A 'Blockchain Bandit' Is Guessing Private Keys and Scoring Millions - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/blockchain-bandit-ethereum-weak-private-keys/ <comment><USER2> > the bandit's account held 38,000 ether, worth more than $54 million at the > time. In the year since then, Ethereum's value has plummeted, reducing the > value of the blockchain bandit's haul by about 85 percent.

> "Don't you feel bad for him?" Bednarek asks with a laugh. "You have a thief > here that amassed this fortune and then lost it all when the market > crashed."

Well, 15% of $54M is still $8M.

<comment><USER3> I don't know much about bitcoin, but how hard would it be to actually exchange that money for US dollars?

<comment><USER4> Small amounts are somewhat easy to exchange, if you want to exchange millions it gets much, much more difficult since you have to explain the source of funds to the exchanges and banks involved. If you have hacked them they will use blockchain analysis etc.

<comment><USER5> _they will use blockchain analysis_

Tumbling the coins would help with this, right?

<comment><USER6> If you have to explain where it's from it may be more suspicious if it looks like you took steps to hide the origin, calling for even more detailed proofs.

<comment><USER7> Does any currently operating exchange actually care about the origin of coins?

<comment><USER8> Most of them [exchanges]]will have tagged stolen coins from known hacks so when they are deposited the account is flagged/locked.

Tumblers/mixers are the most likely place to pick these up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Despite tracking those transfers, Bednarek has no real idea of who the > blockchain bandit might be. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's a state actor, > like North Korea, but that's all just speculation,"

Given how "easy" the attack actually is, I see no reason to suspect a state actor. This is a genuine question: why don't people start by suspecting some kind of criminal organizations like the mafia instead?

<comment><USER10> Or more generally, why do so many people attribute particular competence to, uh, state actors?

While he was at the NSA, Edward Snowden complained that it stores more information on Americans than on Russians. He complained that that's illegal, but there's another remarkable facet to it: How good is the NSA at collecting information from Russia, then? I can hardly believe that the NSA _tries_ to collect more data on Americans than on its actual mission, so how good is the NSA at its mission?

There are many other examples, like the German service that's supposed to monitor the nazis and missed the a group that made and sold a DVD about its killings.

It seems so strange to assume higher-than-average competence in organisations like that.

<comment><USER11> In general, it makes sense to assume that stuff which irrespective of competence would require large amounts of resources, access to intercepts or the ability to flagrantly breach local laws without anyone stepping in might have state involvement, especially if there's an obvious motive for the state to target that person/organization.

Not convinced that guessing private keys of anonymous randoms for a few million in assets of limited fungibility falls into that category. I'm not sure it's a question of _competence_ in this case so much as why would a state be the ones tackling these accounts, when a lone criminal with relevant knowledge of cryptography would have the ability and a lot more motivation to do it?

<comment><USER12> Why would a criminal leave the coins to sit in the final wallet undisturbed? The article said the wallet only had incoming transactions and never sent any coins anywhere. Surely if you're a criminal organization stealing cryptocurrency you'd want to actually use it.

<comment><USER11> It's not necessarily the only wallet a criminal has access to, and most people don't draw on their savings account all the time. Can't fathom why a government would want to write algorithms that quietly steal tokens from thousands of random individuals unfortunate enough to have particularly crackable private keys and send them to a particular dormant account either. It's not like there's a lack of other crypto-heist stories out there.

<comment><USER12> A government has a much more plausible reason to be willing to siphon off and stockpile large amounts of cryptocurrency without using it, just in case they ever do need to have a bunch of coins on hand for something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At one point a couple of years ago, for testing purposes, I created a brain wallet (that is, a short phrase that when hashed would yield a key pair) in Bitcoin testnet so that a group of people could each have access to them for testing purposes. It was just a simple substitution -- a common enough word with 3's and !'s mixed in. For testnet coins, which are worthless, it seemed harmless enough.

It was "stolen" literally minutes after first depositing the coins at the address; we assumed by someone running a monitoring daemon looking for a large rainbow table of bitcoin addresses, and testing out there efforts on the testnet. I wonder how many bitcoins they managed to extract once they put their system into production.

<comment><USER14> Or they were a whitehat wanting your problems to be caught in testing.

<comment><USER15> If he screwed up their project without permission, that's not totally "white hat".

<comment><USER13> It was testnet, though, so worthless, and easily obtained (in small amounts) from a testnet faucet (like [1], [2], or [3]). We considered continuing to share, but in the end it was just easier for individual developers to obtain their own and use them for testing rather than managing a central pool.

[1] [https://testnet-faucet.mempool.co/](https://testnet-faucet.mempool.co/)

[2] [https://bitcoinfaucet.uo1.net/](https://bitcoinfaucet.uo1.net/)

[3] [https://kuttler.eu/en/bitcoin/btc/faucet/](https://kuttler.eu/en/bitcoin/btc/faucet/)

<comment><USER16> Is testnet just for ... testing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To clarify the title: they're guessing _insecure_ private keys, not keys generated by normal (and not buggy) wallet software.

This isn't surprising. "Brain wallets" have been been discouraged for a long time now. Unless you really know what you're doing it's easy to accidentally pick an insecure phrase. Even a paragraph of text from, say, an obscure book will probably eventually be found, if that book ever ends up digitized on the Internet.

The safest way is to generate a truly random key, then map that to a wordlist like BIP39 does.

</comment><comment><USER18> Can anyone read the article on mobile ? Half the page is covered by a stupid overlay telling me i got two articles left to read. If only i can read the first one !

<comment><USER19> Disable Javascript for wired, it removes everything but a small nav header.

<comment><USER20> Can you even disable js on mobile?

<comment><USER19> Yes (for both Chrome and Firefox), and it _massively_ improves browsing experience, IMO. At least for Chrome you can even do site-specific exclusions.

<comment><USER20> I see it now: [https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/questions/934492](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/934492)

I had no idea _about:config_ worked in the Android app as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> People used to do this to bitcoin addresses all the time back in 2013, the same servers are probably still running

I always thought about all the opportunities to do it on other blockchains, but the challenge of picking which blockchain would be so taxing

Now that this season there are several high values one like Ethereum you can easily choose

The concepts are the same for all of the chains

Also lol at state actor. Guessing a private key of "1"? Come on. People were doing this with entire phrases from obscure songs and poems 6 years ago. No brainwallet is safe. Deflecting is a great way to get away with hacking

</comment><comment><USER22> Probably used the technique described here, [https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25814/ecdsa- sign...](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25814/ecdsa-signature- and-the-z-value)

<comment><USER23> It's much easier! Just call ethereum's `crypto.ToECDSA` [1] with a big-endian encoded 256-bit unsigned integer of interest, e.g. 0x1 or 0x100, as described in the article. Try the resulting private key.

[1] [https://godoc.org/github.com/ethereum/go- ethereum/crypto#ToE...](https://godoc.org/github.com/ethereum/go- ethereum/crypto#ToECDSA)

<comment><USER24> Y'all are talking about two different things.

Secret key recovery via nonce reuse(linked SO post) is a different than simply trying a range of integers which is mostly what these researchers did.

<comment><USER22> There are many addresses created from integers under 1000000. This is nothing special. There are also many addresses created from basic words converted to sha256 and the used as the primary key hex. Eg, 'Satoshi Nakamoto' .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So this was a heist performed on a number guessing game by guessing numbers? Poetry in motion.

</comment><comment><USER26> Any idea why the keygen failed so badly? Debian's openssl patches generated predictable private keys for a while but they wouldn't be a single digit. It's Wired so I don't expect technical details but some info woukld be nice.

<comment><USER27> The idea mentioned in the article of either unintentional or intentionally badly coded wallets seems likely.

<comment><USER26> Yeah but I'd like to know how the unintentional mistake was made. Eg

\- Debian OpenSSL was a Debian dev trying to prevent use of uninitialised memory (because Valgrind complained), without realising that uninitialised memory is used for randomness.

\- Years ago a bunch of PHP stuff (I forget what) was seeded with the string value of a randomness function, rather than it's output.

What happened here?

<comment><USER28> > without realising that uninitialised memory is used for randomness

It was more subtle than that: there were two identical calls, one of which added uninitialized memory, while the other added real entropy. The developer mistakenly removed both, thinking both were equally useless, instead of only removing the one with undefined behavior. To make things worse, another call added the current PID, so the results weren't identical every time. See more detail at [https://research.swtch.com/openssl](https://research.swtch.com/openssl)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This part was interesting: "Bednarek then tried putting a dollar into a new, previously unused weak key address. It, too, was emptied in seconds, this time transferred into an account that held just a few thousand dollars worth of ether. But _Bednarek could see in the pending transactions on the Ethereum blockchain that the more successful ether bandit had attempted to grab it as well. Someone had beaten him to it by mere milliseconds._ " [emphasis mine]

It seems like there is an arms race of Blockchain Bandits leading to HFC-like systems aiming to try out as many generic private keys as possible as quickly as possible.

