An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT - <AUTHOR> https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/06/there%E2%80%99s-now-even-worse-anti-encryption-bill-earn-it-doesn%E2%80%99t-make-earn-it-bill-ok <comment><USER2> A Twitter thread [1] from Matthew Green in this bill. Essentially he says that this bill is a dead on arrival bill which is designed to make EARN IT look like a fair compromise.

And we better not fall for it

[1] [https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/12759760840231198...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1275976084023119874)

<comment><USER3> This is called the "Door in the Face technique" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the- face_technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique))

<comment><USER4> I'm surprised that page makes no reference to Overton Window which is also relevant:

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

<comment><USER5> Thanks for that. I was aware of this phenomenon but didn't know its name. Funny, the Overton Window article does link to DITF, but not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These bills terrify me. A lot of stuff happens in politics that's frustrating, and much of it doesn't catch my attention. There's something about the pure ignorance that goes into breaking encryption that I can't comprehend. I can understand when bills come through and the extreme differences in opinion are the result of different interpretations of facts and truth, but when it comes to encryption, there is no safe party. We will all suffer equally, every political party and apolitical individual alike, once these idiots make math illegal.

Whatever your political affiliations may be, these are grounds for r/pcm level unity.

<comment><USER7> I think ironically a bill like this passing would lead to more decentralization of services -- making their goals of monitoring information even harder.

<comment><USER8> They don't want to track people who will use those decentralized services. Simple as that.

They want control over majority. Nothing else. Any legal business will be required to do what law requires them and it will affect every citizen.

I have no hope given the stupidity of my country to do something against acts like [1] personal data protection law or the decryption act. US going towards that road only means it's easier to justify our country and many others to go even higher. Soon a mandatory camera inside house for legal citizen.

1] [https://carnegieindia.org/2020/03/09/what-is-in-india-s- swee...](https://carnegieindia.org/2020/03/09/what-is-in-india-s-sweeping- personal-data-protection-bill-pub-80985)

<comment><USER9> Nailed this. This is about controlling the 99% of folks who aren't going to take the extra step of using a decentralized service. Think about how hard it is to get friends and family members on board with something super easy to use like Signal. Open source decentralized services are DOA for the overwhelming majority of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Computer criminals (especially the commercial variety) and foreign intelligence agents must be drooling right about now. If something like this becomes law, it's only a matter of time until a mass-breach gives, e.g., China or Russia the dirty laundry of thousands of politicians and business leaders in one fell swoop. I don't think I need to spell out what that would mean for what's left of democracy in the USA.

I'm curious to know if anyone has any insight from the inside: do the particular congresscritters drafting these bills genuinely not understand the damage that would be done if this sort of drivel passed into law, or do they just not care?

<comment><USER11> but why do you think that 3 letters such as the FBI, DEA, or the NSA or CIA will stop using strong encryption?

do you really think that the DHS will just break its own encryption because of some laws?

<comment><USER12> The thing is all those three letter agency's make heavy use of civilian contractors and commercial products.

There is no doubt they are using some bigco vpn or other software that can/will eventually be compromised.

<comment><USER13> > The thing is all those three letter agency's make heavy use of civilian > contractors and commercial products.

Using Ed Snowden's autobiography as a point of reference, I'd say the IS agencies have probably 25% of the staff or higher as contractors, so definitely heavy use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Incentivizes technical innovation

What a load of bs.

Because those tech-freaks always find a way right? Innovation will simply appear without any doing on our part. We can just create non-sense bills and laws and they will make it work. They will magically find a way.

These imbeciles do not even understand the simplest things about encryption, but want to make laws for it. Ridiculous. I would laugh right now, if it was not such a serious issue.

Well, I am not in the US, but it will affect people world wide, who use services hosted in the US and next things happening EU comes around the corner with an equally stupid idea and it will hit me directly. Time for EFF again to save this world from idiotic leadership. You have my support.

<comment><USER15> This would be in breach of various privacy laws in the EU.

Companies have been sued for using weak encryption (cough plaintext passwords).

<comment><USER14> Of course, yes, but does it stop any of these politicians to come up with stupid ideas? I don't think so. Do we need more tests of what is OK in front of the European courts? 'cause once these politicians are sufficiently "incentivized" they wont stop pushing "their" ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Crypto is classified as an armament for export control. I'm keeping mine under the second amendment, since the folks who wrote this bill seem to care about that one.

As an aside: does that mean US DoD will get a back door as well? As a secure provider with over 1M users that required encryption at rest and in transit I think they should be the first to give up the keys to law enforcement.

<comment><USER17> Congress should be the first to lose the things they vote to restrict. They should lose it for at least a year before a bill is allowed to pass by simple majority.

<comment><USER16> Yeah the TL;DR: on this is "Bill Barr (or any AG) could read all of your emails without a warrant if you vote for this."

I know they would legally require a warrant to read them, maybe, but he'd have the access without it. Not a fun thought to go back to Hoover-style DoJ practices.

<comment><USER18> > "Bill Barr (or a Democrat AG) could read all of your emails without a > warrant if you vote for this.

That would fix it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Please stop voting dumbasses in the US, it affects everyone living in countries who have commercial agreements with then

<comment><USER20> This might be an unpopular opinion, but I don't think we should encourage people to vote as much as we do. Voting is an opportunity to make your voice heard. If you have nothing to say about the issues facing a particular office, don't vote.

I do not vote for candidates who I am not informed about, but many people do. Those uninformed votes just drown out the voice of the informed voters and reinforce the party-line tribalism that seems to be slowly taking over the nation. In an ideal world, I would be informed about the issues surrounding all of the offices for whom I'm asked to vote. Unfortunately, I simply do not have time to concern myself with more than a handful of offices.

<comment><USER21> > _Those uninformed votes just drown out the voice of the informed voters_

I've always been a fan of general election ballots showing names, in a randomized order, with no reference to party.

<comment><USER22> Taiwan lists the candidates in a random order but includes their picture and their number in that order on the ballot. The candidates know their number from the beginning of their campaigns and wear the number on their clothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Contrary to what some people are implying, support for mandatory decryption is not evidence of technological illiteracy.

From the perspective of these lawmakers, encrypted storage is like a safe. You have the right to store records in a safe to keep them away from prying eyes, but law enforcement has the right to order you to unlock that safe if they have a warrant. You have the same right to store those same records on an encrypted device, but law enforcement has the same right to order you to decrypt that device if they have a warrant.

Since people will sometimes refuse to decrypt a device, even when ordered to do so by a court, these lawmakers want to require OEMs and service providers to maintain control of the keys when they encrypt information on a user's behalf so as to increase the chances that lawful decryption can take place.

Is this a bad policy? Quite possibly. It has certain risks and makes certain tradeoffs, like any other policy. But it is arrogant to assume that anyone who supports it must be ignorant of how encryption works.

<comment><USER24> With the safe analogy, I swear there's precedent that, if the security is a _physical key_ , then a court can compel the owner to produce it. But if the safe uses a _combination_ , the court cannot compel its divulgence, since that would violate the fifth amendment protections against being forced to testify against oneself. Encryption "keys", and the passwords from which they are commonly derived, are much more akin to combinations than to physical keys.

<comment><USER23> I think there might be a circuit split on this issue, but IMO merely divulging a combination or encryption key is not "testimonial" (and therefore not a 5th Amendment violation) except insofar as it admits knowledge of the combination or key itself. But if police can establish separately that you know it, then the "foregone conclusion" exception applies.

If you can point to specific precedent that would be helpful.

<comment><USER23> Did some more research on this; see this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23647018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23647018)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > (R-SC)...(R-AR)...(R-TN)

It's funny how you can read just that and know that the bill is going to be absurdly bad. Not even just bad in the philosophical/political sense but actually just _bad_ as in not understanding the problem space, or not even formulated clearly or coherently.

<comment><USER26> Are you saying that Rs or people from southern states are incapable of critical and analytical thinking?

<comment><USER27> Perhaps just that that combination does not have the best track record in that regard. Their war on science, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Do we need an amendment to the constitution? We can't keep fighting these fights. Eventually they will win.

<comment><USER29> Yes, I'm surprised there is no "right to privacy" spelled out in clear terms. Sounds like that would be a wonderful thing to add directly to the Constitution.

<comment><USER22> The 4th amendment is supposed to guarantee this right. The Senators are old men who don't understand technology, so they believe that the protections that applied to letters at the time of the constitution don't apply to the medium that has replaced letters, namely email and messaging.

<comment><USER30> Please... These people know exactly what they are doing. The internet is a lot of things, and one of those things is a tool for mass surveillance. It's always, always been about power and money.

<comment><USER22> You are right, they have no excuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Would this be for "online services" only, or would operating system vendors have to decrypt users' encrypted file systems on demand?

Answer: according to the article "any device that has more than a gigabyte of storage and sells more than a million units a year could have to build a government-required backdoor if it is subject to five warrants or other requests, as would any operating system or communication system with more than a million active users."

<comment><USER32> I briefly read the doc and it requires assistance to decrypt local device storage and remote storage. So it's a full spectrum demand for decrypting data.

<comment><USER31> Going after systems that have over a million users would leave a pretty big loophole for niche vendors and open source. But with such a big precedent, those could easily be targeted later.

