The Henry Louis Gates "Teaching Moment" - <AUTHOR> http://www.reason.com/news/show/135039.html

<comment><USER4> There were several inconsistencies between the official police report[1], and the original 911 caller, Lucia Whalen's, version of events[2]. Notably:

* The police report states that Whalen said "two black men". In reality, Whalen said "two larger men, one looked kind of Hispanic, but I'm not really sure, and the other one entered, and I didn't see what he looked like at all.". The "black" aspect was entirely invented after-the-fact by the police.

* The police report states the responding officer, Sgt. James Crowley, spoke to the Whalen at the scene. According to Whalen, this conversation did not occur.

* Crowley claims that Gates was belligerent and yelling racial epithets. However, Gates had returned from China with a bronchial infection[3], and was unable to yell or raise his voice. This has been confirmed by his physician.

* Gates showed Crowley two forms of identification, his driver's license and Harvard ID. He did not refuse to show identification.

* Gates was arrested on his front doorstep, after following Crowley out of the house. Gates claims this is because he demanded to see Crowley's identification, which he is allowed by law.

I hope this clears up some of the confusion and misinformation being spread regarding the event.

[1] [http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/CANON8AA683_L...](http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/CANON8AA683_LNOTESMAIL_07202009-153909.PDF)

[2] <http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/27/gates.arrest/>

[3] <http://www.theroot.com/print/19236?page=0%2C0>

<comment><USER5> (Note: The above comment was at '1' when I made this reply. So at least 4 people simply don't care that the info given above is a flat out lie as is shown by the actual report that I link to below)

Just pointing out what I did above.

* The police report never says the officer heard the 911 call ([http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0723092gates...](http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0723092gates1.html))

* The conversation is one's word against the other and Whalen is clearly trying to distance herself from the whole incident so she has the more reason to lie

* That's just silly. I had a bronchial infection and I could still yell (albeit with vastly less capacity)

* The report doesn't claim Gates refused to show ID only that he initially did. In fact it says...

. I asked Gates to provide me with photo identification so that I could verify that he resided at Ware Street and so that I could radio my findings to ECC. Gates initially refused, demanding that I show him identification but then did supply me with a Harvard University identification card. Upon learning that Gates was affiliated with Harvard, I radioed and requested the presence of the Harvard University Police.

* Your last claim could be right. No one can tell. But it's at the root of the two claims so the only way you can believe it's a proven fabrication is if you believe Gates without question (since he has as little proof as Crowley does as to what happened)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The best way to assert your rights to a police officer is to be calm, polite, and firm. Remove emotion from the equation, and you'll come across credible. Get all worked up, and you fit the pattern of an unstable, dangerous individual that will probably need to be subdued.

Keep in mind you can also decline a search or ask a questions like "do you have probable cause", "am I being detained", etc without being a jerk. Taking the high road costs nothing, might avoid a lot of trouble, and might even teach a police officer that not everyone who believes in their civil liberties is a ranting-and-raving asshole.

<comment><USER7> I think this an excellent point that gets lost in all of this. Anyone who is a jerk to the police has to expect to possibly be arrested. If Gates or anyone for that matter has a problem with the way a police office conducts themselves it's imperative that you maintain the moral high ground by above all not being a jack ass and asserting your rights politely.

When it comes out after the fact (in this case by Gate's own admission) that you've said some not nice things to the officer you really loose a _huge_ amount of credibility no matter how right you are. Not to say that you should let a police officer who is acting inappropriately trample all over you but there is a right way and a wrong way to assert yourself and yelling and insults is not the right way.

<comment><USER8> The point is that you should not have to expect the possibility of arrest for being a jerk. Of course you should act in a respectable way, but failure to do should not result in arrest.

<comment><USER7> In a utopian world. I'm not saying that's the way I'd like it to be. I'm saying, as things are, it's something every reasonable person knows is likely to happen if you're belligerent with authorities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "'Contempt of cop,' as it's sometimes called, isn't a crime. Or at least it shouldn't be."

I remember the day the professor of criminal law and criminal procedure law in my law school told the second-year students, "In actual practice, contempt of cop is a crime," meaning that if you piss off a police officer, you can expect trouble to follow.

After edit:

The lesson I take from that in my daily life is what mattmaroon says in his reply,

 _There's a pretty wide gulf between total submission to "authority" and being verbally abusive to a police officer doing his job. As someone who is generally not a fan of cops, but would like them to show up at my door if someone broke in through it (even if its me) it doesn't seem that nuanced really._

Yes. I'm sensible enough not to get into an argument with an armed man who has legal authority to use his weapon. Maybe there is some misunderstanding when a police officer stops me (that happens very rarely in my life), but if there is, I can stay calm and explain my point of view without looking or sounding threatening. I've not had any trouble with police officers, ever.

</comment><comment><USER10> I agree and I think that too many people have turned this into a "race" issue.