</comment><comment><USER30> High frequency crypto 'theft', amazing.

</comment><comment><USER22> There's a hundred private keys on this page [https://2coin.org/keys- btc.html](https://2coin.org/keys-btc.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> I discovered this personally when writing some bitcoin code.

I got to a stage where I wanted to test my code all the way to the BTC blockchain. I figured I'd stick in the randomizing seed later, and just make sure I could talk to the blockchain. To my surprise, every time I made a transaction I'd see another one on the explorer sites, emptying my new address. I did it a couple of times thinking I'd coded something wrong or something like that.

<comment><USER32> How did you generate your seed? Not trying to insult you, but the number of people generating seeds online or using very poor seeds is mind boggling.

<comment><USER31> Just a crappy simple word. I thought I'd just make sure the whole process worked first, then replace the string with something more sensible.

You'd think they'd put a minimum in there before grabbing the coins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As the stream of transactions goes up, how difficult is it to keep up with them to pull this kind of heist off? Actually, I don't even know how many transactions/sec are happening in the Ethereum/Bitcoin world right now. Is there some sort of a stream one can subscribe to, to see what transactions are happening, and try to compromise them?

<comment><USER34> > As the stream of transactions goes up

It doesn't. Bitcoin is architecturally limited to ~7 transactions per second, and typical rates are about half that.

<comment><USER33> At only 7tps, how could Bitcoin ever be used as cash?

<comment><USER34> It can't. At least, not without systems for off-chain transaction settlement, like the Lightning Network -- which brings a bunch of new complexity and new problems with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I spent a few weeks last year running a server on the head of the ethereum chain looking for any up coming transactions with notes containing something in a private key format. I was shocked at the number of notes which mapped to real wallets

</comment><comment><USER36> Hypothetical..

Ethereum is the world currency. Everyone is using it. Criminals and script kiddies are running scripts that guess completely random private keys. Occasionally they make hits and steal people's wealth.

What's the next step in securing your wallet? Making sure your wealth is stored across a million wallets?

<comment><USER37> These occasional hits are basically mathematically impossible. It wouldn't make sense for anyone to run a script to do this.

If you were really concerned, you could make a multisig wallet.

<comment><USER38> That's proved a little more perilous with Ethereum compared to Bitcoin, heh

[https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-999.md](https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-999.md)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> He's not a bandit nor a thief. This is how crypto-property works : if you have knowledge of the keys, it's yours.

<comment><USER40> Same with anything really. If you know my password everything in my bank account is yours too. A private key is simply a very complex password.

Unfortunately crypto's greatest strength (that it's akin to cash) is also it's greatest weakness. There's no way to set up 2FA like I can with my bank and there's no fraud protection, etc.

Edit: doesn't mean he's not a thief, btw.

<comment><USER41> "If you know my password everything in my bank account is yours too."

That's not true. Bank transactions are reversible. The legal system has your back.

[https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-do-i-get-my- mon...](https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-do-i-get-my-money-back- after-i-discovered-an-unauthorized-transaction-or-money-missing-from-my-bank- account-en-1017/)

<comment><USER40> And... I addressed that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Yawn, just another case of poor password selection.

</comment><comment><USER43> I built a house with no walls, and then someone stole my TV!

<comment><USER44> This analogy falls completely flat. It is more like you live in the most secure fortress but set your door code to 1234.

<comment><USER45> But also because crypto is totally unregulated -- and by the rules of the game, if you have the keys, you have the coins -- you have zero recourse. Not that it could be reversed anyways. In both these real-world cases, you've got the police.

<comment><USER46> > But also because crypto is totally unregulated -- and by the rules of the > game, if you have the keys, you have the coins

Nothing could stop you from opening a business that would offer insurance in case of key theft. Most banks offer around $100k (depends on the country) in case they go bankrupt or robbed which is very little if you have life time savings in them that are way more than $100k. Big banks have an advantage though in that if they ever go bankrupt they tend to be bailed out by the government which is hard to replicate as a business (you still end up paying for it through inflation so you don't technically get your money back when your bank goes bankrupt as the total value of your money goes down).

<comment><USER47> > Nothing could stop you from opening a business that would offer insurance in > case of key theft.

There is no way to prove a key was stolen and no way to prove the theft was not a fraud. Insurance is backed up with jail time for insurance fraud and is STILL rife with fraud (especially automotive insurance).

Blockchain theft insurance is not a business that would survive long.

<comment><USER48> One aspect that would be interesting is: I would expect that after an insurance payout the stolen coin would be legally the property of the insurance company. The stolen coin would accumulate on the books of the insurance company, which could then pay a premium to a recovery agency to get it back.

Of course the anonymity factor would make it all difficult, but on the other hand you can't ever truly abscond with the cash. If they could trace the movement through the ledger to a legitimate business entity that respects the same country's laws, they might be partially recoverable.

At a small scale it would be a waste of time, but on a large enough scale it might work.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Unveils Delicious Bookmark Importer - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/02/17/google-delicious-importer/ <comment><USER2> Once Google integrates Chrome bookmarks with 'Google Bookmarks', I'll start paying attention to this. At the moment they're hard to find, and while useful (priority in search results), not worth the hassle.

<comment><USER3> I really don't understand why chrome's current bookmark-sync goes into google docs rather than their existing bookmarks site. I can't decide whether it's people not talking to each other, /bookmarks being unable to handle the load (which again would point to its priority in the scheme of things), some grand plan that hasn't been unveiled yet, or something else.

It's certainly a royal pain though, because it's still useful the way my bookmarks show up at the top of search results -- now I just need a painless way to get them in there!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This might be useful if Google Bookmarks wasn't more neglected than Delicious.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. I really tried to use Google Bookmarks for years, and its horrible browser integration (no toolbar integration plugins at all for Safari and Chrome, only a semi-functional one for Firefox) finally made me give up and switch to Xmarks yesterday. A few minutes of effort and finally all browsers are in sync.

<comment><USER6> It seems bizarre that Google have let Bookmarks gather dust. If they integrated it in to Chrome (instead of continuing to support the weird Chrome- only bookmark sync they've got at the moment), and then produced official plugins for other browsers it would breath some life in to the service. Guess I'll give Xmarks a try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Delicious has tagging -- and does automatic tagging -- but Google Bookmarks doesn't. That's a dealbreaker for me. And yes, I tried google bookmarks again because of this import, this feature is still missing. Google Bookmarks has 'labels' based on the folder that I have arranged (a few of) my bookmarks into, but I lose the ability to sort by the tags that Delicious has set.

I agree, Google Bookmarks is clearly a neglected service.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm sure the tech is great, but damn, how much data am I gonna give G? We need a little more diversity.

</comment><comment><USER9> I keep repeating the import process because it syncs up correctly by ignoring the previously imported items. Now if I can just get a chrome add-on for google bookmarks that works like the Delicious one.

</comment><comment><USER10> Makes no sense jumping from one dead service to another. You might as well use Firefox beta and Slurp to get your URLs out from delicious (with tags) and keep them to your local machine. Better liberate your data from the clutches of the cloud and these untrusted services.</comment>


BitCongress – Decentralized Voting Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitcongress.org/ <comment><USER3> How does this prevent someone from voting more than once with different addresses? The whole bandwagon onto Bitcoin doesn't seem valid in this case. What can Bitcoin do to make online voting better? No matter what you're going to need some external way to verify a user. Otherwise your votes are just going to be a measure of computing power. That's not really useful in this context.

<comment><USER4> Personally, I think the DMV should issue a private key to everyone in the US.

Aside from making the implementation of a remote/online voting system trivial, it would rid us of the horribly broken way we've been using social security numbers.

<comment><USER5> I agree, though I don't like the idea of them having a copy of my private key; wouldn't it make more sense for you to give them a copy of your public key after verifying that you are who you say you are, initially?

<comment><USER6> Could you get a physical token with a random key that is unknown? Some ECC can make use of random bits as a private key.

<comment><USER7> Physically Unclonable Functions (PUF) are what you are looking for.

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

<comment><USER5> Is there a way to verify that a piece of hardware is a PUF, and doesn't contain some sort of trojan horse?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "How BitCongress works: Your Design Here"

[http://i.imgur.com/cgwTawB.png](http://i.imgur.com/cgwTawB.png)

And what's Axiomity? Is that the specific app meant to interact with the BitCongress protocol? For that matter, what's BitCongress?

I feel like this was submitted to HN prematurely.

<comment><USER8> "Legislating, voting & budgeting all in one platform "

Sounds like what kickstarter should be or the key functionality of a working DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmm.. a vote system which is literally requires votes to be bought and paid for?

