Are the Russians Actually Behind the Panama Papers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2016/04/07-panama-papers-putin-gaddy <comment><USER2> Is Clifford Gaddy sponsored by the CIA to discredit Russia?

from [http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2014/mr-putin-2nd- ed...](http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2014/mr-putin-2nd-edition)

> For anyone wishing to understand Russia's evolution since the breakup of the > Soviet Union and its trajectory since then, the book you hold in your hand > is an essential guide. —John McLaughlin, former deputy director of U.S. > Central Intelligence

Certainly more proof and more intuitively plausible than any theory presented in his article.

<comment><USER3> Yep. Another article supporting Betteridge's rule.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty entertaining conspiracy theories in there. No single shred of evidence is provided beyond "I think it would make sense for the Russians to do this". This guy seems to be much preoccupied with Russia. Oh wait he's written books about the country.

Even if he had proof he wouldn't have a point. There seems to be no end to the parade of people saying how "our" interests are harmed by these publications. If your org is corrupt, I want it to be destabilized. I want you to fear personal exposure.

</comment><comment><USER5> The author is focused on making a case that the Russians are behind the Panama Papers and have an ulterior motive. Not once he mentions that the behaviours the papers expose are criminal or otherwise negative. Even while discussing wrongdoing by Western parties, the Russians are implied to be more villainous.

<comment><USER6> > Not once he mentions that the behaviors the papers expose are criminal

Are they criminal _? Having an offshore company generally isn't illegal. There may be questions about how some political figures ' (for example) funds were obtained in the first place, but the mere existence of funds in some tax- advantaged vehicles is no evidence of a crime.

_gosh, one would think that some of the funds might be ill-gotten proceeds from criminal enterprises, but if the use of off-shore entities are prima facie evidence of criminal intent, then I'm in trouble.

<comment><USER5> There is an 'or' in there. Anyway, I'm not a lawyer or a judge, and the assertion that there is a crime is not related to the point was trying to make.

<comment><USER6> > There is an 'or' in there.

Fair enough. There was.

> Anyway, I'm not a lawyer

Are you sure? Your very first sentence sounded very lawyer-like! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> who released this info and for what reasons exactly will always be the question that i think will never be answered, but lets not forget that information itself seems to be legit. Iceland's PM resignation confirms that, at least partially.

Everyone knows that Russia is corrupt up to the top. How? Pretty much every top politician (and their families) in russia own far more than can be purchased on a state salary. Spokes person for Kremlin is spotted wearing 700,000 Euro watch when his official salary is less than 1/10 of that.

A lot of Russian government officials and their inner circles own multi- million dollar properties in: London, Spain, New York, Boston etc. Their families live in the west, their kids go to schools in usa and europe...

Panama papers disclose how these multi million bribes and shady dealings are accepted and how money is transferred and used to buy up assets overseas. Good old days of a bribe in a suitcase are gone... Its hard to fit $300mil of cash in a suitcase (well Italians would argue lol).

IT IS very suspicious that no high profile Americans were caught in this release... It is possible that USA players simply use different entities to set up shell corps and transfer money using different channels.

<comment><USER8> Agree, I'd be inclined to think it is either a hacker, or an insider, or a US agency.

Putin was at the top of the revelations, even if the news was unsurprising (but like the Snowden documents, it's not because we all suspected it that the proof is any less valuable).

If the guy who did it is not US authorities, I would not not sleep well if I was him. The police in London regularly picks up the hung or poisoned bodies of those who dared to attack or expose Putin...

<comment><USER9> Top 10 countries that offer financial secrecy, according to the BBC.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35998801](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35998801)

Switzerland

Hong Kong

USA

Singapore

The Cayman Islands

Luxembourg

Lebanon

Germany

Bahrain

United Arab Emirates

Panama seems to be down at the low-rent end of the financial secrecy market.

So no - the OP is not only not plausible, but raises more questions than it answers.

Practically, I'd expect a Russian hack to specifically target the tax affairs of Putin's enemies.

This may yet happen now, with Russian and/or Chinese hackers targeting the tax secrets of prominent Western politicians - which would be an interesting development for everyone.

<comment><USER8> If that happens, I'd expect that in France or Italy the heads would roll by dozens.

Personally I am a libertarian. I am concerned by the death of privacy and the increasing overreach of governments. I don't really see this drive toward transparency and bullying of countries offering financial secrecy as a good thing.

I have seen or heard of many people who have gone through WW2 and have hidden money in Switzerland. Not to hide money from the taxman. But because they have seen how the governments can easily turn against their citizens and decided they needed a plan B. This concept of "nowhere to hide" is a bit concerning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A big part of the author's logic is based on the assumption that this was a technically complex, state sponsored hack.

This was script-kiddie stuff - it could've been anyone from a teenager in Wisconsin to a couple of channers in Bangkok and Banjul in it for the lulz.

Anyway, any speculation on the source is just a distraction from the content.

</comment><comment><USER11> Or to use the same logic, maybe the lack of Americans implicated in the Panama papers indicates the the US is behind them?

</comment><comment><USER12> More speculation that confirms our theory without any evidence. *

The theory is "we're good. Anyone we don't like is bad"

The evidence collection goes "confirms our theory, it's true." Or " Contradicts it, we either ignore it our dismiss it"

Case in point, the unaoil scandal is much more serious than _anything_ in these Panama papers, it involves "the good guys" and it's largely forgotten a week after it release.

* ironically enough RT is (was?) pushing the theory that the CIA is behind it because there are no notable American on the list. So it's a KGB/CIA plot because Putin/Americans come out relatively unscathed

<comment><USER13> RT is propaganda/psyops on a level that doesn't quite have a Western equivalent. This is not a statement in support of Western journalistic independence and objectivity, so much as it is how carefully packaged/constructed RT is.

edit: Hah! Downvotes. I read RT. I read WSJ (even OpEds sometimes, but I don't enjoy it). I read AJ. I read NYT. I read from many sources and high degree of skepticism of all of them. But if you read RT regularly, I doubt you're the one downvoting.

<comment><USER12> I up voted you. I read RT, but their juicier bits I always look up to cross check.[1]

But I don't live in Russia so Putin can't harm me. Therefore, I'm not scared of them.

However, it is an invaluable source to know what _we 're_ doing. RT wants to discredit the West, and there is too much truthful material for them to work with for to have to fudge too much.

[1] although is disagree with you there is no western equivalent. I used to be a big fan of the WSJ, NYT and The Economist, after Syria and the Snowden leaks, they have become unreadable. Only The Intercept is left (npr gets a pass because I have a 40 minute drive to work)

<comment><USER13> I upvoted you, too! That's usually why I read it.

I think as bad as the mainstream US media source you mentioned can be, they're still not equivalent on the whole. Wish they weren't so actively trying to close the gap, though...

edit: there are sources as bad, and there are source as prominent, but I don't think any are in the intersection. Honestly, it's more of hand-waving/gut feel on my part, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reads like propaganda and misses what I consider a big question: why did Putin claim himself as "the main target" when the media wasn't focused on him and there was no evidence really damning him?

It just raises questions rather than deflecting them. Putin does not seem so stupid. Why would he do this?

It's like getting pulled over for a speeding ticket and saying "I didn't kill him, there's no evidence, this is a plot against me".

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure how any of this comes off as bad for Putin. What's the harm in letting the world know that his friends get rich? Combined with what we already know about the effects on life expectancy of being in the opposition, this sends a pretty strong message. "Gold for my friends, lead for my enemies." I see the whole thing as a declaration from Putin to Russia, especially given his protestations. Authoritarian regimes are all about _internal_ social control. Why do we think this has to be about the West?

<comment><USER14> "I see the whole thing as a declaration from Putin to Russia"

After thinking about it, I think you're right on this. I'm evaluating it as bad international PR when it's probably more internal propaganda.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In short, I don't know. An article like this is (almost) pure speculation and that's all it can be. However, it is one of the more interesting things I've read about the "Panama papers." Nothing in them is much of a surprise. Don't get me wrong; I'm generally happy about the release, and I hope any blatant criminals are caught and prosecuted. That said, we all knew it was happening.

</comment><comment><USER17> Not worth reading. Full of prejudices, logically inconsistent, a bit like a conspiracy theory.

<comment><USER18> Government electronic surveillance was once a "conspiracy theory". I'm not comfortable with it being posed as a dirty word.

<comment><USER17> Maybe the actual extend and details, but US surveillance in Europe was already something the European Parliament investigated in the late 90s. And even then it was no surprise to the people in that area. Snowden added a lot of detail and made the topic a mainstream topic but hardly did he show that a conspiracy theory - which it never was - is in fact true.

 _Within Europe, all email, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London then by Satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York Moors of the UK. The system was first uncovered in the 1970 's by a group of researchers in the UK (Campbell, 1981)._

 _Other work on what is now known as Signals intelligence was undertaken by researchers such as James Bamford, which uncovered a billion dollar world wide interceptions network, which he nicknamed 'Puzzle Palace'. A recent work by Nicky Hager, Secret Power, (Hager,1996) provides the most comprehensive details to date of a project known as ECHELON. Hager interviewed more than 50 people concerned with intelligence to document a global surveillance system that stretches around the world to form a targeting system on all of the key Intelsat satellites used to convey most of the world's satellite phone calls, internet, email, faxes and telexes. These sites are based at Sugar Grove and Yakima, in the USA, at Waihopai in New Zealand, at Geraldton in Australia, Hong Kong, and Morwenstow in the UK._

 _The ECHELON system forms part of the UKUSA system but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the cold war, ECHELON is designed for primarily non-military targets: governments, organisations and businesses in virtually every country. The ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like Memex. to find key words. Five nations share the results with the US as the senior partner under the UKUSA agreement of 1948, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are very much acting as subordinate information servicers._

European Parliament, 1998, An appraisal of technologies for political control, [https://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm](https://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As long as the stuff in them is true I'm only slightly interested about the source.

