How Culture Affects Hallucinations - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/how-culture-affects-hallucinations/ <comment><USER2> There is an internet subculture that tries to create _tulpas_. They are like voices in your head, but they have bodies too. So culture is already changing.

[https://community.tulpa.info/](https://community.tulpa.info/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas](https://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas) [http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/tulpamancy-internet- subcultur...](http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/tulpamancy-internet- subculture-892)

<comment> d-equivalence Tibetan Buddhists and other weird occult folk knew about them for ages, and required years of training before approaching them as a subject. They considered them as highly dangerous too. I shiver at the thought that this concept evolved enough so as to be picked up by reddit subculture. Let's see how many lives will get fucked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "If your only explanation for an auditory hallucination is that you must be going crazy and you have to fight it, you're going to develop a very different relationship to your illness"

This is really the key idea. It reminds me of the story of Eleanor Longden [1], a psychological researcher who has heard voices for years and has come to learn to live with them. "Mental illness/health" is a powerful meme that isn't always for the best.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/08/ted- talk-e...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/08/ted-talk-eleanor- longden-schizophrenia)

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder about cultural patterns that might result in selection bias in the studies mentioned.

> All sixty participants were diagnosed with schizophrenia, and regularly had > auditory hallucinations.

And later:

> ... the Americans' hallucinations seemed much more aggressive and violent.

Perhaps (for example) Americans with non-violent hallucinations tend not to be diagnosed with schizophrenia.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a "hearing voices movement" that aims to change the Western interpretation of auditory hallucinations, in roughly the way this article suggests:

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

</comment><comment><USER6> I highly recommend the book Echopraxia, sci-fi written by a marine biologist which explores voices in heads as reptile programs not unlike shell daemons communicating through audio.

[http://www.amazon.com/Echopraxia-Peter- Watts/dp/076532802X](http://www.amazon.com/Echopraxia-Peter- Watts/dp/076532802X)

</comment><comment><USER7> Ah, I see Priceonomics has completed its transformation into Medium. Kind of a strange pivot.

</comment><comment><USER8> This article misses the fundamental difference between vision and hallucination.

Hallucinations are psychiatric states, characterized by confusion, loss of identity and control, and have a destructive nature.

Visions on the other hand are spiritual experiences, they come with clarity, finding of identity and control about the inner and outer world, and are very constructive and uplifting experiences.

<comment><USER9> Hallucinations are certainly not by definition destructive. If you play Guitar Hero for a few hours and then look at something stationary, it will look like it's moving. If I haven't gotten enough sleep for several days running, sometimes walls will look like they're at the wrong angles.

<comment><USER10> Tetris effect/hypnagogia is maybe what you're talking about, it happens to most everyone given the circumstances [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia)</comment></comment></comment>


Google Finance Portfolios Going Away - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/finance/answer/7534448 <comment><USER2> Why?!? This is why I can't place anything on Google's infrastructure. Are they going to deprecate infinite storage photos once their AI has learned enough?</comment>


Hacker News for Fintech innovations - <AUTHOR> http://news.fintechers.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Finance is not just trading. When you start a company, you need funds. When you buy a new car, you need loans. When you care of your future, you need placements for your saving. Fintech startups break the financial monopoly to bring humanity in finance. Technology makes your online loan application cheaper, faster and more transparent than a bank loan application. You have no fees on your placements whith new assets managers. So, stop to be blind, fintech is real stuff and has a huge place in our life.

</comment><comment><USER2> Why does finance need all this technology?

In a world where real bank transfers between businesses (i.e. real trade) take minutes or hours, why does trading in tiny fractions of the ownership of that business need to be in true real time?

High capitalism is the people who make up the financial system redefining money and power so that they can give it to themselves. The technology is necessary only to make the trick believable, like a health quack speaking science words to make homoeopathy sound legitimate. They believe every word they say too.

Please stop participating and make real stuff.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you build your own ad server for web or mobile platform? - <AUTHOR> I am looking for pointers and technology on how to build your own private ad server. Google search on this topic sucks and points only to OpenX links. Our application has specific requirements and we cant use OpenX. We want to use this server to serve both on mobile, web platforms and any know how would help. Hackers help? <comment><USER2> This is what I do at my day job. It's fun. :) Here are some of the interesting/tricky parts:

\- Everything needs to be lightning fast. You don't have time for 15 calls out to MySQL to figure out what you're going to do. NoSQL is your friend here.

\- Relating to the above, implement a timing/profiling system that operates in production early on. It'll save your life more than you think.

\- Keep track of budgets and ads served per advertiser in a way that's quickly accessible and can handle being shared. Hint: if you're going to run more than 1-2 campaigns, you don't have time to hit your DB every impression to get this.

\- Make sure you fully understand cookie mechanics, especially relating to third-party cookies.

\- The amount of events in online advertising is enormous compared to other fields, so make sure your reporting can scale horizontally.

\- Understand how TCP and HTTP connections work and what stages they go through. You're going to have more connections from more different hosts than most normal load profiles, so optimizing your web stack and load balancing is critical.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rohl, you mean like a miniature adsense setup for your company? Depending on the functionality required you would have at least a horz scaled set of servers replying to ad queries from javascript widgets on peoples websites, collecting metrics as well as serving the ad data back ti the client. I would recommend a CDN for the graphical ad assets like cloudfront for fast loading.

Then you would have a web front end for admin.

Additional features, like confirming the widget in use by member sites would be another set of spidering servers.

IMO this is a very fun technical problem to solve. Lots of moving parts and opportunities to optimize .

</comment><comment><USER4> OpenX has an open source offering which has a plugin framework for adding your own functionality to it.

Building an ad server that'll meet the needs of larger online advertisers can be a real pain, especially if it's just a single component of your business.

If I were you, I'd see if I couldn't just extend the open source version of OpenX with a custom plugin. If it turns out that you can't, well -- you can still learn a lot about ad servers by playing about with OpenX's code.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all for the suggestions, I think this is a good start. I am interested in Nosql suggestion, the question I would have there is how the cache would work in this cache considering object storage is going to be a little challenging.

Some pointers on programming language choices for technology would be great.

Kleinsch you have some very interesting thoughts, is there any other way I could reach you and talk in more detail?

</comment><comment><USER5> One addition to kleinsch's fairly comprehensive post:

Is the serving going go be just ROS or is there going to be any matching/targeting involved?

If targeting is going to be there, will it be fixed (based on pre-set data values) or dynamic, algo-driven.

If it'll be algo based, you need to factor in the associated processing loads etc.

HTH</comment>


High-Res Graphics on a Text-Only TRS-80 Model 4 from 1983 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bytecellar.com/2018/10/17/enjoying-high-res-graphics-on-a-text-only-trs-80-model-4-from-1983/ <comment><USER2> A bit disappointed that this was just a matter of installing a graphics board in a machine designed to host one when it sounds like it would be a nifty hack from the title.

Still an interesting read to someone like me who knows very little about the Radio Shack computers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had a lot of fun with a TRS80 Model 4D when I was a kid. The article actually has the "text mode graphics" resolution wrong. There were characters divided 2x3 blocks so you could divide the 80x24 character screen into 160x72 "pixels" natively, without the extra hardware used in the article.

Since characters were simultaneously available at the full hi res of the screen, this allowed me to make a pretty nice looking rouguelike style game. Text heavy, but using the block pixels for walls and some limited graphics effects.

<comment><USER4> The Model III display was only 64 characters per line (64x16), so the 2x3 blocks gave you 128 horizontal "pixels". Model 4 could operate in either Model III (backward compatible) or Model 4 mode.

Moving to 80x24 on PC from a Model III was _huge_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This post made my childhood come rushing back. I was fortunate to grow up with a new-at-the-time Model I, which my father and I upgraded piecemeal from a Level I Basic ROM to the Level II ROM, then adding the expansion bay, filling it with 48K (16K at a time), then the chip that allowed displaying lowercase letters, and eventually 4 external double-density floppy drives.

The Model 4 was the machine that I would daydream about while flipping through Radio Shack catalogs and "80 Microcomputing" magazine. I was determined that, when I grew up, I'd have a Model 4 with both banks of RAM (128K total) and 4 internal half-height floppy drives in the bays (I don't think that was possible, in retrospect), and the hi-res card.

I still love the look of this machine.

</comment><comment><USER6> This was my first computer. Dad threw it away when I was at college, I was disappointed. Wish I still had it.

<comment><USER7> Come to Tandy Assembly next month in OH and relive your glory days.

<comment><USER6> That would be awesome! I'm way far away from OH though.

