's being built._

I suspect this is a direct leak from GCHQ, trying to get ahead of future stories, and also trying to undermine Snowden's stance as a responsible whistleblower. No-one else is in possession of this information, and the article reads like a puff piece for GCHQ, particularly the ending.

This is incredibly misleading from the Independent - if it was from government sources that should have been clearly stated. If not they should name their source, it's not The Guardian (info destroyed one month ago), Snowden (denied, seems unlikely), Greenwald (Brazil), or Poitras, so where did it come from if not the government? It's really embarrassing for them if they have been duped, and even worse if they are complicit and reproducing press-releases from GCHQ without attribution, and with the implication that they have seen secret documents.

If they have seen secret documents and the UK government provided them, this undermines the argument against whistleblowers like Snowden, if not, who is the source? Without a source being specified, their story is not credible.

<comment><USER6> Yes it does read like dirty tricks alright, particularly this which might as well be a statement from Theresa May who stands over the abuse of the terrorism law:

>"the Metropolitan Police announced it was launching a terrorism investigation.. Scotland Yard said material examined so far from the computer of Mr Miranda was "highly sensitive", the disclosure of which "could put lives at risk". "

I see that as an attempt at discrediting Miranda/Greenwald/The Guardian.

> The Government also demanded that the paper not publish details of how UK > telecoms firms, including BT and Vodafone, were secretly collaborating with > GCHQ... But it only published information on the scheme... after the > allegations appeared in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

More of the same

> The Independent understands that The Guardian agreed to the Government's > request not to publish any material contained in the Snowden documents that > could _damage_ national security... But there are fears in Government that > Mr Greenwald – who still has access to the files – could attempt to release > _damaging_ information.

More of the same

I think the fact there is a base in the middle east is already known from this: [http://oglobo.globo.com/infograficos/volume-rastreamento- gov...](http://oglobo.globo.com/infograficos/volume-rastreamento-governo- americano/)

I think the GCHQ involvement and the BT, Vodafone are the only new information. So it smells pretty bad, especially combined with the misdirection about being in Snowden's files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Independent's article is really strange: It contains the name of the internal portal from which it claims Snowden downloaded files, it contains the time of Snowden's download and the apparent number of downloaded files. Then it describes the foreign probably military-controlled port which GCHQ uses. Otherwise repeats old information.

Why would anybody want to disclose that new info when the goal of Snowden's leaks was to point to the cases of unconstitutional US acts or broad attacks on liberties?

It definitely doesn't fit. The new information only "incriminates" Snowden more, otherwise doesn't contribute anything. In who's interest is that then?

<comment><USER8> I recall that the NSA admitted that they hadn't any audit trail from which they could figure out what downloads Snowden had made. But apparently GCHQ has better information...

<comment><USER7> False argument. It's not "either we know everything or we know nothing." For example, they can have incomplete logs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its called a false flag operation, commonly used to implicate a nation rather than an individual.

The Snowden camp is rather well defended at this point. He has received asylum in a country where US forces can't simply collect him from. The leaks are given out carefully, with lessons learned from the events surrounding Wikileaks. The news are given out in pace with readers ability to absorb them.

So what can a government do? Stopping airplanes with national leaders in them only caused more uproar. Trying to strong-arm journalist just created more news articles. Trying to physical destroy copies only resulted in a somewhat burned laptop, and maybe made someone to release an "insurance file". I guess they tried next with a false flag operation, hoping that it could go unnoticed. I wonder the think tanks will think of next.

<comment><USER10> _> Trying to physical destroy copies only resulted in a somewhat burned laptop, and maybe made someone to release an "insurance file"._

If you buy the plausible argument that this was a UK govt leak designed to discredit Snowden while stating that the stolen information and the handling of it is a national security threat, then the grandiose and very public destruction of the hard drives actually makes sense. It was the gov't calling attention to its "attempt to destroy the information to limit harmful disclosure." The public grandstanding of that act would be a sensical precursor to a controlled leak of the sort the Independent published.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Edit: my reading skills suck today. Feel free to ignore/downvote this.

The independent article [1] referred to has an interesting claim:

>The Independent understands that The Guardian agreed to the Government's request not to publish any material contained in the Snowden documents that could damage national security.

>As well as destroying a computer containing one copy of the Snowden files, the paper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, agreed to restrict the newspaper's reporting of the documents.

From this submission's guardian article:

Greenwald: "Speaking for myself, let me make one thing clear: I'm not aware of, nor subject to, any agreement that imposes any limitations of any kind on the reporting that I am doing on these documents"

It might be helpful if the Guardian explicitly clears this up. What a strange situation...