&Why bitcoin specifically when there's dozens of other cryptocoin ledger systems? Surely not marketing for BTC 'investors'.

also,

Borda Vote Count Method:

      Potential for tactical manipulation

      Tactical voting

      Like many other voting systems, the Borda count is vulnerable
      to tactical voting. In particular, it is highly vulnerable
      to the tactics of compromising and burying. Compromising:
      voters can benefit by insincerely raising the position of
      their second choice candidate over their first choice
      candidate, in order to help the second choice candidate to
      beat a candidate they like even less. Burying: voters can
      help a more-preferred candidate by insincerely lowering the
      position of a less-preferred candidate on their ballot.

      An effective tactic is to combine these two strategies.
      For example, if there are two candidates whom a voter
      considers to be the most likely to win, the voter can
      maximise his impact on the contest between these front
      runners by ranking the candidate whom he likes more in
      first place, and ranking the candidate whom he likes
      less in last place. If neither front runner is his
      sincere first or last choice, the voter is employing
      both the compromising and burying tactics at once; if
      many voters employ such strategies, then the result will
      no longer reflect the sincere preferences of the
      electorate.

As for open source voting software/projects, I'd recommend Liquid Feedback:

[http://www.liquidfeedback.org/](http://www.liquidfeedback.org/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I love the focus on accessibility! (considering I can't even view their landing page without javascript).

<comment><USER5> You're not missing much; it's mostly placeholders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Obligatory link:

Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - <USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI)

<comment><USER11> That's a really good explanation and fits American attention span. He's covered most critical stuff within 3 minutes. I'm keeping it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Those who are interested in anonymous, secure voting should check out the Dissent project (write up here: [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/dissent-a- new-type-of-secur...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/dissent-a-new-type-of- security-tool-could-markedly-improve-online-anonymity) )

</comment><comment><USER13> Website too slow to load. Gave it a miss. Do you really need a interaction heavy site just to explain your ideas?

</comment><comment><USER14> Your votes going into a permanent public ledger seems like a bad idea, and the decentralized part seems not useful. Building this on the block chain seems like a solution in search of a problem. But surely they've given it some thought - what am I missing?

<comment><USER5> Having your representatives' votes be on permanent record seems like a great idea; having individual citizens' votes on record seems like a terrible idea.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but that doesn't require the block chain. You can get that with digital signatures and a timestamp service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> VOTES PLACED: 0

Also, I'm on a fairly recent MBP Retina and that page is really laggy for me. Chrome 47.0.2526.80

</comment><comment><USER5> Will I be able to vote for representatives anonymously?

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting idea. Website too confusing.</comment>


JavaScript Libraries Are Almost Never Updated Once Installed - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/javascript-libraries-are-almost-never-updated/?hn <comment><USER2> In our environment we have a CI process that stars out the package.json then runs and npm update, executes end to end tests and logs tickets along with version numbers as technical debt tickets. This keeps us fairly up to data as far as library dependencies go. The problem with not updating is that after a period of time the upgrade path becomes almost impossible without a significant rewrite. Whereas front running it with CI allows us to see the train coming before it hits us and allows us to digest it in smaller manageable bites.</comment>


Paul Vixie: Whither DNSCurve? [2010] - <AUTHOR> http://www.isc.org/community/blog/201002/whither-dnscurve

<comment><AUTHOR> Could security experts give their take on this? There are some strong statements, such as the last sentence: "Because DNSCurve does not do this, and because the problems DNSCurve actually does solve are pretty well solved by UDP source port randomization and will be entirely eradicated by DNSSEC, ISC is not investing in DNSCurve at all."

I have a few questions, in case anybody is interested in any of them:

1) Would full deployment of IPsec render DNSCurve unnecessary?

2) Isn't "full security" impossible until DNS queries are encrypted? I'm reading the ongoing comments about HSTS [+] and can't help to think that, if you assume the network is a malicious medium, then any unencrypted DNS query, _including DNSSEC_ , can receive a compromised response. But then again, Paul Vixie's quoted sentence seems to counter my reasoning/understanding.

[+] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4266626>

<comment><USER2> I can go on and on about this particular subject, but will refrain from doing so unless there's some demand for yet another DNS & security debate on HN.

I voted the submission up, by the way; thanks for posting it. I hadn't read it.</comment></comment>


Companies are testing if they can make employees wear fitness trackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-are-testing-if-they-can-make-employees-wear-fitness-trackers-2018-3?IR=T <comment><USER2> Sounds like something that wouldn't fly in most European countries (I hope).</comment>


The State of Whole Brain Emulation in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://creativepark.net/1698

<comment><USER2> This is a decent overview, but I feel like I should bring up one thing it didn't mention: safety. We're a significant distance away from being able to emulate a whole brain, and... that's a good thing.

Imagine your brain were scanned, and you found yourself running as a computer program. Consider the powers that would give you. You could make copies of yourself, obviously. You could tune some parameters, to try to increase your intelligence. You could A/B test your copies with identical memories in identical situations, to see what effect that tuning has, and you could incorporate enhancements that wouldn't work biologically. So there's a pretty high chance that you'd end up with a superhuman level intelligence, or at least John von Neumann level intelligence. Plus a large number of copies.

At the same time, the emulation might be imperfect, the modifications and enhancements might have unanticipated side effects, there's a whole lot of opportunities for sanity damage. That's on top of the base rate of humans being evil or turning evil when given power, which is itself uncomfortably high. And finally, there's one more wrinkle. Suppose brain-scanning and whole- brain emulation technology are in the wild, and a bunch of different people scan their brains and start running on computers. In this world, if you hack into someone's hardware and halt their brain program, you can repurpose it to run copies of yourself. While computer security is probably better in that future world than it is today, I seriously doubt that it will be better by nearly _enough_.

If you're thinking of getting into brain-emulation research, please consider also putting some work into safety research. And in the unlikely event your work should pass the level of treating mundane ailments, and moves into the territory of breakthroughs, please remember that you are playing with fire.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like nothing really exceptionally different in 2015. All the projects or ideas the author mentioned have been around for quite some time, at least since the early 2000's. Also, Turing completeness is not a strict requirement for intelligence. That line of thinking has fallen out of favor in recent years, in the same way that comparing the brain to a steam engine has. I think we are increasingly realizing that the brain is not a magnetic pin and the world is not a piece of tape. Intelligence could be solved via artificial neural networks or statistical techniques, so it's not clear to me that a continuous conscious experience requires swapping out one neuron at a time.

</comment><comment><USER4> "human brains are turing complete"

Are we sure we can really support that statement?

<comment><USER5> Would a not turing complete human brain be able to conceive turing completeness?

<comment><USER6> That sounds like saying "Would a not-Turing complete markup language be able to record the definition of Turing completeness?" (If you argue that there's a difference between conceiving something and recording it, then I can soup up the markup language with a mild genetic algorithm equipped with a stop condition that'll let it generate the definition on its own.)</comment></comment></comment>


Painting as a Pastime by Winston Churchill (1948) - <AUTHOR> https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/churchillws-paintingasapastime/churchillws-paintingasapastime-00-h-dir/churchillws-paintingasapastime-00-h.html <comment><USER2> Reading this, it comes to mind one of the most unknown episodes of Churchill's life is the Bengal famine of 1943 [1], in which he was personally responsible for the death of at least two million Indian. I guess that painting and writing wasn't enough of a past time. Gallipoli wasn't really something to write letters home about, you just need to read something mildly objective to realize the kind of sick person this man was.

The point I'm trying to make is, History is written by winners. In most contexts, this man would be nothing more than another early 20th century psychopath. Certainly not a hero, a giant or even a decent human being. Wouldn't he had been kicked out of 10 Downing St. Europe would have certainly suffered another WW2 aftermath, only to feed his personal and sick bloodlust.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943)

<comment> aaron-lebo This is inaccurate. Churchill if anything was underrated by history. The Gallipoli disaster occurred not because of his plans (which was a quick naval attack up the straits, which the British were on the verge of doing and the Turks later admitted would have taken Constantinople had then done so - probably ending the war much earlier, saving millions in Europe, Russia, and elsewhere).

This is a man also largely responsible for the tank (also ending the war, eventually) and probably the main reason Britain did not back down in 1940, saving much of the world from far far worse in Nazi Germany. We can disagree about his methods, but he was probably right in _why_ he was so aggressive after WW2 - he saw the USSR for what it was, as he did many things through his life.

Not without flaw or mistake, but to describe him as you have is not very accurate. There's few people who deserve to be considered "great men", but he was one of them. Even if not, he was not the one sided caricature you have put forward. I'd suggest a good, in-depth biography.

It's perhaps easier to understand some of him when you read the pleadings of a boy for his parents to see or respond to him, which they ignored while they had time for the king and the rest of British high society. This is a man whom actually fought in battles, didn't shy away from conflict or duty, unlike some in his social class. He was at times a liberal and at times a conservative (and took principled stands for both sides), but at the end of the day, was not a monster and was much better than most. The victors may write history, but sometimes there is a reason they won.