<comment><USER7> There's also CoCo Fest in Chicago, it's more color computer related but there are model 1-4s there sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In about 1980 or so i got a TI 99/4A (I was about 12) and figured out how to do high-res graphics within the limitations of what was essentially a text- only machine. By redefining the 8x8 character blocks you could manipulate individual pixels. The main limitation was that when you redefined one character, every one of that number on the screen would change, and I think there were 256 available...still though, i managed to create programs that could graph a line and draw circles, and something that was similar to Missile Command. it was also interesting in that if, for example, you filled the whole screen with a single character and then redefined it in a loop or something, the whole screen would instantly update creating mesmerizing effects. You had to be creative in those days.

<comment><USER9> My favourite 8-bit machine, the Oric-1/Atmos range of systems, had a secret video mode embedded in its bowels that we didn't know much about until this century. It turns out there is a way to do color rendering on the Oric that precludes the attribute clash that inflicted so many systems of the era .. and we didn't find out about it until one of our most elite hackers dug deep.

Since then, there's been a re-birth of new titles written for the Oric to exploit this graphics mode .. and it has resulted in titles that, had they occurred in the 80's, would have propelled the Oric far further into the scene - perhaps. (Perhaps, it was already too late for the Oric by the time it arrived...)

I find it fascinating that these machines still hold so many treasures yet to discover. And, it sure is fun to be writing software for an 8-bit machine, with only perhaps a few hundred users out there who would give a damn ..

<comment><USER10> any references to this display mode? I can't find anything on it on the net.

<comment><USER9> Here's an intro to Oric display in general:

[http://www.defence- force.org/computing/oric/coding/part_7/in...](http://www.defence- force.org/computing/oric/coding/part_7/index.htm)

Here's more details on the attributes mode that, when properly grok'ed, gives us color options never before seen on the Oric:

[http://thespider.oric.org/oric_hires_colour.html](http://thespider.oric.org/oric_hires_colour.html)

Twilighte (RIP) exploited this extensively for his games - check out [http://oric.org/](http://oric.org/) for his titles (they're in the top-10) ..

See also this thread:

[http://forum.defence- force.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=875](http://forum.defence- force.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=875)

<comment><USER11> Thank you - this is quite a find. I remember banging my head against the limitations of the HIRES mode and eventually doing everything in text mode with redefined characters - I was working on a windowing system at the time.

Best thing in for summer was two weeks with my grand father, my Atmos and my monitor - and certainly not my mom telling me to get out in the sun (and my grand father couldn't care less.)

<comment><USER9> Great to encounter another Atmos fan on HN .. have you been following the OricExos project? Its a system consisting of 4 Oric's, tied together, sharing duties for graphics and sound .. pretty amazing hack, if I do say so myself:

[http://forum.defence- force.org/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1880](http://forum.defence- force.org/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1880)

Check out some of the demo's at the end of the thread .. it was recently booted up and demonstrated adding new color resolutions to the system. Truly mind-boggling!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Baroque.me: Bach Cello Suites No. 1, Prelude [Visualization] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chenalexander.com/2011/baroque-bach-cello/

<comment><AUTHOR> "Baroque.me visualizes the first Prelude from Bach's Cello Suites. Using the mathematics behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music's underlying structure and subtle shifts."

The interactive version is extraordinary: <http://baroque.me/></comment>


The Republican Party has an API - <AUTHOR> http://www.gop.gov/api <comment><USER2> Instead of joking about it, you might find it interesting to actually go browse the available methods, as well as some of the examples. (Link to the examples page: <http://www.gop.gov/aboutapi/documentation>) Take an honest look at, say, the Perl example. Then browse a few of the methods (on the right hand side) to see what they return.

Although I don't find myself agreeing with the GOP on many issues, I am able to see that this offers real value beyond fodder for programmers who wish to be comedians. If nothing else, I hope to see it driving the momentum to 'open' government.

<comment><USER3> I don't see how this is useful as long as it's politicized to GOP-members only...

<comment><USER4> You can keep tabs on what half the government is doing.

And there are honest-to-god Republican activists out there (check the comments with negative ratings on the bottom of social news sites) who want to know what their party is up to and keep it on task. Much like how others might want to know what the Obama administration or the Democratic caucus is up to.

All in all, I think it's pretty awesome. I hope the Democrats will follow suit, or that Congress will put up a general API. That would be even better.

<comment><USER5> > _I hope the Democrats will follow suit, or that Congress will put up a > general API._

The worst thing would be if the Dems followed suit, but using a different API. Yuck.

<comment><USER6> It'd be hilarious for the two to use the same API, then patent it so that the Libertarians _couldn't_ use it.

Just to piss them off :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Props to the Republicans for doing this; I'm a confirmed liberal Democrat but I don't mind seeing both parties pandering for the geek vote. :-)

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, how do you become a "confirmed" liberal Democrat? Is that like becoming a confirmed Catholic? Is there a process?

And you are right that the most successful interest groups are ones that can get their policies pushed by both parties. I would love to see intelligent technology policies pushed by 2 parties, instead of about 10% of a party like we see now.

<comment><USER8> regardless of the process, the implication seems to be the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _committee.members

This method provides all Republican members of standing or subcommittees._

I recognize that this is a party site, but I wonder how much additional work it would have been to capture the non-GOP members and votes. I can't think of a situation where I'd want to know just a fraction of the members of a subcommittee; I'd think if you care you'd care about everyone in it.

<comment><USER10> This might actually be more useful in the long run. To me this says that Republicans are trying to show their tech saavy and trying to capture some of the good karma that the Democrats have doned of late in their gestures towards technology and open information.

Having the parties competing on this would be wonderful. It'd be like market effects on the web-ization of government information. Were this just a single political initiative coming from whatever agency it'd be a surefire bitrot target, but if the Republicans and Democrats start trying to one-up each other for political ends, we might see things evolve in a more interesting direction.

Politics seems to be most effective when it's trying to win something. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seems like a direct response to the Obama election team and administration's use of the Internet and technology over recent months. In the short-term it's not going to win them any votes, but it's good for the GOP brand and setting up infrastructure and increasing awareness for later higher-profile campaigns in an area where the Democrats are seen to dominate them.

It's amazing how much competition stimulates progress.

</comment><comment><USER5> I notice all the methods use POST. Shouldn't they use GET instead, on the ground that each access doesn't change the state of the server? <http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/whenToUseGet.html>

<comment><USER12> I like RESTful APIs too, but it's silly to imply that anything else is wrong

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure the implication was necessarily that it was wrong, the poster (no pun intended) could have meant that it could simply have been better to use GET.

<comment><USER5> That's right: I wasn't implying it's wrong to use POST, merely that GET is clearer, since using it would make it more obvious that the query isn't changing the state of the server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has anyone really looked into it? Does it provide anything that, say, opencongress.org/govtrack.us doesn't already have?

<comment><USER14> govtrack is amazing, rsync mirrors of their full database for your own use. A wonderfully useful website, I've even got rss feeds for what my congresspeople are up to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting to see them using ASP.NET MVC.

<comment><USER16> why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice move.

</comment><comment><USER17> rich->funnel_money_from_middle_class( _hide=[true]_ )

environment->screw( _distort_facts=[true]_ )

populus->dictate_christian_lifestyle()

populus->promote_fascism( _not_called_fascism_when_we_do_it=[true]_ )

<comment><USER18> I'm sure I speak for most of the progressives on HN when I say that we support what you're saying as being the overall GOP agenda, but man... that was just lame.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, telling it like it is -- that's just lame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there a DELETE function?

</comment><comment><USER20> Who cares.

Wish GOP sock-puppets would stop posting this stuff on HN.

</comment><comment><USER16> one _can_ simply POST into mordor. huh!

<comment><USER16> jeez. i thought it was funny. im sorry for offending so many sensibilities :/

<comment><USER21> It wasn't funny, but once upon a time this site had a tradition of not voting down silly/stupid stuff quite so much:-/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Did someone say republicans? I hate republicans so much, and this post looks like a perfect place to complain about them.

<comment><USER23> It's not.

<comment><USER22> Thanks for the tip. I was completely unaware of that when I wrote my original post.

That's why I posted a long political diatribe, rather than a short snarky emulation of people who use a post like this as an excuse to launch into long irrelevant political diatribes.

<comment><USER24> I think we all detected your sarcasm, but who in particular are you responding too? I haven't seen any diatribes yet, and I think that it would be best that any reactions or responses to them should be actual replies.

Just my two cents.

<comment><USER25> _I think we all detected your sarcasm, but who in particular are you responding too?_

Scroll down? There are several people who made politically motivated comments. That said, perhaps the fact that they were all downvoted into oblivion is response enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26>
      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>
      <SOAP-ENV:Envelope
       SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
       xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
       xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema-instance"
       xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema">
    	<SOAP-ENV:Body>
    		<ns1:doubleAnInteger
    		 xmlns:ns1="urn:GOPAPI">
    			<param1 xsi:type="xsd:int">666</param1>
    		</ns1:doubleAnInteger>
                    <getTalkingPoints:string xmlns:getTalkingPoints="urn:RequestTalkingPointsTrue">Give
                     me my talking points</getTalkingPoints>
    	</SOAP-ENV:Body>
      </SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

<comment><USER27> Man people cannot take a joke.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Snow Trips – Compare ski resorts by your budget, lift and flight prices - <AUTHOR> http://snowtrips.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hey!