In fact the ideal arrangement for me as a non-government entity is all the government entities constantly smearing each other.

It would be nice to get more of the full picture at least.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nothing in these papers also show anything about me so I must be behind it, you caught me!

</comment><comment><USER21> No way I am believing that. If I'd believe in consoiracies, I'd rather say it is a US leak... The USA is less involved here than Putin's own government. Makes no sense. No, it is no excuse that Putin was already suspected, because these papers are further damaging as solid proof that he is surrounding himself with corruption. Not just rumors.

</comment><comment><USER22> If the information is legitimate, who cares who was behind it?

If it was the Russians, why would we look at the leak as "evil" rather than praising them for doing so? Maybe more Americans should be leaking this sort of information.

</comment><comment><USER23> As a Russian citizen who is following the scandal (and Russian politics), I am a bit baffled by the article.

First, all of its reasoning will fall apart if we examine its premises.

>there is no evidence of Putin's direct involvement—not in any company involved in the leak, much less in criminal activity, theft, tax evasion, or money laundering. There are documents showing that some of his "friends" have moved "up to two billion dollars" through these Panama-based shell companies.

This isn't true and the author is either deliberately lying or is simply misinformed. What we are talking here are $2b moving through the account in the name of a _professional cellist_ Roldugin. Roldugin is a close friend of Putin and he already denied on record that he owns any big business besides his performances. Those $2b came from various shady deals such as:

\- an agreement to buy a bunch of Rosneft stocks which is almost immediately terminated, with $750k in punitive damages being paid to a Roldugin's company;

\- an agreement to collect an outstanding debt of 4 billion roubles (around $50m) from Rostelekom (state-owned telecom company), which cost $1 (yeah, one dollar) to the offshore company;

\- a shell company providing a debt of $6m to Roldugin's offshore and forgiving it after a few months for $1.

A single deal like this is possible but improbable. Two billion dollars of such deals are impossible and they scream "corruption" and "bribe", and there is no single official in Russia that will demand bribes of this order of magnitude except Putin. Even if it's not him, either he is clueless (and the article in question doesn't make sense) or he knows about it and is okay with it (and therefore he is involved).

>But nothing in the Panama Papers reveals anything new about Putin. It is in fact far less of a story than has been alleged for a long time. For over 10 years, there have been suspicions that Putin has a vast personal fortune, claimed at first to be $20 billion, then $40, $70, even $100… And now all they find is "maybe" a couple of billion belonging to a friend?

This passage implies equality of "allegations" and documents detailing business transactions. I'm not sure if I even need to debunk this, but let's recast it a bit: "It's widely alleged that 9/11 was organized by the government because jet fuel can't melt steel beams. Therefore, documents detailing CIA communication with 9/11 terrorists are nothing new and aren't a big deal". Does it even make sense?

>A "friend of Putin" is linked to companies that channel a couple of billion dollars through the offshore companies. Why? To evade Russian taxes? Really? To conceal ownership? From whom? You don't need an offshore registration to do that. To evade sanctions? That's a credible reason, but it makes sense only if the companies were registered after mid-2014. Were they?

I like how the author waves away "to conceal ownership" part as if it's a non- issue. It's a pretty big deal because every dictator wants to a) have a backup plan and for this, they need a safe and anonymous place to hide their money away from their country and b) pass the money to their children so they can spend them somewhere. It's not like you can just load up trucks with $50 bills in Kremlin. However, in general, Western countries don't exactly support this and see such funds as a lever, so you need a concealment.

The rest of the article builds upon this premises, which are false. Therefore, it's all false.

Second, what wonders me is the fact that some Westerners are fascinated by Putin and his cronies. It shows up in the way the author speaks about "Russian hacking capabilities" or Putin's implied geopolitical prowess. No, there is nothing to be fascinated about. Those are people who are managed to waste a golden rain of oil money down the drain (just look at the photos of a typical 1m+ Russian city Omsk [1]) while destroying and corrupting every civic institute in the country. It's a typical reactive behavior of a plutocratic rule that got lucky with oil prices and now tries to stay afloat while having no regard for a wellbeing of their own citizens. I don't believe statesmen like this are even remotely worthy of admiration, and yet some do admire them. This is something beyond my understanding.

[1]: [http://varlamov.ru/1637956.html](http://varlamov.ru/1637956.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Now that's funny, this morning radio headlines about the Panama papers were relaying rumors about how it's America behind the divulgation to embarrass Russia and others.

</comment><comment><USER25> Well, Putin himself claimed that Panama Papers are "western propaganda" so there's no way for him to spin them as legitimate after that.

<comment><USER13> Propaganda is not known for or particularly concerned with consistency ('we've always been at war with Eastasia'). I don't know who did this and don't have an opinion personally, but your conclusion (though logical) isn't particularly meaningful for attribution.

From what I've observed, the Russian political class is not particularly concerned with hiding financial corruption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This pure, raw speculation.

</comment><comment><USER26> meaningless because our reporters are the ones looking at it and will choose what to publish.</comment>


Uber Would Like to Buy Your Robotics Department - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/uber-would-like-to-buy-your-robotics-department.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> I found some of the almost mournful passages in this piece off-putting. As the author ultimately recognizes, the drift of robotics talent from publicly funded universities to private enterprises is an indication that the technology has advanced to the point of commercial viability.

In other words: Companies finally think they can build robots that are good enough that people will pay for them! To me, that is exciting news, not an occasion to lament the sudden emptiness of university laboratories.

Perhaps in other fields, there is a strong tension between the basic research that government funds and the commercial applications that private companies pursue. But in robotics there are usually foreseeable uses for the technologies that researchers are pursuing. I don't foresee the direction of the field being dramatically changed, particularly given the amount of government money that will still pour in through the DoD.

<comment><USER3> Uber and other companies (including Google) have been hiring a lot of robotics faculty as well as newly-minted PhDs. This is a good thing for robotics research.

There's generally a shortage of tenure-track jobs relative to the number of qualified PhDs, so when companies poach faculty, it improves everyone's career options. This is one of the reasons why CS PhDs have a much higher chance of getting good tenure-track faculty jobs than, say, physics PhDs.

Of course, when there's a faculty exodus it causes a temporary leadership vacuum--e.g. this has been the situation at Stanford for the last couple years, where most of the AI faculty has left to start companies. But most of the students at Stanford seem to do fine, and universities can usually fill the void in a few years and hire some new enthusiastic faculty.

<comment><USER4> Yes, the editorialist here seems to be bemoaning the 'professionalization' of the research topic, as if the companies and researchers owe some sort of loyalty to a university which profits off the cheap labour. It is roughly equivalent to chastizing NFL and NBA teams for taking all of the NCAA's best players, and paying them more.

<comment><USER5> That analogy breaks down a little - one of the reasons to lament this is because public universities publish their research for others to consume and build upon. Research within private companies stays inside those companies.

<comment><USER6> No, that's wrong. The same amount of research can still be done in public universities if the talent pool is increased. You now simply have a lot more people working on the problem. Have a dozen companies with a staff of a few hundred researchers creating more knowledge, even if it's temporarily private, is a huge win. Patents expire and other companies are still capable of figuring out the competition's solution.

Basically, the entire premise is stupid. We are adding a few thousand highly skilled people into the workforce. There's no way that's a problem.

<comment><USER7> You can't honestly think that the department will continue doing the same caliber of research immediately after losing 50 of its members. It will take years to regain the amount of know-how that just vacated the premises.

<comment><USER6> In the meantime that team just got a huge budget increase to continue their research.

CMU is a great university. I image there are 2-3 PhD students at the top 50 school who will be looking to work there. CMU might even be able to lure away a couple other professors from the top 25 who'd love the chance to rebuild the program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uber didn't buy CMU's robotics department. They hired the employees. CMU didn't get any money out of it.

It's good to see robotics finally happening. I used to be in that field; I had one of the DARPA Grand Challenge teams in 2005, and was a visiting scholar in robotics at Stanford in the early 1990s, where I figured out how to get legged robots run over rough terrain. It was all too early back then. Now I'm too old.

Nobody is making any money yet, though. Other than teleoperators for the military, vacuum cleaners, and industrial robots, there are no robot products that sell in quantity. Industrial robots with some limited AI are now available[1] but sales are small. This still isn't a commercial technology.

[1] [http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/](http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/baxter/)

<comment><USER9> An important distinction for sure. I wonder if this will make academic jobs more competitive with corporate jobs at those levels.

Side question, but where is the line drawn between something being considered "robotics" vs. something else? For example...is a Nest a robot? If it controls the temperature in my home by regulating various valves and such, isn't that robotic, even if the device isn't physically moving from thermostat to thermostat to change the temperature?

<comment><USER8> It matters that robotics isn't making money yet. Google has a big automatic driving research operation, but to make money from it, they will have to get into the auto business in a big way. That's a huge, risky investment. Also, making cars has lower margins than search ads, which means Google's stock would go down if they did that. Google could become a parts supplier to Detroit, but that's not very profitable. All the big carmakers already have their own automatic driving systems. Cadillac has one developed with CMU which is almost as good as Google's. It's hard to see how Google turns automatic driving into a big moneymaker.