[1][http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive- uks-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-uks-secret- mideast-internet-surveillance-base-is-revealed-in-edward-snowden- leaks-8781082.html)

<comment> grey-area The Guardian editors did an interview a while ago with Charlie Rose explaining the process[1], and I don't think it's so much an agreement as that they run stories past the government first, for comment, and for the government to give them specific objections to revealing information - so far they've not heard anything concrete, just 'don't publish this' \- though this was before the laptop debacle. The Guardian and WaPo redact the documents before publication (sometimes heavily). The Independent is restating that in a slightly misleading way to imply that The Guardian has some sort of firm agreement with the government on vague terms like 'national security'. So I don't think the Guardian needs to clear anything up, they've been quite clear, and even if there were an agreement, I think the Guardian would argue that nothing they have or will publish does endanger 'national security' \- it would come down to arguments over the meaning of that term. Does it meant the comfort and ease of our politicians and security services to keep their activities secret, or does it mean actual danger to citizens of the UK?

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7pdz...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7pdzzZB7Xgo)

From the Independent story:

 _The Independent is not revealing the precise location of the station but information on its activities was contained in the leaked documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden._

This looks really bad for the Independent, as the article makes it sound like this is based on a leak from Snowden, and yet Snowden has specifically denied this, and if you go back and reread the article in that light, it becomes clear that they have simply reproduced a leak at the behest of GCHQ, carefully worded in order to preempt future scoops while giving little away, and yet get in front of the news with their best possible spin. I love the ending as well where they give up pretending to be independent:

 _Intelligence sources have denied the aim is a blanket gathering of all communications, insisting the operation is targeted at security, terror and organised crime._

We know they already collect it all, and the only limits are technical ones (for GCHQ at least, and it's starting to look like the NSA are similar). We already know they target individuals who are nothing to do with terror and organised crime (Laura Poitras, Appelbaum, Miranda etc).

<comment><USER12> I've seen a few suggestions that the SIGINT station is Masirah Island in Oman, which isn't exactly a secret.

[http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=j5J10im3ETMC&lpg=PA212&dq...](http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=j5J10im3ETMC&lpg=PA212&dq=Masirah%20island%20GCHQ&pg=PA212#v=onepage&q=Masirah%20island%20GCHQ&f=false)

<comment> grey-area They imply in the article though that they have seen secret documents, on which the story is based.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Richard Aldirch's book on GCHQ lists three locations in the Middle East used by GCHQ/NSA:

1\. Masirah Island near Oman

2\. Muharraq, Bahrain

3\. Mutlah Ridge, Kuwait

Given its location and the layout of cables in that region I'd guess #1.

I'm not quite sure why The Independent published this article though. Surely, it's not news that GCHQ operates bases around the world? Are they going to reveal the location of Diego Garcia next?

</comment><comment><USER14> An unsavoury attempt at demonising Edward Snowden and those associated with him (Glenn Greenwald) based on false information, with a view to achieving public rationalisation of the actions of the government in the destruction of Guardian data and the detention of David Miranda, hence rationalising the reduction of civil liberties, increased surveillance and enforcement of "law" in the name of protecting the public from terrorism.

[Edit: Removed some emotive exaggeration]

<comment><USER15> This, is nonsense hyperbole.

<comment><USER14> Thank you :)

<comment><USER15> You are aware that this is a 13 year old law, and that the government did not destroy The Guardian's data right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You know, when I read that story I immediately thought "oh boy, now they're going to say Snowden leaks 'hurt them' because they uncovered military operations", or something along those lines.

So if it's coming straight from the UK government, I could see why they'd want to blame Snowden for that, and make him lose favor with the public. If this is why they did it, I could even see US "advising" them on following the same model to destroy his image, just like they did with Manning and Assange (and where somewhat successful in that, I'd say).

</comment><comment><USER17> Fascinating. The Independent doesn't seem to say they got the documents from Snowden. They appear instead to be accepting UK intelligence agencies claiming that Snowden had certain information.

Maybe these were documents that the NSA has identified as likely compromised? Or maybe they were found on someone else (Miranda?) but it seems like this is an interesting development.

I am not even sure the Independent is being dishonest about it. However, something pretty odd is going on and the UK government is starting to look pretty incompetent.

<comment><USER18> Yesterday Schneier was trying to make sense out of the British authorities' play to detain Miranda...

"Schneier: The Real, Terrifying Reason Why British Authorities Detained David Miranda" ([http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/the...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/the- real-terrifying-reason-why-british-authorities-detained-david- miranda/278952/))

<comment><USER17> Where I differ from Schneier here is that I think it is quite plausible that the NSA doesn't know what Snowden actually took. One can more easily audit what he had access to and what he could have taken than one can audit what he did and given his long period of service, what he could have taken is likely to be very large.

You have to remember that even mandatory access control systems aren't really designed to keep sysadmins out, and logging has its limits both in the sorts of information you can extrapolate from a log entry and what you can log.

My point is that it is quite possible that the NSA has a list of documents that Snowden _could have_ taken and has no idea which of those he did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While I'm with the tin-foil hat brigade on this whole debacle, I'm not quite sure that 'it wasn't from Snowden' necessarily means 'so it must be misinformation from the Government'.

especially as it would be _so easily_ disproven that Snowden had anything to do with it.