Every year I spend up to a week or two, researching which ski resort to choose next. I have general idea what I like, what is my skill level. But to choose a resort I need to compare 4 or 5 of them by slopes length, snow conditions, price for lift tickets, price for lodging, is there anything to do besides riding (nightlife, hot springs, sledging), choose convenient and cheap place to stay, find available accomodation), find how to get there comparing all the options (flight, bus, train, shuttle).

So this for season I've built Snow Trips to give me all the info I need to choose next ski resort for my trip.

Snow Trips helps answer questions like:

1) How much will snowboarding trip cost me? 2) What is the price level for lodging? How cheap or expensive lift tickets compared to other resorts I consider? 3) How slopes length compares with other resorts for my skill level 4) Which airport to fly to and for how much?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated! Is Snow Trips valuable to you if you ski or snowboard? How would you improve it? How do you choose ski resorts?

P.S. European ski resorts with all the flights, lift tickets lodging prices at and around resort are coming in 1-2 weeks.

<comment><USER2> I can tell you your app would be super useful to airline employees if you could disregard airfare for ranking! Pretty small user subset, but aside from hardcore skiers like yourself I don't know how many people will consider resorts outside their local geographic area due to airfare.</comment></comment>


Wikipedia dwm article deletion: No consensus - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Flyguy649/Dwm

<comment><USER2> Wikipedia's deletion policies has lead to wiki forks of various kind such as the webcomic encyclopedia, Comixpedia. It was also one of the reason why I choose to create a niche encyclopedia just for open source games.

However, I choose to look at it as a benefit rather than a negative. A subject that is not well known is more likely to be vandalized over time then expanded by editors.

A specialized wiki that has a sense of ownership from its editor will be far more successful at preventing long-term vandalism and neglect.

</comment><comment><USER3> Support the Article Rescue Squadron! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Rescue_Squadron>

</comment><comment><USER4> This was very nice to read. In my experience with articles for deletion, I've never seen the closing administrator's reasons laid out like this. I hope this happens more often than it used to.

<comment><USER5> It won't happen more often because a page like that is a massive timesink. I'd bet that Flyguy649 has spent at a minimum 3 or 4 hours reviewing comments, doing some searches, writing this up, and so on.

(It's easy to be cynical and say "good! If admins have to invest 3 or 4 hours on each article they delete, then Wikipedia will be better for't", but really, most articles on AfD deserve to be deleted and asking 3 or 4 hours of each admin per AfD is a good way to destroy Wikipedia.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've heard it claimed that democracy tends to achieve the correct decision in the long run, but with the drawback of taking a lot of time and effort. This case is certainly supporting evidence for all of those points.

<comment><USER7> Wikipedia's AFD procedure is explicitly not democratic. The voting does not determine the outcome--it's a heuristic meant to help the admin. The criterion for keeping or deleting is consensus and the weight of the arguments on either side (insofar as they are relevant to Wikipedia's general principles). Do not mistake this admin's overview for a summary of a vote--it is not a democracy, and that's not a bad thing.

<comment><USER6> Whether it's a democracy depends on what you think a democracy is. My view is that a democracy is a system where all voices are encouraged to speak up, are heard, given due consideration, and approved or rejected by a community. The whole voting thing is one particular implementation of democracy. It's not necessarily a good approximation of those democratic ideals, but it's practical and it scales well, which makes it Good Enough(tm). Wikipedia's policy of considering arguments rather than votes for page-level decisions is something I would call more democratic than straight-up vote-counting, given the scale that it operates at, the strict (and explicit--rule of law is important) guidelines by which positions are weighed, and the general good- faith of those making the judgments.

YMMV. The definition of democracy is probably worth a thread in its own right. However, regardless of whatever label we each choose to call those policies, we're in accord that those policies are generally well-designed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> jezus. who has time for that shit. wp has been overrun by vogons.

<comment><USER9> No, Wikipedia has been overrun by people who dedicate a spectacular amount of time trying to build an encyclopedia according to a fairly rigid set of rules that has successfully built one of the Internet's signature resources entirely on volunteer effort.

In 2010AD, the Wikilawyers have amassed a large amount of evidence that the Wikicritics lack: an actual encyclopedia that, despite virtually _owning_ the front page of Google, has not been gamed into irrelevance.

I take that evidence into account, and the amount of effort WP volunteers clearly put into the project, and come to the conclusion that they should get a whole hell of a lot more slack than they appear to get on fora like this.

<comment><USER2> Whatever wikipedia volunteers did not choose to write about in open source gaming, I swallowed their long tail!

So in short, whenever wikipedia choose to write about something, they dominate. Whenever they choose not to write about, a niche wiki filled it.</comment></comment></comment>


Who's Selling Credit Cards From Target - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/12/whos-selling-credit-cards-from-target/ <comment><USER2> This is a a good illustration of how hard it can be to stay anonymous online.

With that being said, I don't see how Krebs reaches the conclusion that this guy "probably" knows who stole the Target cards or how they were stolen. They were just posted on his crappy carding forum.

It seems a bit disingenuous to me to plaster this person's dox under this headline; yes, he seems pretty scummy and runs several criminal enterprises but there's no actual evidence in the article linking him to the Target fraud beyond someone else using his forum to hawk their stolen goods.

<comment><USER3> Krebs doxxes people frequently and it seriously undermines any moral argument he may have, since a good deal of his time has been spent complaining about people doxxing him. There's a fine line between exposing crime and opening someone up to vigilante justice. Send the information to the police, but the public has no need for it.

<comment><USER4> Who has Krebs doxxed before exactly? This is the first time I'm hearing about this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was in line and made a short conversation (short so as to not hold up the line) with the cashier at Target. The elderly lady behind me was pretty worried about the credit card theft, and the cashier knew about it too. It's cool at least that news about this stuff is reaching more people.

In my opinion just get a new card, don't wait for suspicious activity. Check it to see if it was already used. Also given that the 3 letter pins weren't from the back are not included I'm not sure if it's going to be very easy to make use of this card data. Having said, still get a new card if you used it at Target recently.

<comment><USER6> By 3 letter pin, do you mean the CVC code?

Many merchants require the CVC code to protect themselves against fraud/chargebacks and because they can get lower processing fees, but strictly speaking, it's not necessary to make a transaction (IIRC, the only thing you need is the card number and expiration date).

Notably, Amazon does this for their 1-click checkout. Saving CVC codes is against PCI compliance, so in order to provide that low-friction experience, they simply post the saved card information without it.

<comment><USER7> "the only thing you need is the card number and expiration date"

If the dollar amount charged is low enough you don't even need the expiration date. You just use the current month.

We've frequently have to charge expired customer credit cards (expired by years in many cases) and as long as the dollar amount is low enough (off the top +- $40 [1]) and the card number hasn't been changed the charge will go through. Very convenient instead of having to contact the customer to get a new credit card expiration date. Also helps because that way you don't give the customer a chance to rethink what they are paying for and whether they need it or not.

[1] May be higher but I'm not certain if it's $60 or $100 so I will go with an amount that I know works.

<comment><USER8> Who are you using as a payment processor? Are you sure they're not running the Account updater service against your card on files and automatically updating expired ones for you?

<comment><USER7> I'm sure. And it's paypal. No cards are on file. These are literally credit cards that are stored in file folders (quite an air gap, huh?) and they are typed in MANUALLY in the paypal interface. Nothing is stored with the processor for repeat transactions. This has been going on since the mid 90's and while using other processors as well as even (in another business) at a credit card processing machine where the cards were keyed into that. CVV is not relevant either.

<comment><USER8> Got it. Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Several years ago I received an email offering to sell me 100k stolen credit cards, and it included a sample of 12k cards. They had card number, issuing bank, customer name, expiration date, customer address, and I think phone number. I don't remember if they had the CSC or not.

Some of these were from banks that would let you try to login given a card number and password, and told you on failure if you got the card number wrong or the password wrong, so I was able to do a check using that on some of the cards and found they were legit card numbers for accounts at those banks.

This was on a Friday late afternoon Pacific time.

I called the FBI to see if they were interested. They were not, and suggested that the Secret Service might be more appropriate. The Secret Service was also not interested. I then tried the credit card associations, and most of them told me that this would be an issue for their security department and suggested that I call back Monday morning as the security department had gone home for the weekend. One did give me the email I could forward the mail to.

I had thought someone would be interested in this, at least enough to want to look at the card numbers I had to determine if they came from a known breach or were from something new.