Google isn't a patient company. They kill off products and research that don't pay off within a few years. At some point, they may "put more wood behind fewer arrows" and dump automatic driving. They've done it before. Google hasn't historically spent big outside their core business area. Google Fiber is still just a few demos, and that's been going on for years now.

Uber is in a better position. They're in the transportation business. They're losing their labor lawsuits and will end up buying cars and hiring drivers. As a high-volume car buyer, they can get car companies to put their self-driving technology in the cars they buy. For Uber, automatic driving adds to the business model.

<comment><USER9> While the question on profitability and margins still exists, I think there are some fairly obvious monetization angles for Google with self-driving cars.

A couple off the top of my heads:

\- Freeing up all that additional time lets people use their devices to browse the internet which leads to more ad revenue

\- Knowing that an AdWords ad engagement results in physically driving a customer to my retail location helps prove the value of "clicks-to-bricks" in a huge way that is worth a lot to big advertisers (speaking from experience).

\- Licensing the technology and having access to all of that data can be leveraged for some very interesting targeting capabilities.

\- Defensively, it keeps them in a position of power over auto makers, Tesla, Apple, etc.

Also, Google Ventures has a significant investment in Uber, so if Uber succeeds, in some ways Google succeeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "There's a useful high-tech concept called the Technology Readiness Level that helps explain why Uber pounced when it did. NASA came up with this scale to gauge the maturity of a given field of applied science. At Level 1, an area of scientific inquiry is so new that nobody understands its basic principles. At Level 9, the related technology is so mature it's ready to be used in commercial products."

There's a often a big difference between the people who like to work on level 1 verse level 9 stuff. "How do I scale this to be used by 10,000 people?" isn't even an interesting/relevant question to a researcher pursuing level 1 areas of science, but it's one of the most important questions for an engineer of a technology at level 9.

</comment><comment><USER11> It seems to me that Silicon Valley's unicorns are themselves turning into incubators for future spin offs. Uber is taking a ridiculous amount of funding and investing in what can barely be called related technologies. It's not a conglomerate, it's not a global taxi firm, it's not a VC. It's ... Something new. And it's not alone.

Google, Amazon, AirBnB for heavens sake, all are placing bets on future innovations and models a long way from their core. I don't have a problem with this, but it's going to have a lot of knock on impacts. From traditional business valuation techniques to how to tax R&D globally, we are going to see a few decades where unfair and undemocratic could be the global theme, or, we could see better forms of governance emerge.

This, Uber going robotics crazy, is for me just a trigger to realise what has been going on for a while, from Pikkety to Varoufakis, tech has emerged from nice career to political engine of the next decades.

The boy has started saying the emperor has no clothes on. We the people need to know how to deal with a naked emperor and a new species of global something's. We the developers are not isolated from the political effects of the fun technologies we work with.

Gosh I'm pontificating now ...

<comment><USER12> Robotics for Uber is not a "barely-related technology." For a lot of us, it was always obvious that the core operational model for autonomous cars was Uber-esque. The fact that every major automaker is investing heavily in autonomy should convince you that autonomous cars are an existential threat to Uber.

(Not to mention that the driver situation is one of Uber's biggest issues at the moment!)

<comment><USER13> Everybody thinks Uber wants to make robotic cars so everybody will just use uber robotic cars.

But, why won't people buy their own robotic cars and put them on day time "search" mode for fares that get directly paid back to the owner of the vehicle? Then the vehicle can still return home for evenings/weekends when real people need immediate on-demand driving without waiting to be picked up.

<comment><USER14> why don't people have their home computers automatically join cloud computing clusters during the day so they can be used and paid for computation while the people are at work?

<comment><USER15> Because the cost of moving the data to the computer is too high. Locality is king. My private car is parked, unused, near potential customers right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a CMU grad it was kind of a gut punch when I heard about this. However, I'm confident that the CMU robotics program will be just fine in the long run.

The thing that worries me more is if this makes universities afraid of partnering with companies like Uber in the future.

<comment><USER17> I'm a CMU grad as well. And CMU has a long and storied history of being raided for talent like this. 40 at once is unusually big, but this story plays out regularly.

It's good for the profs, it's mostly good for the school, and it's part of why we have such a good reputation in industry -- so it's good for alums like you and me personally, as well.

With that said, sure, 40 is a lot. But the Robotics Institute will recover.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Science used to be a gift economy. Today, stuff like physics still is. That's why we have physicists working on problems, building on each other's research. The collaboration aspect is key. This is what the free software and open source model was based on.

Now next door to the physicists are the biochemists who have been snapped up by Big Pharma and now their stuff is patented. And when it's not patented, it's a trade secret. Their colleagues can no longer build on their research.

So the real danger isn't that the companies are willing to pay these researchers to work on commercially viable robots. It's that there will now be an explosion of PATENTS encumbering the whole field! Robotics researchers won't be as free to build on each other's work, like the physicists, whose results are less monetizable.

The public pays for research and, when it gets profitable, the profit is taken away from them. What should happen is that the public universities should be able to continue giving their professors free access to the research whose whole beginning, false starts and proving out, WAS FUNDWD WITH PUBLIC MONEY! Instead, the public is shut out of benefiting from the very research they helped fun. The only benefit they'll derive from now on is as consumers, the profits will go to the private sector.

I guess the private sector owns the means of distribution, and the public essentially funds "incubators" and is forced into an early exit. That's the best we can hope for, in our system... but the sad part is that the research could go a lot faster, like the explosion that open source software fueled, if these guys weren't shut up in silos. The public's money would go a lot further.

Replace patents with prizes.

</comment><comment><USER19> What's the connection between Uber and Robotics? Computer vision for driving?

<comment><USER20> Computer vision for self-driving, then longer-term, automating logistics. Something has to load all those self-driving trucks...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This happened to the University of Toronto's Machine Learning lab. Microsoft just came in and handed out salary offers to everyone. Makes complete sense compared to buying out an actual company.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hopefully this will drive more funding to privately funded research by non- academic groups. I've struggled with such issue in the past.

</comment><comment><USER23> Excellent. I shall dig it out from under the stairs then and give it a bit of a dust.</comment>


7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://bokardo.com/archives/7-reasons-why-web-apps-fail/ <comment><USER2> I think the point about how an app needs to do one thing well is becoming outdated because there are too many functions people are doing to spend time jumping from app to app. People probably only have time to really use about 3 or 4 apps in a regular day.

Please understand that I'm only making a wild conjecture based on my experience with end users in the real world, not any sort of data based claim.

My point is, at some point apps get too specific because people are using the social web for more than 4 or 5 functions. Skipping between 4-6 social apps is confusing and exhausting for me personally and, I suspect, most users.

photos - Facebook keeps expanding its capacity in this area. I suspect that Flickr is mostly being buoyed by it's current community of users.

video - Youtube is the workhorse in this area, Vimeo is the smooth luxurious sedan that keeps all the crap out. Basically these networks are hosters, not viable mainstream social networks.

email - Gmail killed this. Google wins. Move on to next function.

broadcast of one's thoughts/links to one's friends- Twitter/Facebook haven't quite settled who will win this one. I suspect Facebook will even though it's becoming quite played out.

all other blog related functions - most people don't blog. all other services that help blogs are natural products of services demanded by bloggers. until blogging becomes more prevalent, demand for these services will not grow. I don't see demand growing for content sharing services. I barely know what I'm talking about so don't take me seriously.

I'm working on something different to appeal to mainstream users who are not bloggers. I don't want to share what it is until you sign a form and submit a blood sample.</comment>


The sad state of the Raspberry Pi software ecosystem - <AUTHOR> http://thekeywordgeek.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-sad-state-of-raspberry-pi-software.html

<comment><USER2> To me, the only interesting things that could be in a pistore like that are alternate distros (piplay, rasplex, retropie.. etc)

the open pandora had way more success with an 'app store', because it had a uniform interface and niche community formed mostly around gaming.

[http://repo.openpandora.org/](http://repo.openpandora.org/)

That certainly doesn't have an officially sanctioned way to program for it. Just a community oriented around it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Like he writes, Linux has tons of software. Raspberry Pi is part of that platform, not its own thing.</comment>


Ask HN: How did you learn Machine Learning? - <AUTHOR> My company wants to move into the ML world to solve a specific problem that ML would probably excel at. However, all of us are at a loss as to what we are doing.<p>How did you learn Machine Learning? We'd love to get our first step in the right direction. <comment><USER2> I got my start by getting a PhD, but that's perhaps not a practical recommendation. In reality though, you might say I started learning ML by reading Mitchell in class: [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mitchell/ftp/mlbo...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/mitchell/ftp/mlbook.html) It's dated, but it's quite approachable and does a great job explaining a lot of the fundamentals.

If you want to approach machine learning from a more statistical perspective, you could also have a look at An Introduction to Statistical Learning to start: [http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/](http://www- bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/) Or if you're more mathematically inclined than the average bear, you could jump directly into The Elements of Statistical Learning: [https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/ElemStatLearn/](https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/ElemStatLearn/)

If you want something a little more interactive than a book though, you might have a look at Google's free crash course on machine learning: [https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash- course/...](https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course/ml- intro) I checked it out briefly maybe six months ago, and it seemed pretty good. It seemed a bit focused on Tensor Flow and some other tools, but that's okay.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for these resources.</comment></comment>


Stones and Apples - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mathspace.co/stones-and-apples/ <comment><USER2> This was awesome. I've taken astronomy and physics in high school and then later physics and mechanics at university. But this article explained gravity way better than anything I've encountered before.

