Whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang confirmed dead of coronavirus at 34 - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3049411/coronavirus-li-wenliang-doctor-who-alerted-authorities-outbreak <comment><USER4> You know how we look back at the state of medical knowledge from a couple hundred years ago, and it all seems so primitive? Contagion was explained by miasma rather than germs, leeches and trepans were best practices, and even basic surgical sanitation was an uphill battle. From our point of view, they didn't even understand the basics! Easily cured diseases were just left to run their course!

Events like this are a reminder that there is still so much that is beyond the abilities of current medicine. As a prominent doctor, he almost certainly got the best care that is currently available, and yet he still died from a simple virus. Our ability to treat viruses today is where our ability to treat bacterial infections was 100 years ago. We knew that germs existed, but penicillin was still a decade away. The standard of care was to keep the patient well hydrated and hope that they don't die.

Similarly, we know today that viruses exist, but in most cases the best care we can offer is to keep the patient hydrated and hope that they don't die. With sufficient luck, in a hundred years we'll have progressed to the point that people look at us and marvel: "They didn't even know the basics! When people contracted a virus, there was nothing they could do but let the disease run its course!"

<comment><USER5> ...and yet, we are still so much further ahead than we were even only 20 years ago.

This virus was caught by the early detection mechanisms setup after SARS, and it was DNA sequenced from samples taken from some of the first victims within a couple of weeks - pointing to a near match with a sample collected in 2014 in a cave from bat poop as part of a "preparatory program" also setup after SARS.

New sequencing tech has allowed the global distribution of test kits, allowing us to have thousands of confirmed cases shown to us in real time - globally.

Vaccines are already in development and the FDA is prepared to fast-track their testing under procedures, you guessed it, updated after SARS.

...and yet, this turned into a global outbreak that we're desperately trying to stop from becoming a global pandemic. Sadly, Chinese prosperity has meant prolific Chinese tourist industries which helped spread the disease robustly throughout South-east Asia. And so there's a very real possibility that, unlike SARS, this new Coronavirus will become endemic and return each year like the seasonal flu, possibly causing hundreds of thousands of dead per year until a vaccine is deployed. Based on projected numbers, it seems like it has spread far beyond our ability to contain it.

So while it certainly could have been worse, had we not been as prepared - <USER2> like to think that when this happens again 20 years from now, we'll be far better prepared. I'll have to learn to use those three sea shells.

<comment><USER6> How the hell _do_ you use the three sea shells?

<comment><USER7> John Spartan, you have been fined 1 credit...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> First, condolences to Dr. Li's family. As we speak of epidemiology and statistics, let's not forget that every single "case" is an individual with family and friends, and behind each individual are doctors, nurses, and caretakers who risk their own health to help another.

Second, as noted by nkurz the contrast between bacterial and viral treatments is striking. Whereas we expect bacterial infections to be treatable and are alarmed when they aren't (MRSA), we expect viral infections to simply run their course except for the few instances where they're treatable (HIV, influenza) or even (gasp!) curable (HCV). We explain away the sad state of antivirals by pointing to the inherent biochemical challenges of fighting viruses [1] but maybe what we really need is a breakthrough — perhaps a miraculous fortuitous "penicillin" moment — so 100 years from now antivirals will also be a matter of course.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiviral_drug#Approaches_by_l...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiviral_drug#Approaches_by_life_cycle_stage)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm concerned about this virus. Most people I talk to (in the UK) think it's being over-hyped but I can't help but think it's being under-played.

The virus seems, in my completely inexpert assessment, to occupy a sort of sweet spot in a terms of virulence, mortality and incubation period, for wreaking maximum damage.

Based on its current trajectory I can't see any reason to believe the whole of the world won't be affected on the same scale as Wuhan at some point this year.

Am I right to be concerned, and if so what should I be doing about it?

<comment><USER10> The biggest concern is health care capacities being overwhelmed. He died in a place under severe resource constraints, basically a warzone. Fatality inside Wuhan is 5%, the rest of china 0.17% and even lower outside the country. Regardless of how correct the numbers are at this point - available ICU capacity is probably the largest factor for fatality rates for the disease at this point.

Just like the flu, this virus causes number of very serious cases that require intensive care but care capacities in most countries are barely able to cope with a bad flu season before bed appear on hallways - and this year had a particularly bad flu season still ongoing. There are only so many ventilators and artificial lungs available in hospitals and there is limited capacity in the world to deal with a new, highly infectious pathogen hitting a population without any preexisting immunities and people requiring weeks care to recover and become non infectious

China has, for better or worse, sacrificed Wuhan to buy the rest of the country and the world time to shore up capacities and enact procedures to stagger the load that will hit healthcare systems if the virus becomes broadly entrenched. I don't think there is any healthcare system on the planet that won't severely strain if hit by the sudden load of a new, highly infectious virus with long, invisible incubation period.

<comment><USER11> > China has, for better or worse, sacrificed Wuhan to buy the rest of the > country and the world

The point is centralized authority is worse. In a democratic country he would have had warned quicker and his life sacrifice would have made more meaningful.

<comment><USER10> Well it's a good thing then we have a president who is held to account by the people's representatives and firmly rejects autocratic tendencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think what triggers an enormous amount of panic are the stories from Chinese social media - contradicting official Chinese reports. I cannot tell what's true and what's hyperbole... The government numbers don't seem so bad - <USER3> then some of the quarantine measures seem oddly harsh if the numbers were true.

Stories of Tencent "accidentally" leaking numbers online that are 10x what the government is reporting - stories of crematoriums being inundated with corpses - pictures of death certificates omitting the cause - the banning of funerals - videos of women being pulled off the street to be forcibly transported to a quarantine center (that one was particularly concerning) - etc...

The numbers from China are suspect of course - it's statistically hard to imagine such a global contagion last week with the small number of confirmed cases the Chinese gov't was publishing.

I don't want to _over_ react... but I also don't want to _under_ react.

<comment><USER12> I'm not really seeing the "global" aspect to this. A huge majority of the numbers are in Wuhan or Hubei, and then much of the rest is just elsewhere in mainland China. Cases abroad are almost a rounding error by comparison. It's quite weird actually, it's like there's some factor we don't quite understand that has been limiting the virus's spread even before protective measures were taken.

<comment><USER5> If you look at the maps of infections there are some areas, frequented by Chinese tourists, that are not reporting data.

Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia - none have been reporting data because they know that a panic will wreck their tourist industry. The Thai government even admitted that publicly - that they would not release data on the disease.

The "good" news is that Coronaviruses are not great survivors in tropical climates, so when summer comes, the infections will abate - BUT we are still 8 weeks away from warmer weather (with a doubling every 5 days).

The bad news is that if governments do not also stop flights out of Southeast Asia, then there will be a secondary wave of Coronavirus, and it will likely hit the Southern Hemisphere over the summer, and then the entire Northern Hemisphere this winter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Chinese social media has been awash with anger over the death of the > whistle-blower

How about going out to protest? Oh wait, you can't...bravo for your virtue signalling.

</comment><comment><USER14> The fact that the hospital lied about Dr. Li Wenliang dying goes to show you how absolutely dystopian China is. How afraid (or corrupt) do you have to be to continue to claim someone who died was alive?

<comment><USER15> Are you referring to this part?

>The announcement capped several chaotic hours in which Chinese media first reported Li's death, only for the hospital to respond that Li was alive, though in critical condition.

>Li Wenliang has died, Wuhan Central Hospital confirmed early Friday morning, hours after it initially denied reports of his death.

Where here do you see clear evidence or even indication of deceit?

If someone is in critical condition, that does not mean they are dead. Announcing someone dead just hours after saying someone is in critical condition is, actually, super super logical.

I fear your comment might be quite guided by your unfamiliarity with China and xenophobic touch. Please do take some more time to reflect before posting similar comments again. Thank you.

<comment><USER16> It's pretty clear the side of history the CPC is on.

You only have to look to their concentration camps and what's been happening in Hong Kong.

They can't be compared to Western democracies, they are closer to Nazi Germany.

<comment><USER15> Not sure what you are aiming for with this response, what part of my comment did you try to respond to? I'm just trying to wrap my head around this comment and see how I could respond. Thanks!

<comment><USER16> I was addressing your accusation against the GP.

> your unfamiliarity with China and xenophobic touch.

I would argue that he is very familiar with China and his views are not xenophobic but purely rooted in philosophical differences with the Communist Party of China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The coronavirus is devastating for the Chinese Communist Party.

