Why college students stop short of a degree - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/27/us-attn-andrea-education-dropouts-idUSBRE82Q0Y120120327

<comment><AUTHOR> The Harvard study mentioned in the article: [http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/features/2011/Pathway...](http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/features/2011/Pathways_to_Prosperity_Feb2011.pdf)</comment>


Two player Karateka using a 42 byte patch - <AUTHOR> http://retroconnector.com/karateka-two-player/ <comment><USER2> Jordan Mechner published his journals from the period when he made Karateka and Prince of Persia. I found them to be very inspirational.

The Making of Karateka [https://www.amazon.com/dp/1480297232/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1480297232/)

The Making of Prince of Persia [https://www.amazon.com/dp/1468093657/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1468093657/)

I recommend reading them in order.

<comment><USER3> Or just watch his GDC talk which is basically a story of becoming an adult. [https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014634/Classic-Game- Postmorte...](https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014634/Classic-Game-Postmortem- PRINCE-OF)

<comment><USER4> Just watched that. I had no idea Prince of Persia was not a hit when it was first released. Did poorly on Apple II because the market was dying, did poorly on PC because it was a conversion and retailers looked at the poor Apple II sales and assumed it would have poor sales, and then finally on the Mac it came out just as there was enough Mac sales to have customers wanting good software.

Once again it seems that releasing on the right platform at the right time is super important for success.

What does everyone think is the right platform right now (or emerging within the next couple of years), especially for an Indie title? People don't seem to play web games much anymore, Steam is flooded with junk, Mobile seems to be totally saturated, Nintendo Switch seems promising right now but it's starting to go down the same road as Steam. VR seems to be slow to get moving (and looks like it might remain a niche for several more years, at least). Are there any good options to get in at the right time like he did?

<comment><USER5> As you say, the real issue is discoverability, but I don't think the problem is the "junk", as much the large number of perfectly average and acceptably fun games released every day.

I read Mechner's journals a few years ago, and they were illuminating in how basically as an Indie developer at the time you needed not only the willpower and creativeness to make a game, but also have the connections/luck of getting it published (no Steam, no Apple Store... no Internet!) and you also had to dominate the technical aspect and know the underlying hardware, with very little information around (again, no Internet).

If you could manage all this (!) your game was going to be noticed, since there were not so many "good" games being released in general, much less masterpieces like PoP.

Nowadays, the barriers of entry are minimal, there are multi-platform engines with highly refined tools, with plenty of tutorials about pretty much everything, publishing is pretty much an automated process, that gives millions of people instant access to your game.

There was little chance a few years ago of a "good" indie title going unnoticed, nowadays it must be truly excellent to get the spotlight, and even then... it's easy to spot junk, much less to spot a great game in the middle of a sea of perfecty good ones.

<comment><USER6> > but also have the connections/luck of getting it published

That or the guts to take the risk and invest one's own (or, even worse, lent) money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had a "76 in 1" cassette and my friend a "63 in 1" with exactly same games with some repeats. One day I used a pencil (graphite) and randomly drew a connection between some circuit line on the cassette and mine got converted in "63 in 1".

I was 12-13 back then. It was fun.

<comment> orbital-decay Hah, this is how it all started for me. I went a bit further and tried to reverse engineer the purpose of different pins in a NES cartridge, by grounding them one by one in a running system with a small incandescent lamp from a flashlight to avoid short circuits. I've got all kinds of crashes and artifacts which gave a hint to their purpose. Thankfully, the NES was resilient enough for me not to kill it or burn my house down.

Still, I assumed a cartridge to be a simple ROM with a plain addressing scheme, which it wasn't. Only a year after that I've read an EE book with occasional NES architecture details which all made sense in the context of my experiments.

That's why I've taught my son to program with a simple self-designed embedded system first. You can almost physically see its parts moving, no black magic involved.

<comment><USER8> The system you designed for your son sounds really interesting and fun for a beginner. Have you written about this anywhere? I'd love to read more.

<comment> orbital-decay Oh I'm not a professional, so this wasn't a super serious project. It's a 1801-series CPU (an old soviet single-chip LSI-11 clone, chosen because of the beautiful PDP-11 ISA) with 64KB of SRAM, an LCD from Aliexpress, an RS-232 controller, some LEDs in key points to illustrate the inner workings, a pulse- modulated speaker, and some discrete logic to glue all this together. It has no flash/ROM so you have to load the program from a PC each time. It took me ~three months to build in my spare time, including the PCB manufacturer round trip time. The biggest issue was making a modern C compiler work for this CPU, but in the end I've even got a legacy Forth implementation working (more or less). Forth is great on this ISA because one word translates precisely to one machine instruction.

We used it to drive our Christmas lights the last time, then to make some simple platform games. I was trying to make MicroPython run on this board without much success, so we'll probably have to drop it in favor of full- featured Python.

There was a lot of bugs in this thing, which made it even more fun to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ah, I loved Karateka when I was young. That was a hard game!

<comment><USER10> It was awesome on my Atari ST. That feeling when you got to the end, thought you'd saved the princess and she kicked your arse because you were in a fighting stance. Utter genius.

<comment><USER11> I had it for C64 and it took me quite a while to finally get to the princess. I think I cried a little when she killed me.

<comment><USER10> Best and worst ending to a game ever. I still remember the music...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm curious why it uses the keyboard instead of joysticks. Did the Apple II only have one joystick port? I don't know much about its hardware.

<comment><USER13> Apple joysticks were these terrible analog things that were completely useless for anything other than flight simulator. Anything that needed gamepad-like input just used the keyboard.

<comment><USER14> Designed by Jony Ive?

[http://appletothecore.me/files/pasted- graphic-1232chjoy.jpg](http://appletothecore.me/files/pasted- graphic-1232chjoy.jpg)</comment></comment></comment>


Instant Pot Understands the History of Women's Labor in the Kitchen - <AUTHOR> https://www.bustle.com/p/the-instant-pot-understands-the-history-of-womens-labor-in-the-kitchen-19276122 <comment><USER2> Fantastic article, if only the inventor of the juicero had read it</comment>


Townscaper - <AUTHOR> https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/ <comment><USER2> This is so fascinating in many ways.

This little indie game is having a blast, and reviews are raving about it.

I draw two main conclusions:

1) There is enormous interest in how we build cities, how we live in them, and how badly designed most of our cities are. It also happens to be a passion of mine.

2) Games don't need to have the best graphics, the biggest budgets, to be engaging.</comment>


Stephen Jay Gould, Samuel Morton and Investigative Bias - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303936704576397771567839728.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us_business&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

<comment> barry-cotter Stephen Jay Gould, expert on snails, eminently radical political scientist and master polemicist, mistaken by many for a knowledgeable evolutionary biologist because he was a very good writer.

If you want some critiques of him you can look at this explanation of his at best extremely shoddy and more likely deliberately deceptive statistical analysis here.

<http://johnhawks.net/taxonomy/term/700>

It's a commentary on the paper the WSJ is talking about.

Money quote

"Here is the most sympathetic reading I can give to these facts. Gould systematically selected data from Morton's tables that tended to inflate the measured volumes of Native American crania. He did so by averaging some group means instead of overall means (although Lewis and colleagues show that Morton himself had used group means for many comparisons, contrary to Gould's claims), by excluding some small-skulled groups entirely (claiming sample size as a criterion), and by omitting crania that had not been measured in the earlier, seed-based analysis. There is no logical reason for these choices other than selection bias -- Gould began with a conclusion about Morton's unconscious motivations, and worked to confirm that conclusion by selecting some data and omitting contrary data."

Paul Krugman's takedown of Gould

<http://www.pkarchive.org/theory/evolute.html>

"What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - <USER2> consistently misleading."

If you want some more this is good too.

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/kv/beware_of_stephen_j_gould/>

As an aside if someone can explain to me what the hell the big deal with spandrels is I'd appreciate it. AIUI they're features that arise because they're very strongly associated with something that's selected for but have no survival value themselves. They can then be co-opted for later evolution if some minor mutations make them into something that does, in and of itself, have survival value.

</comment><comment><USER3> Its worth noting that the major example in the wsj piece above, that of clinical trials, does not say what they think it does.

Essentially, the doctors involved do not change the results magically by taking the funding. The real explanation is far simpler -only the positive trials are released (barring FOI requests). While I accept the articles major point, the examples they choose are not good exemplars for this point.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do the magisteria of science and money overlap?</comment>


The Farm Automation Breakthrough - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimvinoski/2019/05/06/the-farm-automation-breakthrough-bringing-the-high-tech-west-coast-and-rural-rust-belt-together/ <comment><USER2> Deere bought Blue River, which does this. Deere packages it as a wide implement attached to a tractor. Cameras look down, recognize weeds, and zap them with targeted weed killer. About four companies are already in this space.