<comment><USER3> The viewpoint presented in the article looks "way better" only because you've been exposed to it much more recently than what you've studied in the past. Newer = shinier.

Also, you've not been asked to solve any chapter exercises using this shiny theory, where you have to obtain correct numerical answers.

Ash and Bernard crawling from the apple's equator to its stem is cute, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great mental model, but I'm getting hung up on a more minor point. The masses wouldn't be moving around on a static spacetime model because, as the text says, the masses are what bend the spacetime. So spacetime would be more curved close to each mass, which in turn means they would accelerate toward each other even harder as they got closer to each other.

<comment><USER3> Curved spacetime is not required to explain anything in classical mechanics.

The presented concepts are poorly developed and do not account for forces other than gravity. Suppose A and B are oppositely charged and electrostatically attracted together with great vigor over a considerable distance. Next to A there is a C, which is not charged, and not attracted to B (other than mildly due to gravity). A begins to move toward B rapidly, whereas C hardly moves toward either of them. Are A and C situated in a differently curved spacetime, even though they start off right next to each other in both space and time?

You didn't learn it this way in school because it's bunk. The equations of motion together with fields that are responsible for forces provide a coherent theory that actually solves problems.

<comment><USER5> It's....complicated. That's why The Three Body Problem is not just a great scifi book, but a real mechanics brain teaser. That doesn't take away from the strength of this illustration, which is explanatory in nature, not authoritative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These diagrams look upside down to me. I think of gravity Wells like those coin donation wells: [https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1e/c8/de/1ec8de8c6c3d15ff0df8cafa8...](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/1e/c8/de/1ec8de8c6c3d15ff0df8cafa87bbfa6d.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER7> MinutePhysics on YouTube was the first place I saw a good explanation of spacetime curvature, but this write-up is equally good.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very interesting read... I wonder at what distance the expansion of the universe itself nullify the gravitation attraction?</comment>


Ask YC: which video sharing service? - <AUTHOR>

I need to find a reliable and free video sharing service that will allow our site's members to upload showreels in order to embed them on our site. High quality would be a bonus. <comment><USER2> Depending on what you're trying to do, I might suggest viddyou.com. Shoot me an email with some details on your project (address is in my profile). Otherwise, vimeo.com, viddler.com & blip.tv are good choices as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found Revver to reproduce in higher quality than YouTube or Google video. Not all Revver videos get approved, and non-intrusive text ads are placed at the end.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think Vimeo has high quality video and a great interface.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback everyone - some decent leads here.</comment>


7 projects from Microsoft Research - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/future-tech/7-mind-blowing-projects-from-microsoft-research-480780

<comment><USER2> MSR has been around for a pretty long time. Sure, these are really cool research projects, but turning research into products hasn't traditionally been one of Microsoft's strengths.

It'd be interesting to see where they take these projects three years from now.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Using spam filters to find HIV vaccines" and "Beating programming bugs" sound rather interesting.

</comment><comment><USER3> Number seven sounds suspiciously similar to the halting problem...

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://research.microsoft.com/TERMINATOR/></comment></comment>


WebGoat – A deliberately insecure JavaEE application - <AUTHOR> https://webgoat.github.io/

<comment><USER2> Very fun to practice various cross-scripting and injection techniques on!</comment>


What Can AI Get from Neuroscience? (2007) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://neurolab.gatech.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/potter/publications/Potter-NeuroscienceForAIchapter.pdf

<comment><USER2> It's going to be the other way around. The brain is a knotted mess of connections between lots of different neuron types, and I don't believe the complexity of the brain is a necessary feature of Intelligence. Because of this extra complexity, the brain will serve as a poor model system for Intelligence.

I think deep neural networks running on GPUs will teach us more about Intelligence. Eventually, Neuroscientists will have to transfer ideas from machine learning to notions of how the brain works.

<comment><USER3> Brains are the only pieces of hardware on the planet that exhibit intelligent behavior. I think it's a bit arrogant to think we can do better when we don't even know how the thing works!

<comment><USER4> We have lots of examples of hardware and software that does things-previously- thought-intelligent much faster than brains do them.

<comment><USER5> My take is that's because brains don't do those sorts of things natively. Meaning, no there isn't some level of abstraction in animal or human brains that does lambda calculus. Which paradoxically makes us think that being able to do lambda calculus as mark of intelligence when nothing is further from the truth, it's just our brains are bad at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds very reminiscent of what Jeff Hawkins has been talking about. His company, Numenta, is specifically about creating AI by understand the neocortex. Fascinating stuff.

</comment><comment><USER7> How about the ethical side? If one copies the human brain more or less exactly, then ethics will almost certainly become a big issue.

<comment><USER8> >If one copies the human brain more or less exactly

Is there a reason to think that that is even a possibility?

<comment><USER6> At this point its difficult to say if it is or isn't a possibility.</comment></comment></comment>


WeWork Aims to Go Public in September, Sooner Than Expecte - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/wework-aims-to-go-public-in-september-sooner-than-expected-sources-11563921401?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> i.e. "exiting"</comment>


The Idea of Smart Contracts (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://szabo.best.vwh.net/idea.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting way to look at it.

Another example, of course, would be digital rights management. Interestingly, DRM's high-water mark (from the perspective of those who insisted on it) began shortly after this article was written, when it was formalized by the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. As the author would say, this helped to enhance the costs of "breaching" the DRM's contract. (In the same way, laws against vandalism and petty theft enhance the costs of "breaching" the vending machine's contract.)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.ethereum.org/](https://www.ethereum.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> After a few months of diving into the technical details, I'm bullish on ethereum (or maybe I should say bullish on block chain technology). Any thoughts on it?

<comment><USER3> I believe that blockchains are a very naïve and expensive solution to a non- problem.

Consensus is simply not needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Relevant? Bitcoin itself has very limited functionality for smart contracts, but a set of distributed oracles could change that.

We're building such a system here: [http://orisi.org/](http://orisi.org/) and there's a whitepaper available here - [https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White- Paper](https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper)

A similar system could be used for Ethereum as well, to bring external inputs into the mix.</comment>


Ask HN: Likelihood the FBI also submitted to Google a court ordered mandate? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I don't see why the FBI wouldn't have submitted the same court-ordered mandate for a backdoor to android phones. Will Google come forward about their involvement?</comment>


EasyOCR: Ready-to-use OCR with 40 languages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR <comment><USER2> From what I can tell (without having read the research papers) it looks like this is just an easy to use package for sparse scene text extraction. It seems to do okay if the scene has sparse text but it falls down for dense text detection. The results are going to be pretty bad if you try and do a task like "extract transactions from a picture of a receipt." Here's an example of input you might get for a production app: [https://www.clusin.com/walmart- receipt.jpg](https://www.clusin.com/walmart-receipt.jpg)

Notice the faded text from the printer running out of ink and the slanted text. From limited experience each of these are thorny problems and the state of the art CV algorithms won't help you escape from having to learn how to algorithmicly pre-process images and clean them up prior to feeding them into a CV algorithm. You might be able to use Google's Cloud OCR but that charges per image, although it is pretty good. Even if you use that you've graduated to the next super difficult problem which is Natural Language Processing.

Once you have the text you need to determine if it has meaning to your application. That's basically what NLP is about. For the receipts example, how do you know you're looking at a receipt? What if its a receipt on top of a pile of other receipts? How do you extract transactions from the receipt? Does a transaction span multiple lines? How can you tell? etc etc etc.

<comment><USER3> I'm just happy to see some advancement in open source OCR for Python. Last time I had a Python project that needed OCR, I found that the open-source options were surprisingly limited, and it required some effort to achieve consistently good results even with relatively clean inputs.

Honestly I was kind of surprised that good basic OCR isn't a totally solved issue with an ecosystem of fully open-source solutions by now.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Honestly I was kind of surprised that good basic OCR isn't a totally solved > issue with an ecosystem of fully open-source solutions by now.

Yes! Can anyone comment on why this is the case, since OCR is proclaimed to be a solved problem?

I've always wondered why Google Lens works "out of the box" and shows great accuracy on extracting text from images taken using a phone camera, but open- source OCR software (Tesseract, Ocropy etc.) needs a lot of tweaking to extract text from standard documents with standard fonts, even after heavily pre-processing the images.

PS: Has Google released any paper on Google Lens?

<comment><USER4> I've been wondering this ever since I used Lens. My hobby applications doing OCR always fall way short of Len's magic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah! And Lens is not the only closed-source OCR solution that works. I've gotten great accuracy using ABBYY and docparser.com in the past. But one needs to pay per page after the free trial ends :(

<comment><USER5> I've found that none of the open source stuff works well for Japanese language documents. Most of the time, I've just ran them through Adobe Acrobat's OCR and dumped the results into a text file. There are still mistakes, but it at least returns a passable result compared to others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looking at the Chinese example, it's kinda funny it managed to output Traditional Chinese characters when the image contains Simplified Chinese; the SC and TC versions look pretty different (园 vs 園, 东 vs 東).

<comment><USER7> They're rendering Unicode without any markup for language variant.

<comment><USER6> No, these are completely different, standalone code points, not variant forms of the same code point.