<comment><USER10> Is this due to the CC processors fraud detection? They just figure it's the cost of business and most of the time, the merchant ends up footing the bill, right?

Is it possible the CC companies are worried that if the government steps in, it reduces their role in anti-fraud and helps their competitors?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of value of stolen credit cards comes from the reluctance of businesses and law enforcement to go after the users of such stolen cards, as the transactions are "small" \- sub-1000$.

Last year, I had four fraudulent transactions appear on my card. I am a very cautious user - Linux on the desktop, seperate user and browser profile for e-shopping etc. This was the first time it happened in over 15 years of extensive online card-use.

Two of the transactions were with Netflix to register new streaming accounts. I called up Netflix, and within a couple minutes had a block placed on my card and both the accounts deleted with refunds to my card.

The other two transactions were on frys.com. One was for a laptop and the other, much higher value, for a smartphone. Shockingly enough, while one transaction got security flagged and did not go thru, the laptop one cleared and the laptop had been shipped out before I contacted frys. Frys rep told me on the phone that the information submitted was very clearly and obviously phony - the email address was a string of random letters @gmail.com, name etc everything was fake. Even with the credit card info, the only piece of correct info was the credit card number. No CVV was submitted, no correct billing address, not even the name on the card was correct. Heck, as my credit card is NOT US based, even the country of the card was not correct. Yet Frys shipped it.

I tried to get more information about the fraud but frys refused: they told me point blank, that they will not give me information, they will not initiate a police case, and they will not refund my money even though they were clearly at fault for having the transaction to go thru.

I, not being based in the US, had few options. I filed an online police report with San Jose police, where Frys is based. I also filed an online report with the FBI online fraud division. Both of them assumed I was filing these reports for insurance/reporting purposes, but told me outright that no investigation would take place.

Later, when my bank provided me with more info about the fraud I found out that frys actually challenged my chargeback and provided the transactions details to my bank. As expected they had no case, but I found out from the details that the laptop had been shipped to an address in Abilene, TX. I immediately registered an online report with the Abilene PD as well.

None of the authorities were interested in following up. Considering how trivial it would have been to atleast checkup on the address, this seems like a bad lapse.

I believe it creates a moral hazard: In the end, frys was the one that was out a few hundred dollars, and they refuse to prosecute. Police does not act on my complaint. Once it becomes known that a company has such lax policies, its open season.

<comment><USER12> >> I filed an online police report with San Jose police, where Frys is based.

You can forget about police doing anything to catch the criminals. The only good you get out of contacting police of such ID theft cases is that you can use the resulting paperwork to file claim with credit card company. Forget about police doing anything to actually go out to look for the criminals.

IMO, US police departments are firmly stuck in the mode of 'only-criminal-we- go-after-is-someone-with-a-gun-or-drug'.

It's been a while so the sequence of events is a bit fuzzy but basically I was a victim of ID theft a few years ago. A few checking/credit accounts opened using my name. 2 iPhones purchased using my name (not approved by me of course) at an official phone company store (meaning they were captured on security camera in the store). On Credit Report I pulled immediately after I learned what was happening, I saw my actual addresses and the criminals' addresses on the report. Interestingly the criminals were living in a 'dump' 1 year earlier but had since moved into a rental in a brand new condo complex. I mean a brand new, nice condo complex, also in San Jose area. I found out through Google Street View.

Now I had leads on their addresses and VIDEO FOOTAGE (in possession of the phone store in San Jose) of them existed. I was excited as I was headed to police station to file report. Well, what a disappointment. It seemed no one seemed interested in seeing the video footage. They just took my report (took me about 1+ hours in there). I got a generic confirmation letter from my police dept weeks later. I heard nothing from the police in San Jose. Weeks (or months later ?) I got a call from a US Postal Inspection Service investigator. He gave me names of 2 suspects and asked again if I knew them. I did not and am pretty sure they were the criminals. Thus the crime was being investigated by US Postal Inspection Service. So a potentially slam dunk case was being pushed around between 2 local police departments and a Federal agency. And the result was I was actually interviewed on the phone weeks/months after the crimes had occurred.

These pulps committed a crime that potentially cost someone else a few thousands bucks (cost of phone and fee and late fee), not to mention hours I had to spend to clean up the mess. But because the victim and criminals are in separate/distant jurisdictions, the police essentially did not do much on their own. They simply pushed the case off to a federal agency.

Had someone in my police department called San Jose police department to go look at a video foorage at a phone store and visit a local address up there, they could've caught the guys in a matter of hours or days.

Interestinly, months later I got a letter from landlord of the condo rental the criminals had rented. The landlord was demanding unpaid rent. The pulps had rented the complex using my name and when the fraudulent accounts were cut off and their money dried up, they fled without paying rent. The landlord's collector of course searched for my name and found the real 'me'.

The US police seems helpless with these crimes that cross multiple jurisdictions.

<comment><USER13> Anecdotal counterpoint: when a waiter started skimming cards in a town I used to live in, the county sheriff actually did track them down and arrest them. Charges were filed but I don't remember what happened after that.

Of course, they also tracked down someone who stole a pair of sunglasses out of my car so my experience is likely atypical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How on earth are the sellers "cashing out" and how are they taking payments?

Why can't the money be followed?

If the NSA is such a powerhouse with billions of dollars of assets to track every electronic communication, why aren't they focusing their entire resources on people like the sellers?

Or is it like the TSA where they just hassle the completely innocent people at the airport for show while the real criminals take other paths.

<comment><USER15> > _If the NSA is such a powerhouse with billions of dollars of assets to track > every electronic communication, why aren 't they focusing their entire > resources on people like the sellers?_

Because they didn't invest that kind of money to find the logs in a haystack that are eastern bloc cyber criminals. They are looking for a _needle_ in a haystack dammit. A needle. (and possibly if some of their wives are cheating on them).

<comment><USER16> "Is your wife cheating on you? Well you have the opportunity to figure out by joining the NSA today!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it just me or is anyone else surprised that the first screenshot contains a (working) .su URL?

.su was the TLD of the Soviet Union.

<comment><USER18> Russia still controls the .su tld and allows registering new domains under it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So, granted the perpetrator can easily be considered to be a scumbag, but is doxxing him really the best way to address this situation? What if this guy ends up lynched by a vindictive mob? What if this information is wrong?

<comment><USER20> If he gets lynched, then it becomes news, and generates more pageviews. It's good for business. /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a fascinating bit of research. Has any one posted yet information on how the actual card info was stollen? I read somewhere that the point of sale units were infected, but with no evidence to back that claim up.

<comment><USER22> Not the details of how it was done - but Bob Cringely has an interesting bit of conjecture on how the attack might have been introduced. It is a bit controversial because it hypothesizes that it was a lack of proper change control processes and possible outsourcing.

[http://www.cringely.com/2013/12/20/thoughts-grinch-stole- tar...](http://www.cringely.com/2013/12/20/thoughts-grinch-stole-targets- christmas/)

<comment><USER10> That article is pretty worthless. First, he says "clearly the terminals had access to the Internet", and that if they used a private network, it'd not have been a problem. That's just wrong. Let's assume the POS terminals connected via IPSec over a frame relay linkup to several datacenters. A compromise in the processing center could cause an issue. Or, you could attack the POSes and have them record data to some internal site which you can access from another point in the intranet.

Second, his only actual argument is: "Someone probably made an out of process change to Target's POS system and nobody noticed."

Sure, maybe. Or maybe someone subverted some other security system first. Who knows. Useless conjecture is just that.

Then he goes on about how the NSA should be fixing these issues. Okie dokie.

This is the same guy that doesn't understand how search engines work, and asked Eric Schmidt to manually fix his sister's website ranking in Google. I wouldn't take him as a useful source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Unfortunately, I was one of the shoppers at Target. It's fascinating how different issuers are dealing with the problem. It seems that many are waiting to reissue the cards, so the consumer can continue to shop during the busy time.

</comment><comment><USER24> Of course all this hinges on the admission that he was Hel in the first place .... which seems plausible to the amateur but requires more evidence for courts, I suspect. Though the name-clash of that service and the bribery is intriguing.

As to Target, there had to be a group. Somebody funding, someone inside, and then you've distribution networks for what effectively ends up as money laundering. At least that's the way I imagine it :)

</comment><comment><USER25> I am fascinated how the black market operates. With law enforcement probing every corner, going undercover, I can't imagine myself getting involved in a blackmarket at all. Well, I guess there is always the risk which says high risk yields high return.

<comment><USER26> Russia and CIS countries don't care about US fraud so won't allow citizens to be extradited. FBI/Secret Service prob know who they are and will just wait until they go on vacation somewhere and kidnap them like they usually do.

<comment><USER27> >kidnap them like they usually do

Although that would be impressive, I'm sure you know you are full of shit, but other people don't.