It's sold as "weeding as a service". If you need large-scale weeding, Pacific Ag Rentals in Salinas, CA, will rent you a Robovator. That's made in Denmark, and Pacific Ag Rentals beefed it up for serious use. It kills weeds by chopping them out of the ground with computer-controlled knives. No chemicals, so, "organic".

Making these things rugged enough to do the job is a problem. The R&D projects tend to have flimsy mechanical engineering. You want to be able to pressure- wash the thing. Dust-tight and water-tight are solved problems, but most machine learning people have never dealt with that.

<comment><USER3> > "organic"

I've been going to my local farmers' market for a while. It's interesting to see what people use "organic" as a proxy for. For some, they want to support small family farms. Others will settle for "no spray" produce that's not certified organic. Some people are scared to death of GMOs, and that's one way to avoid them. Organic eggs are also free-range (but it' still not as nice as you'd picture), and there's minimal use of antibiotics during production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are a lot of companies working on something similar. But I hate to disappoint everyone thinking that this will mean the end of herbicides, it will not.

But there are a lot of crops, vegetables mostly, that are hand weeded. It's going to replace a lot of migrant labor. The main reason it won't replace herbicides will be cost. I'm not even certain that it would make economic sense right now for organically grown corn and soybeans.

There also may be problems with it in the Midwest. In California they turn on the water when they need it. What happens if it rains for three weeks in Illinois and the machine can't enter the field? Will it be able to remove fifteen inch tall weeds as easily as those a quarter inch tall? How fast will it operate under those conditions? If I have 2500 acres in that situation the weeds might be five feet tall by the time the machine gets to the last fields.

But if someone makes a successful business of commercial weed removal then like all tech the cost will come down over time, perhaps opening up the much wider market.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely we should expect them to solve easy/valuable problems first. Maybe that's fancy organic vegetables in a greenhouse, which certainly sounds much easier than 5-foot weeds growing in a thousand acres of deep mud!

But we farmed for a long time before inventing weedkiller. First by recognising weeds & pulling them out. Later by plowing, which is really just substituting mechanical work (from oxen) for human labor (and smarts). I don't see a fundamental reason that robot-weeding couldn't ultimately replace most chemicals & most plowing, but obviously not next year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems like kind of a fluff piece, I don't see any details about the actual technology. The whole article is about how proud the company is to be partnering with midwestern farmers. Can anyone provide a link or more information about how they are able to distinguish weed from crops, and by what mechanical process the weeds are removed?

<comment><USER7> Will share links once I find them.

But the technology is: A library of weed images is used to check if the thing visual to the camera is a weed. If it is, then pluck it or spray chemicals (here: pluck).If not, move on.

<comment><USER8> Isn't this creating huge selection pressure for weird-looking weeds?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm still waiting for the version of this that removes invasive crops from non farm land. So DOT could unleash it on any road side, removing kudzu etc and allowing natural plants to take back over. Or under power lines, only letting trees with a max 10 - 15 ft height survive so further maintenance is reduced in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER10> This tech seems to have the potential to decentralize farming somewhat. The same machine with a few attachments and software options could also cultivate, plant, irrigate, debug (organically with frikin' laser beams), and harvest. Since software is the most expensive part of the problem it could be turned into a small retail device in not too many years. Buy a gardenbot like you now buy a lawnmower. Add seeds, compost, power and water, let it loose in the backyard and just wait for it to stack vegetables in a bin.

<comment><USER11> Machinery is pretty expensive in its own right. Also tractors already have the ability to pull multiple different implements behind them. The only thing novel about this is that it's somewhat autonomous. Even that isn't terribly novel since most large scale farming uses GPS guided steering at this point. Ag is very very high-tech already.

<comment><USER12> The automated equipment is still so expensive hardly any of it is owned or used by family farms. The thing was that 10+ years ago the automated equipment was owned by very large ventures (large cooperatives and bigger) that shared or sold service only, traveling the region with the equipment to sell that service. Pretty sure that case has hardly changed. Travel the country and you see that most farms don't have the latest equipment rolling or sitting on their land.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are some incredible maker-farmers involved in ROS. Not downplaying the people and tech in this article but farmboys with no formal education are building computers and microcontrollers run by ROS that strap onto 30 year old farm equipment and make it autonomous.

<comment><USER14> Very rarely does that translate into meaningful venture capital funding and make no mistake, it will take hundreds of millions of upfront investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How is this machine powered? I did not see a bank of solar panels. So are they plugging it in at night? Fuel costs (electric or chemical) would, I think, make this a hard sell against large spray boom operations.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is anyone else concerned that food production is being consolidated into the hands of a few massive corporations? Somehow this is more troubling to me than the energy, automobile, or computer industries

</comment><comment><USER17> Congrats to the marketing team at FarmWise for landing this Forbes piece. There was nothing really interesting or useful in this article at all.</comment>


Do founders have to have a miserable life in order to succeed? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mkagenius/do-founders-have-to-have-a-miserable-life-in-order-to-succeed-bf46f764d535

<comment><USER2> Author only quoted a single source, so I'd argue that the hypothesis is invalid.

IMO, natural born entrepreneurs don't see it as being a zombie or miserable, and creatives that found their way to entrepreneurship can. It really depends on personality type.</comment>


How to Control a PC in Thin Air - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20130723/how-to-control-a-pc-in-thin-air/?mod=atd_reviewbox

<comment><USER2> :)</comment>


What are the lesser known but cool data structures? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/500607/what-are-the-lesser-known-but-cool-data-structures <comment><USER2> Skip lists and splay trees, two frequent suggestions on this thread, are "lesser known" for a reason: skip lists because for any given skip list implementation there is most probably an encoding of balanced binary trees that outperforms it, even in concurrency, and splay trees because _every_ balanced binary tree outperforms them --- and, in order to avoid writing and testing balancing code, you have to trade off the fact that _reading_ the tree modifies the data structure.

Judy arrays came up once too; there's a really excellent critique of Judy arrays here:

<http://www.nothings.org/computer/judy/>

(Long story short: you can get comparable performance from a straightforward hash table, and Judy Arrays have to be tuned to the microarchitecture).

Favorite data structure not cited here:

Aguri trees, which marry a bounded-size radix trie (like you'd use in a software routing table) to an LRU list, and automatically synthesize aggregates (like, 10.0.0.0/16 from 1,000 observations across all IPs) from the pattern of insertion. They're best known in traffic analysis, but we've used them on in runtime memory analysis as well.

<comment><USER3> _for any given skip list implementation there is most probably an encoding of balanced binary trees that outperforms it_

Not just probably, absolutely. Skip lists are probably pretty balanced, which is always less balanced than actually pretty balanced. Their sole claim to fame is their simplicity in implementation compared to actual self-balancing trees.

<comment><USER4> Not so! There's one thing you can do with skip lists that I don't know of any easy way to do with other data structures. Suppose you want a priority queue, and you have a bunch of cores, and these cores want to insert into the queue and remove the minimum element concurrently. How do you implement this to allow fast concurrent access from a lot of threads?

First, there's the approach everybody remembers from Intro to Algorithms: use a binary min-heap. It's guaranteed to be balanced, so you get O(lg n) time insertions and delete-the-minimum operations, with low constant factors. Nice! But how do you make it concurrent? You can put a lock on the whole thing and only let one thread use it at once, but that's slow. You could use fancy fine- grained locking, but there will still be inter-thread memory conflicts arising from the heapify operations you need to maintain the heap invariant. There has been some work on this, and they've come up with some decent ideas, but it still has scaling problems.

Now look at skip lists. It's a randomized sorted list data structure, and it claims to be, as you put it, probably pretty balanced. Various threads can insert concurrently without breaking that "probably pretty balanced" property. The memory read- and write-sets are very local, and it's possible to do all this with lock-free synchronization. The end result is a priority queue data structure that scales to hundreds of cores. And the code doesn't fry your brain, which is a plus. There's a pretty neat paper about it here:

<http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~itayl/ipdps.pdf>

By the way, if you happen to be using a processor with hardware transactional memory support (you aren't, yet), then this code becomes even easier to write, as you don't have to worry about how to do lock-free synchronization. I almost felt cheated by how simple it was.

<comment><USER5> What and where are you working that you have access to a processor with hardware transactional memory support?

<comment><USER4> Only in simulations, I'm afraid. As far as I know, the only processors to have HTM support are Sun's Rock processor (now discontinued by Oracle, I think) and the Vega chips from Azul Systems. I don't have access to either of these, and neither of them have the HTM enhancements that I'm studying. The state of the art in research is a lot more complex than the playing-it-safe state of the art in production chips.