What's actually happening seems to be that the ch_tra model can recognize simplified too and output the corresponding traditional version if the character isn't in the traditional "alphabet"; it doesn't work so well in the other direction.

Example recognizing a partial screenshot of [https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/38707](https://chinese.stackexchange.com/a/38707) (anyone can try this on Google Colab, no hardware required; remember to turn on GPU in Runtime -> Change runtime type):

      import easyocr
      import requests

      zhs_reader = easyocr.Reader(['en', 'ch_sim'])
      zht_reader = easyocr.Reader(['en', 'ch_tra'])
      image = requests.get('https://i.imgur.com/HtrpZCZ.png').content
      print('ch_sim:', ' '.join(text for _, text, _ in zhs_reader.readtext(image)))
      print('ch_tra:', ' '.join(text for _, text, _ in zht_reader.readtext(image)))

Results:

      ch_sim: One simplified character may mapping to multiple traditional ones: 皇后->皇后,後夭->后夭 豌鬟->头发,骏财->发财 As reversed, one traditional character may mapping to multiple simplified ones too: 乾燥->干燥, 乾隆->乾隆 嘹望->嘹望,嘹解->了解
      ch_tra: One simplified character may mapping to multiple traditional ones: 皇后->皇后,後天->后天 頭髮->頭發,發財->發財 As reversed, one traditional character may mapping to multiple simplified ones too: 乾燥->干燥, 乾隆->乾隆 瞭望->瞭望, 瞭解->了解

Compare to the original text:

      One simplified character may mapping to multiple traditional ones:

      - 皇后 -> 皇后,後天 -> 后天
      - 頭髮 -> 头发,發財 -> 发财

      As reversed, one traditional character may mapping to multiple simplified ones too:

      - 乾燥 -> 干燥,乾隆 -> 乾隆
      - 瞭望 -> 瞭望,瞭解 -> 了解

Of course, automatic character-to-character conversion from simplified to traditional can be wrong due to ambiguities; excellent examples from above: 头发 => 頭發 (should be 頭髮), 了解 => 了解 (should be 瞭解).

<comment><USER8> This approach seems a bit weird to me. While I appreciate them separating the models of Traditional and Simplified Chinese, I think I might prefer them to be combined (perhaps even including Japanese Kanji), and instead provide a way for the user to specify which language or regional variant is expected so characters matching the expected variant are simply given a higher score.

<comment><USER6> Without delving into implementation details, I suspect the ch_tra model was simply trained on a dataset including simplified images with traditional labels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What are people using in mobile development (native iOS/native Android/Cross- platform e.g. React-Native) when you want accurate extraction from a fixed format-source?

E.g. poor-quality images of ID cards or credit cards, where the position of data is known.

<comment><USER6> iOS has the Vision framework, can't say whether it's accurate enough for your use case.

[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/recognizing...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/recognizing_text_in_images)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is something that I find really interesting. Open-source OCR is lagging behing commercial applications and seeing someone trying ideas is always beneficial. Kudos!!

</comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone made a desktop app with a really simple UI for detecting text in images? I'm thinking something that lives in the taskbar, lets you make a box around the text you want to read, and then returns it as plaintext?

In my job as a support engineer I sometimes get screenshots of complex technical configurations and end up having to type them in one character at a time, so this would be really handy.

Looks like maybe I could just create a wrapper around EasyOCR.

<comment><USER12> I was looking exactly for the same thing, and found this wonderful script:

[http://askubuntu.com/a/280713/81372](http://askubuntu.com/a/280713/81372)

I put it in a custom keyboard shortcut, so I just press it, draw an onscreen rectangle around any non-selectable text, and in a few seconds it goes to the clipboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What would be the advantage compared to something like Tesseract ?

<comment><USER14> Tesseract isn't very accurate, especially with text in photos. It works OK for scanned documents, but that's about it.

<comment><USER15> Tesseract can be very accurate (>99%), especially when you train it for your particular data set.

This does involve creating your own labeled data.

I got this 99% accuracy by performing incremental training using latest Manheim model as a base. I added about 20k lines which is not really that much. [https://github.com/tesseract- ocr/tesseract/wiki](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki)

The hard part was crowd sourcing those 20k lines :)

Tesseract might not be best for photos as you said but I did not have major problems.

Of course some documents the source is so bad that a human can't achieve 99%.

Tesseract used to be quite average before they moved onto LTSM models a few years ago.

<comment><USER2> Care to share resources/lessons learned for training tesseract with custom data? I'm using it for a side project and would love to hear about your insights.

<comment><USER15> I followed the resources here: [https://github.com/tesseract- ocr/tessdoc/blob/master/Trainin...](https://github.com/tesseract- ocr/tessdoc/blob/master/TrainingTesseract-4.00.md)

Also this: [https://github.com/UB- Mannheim/tesseract/wiki](https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract/wiki)

The original data was here: [https://github.com/tesseract- ocr/langdata_lstm](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/langdata_lstm)

I did use another data source from Manheim but can't locate it right now.

Using vanilla Ubuntu 18.04

I looked at the example training files and made a small script to convert my own labeled data to fit the format that tesseract requires.

I did do a bit of pre-processing adjusting contrast.

All the data munging was done on Python (Pillow for image processing, Flask for collecting data into a simple SQLite DB before converting back to format that Tesseract requires).

Python was not necessary just something that felt most comfortable to me. I am sure someone could do it using bash scripts or node.js or anything else.

EDIT: To make life easier for my curators I did run Tesseract first to generate prelabeled data for my training set. It was about 90% accurate to start with.

So the process was: Tesseract OCR on some documents to be trained -> hand curation (2 months)-> train (took about 12 hours) -> 99% (on completely separate test set)

<comment><USER16> If you don't mind disclosing, what was your particular use-case (the labeled dataset you trained on)?

<comment><USER15> It was for digitizing 19th century books written in a font and language not supported in a vanilla Tesseract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does this require a Nvidia GPU? Some modules seem to import PyTorch and Cuda libs: [https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR/blob/master/easyocr/dete...](https://github.com/JaidedAI/EasyOCR/blob/master/easyocr/detection.py#L2)

<comment><USER18> The CPU fallback taking on the order of tens of seconds on my modest i5-5250U for a few images of street signs I've thrown at it. Good enough for my purposes at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm going to test this on my shopping receipts, if I can get over the Windows packaging hassle, and report back ..

</comment><comment><USER20> Compared to ABBYY, how does this thing fare? I don't have the time right now to do this test and if anyone here did it I'd be thankful to share.

<comment><USER21> It can not compete with cloud services from Abbyy, Google, OCR.space and others. But it runs locally and is open-source.

It works for sparse text on images, and for that specific use case it is better than Tesseract.

<comment><USER20> I have Abby installed locally as well. I don't use it's cloud components. And I can set my own server exposing ABBYY's API's to rollout my own cloud server instead of theirs, if needs be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've recently become interested in OCR due to using Kaku on Android for trying to get better at reading Japanese. So thanks Hacker News for showing me a new version. I'd love any comments about other resources that may be good for learning. Especially because for funsies I'd like to try and develop my own.

<comment><USER23> For learning, you could try training yourself on datasets for handwritten character recognition: [http://etlcdb.db.aist.go.jp/](http://etlcdb.db.aist.go.jp/)

<comment><USER22> Thanks! A dataset was one of the things I was dreading searching for/building. (Maybe this was super easily searchable and I'm just a goon, again I'm early stages of passing interest).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> this is great, been waiting for a newer machine learning based library as an option to Tesseract.

a bit out of topic - but does anyone happen to know if there is an open- source, new school OCR library for music notation?

</comment><comment><USER25> Anyone know how this (EasyOCR) compares with a service like AWS Textract?

<comment><USER26> What metrics do you want the comparison on?

Cost: AWS is not free vs Open Sourced

Time: AWS averages under 10 seconds vs 140 seconds on a standard Dell 7480 & 9 seconds on a GPU Google colab

Character Accuracy: Almost same on a high quality input. No comparison with AWS on a blurred camera photo like this [https://github.com/ExtractTable/ExtractTable- py/blob/master/...](https://github.com/ExtractTable/ExtractTable- py/blob/master/samples/BlurryImage.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Has anyone tried it? How good is it?

<comment><USER28> It doesn't work that bad on a few French examples I had lying around: It's doing quite well on scanned documents, even quite dense ones. Handwriting doesn't work well at all, even for simpler cases. It managed to recognize a few words from a blackboard picture, but that's hardly usable.

However, it looks like my simple example of an old "S note" export (like a lowish resolution phone screenshot) confused it a bit:

        Reglementation -> Reglemantation
        km -> kn
        illimitée -> illiritée
        limite -> liite
        baptême -> bapteme
        etc.

Overall, it works, and it is quite easy to install and use. I'd have to compare it with tesseract, but I think it's a bit better. A lot slower, though (I only have AMD devices, no CUDA). It's underusing my CPU, and maybe leaking memory a bit, though I didn't clean up.

Take that with a grain of salt, that was a quick try, I haven't tried to tune anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The README presents an unfinished example. How does one work with the result?

</comment><comment><USER30> From the title I thought it was OCR implemented in 40 programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER31> How do I train this on my own custom dataset/font?</comment>


Boeing uses potatoes to simulate people for Wi-Fi testing - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21572923-flight-electronics-researchers-have-resorted-unusual-approach-model

<comment><USER2> This is unfair to self-respecting potatoes.</comment>


This real-time coding environment could take social code to the next level - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/07/10/hey-developers-this-real-time-coding-environment-could-take-social-code-to-the-next-level/

<comment><USER2> Social coding rarely means working on the same file at the same time. In order for work to proceed efficiently, there has to be some separation of work and responsibility.