To offer a counter-example, consider Churchill's dressing down of the man responsible for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre in front of Parliament:

[http://www.indiaofthepast.org/contribute-memories/read- contr...](http://www.indiaofthepast.org/contribute-memories/read- contributions/major-events-pre-1950/365-churchill-on-jallianwala-bagh- massacre-1919)

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

 _Both Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill and former Prime Minister H. H. Asquith however, openly condemned the attack, Churchill referring to it as "monstrous", while Asquith called it "one of the worst outrages in the whole of our history".[54] Winston Churchill, in the House of Commons debate of 8 July 1920, said, "The crowd was unarmed, except with bludgeons. It was not attacking anybody or anything… When fire had been opened upon it to disperse it, it tried to run away. Pinned up in a narrow place considerably smaller than Trafalgar Square, with hardly any exits, and packed together so that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies, the people ran madly this way and the other. When the fire was directed upon the centre, they ran to the sides. The fire was then directed to the sides. Many threw themselves down on the ground, the fire was then directed down on the ground. This was continued to 8 to 10 minutes, and it stopped only when the ammunition had reached the point of exhaustion."[55] After Churchill's speech in the House of Commons debate, MPs voted 247 to 37 against Dyer and in support of the Government.[56] Cloake reports that despite the official rebuke, many Britons "thought him a hero for saving the rule of British law in India."[57]_

Dyer was celebrated by the pubic at large both before and after the attack (and after this speech). But if Winston was a such an inhumane monster, why take the side he did? You'll find in many occasions in history, he took principled and considered if not always correct positions. He certainly wasn't a Hilter or even a Bush.

For more reading:

[https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lion-Winston- Churchill-1874-1932...](https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lion-Winston- Churchill-1874-1932/dp/0385313489)

<comment><USER3> this book makes a valid point:

[https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0307405168/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_e...](https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0307405168/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_eijjBbHKQ5VKY)

<comment><USER4> No, it _really_ doesn't. It's pulp fiction fantasy.

I read it when it came out and I enjoyed it - as fiction. I like alternative histories - I've read many. I enjoyed the novel SS-GB 30 years ago far more, it was far more credible.

From memory... His whole argument is built on the assumption all Hitler wanted from Poland was the return of Danzig, and that all Germany wanted was peace and prosperity, but poor harmless Germany was surrounded by oppressive enemies. The same oppressors who spent 15 years appeasing whilst Germany occupied Rhineland, Austria and Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia) Well, there are so many ways to tear down the second point I barely know where to start.

So let's have a go at the first. He claims Hitler wanted Poland as an ally so clearly only wanted Danzig. So how better to gain an ally than invade them? So he starts trying to make a case that German diplomatic efforts were entirely honest and seeking to preserve peace. Further he dismisses the Polish politicians in short order (as some historians have done). It does rather raise the question of why then would Germany want an alliance.

Nonetheless they signed a non-aggression pact (note: not an alliance) in the mid 30s. Germany then sought to be given sovereignty of Danzig the surrounding region and roads leading to it (includig a half-built autobahn) in, I think 36 or 37. Poland declined, ultimately resulting in the 39 German ultimatum and invasion. Yup, definitely seeking an ally.

From there he builds on those unlikely assumptions and dives off into fantasy and antisemitism. Oh, and if Britain had accepted the Nazi's 1940 peace offer the Holocaust would not have happened at all. Even with all the antisemitism in Germany throughout the 30s and the propaganda and violence against them? Further he claims moral equivalence between Hitler and Churchill. Oh dear, really?

You could make a credible case of an unnecessary war, but it would resemble this book barely at all. There's a lot of arguments and ways you could approach that.

You might start with Churchill's (surprising given his history) actions as Chancellor in the 20s. The disastrous return to the Gold Standard, and by dramatically reducing defence budgets, _especially_ naval, encouraged further German rearming and especially naval building. One of the few points I was able to agree with in the book was his criticism of Churchill's adoption of the Ten Year Rule. Though he makes it as a minor argument.

You might also point at the harsh terms of Versailles and the failure of the post-war alliance. It's worth noting Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points War Aims and instigation of the League of Nations. Not to forget the Americans never actually got as far as officially joining the League which significantly weakened the global standing of it. As far as reparations go it was _Clemenceau_ who wanted harsh terms - mainly as so much of the war took place on French soil. With the obvious expenses that caused. Lloyd George argued firmly against excessive reparations. The United States Senate voted down the agreed 3 party post-war alliance with France and Britain. Churchill wanted an Anglo-French alliance in the absence of Americans to keep the continental peace but was unsuccessful. None were willing to occupy alone. Thus reoccupation of Rhineland, Sudetenland etc were rather easier than they should have been. The rest is factual history.

Forgive any mistakes. It'll all be on Wikipedia so I'm not going to link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For many of the reasons outlined in this introduction, I've taken up drawing, wood engraving, and origami/papercraft. The repetitive parts (carving lines or folding paper) in particular have an acute soothing psychological effect.

Additionally, my sense is that while engaged in these activities parts of the mind normally dormant while working with code all day spring to life.

Seems a good antidote to boredom or sadness is painting, drawing, sculpting, gardening, or something else that's a different language:

>Since change is an essential element in diversion of all kinds, it is naturally more restful and refreshing to read in a different language from that in which one's ordinary daily work is done.

<comment><USER6> I've sadly come to the conclusion that painting is not a relief from coding for me. Coding is translating data logic to keyboard strokes, and then painting is conceptualizing very different abstract shapes into brush strokes. They are actually so similar in concept that the coding wears out the part of my brain that would be really helpful for painting. I've spent many days split between coding and painting and I've yet to come out the experience feeling extremely worn out at one of the two. Of course I'm talking about representational painting, not just making random marks. I've had many nights of making random marks with brush strokes and all I create is a mess. Perhaps I need to try to completely lose the analytical part of my brain during painting.

<comment><USER7> The subject you pick and the reaction of the people around you to your initial attempts makes a big difference here.

People underestimate this.

So pick subjects that interest you or are sure to tickle/provoke/excite the people you intend to show the work too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> George W. Bush was so inspired by this essay that he did the same thing after leaving office.

[https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/politics/george-w-bush- painti...](https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/politics/george-w-bush- paintings/index.html)

<comment><USER9> Drawing is not great, but color is nice and faces are expressive. I wouldn't buy the paintings but they're better than I expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a book of his paintings available. It's fascinating, a peep into a uncommonly seen side of one of the giants of the 20th C.</comment>


Software Patents: A Personal Story - <AUTHOR> http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/10/03/software-patents-a-personal-story/ <comment><USER2> I've had a similar experience with a company called 'Acacia', they claimed to have some broad ranging patent wrt to audio and video over the internet. I told them to either sue or get lost and never heard from them again. It probably helped a lot that I'm based in europe.

I have absolutely no respect for companies that use software patents as a way to either control their competition or, as seems to be the case here to use it to effect a take-over.

It's a pity these jerks aren't named because it would be quite neat to give them as much bad press as they could handle. Cowards.

</comment><comment><USER3> Believe me, I'd love to give these guys bad press--TechCrunch or Gawker could do a nice story at their expense. But that's my friend's decision to make, not mine. The last thing I want to do is undermine his defense.

<comment><USER4> Keep in mind that those who silently capitulate don't just hurt themselves, they hurt all those who the companies go after later... and effectively, all of us.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but legal maneuverings are incredibly sensitive things, and anything officially entered into the public record becomes evidence. It's generally not a matter of silently capitulating, but if you want to fight back and have any hope of winning, you have to play by the rules.

I'm in exactly the same situation and it's incredibly frustrating, but the alternative is to open your mouth and potentially undermine your legal defense. About the best you can do is to fight the lawsuit to the best of your abilities, but that unfortunately requires that you route all public communication through your lawyers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My husband's company invited their IP lawyer to give a talk on software patents a few years ago. He compared them to the English enclosure movement of the 16-17th centures - no one really believes they're protecting innovation so much as providing a way for the established companies to declare their territory and ward off upstarts.

Of course, it didn't stop him from recommending that they look for patentable aspects of their software. The other benefit to holding patents is that the best way to prevent an infringement suit is to have the ability to counter-sue based on your own patent collection.

<comment><USER7> The counter-sue idea doesn't really work for patent troll companies though, which only hold patents for extortion, and don't do any productive work of their own.

<comment><USER8> This isn't completely correct. It does work if the counter-suit claims are valid and encompassing - sanctions in the legal process can provide significant leverage, especially because the "patent-trolls" are heavily involved with patent attorneys.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't work because of the _portfolio effect_.

"Reback often tells the story of how a team of IBM patent lawyers went to Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1980s and claimed that the then start-up was infringing on seven of its patents. After Sun engineers explained why they were not infringing, the IBM lawyers responded that with 10,000 patents, they would be sure to find some infringement somewhere." -- The Washington Post

<http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it's interesting that everyone is assuming it's a bad software patent. Here's the chain of reasoning I see again and again, and I don't buy it:

1\. Some software patents are vague, overbroad, or not novel. 2\. This is a software patent. 3\. This patent is vague, overbroad or not novel.