Basically, the deal with the populace was people gave up their freedom in exchange for competent government and economic growth. In the last several decades, this was seen as a good deal, by a lot of people both inside and outside China. China had massive economic growth and modernization.

Now, however, the handling of coronavirus was a huge blow to the perception of competency of the government, and is likely to have big economic implications as well, thereby threatening the foundations of this deal.

<comment><USER5> I'm not so sure. Could a western country initiate entire city-wide quarantines at the drop of a hat? Could a western country pull sick people off the streets and forcibly put them into quarantine centers? Unilaterally shut down schools, factories, and transportation at a whim?

Maybe. ...but, to be honest, despite their clear dishonestly about the number of infected/dying, they are also clearly taking some definitive actions to contain this.

<comment><USER18> The propensity for lying, in order to protect the power structure, results in a major constraint on future options - requiring more lies. It is a vicious cycle that completely obliterates any potential strong-arm advantage a single party system may have. If for no other reason: this is why you don't lie, you have no idea how badly you screw your future self. Also, and I'm looking at you World Health Organization, anyone trying to soften the blowback from lying suffers major damage to their credibility.

<comment><USER19> The WHO fucked everyone. "No alarm" from WHO is my new "red flag".

<comment><USER20> People who think the WHO is somehow corrupted scare me.

They are easily one of the most honest and forthright global organisations around, made up of competing professionals in their field from around the globe. They would be the first to be ringing alarm bells if there was a problem.

The onus is on you to prove they are being dishonest, not the other way around friendly internet commentator.

<comment><USER18> Unlike the WHO, this friendly internet commentator hasn't appointed Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador. So you'd be better served appealing to my authority, not theirs.

<comment><USER20> It was honestly a good move, with all upside and no downside, influence moves in subtle ways. The rabid internet mobs who move from one issue to the next with no concern for the bigger picture made quick work of it though.

I truly wonder if these people reflect on what they did, was it in the interest of human suffering or simply petty signalling?

Was nothing more than a title, much like the CEO's and Senior engineers in startups. Saying this as a code artisan.

Please read the statement on the matter:

[https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/22-10-2017-director- gen...](https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/22-10-2017-director-general- rescinds-goodwill-ambassador-appointment)

<comment><USER18> And snap goes the bear trap. I was a little concerned that the parallels between their political maneuvering with Mugabe and Jinping would be too obvious, but you've clearly missed it. They have a history of this sort of behavior.

> They are easily one of the most honest and forthright global organisations > around, made up of competing professionals in their field from around the > globe.

They are political actors. You may, most charitably, say that they are pragmatic in pursuit of a great good - but there are two problems with that: loss of trust and misaligned objectives.

> They would be the first to be ringing alarm bells if there was a problem.

Would they? You just admitted that their motives can't be examined without considering the political dimension. This is why you shouldn't lie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 567 deaths, 1,341 recovered, 28,403 cases.

It's remarkable that humanity can globally track such things.

He was only a few years older than me.

How does the coronavirus kill? I tried searching, but the first five results were all paywalled. I'm curious about what specifically makes the coronavirus deadly compared to the flu.

<comment><USER22> Studies from patients who died from SARS coronavirus showed the virus caused damage to not only the lungs, but also other organs in the body. Early research suggests the Wuhan coronavirus can also damage other organs, including the kidneys.

The Wuhan coronavirus appears to cause pneumonia in two ways: when the virus takes hold in the lungs, and through secondary bacterial infections, however, the first way appears to be more common.

Although it can be difficult to determine whether organ damage from the Wuhan coronavirus is a result of direct viral infection or indirect "collateral damage" from the immune system, initial reports suggested around 11% of people severely ill with the Wuhan coronavirus experienced sepsis with multi-organ failure.

[https://theconversation.com/how-does-the-wuhan- coronavirus-c...](https://theconversation.com/how-does-the-wuhan-coronavirus- cause-severe-illness-130864)

I am not a medical practitioner nor researcher and have no understanding of the virus. I make no representation as to the veracity of this source lacking the means to independently verify it.

<comment><USER23> It is hard to square 11% "sepsis with multiple organ failure" with only 2% reported fatality rate.

Somebody isn't telling the truth, and I'd bet it is the Chinese government.

<comment><USER17> > Of the first 99 people with severe infection, three-quarters had pneumonia > involving both lungs. Around 14% appeared to have lung damage caused by the > immune system, while 11% suffered from multi-organ system failure, or > sepsis.

The 11% with multiple organ failure is referring to the first 99 people with severe infection.

The 2% reported fatality rate is for everyone that acquires the virus.

<comment><USER5> No - 2% is only for those sick enough to have the test administered. Many are not even being checked because their symptoms don't warrant hospitalization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interestingly and rarely, instead of covering up or Force deleting the posts, this time the Central government treat this seriously with several investigation announced and official mourning. This news does go viral among Chinese internet and triggered huge criticism of the government so it might be impractical to censor it. All in all, it could be a good thing to CCP since they showed iron hand in the right way this time

</comment><comment><USER25> Why does this media make such a big deal about a virus with such a low mortality rate?

<comment><USER22> National mortality rate is 2.1% of confirmed cases.

[https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus- death-...](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-rate/)

What would you consider a high mortality rate? 2% lethality in healthy patients is significant and it is "so far". We don't know the true rate yet.

<comment><USER26> The swine flu of 2009 had up to a 5% mortality rate in confirmed cases ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/)).

SARS was 10% ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome))

MERS is 35% ([https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/clinical- features.html](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/mers/clinical-features.html))

The bird flu is 60% ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avian_influenza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avian_influenza)), though there's few cases and estimates of what it would actually be are lower, but still >15% ([https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555](https://jech.bmj.com/content/62/6/555))

<comment><USER27> The denominator currently has a multi day head start vs the numerator. Exponential growth means the fraction will grow.

Not to mention limits of testing and reporting at this point. Regardless, we're not at a point where your method of comparison is meaningful yet.

If we want to err the other way, you could look at deaths over deaths+ recoveries:

638/(638+1341)=32.2%

That, combined with the growth/spread rate and the fact that otherwise healthy 30-somethings are dying, means a potentially nasty outbreak. And that's based on taking the Chinese government at their word.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A new form of carbon, schwartzites, has been created - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/carbon-new-form-chemistry-schwarzite-zeolite-ztc-graphene-university-california-berkeley-a8490226.html <comment><USER2> Direct link to paper: [http://sci- email@example.com](http://sci- firstname.lastname@example.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am allowed to read articles at work, it is tangentially part of my job, but independent.co.uk just put me in an awkward situation, and not for the first time.

My boss walked by and made a joke about what I was reading. The physics of carbon is a perfect valid thing for me to read, but what caught his eye was the plethora of sidebar/sponsored content on independent.co.uk. Does every add have to involve sexy models? I've got a blonde schoolgirl pushing something about investments, a redhead with something to tell me about kindles, and a athlete in bathing suit pushing some other clickbait. Sure, this is a work computer and I'm sure the advertising spies know I'm male, but I don't want this crap on my screen at home either.

My mistake: I just tried to highlight one of the sponsored content headlines ... which was actually part of the underlying pic. So I just 'clicked' the redhead with the kindle. My bad. I guess I'll need to cover my screen every time I want to read about graphite.

<comment><USER4> Why don't you use an ad-blocker?

<comment><USER3> "Secure" work computer. Security settings. Windows. We have a very short list of available software. I cannot even clear my browser history without first emailing IT.

<comment><USER5> Weird... using an adblocker would be the easiest and most efficient way to improve security.

<comment><USER6> I can understand the reluctance to install things that have the ability to read and modify all webpages read though.

<comment><USER7> That is indeed a big downside of adblocker plugins. You are giving a lot of permissions/trust to a third party. I assume uBlock Origin is safe, but in that I am trusting not only the author but also that the Firefox AddOns "store" is uncompromised. Those are things I probably could not verify on my own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Once inside, the carbon assembles into a graphene-like sheet that lines the > walls of the zeolite pores. In doing so, the surface stretches and bends > negatively.

I understand the negative curvature part, but the article fails to elaborate on _why_ that's an important or valuable property for a material to have. Can anyone explain a bit further?

<comment><USER9> It seems the curvature is positive or negative in relation to the overall body of the material. With positive surface curvature we get bubble or shell shaped objects which in bulk amount to a very fine powder. If those shells/balls are fused with each other into a regular lattice - most of the structure can be identical (except the fused parts) but the balls become connected holes in a larger rigidly connected body, which is formed by their union.