I do think, however, that this will be great for code review and teaching. None of our developers are in the same place. We use Github and Gists to collaborate, escalating to a MeetingBurner session if we really need eyes on a conflict all at once. Those instances are infrequent, but on the business side, the sales and marketing teams use Google Docs to great effect when collaborating on their documents.

The ability to see someone else's cursor and watch their edits in real time is a major force multiplier. Documents reach a final stage much more quickly than they do with the old "track changes and email" approach. I can't help but see parallels in the dev team's approach, even with Git.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't help but be reminded of <http://xkcd.com/927/> every time I see a new collaborative editor. Whether it's Cloud9, Google Collide, Collabedit or Space, one must sacrifice all the benefits of their current IDE in order to use this one. Wouldn't these sorts of projects make infinitely more sense as a plugin for an established text editor or IDE like Sublime or Visual Studio?

<comment><USER4> Couldn't agree more. I wrote up similar thoughts a few months ago where I tried to outline a lightweight protocol that would be implemented at the editor level (as a plugin) to support common editor functions such as opening files, switching tabs, and of course real-time syncing.

<https://gist.github.com/1999816>

<comment><USER3> I hadn't even considered a cross text-editor solution/protocol. That's a fantastic idea.

<comment><USER5> I don't like it. People should be required to use Emacs to be privileged to program with me.

<comment><USER6> You misspelled Vim.

<comment><USER5> Clearly you don't understand that Emacs is a perfectly suitable Vim.

<comment><USER6> Why would I emulate perfection?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not bullish on the idea of real-time collaborative coding. Maybe a simple CRUD app can handle that sort of thing, but anyone who's spent days debugging a corner case knows that the presence of someone else tends to just complicate the process. I agree with others that this could be great as a teaching/mentoring tool, or maybe an easier way to do code reviews. Just not seeing the point with collaborative coding.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's funny - all these "real time code collaboration" editors that have been popping up lately remind me of a job at a research institute I had some 15 years ago. There we would sometimes do a `xhost -`, set the DISPLAY variable and just open a second Emacs frame on the remote machine. Of course that gives the other person pretty much full access to all your local files, but come on, we were all buddies there...

</comment><comment><USER9> It's like P = x^n where n is how much a bit of code is pissing me off, n is how many people are working on it, and P is how much I am actually pissed off.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems apparent to me that Space's best use would be education of programming through pair programming. Or, imagine a lecture being taught with Space - each student watching the prof (and, of course, _not_ deleting everything she types) code on their laptop rather than on a projector.

</comment><comment><USER11> A reliable shared web code editor with syntax highlighting would be great for interviews. I've tried a few, but they crap out. Or the editors don't support the languages I care about, like Objective C. I've been living with Skype screencasts.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand social coding. If I'm working on file A and someone is working on file B. I want to compile the project and test the changes I just made to A, But someone happened to break file B, so the project won't compile. Then what?

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines>

</comment><comment><USER14> While I don't really want this for coding, something like this for a music editor (DAW) would really be fantastic.

<comment><USER15> Actually there is at least one: <http://www.ohmstudio.com/> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4eRu7iHR_I&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4eRu7iHR_I&feature=player_embedded)

<comment><USER14> Very cool, thanks for linking me to this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have never encountered a scenario where I need to work on the same file, at the same time as somebody else.

That's what revision control is for. This looks like it was built by people who don't use a revision control system.

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh my god, oh my god. Yes please. Please open source this. I'd love to be able to open a browser and have my workspace spring to life and I'd love to be able to pair program with two computers, keyboards, mice.</comment>


I got first class degree in CS, but I know nothing about computers - <AUTHOR>

I am programmer and I have been doing it since 14 years old. I believe I am great at it. I've just finished my CS degree in pretty good rated UK university. But I feel that I know nothing about computers except programming and little bit of maths. Is it my fault that I learnt stuff just before exams to pass it and forgot everything afterwards? Did I really need to go to Uni? What do you think? <comment><USER2> Everyone goes through college feeling this way once they finish. Keep going with your university studies, get the highest degree you can or jump to a well-paying job in industry. You have alpha number of hours in the day, and bravo number of topics to study relating to computing. Where alpha is finite, and bravo is infinite(and growing!).

At a job you will focus (even if focusing on say web development, it's still generic focusing in that area); when you are on your off-time you can begin to branch out into further, specialized focus area's learning what you want, exploring what you want.

The possibilities are always endless and the topics, oh they are many: high- performance computing, gaming, graphics, sound, web, application, server, user-interface, user-design, IT Tech, networking, the list goes on and on. Congratulations on graduating; never forget life is what you make it!

<comment><USER3> Ouch. This advice sounds alarming and extreme. Degrees will only carry you so far. One place they will carry you is into debt. Experience > formal education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I doubt you forgot everything. It's your brain tricking you. You began school with a strong knowledge of the of the things you were aware of. Now you're aware of many more areas so you feel like you learned nothing overall.

Imagine a large circle A with a smaller B inside of it centered on the same point. A represents your awareness of all things computers, the set of things you know about but haven't learned yet. B represents the things you know very well, a few programming languages, some math, etc.

While you've been learning, A and B are both expanding, but A is expanding faster than B. You're feeling intimidated by the things you are aware of, but don't know very well.

It's probably related to this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome>

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this might stem from the fact you've finished your academic studies for the first time in your life.

You studied CS and you proved you're capable of learning to a high standard AND you achieved a great result.

Now it's up to you to choose what you study next. What areas do you feel you are missing? Even outside of tech.

When you leave uni it's not possible to have studied every concept. I did CS in the UK too and I went down the analytics, data, ecommerce route and left with very limited programming skills. That's something I've had to address since leaving.

Follow your interests and plug the gaps that are worrying you.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not quite sure if you're talking about the underlying hardware and all. But awhile back I ran across the book "Building a Modern Computer from First Principles". I haven't actually read it due to being in school myself but it seems extremely interesting. Basically it walks you from low level boolean logic up through processor design, compilers, operating systems, and languages. Most of the book can actually be downloaded from their site here: <http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/plan.html>.

<comment><USER7> _Basically it walks you from low level boolean logic up through processor design, compilers, operating systems, and languages_

Isn't that what his university degree should have already covered?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You did not need to go to Uni. It really matters what you went for (employment vs well rounded learning).

For employment, it would have been much more efficient to use the same time/money to gain experience and post it through github. I am twice as likely to hire a person with a good portfolio than someone who has a good degree. That said..both would be good.

For getting a more well rounded understanding of what is really happening and why computers do what they do....a uni degree/experience is really helpful.

</comment><comment><USER9> Stay in school as long as you can, unless you have a burning desire to change the world...

</comment><comment><USER10> I actually go to university now i started doing programming and built my own business at 16. I learned more than I have ever learned in school. I am really contemplating just going into working for a startup. I heard startups don't care if you have a degree, but I haven't heard back from any I have applied for. So if anyone could post whether they care if someone goes to Uni or if experience is enough.

<comment><USER11> It very much depends on the employer. I've hired people who haven't studied Computer Science (or even a science or engineering degree) and found that they can be a mixed bag. Generally they can program, but the quality of their code and the way they approach problems isn't always as good as people who have been taught Computer Science.

Also, and please don't take this the wrong way as you were posting on HN, not applying for a job, but if you don't have a degree I'd expect you to be more than just a great programmer. The structure of your first sentence would ring alarm bells for me. It's not just your technical abilities that are important but all your skills, including communication.

<comment><USER12> >> the quality of their code and the way they approach problems isn't always as good as people who have been taught Computer Science.

Might want to get your degree'ed nose out of the air, you might trip over the next obstacle that lies in your path.</comment></comment></comment>


The Chilling Effect of Confiscation - <AUTHOR> https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-chilling-effect-of-confiscation <comment><USER2> Most who have suffered alimony would agree.</comment>


The Problem with Averaging Star Ratings - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/andymangold/status/341327603451441152 <comment><USER2> Opened the page of the app, and I see a review at the top that starts like this (I hope quoting it entirely is ok):

> _First, THIS APP IS NOT RELIABLE IN AN EMERGENCY SITUATION. I will elaborate > below on what 's good about "Tornado" and what's bad about it. I'm a trained > spotter for the NWS, so I have a phone loaded with weather apps. The bad: At > least six different services/apps alert me when a weather alert is issued > for my area. "Tornado" is not only always the last app to alert me, it is > often delayed by 2 HOURS OR MORE. It also, for no particular reason, sends > me alerts for warnings that don't affect any of my selected locations._

Now, how many stars would you expect?

Correct, it's 4, because:

> _Tornado is quite educational, enough that I would recommend downloading it > solely for the purpose of learning about the weather. It has easy-to-read > articles with corresponding tests so you can discover how much of a weather > buff you truly are. In summary, I would recommend downloading this app for > the educational aspect, but be aware that a very key feature--alerting-- > might not be fully operational._</comment>


New Technique for Getting Your Resume Noticed - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottporad.com/2010/06/23/a-new-technique-for-getting-your-resume-noticed/

<comment><USER2> It's a big ol' world, and I'm sure you can find an example of _anything_ working at least once, but this is not a good idea.

This isn't because its right, wrong, or indifferent, it isn't because how you look should or shouldn't make a difference. It's because this is the way the world works.