It doesn't logically hold up. You may want to argue that we shouldn't have software patents as a matter of principle, but pointing to examples of bad patents doesn't prove this. The guidepost for me is RSA. To me, if you have patents, then RSA should be patentable. It was novel, it was useful, and the fact that it could be implemented in software doesn't change that.

This being about _software_ patents is coincidental. This same story could be told by a tool manufacturer, or an MP3 manufacturer, or anyone else. The real issues are whether the patent is valid, whether they are infringing, and then, if we find that we don't like the consequences when all is played out, figure out where the breakdown between what is really good for innovation and what is actually happening is.

If you want to say no software patents, then someone needs to come up with a strong argument why a new way to build an amplifier that improves sound quality should be patentable, but a new way to compress audio files that improves sound quality should not be.

There's a lot that could be done with patent reform to make things better, but doing away with software patents is orthogonal to this.

Business practice patents are a different story. Most of them don't patent a "how to do X", they patent a "wouldn't it be cool if we did X". My example is that Amazon One-click was trivial to implement. There was no "how". The proof of this is that B&N worked around it by going back in and adding a second click. You couldn't work around a good patent in this kind of way.

<comment><USER5> As a developer, the main problems with software patents are that 1) pretty much any combination of things you're doing could currently be patented by someone else, 2) it's impossible to tell if you're infringing something until you get sued, and 3) things that should be filtered out by the "obviousness" principle aren't, such that you're constantly in danger of stumbling onto a patent just by solving a problem.

A patent is a very, very, _very_ sharp tool: it grants someone monopoly rights to that "invention" for 17 years (or 20, if it's international). Anything that most people could come up with inside 2 days, or even 2 weeks, of thinking about a problem shouldn't be patentable; that's ludicrous, and counts as "obvious" in my book. Things that are obvious combinations or extensions of existing inventions aren't supposed to be patentable.

So a lot of this software/business patent nonsense would go away if the patent office would apply a more ruthless standard of patent obviousness. Most software patents are things that at least 10% of the engineering population would come up with inside a week of trying to solve the same sort of problem; many of them are the sort of thing that 90% of engineers would come up with inside 4 hours. That doesn't apply to RSA, or to MP3, or to most algorithmic things, but it does apply to things like "method for holding online auction" or "method for allowing purchaser to assemble a shopping cart" or the other ludicrous sorts of things people patent.

So I totally agree, RSA should be patentable: it's a non-obvious invention, and if you're using RSA without their permission there's a 100% chance it's because you stole it/reverse engineered it. But most software patents are the sort of thing you accidentally stumble onto in the course of solving the same sets of problems, and patents were never intended to (and should not) preclude other people from solving those same problems. You can't patent the idea of holding an auction in meatspace, but suddenly because it involves software it's patentable? Etc. Most software patents are much closer to business process patents than to mechanical patents.

Personally, I'd settle for simple ruthless application of the obviousness principle. The USO PTO granted more than 40,000 software patents last year. If you only included things that were really novel, that a decent engineer wouldn't come up with on their own in a few days or weeks of thinking about a problem, and that you'd have a hard time accidentally infringing, I bet that number would be more like 500.

Keep in mind, there are plenty of other things that aren't patentable: story ideas, for example. So yes, you're going to draw an arbitrary line about what's patentable, but that's the job of congress and the patent office: to draw that line in the place it maximizes utility.Remember, there is no natural right to a patent in the US. Congress has the power to determine what's patentable and what's not, and is explicitly directed by the constitution to do so in a way that maximizes progress. The way it's done for software _hinders_ progress right now.

<comment><USER10> You say that you approve of RSA because if someone is using it, its inevitable that they learned of it from RSA. I don't think you'd have to go that far to say what's worth patenting. I think that's the purpose of patents -- to make people disclose worthwhile discoveries so that others can benefit from them at a fee -- but they can't be structured that way legally, because unlike copyright, it's very hard to show the origin of ideas.

What makes a patent a bad patent is usually that it's on the idea of what's a good idea to do from a business perspective, and once you've realized that, hey, online auctions are a great idea, the mechanics of writing the code is pretty straightforward, as you say.

I'm not clear how things are de facto in European law, but from reading <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_258/03> it looks like at least some people are on the right track -- you can patent something involving software, but only if you innovation is technical in nature, not a business innovation that involves a lot of technical details to implement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We've had the same thing happen to us, though in our case there was no attempt to negotiate beforehand or to buy us out: we found out we were being sued when the other company issued a press release about it. Classy. They're just trying to put us out of business through a combination of lawyer fees and scaring off potential customers. Thankfully, it's not working.

It's amazing how many resources lawyers suck up, and how long patent lawsuits last (we were sued in December 2007, and we're still nowhere near trial). It's easily the sort of thing that can cost millions of dollars to fight, which is obviously the sort of expense that can put a startup out of business.

However, I'm not too hopeful anything will get done about it any time soon: it seemed from the discussion the other day that the HN community wasn't even solidly against them, and if this kind of community isn't, then the anti- software-patent movement clearly isn't mainstream enough to make any kind of impact yet.</comment>


Mammograms are a total waste of your time and money - <AUTHOR> http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/mammograms-are-a-total-waste-of-your-time-and-money/ <comment><USER2> In the source article in the New England Journal of Medicine[1] to this summary article there this statement, "After 25 years of follow-up, it found that 106 of 484 screen-detected cancers (21.9%) were overdiagnosed." I don't understand how the recommendation ends up being, "don't bother with mammography," instead of something like, the protocol after a mammography returns a result needs to be adjusted. Prostate cancer seems to get into the exact same bind.

Blinding yourself to additional information because we don't know how to act correctly on the information seems like a non-solution. I know the flip-side argument might be that the test isn't uncovering relevant information. As long as what the test is detecting can be further filtered, why isn't that filtering the focus? e.g. why wouldn't there be some sort of protocol step of longer wait-and-see intervals with added monitoring to see if it would cut out the overdiagnosis after an initial detection event.

[1] [http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1401875#t=article](http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1401875#t=article)</comment>


Your Android device's Pattern Lock can be cracked within five attempts - <AUTHOR> http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/articles/2017/your-android-devices-pattern-lock-can-be-cracked-within-five-attempts/ <comment><USER2> To sum up the article, if you record someone, with a camera, entering their pattern, you can narrow the possibilities with some software that watches your finger.</comment>


A Traffic Cop's Ticket Bonanza in a Poor Texas Town - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexcampbell/the-ticket-machine#.akZrRROqd <comment><USER4> > Councilman Felix Barker pointed out that the extra cash the city had brought > in far exceeded the cost of jailing all those people. "We increased the > profits," he said.

Uh, that's not what police are supposed to be. They are not supposed to be a revenue source.

> "You have a heart and you feel for those people," he said. "The judge could > charge a dollar. I don't care."

Except he can't, there are minimum fines and they will only go down to that level. Other times it could be a dismissal fee, but other than that, no.

<comment><USER5> Reminds me of this article about the link between excessive policing of traffic offenses, police as a profit center, and getting a huge chunk of your budget from your poorest citizens:

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police- shootings...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings- traffic-stops-excessive-fines)

Once you lose sight of 'Protect and serve', things can go very wrong.

<comment><USER6> It really depends on the nature of the fines levied, on its face, you'd not convince me that speed enforcement alone is disproportionately levied on the poor.

There is another class of fines, like Failure to Appear, fix it tickets resulting in a warrant (warrants shouldn't be issued for non-moving violations ever), unable to provide proof of insurance, and failure to pay fines - <USER2> are very likely levied excessively on the poor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The real problem is not with the cops doing their jobs and enforcing the law. The real problem is that the laws are so dysfunctional to begin with. For decades, stupid laws were patched up by a police system that simply chose not to enforce them widely. This is of course as ugly a "hack" as you can possibly get. People lose respect for the laws, and it gives the police immense discretionary power that they can wield on the basis of their subjective whims. But the system chugged along like a 20 year old computer valiantly running Windows 95... until one day, a cop shows up who decides that his job is to enforce the law, and that's when the sheets come off and people realize just how stupid the laws really are.

If you find yourself shaking your head when reading the article, and are looking for someone to blame, don't blame the cops. Don't blame the police commissioner. They are simply doing their jobs, and that's a good thing. Blame your lawmakers for writing into law, or not repealing, absolutely idiotic laws. This problem does indeed need to be fixed, and we need to fix it by actually changing the law so that it makes sense.

1) The speed limit should be set at a level that people are actually expected to follow. If you don't mind people driving 70mph on the freeways, change the speed limit to 70.

2) Traffic fines are not meant to be a revenue source for the government. They are meant to be a form of punitive punishment and deterrent. A $400 fine is overly punitive for an unemployed person, but it's also too lenient for a millionaire. If the goal is for the fine to be punitive, it needs to be indexed to the person's income.