<comment><USER33> For those, like you and me, who have been touting open-source as a beacon of hope: I'm sorry, we're done for.

First, anything that has more than a gig of memory and sells over a million units must be engineered according to the government's whims. That is pretty much ANYTHING useful nowadays. Hardware will now spy on you. And even though there is old hardware, and theoretically zero-trust programming techniques out there, that won't matter because:

They will go after open-source projects.

Any single method alone wouldn't work, but if pushed all at once, they could smother us. File lawsuits against and harass not just maintainers, but contributors and possibly even users; force registrars to de-register domains, and search engines to forget links; have ISP's stop allowing Tor connections, or possibly even implement whitelists of all websites instead of blacklists of "bad" ones.

Without secure computers, in today's world, there is no organized protest; there is no organized opposition; there is no truly effectual dissent, because the other side can see all and end it before it becomes an issue. And even then... _gestures wildly_.

Constitutionality means jack without both belief and enforcement. We have neither; a public split and jaded, and a government empowered in the worst possible way. And even if this doesn't pass - and that is a horrifyingly small if - the very fact that this is even being proposed is evidence that the battle is close to being lost completely. There is no second chance in this chase, and we are going to trip and fall eventually.

Though hope may be lost for us, may we retain hope that our descendants are at least somewhat at peace with the world we have given them.

<comment><USER15> What if you put a text in your project:

All lawsuits are in the jurisdiction of X Tribunal, situated in Switzerland or another privacy-friendly country?

<comment><USER34> I'm drawing a blank on the name of the show... there's a series on either Netflix or Prime Video where a retired high ranking FBI officer walks the viewers through a bunch of crazy cases. The majority of them are foreign intelligence related. I think it's meant as some kind of pro-FBI pro-American low key propaganda.

Anyway, as a Canadian, one of my key takeaways from watching it is that it doesn't matter what country you're in, nor your nationality, nor the nation where you're committing crimes; if the FBI or similar large agency decides to target you, you're going to at a minimum have a really bad time, and very potentially end up getting a free trip to the US to spend time in jail, even if you've never stepped foot in the country before.

The show has this "look at how far we're willing to go to keep America safe!" vibe to it, but as an outsider I found it pretty horrifying.

Edit: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassified_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassified_\(TV_series\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This bill will be sold to the right as helping fight against foreign terrorists living in the US. It will be sold to the left as helping against the alt-right organizing and spreading hate. And it will be sold to everyone as helping stop child exploitation.

In addition, there is already a lot going on in the country to keep the average person from focusing on this issue. It seems like allowing the government to spy on everyone is a pretty bipartisan agenda.

<comment><USER36> The further we get from wwii, and the Cold War to some extent, the harder it is to remind the public how scary it is to live without freedoms. How do we remind them? Could China and Russia act as cautionary tales that voters would respond to?

Putin jailing and murdering his political opposition, Chinese concentration camps for muslims - why do so many people assume it can't happen here? Nazi germany wasnt some backwater nation, it was a strong, extremely cultured, advanced nation that was going through some very hard times. Germans didn't like what happened - there were countless assassination attempts against hitler, but it was just eventually too late

<comment><USER37> > why do so many people assume it can't happen here?

Is that actually the assumption? I'm pretty sure everyone already assumes that the government already has all of your messages, browsing history, transactions, etc, and they can come for you if they want.

Between the massive surveillance state that already exists and the judicial miracle of "parallel construction", it's _already_ very much a problem. The only thing left to do is scale up.

<comment><USER38> There is something worse than gulags.

Telescreens, watched by "AI".

They can arrest you on trumped up charges, but it's not really feasible to do that to everybody, and extreme heavy-handedness promotes resistance.

Once they reach inside your device, they don't have to murder or imprison you, they can just give you a little slap whenever you try to stray from the garden path. Let you know that they're watching so they don't even have to censor you, and can claim that they don't, because you censor yourself.

Crimethink. Doubleplus ungood.

<comment><USER39> _They can arrest you on trumped up charges, but it 's not really feasible to do that to everybody_

No, but I would imagine there would soon be some way of removing your liberty and keep you under house arrest for a set period. Imagine if they made sure your banking and cards were frozen for the period to stop you going anywhere...

<comment><USER36> Or a social credit system that prevented you from using public transit

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What's the situation when two (ostensibly friendly) superpowers, the US and EU, have totally mutually incompatible laws regarding something totally transnational? I'm not asking rhetorically, I'm asking legally, what is a company to do if they want to do business in both locations?

<comment><USER41> Depending on the nature of the conflict, it might not be possible at all. Countries generally reserve the right to control both what crosses and happens within their borders- that's more or less the definiton of sovereignty. If two countries have mutually-exclusive regulations regarding some goods, there isn't a legal trade in those goods between them.

<comment><USER15> I guess it's time for github.eu

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The solution to policies like this is serverless or point-to-point systems. As an application publisher you cannot be held liable or obligated towards that which you do not possess and are, by design, not capable of possessing. As an example consider copyright law and BitTorrent. BitTorrent provides a software application and protocol but not servers or services, so the BitTorrent software is never liable for the copyright violations of content that makes use of its protocol.

<comment><USER43> The solution is to vote out idiots who support things like this, and get the government actually working for its citizens again, not against it. That's hard, and feels damn near impossible sometimes, but it's required. You can't fix social problems with clever technological workarounds.

<comment><USER15> But clever technological workarounds might expose those idiots for what they are:

Clowns trying to "regulate" things they don't understand without seeking expert advices beyond their narrow lobbyists.

<comment><USER44> The most "exposing" you will be able to do is to get them pushing insane laws that criminalize coherent action.

AFAIK, that's done already. You won't move further by technical decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm from TN. It's no surprise to me that they also target DNS over HTTPS. Marsha Blackburn has long been in the pocket of large internet providers. She successfully stopped a large city here in TN from expanding their own successful municipal broadband.

</comment><comment><USER45> As someone who typically votes conservative, this is the kind of ignorance that makes me seriously reconsider my stances. This would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and go a long way toward emulating China. No thank you! Time to double down on encryption efforts and Tor usage.

<comment><USER46> I hate to break it to you, but if this bill bothers you, then you're best bet is to vote for the progressives. Welcome to the left wing, comrade. :-)

Over the years, I've watched most of my conservative friends defect to the democrats as the Republican party morphed from "small (but efficient) government" to starting the War on Science and War on the Climate, not to mention all the useless wars against the Middle East, etc.

At the same time, the Democratic party also veered to the right, and I've watched my liberal friends (and now, some of those conservative defectors) move to the progressive part of the democratic party.

It's not that people's opinions have changed, it's that the parties have sold out their core values to appease big donors.

Prior generations in the US became more conservative as they aged. I don't see that happening with my generation. Between that and demographic shifts, the Republican party is representing a rapidly shrinking minority of the population. I just wish the senate wasn't so skewed toward conservative states and against city dwellers. 42 votes are controlled by a group of people the size of California.

Worse, the senate gets to appoint federal judges, so a minority of the US is electing the people that have exclusive control over court appointments (they simply refuse to appoint judges when there is a Democrat in the white house) and they've packed them with radicals.

<comment><USER47> > I hate to break it to you, but if this bill bothers you, then you're best > bet is to vote for the progressives.

Haha no. They both suck. It's only politically convient

> the Democratic party also veered to the right

I think you mean the left have veered radically more to the left.

> I just wish the senate wasn't so skewed toward conservative states and > against city dwellers.

As designed. Really we should go to the way it was supposed to be with the state legislatures choosing senators.

> hey simply refuse to appoint judges when there is a Democrat in the white > house

The democrats will do exactly the same in the reverse situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Perhaps conservatives will find compelling a comparison to the second amendment. When crypto was outlawed, only outlaws will have crypto.

The letter I sent to my senators is as follows:

I care deeply about the safety and security of my fellow Americans. I understand the challenges that strong encryption poses for law enforcement. I don't want the terrorists and pederasts to win.

Yet, I strongly oppose Senate bill 4051, LAEDA. Consider giving a copy of your house keys the police just in case they need to come in without you knowing. Boy, I hope no one ever decides to steal all those keys at once. I hope no one guarding the keys ever develops an opioid addiction and decides to sell just a few keys. I hope China and Russia don't get curious about what you are discussing with your colleagues and decide it would just be easiest to raid the key pantry.

Meanwhile, the real bad guys will just continue using existing, strong crypto. When crypto is outlawed, only outlaws will have crypto. As a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment, you understand that it is every person's right to defend themselves against the evil forces in the world as well as protect against a potentially tyrannical government. Just because some criminals use guns for evil doesn't mean we should curtail the rights of the majority who uses them for lawful defense.

Please don't be fooled that LAED or EARNIT leave strong crypto intact until a warrant is issued. No. These acts force everyone, law abiding or not, to install a trigger lock the government can switch on remotely. Do we really trust the next administration not abuse that right? Do we really trust big business that much?

Personally, I prefer to stand my ground. I have done nothing wrong. I will not hand over my rights to defend myself.

<comment><USER15> Given how controversial gun ownership is, I wouldn't use that as an example, it might undermine the case.

<comment><USER28> Depends on who the recipient is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Is there a way to see exactly which senators vote for a bill? I'm writing my senators now about how bad this bill would be, and I want to see if they follow through.