That said, future HTM systems have a lot of potential, and I think we'll see them come into wider use eventually. The main problem with them seems to be that existing software ecosystems aren't written with HTM in mind, so you get pathological memory access patterns slowing things down. But with some minor enhancements to the HTM design (like a load instruction which immediately adds its destination address to the write set of a transaction) and compiler and runtime support, and a reasonable set of concurrent data structures, HTM can absolutely fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nobody mentioned the unrolled linked list, a simple, useful, and often- overlooked data structure.

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

The idea is the same as a linked list, but instead of just one element in each node, it stores an entire array. This simple change fixes the two biggest problems with linked lists — memory overhead and cache efficiency. It's also easy to tweak to be more "array-like" or more "list-like" as needed.

<comment><USER4> At one point, Python tried to move to something similar for their standard list data structure:

<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3128/>

The BList is similar to a B+Tree. It was meant to act like an array for small lists, but to make operations like append, concatenation, and slicing faster. It was a pretty cool combination of arrays (for memory compactness and good cache performance and small constant factors) with trees, for the asymptotic improvements they can bring.

Sadly, it didn't take off, as it would have broken backward compatibility with extension modules.

<comment><USER7> Some lisp and scheme implementations have used it as well, partly spurred by this 1994 paper: <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=182453>

(I don't know offhand if any widely used ones currently do, though.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ZDDs. A ZDD is a DAG of outdegree two where each node represents a set of subsets of some arbitrarily-ordered domain. A node's left child contains all subsets which lack the smallest element in those subsets; its right child contains all subsets which do contain the smallest element.

This allows for tremendous compression of search spaces -- one example Knuth gave in a talk I went to a few weeks ago was representing all five-letter words in the English (represented as subsets of {a_1, a_2, ..., z_4, z_5}, where e.g.: {k_1, n_2, u_3, t_4, h_5} represents "knuth"), and efficiently making queries such as finding all words that, when a 'b' is replaced with an 'o', yield another word. More impressive to me was representing all of a certain class of tilings with only a few hundred thousand nodes, when the total number of such tilings was, IIRC, on the order of 10^20.

<comment><USER9> It's not all good however. Try representing all valid Sudokus with a ZDD

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> By far the coolest data structure is the soft heap ([http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/15859-f07/papers/chazelle-soft- he...](http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/15859-f07/papers/chazelle-soft-heap.pdf)).

From wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_heap>

In computer science, the soft heap, designed by Bernard Chazelle in 2000, is a variant on the simple heap data structure. By carefully "corrupting" (increasing) the keys of at most a certain fixed percentage of values in the heap, it is able to achieve amortized constant-time bounds for all five of its operations:

<comment><USER11> Off-topic but meh. The guy is a frighteningly funny and shrewd to boot. See any of his posts at A Tiny Revolution <http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/>

Oh a thanks for the heads-up on this data structure ljlolel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not sure if kd-trees are lesser known, but they are neat. I only learned about them recently so to me they were "lesser known".

"In computer science, a kd-tree (short for k-dimensional tree) is a space- partitioning data structure for organizing points in a k-dimensional space. kd-trees are a useful data structure for several applications, such as searches involving a multidimensional search key (e.g. range searches and nearest neighbor searches). kd-trees are a special case of BSP trees." -- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kd-tree>

<comment><USER13> I second kd-trees. I also only recently learned them, and at first encounter thought that they are in concept similar to binary space partitions used in computer graphics. Nearest neighbor search can be implemented using a pretty simple two-dimensional kd-tree. Useful for things like finding the n closest neighboring points for a given point on a plane (used for mapping applications, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nothing makes me want to hire developers like reading lists of algorithms and discovering I don't understand them.

<comment><USER15> If only the daily grind of programming would require interesting algorithms more often. Certainly not the case for web development :-(

<comment><USER16> The most practical lesser known types for my day to day programming are:

\- element trees (etrees), partiocularly lxml implementation. Simple insert and append operations at xpaths (eg /body/html/table/tr[3]/td[7]), iterating over children, accessing element properties as object properties.

\- dependency graphs (aka graphs). I have no idea why they're called graphs (I did business, not CS) but anywhere you have dependencies to store and work out (say for a project management app, or a packaging tool) these are the best fit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> An earlier HN item discussed an interesting one (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1156628>)

</comment><comment><USER18> I didn't see any mention of "Threaded Trees": <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_binary_tree>

They're discussed in detail in volume one of Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming".

</comment><comment><USER19> it's hard to qualify 'lesser known', I'm not sure if red-black trees qualify, but they're certainly cool:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-black_tree>

<comment><USER4> I like relaxed balanced red-black trees. In those, you're allowed to violate the balancing conditions; you can go back and fix the violations later. This is useful if you want to use them concurrently. The balancing transformations tend to cause lots of contention between threads, so deferring that rebalancing for a later, clean-up thread can really help with scalability.

<comment><USER19> I only learned about this fairly recently:

<http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/>

And I feel pretty stupid for not having realized earlier that something like that almost has to exist.

<comment><USER4> Heh; it hit me that way, too. It seems obvious in retrospect. I found that this page has a nice mini-introduction:

<http://www.imada.sdu.dk/~kslarsen/RelBal/>

If requests that use a red-black tree tend to come in bursts, then you can probably get speedups by deferring rebalancing for idle periods, even single- threaded. That's pretty darn cool. I would like to see some programming language runtime that watched rb-tree access patterns and decided if this would be a good idea at runtime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Markov Chain: [http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/HTML/markovchain.htm...](http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/HTML/markovchain.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> I found a lot of the data structures in "Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications" interesting

</comment><comment><USER22> happy to see disjoint sets in there</comment>


Facebook now informs the sender if you've read their message - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=316575021742112#How-do-I-know-if-a-friend-has-seen-a-message-I-sent?

<comment><USER2> This is a very slippery slope for FB, I feel. No real way to hide from those you want to ignore now.

Next up: Let you see who is searching for you / browsed your photo albums / etc.. ???

Very "badoo-esque" I think- Not that its a bad thing, it just feels out of place here. FB is not a dating site.

<comment><USER3> _No real way to hide from those you want to ignore now._

Then, umm, don't add them as friends.

BBM has statuses for delivered (the message has arrived on the recipients device) and read (they have actually opened it). It's very very useful. You know at a glance where a conversation stands, you never have to "follow-up" to check a message arrived, you know if a message isn't in state D not to bother because they'll be out of reception, etc. It basically makes a BBM conversation much more natural than on SMS, or any of the big chat networks.

<comment><USER4> > Then, umm, don't add them as friends.

This completely ignores the reality of how people use Facebook, as if one could partition every personal relationship in your life into two homogeneous groups "friends" and "not friends."

Yes, I know you can have friend lists on Facebook, but this feature clearly _embraces_ its uniformity.

<comment><USER3> It's worth noting that G+ was intended to solve the fine-grained partitioning of people, and yet, no-one I know uses it regularly. It's FB for friends, LinkedIn for work contacts, for most people.

<comment><USER4> > It's worth noting that G+ was intended to solve the fine-grained > partitioning of people, and yet, no-one I know uses it regularly.

So... you're arguing that people choose social networks based on more than the presence of a particular implementation of a single feature? Groundbreaking addition to your "all your friends are the same" theory.

<comment><USER3> No, I'm arguing that partitioning of friends groups isn't a serious (enough) problem that anyone cares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a way to get around letting Facebook know you've read someone's message:

I'm one of those people who likes the little red notifications showing when I've received a FB message. I don't check FB's messages often, so without that notification, I forget to follow up on FB messages.

My work-around is to have FB send me an email notification whenever someone writes me a message via FB. Then I read that message in my email reader instead of through the FB UI.

I also have all email images turned off for performance and privacy reasons.

It seems to me you could do this too, and avoid having FB inform the sender that you've read their message.

<comment><USER6> Here's another way to get around letting Facebook know you've read someone's message:

Delete your facebook account.

<comment><USER7> Sure, and you can cure a rash on your arm by cutting the arm off.

<comment><USER8> Actually the rash is probably some type of bacterial or fungal infection that will live on the arm for quite a while regardless of whether or not that arm is connected to your body.

Most other causes of rash would allow that rash to reappear on another appendage. Only if the rash results from contact with something (poison ivy,etc.) would cutting off the arm 'cure' it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's amazing how Facebook can still come up with more reasons for me not to use them. For me, it's a feature of asynchronous communication that you're not pressured to read it immediately and you get think time between reading and replying without the other end getting agitated.