Im guessing that in normal space negative curvature has to imply surfaces which do not bound a space, but which rather extend through a space - a kind of solid.

<comment><USER10> Negative curvature means a saddle, right?

<comment><USER9> I see - like around the inside of a torus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I correct that it looks like a 3D lattice made of units like this?

[https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1366&bi...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1366&bih=606&ei=NUN0W6XcD8jVzwKiuIagDw&q=schwartzite&oq=schwartzite&gs_l=img.3..0i10i24k1.19317.20945.0.214188.8.131.52.0.0.0.275.770.2-3.3.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..9.3.766.0..0.0.cwn97WpNWxc#imgrc=PP4Oa9PLWZS5yM):

<comment><USER12> Basically, yes. There are some pictures in the original PNAS article.

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/13/1805062115](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/08/13/1805062115)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "schwarzites", not "schwartzites", which the article mistakenly prints 4 times, plus the HN submission

</comment><comment><USER14> How do they know that the structure has only negative curvature and not regions with positive curvature? (like a bunch of soap bubbles that have coalesced)The structure in the paper labeled ztc-RWY certainly looks like it is ONLY positively curved.

</comment><comment><USER15> Cue the "Spaceballs" references.

<comment><USER16> Due to its negative curvature, "Blazing Saddles" may be more appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment> Iwan-Zotow Named after the one and only Arnold Schwarzenegger</comment>


Why does Ember.js rock? - <AUTHOR> https://kerricklong.com/articles/why-ember-js-rocks.html <comment><USER2> Every generation has its war.

My forefathers fought the great war of emacs and vi in the 1980s. Those were dark times, which many still refuse to speak of. When I think of the horrifying atrocities committed by both sides, the snarky BBS posts, the bickering over usenet, it shudders the mind.

My generation got off relatively lightly. There were a handful of skirmishes during the browser wars which were difficult on the civilian population. Tables being used for layout, limited CSS support, that sort of thing. While many a fine web developer met their end at the hands of Internet Explorer 6, a lot of us (some would say, the less patriotic) chose to ride out the war as desktop application developers, avoiding the draft entirely.

Today I see many of the young and impressionable being manipulated in an ardent search for desperate glory. They get roped in by blog posts, conference talks, friends and coworkers who are too young to remember the atrocities of old. I fear this generation's war will soon be upon us. It will not take place in mobile as many had expected (the Android/iOS battle was a classic case of corporate manipulation), but instead will be fought in Java Script.

<comment><USER3> > friends and coworkers who are too young to remember the atrocities of old

I'm 21. If I'm working on a project, I'll use whatever the guy paying for it wants. If I get a choice, I'll use what I'm most experienced in.

There is no magical solution at the end of the rainbow. The only real important consideration is that 99.9999% of code you will write has already been written and is probably open source somewhere. A lot of that ends up in a library. And a lot of _that_ is still maintained to this day. So rather than look for a framework to reinvent the wheel in as quickly as possible, relearning the entire stack every time (or at least the framework, which I find takes the longest just because it constitutes huge amounts of library functionality and dictates the workflow) is almost always a waste of effort.

In my defense, I have experienced the "reinventing of the wheel" many times that didn't work or caused a lot of unneeded growing pains, starting probably with Netscape 6, but more recent examples are Gnome3, KDE4, a lot of switching between wxwidgets, gtk, qt, and efl over the years, and the duplications of work associated with them, even if I am young in the profession.

<comment><USER4> Oh come on, don't get that defensive! There certainly was some humor in the parent post's style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have nothing but praise for both Ember and Angular. Both give you real data binding, and delegation rather than events. Compared to Backbone, both are like being in heaven rather than the 4th level of "event" hell.

There are a lot of differences, but if I had to pick, it would depend on the application. If I was building something with complex front-end requirements where the vocabulary was mostly tabs/panes/switches/filter-dropdowns/etc., then I would go with Angular. If I were building something where the data domain was more important, e.g. the vocabulary is more about authors/titles/posts/tags/etc. then I'd go with Ember.

With Ember, persisting a complex model to a backend is a priority for the framework developers. With Angular, it is left as an exercise for the reader.

With Angular, extending the DOM to create new web components is a central focus, but with Ember, it is totally an after thought. Ember Components are a joke compared to Angular directives...

I was about to link to the Ember component source code showing how pointless they are. (A week ago they were useless) The devs have been furiously fixing Ember Components to have the power of Angular JS directives. I am so happy to see the good parts of Anular making their way into Ember. For those that hate Angular terminology, it appears 'isolate' has made its way to Ember. I hope 'transclusion' does as well. Need more than one way to {{yield}}

<comment><USER6> Even comparing Backbone (by itself) to these two is futile. It's thin, doesn't prescribe much, and doesn't even promise to offer what Emb/Ang do, so to compare them is unfair to all involved IMHO.

I'm reluctant to try something big with Angular because of its insistence on dirty checking, which just ends up being an annoyingly leaky abstraction half the time (see $timeout, for example).

<comment><USER7> I've written large applications in AngularJS, the dirty checking is generally not a problem. If you write complex directives that need to pass non-trivial data structures around, you have to know what you're doing, but it still works fine.

I don't get your reference to $timeout - $timeout is Angular's more testable wrapper around setTimeout for an asynchronous operation. AFAICT it's entirely unrelated to dirty checking - sometimes you just want something to happen later. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER8> I think that one of the most important features of $timout is that it runs a digest cycle after the timeout completes. That's why bindings get updated when you modify data in a $timout callback. So it is related to dirty checking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> :(

[blocked] The page at [https://kerricklong.com/articles/why-ember-js- rocks.html](https://kerricklong.com/articles/why-ember-js-rocks.html) ran insecure content from [http://jsfiddle.net/Kerrick/Vd6eF/embedded/result,html](http://jsfiddle.net/Kerrick/Vd6eF/embedded/result,html).

Unfortunately kerricklong.com won't serve http, nor jsfiddle.net https, so I don't see an easy fix.

<comment><USER10> Quick fix here until I find a fiddle equivalent that allows SSL embeds: [https://kerricklong.com/articles/why-ember-js- rocks.noembed....](https://kerricklong.com/articles/why-ember-js- rocks.noembed.html)

Sorry about that.

<comment><USER11> Getting an SSL error on all those links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am mostly a systems dev but I have written my share of websites. They are all built with just jQuery. Can someone englighten me the need for data bindings and all these frameworks?

For example, say, github.com. Where in that website would I use data bindings? Or say gmail for that matter. The idea of bindings is not alien to me but I just fail to appreciate why bindings are useful for most websites.

(I do understand backbone.js but I just feel I can write what I want in a observer/listener pattern in 20 mins instead of bothering to learn all intricacies of a framework)

<comment><USER13> * not useful in github (simple page with some js extras on top, it's a prime job for jquery)

* for gmail you would use it to handle emails for example. Your view in gmail never changes, if you're looking at tags, or archive, or sent mails, or inbox, ... It's always the same thing, but the dataset changes; it comes from different sources, it is sorted and filtered different, ...

For a Gmail clone with angular, you do you app/html/css one time, and then you only ever manipulate your model, everything else is done for you. Want to filter email to only get those tagged "hacker news" ? Map reduce your email set then assign it to your model, that's it - no dom no event assign no view logic no nothing, only data.

Now, I'm pretty sure you read this and you think "but I could do the same with what I'm used to, just create a setEmailList(emails) function and use it", that is entirely true. Angular does not provide new functionnalities that you couldn't get otherwise. What angular provide is that

1 - it will be way faster to code than your "traditionnal" method once you're used to it, because angular does most of it for you, and

2 - large changes, special cases and thus evolution of the app are much easier to handle and code.

It provide those two things by being made explicitely for them. Angular is so tailored for that use case that it sucks and should never be used for anything else. Don't be fooled by all the hype into thinking every website should now use angular/ember/whatever, they shouldn't. It does only one kind of job, but it does it very, very well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I get that this was written in quick response to the earlier post about AngularJS, but it would have been far more useful if it had actually drawn direct comparisons between the two frameworks.

I'm currently using AngularJS for a project, and loving it. Everything in this blog post looked like something with a close equivalent in Angular (data binding => data binding, components => directives, Handlebars Helpers => filters), so I didn't see any compelling reason to try Ember.

It is great to see competition in this space though! It seems that full- featured JS frameworks are progressing rapidly because of it.

<comment><USER15> There was a link posted in the other discussion (by visionscaper) that makes the direct comparisons that you suggested. Personally, that's also what I want to see in these types of blog posts.