3) People shouldn't have to leave their jobs and go to court, and sit around for hours, just to have 5 minutes in front of a judge to ask for a payment plan. This sort of thing should be completely automated and doable online. Judge appearances should be reserved for special cases, not for rubber stamping.

The sooner the police start enforcing the laws strictly, the sooner people will realize how broken the laws are, and the sooner we can get to making real fixes like described above.

</comment><comment><USER8> Traffic fines are set high based on the assumption that enforcement will be light. The canonical example is a $500 fine for littering. Because your chances of getting caught are so low, a high fine is needed to provide an incentive. If your chances of getting caught were 100%, a $5 fine would probably be sufficient.

If you're going to increase enforcement you should probably lower the fines.

<comment><USER6> I'd have no problem with aggressive enforcement so long as the fines and consequences were light - as you noted, both the fine structure and the way external agencies (insurance companies for one) treat moving violations assume for light enforcement

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious how is it legal to pull over a vehicle based on the license plate without knowing who is actually driving the car?

On a related note, my driving school teacher told us if we're married register your spouse's car in your name and _your_ car in theirs.

The logic being that spousal privilege prevents you from testifying against them if you ever get a red light/speeding or other automated ticket in the mail, and it seems like a good defense for these kind of plate-reader shenanigans as well - unless you are both wanted scofflaws, of course.

<comment><USER10> <the logic being that spousal privilege prevents you from testifying against them>

In certain limited circumstances, a spouse cannot be _compelled_ to testify against a spouse... but in what jurisdiction are witnesses being called by the prosecution for traffic infractions in the first place??

<comment><USER9> As he explained it, they will only dismiss the ticket against you (the registered owner receiving the ticket in the mail) if you identify the actual driver - so _you_ have to go in and roll over on the driver if you want to get out of the ticket.

But if the driver is your spouse you can invoke spousal privilege and you both get off, IIRC. I'm not sure of the legal convolutions that lets you say "I can't identify that person due to spousal privilege" and _not_ identify that person as your spouse but there it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't let the buzzfeed source put you off of the article, it's pretty good.

I really like the day fine idea, seems like it would lessen the incentive to ticket to generate lots of revenue. An obvious fix for the overworked courts is simply bring in a pay stub or tax return. If you don't you get the max fine. (Perhaps a week or two to bring in the documentation and revise the fine down)

<comment><USER12> >seems like it would lessen the incentive to ticket to generate lots of revenue.

That still doesn't align the incentives. It just shifts the focus from quantity of stops to quality of stops (the correlation between vehicle cost and yearly income is very stong).

Law enforcement should not be about generating revenue. Full stop.

<comment><USER11> This feels like the "Perfect solution fallacy".

Fines are effective. Governments are going to do something with the money. Picking a price curve that closely matches actual cost of running the department seems better than what we do now. Yes, officers will have a preference for pulling over a ferarri instead of some beat up old honda, but with all of the automation the article talked about, it seems like the times an officer has a choice between the two are rare. If the policy is pull over everyone breaking the law, officers would have to account for not pulling over cheap cars.

Now, i could see a good argument for simply requiring public service from everyone. The thing we're all limited by is time. 10 hours of a rich guy's time is just as valuable as 10 hours of a poor guy's time (to them at least). Of course, you're not really proposing this as an alternative, you appear to be saying because it's not perfect, it's not worth doing.

<comment><USER12> I guess my point is that unless you change the monetary beneficiary of the traffic fines you retain perverse incentives even if you try to make the costs more equitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like how they provide the cost of jailing people and the revenue, but no mention of the administrative cost and the "expensive" cost of the system. I have a suspicion that if you did the accounting properly, you would probably come up with a net decrease in income, not to mention the economic impact of debtor prison.

<comment><USER14> It also might deter people from doing business in that town. If I have the choice to get a coffee I this town or a neighboring town that's not known for hyper active ticketing, I'd rather avoid this place.

<comment><USER4> I live in Texas, and used to love going to Port A as a kid. Now, I will not even give it a second thought to avoid the city entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As much as the article makes this sound horrendous .. I'm not sure.

"Back in 2007, his bosses at the Port Arthur Police Department tapped him for a brand-new kind of job: writing up driving infractions full-time"

[http://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Port-Arthur- Texas.htm...](http://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Port-Arthur-Texas.html)

It's interesting to compare the actual data from the 5 years before, and the 5 years following 2007. It may be a coincidence, but .. something has changed. Something that's roughly halved their fatal accidents.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Police higher-ups say the traffic unit has made Port Arthur a safer place to > drive

They don't show any data to back up this claim that they make throughout the story. IMO part of the problem is that the speed limits are far too low for modern vehicles. They keep them low so they can continue to collect.

It's not about safety it's about money. How is going around with plate readers making anyone safer? Unless they were using that technology to find a fugitive, but they're not they're using it to collect.

<comment><USER8> The article links to a study[1] in the Lancet that says that aggressive traffic policing results in fewer car accidents and fewer deaths.

1: [http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673...](http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673603137701/abstract)

<comment><USER16> Ah, I missed that. However that doesn't mean increasing the speed limit would be bad. Instead of speeding tickets they could focus on aggressive drivers constantly changing lanes and other more serious maneuvers that could cause more danger.

<comment><USER8> There are hundreds of studies on increasing the speed limit. Most say increasing the limit causes increased fatalities, others say the effect is negligible. Most of these studies focus on highway speeds, though.

But lowering street level speed limits has a dramatic effect on fatalities. Sweden reduced their street speed limits to 15-20mph and strictly enforced them.[1] This dropped their fatality rate to essentially zero. It didn't reduce accidents significantly, but reduced their severity massively.

1: [http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/](http://www.visionzeroinitiative.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _" Traffic safety is equally important for poor people and for people with money. But traffic fines, as they are typically imposed, inflict far more pain on poor people."_

The first part of that is quite an assertion. Richer people probably have newer cars (thus benefiting from newer safety features), better maintained cars, bigger cars, live in areas with less traffic, have better access to healthcare, and can afford to take time off due to injury. In addition, their jobs overall are probably less physically demanding.

I wonder if that's a good part of why they aren't doing things that would cost taxpayers money, like re-engineering roads to improve safety and lower speeds?

</comment><comment><USER18> > License plate recognition software is often touted as a way to catch > terrorists

Huh? How does that work?

</comment><comment><USER19> Off-topic and not appropriate for HN.

If you want to circle jerk about how terrible the police can be, do it somewhere else - this isn't the place.

Flagged.

<comment><USER6> I've concluded there is very little off-topic for HN - and if you'd read the article, it actually paints the police in a fairly positive light - <USER3> enforcement is not the same a zealous enforcement.</comment></comment>


Dear Nokia fans: you're nuts - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/11/dear-nokia-fans-youre-nuts/ <comment><USER2> To paraphrase Churchill, Nokia's deal with Microsoft was the worst strategy they could have come up with, except for all the available alternatives. It's a partnership born out of mutual desperation. Nokia needs an OS that doesn't suck to develop on (unlike Symbian) and that they can actually ship (unlike Meego). Microsoft needs a revenue stream other than their Windows/Office duopoly. Thus, they need each other.

Why isn't Nokia going with Android? Because Google doesn't _need_ anything that Nokia can offer; Google will be happy to count their ad-clicks while Samsung, Motorola, HTC, et al. drive down one another's profit margins.

(Disclaimer: I work for Nokia and despise Microsoft as much as any self- respecting Linux geek, so I think my biases cancel one another out.)

<comment><USER3> In some ways you are right but as a Nokia employee you should know Nokia's put a decent amount of effort into embracing an "open" philosophy. In fact, the make up and goals of MeeGo are not all that different from Android (Open source OS run by a consortium of companies working to be the defacto standard on all kinds of devices). This marketing push towards openness goes all the way back to the decision to open source Symbian.

So for them to now do a 180 and embrace a proprietary operating system from Microsoft flies in the face of everything they'd been selling to their developers

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It takes some impressive cognitive dissonance to say this...

 _So, should Nokia have gone Android? No way. That takes them through a real commoditization (IE, non differentiated) minefield. One that Nokia execs aren't smart enough to get through._

and this...

 _Nothing matters in this world more than apps. Write that on your forehead. Write that on the mirror on your bathroom wall. Write that on your car windshield. Whatever it will take so you remember it._

in the same post (a post praising Nokia for picking the platform with virtually no apps).

The rest of his points would be decent if Microsoft were in any way committing to Nokia. But they're not so all those platform advantages are spread across other hardware competitors.

Yes it will be 8 hardware competitors instead of the 40 they'd have to fight on Android. But Android would at least give them the apps and if Nokia really does have top notch hardware people they could find a way to perform in the Android market.