<comment><USER26> Derp dey derp [http://rt.com/news/extradite-russian-national- panin-901/](http://rt.com/news/extradite-russian-national-panin-901/)

Also Maksim Yastremsky (sp?) who the SS had Turkey work over for his FDE key because when they broke into his hotel room in Dubai couldn't extract info. That was from the 2007 big TJmax carding heist.

<comment><USER28> I'm confused, are you implying it's not okay for these criminals to be brought to justice, in accordance with various international laws, when their parent state acts belligerent and refuses to cooperate? These people hurt others for a living. They deserve punishment.

<comment><USER26> So does the Pentagon but you never see them punished for blowing up a wedding. US does not act within international law if they did CIS/Russia wouldn't be complaining about these kidnappings

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I tend to create temporary e-cards for online purchases outside of subscriptions...</comment>


Show HN: Cyborg Writer - In-Browser Text Editor with Neural Autocomplete - <AUTHOR> https://cyborg.tenso.rs/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

This is our latest demo for TensorFire ([https://tenso.rs/](https://tenso.rs/)), a Javascript library for running neural networks in the browser GPU-accelerated by WebGL.

Each of these models is a simple two-layer char-rnn (the kind explored in Karpathy's "Unreasonable Effectiveness of RNNs" post [http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn- effectiveness/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)). When you hit "Tab" the editor feeds in the contents of your document letter- by-letter into a network which is trying to predict the most likely next letter. It samples from that probability distribution and feeds it back into the network to generate an arbitrarily long string.

We've published code and instructions for training new models on Github ([https://github.com/tensorfire/cyborg- writer/tree/master/trai...](https://github.com/tensorfire/cyborg- writer/tree/master/training)). With about a megabyte of any sort of text, you can train a model and easily embed it into any web application.

We (@bijection and @antimatter15) will be answering questions in the comments.

<comment><USER2> No offence, but with a megabyte of text per speaker I feel I could do better with word n-gram Markov models (even bigrams), and random path choice.

I think deep learning is great and all ( and I'm meaning to learn it ) but shouldn't it be able to do far better than Markov models, or other simple things?

Image captioning? Incredible. Deep Mind winning video games? Incredible. Style transfer? Incredible. With one exception ( I saw on HN ages ago, sorry I have no link -- it basically generates novel text using deep learning, across all sorts of genres, such as "academic paper", "math paper", "novel", "film script" and I found the results remarkable and interesting ) I question if many text applications are doing better than Markov.

I think the issue is there is something fundamental and sophisticated about human language which our current deep learning models, with all their omniscient benevolence ( or whatever ), are missing. There's something deep about the structure of language that we are not modelling yet in deep learning as far as I've seen. When we do .... boom ... computers that learn from the internet and amaze us all. Then we'll have something to shine, smile about or fear.

Sorry for the digression and what may be inapplicable comparisons. I can get impassioned about this topic.

<comment><USER2> i think this, learning of hierarchies, could be the start of something relevant to unlocking more workable language modelling

[https://blog.openai.com/learning-a- hierarchy/](https://blog.openai.com/learning-a-hierarchy/)

<comment><USER3> I certainly agree. After-all, each rule for creating a pair in a syntax tree could be learned and these rules could be put together [1]

[1][https://www.google.cz/search?q=sentence+structure+chomsky&so...](https://www.google.cz/search?q=sentence+structure+chomsky&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjoq7CJ5pDXAhXkCMAKHbX7BowQ_AUICigB&biw=1262&bih=594#imgrc=c5TW8LQzC5gbzM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ha very nice!

I made a vary similar (but much rougher around the edges) project for fun a few months ago using a smaller french corpus of press releases from _La Quadrature du Net_ (a non-profit lobbying for net neutrality in France and Europe).

There is a live demo at [http://jorquera.net/quadra_neural/](http://jorquera.net/quadra_neural/). You can press tab to auto-complete word-by-word, or just start typing and the suggestions update on the fly. Instead of "Weirdness" I called my cursor "Drunkenness" :)

I used keras-js ([https://github.com/transcranial/keras- js](https://github.com/transcranial/keras-js)) to run my model in the browser.

If you are interested in this kind of experiments, do go for it! It's quite accessible, and projects of this scale do not require heavy hardware (I generated my models using a GTX 770).

If you need a kickstart, in addition to the repo from the OP all the code for my project is Free Software ([https://github.com/tomjorquera/quadra_neural](https://github.com/tomjorquera/quadra_neural)), and I tried to document the generation process in a jupyter notepad [https://github.com/tomjorquera/quadra_neural/blob/master/gen...](https://github.com/tomjorquera/quadra_neural/blob/master/generation/model_gen.ipynb). While I did it on a french corpus, it should work with any language.

I used two main resources for inspiration :

\- [http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn- effectiveness/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)

\- [https://github.com/fchollet/keras/blob/master/examples/lstm_...](https://github.com/fchollet/keras/blob/master/examples/lstm_text_generation.py)

</comment><comment><USER5> Pretty hilarious. I've found Tupac to work the best, e.g. (my starting text in quotes):

      "I was reading Hacker News when" he gladed out
      Somebody excuse I went down today
      I wonder if I give a fuck, when I creep

For some reason Donald Trump always seems to produce garbage...

<comment><USER6> "For some reason Donald Trump always seems to produce garbage..."

I think that means it's working correctly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Eh, it's scarcely better than a Markov chain. I was hoping for something a little more useful, like the ability to scroll through many similar words or concepts.

<comment><USER8> You might like this, then: a word2vec tool which suggests words of the same rough meaning starting with a particular letter or spelling, allowing you to write Genesis solely in words starting with 'a' [https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.ht...](https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.html) or generate large numbers of rhyming definitions (see comments), some examples of which:

        Cat: purr fur
        Dolphin: bark shark
        Puppy: yelp welp
        Shetland pony: shag nag
        Mosquito: mighty bitey
       Shrimp: chill krill

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fun with Shakespeare:

It seemed, somehow mock'd; Unbashed as it was my father.

My lady shall have him, perchance and reasons will abide it. Upon his unspoken thing, the devil shall see.

MISTRESS QUICKLY: Hide amongst you the gods? Wherefore comes here, sir?

</comment><comment><USER10> We have to be pretty close to someone having a system to generate mountains of convincing/unique "content" using Neural Nets (or something comparable) for the purposes of web spam/seo right?

Back in the day, SEOs would use spun content to generate lots of unique variants. But at this point, surely a ML algorithm can crack this nut?

<comment><USER11> Sure, at this point building RNNs that generate unique text on a particular topic isn't a big thing to do, it's something that can be given as a home exercise for undergrads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was expecting it to at least generate valid words, but that doesn't seem to be the case...

<comment><USER13> Safari on latest MacOS gives me unintelligible words pretty often.

My input: "I went to the grocery store to pick up some milk for"

Output on wikipedia setting:

"I went to the grocery story to pick up some milk for ... proposes of such to take a amplifier and the exporteruation of the player of former"

None of the options seem to key off of the text of my sentence except for vaguely the last word (in my case a generic preposition). Am I doing it wrong?

Here's another example, with the ellipses where I pressed tab:

> As I walked along the forest trail, I came to a most amazing [...] the > history of the town himself, the complete material was made to be a > traditional

<comment><USER14> You're starting the text like a story (in the first person even!). Wikipedia articles aren't usually written like that, so the network is in unfamiliar territory. Its only option is to quickly revert back to something closer to the style of an informative article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is actually pretty neat, although requires more digging

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there a technical reason why it generates text with lot of spelling mistakes?

Ayn Rand seems very sloppy with her spelling!

</comment><comment><USER17> It's pretty neat, even got a t.co URL. Sadly, it didn't lead anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER18> Mobile Safari just sits there...

</comment><comment><USER19> Hitting tab crashes Chrome for me.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the tip! What OS and chrome version are you using?

<comment><USER21> Not OP, same issue here. Whole browser just locks up, pretty impressive.

Windows 7, Version 61.0.3163.100 (Official Build) (64-bit)

<comment><USER19> Same specs here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Docker's Dirty Little Secret - <AUTHOR> http://blog.altometrics.com/2016/06/dockers-dirty-little-secret/ <comment><USER2> There's nothing _dirty_ or _secret_ about this. The whole point of docker is to be lighter weight than VM, because you're sharing a kernel with the host. It's no surprise, then, that you can't run a container with an OS using a different kernel from the host.

<comment><USER3> Author here. Thanks for your comment. I figured this would be obvious to some.

Question: do you know of a good resource that describes docker in these terms, such that what I wrote about isn't surprising?

The official architecture page [1] doesn't illuminate this issue. To be fair, it isn't super relevant—so long as you run Linux, OS X, or Windows. When you run alternative OS's, though, it becomes pretty important.