The conceit is that someone is being considered based upon what they've done, not on the way they look. I've known HR departments to block out faces with markers on resumes under review. When I'm confronted with a resume with a face, at least for the first cut, I have to worry whether I'm selecting for the face or the accomplishments. Later, when I actually meet the person, _thats_ when that all important first impression happens. First impressions should be based on the way someone _acts_ not on the way they _look_.

(And personally, if I'm impressed with their stats, even if they make a poor or mediocre first impression, I try to go back and give them another chance; a potential good employee is worth the extra effort.)

The only type of job for which this would be a good idea is for a job as an actor/actress/performer. In their industry including a photo is routine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Showing photo and age will make it stick out but precisely because you're telling them age and (usually also) race and gender you're going to trigger problems due to hiring and civil rights laws, esp if a large corp or HR is involved.

Stick out? Yes. Bad way? Probably sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Based on feedback, I followed this up with another post: [http://www.scottporad.com/2010/06/24/getting-your-resume- not...](http://www.scottporad.com/2010/06/24/getting-your-resume-noticed-vs- hiring-the-best-candidate/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've tripled posted this already, but I don't like faces on resumes -- it can be practical (if it shows the person in a manner that resonates with your company culture), but the odds of that happening seem pretty remote, since it can't be a good photo for all involved.

I think I'm starting to show my stodginess because I like resumes looking like they've always looked.

</comment><comment><USER6> This may work well once your resume makes it to the hiring manager, but chances are that it won't get that far. Most corporate HR departments will eliminate resumes with pictures to avoid any potential EEOC issues.

<comment><USER7> I was thinking that if any company required photos with resumes, that they would get into trouble if they kept picking white males.

It would be interesting if people could submit resumes anonymously, without a picture or name.

<comment><USER4> The anonymous submission thing is interesting to me, despite the fact that I liked the photo idea.

I would genuinely be interested in participating in an experiment to compare all resumes with pictures versus all resumes that are anonymous. I would like to be the subject...to review the resumes and see if I'm biased or not. I think that would be interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's also a great way to start discriminating based on looks/gender/physical appearance (fitness, for example)

</comment><comment><USER9> From the article:

"literally anybody and everybody could do this and improve their resume in a matter of minutes."

...and then it would no longer be a technique to make your resume stand out.

</comment><comment><USER10> There's probably a good way to do this. The one time someone gave me a resume with a face on it, it came across as creepy and desperate, and I ditched it immediately.

</comment><comment><USER11> Maybe LinkedIn/Facebook is making this more socially acceptable. I sure would like to picture a potential employee before phone screening/in depth interviews.

<comment><USER12> Are you in a technical area? Why would someone's appearance matter? I can understand if you're hiring for Hooter's (or sales, not too different).

The appearance of judging based on pictures can also open your company up to EEO lawsuits.

<comment><USER4> Appearance doesn't matter, and in the post, I don't think I ever said it did. (In fact, what I said was, "it wasn't his pretty face that was the deciding factor; he was a very qualified candidate who would have passed our screening regardless".)

I know nothing about this guy's skills other than what his resume says. But, what I do know is that he's a person, compared to every one of these other resumes that are an abstraction.

<comment><USER13> And you also know that he's an early-middle-aged white male, which likely influenced you to _some_ degree, however minor, in whatever direction. You've even labeled him a "guy". Why "guy"? Why not some other term? A sense of familiarity?

Hence the EEOC issues.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, but most of the time, the name is going to give you strong clues about gender and ethnicity anyways. And education and job history probably give you good ideas about the applicant's age. People already have plenty of opportunity to discriminate even without the photo.

<comment><USER13> Very true.

I've long thought that I'd love to make / have a hiring-tool which just hashes names and hides them (as there's still rare uses) and all racial data to hide this sort of bias. I wonder what it'd do to hiring stats.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: 3d Word Vectors with Neural Networks, T-SNE, and WebGL - <AUTHOR> http://wordcloud.ersatz1.com/ <comment><USER2> Hey Dave - Your visualization is cool, no doubt, but I'm not seeing as much structure in the 3D cloud as I see in 2D visualizations. In 2D, the words form clusters of similarity which are pretty obvious, but I don't really see that here. What training data did you use for word2vec, and for how many iterations did you run t-sne?

I ran some visualizations of my own a while back, and they're a lot less aesthetically pleasing, but you can see more structure and clustering.

[https://raw.github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/master/visua...](https://raw.github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/master/visualizations/figure_5.png) [https://raw.github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/master/visua...](https://raw.github.com/dhammack/Word2VecExample/master/visualizations/figure_6.png)

(It could also just be a WebGL thing, because the third dimension seems to have a lot less variance than the other two)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's true, I've noticed this too.

I trained word2vec on wikipedia and trained a bunch of different models w/ TSNE for between 800 and 1500 iterations. In 2d, the results actually appear fine (similar to your graphics + others that have been demonstrated). Unfortunately, at least for me, this doesn't seem to be translating to 3d.

It's either a mix of the quality of the vectors (maybe I need to try some other word vectors) and/or T-SNE needs to be optimized a bit better (and/or there's a bug). It's not quite where I want it to be yet, so consider this a "cool tech demo we're still working on" kind of thing.

<comment><USER2> Did you roll your own version of t-sne to use in Erstaz? Now that I think about it, I've never seen a 3D visualization with t-sne before (and searching just now didn't find any), it could be that t-sne doesn't work as well in 3D (or has bugs which only appear in >2 dims).

<comment><AUTHOR> We're rolling our own for release, but right now we're borrowing liberally from the Barnes-Hut-SNE implementation here: [http://homepage.tudelft.nl/19j49/t-SNE.html](http://homepage.tudelft.nl/19j49/t-SNE.html) Barnes-Hut is a modification that makes T-SNE a lot more efficient, so I could train on hundreds of thousands of vectors instead of <10,000.

However, I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing that makes it not suitable for 3d--IE, maybe the assumptions being made to speed things up break down after the 2nd dimension. Also, there's interesting discussion in the literature about whether or not T-SNE is a good dimensionality reduction technique in general (as opposed to only a very powerful visualization technique), so my next step is probably going to be running the vectors through an autoencoder to generate 3d coordinates and then plotting those and comparing the visualizations.

Re: another example of TSNE w/ text--yeah, I've only seen this [http://homepage.tudelft.nl/19j49/t-SNE_files/semantic_tsne.j...](http://homepage.tudelft.nl/19j49/t-SNE_files/semantic_tsne.jpg) which seems to work but isn't interactive. Frankly, I'm surprised we got it to work with three.js--we're able to render as many as 250,000 unique words and it runs smooth (it just takes longer to download--this demo has 25,000).

<comment><USER3> Barnes-Hut uses a quadtree, doesn't it? I don't know whether the code was adapted to use an octree in 3D instead; maybe it was? FWIW there's a really interesting Google techtalk on how it works: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVL80Gg3lA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVL80Gg3lA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ha, I made something very similar with the goal of mesmerizing passersby at a conference where we had a booth: [http://www.a1k0n.net/spotify/artist- viz/](http://www.a1k0n.net/spotify/artist-viz/)

Used t-SNE on a vector clustering which came from LDA.

<comment><USER2> Nice! I assume LDA was run on the lyrics?

<comment><USER3> Not at all... "documents" were the user's play history and "words" were artists. So if you played one artist twice and another artist once it'd be like a document that says "artist1 artist1 artist2". The assumption is that document topics are analogous to music genres, and each artist creates music within a small set of genres each user prefers music within a small set of genres.

<comment><USER2> Ah, that explains why the groupings are so good. That's cool, I hadn't thought about topic models outside of NLP before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Green words on black screen look very intriquing and matrix-like, but I cannot wrap my head around what this clustering actually represents.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, some explanation might be in order...

These are a bunch of "word vectors" (generated w/ word2vec [https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/](https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/)) put through a dimensionality reduction/visualization technique called T-SNE and then plotted in 3d. As far as what the clustering represents, check out T-SNE ([http://homepage.tudelft.nl/19j49/t-SNE.html](http://homepage.tudelft.nl/19j49/t-SNE.html)), but the short answer is--it's hard to say...

Here's a longer explanation from a webinar I did yesterday where I demoed this: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmlj5uTUTFY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmlj5uTUTFY) (skip to 12:11 to get to the applicable section)

<comment><USER5> How are the word vectors generated? word2vec?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes sir, word2vec (edited parent)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Poked around the word cloud, but the output of the clustering doesn't seem to many any sense to me.

"boat" is by "scarecrow", "adopted", and "feelings"

"window" is by "insulted", "prize" and "arson"

Rotating around the word-in-question didn't pop up any more similar words.

t-SNE is known for producing immediately interpretable clusterings, but this seems a bit obscure.</comment>


Quantifying the Nightmare Scenarios - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/quantifying-the-nightmare-scenarios/ <comment><USER2> From the article: "In other words, option prices suggest that there is a very real chance of, dare I write it, another Great Depression."

I thought that option prices were mathematically priced primarily on the volatility of the underlying stock or index, with the market makers taking no position on the direction of the price change one way or another. This would make the statement above equivalent to "the recent drop in the market shows that there is a risk of a much larger drop", which seems sort of obvious.

Am I missing something deeper?

<comment><USER3> If you think about options as a form of insurance, then we can infer something about the marginal investors beliefs about various scenarios by the price they're willing to pay to protect themselves from them.