Cage Match – Ember.js vs. AngularJS : [http://vimeo.com/68215606](http://vimeo.com/68215606)

I still haven't had to pick one side, but this talk will certainly make me lean towards some framework. I just wish it was a 4-sided battle with Backbone.js and Knockout.js since those are the other 2 frameworks that are on my radar.

<comment><USER16> OT: What is the name of the editor the Angular guy is using?

<comment><USER17> Looks like JetBrains WebStorm [http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/](http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Note that if you have, say, HTTPS Everywhere installed, the embedded JSFiddles won't display. The site the post is hosted on supports HTTPS, while JSFiddle apparently does not, so Firefox blocks "loading mixed active content".

<comment><USER19> I get that on Firefox Nightly with no extensions installed.

<comment><USER20> Same here, [https://](https://) or [http://](http://) no luck

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I just used ember to build a side project ([http://bests.com](http://bests.com)) and it turned me into a huge fan. It is great how little code you need in ember to tie an API with a UI in the browser.

<comment><USER22> I look at your code and i think for this small project you can use jquery and ajax. Where does it use the advantages of a big framework like Ember?

<comment><USER21> The advantage comes in for organization and simplicity of the code. I don't have to write any jQuery like for $("#item').html(). I just set a property on the model and it updates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Your answer to "why it rocks" is "data binding." Why does this seem like an important feature to you? What problem does it solve?

<comment><USER24> Support for two-way binding _significantly_ speeds up development time when compared to the old way of doing things because so much of frontend development consists of shuttling JS objects to the document and returning user input to those objects. It is night and day using one of these frameworks when compared to the old favorites (ExtJS, Closure Library, Dojo).

<comment><USER22> Yes it speeds up, but significantly ? Like in Backbone, some lines of code and if you build a small "Framework / Function-Set" on top of backbone Marionette (~10 Lines of Code), you have nearly the same feature.

Did somebody really looked at Ember and its Ember-Data and the missing features that you need when you program a RESTful application? E.g. Server Errors. Ember "Frontend" is nice, but Ember "Backend" is (in my mind) not production ready.

And only for a little two Way Binding 800 KB of Code? ;-) I think Ember has more to give.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Everybody is trying to emulate the old (VB, Delphi, etc) way.

<comment><USER26> I was just thinking about this yesterday. Remember how easy it was to build a working UI in Delphi? Throw some controls on the form with a few clicks, maybe write some code, and it just worked. By comparison, integrating various javascript widgets into existing applications still remains such a pain, you'd think we've receded into the stone age of application development.

<comment><USER27> You don't have to reminisce about delphi as if it is long gone. Delphi still exists, and it's still being actively developed. They now have a set of opengl-powered ui controls called firemonkey so you can use the same components and code to build native apps with hardware-accelerated ui for windows, mac and ios, with android support right around the corner.

It is a pity that the perception of delphi is that it is yesteryear's technology, because in my opinion it is still the absolute best way to build windows native apps, better than microsoft's own tools, and technologically they are really onto something with firemonkey on top of their data binding layer (which does two-way data binding in a more powerful way than any of the web frameworks).

See this example of building an app in delphi xe4: [http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/XE4/en/Tutorial:_Us...](http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/XE4/en/Tutorial:_Using_LiveBinding_to_Create_an_Application_Without_Code)

Note that i'm still doing web development though, because the era of the desktop is fading for the sort of software i'm making. I'm just aware that as good as frameworks like angular and ember are, they have a way still to go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can see the important difference between Amber and AngularJS in the 'computed properties' snippet of Amber:

        App = Ember.Application.create();

        App.ApplicationController = Ember.Controller.extend({
            name: '',
            greeting: function() {
                if (this.name.length < 1) return '';
                return 'Hello, ' + this.name;
            }.property('name')
        });

You write this to use a property 'greeting' in a view that's calculated from a different property 'name'. This works for one model, but imagine you have dependencies across different model objects, nested properties, and so forth. Seems like it'll get complicated pretty quickly.

In AngularJS, that's just (in the template, or a controller function, or where ever):

        {{name + greeting}}

AngularJS uses dirty checking, which makes it trivial to implement complicated interdependencies between various fields. Any plain JavaScript code will work, including model objects that were not written as Ember code.

This comes at the cost of the dirty-checking loop (checking each expression in a tight loop on every user 'event'), but in my experience that's at least not a problem for normal desktop web applications.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure I really catch your drift, but:

Using

      {{name}} {{greeting}}

in Ember should have the same effect as

      {{name + greeting}}

in your example, right?

You need not use computed properties in Ember, because updates on ordinary model fields are also updated in templates in real-time (AFAIK works very similar to KVO in Objective-C). Computed properties are just a ridiculously useful concept which allows you to modify/transform stuff before you show it to the user, similar to the view-model in MVVM. How would you show an empty string in Angular with "{{name + greeting}}" if name is empty?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I see ember and angular on hn today...are the backbone evangelists on summer vacation?

<comment><USER30> Backbone is a library, not a full-fledged framework like Ember and Angular. I could see Ember and Angular being implemented with Backbone. Backbone isn't opinionated and makes no design decisions for you. It's also very low-level (no two-way binding).

Not really fair to compare them, they cover very different use cases.

<comment><USER31> I've been saying this for 2 years.. Backbone is a MVC meta-framework!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I still can't let go of knockout, because it gave me such a hard time to learn it. I think what is needed are migration guides or services for various frameworks to Angular, the de-facto standard.

<comment><USER33> I don't think you see much about Knockout around here because it comes from the ASP.NET MVC world. It's a nice lib, regardless. I would not describe it as being similar to Angular or Ember at all, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't really like to mess with front-end stuff. Can someone explain why ember/angular are so amazing? What does it enable you to do so much more easily?

<comment><USER35> Take a jumble of jQuery that is continually updating the DOM via event callbacks and function calls and giving you structured code that wires it up in a smart way. In the same way you don't need a framework like Django or Rails, but server-side code tends to turn into a mess without one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I say once you do our own or add databinding to backbone, life is very very good. I love the events on the models views and collections. I was almost thinking about writing a databinding where it only updates one property at a time on change. Why update the whole view or model. Is that provided in any backbone addition?

</comment><comment><USER37> Well, seeing everyone saying how good ember is, here is a counter-argument:

[http://discuss.emberjs.com/t/getting-started-with-ember- js-i...](http://discuss.emberjs.com/t/getting-started-with-ember-js-is-easy- no-it-isnt/559)

<comment><USER38> That link says nothing about how good or bad Ember is, it refers to a lack of Getting Started documentation.

Last time I checked (which was a few weeks to two months ago) the documentation was mostly of an 'intermediate' level, ie. hardly any documentation on the easy parts and hardly any documentation on the hard parts. It looks like it's gotten tons better since, eg. [http://emberjs.com/guides/getting- started/](http://emberjs.com/guides/getting-started/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> We shouldn't compare backbone with EmberJS or Angular. Backbone alone is not MVC framework. I started with Backbone worked with Marionette but Ember is so awesome that now i even use for simple pages.

</comment><comment><USER40> The example given for the "components" argument in this article is very contrived and unpersuasive.

</comment><comment><USER41> Have a look at [http://ractivejs.org](http://ractivejs.org)

</comment><comment><USER42> Ok but what am I going to use this data-binding for? Ensuring that nobody will ever have to ( _GASP_ ) click a "calculate" button? I mean what am I supposed to use this for?

<comment><USER43> I'm using it to display analytics. The page has various controls to view different metrics with different filters etc. there's a single chart which updates as you change settings. The backend is super fast so the chart updates almost immediately when you change metrics/filters. Our users absolutely love it, it's so much easier for them to learn the interface when the feedback loop is so quick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The site does not work for me.

</comment><comment><USER25> I don't care.

</comment><comment><USER45> The fact that this isn't "it doesn't" in full capitals and 72-pt font baffles me

<comment><USER46> Why?</comment></comment>


The future of Microsoft depends on Windows being free - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/10/11/future-microsoft-depends-windows-free/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if they will also buy Xamarin and Unity3d to become the best cross- platform development solution.</comment>


How to Build a HUD for your Car - <AUTHOR> http://bwongtech.blogspot.com/2013/02/how-to-build-hud-for-your-car.html

<comment><USER2> It doesn't solve the #1 problem all HUDs have to solve - view obstruction. That's a _very_ significant portion of your view being effectively removed by the scotch-taped + suction-cupped piece of glass which _should_ be transparent.

<comment><USER3> There is a reflective tape you buy specifically for cars that came with HUD from the factory. You could also measure the tach signal for a tachometer too.