[1] [https://docs.docker.com/engine/understanding- docker/](https://docs.docker.com/engine/understanding-docker/)

<comment><USER4> On Linux, Docker uses cgroups to isolate resources. Cgroups is a feature of the Linux kernel. Cgroups are almost ten years old.

Docker on FreeBSD utilizes the Linux compatibility layer. It was introduced in 2015. It is officially experimental.

[https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker](https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker)

To me, none of this is obvious and my limited understanding has taken several years and many hours of podcast listening and technical reading. I still don't know squat.

<comment><USER5> > Docker on FreeBSD utilizes the Linux compatibility layer. It was introduced > in 2015. It is officially experimental.

Huh!? I remember running unmodified Linux binaries on FreeBSD (and other BSDs) in the late 90s. Maybe it was not suitable for most docker images and that started last year...

<comment><USER4> Per the link, Docker [the subject of the thread] is experimental on FreeBSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is of course also true of linux running on a different architecture such as power, you need specific images that are built for that architecture.

I wonder if the author noticed that none of his docker images were actually _running_ on Mac OS...

</comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR: Containers are containers, and not virtual machines. In other shocking news: Water is still wet.

</comment><comment><USER8> The clickbait is real with this one. Nothing shocking or "secret" here that a 30 second skim of the documentation wouldn't reveal.

<comment><USER4> Docker [the technology not the company] has reached a level of success where it is discussed and used by people who are not aware of the technical details of its implementation. It is entirely practical to use Docker without ever visiting Docker's official documentation.

Because Docker is an alternative to the virtual machines with which people tend to have more experience, it is normal for people to fill holes in their knowledge with facts about VM's. Much of the time, this works.

I don't think the title is great, but I think more than anything else it reflects frustration with the complexity of containers and normal disappointment with things that at first appear to be silver bullets.

 _The future is already here -- it 's just not very evenly distributed._ \-- William Gibson</comment></comment>


Show HN: Box2d with React DOM - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-dom-box2d <comment><USER2> I made something like this for my own amusement some years ago, I just manipulated the DOM though. Made the script so it could easily be applied to most websites as a gag, just by running the script and if you wanted you could set parameters for which elements should be static or dynamic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I always wanted to do something like this [https://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/google- gravity...](https://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/google-gravity/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> this is dope af! [https://q8l48rwk49.codesandbox.io](https://q8l48rwk49.codesandbox.io)</comment>


So where do I signup for Bootstrappers Anonymous? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fakepad.com/post/698662534/so-where-do-i-signup-for-bootstrappers-anonymous <comment><USER2> Misleading title. Very little to do with bootstrapping. Instead, it's mainly a discussion of iPhone/iPad owner psychology.

</comment><comment><USER3> Was hoping for more discussion around bootstrapping and being cheap as opposed to iPhone development.

Is there anything wrong with being cheap? My company is currently barely "ramen profitable" and being cheap is more of a necesity vs a choice.

Being able to lower your standard of living is a big part of being an entrepreneur, we all need to be able to do it at some point.

</comment><comment><USER4> Best paragraph:

''' Imagine the reaction when a company like Apple suddenly comes with devices like iPhones and iPads that don't feel like computers, don't require nearly as much maintenance & 'Just work'. Or at least work enough. Imagine the reaction: "Hey, tech doesn't need to be difficult. Those nerds have been fooling us all along. Screw them."

'''

That one hits home! Ouch!!

<comment><USER5> I'm the author & while I think that particular post is one of the more rambling entries, this part indeed summarizes how I generally feel about the whole iOs debacle. While the long-term future probably is in html5 apps, right now ordinary people are voting en masse with their wallets. Lots of nerds are slow to wake up to this reality: the iPad is a device nerds love to hate and normal people love to love.</comment></comment>


QuickAnswers.io: instant answers to natural language questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.quickanswers.io/

<comment><USER2> Like the idea.

I tried 'how many seeds an avocado has?, 'How many hairs an average human has?' and finally 'how tall is Brad Pitt?'.

Only the third one got a straight answer, the rest started talking about avocados in general and types of cells in the human body. Needs more work, but I like the idea of a simpler Wolfram Alpha.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I'm currently trying to figure out ways to make the engine much smarter in the way it collects data.</comment></comment>


Is it stupid to believe in the singularity? - <AUTHOR>

(By singularity I mean roughly any future society that is so complex and advanced that it would be impossible to understand it in our current state. According to most proponents of this theory this likely would involve the development of a super intelligence far removed from anything we know today.)
I'm fairly young so I frequently fantasize that humanity will make incredible leaps forward within my lifetime. I can't help but dream that most of our problems will be solved in a matter of decades. I have held this belief for most of my short existence, but I am now starting to have doubts.
The main problem is that technology doesn't seem to be progressing as fast as it should. Sure, we have a new smartphone model every six months, but what about more fundamental long term research that doesn't have immediate commercial applications? I don't have enough information or scientific education to determine whether we are heading in the right direction. However it does seem that A.I. and genetic manipulation research is evolving at a snail's pace.
A lesser but perhaps even more depressing problem is that belief in the singularity itself is starting to look awkwardly like a form of religion:
1) A belief in a second, better life in the future whose nature is incomprehensible to "mortals".
2) A small evidence/speculation ratio
3) Worship (in this case, technology or those who create it)
4) A "chosen few" mentality.  (For example, the singularity benefitting only scientists or people who saw it coming and planned accordingly i.e. Kurzweil taking 40 pills a day to live long enough) This is extremely common in internet discussions around the subject. I had this same attitude myself until recently, patting myself on the back for being "in the know".
So do you think it is stupid to believe in the singularity? Am I delusional? I really need some outside perspective here. <comment><USER2> You have a strange definition of singularity. They way I understand it, singularity is a point in time, when AI becomes "smarter" than humans, and begins the process of self-improvement. The big assumption here is that AI will actually be "like" humans, and will have goals, and motivations to achieve those goals.

However, if we assume that to be the case, AI will quickly become so smart that we will no longer be able to predict any of its actions, and therefore, we are unable to see the future beyond that point.

It was called 'singularity' because it's kind of like a concept of gravitational singularity in physics, where there can be regions in time (Big Bang) or space (black holes), where matter changes so much that we unable to see what's going on.

As for you question - yes, it's pretty stupid to "believe" in singularity. You should believe in yourself. You can change the world. Do you think technological progress is good? Do you want it to keep happening? Then do something about it. Learn, invent, make it happen.

People, who think they are "in the know", and who sit on their asses and wait until someone else do it, look pretty stupid.</comment>


Why Nerds Succeed - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/book-review-the-geeks-shall-inherit-the-earth-by-alexandra-robbins.html <comment><USER2> High school rewards people who socialize well, it doesn't punish kids for loving science. If you socialize well, you can 'get away' with being a CS major, hell, you can even make it cool. It just so happens plenty of nerds _don't_ socialize well.

Reaching out to teens and asking them to reach out to their dorky classmates because they might be their bosses one day just doesn't take. They lack the foresight, control, and interest.

The reality of the situation is that teens can and will be immature, annoying, shits. People have known this for centuries.

<comment><USER3> It's unfortunate that people can't be successful _in high school_ without socializing well. Fortunately, high school doesn't last forever. And, there are other ways to get a functioning adult without mass incarceration at a public school.

We talk about how high school is a problem, but improperly-socialized children is a parental failure. Most parents are quick to drop the children off at day care at six weeks old and then they wonder why high school is barely more civilized than a wolfpack.

I have a three-year old, and I will support any activity he wants to do (from fly fishing to perl hacking), but I will also make sure he's polite, articulate, and compassionate. If only all parents made that a priority.

<comment><USER2> Well, as great as being polite, articulate, and compassionate is, those attributes don't (necessarily) add up to cool in school. I don't think that's something parents can really teach.

<comment><USER4> I think the essence of being cool is having a sophisticated understanding of what is going on around you. High school geeks often find their environment tedious and can't be bothered to invest a lot of effort into figuring it out.

This is the thesis of PG's "Why nerds are unpopular", and having lived that life, I can assert he's right. Being polite, articulate, and compassionate doesn't hurt you in life -- and neither does intelligence -- but when it comes to "coolness" I think awareness of your surroundings is the most important key.