</comment><comment><USER10> No! It's of no interest to the sender when somebody has read their message. When building our invitation application we also had a feature that showed when somebody opened your invitation. But we quickly noticed that it was annoying because when you knew the sender would be notified, you wouldn't open the invitation to read it if you weren't sure you had the time to respond. It's the same with WhatsApp, the "social" pressure to respond because the other person knows you have read the message.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ugh. The feature has no purpose besides notifying people you're ignoring or haven't yet gotten around to. Not to mention that it's way too close to OKCupid's design where you can see visitors; I'd like to browse with some semblance of privacy.

<comment><USER12> If you're roaming around on Facebook's turf, you should probably keep your privacy expectations low.

<comment><USER11> Admittedly, and I avoid it as much as possible. But while pretty much everyone assumes that anything they do online will be public, they don't assume that anywhere they go will be public too. Passive browsing has a very strong expectation of privacy and if you dismantle that without strong warnings ahead of time, some people are going to get burned badly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the right answer might be writing a tool that uses the Facebook API to "open" your message and immediately reply saying "OpenAllMessages just opened your message. The actual person will read it when they get around to it."

<comment><USER14> While a cheeky solution, I can almost guarantee FB would block it, citing some sort of TOS clause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> AOL did this back in the 90's for any mail sent within the confines of its walled garden. You could also _unsend_ a message.

At the time, I believe the purpose was to engender a sense of trust in "the new medium of email." Obviously that's not the purpose of the implementation on FB.

So, what _is_ the purpose?

Maybe it's the extremely late hour, but my cynical feeling is that this seems really a psychologically driven feature... driven by some kind of awkward, socially obsessive mindset.

<comment><USER16> If someone hasn't read your message in a month that means a different thing than no response for a month. Some would assume you said the wrong thing, etc. Also remember Facebook is software- which can fail. Maybe this is also a way to help reduce message delivery failure- with email you might get a message bounce back if the send failed. If a Facebook message failed to deliver due to bugs, hardware failure, etc how would a user know? If they don't know they probably won't complain to the FB message API developer/manager who has a "can't reproduce", "intermittent", "sometimes occurs" bug.

<comment><USER17> If it's important you'll find another way to contact them.

The logic behind using it to show if they fail or not doesn't work. The system that would identify if a message was sent would be tied into the messaging system; They should have this if it's possible, though they don't need to make the results known.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone seen this happen in chat yet (I don't use FB chat much)? The example image shows it in a group chat (and the text also says "That way, you always know who got the message, and who didn't.", which semi-implies multiple receivers) - does it also happen with just one-on-one chat or is it possible it only happens in group chat? Doing this in group chat seems at least somewhat less invasive, as each person is less likely to be expected to reply in a group chat (and hence wouldn't be as likely to be interpreted as "ignoring" the sender and might have more common legitimate purposes like, as the example image shows, updating people on meeting times/locations).

<comment><USER19> Yes, I saw it a day or two ago, in a one-on-one chat. And now I feel bad for not having responded to someone else when I was busy, as they may have received a similar notice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Aren't they shooting themselves in the foot with this? People seem to love checking out their acquaintances, so enabling some mild "stalking" seems to be part of FB's appeal. If that becomes visible and thus awkward, it could make them a less attractive platform.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is like Outlooks read-receipts, which I refuse to use or [immediately] acknowledge when someone attaches one.

For those that want to be slightly evil, save all these messages in your archived folder, and at the end of the year - select all, read all: and you'll hear screams from across the office from all the guilty parties that attach read receipts as they will get their inbox flooded from all of your confirmations.

<comment><USER8> I love this suggestion!

I always leave Outlook set to 'Prompt' me for read receipts. That way I know which people are annoying. I always DENY.

Read-Receipts have to be the most passive aggressive feature ever coded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Want to show your discontempt? Click on "Was this answer useful?" Then, "I didn't like the answer" (from memory).

<comment><USER23> contempt + discontent = discontempt? ;-)

<comment><USER22> Wow. English really is a broken language. Thanks for the fix. I'll leave my comment as-is for posterity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As someone that doesn't like facebook, I find this a very useful feature.

I rarely ever check facebook, don't have it on my phone, don't get their e-mails, etc, but haven't deleted it just yet because maybe there are some people from my past that I don't communicate with that I might like to some day.

People who are on facebook all the time don't understand that not everyone who has an account will always see their messages, and even though I've repeatedly told family members to e-mail me, they still try to send me messages.

This feature would help people to realize that I'm not actually reading facebook messages on a regular basis.

People that want to contact me, know how to contact me. Family members.. well they're not always the brightest bunch.

</comment><comment><USER25> Good thing I get Facebook messages by email. Even if they're using an email image bug to set the "read" status, I'll just avoid downloading images. Sorry, but when I read your message to me is up to me, and whether or not I read it is private.

</comment><comment><USER26> There have been times where I've actually wished they had a feature like this. Now that it's here, can't say I care for it much. In some cases, this denies me the opportunity to move at my own pace and come up with a well advised response.

</comment><comment><USER27> What's funny is, not having this feature is one of the main reasons I moved over from myspace. Having your every message now visibly tracked is not a good way to entice new people, who are worried about their privacy, to stick around.

Does this move mean that FB has reached its saturation point and now the best way to instantiate more clicks is to prey on our insecurities? Who knows. However, it does feel like I've read this script somewhere before. If we're lucky, maybe next we can see how many times our profile has been viewed.

<comment><USER28> By this action, I think they're assuming a closeness in relationships that doesn't always exist. I tend to read messages from close actual friends fairly quickly, but messages from people I have friended who aren't really friends will get read ... maybe: maybe next week, maybe in a couple of months, maybe never. I don't feel that those relationships need any notification of this either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If I have Facebook in a background tab, and a message appears, will it say i read it? I keep Facebook in a background tab 24x7, but only look at Facebook about once every 2 or 3 days.

<comment><USER30> Find out and report back, please!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is like those horrible read receipts in Outlook. When I read and reply to a message is my business. Facebook is just going to create an atmosphere where the sender gets miffed because the receiver read the message and didn't reply for x hours/days and the receiver is going to resent the sender and Facebook for creating this obligation which they have to deal with now so as not to offend the sender.

</comment><comment><USER30> Isn't the messaging xmpp based? Does my xmpp client tell fb that I read a message? I understand this can work on the web where fb has full control.

<comment><USER32> Yes, FB messaging is XMPP, and whether your client tells fb or not obviously depends on your client, specifically whether it implements XEP-0184 (still in draft) or not:

<http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0184.html>

<comment><USER33> Not sure how this is _obvious_ to people who don't follow XMPP draft discussions.

<comment><USER32> Sorry, didn't mean to be rude. I meant that it was obvious that it was up to the client to send read receipts or not (you could easily just take an open source XMPP client and comment out the line that sends read receipts), not that the relevant XMPP draft was obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A SpySpace style add on for Facebook (a hacked together java/action/?script exploiting piece of code that trapped users viewing your page, their ip, clipboard, etc) would net Facebook a large chunk of revenue as an add on feature.

I loved having SpySpace installed, certainly made MySpace, and trolling friends based off the contents of their clipboards, a whole lot of (somewhat nebulous) fun.

</comment><comment><USER35> FWIW, I tested this a bit with a friend, and it only shows that you've read the message if you're signed in to FB chat. I always stay offline and the sender was not able to see the read-receipt.

</comment><comment><USER36> There's the email hack where you can insert an image and check the server logs later to see if (and how many times) it was viewed. Its a hack, and not a feature, for a reason. :\

<comment> mike-cardwell Most sane email clients have automatic loading of remote content disabled by default. The iOS client doesn't. There are loads of similar tricks to the img tag one. Many clients which attempt to disable the automatic loading of remote content fail in different ways. I built an automated web based tool which sends you a specially crafted email which attempts many of these tricks. You can see it here: <https://emailprivacytester.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've used other online communities that have implemented this feature. It's creepy, esp. when you get messages from people that you would prefer to silently ignore.

</comment><comment><USER38> this is just for messages directed at people personally.

I don't see it as being that much different to read receipts or any other form of messaging software

<comment><USER39> The difference is you can't turn it off.

People have different expectations when using this software. I think I've logged on once in the past 6 months. A heavy user who sends me a message and expects, but does not see, a read receipt may think I'm deliberately giving them the cold shoulder.

I want the freedom to not respond or read in privacy. Let them think it was spam filtered or lost in the shuffle.

Yet another reason Facebook is not for me.

<comment><USER40> Sounds like quite the opposite. If I sent you a message, and saw there was no read receipt, I'll assume you haven't logged in. Without it, I assume you read it and didn't reply...

<comment><USER39> Like I said, people have different expectations. You can also see when people are logged into Facebook because they are available to chat with. How would you react if they were logged in but you didn't have a read receipt? Or there was a receipt but they didn't respond?