([http://www.ebay.com/itm/Head-up-display-OBD-II- HUD-S-200-Typ...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Head-up-display-OBD-II- HUD-S-200-Type-reflector-sticker-film-one-piece-/140778303797))

<comment><USER4> From the pictures it looks like the projection is focused on the film (also true for OP's link), where as in newer HUDs (such as my 2013 BMW) it looks like the projection has infinity set as the focus thus achieving the result of it looking like it's floating in a distance, and I don't need to adjust the focus of my eyes to look at the contents of the HUD. But I have not reviewed the tech spec, it just seems this way and the videos/pictures in OP's link and your link look way too jarring.

<comment><USER5> OP uses a fresnel lens and gives instructions on how to focus the HUD at infinity to avoid this problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretty cool, next up use a Raspberry Pi with a pico projector and you've got all the data you ever wanted to distract you :-). I've noticed that some of the HUDs on the market actually put the display fairly low on the windshield so it is above what you would normally consider the dashboard but in terms of what it is obstructing in the view its where your eyes would be looking at the hood of the car.

<comment><USER7> Has anybody experimented with a pico projector? I've been thinking that a HUD would be a fantastic application since some (most?) pico's have infinite focus. Some of the newer ones are pretty bright too - especially if you only need to illuminate a couple of square inches instead of a couple of square feet.

<comment><USER6> I've got two of them (both from Woot). One is 10 lumens the other is 15. Both are fabulous when camping, they are pretty easy to watch indoors at a couple of feet in all lighting conditions (10 - 18" diagonal) and mildly amusing in a dark room at > 100" in size.

They do get warm so having them on the dash would either require some forced air cooling or a different mounting system. Paired with a webcam they let you reproduce the 'put a controller on anything' [1] stuff that Microsoft showed off.

[1] [http://www.kurzweilai.net/wearable-projection-system- turns-a...](http://www.kurzweilai.net/wearable-projection-system-turns-any- surface-into-a-multitouch-interface)

<comment><USER7> Have you tried taking one out to the car and shining it up on the windshield during the day? Without any special windshield coatings you'll get a double- image, but at least you can get an idea of how visible and focused it would be under normal driving conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a recent update to this here: [http://bwongtech.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/car-hud- version-11....](http://bwongtech.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/car-hud- version-11.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this legal? My understanding is that most states have strict regulations concerning any kind of light being projected from / on your windows.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure there are some jurisdictions in which this would be illegal.

In some places, certain "traffic aides" are outlawed E.G. Radar detectors. While it could be argued that this doesn't help you evade police, the fact that it's an extraneous (potentially distracting) "thing" attached to the windshield could be a legal hiccup.

<comment><USER10> I am less than keen on the idea of a loosely-fastened sheet of glass sitting in front of my face. In an accident, that can't be very safe.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's very true. To be fair, this is highly, highly experimental so first iteration will be the proverbial ducktape and cardboard solution.

I think future versions will have the device embedded directly into the dash and fastened someway to prevent dislodging in a crash. There are polycarbonates that can take the place of glass to serve as both projection surface and combiner (though these might be pricey).

Once attached using solvent, these are very sturdy. So sturdy, in fact, that they're used in high capacity fish tanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can also buy a GPS-based one on Amazon: [http://amzn.com/B005X4QCAA](http://amzn.com/B005X4QCAA)

</comment><comment><USER12> Cool!

For a poor, but effortless, way to try out a HUD, the OBD app Torque has a HUD mode that inverts the display. Put your phone on your dashboard while driving at night, and you get a HUD-like effect (with a different focal plane).

<comment><USER13> I know somebody* who occasionally puts his phone on the dashboard like this to watch movies while driving.

*me

<comment><USER12> Please consider not doing that on public roads. The rest of us are out there too.

(that said, I bet it works great. A movie in the mirror is still a movie)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is great, it shouldn´t be very difficult to adapt this design to an airplane, with an ipad with a navigation app or something similar.</comment>


Transitioning entirely to neural machine translation - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/289921871474277/transitioning-entirely-to-neural-machine-translation/?utm_source=codedot_rss_feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS+Feed <comment><USER2> Will be interesting to see how it performs in the wild.

Here's a sample sentence that I've never seen any automatic translator get right:

 _" My cousin and her wife"_

Any human would infer from the context that my cousin is a woman, in a same sex marriage. Yet Google, who also uses fancy deep learning, gives us, for Spanish:

 _" Mi primo y su esposa"_

This should be _" Mi prima y su esposa"_. And that's just for Spanish, a language relatively close to English. With more convoluted examples and more distant languages, it still breaks down pretty fast.

See also: examples of gender bias when using deep learning to translate from languages with gender neutral pronouns:

[https://twitter.com/amuellerml/status/799658925326995456](https://twitter.com/amuellerml/status/799658925326995456)

[https://twitter.com/nobody_indepth/status/799700696572526592](https://twitter.com/nobody_indepth/status/799700696572526592)

<comment><USER3> Actually as a human I did not immediately infer the lesbian relationship part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is much more impressive than I think it will get credit for.

I mean really, having an always on, immediate access massive NLP DNN system translating every piece of text from any language on the worlds largest platform is a staggering feat.

Facebook has the most impressive applications of ML right now in my opinion. They have Yann Lecun to thank for that (and Mark for recruiting him).

<comment><USER5> ??? Google's been doing this at scale for a while.

<comment><USER6> Google only supports Neural Machine Translation for a subset of languages. Whereas as Facebook is doing it for 2,000 translation directions.

<comment><USER7> 45 languages * 44 other langues ~= 2000 translation directions. There are ~4,500 languages with more than 1,000 speakers ~4,500 * 4,499 ~= 20,254,500 language pairs so that's a very long way from every language.

<comment><USER8> Frankly though, I imagine the vast majority of those languages are unappealing targets in terms of return on investment.

<comment><USER9> and much smaller training data..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I made Pingtype, a site to translate Chinese to English word-for-word.

[https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io)

I also made an English-to-Chinese version, [https://pingtype.github.io/english.html](https://pingtype.github.io/english.html)

One thing that struck me is that even the largest online dictionaries (Oxford, Wiktionary) are totally inadequate. I'm continually adding new words. Another thing I noticed is that spaces are not always between words! Chinese doesn't have spaces at all, so I wrote a word spacing tool. When I rewrote the app for English, I thought I could use the space character, but I can't.

Many verbs wrap around nouns e.g. "put [the phone] down". The source dictionary data has a definition for "put something down", and my program has support for a special word: "something", which causes it to look ahead for the second half of the phrase.

Pingtype doesn't reorder the sentence, because it's intended for education. But it's easy to train, unlike machine learning models.

<comment><USER11> I don't think that even on a trivial level it's possible to word-for-word translate most languages, except the most closely related ones, since they have very different language structures.

<comment><USER12> And then there is the German word backpfeifengesicht, a personal favorite along with schadenfreude.

<comment><USER13> You can still solve those with a dictionary of translations and for the missing words, a sub-word embedding system that gleans the meaning from the phonetic form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's always interesting to compare machine translation of French to my (albeit limited) translation of French. I tend to prefer cognates, even if they're a bit obscure, to more colloquial translations, since I think it preserves a bit more of the original text.

For instance, "Drôle" in French is usually translated to "Funny", but I would translate it to "Droll". I also try to keep the sentence structure closer to the original, which does make my translations look like they were written by Shakespeare.

Something that I really like in regards to the implementation of FB translation is that I can select languages that I don't want to be automatically translated. For French, German, and Spanish, I'd prefer to at least have a crack at it before translating it, but for other languages like Turkish, there's no point.

One thing I don't like so much though is that for automatically translated languages, they replace the original text and don't make it super obvious that it's a translation. I do feel like there's a bit of language colonialism going on with that.

</comment><comment><USER14> Native Turkish speaker here. Very impressive, especially since the sentence they display in the post is actually quite colloquial in its use of the language.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is there a more detailed example of how such neural systems work?

Like, what are the inputs? how the architecture of the network looks like?

I ask because sentences could be of any length, so I'm not sure what's feed to the model.

My only experience with NLP is setting a toy text classifier using naive- bayes.

<comment><USER16> You can read more about it in [https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0473](https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0473)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised they weren't already fully neural. NTM (neural machine translation) has been much better than everything else for a while now.

<comment><USER18> I'd imagine part of it is just having to test all the edge cases-- for every language is their full neural better?