<comment><USER4> While your logic is right, I think you have missed the point of the post. While apps are certainly important, differentiation is probably going to be a bigger factor because you only need a relatively small number of killer apps to kick start an ecosystem. Just think of how the iPhone AppStore got started. To this day I'm still using Bump and Urbanspoon. I think Nokia is betting on that they can monetize from an ecosystem that they can control with a higher profit margin, then just be a small fish in a big pond with not a whole lot of control and thus ways to make money.

Remember what Elop said in the memo, the enemies are not fighting with devices and apps, they are fighting with the entire ecosystem. Nokia doesn't have its own now, and they need to create one. If they jump onto the Andriod ship, what exactly can' they monetize from the ecosystem that Google can't even milk?

This is a really big gamble on Nokia's part, if it works it's going to pay off big time. Palm tried that and failed but hey at least they got an exit to HP. At worst Nokia is just going to repeat that and got folded in MS. What makes you think going Android will end better for Nokia? I wouldn't underestimate 2 desperate turkeys with beaks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dear HN Submitters: No more scobleizer blog posts!

<comment><AUTHOR> Best post he has written for a long time - catches the Nokia/MS deal absolutely right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting to see that Scoble puts ESR's post in the same sack as the rest of the "nuts", yet doesn't do much to refute it. It's almost as if he read only the title.

<comment><USER7> The ESR post has no basis in reality. The announcement will "split nokia in half"? How does he think it's structured right now? Nokia is split sixteen different ways inside already, it's a total mess of competing agendas and technologies.

<comment><USER6> Eric's point is that Nokia's move does not do anything to address this and might even make it worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Scoble misses an important point about Nokia logistics. Nokia doesn't do all its manufacturing in China (my Nokia was made in Finland). This removes a lot of the uncertainty around evolving political, economic and trade relationships.</comment>


Rate my startup: community reputation system. - <AUTHOR>

I'm participating in Lean Startup Machine (a 54-hour startup weekend dedicated to learning and implementing Lean Startup principles).  My team is working on building a simple out-of-the-box reputation system.
The tool helps busy bloggers and community managers better manage trolls, spammers and inappropriate content.  It also helps encourage participation on blogs.
Would love some feedback on the concept: whether it addresses an issue you've had, and whether the any of you community manager types would be willing to pay for this tool that can deliver productivity gains.
http://www.ReputAPI.com
Thanks in advance! -Jonathan <comment><USER2> Your site says nothing of how the system actually works. How does it identify individuals across sites? How is reputation calculated?

If you did this the obvious way (HN or Reddit-style karma keyed to email addresses), you're going to run into a couple problems. First: if your startup takes off, users with a grudge will have a way to hurt another user's reputation across a large chunk of the Internet. This is obviously an issue with existing reputation systems, but there the damage is contained.

Second: trolls are accustomed to creating new addresses for each campaign on a troll-hostile site. The users you really need to worry about wouldn't have negative karma, they'd have a blank slate.

<comment><USER3> I'm one of the other participants. It is true that the site does not have much content at all, we're just throwing something out there to get feedback from potential customers as quickly as possible. The idea is to let implementors/sites choose whether they will keep the reputation-system scoped to their site only, to a collection of sites (usually in the same space), or globally.

Our algorithm for calculationg reputation is an improved upon version of the attack-resiliant trust metrics of <http://advogato.org>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It'd be nice if I could find out some more information without having to enter my e-mail address. Until your website has built up it's "reputation" you might want to have more information available without requiring an e-mail as people might not trust something they haven't heard about before.

</comment><comment><USER5> There is a book that came out a few months ago by the people who built the reputation system that Yahoo uses called, aptly enough, "Building Web Reputation Systems". It's a really good book. One of the things they make very clear is that the idea of trying to build a globally useful reputation system is basically a pipe dream.

The problem is that reputation is earned in context. So, reputation on a particular blog is useful, but trying to extrapolate that out to be useful on another blog is not as useful. Reputation gained in one domain is not really transferable to another. (As an example - if Jon Skeet had a cooking.stackexchange beta account, he shouldn't be automatically the most reputable user just because he has the top stackoverflow account - cooking and coding aren't directly transferable skills.) The best you can hope for is saying that this person is not a troll or spammer. The real hard part is, say, for Wordpress, it's easy for people to create a new account - how do you distinguish between new people and trolls on new accounts? This is probably the fatal flaw for the use case you are espousing.

You also need to think about how you're going to control overprotective "old timer" members. I've read of people that put in systems only to have the top members down mod everyone else so they could protect their top spots. I assume for the Wordpress plugin that you are going to add some sort of comment voting system. (On a side not that's ANOTHER problem with blogs - there isn't much a person can actually do on them - read a post, comment, maybe vote in a poll - hard to build a reputation system around that).

Obviously, since my startup (IActionable) is in the same space and would be a competitor I believe in the general concept, but I think many people make the mistake in thinking that it is an easy problem to solve. Blogs especially are a tough nut to crack because you have to add in a lot of functionality that most of them don't come with.

</comment><comment><USER6> We're considering a build vs. buy decision for our site <http://gamersunite.coolchaser.com>. So, I'll say minimally we have such a need.

<comment><USER7> I couldn't find any contact information for you. I sent you a message using your site's contact form. Check us out - <http://www.IActionable.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> vaporware alert

<comment><USER9> This. Maybe they've done some actual work, but there's no way to tell from reading this. It reeks of a "dry testing" scam.

 _Edit:_ Oh, it seems they started ... yesterday. There simply isn't enough here for any meaningful feedback.</comment></comment>


Now IT'S SMART TV (1989) - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1989/11/20/72774/index.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> From article: "One of the biggest skeptics about digital video computing is Steven P. Jobs, the Apple co-founder who now is chairman of Next Inc., a workstation maker. Says he: ''In order to compress and manipulate video images you have to throw away a bunch of data, and with it much of the picture quality.'' That leaves the images fuzzy and jerky. ''As regular TV viewers,'' Jobs argues, ''we all have high standards for what this stuff should look like. So unless you solve the compression issue in a serious way, it's all just fluff.'' "</comment>


Ask HN: New IoT Book structure - <AUTHOR> Dear
I'd like to hear you opinion, experience and recommendation.
We have task: Write a book about IoT for your students 17-18 years. Books should be used by teachers at schools, but will be also available in printed form in normal bookstore. Book also should motivate students for next study technical science. I know, goals are little bit contradictory. Teacher and students have different needs and expectations.
We have following ideas about structure (areas are just illustrative):
Choice A:
-Electronics
|
|- Project A
|- Project B
|- Project C
|
- Software
|
|- Project A
|- Project B
|- Project C
|
- Network
|
|- Project A
|- Project B
|- Project C
|
- Security
|
|- Project A
|- Project B
|- Project C
Choice B:
Project A
|
|- Electronics
|- Software
|- Network
|- Security
Project B
|
|- Electronics
|- Software
|- Network
|- Security
Project C
|
|- Electronics
|- Software
|- Network
|- Security
What do you think...which structure it more suitable ? Why do you prefer certain choice?
Thank you indeed for your views. <comment><USER2> The second one is better because it makes it easier to work on a project and complete it without introducing too much work-in-progress.</comment>


Sonos: Some of our oldest products will no longer receive software updates - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sonos.com/en/end-of-software-updates-for-legacy-products/ <comment><USER2> The big question: do we have to disable updates to the iOS app? Usually the app and the speaker FW are connected, if you upgrade one, the other must also be upgraded. If they stop upgrading the speakers but the app does upgrade...

This happened to me with their change to a more cloud based model some time back, where I was not particularly in favor of accepting the new terms. But my phone had already auto-upgraded the Sonos app. And to also upgrade the speakers I was forced to first accept the new terms, else no access to the app which was needed to upgrade and control the speakers. Thereby they essentially forced users to accept the terms or accept owning a set of expensive door stops.

</comment><comment><USER2> Most comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22108223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22108223)

</comment><comment><USER3> Definitely a lot of rage about this on twitter at the moment. Early customers feeling betrayed.

[https://twitter.com/therealfitz/status/1219656757242474496](https://twitter.com/therealfitz/status/1219656757242474496)</comment>


99 cents eBook on survival techniques for "slow start" entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0054ECIV6

<comment><AUTHOR> As one reviewer puts it ...

A humble immigrant from Macau comes to the U.S. and earns his doctorate in engineering at a prestigious university. Frustrated by the politics of academia, he sets out to free his inner entrepreneur. After a solid start, he is fired by the board of his first start-up. Realizing he is basically unemployable in a traditional job, he picks himself up, dusts himself off, and sets out to learn from his mistakes and start another company. The second attempt is a huge success; he cashes out and retires before his 50th birthday.

In "Survival Guide...", Denny tells the story of his failure, the lessons learned, and how they enabled him to ultimately succeed. A thoughtful, sensitive historian with a flair for reading people, he weaves an entertaining tale of VC's, technologists, money and power. Through it all, he never loses sight of the distinction between "lifestyle" and "life."