<comment><USER50> Yes! [https://www.senate.gov/legislative/HowTo/how_to_votes.htm](https://www.senate.gov/legislative/HowTo/how_to_votes.htm)

There's also third party sites, such as this one which offers email services. [https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes](https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes)

<comment><USER51> govtrack.us offers RSS feeds for every legislator as well, so if you have an RSS reader already set up you can just add the feeds for your representatives (you don't even need to create an account on govtrack!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Being in the EU, I really wonder how this is going to play out if this bill comes to pass.

It's pretty clear this bill is incompatible with the GDPR, which specifically mandates using state of the art encryption when appropriate (and a backdoored encryption is certainly NOT state of the art).

The 2 laws would be fundamentally incompatible, which means we would probably see different services based on geolocation from the big companies (GDPR applies to EU residents, not citizens, so there is no overlap), but this means small players will have to choose between EU and US or take a legal risk.

From a risk perspective, the US have an exception for under 1 million users, while the EU has nothing of the sort. Which means it would, in theory, be less risky to start in the EU, expand in the US, and when you reach the 1 million users bar, separate EU from US operations (which has obviously a lot of issues, how do you handle a user moving from one place to the other, or users interacting accross boundaries?).

Let's hope this won't be the trigger to have several continental/national "internet" instances, but this is definitely going to contribute to a split.

<comment><USER53> We're going to have the "international edition", with 256-bit encryption, and the "US edition" with 40-bit encryption. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40-bit_encryption](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40-bit_encryption)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> What are the effects of this, if passed, on the rest of the world using Office 365, Facebook or AWS? It might be impossible to reconcile with some regulation in eg the EU.

<comment><USER55> I hope (fingers crossed) that the encryption laws will simply not apply to the EU. I mean most US companies operate via an intermediate company hosted in e.g. Ireland or the Netherlands already, so I reckon legally they can disregard these bills.

Of course, if the US government starts to offer money for data, they may budge anyways. I'm fairly sure MOST data can freely be shared with the US, it's just government data and higher level company data that isn't allowed to cross the borders.

<comment><USER46> [https://www.linklaters.com/en/insights/blogs/digilinks/2019/...](https://www.linklaters.com/en/insights/blogs/digilinks/2019/september/us- cloud-act-and-gdpr-is-the-cloud-still-safe)

Tl;dr: For most data, the cloud vendor is basically forced to violate either the cloud act or the gpdr. The gpdr has a bunch of fuzzy carve outs for requests involving people in danger or the "public interest". My guess is that those will be expanded over time to force the data to be handed over, regardless.

If the data isn't "personal information" (financial records aren't, for example), GPDR doesn't apply and the warrant must be served.

I think this means that, because they could hypothetically receive a warrant they have to serve, the Ireland/EU intermediary (or the US company that provides them with the software/hardware) will have to backdoor the encryption.

I am not a lawyer, and I haven't even read any of these bills. I'm just piecing together summaries. I don't think anyone really knows how the three bills will interact in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I've read the bill of rights.

i have a right to be secure in my papers and affects.

okay, this bill emphasizes that police need a warrant, but glosses over the bit about actual _security_.

administrative controls aren't security. That's why we haven't outlawed locks on the front door...

<comment><USER57> lockpickinglawyer on youtube should quickly dispel any sense of security you have with the lock on your house. It is literally ZERO

<comment><USER58> Entering an unlocked house, in many common law jurisdictions, is tresspass at best.

Picking a lock falls into break and enter, regardless of the name of the charge.

Windows, and even walls offer little security in modern houses too! I can literally punch my way through vinyl siding, with chipboard under that, through to drywall.

<comment><USER59> > Entering an unlocked house, in many common law jurisdictions, is tresspass > at best.

False, opening or door window is sufficient for the breaking part of burglary at common law, locks.are irrelevant. If locks are relevant, it's not because of common law.

<comment><USER58> There's no universal 'common law'. Each jurisdiction has its own, diverged "branch" of common-law, each with its own peculiarities.

Primarily, based upon its history.

And as the legislative branch passes laws, they effect the power of, modify the scope of, or render inert many such judicial decisions.

This is why I said "many common law jurisdictions', not just 'common law'.

One vital part of common law, is intent.

A door with a lock on it? And you pick it / disable it? It is going to be exceptionally difficult to prove benign intent here.

An unlocked door? Well...

Are your friends 'breaking and entering' by opening the door and walking in? Again, intent here...

Did you knock, and "thought you heard something"? Again, intent.

There have been many court cases, but as an example, for a while, in Ontario, Canada, it was common for police to knock at the door, and simply enter saying "Oh, I knocked.. but no one heard me."

I kid you not.

But let's take a step back here, and give you an example as to why this becomes more difficult with an unlocked door.

Part of the issue here is, many houses have a covered, 'cold room' prior to the house proper. Yet, this is _still part of the house_. It has a roof and walls, a door. It is simply part of the house.

In many colder climates, you enter this area. This is fully expected. You're now sheltered, but it isn't heated. When the owner opens the "door proper", blowing snow and wind won't enter their house. Ergo, to knock, you must approach the "real door" of the house, inside this room, and knock.

It is also not immediately clear if the "very outside door" you are accessing, is a cold room, or the actual door of the house. How do you discover one way or the other? Why you open the door, and enter!

Intent is primary here. Entry into an unlocked house does not prove intent, as there is no 'forced entry'.

One thing ; in Canada, the police lay charges. A person need not even make a complaint, for the police to act. Nor does a person insisting that the police not charge someone, indicate this will happen! An example here ; the police discover assault of some form. They only need evidence, not willingness to 'charge'.

Now take this legal position, and assign it to people entering houses. Your friend enters your house, as he always does, without even knocking.

According to you, that's 'break and enter', yes? What differentiates here?

Why, intent of course!

Intent is primary, and a locked door creates a very strong validation of intent. An unlocked? Zero validation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> reading those bills makes me feel quite hopeless, considering Gell-Mann Amnesia[1]:

      Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open
      the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's
      case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see
      the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or
      the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the
      story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet
      streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

      In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple
      errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international
      affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more
      accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the
      page, and forget what you know.

It is horrible to think the same thing probably exists in politics, and I cant even imagine what goes through in fields I don't understand.

[1][https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann- amnesia/](https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/)

<comment> second--shift Have an upvote for an ET allusion.

The blog has some interesting philosophy about collective "philosophical" inertia - everything is meta-stable, until it isn't. I can't help but think and feel that we are at or nearing a maxima change - we are pushing over the edge of our current local maxima, and many things about modern society will change all at once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> After this passes, imagine a perfect storm scenario where a widespread crisis --real, manufactured, or blown out of proportion and deemed an imminent threat by the powers that be--affords governments the cover to force everyone to stay at home and completely rely on the Internet in efforts to maintain some kind of sanity during "these challenging times".

Oh, wait...

From there, it is not hard to imagine that compliance with such government lockdowns could be deemed critical for "national security". Suddenly, decryption surveillance on large numbers of the population is done in response to a situation seemingly not even imagined (as far as we can tell) in the creation of this bill. They will not have to publicly ask for people to snitch on their neighbors--they will already know.

"But," some will say, "it is to keep us all safe." Replace a health crisis in the above scenario with...I don't know...maybe your desire to join a local protest over something.

When the LAED Act passes (I am pessimistically sure that "if" does not apply here) poetic justice would be for those "Republican" senators to be the first targets of state-sponsored hackers decimating the personal fortunes they have coincidentally amassed while holding office. To be honest, I am surprised that there is not a provision in the bill to somehow exempt Congress, just like there is with most other garbage legislation they say is best for us.

</comment><comment><USER62> Democratic nations are drifting more and more away from the wills of their people. How can this be changed?

<comment><USER63> Perhaps more accurate: some nations are drifting away from democracy. In particular the US can't really be considered a full democracy anymore, and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) which publishes a "democracy index" every year, has recently downgraded the US to "flawed democracy".

I think that this could happen in the US shows that democracy as currently implemented in most countries still has significant design flaws. We need a democracy 2.0 that's more stable, less easily corrupted, and helps educate the people so that their "will" is more rational. Personally I still believe that democracy is the only civilized option, or rather some manifestation of the principles of the "Open Society" as described by Karl Popper is the only option. But an Open Society is an iterative process which needs continuous improvement by definition.

<comment><USER46> No democracy has lasted more than a few hundred years. I think the constitution needed an expiration date. California's proposition system is slightly better, but not great.

We probably need about a half dozen amendments at this point. Here are a few:

\- "Right to privacy", including against privatized surveillance.

\- "Right to civil protection" (end qualified immunity and binding arbitration / class action waivers)

\- Ban slavery, and ban profiting off slavery (no, we don't have a blanket ban, and yes, forced labor is a huge industry in the US)

\- Move closer to proportional democracy. All votes should count equally, regardless of where you live. Currently a Californian vote in a federal senate election is worth < 1/20 of a vote from a small state. Similarly, if you are not in a swing state, your vote for the president basically doesn't matter at all.

\- Some sort of police reform. Maybe spell out "equal protection" a bit more clearly.