That, and also building a good pipeline for it to work at scale.</comment></comment>


Libya, a Seventh-Tier Problem for America - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/03/libya-a-seventh-tier-problem-for-america/72760/

<comment><USER2> Interesting analysis, but I'm not sure whether I think that any problems in the Middle East quite compare to the problems the US faces at home.</comment>


Chinese gov't reveals Microsoft's secret list of Android-killer patents - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/chinese-govt-reveals-microsofts-secret-list-of-android-killer-patents/#p3

<comment><AUTHOR> I found this part intriguing: " _recent estimates of its Android licensing business suggest Microsoft is earning somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion from Android device makers paying royalties. Microsoft said last year more than 50 percent of Android devices are made by companies with licensing deals in place, and the estimates now range as high as 70 percent._ "

I wonder if that's $1 billion-$2 billion/year? If so, I'm wondering how seriously (if at all) Apple has ever considering pivoting from a "Prevent other companies from copying our core design differentiation" to a "$1 Billion/year is a pretty good licensing revenue stream."

<comment><USER2> Yes, other articles/sources have mentioned the $1-$2 billion per year figure for Microsoft.

Apple second quarter ended March 29, 2014 posted quarterly revenue of $45.6 billion and quarterly net profit of $10.2 billion.

Multiply by 4 to approximate yearly. $1 billion/year in licensing is insignificant if they believe it is coming at the expense of their core products.</comment></comment>


The Feds Cracked El Chapo's Encrypted Comms Network by Flipping His System Admin - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/the-feds-cracked-el-chapos-encrypted-communications-net-1831595734 <comment><USER2> I'm curious about this encrypted VoIP network. I've never heard of an off-the- shelf product like that, so was it custom-written? What was the interface like?

The source NYT article has some more details, but not enough to answer these questions:

      One of Mr. Guzmán's Colombian suppliers, Jorge Cifuentes,
      who introduced the kingpin to the I.T. expert, testified
      last month that Mr. Rodriguez had promised to arrange
      secure communications for what amounted to the entire
      cartel's leadership. His system operated on VoiP, or voice
      over internet protocol, Mr. Marston said on Tuesday, and
      was accessible only to those within the network. According
      to Mr. Cifuentes, Mr. Guzmán was able to sign in through
      Wi-Fi even from his hide-outs in the Sierra Madre
      mountains.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/nyregion/el-chapo- trial.h...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html)

<comment><USER3> I have a tinc + asterisk setup to my cell phone (for my personal/home line) and openvpn + asterisk to desk Yealink phones (They have built-in openvpn clients) (for business)

Fairly easy to maintain + grow once you get some basics out of the way. The net result is that all the signaling + transport is encrypted as far as non- VPN nodes are concerned.

<comment><USER4> I'd love to know about this setup! What hardware you run it on and where you get the #'s from for the home line. Trying to set up something like this for myself at home and business. Thank you!!

<comment><USER3> The business line has a T1, and a Sangoma Vega 100 T1/SIP gateway, with SIP trunking service from [https://voip.ms](https://voip.ms) as a backup if there's trouble w/ the T1. (My personal phone service is just voip.ms at this point)

Yealink T23P Phones have a OpenVPN client built in (some newer Grandstream phones do too), these are relatively inexpensive VoIP desk phones. Once you configure them, and an OpenVPN server you can plug them anywhere you have internet (NAT'ed or otherwise), and not have to worry about NAT Traversal, or other issues.

Asterisk is just running on a stock PC. I'm running on a Supermicro Board with an Atom processor, and for our call volume (50 extension phones, 23 inbound lines, 30 on an inbound call queue, 3 simultaneous calls average, 15 @ our known peak, no transcoding (all uLaw)). The OpenVPN server is a a separate machine, for lighter usage the VPN + Asterisk could probably be the same machine.

For the cell phone, I have CSipSimple running there, with a OpenVPN client to connect to the network.

In my configuration, the phones + Asterisk are not using SSL/TLS directly, but the VPN secures the traffic over untrusted LANs.

Calls within the system are on the protected LAN, but once they reach out to the PSTN, all bets are off.

I've setup a smaller office with a Raspberry Pi 3, and a Grandstream SIP/Analog Gateway, ( 7 Grandstream phones, 3 lines, no transcoding, not very heavy use), and they haven't had any complaints. (see [http://www.raspberry- asterisk.org/](http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org/)) If they used SIP trunking over their internet connection, they woulden't need the SIP/Analog gateway, which was the single most expensive piece of equipment in this setup (@ US$399-ish)

<comment><USER5> I'd like to follow your steps and setup something similar, but I'm completely a noob. Where is the best place to start?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember an article on HN about disappearing techs who were kidnapped by cartels to build them a custom telecoms network or something. Wondering how related this could be to that.

Edit - found the article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145003)

</comment><comment><USER7> > Amid the accounts of corruption, murder, and drug smuggling, Vice News' > Keegan Hamilton wrote on Twitter, there was a brief moment of levity when > lights in the courtroom went out. When the electricity returned, someone > shouted "He's gone!", referring to Guzmán's habit of escaping from prison. > "Everybody laughed, except maybe the U.S. Marshals," Hamilton wrote.

It's interesting how even such a serious situation as this can have these moments of laughter.

</comment><comment><USER8> The article mentions that the server was moved to the Netherlands, but not the reason. According to the Dutch press, it was because the FBI asked so, because we're not so difficult installing wire taps on the internet [1].

[1]: [https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/nederlandse- pol...](https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/nederlandse-politie- tapte-anderhalf-jaar-lang-alle-communicatie-van-mexicaanse-drugsbaron-el- chapo-~bab33a30/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Asking for a ... friend. What is the mitigation against attacks like this? Seriously, it would appear that every organization is at risk of having a trusted insider hand over keys to a competitor, criminals, etc. There must be a way to detect or protect against this, right?

<comment><USER10> Dual control (aka the two-man rule), separation of duties (person who requests a change isn't allowed to approve/implement it), mandatory vacation, etc. These policies have existing in fields like finance for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The battleground in crypto is so often around crypto key management. With the Snowden revelations, it was obvious that the NSA strategy is going after keys in targets key management systems first.

Then cryptoanalysis becomes O(n)

</comment><comment><USER12> Actually there are a few providers that do encrypted VoIP, or more specifically encrypted SIP. Telnyx offer a private infrastructure deployed around the world with low latency and the really good call quality.

[https://telnyx.com/solutions/global-ip- network?utm_source=or...](https://telnyx.com/solutions/global-ip- network?utm_source=organic_social&utm_medium=hackernews_organic&utm_campaign=encrypted- voip-january-2019)

</comment><comment><USER13> Well, we know at least one guy who is going to be dead shortly.

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh they turned him to their side. I was wondering how he could give away anything while they showed him the finger(s) :D

<comment><USER15> DEA /FBI offers /can offer millions to cooperating witnesses and a new identity. Or life in prison. Or death in the hands of the cartel if they find out about the chat. They kinda make it very easy to choose.

Jorge Salcedo that took down Cali cartel got million$ for his cooperation.

<comment><USER16> The question is, how do these people avoid vengeful followers of the former cartel bosses?

<comment><USER17> That is a good question. And I'm sure it's because the reality isn't much like what we perceive from TV and movies. And cartels and crime organizations are far from omnipotent.

They don't have infinite resources. And if they can't get at a person easily, trivially even, maybe it's just not worth the effort a lot of the time. Especially once the damage has been done.

<comment><USER18> It's not just TV and movies. Go Wiki browsing on organized crime some time. Here's [1] a fun starting point. These organizations go through extensive efforts, which at times has included things such as flipping decorated law enforcement officers, to 'get revenge'. I put that in quotes because I'd imagine it's not really about revenge, at least not entirely. It's the criminal analog of law enforcement. If you don't enforce your laws, there will be an increasingly large number of people that break them. And similar to a law it's not just the penalty people factor into consideration, but also the probability of getting caught.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_criminal_enterprises,_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_criminal_enterprises,_gangs_and_syndicates)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I hope this guy is in witness protection!

</comment><comment><USER20> The feds didn't crack, I recall in the NYT article, the encryption keys were handed over from someone who flipped.

</comment><comment><USER21> servers were in Canada?? interesting

</comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of [https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

No matter the technological sophistication, humans will always be the weakest link in any secure system.