Right now, the risk-neutral expectation is that the S&P will appreciate by 5 to 30% over the next year, but the strong concern that the market will drop catastrophically drives up demand for insurance against a depression. So on average the options market looks pessimistic even though in some sense the median belief is that the market will go up.

This is not the way perceptions have to go, for example the greatest mass of investors might have been around -5% to -30% but a smaller group, convinced the market would quickly rebound to beyond its former glory, might produce a net effect of slightly rosy.

So in essence using options prices we can determine that in general investors are not thinking "yay, bargains" rather "yikes, mattress"</comment></comment>


Kovri – A secure, private, untraceable C++ implementation of the I2P network - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/monero-project/kovri <comment><USER2> One thing I love about cryptocurrencies is that it has created an economic incentive to accelerate hardening of internet communication.

I wager that TOR would still be extremely slow without the dark net markets and payment rails.

The I2P stewards have similarly has been affiliated with several cryptocurrency projects. But The Monero team's Kovri implementation of I2P will be the best.

<comment><USER3> Tor is fast because they have a birds eye view of the entire routing concensous where as i2p does not as it can not. The latency suffers as a result in i2p. That is why tor is faster, it's not because of coins.

I have considered adding such a thing for i2pd optionally enabled but there is no such interest from the community to maintain such entities.

<comment><USER4> Don't you think that clients' peer selection logic could be improved to build lower-latency tunnels? Perhaps an intuitive UI could be provided, allowing the user to tradeoff anonymity with latency.

<comment><USER3> I have such functionality in i2pd, what would help a lot are more hints on capacity bandwith and latency from the network. I added "aligned outbound tunnels" which make things MUCH more responsive and snappy. i think that lowering the latency on the network is probably the only way to make i2p faster again.

<comment><USER4> Can you contact me via: [https://apeace.github.io/contact.html](https://apeace.github.io/contact.html)

I've been reading the i2pd source the past few weeks and would love to pick your brain over a couple of emails!

<comment><USER3> sent

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not really fun to be down voted constantly but I guess I can't help but share my beliefs.

What we need more than a 0% trust and 100% anonymity is just a decentralized internet where so many nodes are not controlled by centralized organizations.

So while I2P and Monero etc are great, I think we can replace banks and credit card payments for most things with less stringent requirements.

<comment><USER6> sounds like you might like cjdns

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't get it they took I2P and just renamed it, why do people care about this? Their faq says "Kovri has become a unique, actively-developed, community-driven C++ I2P implementation with many improvements, security enhancements, and new features over its predecessor."

They claim its unique, cool whats unique about it? What are these improvements, security enhancements and new features? Would it not make more sense to list the new improvements, security enhancements and features? Their table "What does Kovri do/not do for you?" shows it can do everything I2P can do and nothing else, unless I am missing something.

Call me paranoid but renaming another project and then, marketing it as more secure and trustworthy without proof is what dodgy fuckers do.

<comment><USER8> Do your research before fucking other people, dude.

i2pd has been abandonned by their devs for roughly 6 months and they have not been available at all. Since the Monero team believed, i2p would be better than Tor, they forked i2pd to Kovri and started cleaning up the code and fixing bugs. Why not the official i2p Java client? Because of Java, which is not common in secure environments, fucks up Proxy settings or just ignores them eg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> With the recent bust of AlphaBay we know bitcoin mixers are vulnerable. It looks like Monero will take over as the favorite cryptocurrency of new markets especially with I2P integration.

<comment><USER10> I support your theory. For whatever that's worth. I've put some of my assets into Monero instead of other alt coins. When I researched the landscape of crypto currencies IMO Monero was best of breed regarding anonymity, privacy, and cryptography theory. Now of course time will tell if the bullet points of Monero regarding untraceable privacy hold true or not but from everything I've read that's the crypto coin I'm parking my Fiat in.

<comment><USER11> Just curious what made you opt for monero instead of dash or zcash?

<comment><USER8> I can tell you my reasons, but it's mainly the mandatory privacy, where every single transaction has to use RingCT and helps to protect the privacy of the whole network.

Zcash's very computing expensive shielded transactions are rarely used and no GUI (and mobile) wallets simply offer them. You can see this in their block explorer: [https://explorer.zcha.in/transactions](https://explorer.zcha.in/transactions) Here is some more information on their own forum: [https://forum.z.cash/t/low- percentage-of-total-shielded-zec-...](https://forum.z.cash/t/low-percentage- of-total-shielded-zec-as-indicator-of-lack-of-interest/12888/10) Most exchanges also don't accept shielded Zcash deposits/withdrawals.

DASH's private send is just similar to a bitcoin mixer and takes even more than 24 hours to finish, since the Masternodes have to wait for mixing partners for you. This mixing creates a shitload of transactions on chain, it were around 70 when I tested it lately and that's a huge overhead. That are probably the (main) reasons why it's rarely used and since Chainalysis, Blockseer and all the Bitcoin tracking companies have no troubles to track mixed transactions, like they did with Wanna Cry, I think it's only a matter of time to extend them for DASH with more adoption: [https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-exchange- shapeshift-h...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-exchange-shapeshift- helps-police-as-wannacry-attacker-converts-to-monero)

Summarising optional privacy makes where almost no one uses it, makes you suspect just for opting in for the privacy feature. It's also much easier to track just the few percent of private transactions by design.

<comment><USER10> You pretty much summed up my opinions as well. I view DASH like I view linux containers. They are taking something NOT designed to be secure and private/anonymous and _trying_ to retroactively bolt on anonymity and security to the existing bitcoin tech. Which is NOT now you secure something. It has to be designed in from the get go not baked in after the fact.

This is the problem with all the so called "secure anonymous" coins I looked at until I read up on Monero and how it works. Security and anonymity is baked in by design, not retrofitted after the fact which never works.

So as far as I can tell Monero is the only one that has this right. Now, again, time will tell if their technology choices actually deliver what they say it will deliver regarding anonymity and security.

But for now it's the only game in town as far as I am concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How does this compare to i2pd, a more mature C++ implementation of I2P?

<comment><USER13> The FAQ answers this: [https://github.com/monero-project/kovri- docs/blob/master/i18...](https://github.com/monero-project/kovri- docs/blob/master/i18n/en/faq.md)

<comment><USER14> Yet this is just one side of the split.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Monero Team is doing lots of cool things, and the proactive security testing they do is comforting. I'm excited to see what this brings to the project, and I applaud the devs for their hard work.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand-- what's the significance of an re-implementation of I2P in a memory unsafe language?

Also-- why all the comments about Monero? Is it the only altcoin that supports I2P?

<comment><USER17> Hey I write memory safe C++ - do others not? Only ignoring RAII and move semantics will give you unsafe code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Too bad they couldn't build it in anything safer than C++.

</comment><comment><USER19> If the first adjective is "secure", how to reconcile this with C++?

</comment><comment><USER20> This is why I've lost respect for lots of developers. I mean why the heck would someone re-implement a piece of code in memory unsafe language? We've a better language now, but this habit isn't dying very soon...

<comment><USER21> Your account is 2 hours old and _all_ of your comments consist of you complaining about C++/proselytising Rust. Please stop trolling.

<comment><USER20> What makes you think I'm trolling? Honestly, I'm tired of all these mediocre devs just pushing their keyboards in some inefficient, unsafe language and are totally unaware of the alternatives. If I'm showing them a greater alternative, am I trolling on this site? Can you show a single reply where I spoke something that doesn't holds true? I accept that there are certain opinions of every individuals that are not ought to match, certain disagreements and other things, but you should respect mine too.

<comment><USER8> Rust is god. We got it. Now come back to topic...

Btw. are we already again in these HTML / Flash wars where the second one was shilled as the only possible future for websites and incoming death for HTML? Oh wait, children can't even remember it... Search for it on Wikipedia (or probably even a printed encyclopedia).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: PJON 6.1 is out - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gioblu/PJON/releases/tag/6.1 <comment><AUTHOR> Ciao Shakna! I would say that calling PJON a serialization protocol is a little limitative. Thanks to Hackaday and Atmel blog publications, soon an year ago, the repository started having thousands of visits per month, it has been implemented in Python and C by other developers around the world, but is still not finished, or better it doesn't include all the features will have when finished. The first versions (in 2010) were almost totally unusable in the real world because a lot of bugs and inconsistencies, but it is almost 8 years I am linting, correcting and enhancing, before personally and in the last two years with the internet and github community. The protocol overhead depends on header configuration from 3 up to 19 bytes.

If you want to see something real applied on top, take a look to this project: [https://github.com/fredilarsen/ModuleInterface](https://github.com/fredilarsen/ModuleInterface)

</comment><comment><USER2> A serialisation protocol for Arduino, interesting.

But looking through the documentation, I couldn't find the two questions that immediately leaped to mind:

1\. Who is using this in the real world? Or has it gone through 6 major versions without any adoption at all? (Doing so is fine... But may mean the entire project is full of wasted effort).

2\. What's the added overhead? Measuring SRAM usage can be difficult, especially with gcc-avr and its black magic optimisations, but is especially necessary when considering abandoning the builtin protocols.

</comment><comment><USER3> PJSON is: "Digital communication framework for IOT. Compatible with Arduino, ESP8266 and Teensy."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What do you think about this????</comment>


Get Your Facebook Feed in your Inbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.fb2e.com

<comment><USER2> it is similar to a service that was mentioned on hacker news a week ago or so: <http://www.newsfeedemail.com/>

just putting that out there as a datapoint.</comment>