<comment><USER20> Its perfectly possible that they have known about these monitoring stations for years, but lacked confirmation, or a narrative.

<comment><USER21> I think it would be awesome if they played along on this one and then followed up a few days later explaining that the tin-foil hat crowd was right and that the information was in fact leaked by the government in an attempt to discredit Snowden and Greenwald.

If I ran a news business and was approached to disinform the public, to me that is a huge story. I would milk it and play along and gather as much irrefutable evidence of willful acts to mislead the public and then drop that story later on.

If you simply say that you won't play along, you lose the opportunity to discover how deep that rabbit hole goes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a propaganda war, take nothing at face value. Is the Government lying (or ill-informed)? The Independent? The Guardian? Snowden? Is there another source of leaks?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder whether the Independent would reveal their source, or at least confirm or deny that it came from the UK government.

</comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know what kind of encryption was used on those drives that were taken from Miranda at Heathrow? Is it feasible to break that in this little time? That seems to be the angle here, that that info was on those drives. At least that's my wild stab in the dark.

<comment><USER24> There is some confusion on this front. Apparently Miranda gave them either the keys to the encrypted devices, the passwords to his online accounts or both.

It should be possible to clear this up but I can't find a direct quote of either Miranda or Greenwald on the matter.

<comment> grey-area [https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/370512998017683457](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/370512998017683457)

<comment><USER24> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One day there will be a movie about all this.

<comment><USER7> "The Return of All the President's Men."

<comment><USER25> "All the President's Men: The Quickening"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Let the chess games begin. UK on the attack now desperately trying to find an angle to sell to the public.

</comment><comment><USER27> It figures - this "leak" seemed completely uncharacteristic of Snowden's other leaks.

</comment><comment><USER25> There could be a second Snowden.

<comment><USER2> If only....

That would be one hell of a twist. Just to really push it, what if he has an unknown identical twin???

<comment><USER24> That would make passing through customs interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe the independent should drop the 'in' from it's name.

</comment><comment><USER28> The claim that the UK gov leaked this appears to be complete conjecture. It _may_ be correct, but there are no facts, even circumstantial, to back this claim.

<comment><USER2> Until the the UK gov confirms political leaking, its is all we have. So, either we have a bit of a chat and see what we can work out, or we say nothing because its conjecture and so forth. Are you suggesting that we cant have that conversation? Or are you suggesting that we all think we are talking god's fact and are deluding ourselves? Yes, we know it is conjecture.

Remind me, when was the last time a government freely admitted to leaking information for political reasons?

<comment><USER28> I never said any of that. The title states it as fact, there are no facts.

<comment><USER2> I know.

I had to go with the implication of what you said because the bare bones of it were too obvious to have been worth posting.

<comment><USER28> I know your excited but please don't put words in my mouth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I remember when hacker news used to be about hacking, programming, startups etc.

What the hell has this political article got to do with any of the above?

<comment><USER24> This is a defining moment in history, one which will shape the digital environment in which we all operate for decades to come. By the time the last echoes have fades HTTP and SMTP will likely no longer exist, every last bit of every communication will be encrypted and the general public will be about as paranoid as the most tinfoil hat type of 2 years ago.

All it takes for that to be the case is a few more things to happen:

      - someone leaks a substantial body of cleartext records on citizens

      - ditto on some foreign head of state / politician / judge

      - ditto on an American politician

The term 'plaintext' will be as antiquated as 'morse'. Still occasionally in use but not for anything that matters. Intelligence agencies will be reduced to traffic analysis and likely not even that with a vast chunk of the internet simply going dark, either as a mesh network or in some other decentralized fashion where there are no more supernodes such as Mae-East, Mae-West and Front 151.

The other alternative is not so much fun so I won't outline that here. There is a good reason why 'may you live in interesting times' is considered a curse.

The fall-out from this will affect every hacker, every start-up and likely every company operating at the moment with even a peripheral interface with the digital world, which is probably all of them.

<comment><USER29> It's really not a defining moment, in any sense of the word.

Same old, same old.

In actual fact though, The independent has stated that it wasn't leaked anything by the government, so the original post is moot. This is no better than gossip about celebrities.

So governments monitor the internet. Wouldn't it be really bizarre if they _didn 't_ monitor the internet?</comment></comment></comment>


The Word 'Machine' Comes from the Ancient Greek Word 'Mekhane' - <AUTHOR> https://floown.com/vision/ <comment><USER2> And 'robot' means 'slave'.

<comment><USER3> Robot comes from 'robota' means mindless work or drudgery, which comes from 'rabota' meaning servitude, which comes from 'rabŭ' meaning slave, which comes from 'orbŭ' meaning orphan.</comment></comment>


Tips on Writing Code for Data-Oriented Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarcCosta/20190409/340374/Tips_on_writing_code_for_DataOriented_Design.php <comment><AUTHOR> Explicitly posted for the potential for discussion - I felt myself bristling several times while reading. On the other hand, there a lot to be said for data-first and simple design...</comment>