<comment><USER23> This is a form of: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber- hose_cryptanalysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis)</comment></comment>


Show HN: A new way of communication with photos about fashion - <AUTHOR>

www.catwall.com <comment><USER2> Nice website. However, it is not-at-all obvious that I need to scroll downwards. Perhaps, after landing, if the user doesn't scroll down within 2-4 seconds fade-in-and-out a arrow, or some kind of indicator to scroll?

edit: Looks fine on 1366 x 768. On 1920 x 1200 there's a big expanse of white towards the bottom of the page.</comment>


StrongVPN.com GFW'd as China's 60th anniversary nears - <AUTHOR> http://uuuming.blogspot.com/2009/09/strongvpncom-gfwd-as-chinas-60th.html China ISP blocks StrongVPN.com HK Server as China's 60th anniversary nears <comment><AUTHOR> I fear the future. Once countries start compiling a blacklist of secure VPN providers worldwide and block these IP segments. Everyone will start building their own VPNs on SliceHost / Linode / RackSpace Cloud Servers. Then these countries (China) will start blocking SliceHost / Linode / <insert your fav VPS provider here>

I don't care much about using Twitter / Facebook / social apps. I have no doubt that I'll become a victim from further IP blocking. I won't be surprised to find my website on SliceHost GFW'd in China in the near future.

As I do most of my online business with China, hopefully a Chinese company will duplicate SliceHost's services here.

\- UUuMing

</comment><comment><USER2> Although some services like StrongVPN may be convenient, the solution I've relied on over the years is doing my own tunnel through my own server in the U.S. I usually use a dedicated server in the U.S. But this works with just about anything you have SSH access with. Just run SSH from the command line like "ssh -CND 9999 <your_server_name_in_your_ssh_config>" and setup FoxyProxy (Firefox extension) to use port 9999 (choose any high port you like) for the SOCKS tunnel.

There was a blog post making the rounds a month or so ago promoting another VPN/proxy service similar to StrongVPN. All I could think was all those poor non-techies will sign up for this and it will soon get blocked. You are correct that the GFW will not block port 443 for ALL IPs. So your little unknown server serving up SSH connects on 443 (I don't use that port) is the safest bet you've got.

This has been a big year for anniversaries in China. It will be interesting to see if things ease up soon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tor is blocked as well:

* [http://cubiclemuses.com/cm/articles/2009/09/27/tor-blocked-i...](http://cubiclemuses.com/cm/articles/2009/09/27/tor-blocked-in-china/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ah.. finally! StrongVPN's OpenVPN Client can connect to HK server now. Not sure who changed what on which side (China ISP vs StrongVPN) but I'm glad it's working now!

<comment><USER3> Where are you connecting from? I'm in Guangzhou. Tor was down this morning (haven't checked recently).

<comment><AUTHOR> Connecting from Xian City, Shaanxi Province. It's been on and off the past 3 days.

My connection is fine now but I foresee VPN outages anytime without warnings.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to validate an idea using a landing page - <AUTHOR> The problem I want to solve: hassle free photo printing app.
I know that there's tons of apps like that but there's only websites in my country that allow you to do this and they're not the most user friendly sites especially on mobile.
To avoid building something people don't want I built a landing page with minimal content and just links to app stores which open up an email signup form when clicked.
I've google ads for a couple of days so far and this is how the funnel is looking currently: 13.19% (google ad to landing page visit), 32.56% (landing page visit to cta click), 28.57% (cta click to leaving your email) and overall 1.23% (ad impression  to leaving email). This is from a low budget google ads campaign: ~300 ad impressions, ~40 ad clicks, 14 cta clicks, 4 emails.
Issue is that that I have no clue how to interpret these numbers, I understand that 3 days is not a lot, but I'm not sure what should be my goals with this landing page.
My goals for the business: employ a single person to handle operations (printing, shipping) full time.
Having this basic landing page should I be:
* Looking into different marketing channels to measure how many customers I could get? (google ads estimate ~2k clicks per month)
* Validating if there's enough interest in general? (conversion should be above x%?)
* Something else? <comment><USER2> Hmmm, that is a hard one.

My suggestion would be to do customer dev calls with target customers and really make sure you are solving a pain point and talk to them and get a feel for it. *Search on youtube for some great videos from YC.

Barring that you could look at the cost of acquiring a customer if this is more a question of how to attract them. IE, if you have to pay $10 in PPC to acquire one customer when and how will you be profitable?

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you try talking to the people who left their emails? Leaving an email is a nice sign from savvy users. But in some countries it might not mean much. Your other pipeline numbers look pretty great to me based on personal experience running AdWords campaigns. But I'm far from an expert.</comment>


Why is Windows still a Thing? - <AUTHOR> http://pcimino.blog.com/2013/02/23/why-is-windows-still-a-thing/

<comment><USER2> Wow, upwards of 4 things you don't like? Better throw out the whole operating system.

Good luck when you switch to Apple. I could, for instance, easily list, oh, I don't know, five -- maybe even six -- aspects of the OS that I don't like. That's like your article, but with two more.

"And boy, what's the deal with only being able to re-size a window via the bottom right corner, huh? Why is OS X even a thing anymore?"

I'm sure the grass always seems greener, but as a guy who uses (gasp) _both_ operating systems regularly at work, I can tell you that they both have irksome features. They also do some things _really, really_ well. I cannot speak for Win8, but Windows7 is an excellent platform. For every little problem like not being able to copy error codes, there's a little extra polish that makes up for it. Same with OS X. There are some things fundamental to the workflow of using Apple's operating system that I absolutely can not stand.. However, they also execute other things beautifully.

I get that it's popular to hate on Microsoft, and a good way to drum up some traffic, but seriously, this is all pretty petty and trivial.

<comment><AUTHOR> Trivial, but was using these irritations as an example. What isn't trivial is how poor and inconsistent the UI is (not just 7, but shockingly, 8). All OSes have warts, all companies are out to make a buck. I have been hoping MS would look at the competition and the business climate and really come up with some new ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure how it's different from Apple? Doesn't Apple require iTunes to put content from your computer to your iDevice? Doesn't it require paid developer license which you have to renew every year?

As for bad error messages, I've once spent half an hour trying to connect to Mac App Store and it kept rejecting me saying my email address is already used - it was indeed already used, by me. It couldn't retrieve my existing account for some reason (no, not wrong password), then demanded my credit card even though I wasn't going to buy anything, and when I tried to use Paypal option it run me through a dozen of screens and had me land back on the same page I started without any explanation whatsoever what happened. One of the most frustrating experiences. I'd rather take error messages that can at least be looked up somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Windows error alerts. If you've used Windows then you're familiar with the limited help that happens when an error occurs. So this popup is actually pretty clear on what needs to happen, but WHY isn't the URL clickable? Okay, maybe that was too hard, I'll simply select the text, copy, paste…Oh right, I CAN'T SELECT TEXT IN THE POPUP! (yes, I'm shouting) Really, after a quarter of a century you son't see the value in letting me copy text from the error dialog?"

<Rant>

This.

I've been running xfce on arch since October on my main machine, and I've yet to have a fit of frustration. There's nothing terribly idiotic, and I can always easily access what I need. I've got about 3 years of experience with Linux under my belt.

I've been using Windows wince about 1995. I'd say I average about 1 fit of rage a day from using Windows at work as a result of stupid little things such as the above. Just yesterday, I had an explorer window open, and I wasn't able to move up a directory as there was no "up a directory" button nor the parent directory listed in the address bar. How in the hell am I supposed to move up a directory?

I know this is just kvetching, but HOW IN THE FUCK CAN A $200 BILLION COMPANY FUCK THIS UP FOR OVER 20 YEARS??

I'm happy I'm never stuck using MS Office. I've too many friends who cry about how it crashes itself right before/right as they try to save their file. To me, this paints Word (and other products in the suite) as some kind of sadistic bully; you're just about to hand in your assignment to the teacher, and the Word bully comes along, rips the assignment out of your hand, tears it to shreds and quips "Haha! Fuck you!" leaving you in tears while Word bully disappears and is not held accountable. </Rant>

<comment><USER5> Ctrl+C works for copying all text of error alert. It's still frustrating because for googling usually better to enter only part of it.

>Just yesterday, I had an explorer window open, and I wasn't able to move up a directory as there was no "up a directory" button nor the parent directory listed in the address bar.

Fixed in Windows 8.

<comment><USER6> Even in Windows 7's file explorer, you can move up to any ancestor directory in the path (not just the immediate parent) by clicking on that directory in the path displayed at the top of the window.

<comment><USER5> But skylan_q wrote that in his case parent directory was not listed in address bar. I don't know how it's possible, but believe him.

<comment><USER6> He also said that there was "no 'up a directory' button", which suggested to me an unfamiliarity with the Windows UI for navigating up the directory path. Or maybe he was using a version of Windows older than Windows 7.