Anyhow, this is all just proving the point. Read receipts introduce a piece of "evidence" that is bound to be misinterpreted. So I don't like them and they're yet another feature hostile to some customers in Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I also haven't found a way to turn it off.

<comment><USER41> I think I read somewhere that FB embed sound tags in their html to simulate the images trick.

<comment> mike-cardwell Yes, they use the bgsound tag. That's one of the many tests that the Email Privacy Tester uses: <https://emailprivacytester.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Well, there goes my use of Facebook messages. There is a reason SMS and email read-notifications were failures.

</comment><comment><USER43> You can have Facebook email your messages to you, and just read them there without the other party knowing.

<comment><USER44> Facebook knows when you open your emails too. [http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/06/facebook-knows-when-you- ope...](http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/06/facebook-knows-when-you-open-their- emails-how-creepy-silent-sounds/)

<comment><USER43> yikes, creepy. Glad I use Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> IMO, this isn't a big deal? Don't most mobile messaging apps do this, like BBM, Kik, etc etc.?

<comment><USER46> There's a different starting expectation: Anything that fits in the "instant messaging" batch is often used when people wants immediate interaction.

It annoys me to no end - being old school enough to finding it completely acceptable to send a question to someone over IM, and expect them to get it and deal with it later, while many of my co-workers etc. will start any IM conversation with "are you there?" or "hi" and expect a back and forth to confirm this is "live" before telling me what it's about, and effectively removing the choice of dealing with it right away. That's a substitute for the system telling them the message has or will be read.

With that usage pattern - as a slightly less intrusive substitute for a phone call or face to face encounter - knowing that you're not talking to an empty chair helps.

This change effectively shifts Facebook messages further towards the IM spectrum away from the e-mail/letter spectrum. Many e-mail systems support read-receipts, but most people never use them, exactly because a large part of sending an e-mail is that you acknowledge the recipient may want to deal with the message in their own time, or perhaps not at all.

And that's probably why Facebook wants this change: To increase user engagement by getting users to feel more of an obligation to reply and to reply quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> it used to be like this with phpbb, so it is not a news really. but as bad as phpbb was, this is annoying too.

fb should make it an option in the privacy settings, as it is with email systems where you can opt out from the message receipts.

<comment><USER48> It still is, as of the latest version. Messages can be edited or deleted up until the point where they've been read. Then they're moved from your 'outbox' to a 'sent' folder.

I'm not entirely certain of what my opinion on this sort of thing really is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> How do I turn this off?

</comment><comment><USER50> Is this only for group messages?</comment>


Emergences: A Talk by Danny Hillis - <AUTHOR> https://www.edge.org/conversation/w_daniel_hillis-emergences <comment><USER3> FYI, Danny Hillis is a pioneer of large scale parallel computing ("Connection Machine", he hired Richard Feynman to help him with that project), the author of the book that got me interested in computers ("The Pattern on the Stone"), and a researcher in evolutionary programming ("Co-evolving parasites improve simulated evolution as an optimization procedure")

<comment><USER4>
       Co-evolving parasites

This paper strikes me as the earliest manifestation of what would later become GANs (generative adversarial networks). Yes, the mechanism is different (GAs vs NNs), but the spirit (having a competitive mechanism for speeding up local search) is similar.

<comment><USER5> One individual that has always interested me - and for some reason, has seemed to be "black-holed" by those in computer science (but maybe that is my own perception of things) is Hugo de Garis:

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

A relatively eccentric person, in the late 1990s - early 2000s he along with others created a hardware system called the CAM Brain Machine (CBM) - his bio above contains more information about it. Numerous papers regarding it were published, some of which can still be found on the internet today.

The machine itself never achieved the successes he marketed it as being able to achieve, but it did seem like an interesting project. Much like Babbage, though, de Garis was constantly moving to "sell" the system to get more government grants to do more research with the machine, hopping from one place to another as the grants (or the government's patience) ran out and cancelled the project.

Perhaps that's why you don't here much about him any longer:

A combination of his eccentricity, his work not panning out as expected (indeed, from what I understand, the whole idea of "evolving neural networks" didn't pan out), his funding model likely sowing seeds of discontent among potential funding sources (that future AI/ML researchers would run up against, generating animosity or disdain toward him?), plus his later ideas being a bit too far out there for researchers to continue to take him seriously (expressed in his work of fiction "The Artilect War"); all of that contributing to his imposed seclusion from the subject matter...

While the idea of creating a "robotic kitten" (Robonoko) controlled by an "evolved neural network" didn't work out, the machines he created are still among the most "aesthetically pleasing to look at" computers around (I place them second only to the Cray Supercomputer designs); they were systems that weren't only technically advanced for their purpose, but also pleasing to look at and display (handy from a marketing perspective I suppose). Only a handful of them were built - I often wonder what happened to those machines; at least one example should belong in a museum - ideally CHM in Mountain View.

<comment><USER3> _the whole idea of "evolving neural networks" didn't pan out_

To the contrary, evolving neural networks is all the rage these days ("Neural Architecture Search", e.g. SOTA on Imagenet [1])

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.11946](https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.11946)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > We're now in a post-individual human world. We're now in a world that is > controlled by these emergent goals of the corporations. I don't think > there's any turning back the clock on that. We are now in that world.

One of the things that worries me about this is that there are some things that corporations and governments aren't good at yet.

Lets call the root of the problem, adopting a new world view. Why is this important? Adopting new world views is very important for scientific advancement and for adapting to problems (climate change denial can be seen as a failure to adopt a world view).

If we accept organisations are the future, we need to create new organisational types that can adopt new world views more quickly, so that we can have more reactive and innovative organisations. New organisations tend to require new legislation, as what is a legal organisations is defined in law.

However our current organisations can chose to stop this legislation. So we might be left in a position where individuals are squeezed out of having any influence but not so much innovation is coming from the organisations either. It might be worth looking to see if this view is historically consistent with things like the stagnation in China.

<comment><USER7> I have also wondered about the inevitability of the dominance of a tiny number of increasingly powerful corporations. I used to joke about William Gibson's cyber punk novels being future history, but now perhaps it is nothing to joke about.

Since (mostly) retiring I have been volunteering at my local food bank which is both a positive example of local self organization and serves as an introduction to many other small specialized groups that make sure kids get new school clothes, and other specific community needs.

By nature I am a happy and optimistic person and I think that the future might still turn out just fine, but with better AI and other tech, different social structures, etc. I bet that changes in society will accelerate. Nothing is the same except for change, but I argue the that second derivative of change is going to exponentially skyrocket.

<comment><USER6> > I bet that changes in society will accelerate. Nothing is the same except > for change, but I argue the that second derivative of change is going to > exponentially skyrocket.

Whenever people talk about change, I look at my flush toilet which uses the same technology which was invented in 1592. Feeding into a sewage system built in 1866. With waste water treatment standards from 1912. This helps ground me in expectations about how quickly things change.

There are countervailing forces to change as well. Society has had the internet for 20-30 years which has changed the means with which society forms opinions (for the better and worse), but it has had little impact on the actual method of government and laws. Nor has it changed how these things change much. Why not? Should we expect more changes in these things or not? This is all a bit unknowable.

We now exist in two-three ( western/china and possibly russia) spheres of influence in the on-line world. Lack of small disconnected regions has been hypothesised as a cause of china's stagnation. Will it be the same for us?

Another countervailing tendency is energy (or lack of it). Change requires energy and energy is problematic right now. We cannot agree how it should be produced (carbon is out, but nuclear and renewables are at loggerheads a bit) and it seems like it we have some negative feedback loops in progress already (increased numbers of droughts due to climate change will decrease the amount of food energy we can capture as a whole).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems to me the heart of this discussion is objective functions -- the goals of parent organizations and emergent 'AIs' being created within their R&D departments. It's not clear that the current goals are coherent, that the funders (governments or FAANG corporations or billionaires) have a clear agenda aside from driving demand for their primary product, which is mostly advertising.

The East India Company knew what it wanted: profits derived from maximizing industries based on colonialist labor and raw materials. But what are the driving forces that will shape and direct AI-enabled industries, today and tomorrow?

<comment><USER9> What about AI-as-a-service?

<comment><USER8> Seems like AI-as-a-service would just delegate the AI objective function (OF) to someone else. But unless demand for smart services ignites into a business value multiplier (like elimination of existing human labor, maybe), I don't see it catalyzing downstream emergences of the kind Hillis et al were discussing.

I think the Edge group is suggesting that AI might spawn unexpected forms of emergence in terms of social priorities behaviors or or movements, though they don't provide any examples (outside sci-fi) of what forms this might take.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://soundcloud.com/edgefoundationinc](https://soundcloud.com/edgefoundationinc)

The other talks from the conference that Danny spoke at are here as well...