\--

If you want a free copy, please email me at denny dot miu at gmail dot com. Thanks.</comment>


Android Performance Case Study - <AUTHOR> http://www.curious-creature.org/docs/android-performance-case-study-1.html <comment><USER2> This is an avalanche of wisdom. I'm summoning the courage to enable "Show GPU Overdraw" on my apps and seeing just how bad it is.

And if anyone else was interested, the developer of Falcon Pro has already started implementing the fixes. To quote him from Twitter (@joenrv): "Reading @romainguy analysis of my app makes me feel a bit like a naked dude in a room full of people staring xD #letsgettowork"

<comment><USER3> He has already updated the app: <https://twitter.com/joenrv/status/275289692998623232>

"#FalconPro v1.0.2 uploaded to @GooglePlay. Get ready for some extra butter thanks to @romainguy ! Should hit your devices in an hour or so"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have very little interest in Android/mobile development, but this post was one of the most interesting things I've read in the past few days. Very well done, I feel like I've learnt very much about graphics performance (generally, not just on mobiles) in five minutes.

</comment><comment><USER5> The OP is slightly overstating the impact of overdraw as a general thing. While in this particular case it is likely that the overdraw is the cause of poor performance in this application, it's not always going to be the cause.

Overdraw primarily eats up memory bandwidth. Bandwidth isn't the only resource you have to worry about on a GPU (though on a mobile, it's certainly important). Equally important can be the time spent running pixel and/or vertex shaders when actually drawing onscreen elements - it's quite easy for a poorly written pixel shader to add multiple milliseconds to the time taken to render _one_ fullscreen image on an embedded device.

Unfortunately none of the steps he takes in this article, until the OpenGL ES Trace near the end, appear to give you any of the information you'd need to figure out whether overdraw is actually your problem. Maybe it's a safe bet that for most Android apps, overdraw is the issue, because they're using Skia and thus don't have access to use custom shaders?

On the other hand, that Hierarchy Viewer feature in the debug tools looks really great. I wish more SDKs offered features that nice.

<comment><USER6> In the case of pixels hidden behind views that do not use blending, overdraw only eats a very small amount of memory bandwidth checking the depth/stencil buffer for each covered pixel. This check is highly optimized in the hardware to reject whole blocks of pixels while reading only a few bits. (Android UI does use the depth/stencil buffer, right???) However, I don't think that's what the article is talking about. "You can see that the transparent pixels of the bitmaps count against your overdraw."

In the case of visible views that do use blending, overdraw multiplies the time spent running shader computation right along side multiplying the full memory bandwidth consumption of the shader (much more than just checking the depth/stencil buffer). It's true that it's totally possible to write slow shaders that chug with only 1x overdraw. But, at 3x overdraw it will be 3x as bad because you are running the whole function 3x per pixel.

<comment><USER7> Android does not use the depth buffer. The UI toolkit draws back to front. We are thinking about ways to improve this but most apps draw blended primitives back to front. An optimization I want to get in is to resort the render tree to batch commands by type and state. A side effect of this will be the ability to cull invisible primitives.

The stencil is not used at the moment (well... that's actually how overdraw debugging is implemented) because the hardware renderer only support rectangular clipping regions and thus relies on the scissor instead. Given how the original 2D API was designed, using the stencil buffer for clipping could eat up quite a bit of bandwidth or require a rather complex implementation.

It is planned to start using the stencil buffer to support non-rectangular clipping regions but this will have a cost.

Remember that the GPU rendering pipeline was written for an API that was never designed to run on the GPU and some obvious optimizations applied to traditional rendering engines do not necessarily apply.

<comment><USER6> That's actually what I expected, but I couldn't find any reference. So, I defaulted to the optimistic, but probably wrong stance hoping that someone would correct me. Thanks!

This means that, at least on traditional forward rendering GPUs (Nvidia, Adreno), overdraw is full cost even for pixels covered by opaque views. Do the PowerVR chips still get effectively-zero opaque overdraw from their tile- based-deferred-rendering approach?

Meanwhile, I'm not totally clear how hidden surface removal works on Mali chips. They use TBDR, but still recommend drawing front-to-back to avoid overdraw [http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc....](http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.dui0555a/CHDIJGGA.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow. I didn't know that the Android SDK shipped with such advanced profiling tools. They have really improved since the last time I played with it, circa 1.x. Impressive. Can anyone comment on other similar tools?

<comment><USER9> Another common one is "strict mode", where you tell Android to notify you (via screen flash or log dump) any time your app makes a potentially blocking call (network, file system) on the UI thread. Very useful as a first optimization.

<comment><USER10> As of (IIRC) Gingerbread, you get thrown a NetworkOnMainThreadException if you're making network calls in the UI thread and haven't explicitly turned StrictMode off.

(The WinRT SDK goes a step further, there simply _aren't_ any blocking network/FS methods available. async/await makes that less painful than it would seem, though.)

<comment><USER10> PS: It's actually Honeycomb and later. This behavior only kicks in if you're compiling against HC+, anything compiled against GB or lower can freely block the UI thread with reckless abandon regardless of which Android version you're running on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hosted the trace here, if anyone wants to look: <http://dev.mindfuzz.net/trace.html>

</comment><comment><USER12> One side affect of this is that Falcon Pro now should be significantly better optimized as a result. The "What's New" log on Google Play reveals this[1]:

v1.0.2 * Optimized the app following @romainguy recommendations. Report back if you feel the butter :)

[1]: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jv.falcon....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jv.falcon.pro)

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow, I'm amazed! Android performance tools have really advanced since my early attempts at android development (2.2-.3). I'll need to try some of these tools out.

Have they advanced on the NDK/C++ front as well? I've never been interested in the Java aspect of Android and working with the NDK was brutal compared to iOS.

</comment><comment><USER14> As an Android developer, its really exciting to see good examples of the tools in action. The documentation on how to debug problems beyond crashes/ANRs is a bit thin.

That being said, I do have one gripe. There are some chasms between the different tools. It is a bit painful to operate all the different performance tools and deal with switching contexts for the same problem. Systrace -> traceview and back and forth.

Also, it would be nice if traceview had a text based api/interface. I know that the graph visualization must be valuable for something, but I spend the majority of my time looking for particular methods and signs of excessive consumption/trouble. Now that I think of it, this sounds like a fun weekend project :)

<comment><USER7> We are trying to have all the tools available in ADT/monitor. Systrace can actually be invoked directly from ADT/monitor, there's a button in the toolbar for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Quite useful for Android developers.

<comment><USER16> Quite useful for most developers. The optimization process described here is applicable to many flavors of development. Very nice article OP!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Slightly off-topic: I thought "Twitter clients" were frounded upon now, and massive API restrictions made them virtually impossible?

Very interesting post though. :)

<comment><USER17> There's a limit of maximum 100.000 users/tokens for new Twitter clients. That's still $100 000 for $1 Twitter apps ($70 000 after Apple/Google takes their share), so it's not the end of the world of Twitter apps, but it won't make any developers rich either.

Getting 100 000 users for paid apps is very rare, Falcon Pro has just between 1000 and 5000 users so far for example. It's was just recently released though. If it starts to become popular "too fast" the price can just be raised.

<comment><USER18> Maybe if they fix those graphics performance bugs!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I tried to do the memory bandwidth math but ended up even more puzzled:

Anandtech Nexus 7 review says it has 5.3 GB/s of memory bandwidth. At 60 fps that would leave 88 MB per frame.

The 1280x800 screen has 3 megabytes worth of pixels at 24 bpp. That's 1/29 of the 88MB-per-frame. So how come the overdraw related slowdowns started appearing with just 4x overdraw?

<comment><USER20> Because of Java ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Brilliant as always.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. It's very interesting. And as a junior Android Application Developer, I've learnt so much in less than 30 minutes.

To Romain Guy, please keep it up. Thanks !</comment></comment>


An Inspirational Story About a Student and "The System" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.toolyo.com/inspirational-story-student-system/

<comment><USER2> "6\. Students who master skills they love, will become much more successful and happy than those who mastered their grades."

I was #20 in my high school class of 450 students, yet was accepted to Caltech, in part because I was into grinding my own telescope mirrors, and in part because I was so heavily into the theatre.

The valedictorian of the other high school in my town had a 4.0 GPA, yet was not even interviewed. The valedictorian of my high school didn't even apply to Caltech, despite going on to do well as an applied mathematician.</comment>


Can employers require fundraising as part of an application process? - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/bp1t84/can_employers_require_fundraising_as_part_of_an/ <comment><AUTHOR> > They've been advertising for full-time jobs and as part of the application > process, are requiring candidates to raise funds and get signups. Assessment > for the roles will take into account these candidates' success in raising > money. The founders recently confirmed to me that they don't actually have > the funds to pay for these employees: those will be raised by the candidates > themselves during the recruitment process.

A baffling choice by these founders.</comment>