<comment><USER5> This way of navigating was introduced with Vista; older versions had up button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is water still a Thing?

1\. Cans. If you ever used an un-closable can, you can skip to #2.

2\. I can't take water from bottle A to bottle B using my hands.

3\. Obtuse composition. Seriously, just look at the recipe: H2O. Why is there OXYGEN IN THERE (yes I'm shouting)? We all know oxygen's a GAZ, right?

4\. Milking the third-world countries. Guys, some countries are in DIRE NEED of water, and they are being CHARGED for a ridiculous price by their neighboring countries just for some water.

Years of frustration: I drink water and I pee half of its content. You'd think by now we'd have something that my whole body can consume instead of, you know, rejecting almost all of it twelve hours later.

</comment><comment><USER8> As for zune, apple does the exams thing with iTunes. Apple also charges money for writing software for your own device.

</comment><comment><USER9> For me windows = games, and no, steam for osx and linux is still crap. When we have 70%+ of the big and indie titles for linux then I'll totally move to linux and forget windows forever.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the great comments/responses. It really comes down to one thing: After so much time and some decent competition, why can't MS do a better job of UI? Windows 8 was their chance, and it really feels like a fancy skin on Win 7.

</comment><comment><USER10> Style tip: Companies and products are not works of art and shouldn't be italicized.</comment>


Show HN: ImageCart – Low cost unlimited public and private Docker repositories - <AUTHOR> https://imagecart.cloud <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the creator of ImageCart - I've been working on it now for a few months and a friend strongly encouraged me to share it for community feedback.

ImageCart is (going to be) a low cost private repository hosting solution for individuals and small teams. I've started with support for Docker repositories, but plan to add other repository types.

<comment><USER2> Is this like what GitHub made?

We use a private docker registry already, insanely cheap (only paying for S3 costs), why would I want this? Can you beat that price? Is this what you really want to compete on? (we're the cheapest solution!)

Who wants to buy the cheapest option of anything anyway?</comment></comment>


Robbery Suspect Tracked by GPS and Killed - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/nyregion/robbery-suspect-tracked-by-gps-and-killed.html

<comment><USER2> US drug abuse patterns have suddenly shifted over the past decade.

Prescription painkiller overdoses used to hover around the number of overdoses from heroin. In a few short years, they increased sixfold.

[http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/public- health...](http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/public- health/heroin-use-in-the-united-states-data-and-recent-trends)

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

[http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/topics-in- brief/prescr...](http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/topics-in- brief/prescription-drug-abuse)

[http://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/noras- blog/2013/07/presc...](http://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/noras- blog/2013/07/prescription-painkillers-are-claiming-more-womens-lives)

"Lojack in everything" is really cool, could push us towards a theftless society. We still have a lot of work to help people escape drug dependency, though.

Planet Money had an episode on Suboxone, a pill used to treat addiction, that was a pretty alarming look inside the insanity of US drug policy: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/31/157665908/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/31/157665908/episode-391-the- anti-addiction-pill-thats-big-business-for-drug-dealers)

They see Suboxone as a sort of "miracle drug," a few people object to that description: [http://www.thefix.com/content/trapped- suboxone](http://www.thefix.com/content/trapped-suboxone)

Either way, the podcast does a great job at illustrating just how complicated and intimately political pharmaceutical manufacturing has become.

<comment><USER3> I think consumer goods getting cheap relative to real property and other non- stealable things, and expensive things becoming online services with activation components, already is pushing the returns to theft down. Certainly, ATMs, credit cards, ACH payroll, etc. has pushed the returns to theft down (vs when people carried a lot more cash, or kept it in their homes...)

<comment><USER4> yes, as per Piketty, r > g

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The technology has little to do with the punchline of this story. A convict and a suspect in an armed robbery pointed a gun at NYC police officers. He was shot and killed. Nothing new or unusual.

</comment><comment><USER6> How long until people start using portable RF detectors/sweepers?

How long until people use these devices to manipulate police officers into shooting who they want?

<comment><USER7> Hopefully someone innocent wouldn't aim a handgun at a police officer.

<comment><USER8> Nothing hopeful about it. There's something like 8 million citizens who are licensed to carry concealed right now, plus no license is required in Alaska, Arizona, Wyoming, and Vermont (never was for the latter). I'm one of them, and we by definition don't routinely aim our handguns at police officers, else we'd at minimum lose our license.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Last summer, a guy held up a pharmacy near where I was living in Somerville and dropped the (lojack'ed) containers in our garbage.

<comment><USER10> And ... ?

What sort of response did this prompt?

<comment><USER9> A bunch of cops showed up. Oddly, they didn't seem particularly interested in talking to us. They immediately suspected a neighbor who had a history of trouble with the law. They even briefly had him in cuffs outside his house, but let him go when they caught they caught the real guy elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is it worth keeping drugs off the non prescription market if it just leads to robberies and the killing of those robbers?

</comment><comment><USER12> "As officers closed in, the man pointed a handgun in the direction of at least one of the officers; one or more of the officers opened fire, killing the man, the police said."

Why "one or more"? Is this unknown to the police or do the police just not report such things to the press?

<comment><USER13> "one" implies that the officer who fired the deadly shot can be easily determined.

<comment><USER14> Some have suggested all ammo sold should be traceable to the buyer. If that's a good idea, perhaps we could start with the much-smaller task tracking all ammo issued to law enforcement. (A chemical-tagging mechanism like SelectDNA could help identify kill-shots even when the bullet passes through the victim or is otherwise unrecoverable.)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SelectaDNA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SelectaDNA)

<comment><USER8> Even at handgun energies, I find it difficult to imagine DNA surviving the heat and flame associated with firing, and enough being recoverable in the pass through case.

Actually, the smokeless powder in handgun ammo pretty much doesn't finish burning up by the time the bullet exits, resulting in a muzzle flash problem at nighttime, and that burning powder ought to do a good job of burning up any chemical taggant. It's probably telling the gun grabbers have never seriously suggested this (vs. tagging powder or brass).

Then there's the traceability problem. Lots of ammo is bought in bulk, especially by police departments, it would cost vastly more to get customized ammo for each officer, be a total nightmare to try to get it to designated officers and keep it isolated to them. You can't realistically demand an officer never hand a spare magazine to another, especially in a firefight, and ammo is generally a fungible item.

It would _never_ work in a civilian context, it would be vastly more expensive as noted above, we'd boycott any manufacturer who tried such a stunt, and since in the US we buy the vast majority of ammo it would stick.

Also note US civilian ammo production for all types is above 12 _billion_ rounds per year, and I've read rimfire ammo (e.g. .22 LR, not considered by almost everyone as suitable for self-defense) is only 3-4 billion of that. Those numbers strongly suggest taggant approaches are impractical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> From a purely tech nerd perspective, I'm interested in how these pill bottle tracers work. Do they just rf beacon, or do they maintain a cell data link and periodically report position.

</comment><comment><USER15> ...as for the technology used, it's kind of like the 1970's-era transponder from the movie No Country For Old Men (except GPS instead).

</comment><comment><USER14> Eventually, drones will be able to follow and even shoot the suspect. Don't worry, other specialized "judge & jury" drones flying in close formation will ensure due-process is rapidly followed.

Simply because it's a great story on some related issues, I'll again recommend Neal Stephenson's "Jipi and the Paranoid Chip":

[http://www.vanemden.com/books/neals/jipi.html](http://www.vanemden.com/books/neals/jipi.html)</comment>


Show HN: Replace your business voicemail with a voice assistant - <AUTHOR> https://clearcall.app <comment><AUTHOR> You can try the live demo here: [https://dashboard.clearcall.app/demo](https://dashboard.clearcall.app/demo)</comment>


The 20 most common PIN numbers - <AUTHOR> http://datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html <comment><USER2> And given a stolen database, they can all be cracked in the same amount of practical time.</comment>


The FCC Votes to Let Monopolies Decide What Local News You See - <AUTHOR> https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/11/19/fake-news-only-beginning-fcc-votes-let-monopolies-decide-what-local-news-you-see <comment><USER2> Outrageous. What can (and should) be done to prevent this? A free society needs access to factual news, not fake news. If a monopoly controls the distribution mechanism(s), they can choose what news gets distributed. When that happens, truth is the first casualty.</comment>


Smart contracts: Turing completeness and reality - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/smart-contracts-turing-completeness-reality-3eb897996621#.4844vm8li <comment><USER2> Thanks for a great article!</comment>