[https://www.edge.org/conversations](https://www.edge.org/conversations)

It appears that these conversations all happened around the same table where some members of Edge gathered on a particular day but they were published each week over a course of time

</comment><comment><USER5> As noted in the talk, Hillis is fascinated by how simpler units form more complex and dynamic systems from which ultimately emerge greater levels of intelligence. He also wonders how we can understand such an emergent intelligence (EI), and whether we can detect it - and if so, how? He believes that it's possible that such EI is already happening.

I would tend to agree with this. But I am not sure if we can detect it - or if we should even try, given the potential consequences.

Let us imagine a scenario unlikely to happen:

What if tomorrow, one of your neurons realized "Hey - I'm actually part of a larger thinking systems - what if instead of firing now - I fire a bit later - or if I do something completely at odds with what I should do? Maybe some of my friends around here would like to help? Hey guys! Guys...!"

...and let's say you - as the higher EI - noticed this happening; that is, a part of your brain "revolting" or at least trying to do something odd - <USER2> would you do?

Well - you'd likely try to find a way to stop those neurons, right? Maybe via surgery or some other drastic means, you would do your best to either make sure they stopped asking such questions at the least, or destroy them at the worst.

So - let us imagine right now - that we suspect some larger organization of -us- humans - are actually "processing units" or "processing elements" of a larger "entity". A large corporation could be one such entity; a religion could be another. Or perhaps just the interaction of people on the internet; maybe more than just information or what-not is being passed?

If we started to "poke around" these systems, and somehow attempt to figure out whether we were creating an EI from our social and/or economic interactions (perhaps even aided and abetted by the processing power of our computer and network systems) - do you really think that such a "higher order" intelligence would just sit there and let it happen?

Or do you think you, and perhaps your cohorts in "crime", would die strange and mysterious "random" deaths by accident or maybe adventure?

I also posit that it may not even be possible for us - at this level - to know if such an intelligence is or has emerged from us lower level processing units/elements. We have no idea how this "being" would think, what it's language is, or what timescale it operates on - it could be that "normal time" to it is either much faster or much slower than our timescale; either way, it wouldn't help the situation.

Also - we would be operating on a smaller level, trying to figure out how the greater EI system actually works; akin to trying to predict the weather by following the motion of the winds and other events. While we've had some success, weather prediction is not an exact science; I'd say we'd likely have about the same amount of luck predicting the actions or thinking of an EI.

So does such an EI (or multiple?) actually exist? I don't know. But it may turn out to be an exercise in hubris to attempt to find out...

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow, one might have expected Edge to take a little break, given recent news.

[https://www.edge.org/event/the-edge-billionaires- dinner-2004](https://www.edge.org/event/the-edge-billionaires-dinner-2004)

[https://www.edge.org/conversation/lawrence_m_krauss-the- ener...](https://www.edge.org/conversation/lawrence_m_krauss-the-energy-of- empty-space-that-isnt-zero)

<comment><USER12> Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER13> "and Jeffrey Epstein, who recently endowed The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University which is involved in researching applications of mathematics and computer science to biology."</comment></comment></comment>


Building a More Honest Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/special_report/building-honest-internet-public-interest.php <comment><USER2> The problem with the CJR presenting themselves as neutral is that they are an interest group, and their idea of "honest" and the "public interest" is their business model being promoted.

And that's not peculiar to journalists. Virtually every corporation thinks they're doing a public good, since people are voluntarily buying their product or service.

But here they omit facts relevant to their claims, and the omissions distort the history they're presenting:

> In the US, radio began as a free-market free-for-all.

It did _begin_ that way, but in 1934 the FCC was formed and explicitly regulated speech via the Mayflower and Fairness doctrines.[1][2]

It was then revoked under Reagan[2#Revocation], much to the chagrin of special interest groups like the CJR, and political radio exploded.

When political radio was deregulated, consumers got options outside of traditional media groups who lost subscribers and influence.

An honest recounting of the history is that the US has had regulations in the name of "fairness" and those regulations do in fact quash a lot of speech.

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

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

<comment><USER3> "Fairness" in that sort of political context is rarely about fairness as it would be in real life interactions, but about allowing entrenched interests (or special interest groups in general) being artificially propped up by their political connections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a plug for my personal project, Thread, which is a take on social media that serves the public's interests.

It's not propped up by VCs, and not funded by advertisements that suck up our attention via engagement metrics.

Would appreciate a look! [https://get.thread-app.com](https://get.thread- app.com)

I'm glad the conversation is now turning towards ethical, human-centered alternatives to giants like FB and Instagram.

<comment><USER5> Path 2.0? I think it's needed now more than ever.

Bootstrapping communities is hard though, how do you plan to do that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this article is high-minded and moralistic. I feel conflicted after reading it because while I sympathize with the plight that journalists face, I also just see so many problems with this author's analysis and questions.

There is a fundamental distinction between the internet and radio/broadcast television in that the usable spectrum of airwaves is a finite public resource. If I'm broadcasting on 700 AM then you're not. The licensing and regulatory structure that is (debatably) appropriate for public broadcast has no application to the internet. There is room for everyone to publish what they want.

The advertising model is not broken. The wealth of information and services available to users at zero monetary cost is a miracle of the "free-market free-for-all" and is most beneficial to those with the least amount of disposable income. Coining "surveillance capitalism" as a pejorative term to describe the success of this model is ridiculous.

> While it's true that public service media like Wikipedia have had to share > the landscape with increasingly sophisticated commercial companies, it's > also true that they fill a void in the marketplace.

Wikipedia is not a "public service" media organization. The author uses the same term to describe the BBC. If that were the case, then the sale of every internet-connected device would be taxed to fund Wikipedia and the organization would be run by the government. Instead Wikipedia is funded by voluntary donations from millions of individuals. The fact that it fills a void in the marketplace is a testament to the success of the free market approach to the internet.

> We've grown so used to the idea that social media is damaging our > democracies that we've thought very little about how we might build new > networks to strengthen societies.

Built into this is the assumption that social media is doing more damage than or is more susceptible to malevolent influence than state-run news organizations or the monopolistic broadcast and print publications of the 20th century and I reject that. If you don't like Twitter and Facebook, then stop using them. Asking the government to get involved is the least productive thing anyone can do. Increased regulation will only serve to further cement the current crop of companies in their dominant position and we don't need any more Quaeros. [The alternatives]([https://readup.com](https://readup.com)) are out there, you just have to be willing to put in the effort to find them and be an active participant instead of passive consumer.

<comment><USER7> >Asking the government to get involved is the least productive thing anyone can do.

You win the Internet today as far as I'm concerned.

I wish our culture wasn't so focused on rebooting existing things. People should spend their time creating some new, in their image, and put it out into the world. The fight should be removing barriers for entry.

<comment><USER6> Well said. Creating something new of course takes an enormous amount of time and energy. It makes sense that not everyone would be willing or afforded the ability to take on such a task. I agree that removing or lowering any barriers to allow for further, more distributed experimentation would benefit society as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Have everyone sign their own work. Then we can judge for ourselves.

Any unsigned work is just gossip (or worse) and should be treated as such.

</comment><comment><USER9> Political article.

> Recently, President Trump referenced a widely discredited study to make the > absurd claim that Google manipulated search results in order to swing the > 2016 presidential election toward Hillary Clinton. Though Trump's claim is > incorrect (and was widely shared with his massive following on Twitter, > demonstrating the untrustworthiness of social media), it rests atop some > uncomfortable facts.

Okay. No links to the original study, the repudiations, or the defense of said study. That's bad enough, but then they follow that sentence immediately with this one:

> Research conducted by Facebook in 2013 demonstrated that it may indeed be > possible for the platform to affect election turnout.

Thank goodness we're relying on research conducted by Facebook.</comment>


Open Source Doesn't Just Market Itself - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/posts/open-source-marketing/ <comment><USER2> Your project doesn't market itself, but remember, many folks writing open source really don't care if anyone else uses it or not.

The statement, "But if you believe your project has value — which you probably do, since you spent time on it — you should try to get it in the hands of as many people as possible," is not really true. There are times it makes sense to market it widely, such as: 1) you are a consultant and want to use it for marketing yourself, or to get gigs based on it, 2) the project complements your product so driving wider adoption of it has positive implications for your main focus; 3) you are attempting to establish a name for yourself via open source, and being an author of a widely used library is a Good Thing. There are others, but those are three common ones.

There is a VERY large class of open source where this just doesn't matter though -- things which you write for yourself to use, which solve your problem, and which there is no overhead to open sourcing, so you do it altruistically. Frequently, in this case, adding lots of user support, community building, marketing effort, etc will in fact add enough overhead that the project becomes a net negative in relation to your goals.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really disagree. I think the "marketing" of an open source project is _more_ critical for long-tail projects- the projects that few use, that don't appeal to a huge audience. Large projects are going to get "marketing" pushes just as a result of their largeness; it's important for smaller projects to do some push to get themselves out there.