\- Campaign finance (and revolving door bribery) reform

<comment><USER64> I don't think even your basic desires are possible, because no way in hell you'd get the majority of states to buy in to point four, which might as well read: "Establish a Californian political hegemony and erode away a significant portion of innate state strength for 38/50 states". Couple this with the fact that you'd need to spell out more well defined, explicit version of the first and second (which you cannot do meaningfully and get a large majority of support) , and the idea is DoA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Has anyone tried asking politicians who are all for this kind of legislation if they've thought about how it might affect them? I'm assuming they're not using government networks for private communications with friends, family, donors, mistresses, etc. Someone might suggest to them that once a bill like this passes, those silly "LEO-only" limitations will be hacked pretty quickly and the entire world will be reading their messages too.

</comment><comment><USER66> The thing I always wonder about something like the government having the power to force people to decrypt data is what happens if the person claims they forgot their key. I could very much see this happening to me if I was arrested and my computers taken away only to months later be asked to unlock them.

Also what happens if the person used Rubber Hose cryptography. They could give up a key and the government gets some data but it would be impossible to know if they gave up all the keys. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber- hose_cryptanalysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis)

</comment><comment><USER67> They are pushing the overton window of public opinion by introducing extreme legislation which is so obviously bad it is certainly rejected. Then they incrementally introduce "a fair compromise" and in either case: YOU LOSE!

</comment><comment><USER68> This seems quite similar to the Australian Assistance and Access Bill [0], which also compels companies to implement new solutions that enable decryption services. This bill also makes it illegal for a compelled person to communicate this order, even to their own company.

Seems like the old trope of Australia being the squishy testbed for shitty US laws is true after all.

[0] - [https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/help-and-support/how-to- engag...](https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/help-and-support/how-to-engage- us/consultations/the-assistance-and-access-bill-2018)

</comment><comment><USER69> Have any smart people in tech come up with a solution that would satisfy the 4th amendment while preserving secure communications? It seems that to lawmakers, tech people are proclaiming that they've done such a good job building secure systems that the 4th amendment cannot apply to them.

Personally, I'd rather let some criminals go free than to break encryption. I don't see lawmakers being willing to make the same trade-off.

<comment><USER59> > Have any smart people in tech come up with a solution that would satisfy the > 4th amendment while preserving secure communications?

Sure. The 4th Amendment has nothing against anything that preserves secure communications.

> It seems that to lawmakers, tech people are proclaiming that they've done > such a good job building secure systems that the 4th amendment cannot apply > to them.

No, they are proclaiming that getting dangerous people is so important that the privacy rights like those in the Fourth Amendment shouldn't apply, which tendency is exactly why we have the Fourth Amendment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> What can we do about this? if it is not this one there will be another one after it. I feel like the longer we wait the more likely this will get passed.

<comment><USER46> A constitutional "right to privacy" amendment would help, but it would need to be carefully worded to avoid the loopholes that have been established around unreasonable search and seizure.

Short of that, donate to progressive candidates, and tell them that this is your hot-button issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> This is why I donate a hundred dollars each to the ACLU and EFF every year around Christmas time. It's not much but if everyone did it they'd be able to find this stuff a lot better. Once our rights to liberty and privacy are taken by the government it's 10X as hard to get them back.

</comment><comment><USER72> Until we get encryption as a constitutional amendment we can probably expect to fight these types of laws perennially.

</comment><comment><USER73> I really enjoyed reading this: [https://theneutral.com/2020/06/25/republican- senators-propos...](https://theneutral.com/2020/06/25/republican-senators- propose-lawful-access-to-encrypted-data-act/)

</comment><comment><USER74> When Phil Zimmerman created PGP one of his stated use cases was protection of speech in totalitarian regimes. Well... looks like we're approaching that use case. Encryption is permissionless by design.

<comment><USER74> Also, I think begging politicians to see it any other way is a waste of time. Widespread disobedience and resistance is the only way to knock it down. Make it cost a lot to enforce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> How do we practically and legally fight this without becoming an activist? This is one of the few issues I actually care about.

This doesn't seem to be a topic on presidential candidate radars.

</comment><comment><USER76> Encryption is only one overrepresented technological technique to achieve communication security.

al-Qaeda reportedly favoured communicating in the clear with obfuscated messages, attempting to make their communications become a needle in a haystack of mundaneness that no one would raise an eyebrow to[1].

In World War 2, the United States hired native American speakers to communicate in the clear, knowing that the Nazis would have no comprehension of the languages spoken[2]. Use of obscure languages, local dialects and local euphemisms has been widely used by drug cartels[3], parties to violent conflicts, etc.

Criminals have been known to join and communicate via obscure online multiplayer games under the assumption that no one has gone to the effort of reverse engineering a proprietary game protocol and the developer hasn't gone to the effort of implementing recording of or monitoring of in-game activities that could be used for communication, including painting words on a surface in-game, naming objects in-game, etc. Online multiplayer games also provide a plausible reason (cover story) for two people to communicate with each other and yet claim they don't know each other in real life--a feature most encrypted messaging protocols can't guarantee.

Encryption backdoors are unlikely to be a concern to adversaries we should be most worried about. History shows they have tended to assume that backdoors exist and that use of encryption tends to draw unwanted attention.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscation#Secure_communicati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscation#Secure_communication)

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

[3] [https://publicintelligence.net/dea-drug-slang-code- words-201...](https://publicintelligence.net/dea-drug-slang-code-words-2018/)

<comment><USER77> None of your cited examples are "secure," they're the very definition of "security by obscurity," which is to say insecure.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> We should be prosecuting senators who bring such blatant violations of the Bill of Rights forward in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER79> I'm glad this post hasn't been removed because it's about a proposed bill as opposed to a new law :).

</comment><comment><USER80> How are you even going to enforce anti-encryption legislation? Deep packet inspection?

</comment><comment><USER81> Would this have any ramifications on something like the Tor project?

</comment><comment><USER82> This bill seems like something out of 1984... I kinda wonder if any big tech companies will fight back like Apple since they push backed on issues before... Other tech companies maybe too, but I think some tech companies are fine with this stuff even if it creates extra burdens because its for example easier for some of these huge companies on the stock market to go over everything than some smaller tech startups.

Also really makes me less of a fan of the two party system... but then again some people don't want to due to busy or just boring to look over every candidates... Like maybe you are a Republican in Tennessee and then for all the other candidates you check Blackburn since she's part of your party... Seems like the actual president actions get more attention, more people have opinions on Obama or Trump than their own representatives or governor.

I think it'd be interesting if people could vote on issues more directly, but wonder if that'd be open up to fraud... Like how some candidates are against mail-in votes... I'd think crypto and some other things might be stronger than a signature. Speaking of signatures, I voted in one of the state elections mail-in and the local county election commission rejected my ballot because of my signature and got a letter back after it's too late to go to the polls... I have really bad hand writings and I hate signing for things. It's annoying lol... Like I used the mobile app for Subway once since they had a deal and you have to sign the little paper receipt print out, kinda like scribble and be done with it since not as important as other signatures though. While other mobile apps, nothing to sign. Plus They don't even teach cursive writing in schools anymore. So I think crypto and maybe some proof of being a live person using tech might actually help. Kinda one of my own concerns about some areas doing mail-in only for COVID... I wonder if you lived in maybe an area that's mostly democrat and voted republican or vise verses if your signature is more likely to be rejected. I wonder what the process for that is, do they keep copies of people signatures when they registered to vote (DMV will register you too, so maybe from state ID or License) or from their last ballot or when they requested an absentee ballot maybe more likely?

Then I also feel like some of these candidates and other elected officials live in their own little bubble, rich, overpaid and out of touch with society.

</comment><comment><USER83> how does something like this affect password managers like 1-password?

</comment><comment><USER84> who would be he people in congress backing this bill? is there a list?

<comment><USER85> It says at the top of the article

>On Tuesday, June 23, Senators Graham (R-SC), Cotton (R-AR), and Blackburn (R-TN) introduced a bill that is a full-frontal nuclear assault on encryption in the United States.

As a general rule of thumb with how US politics have been going, this bill will probably be split down party line.

<comment><USER86> Graham has some compromat on him (he used to hate Trump and suddenly became his biggest supporter over night), Cotton was the guy who wanted all protesters killed, I have no clue on Blackburn. But this bill has zero chance of passing; it's merely yet another case of political grandstanding. Lots of things get introduced that can never pass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> This bill wouldn't receive enough support to pass considering the libertarian wing of the Republican Party right?

<comment><USER88> Isn't the libertarian wing considerably small part of the Republican party at the moment? On top of my head I can only recount 3 major figures. The rest are libertarians until they enter the game(get elected), then switch to being party acolytes.

<comment><USER89> The Liberty Caucus has eight members in the House. Who knows how these people will vote though and which ones can be pressured to vote for.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> With China on the one end going into full dystopian mode and the US aiming for a modern police state, I really wonder what the endgame is. Full fascism again?

<comment><USER36> Again? When was the USA or world fully fascist? Whose endgame?

<comment><USER91> Fascism did control quite a number of countries some 80 years ago. I think it's not unreasonable to say that full fascism was their endgame.

<comment><USER92> Fascism was a political situation in 1930s italy. I think the commentor is objecting to this new, rhetorical use of the term which essentially connects any "nostalgic, authoriatrian" impulse to a 1930s-style tyranny.