<comment><USER5> This is spot on. I was a "band geek", more specifically an "orchestra dork", in high school, and a computer science nerd as well. Not exactly the most popular combination. My attitude in high school was mostly not caring about being popular, and I didn't make any effort to identify with people I considered to be unlike me. I had other friends, in the music program, who were sociable and could identify with the less academic oriented crowd and they did fine. I gained a lot of this awareness in college and actually went on to be my fraternities social and rush chair, and what changed was that I gained a more acute awareness of people's social interactions and put in the time to figure out the college social situation. This isn't always a huge priority of nerds, or they just haven't gotten there yet: they may be so advanced in one aspect that the social skills haven't quite caught up yet. However, I disagree that all these geeks will go on to inherit the world: if they don't EVENTUALLY gain those social skills and recognize how valuable they are, they won't get anywhere near as far as they can. There is some ridiculous statistic like some 60-70% of all senators/presidents were Greek (frat and sorority life), and I think this speaks less to the value of the greek system and more to the fact that people who place value on interacting with other people and communicating go farther than those who don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      1960's: Eddie's so gifted! Send him to a special school.
      1970's: What a nerd! How will he ever meet a girl?
      1980's: What? You want to go out with me? What a nerd!
      1990's: Look at that's nerd's car. His father must have bought it.
      2000's: With all this computer stuff, good thing he was always a nerd.
      2010's: No longer a nerd. Just an "outlier".

<comment><USER7> Also, now people want to be somewhat disguised as nerds, using geeky gadgets and pretending to like computers (just because they like Facebook and MSN).

<comment><USER8> A lot of people are buying Macbook Pro's these days, and all I see them ever do is use them to read Facebook.

<comment><USER9> From a technical point of view, what are some critical tasks can you do on a mac that you couldn't do on a windows or linux machine?

<comment><USER10> Program IOS apps.

<comment><USER11> why would anyone want to do that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "None of this, however, dampens the urgency of her broader message. "Adults tell students that it gets better, that the world changes after school, that being 'different' will pay off sometime after graduation," she writes. "But no one explains to them why." Beyond the bromides, she's dead on: teenagers need to hear that adolescence ends. And more than that, they need to believe it."

Our kids have been told that they will learn more about living in the world from school than they will of the Three Rs. And that it is an important skill, being able to cope with the stress. It just seems to be the best way to frame it for them: people are sometimes shitty. No sense in trying to figure out why or change them. Better spend your energies finding ways to avoid them when possible and suck it up the rest of the time. And I don't exclude teachers. I tell them that these are skills they'll need for the rest of their lives, because there will always be a boss, a cop, a teacher or some other person in a position of authority who may not be inclined to act to your advantage.

Then you move on. Build stuff. Learn to play an instrument. Write stuff. Anything that makes you feel good that doesn't rely on someone else's approval. Next thing you know, you're interesting and everybody wants to know you. It's a better use of your resources than whining, for sure.

<comment><USER13> I think you should tell this to the bullies. That way they can tell their victims "Remember, I'm teaching you a valuable life lesson" after they're done beating them up and taking their lunch money.

Seriously though, being a social outcast isn't a valuable experience, nor is it healthy. It sucks, and it teaches you that your only options are to avoid the shitty people or suck it up as you put it. The reality is that you have a third option: being assertive. Believe it or not, you can make a shitty situation tolerable with a bit of honesty and frankness.

After all, there are going to be shitty people you can't avoid, and you'll explode if you just suck it up. But school doesn't teach geeks to do that. It teaches them to be docile and accept their shitty situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's amazing is that this kind of article is purely due to societal labeling.

In India you would never have this kind of article because the students with the highest grades are revered by everyone else while the jocks are looked down as guys who will , in the future, only be able to get menial jobs!

I'm always surprised at how much pain and suffering a "geek" has to go through in the US whereas he would be the center of attention in India.

Same situation but with different labeling applied ... Amazing.

<comment><USER15> _In India you would never have this kind of article because the students with the highest grades_

There is something wrong here. Someone with high grades is not necessarily a geek. A geek will probably rank well and get good grades. I actually think, geeks will have not so good grades. That's because they are busy doing other things: like programming, or free-thinking.

In Tunisia, high school encourage stupidity. I can't imply the same for India, but I'm almost sure that it is the same case. With little intelligence, lot of hard (repetitive) work and sometimes private courses, you can get incredibly good results.

If someone has the highest grades in a high school that encourages stupidity, he is probably not a geek. There are more than Maths and Physics in high school. I doubt geeks will be interested in subjects that focus on dumb- memorization of a few sentences. This will decrease their rank.

I would like that you comment more about this subject, because I have been there (High School) and lived it.

<comment><USER16> I disagree. When it comes to highschools in the United States, things are so viciously easy outside of the AP/IB track that you can sleep through class and still get a high B or low A.

It's anecdotal but its confirmed by foreign students that I know who came from abroad to begin schooling in the US.

<comment><USER14> Yeah US/UK school curriculum is a cake walk compared to Indian/Chinese school curriculum.

I was born in India and lived in the UK for 6 years. My dad used to make me study the Indian curriculum after I got home. I hated studying the Indian one.

School however was like a breeze though ... Didnt have to even think :) ... They even made me go to a senior class for math because I found the subject matter so easy.

And it wasnt only math that I did well at. I was the top of the class in english as well.

Anyway seriously, you cant compare the Indian/Chinese curriculum to the US one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _For the modern adult, nothing signifies self-confidence, street credibility and authenticity like one simple confession: "I was such a nerd in high school."_

Really? Credibility, of the street variety or otherwise, and authenticity? I think Bruder should review what those words mean before using them again.

It depends on the person, but, for the most part, when I hear people say that, I know they're making shit up.

Of course, since the opening premise is based on lies, there's basically nowhere that Bruder can go with this. Some nerds are successful, yes. Yet so are many gorillas.

</comment><comment><USER18> Successful nerds succeed, there are plenty of unsuccessful nerds. I, without a shred of evidence, would think there is a positive correlation between school geekiness and success, but all this "nerds will own the world" talk that is gaining traction lately is a bit foolish, in my opinion.

<comment><USER19> Being different and bullied is sadly not always followed by success. As someone with the diagnosis of Asperger's, which has been called "the Geek syndrome," I am acquianted with many with the diagnosis who have struggled for a long time to maintain stable employment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was a "closeted" geek in my high school until people found out I had made $15k in a few months off my Cydia Store iOS tweaks. My classmates responded positively, which is understandable. However, most of my classmates don't care that I'm a passionate programmer, or was one long before I started to make money. Most of my classmates simply view me a success from a monetary standpoint. I don't think geeks are necessarily becoming respected in droves by their peers; if anything, people are now recognizing that geeks have the potential for great success. For example, most of my classmates (again, most), would probably not respond positively to another, hypothetical geek student who is a brilliant programmer and prolific free software contributor. They would likely ridicule him or her for not trying to make money.

 _The Social Network_ has contributed to this new stance towards geeks, which, save for the cringe-inducing "I know HTML so I'm gonna make the next FB!", is generally a good thing.

<comment><USER21> My exact story.

Before I started making things for profit everyone just saw me as extremely good with computers. After people found out I made XX dollars, everyone started calling me the overly clichéd "next [Steve Jobs|Mark Zuckerberg]".

Because of this, I prefer not to give out sales figures anymore. When classmates ask how many people have bought my products, I respond "A good amount." and leave it at that. Being called the next Steve Jobs by someone is being alienated by that person.

<comment><USER20> Merely by becoming a programmer, you have alienated yourself in a sense. The most successful people in the world have alienated themselves. They are outliers. Superlative compliments can be alienating in a positive sense. Comments like "Dude, wtf? How do you find the time to do that s---? Are trying to be the next [famous technology-related individual]?" are alienating in a negative sense and convey disapproval. Some environments reward individuality; others ridicule it. Unfortunately, it seems that you have experienced more of the latter than I have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Cafeteria fringe". I think a lot of us can identify.

But not everyone finds a friend or their own group (geeks, goths, whatever) and are pretty much completely alienated. Of course it leaves bitterness, as this story (I recall it was linked from HN some years ago) attests:

[http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/07/very_off_topic_why_...](http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/07/very_off_topic_why_i_wont_be_a.php)

Also worth reading: pg's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular"

<http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>

</comment><comment><USER23> Socializing too deeply early on at school is often a disadvantage in later life; the best successes are those with raw talents that learnt to socialise out of school.

The reason for this disadvantage is institutional and would be difficult to decouple from a mainstream education. Basically, the social hierarchy at a school promotes the social status of people that (a) are older or part of the educational bureaucracy, (b) demonstrate superficial interest in manufactured culture, (c) belong to mainstream cliques with lowest common denominator values, and most of all (d) are non-disruptive and therefore willing to follow the rules and authorities of the institution. This is as opposed to later life where in a less rigid social structure freethinkers move ahead from others depending on their ability to be (e) disruptive and on their human merit: (f) intellectual and (g) social.

It should be quite clear that, while a school may attempt to educate pupils which it often achieves to a high degree of success, the actual social structure is counter to the abilities eventually self-learned by a freethinker [e, f, g].