A little goes a _long_ way, too. You don't need to rebuild Django's docs; just a few tweets here and there, maybe a web page for a slightly larger project.

One of my smallest projects has maybe 5-10 watchers on GitHub, but it's surprisingly a popular project in terms of users because it targets a very specific niche. Writing a simple blog post got me to target that niche far more than just putting it on GitHub would.

<comment><USER2> Imagine a small but useful library doing something really boring but doing it well. The authors, over the years, have all been established top-tier developers who just want to solve their common, and frankly boring, problem and get on with building their products/projects/whatever.

Now, any of them could probably drive marketing for this boring but works well open source library, and lead to, I don't know, 1000x the adoption without much difficulty (afaik, the one I am thinking of is only used in about a dozen places, so 1000x isn't hard).

But... why? The folks who work on it are experts (in the ten+ years of active learning in the space sense) already, it solves the problem it is designed to solve well, and allows them to focus on the things they actually care about. Spread to the dozen or so companies who use it has been completely organic (I guess we would say viral today), and that is fine as the users have learned it by using it for the most part. It has good reference docs, almost no tutorial style docs, and this is fine in those circumstances.

Adding users would mean supporting them, monitoring yet another mailing list that would now receive more than a message every couple months or so, and frankly, just require effort that everyone involved prefers to put elsewhere.

In a purely "good for the universe through entropy reduction" sense, sure, getting wider use would be Good, but in terms of finding an optimum for the existing developers/users, it would be a net negative.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that makes sense; good point. I'm speaking less about them, though, and more about the "unwashed masses", so to speak. "Top developers" tend to code their projects by default to be viral or usable or whatever you'd like to call it. They're good at what they do, and their normal practices are good practices. But I've seen tons and tons of projects on GitHub, personal sites, and other places that are more of "push and forget". Or they're of the mentality that "this is only worthwhile for _me_ ", when that mentality couldn't be further from the truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This pretty much sums up why I made a Shamwow inspired commercial for my project (RestSharp): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460298>

I also had stickers made that I mail to contributors and promoters. If I had the cash, I'd make tshirts. All of this makes the project feel vibrant and alive which inspires people to participate and contribute.

</comment><comment><USER4> I used to think that marketing didn't matter then I realized it does matter. Now I'm realizing that it doesn't matter again and that it's just another way that the profit motive seeps into the project and starts making it un-fun.

Marketing a free software project is the same as SEO: have good code _and documentation_ and you're 90% of the way there. Most projects don't have very good documentation, or they actively discourage users and developers in other ways.

Make it easy for people to use and develop the project and you're ahead of the game and don't have to worry about marketing or any other bizniz development crap.

<comment><AUTHOR> +1. It's all about how you perceive it. "Marketing" can involve things like documentation, steps for developers to contribute, stuff like that. The more we can focus on that, the less we have to focus on the sleazy glitz and glam of it. And, exactly like you said, most projects _don't_ do the easy stuff, so if you even do a small amount it goes a long way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Changelog[1] does a pretty good job at telling the world about awesome open source projects. Especially their new gig at the github blog (github reflog[2][3]) is always worth checking out.

[1] <http://thechangelog.com/>

[2] <https://github.com/blog/837-github-reflog-v1-4-12>

[3] <https://github.com/kennethreitz/github-reflog>

</comment><comment><USER6> No, but it tends to be marketed by the same people who made it. Much like Bob the discount furniture guy[0].

The case of Bob is particularly interesting to me. Back in the early nineties Bob commissioned a slick marketing campaign with trendy music and hip radio personalities. I surmise it didn't drive sales too well because it lasted for only a few months before he dropped it and appeared in his own commercials, in trademark polo shirt and jeans with his loud annoying voice. The authenticity, real or perceived, helped turn Bob's from a Connecticut business with a single location in Newington into a force to be reckoned with throughout New England.

[0] <http://www.mybobs.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> It's true, I've recenlty found some interesting open source projects while browsing Google Summer of Code accepted organizations.</comment>


Supreme Court Should Block Printer Company's Ploy to Undermine Consumer Rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/press/releases/supreme-court-should-block-printer-companys-ploy-undermine-consumer-rights <comment><USER2> Another move in the war on general purpose computing.

Printers (and 3D printers) are as much of a threat to IP as the internet was/is. Nobody would argue that the costs of that threat outweighed the benefits, we all understand it was worth it. I think the same will be true for 3D printing.

I'll enjoy ignoring Lexmark next time I buy.

<comment><USER3> There is both an outside war and an inside war going on, and right now i worry as much or more about the inside war.

<comment><USER4> The problem with both of these wars is that their participants are mostly either unaware about the conflict, or without any intent to fight in it. On the outside, you have people wanting more security, pressure of various business models (e.g. IP protection), and people who would just want to watch the new episode of their favourite show with as little hassle as possible. On the inside, you have techies following the trends, or following money. I doubt many of them consciously want to destroy general-purpose computing, but the end result of the aggregate trend is nevertheless a huge threat. And it's hard to fight against without looking like an idealist with head in the (cloudless) sky, or an RMS follower, or something like that. Short-term practical thinking unfortunately tends to win over the big picture.

<comment><USER5> Some money is shifting to the "Edge" to supplement the cloud, due to volume of sensor data and need for real-time response to sensed events at the edge, [http://a16z.com/2016/12/16/the-end-of-cloud- computing/](http://a16z.com/2016/12/16/the-end-of-cloud-computing/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the doctrine of patent exhaustion is undermined, I can only imagine how the public's ability to use general purpose computers might be restricted. Possibly the only unencumbered computer I own is an 8088 that hasn't been powered on for well over a decade.

<comment><USER7> Was looking through our alumni magazine this weekend. This section [0] really caught my attention. Massive props to the Prof. That said, seriously nice donation.

"In 1984, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s donation of $24 million provides the University of Waterloo with eight new VAX machines — on the condition that work created using the machines would be the property of DEC.

Wes Graham, a professor of computer science, stopped the shipment until the company agreed to Waterloo's policy of leaving intellectual property in the hands of its inventors."

[0] [https://uwaterloo.ca/magazine/fall-2016/feature/60-years- inn...](https://uwaterloo.ca/magazine/fall-2016/feature/60-years-innovation)

<comment><USER8> The irony of that is most universities make their students sign a clause stating that all IP generated by the student for the duration of their studies is the property of the university.

I would be very surprised if the University of Waterloo doesn't have a similar arrangement.

Well color me impressed, the University of Waterloo indeed does not make claim to student IP [1].

[1] [https://uwaterloo.ca/research/waterloo-commercialization- off...](https://uwaterloo.ca/research/waterloo-commercialization-office- watco/intellectual-property)

<comment><USER9> At University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, a student owns the IP to his inventions that are not part of funded research.

<comment><USER10> And where does the bulk of that funding come from...? ;-)

<comment><USER11> Grants, university funded research is not the same thing as curriculum paid for by tution and non specific funding sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Recent thread: Five States Are Considering Bills to Legalize the 'Right to Repair' Electronics, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465303)

</comment><comment><USER12> > he Federal Circuit decided in Lexmark's favor, ruling that a customer's use > of a product can be "restricted" by the patent owner with something as > simple as a notice on disposable packaging.

Holy hell. IP law is getting out of control. How are we debating someone's right to use the thing they legally purchased?

If you don't want someone to use your product, then don't sell it.

<comment><USER13> This is why I am glad the TPP is dead. Whatever good it may have done in other arenas, it exported our utterly insane IP policies, which is something I can't support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do- not-d...](https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display- tracking-dots)

Lots of printing companies undermine privacy by including serial number tracking dots.

<comment><USER15> Don't expect this to change, it's used to help track counterfeit money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Couldn't Lexmark just have an EULA covering the firmware inside the chip on the toner bottle that has to be clicked through on the printer's UI when the bottle is installed which then restricts sale of the licensed firmware in order to prevent this?

Almost all toner these days has a chip attached, they just need to put something inside the chip which is copyrightable rather than patentable in order to "fix" this (from Lexmark's point of view).

<comment><USER17> See Sega v Accolade [1]. Violating copyright used purely to protect a monopoly is fair use.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's funny to see the AARP working together with EFF and Mozilla.

<comment><USER19> Why? The AARP foundation is involved in all areas of consumer protection since many retired people have limited funds.

[http://www.aarp.org/aarp-foundation/our-work/legal- advocacy/...](http://www.aarp.org/aarp-foundation/our-work/legal-advocacy/afl- docket-consumer-and-utilities.html)

Your comment comes across as ageist.