The left's use of "fascism" today is much like the rights use of "socialism/communism".

<comment> grey-area Just like the symbol of fasces was only used in ancient Rome and has no other meaning? Or the swastika, used in India as a symbol meaning wellbeing?

Do you genuinely think symbolism and the meaning of words isn't plastic and contingent on context?

<comment><USER92> I think when people trade on the negative connotations of "fascism" and then turn around and go "oh i mean this..." they're being duplicitous and alarmist.

The antifa lot essentially define fascism as an eternal set of human psychological impulses: nostalgia, in-group preference, desire for cultural homogenity, etc.

These did not lead to Fascism, the "obviously bad thing" which they are being alarmist about. Fascism was a direct result of, and contingent upon, the mass death and poverty caused by WWI.

Words do have meaning, and it is precisely the negative connotations of fascism that are being appealed to in the accusation. Absent these connotations, almost everyone is fascist some of the time.

<comment><USER93> > Fascism was a direct result of, and contingent upon, the mass death and > poverty caused by WWI.

That is grossly wrong. There was no "mass death and poverty" in Italy during or after WWI.

<comment><USER92> wtf are you talking about?

Half a million Italians died in WW1. And as many again from the spanish flu. And all of Europe was in a permanent condition of poverty until way into the 20th C. 80% of the population was poor working class even in 1970.

You do not get Russian communism without the prolonged period of slavery called "serfdom" which persisted into the late 19th C. in russia.

You do not get fascism in italy without WW1.

This isn't controversial in political science.

<comment><USER93> The Italian deaths in WW1 were overwhelmingly soldier deaths, as the fighting on Italian soil was limited to north-east border of the country (where incidentally I am from). The civilian population was largely unaffected by the war.

> And as many again from the spanish flu.

Who talked about flu? You were talking about WW1, now you are pivoting to the flu?

> And all of Europe was in a permanent condition of poverty until way into the > 20th C. 80% of the population was poor working class even in 1970.

This is also grossly wrong. I suggest you better inform yourself about the 20-th century history of European societies before spouting more nonsense.

<comment><USER92> WW1 was a total war. Fascism was a response to total war which conscripted every civilian into the military. Italy did not have an army of 500,000 soliders before WW1, no country did. The british empire's armed force was 80,000 -- and was one of the largest in the world. Where do you think 500,000 "soliders" came from? They were drafted from the population.

It's literally in the first paragraph in the wikipedia article on fascism...

> Fascists saw World War I as a revolution that brought massive changes to the > nature of war, society, the state, and technology. The advent of total war > and the total mass mobilization of society had broken down the distinction > between civilians and combatants. A "military citizenship" arose in which > all citizens were involved with the military in some manner during the war.

> I suggest you better inform yourself about the 20-th century history of > European societies before spouting more nonsense.

I'm British and I know my own history very well. Read any book of the time, "Road to Wigan Peer" will give you the quality of poverty.. and any graph by any serious economic study of human history will give you the actual level of wealth.

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

<comment><USER93> > WW1 was a total war. Fascism was a response to total war which conscripted > every civilian into the military.

WWI was a contributing factor to the rise of fascism, which is a complex phenomenon whose roots date back at least to the late 1800s with the rise of nationalism throughout Europe, the unification of Germany, the growing distrust of liberal democracies at the turn of the century, etc. It was not a "direct result" of WWI.

> Italy did not have an army of 500,000 soliders before WW1, no country did. > The british empire's armed force was 80,000 -- and was one of the largest in > the world. Where do you think 500,000 "soliders" came from? They were > drafted from the population.

WWI was unparalleled in magnitude with respect to previous wars, but, as far as Italy is concerned, it did not involve directly the vast majority of the civilian population (around 34M at the time), which was never in a war zone or at risk of atrocities from the opposing force. The fighting was confined to the northeastern Alpine regions of Trentino, Veneto and Friuli. The Austrians made a small advance into the Italian territory before being decisively defeated on the Piave river. The industrial and agricultural heartlands of the country were largely intact at the end of the war, no major urban centres were captured or destroyed, and important land gains were made in the form of new territories formerly under Austrian control.

WWI was hell on Earth in the trenches, but no, Italy was not in disarray and did not experience mass death or poverty as a result of WWI.

(There were of course serious economic issues in the interwar period, but their genesis is in the great depression, not WWI)

> I'm British and I know my own history very well. Read any book of the time, > "Road to Wigan Peer" will give you the quality of poverty.

Life has been shit for most people for millenia, in Europe and elsewhere. But just take a look at any graph of the life expectancy over time in Europe and you will see that is has been steadily improving throughout the 20th century (with a couple of big temporary down spikes for the flu and WW2 - not WW1).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> I was under the impression that a certain GOP Presidential candidate served the same purpose, and that did not turn out well.

<comment><USER95> Could you tell me more about that?

<comment><USER96> He means Trump.

As seen in the leaked Podesta emails (Hillary's campaign manager that was phished and has a password of "Pa$$w0rd" or such), Hillary Co asked their media contacts to put emphasis on Trump. To give him more coverage than the others running. They literally called him their "pied piper" candidate. They were so confident they could beat Trump that they helped prop him up.

How Hillary skated by with many people not knowing or not caring that in more ways than one she is responsible for the president they hate so much, I have no idea.

Edit: you know the emails are on Wikileaks HN, the chain starts with "Friday Strategy"

<comment><USER97> Can someone explain why this is being heavily downvoted? Was something they said false?

<comment><USER98> Probably the ludicrous notion that somehow Hillary Clinton is to blame for electing Donald Trump rather than the millions of people who voted for him despite overwhelming evidence of his lack of fitness for the office.

<comment><USER99> If the accusation is true then she certainly shares some of the blame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> I wonder how the 4chan crowd feels about helping "meme Trump into office?"

<comment><USER101> If you think who is currently president matters one bit when it comes to passing bills increasing federal spying and power then you haven't been paying attention.</comment></comment>


Layoffs Accelerate Across Silicon Valley Startups - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/articles/layoffs-accelerate-across-silicon-valley-startups <comment><USER3> This is a good time to get familiar with your rights in a lay-off - <USER2> how severance works, what happens with you health insurance and what to sign/not to sign on your way out. Even if you feel it won't happen to you, read this. Layoffs are extremely sudden and it helps to be prepared : [https://candor.co/guides/layoff](https://candor.co/guides/layoff)

<comment><USER4> I wish I had known this. I had a few months of advanced notice, and I had no idea that commuter benefits just go poof on the last day of employment. Lost about a $1k in that.

And additional point I'd add to this list, especially for those on H1b visas, if you are not getting any severance and no notice period, then the employer is liable for your move back to home country. I didn't know about this option nor do I know anyone personally who got this. If anyone can share info on this, that'd be great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And then you have VCs like this: [https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1241382507226050562](https://twitter.com/pitdesi/status/1241382507226050562) Who want to take the opportunity of the crisis to inflict pain on workers. Here, a VC suggests 10 or 25% paycuts for employees so "employees feel a bit of the sting that their customers are feeling"

<comment><USER6> Surely many people would prefer a 10% cut rather than being laid off outright?

Pretty sure unemployment doesn't cover 90% indefinitely, and they did promise to make everyone whole (which should be put in writing, but still)

<comment><USER7> > they have $$$ but thinking of cutting

Seems like they just want to cut so that

> employees feel a bit of the sting that their customers are feeling

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Even if you can ace all coding interviews and can scale things to dyson sphere levels, you should consider a back up job during this crisis. Reconnect with some folks you haven't spoken to in a while, and ask how they're doing. Do a little research over a couple of afternoons.

</comment><comment><USER9> "75 people across all four, ranging across both technical and nontechnical job roles"

</comment><comment><USER10> Do we need f*dcompany.com yet?</comment>


Delete HN account? - <AUTHOR>

Where's the option to delete an account here? <comment><USER2> Ironically for a community so adamant about data liberation, there is no way to delete your posts or identity. I am surprised there aren't laws to force site owners to allow users to delete their information.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking the same thing. Twitter, Facebook, Google all allow you to make edits and/or delete.

At the very least, StackExchange-like revisions would be nice. So if something really needs to be rolled back, that's an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just set your password to a large random string...

</comment><comment><USER4> Email PG.</comment>


Node.js Is Cancer (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/10/node-js-is-cancer.html <comment><USER2> I was expecting this to include dependency issues (node_module). I guess by now every developer know about not doing CPU intensive stuff inside node main thread. Using TypeScript helps in avoiding JavaScript gotchas.

I created the same Fibonacci server in Golang, That also doesn't do much better either unless we implement concurrency.

I created the same

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is great, but is CGI and static servers really the pinnacle of technology?

I think NodeJS accepts that no single webserver is capable of scaling to millions of concurrent users. So the solution is to just run more instances of them...

</comment><comment><USER4> That was a surprisingly good read.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use widgets on Android? - <AUTHOR> As a designer I'm interested of widget usage on Android. I found this (old) post where HTC claims that people don't use widgets: http://www.imore.com/htc-learns-2013-what-apple-knew-back-2007-widgets-arent-widely-used<p>I'm a bit confused because I know many people who use widgets on Android. So, do Android users use widgets or not? I guess widgets are mainly for techies than casual non-tech-savvy users? What do you think? <comment><USER2> I cannot survive without the calendar widget.