When a person that does not feel part of an institution and does not socialise as readily with it, they are not as easily influenced by the institution they: (h) criticise it and (i) differentiate themselves from it — often this means the band geek buries themselves in music and the nerd starts to read science text books in their spare time. While later on they are not handed the opportunities that would have arisen from a high social status at school they are: (j) less impeded by new hierarchies that they join, (k) now promoted based on the merits that they fostered while on the fringes of the educational institution.

On the contrary, the person that felt one with the institution and was celebrated for conforming to the values of its social structure has now learned behaviour that: (l) either brings no benefit to their existence in the new hierarchies or (m) actually counts against them. Worst of all, since they never learnt how to exist apart from a hierarchy (n) they prefer the security of groups over the risk of trying to do things their own way, (o) are likely to lack technical skills, (p) and might still be friends with the people they grew up with in school which would create "stickyness".

As a closing point, of course there are exceptions, for instance: there are those with (q) leadership qualities and (r) high emotional intelligence that were successul at school while also able to control their school experience to their own long-term advantage. There are also many unsuccessful geeks and nerds whom only gain (s) intellectual skills, (t) simply belonged to a much worse-off social clique with the same problems, and most importantly (u) never learn to socialise and take risks.

</comment><comment><USER24> _Many of the traits that correlate with "outsider" status among high school students — originality, self-awareness, courage, resilience, integrity and passion — reveal themselves as assets later in life._

Those are also useful, for well, anyone who is successful...

<comment><USER25> Indeed! That line also struck me as nothing but feel good platitude! Most nerds in high school lack self awareness, perhaps the reason they are social awkward. Integrity and passion are unrelated to being socially well adjusted and I'm not sure about courage and resilience!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The fact that a some successful people are nerds, doesn't mean that every nerd is going to be successful.

Not only this theory is not backed even by a simple correlation, but it hastily extrapolate the USAs case to the world.

<comment><USER27> This theory is targeted directly at American high schools. There is no attempt to extrapolate this to the rest of the world. If you're not from the US you can view this as a curiosity, but it is not meant to be relevant to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The author spoken about in the article that wrote the book about "quirk theory" did an AMA on reddit not too long ago that you can find here [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/h2ajd/i_invented_quirk...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/h2ajd/i_invented_quirk_theory_and_was_a_guest_on/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I like how 'nerd' is always associated with 'anti-social'. Doesn't a nerd's success hinge on their ability to create social networks for themselves?

</comment><comment><USER29> this "us against them" mentality seems to really be picking up steam these days. it doesn't make sense to me. for every "successful" computer geek there is a successful banker, lawyer, politician or any other traditionally mainstream-sexy profession. CEOs tend to be extremely charismatic...not exactly a trait associated with "revenge of the nerds."

this fixation on popularity seems to exist as strongly in the tech world as it did in my high school. I mean, christ, our two biggest web services right now (fb & tw) are entirely, "look at me! pay attention to me!"

<comment><USER27> Actually, most of the people in those positions tend to be well educated and studious. This tends to not be popular in high school.

<comment><USER29> you haven't spent much time with wall street types, have you? It's a lot of alpha-male, machismo, 'let's drink beers and tell dirty jokes' - which, in my experience, is pretty much in line with being "cool" as an adolescent. Your implication that being well-educated and popular are mutually exclusive is just plain false, at least where I grew up...

<comment><USER27> I have spent a lot of time with them, actually, given that Northwestern's most popular major is economics. I'm also in a frat and enjoy drinking beer and telling dirty jokes with many of my finance-oriented brothers. Of course, when the rubber meets the road and they have a statistics test the next day, they're not out partying, they're studying all night with a big cup of coffee.

I would say that this kind of popularity is less common in high school, though. Simply the fact that you care about school and study is likely to put you into a separate group. College, however, is a different story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Reading this made me think about the punk movement in music. In the beginning it was about being different. Real punk was anything that your parents and friends didn't like. It wasn't about the kind of music you were playing per se, rather about your attitude. Commercially and socially it didn't really take off. You can argue however that the attitude did. Some musicians started to adapt to the attitude in order to take advantage of the small "movement". Rebellion and individuality were what some went after.

Then punk became accepted. Then it even became commercial. Now you can't recognize punk.

</comment><comment><USER31> Funny how the treatment varies across cultures. At least where I'm from, if some one is getting good grades/considered to be geeky, there will be a lot of "why can't you be more like him" comments from other parents.

<comment><USER32> "From other parents" sure. It's the _other kids_ that shut the geeks out. I always got along with adults better than my "peers".

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think it's important to tell nerds "it gets better." Better still, tell them to get a GED, form a company, and sell a product. Go to college if you really want to. Just get the hell out of HS.

High school is so jacked. I even went to the science/math/tech school. I never got picked on, but forcing me into mandatory standardized classes made me hate it. Unless you want the ivy league it's just not worth the time/risk. Since no one there gives a shit about you or your future, why leave it in their hands?

<comment><USER34> > I think it's important to tell nerds "it gets better." Better still, tell > them to get a GED, form a company, and sell a product. Go to college if you > really want to. Just get the hell out of HS.

If you're implying nerds should be home-schooled before college, I disagree. As unfortunate situation as it is with high school being a big popularity contest, if you acknowledge it and work hard on social skills, you can succeed. Just have to spend time on sports and socializing, and not 100% behind the computer. And if you enter college without any real-life social skills, that's going to be a disaster.

The earlier in life you learn social skills, the better. When I have kids, I'm definitely going to spend a lot of time teaching them that.

<comment><USER35> What do you consider as poor social skills, if I may ask? I spent most of my time in high school behind the computer, and never played sports (I find sports not mentally stimulating enough relative to the effort). I'm pretty introverted, don't like associating with a large number of people, would rather write code half the time and play video games half the time on a Friday night than going out to a club, hate socializing, and simply cannot make small talk.

However I'd be willing to talk about computers, maths, and philosophy and logic all day long, and I also seem to be good at finding people who're somewhat like me. Maybe it's just my luck, but through high school and college, I've never not been able to find at least a few people who're interested in most of the same stuff I'm interested in, even as my interests have changed.

In other words, I'm a typical nerd with what would I suspect traditionally be called poor social skills -- yet I'm pretty happy with whatever social skills I have, and it's overall been far from a disaster.

edit: note that this wasn't an American high school, and I remember others just letting me be.

<comment><USER36> And why do you hack Pokemon homepages, POK3???

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I consider myself very lucky that 1) I've always been big and athletic since elementary school and 2) that I went to a high school with other really smart people where people were known and respected for being smart. Hence, I don't really remember being picked on, except for a couple of minor instances in elementary and middle school. I'm glad I could never relate to the stereotypical midwestern US high school culture that's always on TV and in the movies.

</comment><comment><USER38> _When students buckle under that weight, tragedies happen (the Columbine shootings; the recent spate of suicides among gay teenagers)._

B.S. The Columbine shootings weren't the work of bullied nerds. It was the work of two utter _assholes_. One guy was a cruel psychopath with a history of violence (pipe bombs, known but not followed up on), the other guy was a severely depressed loser who stupidly did whatever his 'friend' suggested.

They weren't lashing out at anything. They intended to commit the largest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, and the only thing that stopped them was their own incompetence.

Whoever wrote this article just perpetuated myths which reflect the standard views of society: that bullied outcasts are the types who become murderous assholes. If you have ever been been bullied, considered "weird," or an outcast, you owe it to your younger counterparts to help dispel this myth.

[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1032342...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103234226)

There was hardly any real information following Columbine. Instead, noise was bounced around between journalists and bloggers. It was like a giant game of telephone. Soon, there was noise about bullying, about outcast kids, and even the dangers of first-person shooters. The scary thing is that _none_ of this was based on facts, it was just social bias revealing itself in an echo chamber! Instead of following up on known violent tendencies (which would have prevented Columbine in the first place), misinformed school administrators across the country began targeting kids who were already the target of mistreatment by their peers. It's bad enough to have the stigma of the weird, nerdy kid, but to add arbitrary suspicions that you may be a murderer is unconscionable.

<comment><USER39> Did you know any of the people involved or live in Littleton at the time? What's your source of expertise on this subject?

I find it very reasonable that even people with a predisposition towards violence are strongly affected by how they're treated. How would having coins thrown at you by the popular kids and regularly taunted not have an effect?

<comment><USER38> See the NPR link and the associated book.</comment></comment></comment>


A Complete Guide to 'Hipster Racism' - <AUTHOR> http://jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism

<comment><USER2> Does no one else recognize the sheer irony in inciting hatred towards a certain group of people for being insensitive towards a certain group of people.

"Hipster"s don't do these things. People do these things. This isn't a hipster problem. It's a societal problem. Race is a complicated issue, it's incredibly complicated. Everyone has a different personal way of dealing with race that is nuanced and rooted in personal experience. Lindy West is clearly a social crusader determined to end racism. I just wish she would do so without such explosive, useless stereo-typing.

And that picture is appallingly insensitive.</comment>