Edit: surprising rather than funny would have been a better adjective.

<comment><USER20>
      Why?

It's a little surprising because a lot of advocacy groups focus their resources on problems with a significantly disproportionate impact the people they represent, and it's not obvious at first glance why this issue would disproportionately impact retired people.

Coloured people and gun owners also print things out, but I don't see NAACP or NRA putting their names on this amicus brief :)

Still, when it comes to supporting common sense amicus briefs like this one I say the more the merrier! If NAACP and NRA want to sign the brief too, let them :)

<comment><USER21> Holy shit, did you just say "colored people" in 2017? That's not cool, anymore, dude

<comment><USER22> I suspect it was a deliberate usage based on the expansion of the NAACP acronym, rather than a term one would normally use. In _this_ case, that seems relatively harmless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So why do electronic devices work by one set of rules but car parts go by another?

<comment><USER24> are you talking about the security stuff? i think in that case it's about the software that they assert is their IP, where this is the physical cartridge

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How did I know this was going to be Lexmark, before I even clicked to read The Fine Article?

Oh, right. Because Lexmark.

</comment><comment><USER26> Never knew there was a Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents.

<comment><USER27> for $250000 there can be a Coldcode Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents too!

[https://www.eff.org/press/releases/staff-attorney-daniel- naz...](https://www.eff.org/press/releases/staff-attorney-daniel-nazer- becomes-new-mark-cuban-chair-eliminate-stupid-patents)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think as long as it is communicated clearly to the consumer I don't have any problem with whatever restrictions the company wants (purchasing is a voluntary decision).

<comment><USER29> Purchasing could be a voluntary decision but, here, we are talking about changing the definition of purchasing because it's not convenient for the seller.

This has been already done with music and other media, by the way.

<comment><USER28> It can be explicitly labelled as not being a "purchase".

<comment><USER30> That would be fine, so long as it's not sold in stores alongside other items for purchase, and is explicitly and prominently communicated to the buyer. There's nothing wrong with renting, so long as everyone knows it's a rental.

Somehow, I think Lexmark might have a problem with this. They want the benefits of the rental model without the drawbacks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Console.log() all the things - <AUTHOR> http://seanmonstar.com/post/56448644049/console-log-all-the-things

<comment><USER2> I just read this, interesting concept, albeit dirty. I still think we should all accept a logger and use this to work around bad libraries. $0.02</comment>


9223372036854775807 - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9223372036854775807 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion of the Paypal error mentioned in the article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832069)</comment>


Ask HN: 'Must read' books - <AUTHOR>

What are the best programming/entrepreneurial/etc books you've read in the last years? Anything interesting counts! <comment><AUTHOR> A few I read:

Design is Job - Mike Monteiro by A Book Apart (Really basic stuff for people starting with agency/freelance work, but really good).

Learn Ruby The Hard Way for people starting.

Applied Cryptography, Second Edition: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C

Baked In from Alex Bogusky and John Winsor (About C+P agency)

I'll try to think of a couple more.

</comment><comment><USER2> Rework: <http://37signals.com/rework/>

</comment><comment><USER3> There are probably > 100 topics in the past two years with a similar title/vein. You'd likely enjoy reading through those - lots of good suggestions in the previous threads.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I thought so. I did a fast search and couldn't find many of those, but I'm gonna search a little longer. Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> -Stumbling on Happiness -Free Software, Free Society -Masters of Doom (not finished, just started reading it, great so far)

</comment><comment><USER5> A great scifi book that also mixes in entrepreneurial concepts is "Infoquake."

</comment><comment><USER6> "Do more faster" by David cohen and Brad feld. A must have book.

</comment><comment><USER7> The 4 Hour Workweek

[http://www.amazon.com/The-4-Hour-Workweek-Anywhere- Expanded/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-4-Hour-Workweek-Anywhere- Expanded/dp/0307465357)

<comment><USER8> That book only applies to you if you have a very flexible schedule.

<comment><USER7> It's not that you should read and implement it verbatim. It's a great read in terms of getting you into different mindset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> running lean</comment>


One Nuclear Bomb Will Ruin Your Whole Startup Bubble - <AUTHOR> http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/one-nuclear-bomb-will-ruin-your-whole-startup-bubble <comment><USER2> The title has nothing to do with a post that sort of starts off somewhere and ends up going absolutely nowhere.

What I thought you were going to write about was if some nation dropped an H-bomb and we all went to war, everyone would be recruited out of their current lives and startup-centric mind frames. No more entrepreneurship when everyone's trying to survive a war (Unless you're Milo Minderbiner in a Hellerian universe).

<comment><USER3> The title is parody - he's commenting on the general amount of gibberish that gets written about startups.

<comment><USER4> Parody has a referent, the title here is more accurately called "sarcastic."

<comment><USER3> I think it's a mashup of multiple startup memes. If a referent has to be singular rather than a general class in order for it to qualify as parody, then I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm reading the title and thinking "if it's gonna take a _nuclear bomb_ to ruin my startup, it must be doing really well!".

<comment><USER6> The title says "startup _bubble_ "; and bubbles are pretty fragile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Launchrock is a little too meta for me... it probably will never make any money but hey, it probably didn't really cost any money to make.

I guess that's one problem with people not working for big companies when they graduate college and instead just going to their startup, they don't know the kinds of problems real people are having. Now let me go back to working on my iPhone game.

</comment><comment><USER8> I enjoy the irony that while I enjoyed the parody and message, I still want to know what Elephant is...

</comment><comment><USER9> A social dreaming application to harvest the power of the subconscious and connect our collective hivemind into a powerful dream society...</comment>


In 1973, an MIT computer predicted when civilization will end (2018 about 1973) - <AUTHOR> https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/in-1973-an-mit-computer-predicted-the-end-of-civilization-so-far-its-on-target <comment><AUTHOR> >"At around 2020, the condition of the planet becomes highly critical. If we do nothing about it, the quality of life goes down to zero. Pollution becomes so seriously it will start to kill people, which in turn will cause the population to diminish, lower than it was in the 1900. At this stage, around 2040 to 2050, civilised life as we know it on this planet will cease to exist."

Looking at recent news and our current battles with climate change, microplastics pollution etc... interesting.

See also:

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

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

<comment><USER2> Also interesting is there was a fairly recent study by the University of Melbourne. They found since 1973 we have tracked the predicted measures of "business as usual" quite remarkably.

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits- to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The Systems Dynamics models make assumptions that simplify almost everything. They still predict collapse in the 2030-2050 time frame. Many people dismiss the forecast because, they say, mankind always has discovered a solutions in the nick of time, but that is neither guaranteed or likely in the case of global warming.</comment>


Security Advisory for Cargo - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/09/30/Security-advisory-for-cargo.html <comment><USER2> Kudos to them for being so open. However to avoid issues of this class would namespacing package names not help?

<comment><USER3> I think the bigger problem (which I hope is now fixed) is that cargo would silently ignore unknown Cargo.toml directives.

Namespacing might help alleviate this particular problem slightly, but even with namespaces you'll need to have a way to replace a crate with another (but maintaining the same "import path").

<comment><USER4> Cargo does ignore unknown directives, as mentioned in the link:

> For Rust 1.25.0 and prior, however, Cargo would ignore the package key

The problem is that the new key changes how an existing key is interpreted, which is a slightly different problem.

<comment><USER3> > Cargo does ignore unknown directives

Maybe you misread what I said, I said that _silently ignoring_ a key was actually the incorrect behaviour. You should get an error if you see a key you don't recognise -- completely separate from the security considerations, it's also one of correctness (if the tool doesn't recognise the configuration it won't produce the right output so it's much better to not give any output than to silently give the wrong output).

(This would make importing projects that use newer compiler versions into projects that use older ones slightly harder, but if the model of Rust is that everyone will use the newest compiler -- which I don't really agree with -- then they should follow that model completely).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google announces Project Shield: Protect your site from DDoS attacks - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/10/21/google-announces-project-shield-protect-site-ddos-attacks-leveraging-companys-infrastructure/ <comment><USER2> So a competitor to CloudFlare ([https://www.cloudflare.com/](https://www.cloudflare.com/))?</comment>


Facebook faces fresh questions over when it knew of data harvesting - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/16/facebook-fresh-questions-data-harvesting-cambridge-analytica <comment><USER2> Apparently Marc Andreessen met with Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower way before. Something that Zuckerberg didn't mention in last years hearing. So they knew about CA data leakage issues long ago and were discussing how to "fix" it according to article.</comment>


Shen 1.7 to be released today - <AUTHOR> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.qi/2230

<comment><AUTHOR> Main page: <http://www.lambdassociates.org/>

The download page: <http://www.lambdassociates.org/Download/download.htm></comment>