My need is to have a glanceable schedule for the day - what is coming up, when and where; or how packed the day is or not. Calendar notifications don't work for me as I need information at the back of my mind. Having a widget displaying information without me seeking it out, helps my back of mind scheduler.

Now thinking about it, Widgets (atleast for my case) acts like an ambient device.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Air Quality Index (almost everyone I know uses this, but I'm in a more polluted part of the world).

Some internal company ones giving quick KPI/dashboarding. I think this market is under-served by corporate apps in general. If a process is critical to an organisation no matter it's size, a widget can be a great tool for monitoring it.

When a real-time statistic is sufficiently important I prefer a widget to needing to load (or even develop) a dedicated app. I can then go through unified web-based (responsive) interface to take any action needed.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nope.

I perceive them to use up battery and memory and I don't want the unnecessary distraction. Whether they actually do use battery or not is another question.

I used to use a wifi/BT/GPS toggle widget but all that is now in the notification drawer there's no need.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just two - digital clock, for the day and date; and power control, because it lets me toggle wifi and GPS with a single press unlike the settings drawer that opens settings dialog and requires more clicks. Moto on Android KitKat.

</comment><comment><USER6> I so want to use them but I haven't found any good reason yet.

What I have used instead (but not much ) is the OneNote badge. It works kind of like Facebook "conversation bubbles", giving me a shortcut to OneNote from any app.

</comment><comment><USER7> I use one for weather, another one for calendar. But given than Google Now prompts your for both weather information and next meetings, I should probably get rid of them.

There are not a lot of information you need to have always up to date.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was just re-arranging my widgets last night! I use the bookmarks, google now, email, calendar & spotify widgets.

I used to use the Weather widget, but switched that with spotify and a smaller clock widget.

<comment><AUTHOR> Who's bookmark widget are you using?

<comment><USER8> Chrome. I've since just made a whole separate page for the bookmark widget (it's resizeable), and that seems even more visually helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I only use "Power Control" it allows me to toggle WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS/Synchronization

I have tried using other widgets but I found myself always opening the App instead.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nope. Had a battery stat widget which I removed, now I have this calendar and all-in-one widgets which I basically never open, they just stand there for looks. Don't know many folks that use them.

</comment><comment><USER11> I like the idea of them but from my experience widgets have been lacking. Whether that be from not updating correctly/timely to just not working at all.

</comment><comment><USER12> They are hidden in an hard to discover menu, as a rule of thumb, it means that the casual user won't ever use them.

There is a niche of users that can't live without them though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is it important that the widget looks nice?</comment>


Groupthink - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

<comment><USER2> Groupthink on HN:

\- Bashing liberal arts and academia; makes the engineering crowd feel a lot better about themselves.

\- Bashing business-dev. See above.

\- Idea that Web 2.0 is somehow revolutionary and makes the world a better place. Justifies inane CRUD applications and re-inventing the wheel.

\- Lots of water-down self-help articles written with a tech perspective. Advice for startup's. But no concrete statistics, spec's or implementation to follow through on idea's. To preach to the choir and boost blog traffic.

\- Idea that entrepreneurship is a lifestyle; Fail early and often, iterate and release often; work hard to get your FU money. Makes geeks feel good about themselves, to focus solely and highlight their relative superiority in tech skills; builds an illusion that somehow working on programming or making a huge financial exit will resolve all other issues in life.

\- NoSQL/Cassandra/CouchDB, new technologies that are fun to use in a hobby project and have nowhere the scalability, durability, and customization of production-grade frameworks used in running real life software; Promoted by geeks to stick to the man who prefers Java/C++/.net.

<comment><USER3> \- Bias against misspelling's. Idea that dumb-down writing tend's to indicate murky thinking. To draw bogus conclusion's.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In case you're curious, this term is used in the YC "How To Apply" post found at: <http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> "Groupthink (wikipedia.org)"

Love the juxtaposition!</comment>


How the neo-medieval 21st century will be more like the 12th century - <AUTHOR> http://www.paragkhanna.com/?p=956 <comment><USER3> If you ignore the millions of ways the world has changed since the 12th century, and focus only on one superficial broad-brushed similarity, then this article is persuasive. Otherwise, not.

<comment><USER4> It's a good article, with a nice analysis of the 12th century Eurasian system.

Yes, this is clearly not the 12th century, but the parallels can give a good deal of insight into our present world-system.

I think the most interesting thing about looking at the parallels is how similar the models are between 12th century and present. Yes, we move and communicate a lot faster, and there are a lot more of us, but at the core you can still see the same sorts of organizational units showing up, and the relationships between those organizational units function very similarly. That said, you can see some fundamental shifts in the nature of organizations. Slavery is almost universally shunned, which marks one institution that has shifted radically in social importance. Democracies are consequently very different from their historical predecessors.

There's a lot of interesting stuff here. Your post, on the other hand, is reductive and boring.

<comment><USER5> Actually, it is said that there are more slaves today than at any point in history

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859770>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One thing the author gets exactly right: loyalty accrues to those who reliably delivers the goods. And the tendency to trust states, companies, unions, or even families by default is busy eroding at a remarkable pace.

Different people in different places will find equilibrium in very different ways. Or they won't. In either case, they're unlikely to share a common conception about where it 'should' come from.

And once that widely shared framework of "what works for everyone" goes, then the world does look considerably more feudal and transitional than it did a generation ago. In that regard, the 12th Century is a useful source of patterns. So is the late 15th - early 17th. Maybe even more so, since this is when empirical science, truly global trading operations and commercial printers all came to the fore.

</comment><comment><USER7> 12th century?

Just few day ago I was thinking, that we(people) are loosing some very basic rights, established for the first time back there in 13th century (1215) in medieval England by Magna Carta.

For example:

 _\+ (39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

\+ (40) To no one will we sell, to no one deny or _delay_ right or justice._

</comment><comment><USER8> I wanted this article to be interesting, but it's quite flawed actually. The comparisons are weak, at best. You can't ignore how much more ubiquity there is in the world today. The Middle Ages were a time of discovery, in many ways. There was no global culture like there is today. This is due, in part to the fact that the globe is much more accessible, in terms of physical travel and information distribution (thanks, internet). This article is a great attempt to make the facts fit the assertion, but that doesn't make the assertion true.

<comment><USER9> There is still no global culture today. Also there are so many more poeple today that the number of people who don't do _ (ex: "speak English", "have access to the internet", "know how to read") has dramatically increased.

<comment><USER8> Culture was probably not the word I wanted. There is a global "community", or "connectedness" that did not exist in the 12th Century. While there may be many people who don't participate in this community, they are still affected by it (directly or indirectly) and the world operates in an extremely different way because of it. In the 12th Century, information traveled one way (by foot), and the printing press wasn't even invented and wouldn't be for several hundred years. Now we can share information instantly across the globe, and if I really wanted to, I could hand deliver a letter to someone half-way around the world tomorrow.

<comment><USER9> There are probably people 1/2 way around the world you could hand deliver a letter within 24 hours, but I suspect there are more people you can't hand a message to within 24 hours now than there where alive in the 12th century. At the extreme, a random Peasant in North Korea and someone staying at mcmurdo station in Antarctica are both fairly inaccessible in those time scales, but so is most of China, and India.

PS: Granted, extend it to a week and the numbers shift, but at the edges the world is really not all that connected. Getting within 1000 miles of someone may be easy, but that's not contact.

<comment><USER10> Yes and no. The world is a lot more populated, but also increasingly urban, which by its nature(more communication and transportation services in town) means a larger proportion of people are easy to access.

As well, the proliferation of cell phones into rural areas is a inestimable breakthrough in communication. We've only started to see the impact of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A good time to plug "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers" by Paul Kennedy. I'm some of the way through this and it's a superb book.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yet another comparison is temperature. The 12th century was in the medieval warm period. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period> for more on that.

</comment><comment><USER13> If America is in a period of Byzantinian decline then how do the great tech- hub city-states like San Francisco and New York play into this narrative? This doesn't seem consistent.

<comment><USER14> IMO, I don't think America is represented at all by SF or NY, in fact I think they're the exceptions. Other than a few regions and city-states (New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Dallas, Silicon Valley, Seattle, Portland) in the US I'd say the US largely lives in perpetual willful ignorance and continues to pat itself on its back for World War II.

To quote The Wire, "We used to make shit in this country." Now? Some do, but not so much anymore. I feel like more than every America is diverging.

<comment><USER15> That's a myth, the US continues to be manufacture ~ 20% of the world's output (this has held since at least 1982). The real story is that manufacturing jobs have eroded though.

<comment><USER16> Apart from GM corn [I don't want] I can't think of any USA products that I come in contact with; could you give a list of the major ones or a link to such?

TBH the same is true of my own country (excepting food). Perhaps it's just that China market themselves well by ensuring China itself is a global brand (as in "China" appears on so many products).

Edit: Silly me, TV+Films+Music, what else?

<comment><USER17> Our industrial production has done nothing but increase (recessions and minor blips excluded). We make more than just TV shows.

<http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO>

Everyday stuff made in the US: cars (e.g., my mom's Toyota), airplanes, medical devices, construction supplies.

Interestingly, a significant US export is industrial machinery. Many of those factories in China use industrial machinery built in the US.

<comment><USER16> >Everyday stuff made in the US: cars (e.g., my mom's Toyota), airplanes, medical devices, construction supplies.

Cars appear generally to be bought/made close to the point of use - "far eastern" cars are made in the UK for example. I'd guess that Toyotas used in Europe are mainly made in Europe now, but stand to be corrected. Sp[eculating further I'd say the same will be true of construction supplies - I've heard of prefab stuff being moved around Europe a lot but I imagine demand and transportation costs allow/require production close to point of use. Aeroplanes and medical devices, yes they should have come to mind.

I've also heard that it is best to have precision dies and things made elsewhere and then shipped to China for the mass production part of the process.

WRT the link I wonder how resource use has increased over that time too. How much of this increased level of production is down to increasing population confounded with a per head increase in resources?

Thanks for your reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article's recommendation that the U.S. imitate the "diplomacy and deception" of Byzantium is a complete non-starter. The commitment (even if flawed) of the U.S. to an open society plus new technology - <USER2> illustrated in recent months - doubly underscores Benjamin Franklin's quip: "Two may keep a secret - if one of them is dead."

</comment><comment><USER19> Really hard to take this article seriously with sentences like this:

"The 21st century will resemble nothing more than the 12th century."

Nothing more? Like, exactly the same?

<comment><USER20> Everything old is new again! Including, like, horses pooping on muddy streets.

<comment><USER21> Greener than a Prius!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> history does repeat itself!</comment>


WireGuard 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/T/#u <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22724768](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22724768), which was posted earlier.

<comment><USER3> Too bad that announcement was posted first, since it doesn't have this marvelous typo:

> Earlier this evening, Linus released [1] Linus 5.6...</comment></comment>


"The Connection Has Been Reset" - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/chinese-firewall

<comment><USER2> I live in Beijing, and the article is accurate. For anyone with even minimal technical expertise it's trivial to circumvent censorship. I use tor for blocked sites, and get my email over secure IMAP.

The government doesn't care about what any individual reads here, but I'm sure they log everything, and if you attract too much attention, you'd be in real trouble. Mainly, they seem to be concerned (read: paranoid) about (large) groups of people organizing in a way that could threaten the government's power to such an extent that they would have to suppress them in a PR-damaging way.

Chinese culture values "face" to a ridiculous extent, and the government is learning fast that crude suppression is inferior to "acknowledge, downplay, spin and lie by omission" - they are, in a way, just catching up with their Western counterparts, making their propaganda more sophisticated.

Getting back to Internet censorship, I have two interesting observations:

1\. Not a single major US newspaper is blocked here - this could mean that the US has a lot of influence on Chinese censorship, or that US newspaper reporting is not considered threatening. cbc.ca and news.bbc.co.uk are blocked. Non-english sites are not blocked, probably because too few people speak those languages to make them a threat.

2\. I encounter what I call the reverse firewall almost as often as the firewall. It appears that a lot of sites blacklist Chinese IP address ranges (probably because of attacks/spam), but it can get kind of annoying.

Internet access here is definitely frustrating for power users, because of high latency, internal and external blocking, and additional slowdowns through proxy use to do things like blogging.

</comment><comment><USER3> "For two months in 2002, Google's Chinese site, Google.cn, got a different kind of bad-address treatment, which shunted users to its main competitor, the dominant Chinese search engine, Baidu. Chinese academics complained that this was hampering their work."

It's nice to know that some people in China also use Google to do their jobs.

</comment><comment><USER4> My back of the envelope calculation says an electon at normal electronic speeds (maybe 1/10 the speed of light) takes less than a millisecond back and forth across the Pacific. So blame the electronics, not the ocean

</comment><comment><USER5> It would be interesting to know if they filter all DNS requests or only DNS requests to their own servers. Like if they see someone using a service like opendns and filter those dns requests as well. Perhaps they just block DNS servers too.

You still have to make a DNS request for secure connections if you use a domain name... so some of their filtering would still work on secure connections.</comment>


Gliff app - new football forum app. Feedback appreciated. - <AUTHOR> http://www.thegliff.com/app

<comment><AUTHOR> HN - We're just about to start marketing push on our app Gliff. It's for football fans to have conversations in a more impacting and engaging way. We've adopted a words+pictures approach to posting a status/conversation.Be great to hear your thoughts!</comment>


Popcuts (YC S08): Buying Music Has Never Been So Profitable - <AUTHOR> http://hyveup.tv/2009/04/popcuts-buying-music-has-never-been-so.html

<comment><USER3> I get worried when I see this described as "profitable". There is no way that you can describe "I spent $20 and made $6" as profitable in an honest fashion. Trying to do so just makes it sound less like "innovative method at getting new artists some exposure" and more like "pyramid scheme".

<comment><USER4> I think this is an acceptable use of the word. This particular account may not have turned a profit, but it might over time. And even if it doesn't this is certainly more revenue than you would receive with iTunes.

<comment><USER3> _This particular account may not have turned a profit, but it might over time._

Setting aside the top earner on the service (because they're a record label), the second highest earner has earned $29 by buying $70 worth of songs. Third highest: $28 for $64. 4th highest: $24 for $66.

I have absolutely no doubt that with access to their database and a quick query you'd find out exactly what you find out in any MLM: the overwhelming majority of the people lose money. And I have a profound, abiding disrespect for something which is a business model when it is profitable and a consumption expense when it is not -- its not like Mary Kay recruits people with promises of access to wonderful new cosmetics.

<comment><USER5> Reading over Popcuts' site, they don't proclaim anything about your ability to make a profit or start a new living by buying music off their site. In their about section, they specifically angle it as getting something back for having 'good' taste in music. And they seem to be delivering on their pitch, as the top earner you cited is getting a 41% discount on the music they purchased. Their music prices are also aligned with both iTunes and Amazon, so I would hope nobody feels ripped off or deceived for purchasing market rate music with the chance of getting something in return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I saw these guys present to the MIT e-club.

Choice of the word profitable: it's profit sharing (for some percentage). There is a definite incentivization. When one uses a credit card with "cash back" or to get airline miles there's not a huge difference.

A novel idea - think it just needs some simplification. Maybe it'd also be good to focus on a niche, or user generated content.

</comment><comment><USER7> This site sounds pretty interesting, but every other "buy DRM-free music" site I've seen has crippling geographic restrictions (crippling to me at least, I'm in Australia). I can't find statements one way or the other on the site - <USER2> anybody know what the deal is?

</comment><comment><USER8> it's profitable in the sense that buying music enables you to get more music...</comment>


Richard Stallman Explains Everything [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUibaPTXSHk <comment> _-david-_ I thought Stallman didn't like his videos on Youtube?

<comment><AUTHOR> The content belongs to Pakman. Its a progressive political show. I'm not sure what the backstory is, I don't think it was even announced. People are digging it though.

<comment> _-david-_ I know it doesn't belong to Stallman. I thought I remembered reading before that Stallman doesn't like videos with him in them on Youtube due to some kind of patents on the codecs or something like that.

This is the only source I could find though. Not sure if its accurate: [http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2007/02/08/no_more_stallm...](http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2007/02/08/no_more_stallman_on_youtube.htm)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Ego-Splitting: From Non-Overlapping to Overlapping Clusters (KDD 17) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/benedekrozemberczki/EgoSplitting <comment><AUTHOR> A video explaining the paper:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMGZo- F_jss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMGZo-F_jss)

The paper itself:

[https://www.eecs.yorku.ca/course_archive/2017-18/F/6412/read...](https://www.eecs.yorku.ca/course_archive/2017-18/F/6412/reading/kdd17p145.pdf)</comment>


What Elon Musk is proposing runs parallel to a train that costs $2.25 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/gin_and_tacos/status/1082434944582979586 <comment><USER2> What the author of this tweet doesn't mention is the reliability of the blue line between downtown Chicago and ORD is absolute garbage. You can routinely be stuck on a train for 45-60 minutes at a time because of technical difficulties.

[https://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/why-are-cta- trains...](https://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/why-are-cta-trains- stopped-495110281.html)

> Responding to an open records request, the CTA said between January of 2017 > to May 2018, there were 471 disruptions of 10 minutes or longer. Of those > 469 breakdowns, 162 were on the Blue Line. The Red Line was second with 94, > followed by the Green with 55.

> We are running, right now, as many trains as possible, on the O'Hare branch > of the Blue Line during the am/pm rush," he says. "We are running as many > trains as possible, and we are running them as closely together, as we can."

If Boring Co can offer consistently reliable 12 minute trips that parallel the Blue Line for $20, sign me up. Cheaper than a Lyft, but more reliable than what the CTA can deliver.

TLDR Edgy Chicago journalist uses baseless complaints to push mediocre podcast on Twitter and sidestep that Chicago politics and no will to fix systemic city level financial issues are the core issue.

<comment><USER3> Ok, then use the money that would be used by Musk's tunnel to improve the blue line. Musk's 1 car system is great for a few but long term it adds nothing to solve the problem and drains money from the transits system.

Musk is a businessman and he's looking to make a buck. I applaud him for that but he's not humanity's savior and his solutions need to be properly evaluated.

<comment><USER2> The Boring Company isn't asking Chicago for any money to build it (which is great! Chicago is broke due to pension obligations and historical graft/patronage), and will support itself off of use fees. It will be 100% privately financed. This is no different than how the Illinois Tollway is operated (and while the tollway is plagued with oversight, governace, and corruption issues because Illinois, Musk can have the benefit of the doubt).

Sidenote: If the CTA is chronically underfunded, and the city is broke, perhaps the $2.25 fare the author mentions is structurally unsustainable.

I'm not going to judge so fast and say that he's _not_ humanity's savior, because I don't see a lot of folks with his resources pushing in the right direction like he is (despite him appearing to be on the spectrum and occasionally a shit person). To be determined.

[https://www.boringcompany.com/chicago/](https://www.boringcompany.com/chicago/)

<comment><USER4> yeah but he also overpromises and under-delivers - Thousands prepaid into his FSD vaporware since Oct 2016 #"driver is just there for legal reasons" on tesla.com/autopilot #ScamOfTheDecade

<comment><USER2> Sorry to hear you're aggrieved about a preorder that hasn't been delivered yet.

I bought my Model S without FSD because it's not proven yet and I'm happy to pay a higher price in the future for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beyond the PHP mountain - <AUTHOR> http://juokaz.com/blog/beyond-the-php-mountain.html

<comment><USER2> > Now I can have a production-ready Node.js stack after 5 minutes on > StackOverflow

The only 5 minute task that is likely to result in an actual "production ready" environment, is making/buying a cup of coffee.

This sums up my beef with what appears to be a reasonably popular interpretation of the term "dev ops".

People always claim that developers should have more hands-on involvement in managing servers.

In theory that's fine, but the problem is, they generally don't tend to appreciate that sysadmin/server management/call-it-what-you-will is not just 2 lines of shell commands copy-pasted from stack overflow.

</comment><comment><USER3> While true that some languages (and supporting open source modules) are better at certain tasks than other, I believe the real reason people want "one language to rule them all" is reduce the loss in productivity due to context switching between languages.

Try going back and forth between langauges when you have an app in Java/Obj-C, high performance native code in C++, a backend server written in python/php and an admin dashboard written in Javascript.</comment>


The most-shared images of Amazon fires are old or not of the Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/debunk-amazon-photos-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> It started on celebrity Instagram.

In three days it expanded until it forced the global media to report on it. It didn't before, because fires like this happen every year, so it was considered just ordinary fact.

I saw some Instagram posts which suggest that some big influencers were DMed with the story from local activists, and then influencers started copying eachother and spreading it further.

I think it's the first time a thing started on Instagram became G7 agenda.

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't have any news before because the current brazilian government is negligent and there are some interest in not making a big allarm over the issue locally because of the consequences on economy (agribusiness related and because of the EU-MERCOSUL agreement). But the fire is more severe than usual (about 80% more fire focus than last year), so much more severe than usual that the smoke reached the Southeast part of the country and one day the afternoon became night in São Paulo because of it and that never happened before...

The most alarming of all it is that the environment minister had take many actions that lead to this situation (cut money from a fund that worked to prevent fire, had actively work to disrupt environmental government organizations, among other things). The president also, lost a lot of money from the Amazon fund and now it's saying there is no money to put the fire out... He also fired the head of a scientific institute (INPE) that report that deforestation had increase and put someone that denies gobal warming in his place... A totally irresponsable fool...only now, with all this (economical) pressure he started to take some action to diminish the fire. Beside there are a lot of bills being discussed in the Congress to free for economical exploration indigenous reserves... It is a very alarming situation for the environment here in Brazil....

</comment><comment><USER4> Imagine how amplified this problem will become once creating a 'deepfake' or fictitious GAN-generated photo is as easy as typing an emoji.</comment>


DIY genetics put to test - <AUTHOR> http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/93606064.html <comment><USER2> On april 23rd 23andme.com had a sale, everything for 99$ but it seemed to good to be true, but now im kicking myself for not going for it</comment>


Finding data items in one field that contradict data items in another field - <AUTHOR> https://www.polydesmida.info/BASHing/2018-09-30.html <comment><USER2> Ok so the title of the blog is 'Data ops in the Linux command line'. Sounds fun, but in the same way that 'paintball with blindfolds' would be fun.

e.g. this is one of the examples - a kindof sanity check on two fields in a tab separated file to see if one is less than the other. The fields are identified by their position (31, 33 etc)

        awk -F"\t" 'NR>1 && $31!="" && $33!="" && $33>$31' fish | wc -l

Surely much better to just import it into a database and do the analysis in SQL. The SQL equivalent of the above would be something like:

        SELECT *
        FROM FishSpecimenData
        WHERE MinDepth > MaxDepth
          AND MinDepth is not null AND MaxDepth is not null

If you're worried about type conversions while importing into SQL, just import everything as a varchar. You've still got a fairly easy job to compare the numbers:

        SELECT *
        FROM FishSpecimenData
        WHERE Cast(MinDepth as int) > Cast(MaxDepth as int)
          AND MinDepth is not null AND MaxDepth is not null
          AND IsNumeric(MinDepth) = 1 and IsNumeric(MaxDepth) = 1

edit: To be fair, on this page [https://www.polydesmida.info/cookbook/index.html](https://www.polydesmida.info/cookbook/index.html) the author explains the rationale for using command line tools:

 _I 'm a retired scientist and I've been mucking around with data tables for nearly 50 years. I started with printed columns on paper (and a calculator) before moving to spreadsheets and relational databases (Microsoft Access, Filemaker Pro, MySQL, SQLite). In 2012 I discovered the AWK language and realised that every processing job I'd ever done with data tables could be done faster and more simply on the command line. Since then my data tables have been stored as plain text and managed with GNU/Linux command-line tools, especially AWK_

So I guess the point of the blog is to promote that approach. Fair enough.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's much better to use SQL, it's literally killing flies with nuclear bombs. Awk does the job perfectly well and you don't have to spin up a SQL database, import the data, deal with any possible problem when importing the data. I don't know why a lot of people have this aversion to the console when it can do the job fairly well, specially in these cases where you just want a quick check.

<comment><USER4> How would SQLite fare in regards to your concerns? You won't have to 'spin up' a database and importing from various sources, AFAIK, is pretty easy these days (and OP even goes out of their way to deal with VARCHAR fields).

It strikes me as much easier than having to figure out Awk, but that's assuming most people are more likely to know SQL and/or use it in the future.

I mean, I'd be happy to try and solve the problem with Awk because it's been high on my list of things to learn, but SQL does seem like an easier solution in most cases.

<comment><USER3> You still have to create the SQLite database and have the client handy. Awk is there by default in all *nix systems, and for these basic tasks it's incredibly easy (see [http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~dholland/computers/awk.html](http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~dholland/computers/awk.html) for a quick intro). Once you know it you can use it to process a lot of text files in the console without any kind of worry. Maybe it's a preprocess step before importing data to a database, maybe you're just exploring a dataset, maybe you want to modify some command's output in the middle of a pipe.

I learned awk a few years ago and it does not have equivalent when the only thing you want to do is to consume column-based text and do some simple processing: it is simple and incredibly fast.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the link and the motivation to keep reading the AWK book I started a while ago!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh I thought the article would be about scientific fields. Not data fields. I became increasingly irritated about the pedantry before I realized that this was the topic.

Once the confusion lifted I could enjoy the read.

<comment><USER6> Last week I signed a lease that stated "Mold have existed since the beginning of time." While scientifically inaccurate, I believe legally it is close enough.

<comment><USER7> Is that a waiver so you could agree to live in a moldy house? Do you have an option of not living there?

Fixing your health issues could cost more than the savings you get from living in that shack.

<comment><USER6> Mold can become a bad issue if your bathroom isn't ventilated after showers. I've rented for decades in WA State and every lease I've signed has had a mold clause. The building was built 4 years ago; I watched them build it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Sheets Formula Clock - <AUTHOR> https://www.benlcollins.com/spreadsheets/google-sheets-formula-clock/ <comment><USER2> > (Pro-tip: type sheet.new into your browser address bar to do this instantly)

That blew my mind. Sure enough, Google owns the .new TLD.

<comment><USER3> Wow that's useful. Worth reading the article just to learn that.

<comment><USER4> If you like yours like this consider browsing the rest of the tools and tips section of the GitLab handbook [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/tools-and- tips/#google-doc...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/tools-and-tips/#google- docs-pro-tips)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From this discovered couple of other useful blog writeup..

 _Everything you ever wanted to know about Sparklines in Google Sheets_

[https://www.benlcollins.com/spreadsheets/sparklines-in- googl...](https://www.benlcollins.com/spreadsheets/sparklines-in-google- sheets/)

 _10 Techniques for building a Google Sheets Dashboard_

[https://www.benlcollins.com/spreadsheets/10-techniques- googl...](https://www.benlcollins.com/spreadsheets/10-techniques-google- sheets-dashboard/)

</comment><comment><USER6> "No code" \- how is writing mathematical functions with inputs and outputs not code?

</comment><comment><USER7> This is worth a read. Amazing how a small idea can grow

<comment><USER8> ^ Agreed! The concept itself is incredible, but the write-up really makes the difference in explaining how we got to the final product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is Google sheets practically Turing complete?

<comment><USER10> What spreadsheet software isn't?</comment></comment>