My sense is that the professor was wrong in attributing racial motives to Officer Crowley's actions. I also think that the office was wrong in arresting Professor Gates for being rude to him.

<comment><USER11> Gates made it a race issue; Obama backed him up on the matter; the media agree.

The cop was doing what cops always do. The solitary difference is that he came up against a professional racist.

<comment><USER8> The argument is that "what cops always do" is wrong, and that race played no part.

<comment><USER12> The real issue here is that race often plays a part in "what cops always do"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a pretty wide gulf between total submission to "authority" and being verbally abusive to a police officer doing his job. As someone who is generally not a fan of cops, but would like them to show up at my door if someone broke in through it (even if its me) it doesn't seem that nuanced really.

Cops have a dangerous job and a lot of bullets are preceded by yelling. They actually should be able to arrest people who totally lose their cool, because who knows where it might go from there.

The iPod dancing wierdos getting arrested is a total ad-hominem too.

<comment><USER14> > They actually should be able to arrest people who totally lose their cool, > because who knows where it might go from there.

No they shouldn't, preventative arrest is wrong and crosses a line that should not be crossed. If you can't handle angry citizens then you have no business being a cop. The day we can be arrested for merely speaking out against the government is a day we should not allow to ever come.

I was a cop, I put up with plenty of verbal abuse from people, it's part of the job. A cops safety is not more important that citizens rights.

<comment><USER13> There's a big difference between speaking out against the government and yelling at a cop (or anyone for that matter).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The "Right to Record" should be a civil right trumping all others.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article misses two really important points.

1\. Police officers are people under an intense amount of pressure in a dangerous line of work. Ability to dissent from police is good - <USER2> police really, really isn't. The vast majority of police are really nice people, and will work with you and help you on a wide range of things. Like in other professions, some cops suck or are incompetent to varying degrees, but most are pretty good sorts. The officer's report from the Gates incident had Gates coming out onto the street and yelling more after Gates had left his home. I don't know at what point yelling at police officers starts getting in the way of that work, but there is that point somewhere.

2\. The article did gloss over it, but yes, it is really impractical to get hostile to anyone that has power over you - even including the electric company. People are people - you remember the last time someone was seriously a jerk to you? Remember how you felt? Now, do you remember the last time it happened in relation to your work? Would you say you worked harder to please that person afterwards, or would you say you held at least a bit of an "F you" attitude? That's just a practical point. Police officers are people. They undergo training to react more sensibly and less emotionally, but they're going to react way more friendly and cooperative with people who are friendly and cooperative with them. Yeah, sure, it _shouldn't_ be like that. I guess technically an employee at the electric company should work doubletime to get your power back on even if you're cursing and raising your voice at them and calling them names. But the world doesn't work like that.

So many places like to list every police misconduct incident in the last xyz years every time something happens. They don't mark down or just pay lip service to all the lives saved, and all the officers killed in the line of duty doing good work. Police and citizens are fundamentally "on the same team" - less tension and more respect between both groups would be a good thing. Articles that go hard to one side don't promote that.

<comment><USER16> Would some of the people who anonymously downvoted care to explain why?

When I was a teenager, I had some anti-police/anti-law angst like a lot of people in free countries feel and express. After traveling, and seeing how police operate in the second and third world, I can confidently say we have some pretty outstanding officers in the United States. A good friend's father is a policeman as well, so I've gotten to hear a few stories of how policework goes.

Here's the points I made:

Point #1: Abusing police is not okay, gets in the way of their work, and at some point, is no longer protected speech but instead a crime. I don't know where that line is, but it's somewhere.

Point #2: Being rude and insulting to any people with power over you is likely a bad play, and they'll probably make your life harder.

Point #3: The article mentions a number of negative police incidents, but really doesn't give much respect to the _vast majority of officers_ who are doing a good job in hard work. I think that's a bad thing.

I'd be happy to discuss with anyone who disagrees philosophically or factually, and hopefully I'll learn something.

<comment><USER17> 1: Abusing the police != being rude to the police. You're conflating the two. Saying "Leave me alone, you useless pigs" is not interfering with police business; it's hard to imagine an example use of speech that would be.

2: That's true, but the whole point of the article is that even though it might be _inconvenient_ to you to challenge the police when they abuse their power, it is still an abuse of power. This whole question is specifically addressed in the article.

3: This article is specifically about systematic abuse of police power. That's a real problem. Its truth has no dependence on them complimenting the police who don't abuse their power. This is completely irrelevant to whether the article's argument is true.

In short, your 2/3 of your arguments are irrelevant to the article completely. Your first point, while engaging the article, is essentially contradiction by assertion (you provide no evidence that the kinds of abuses discussed in the article could ever be considered interference with police work). So that's a very very weak point. That's probably why you were voted down.

<comment><USER16> Thank you for the reply, this is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping we might have.

> 1: Abusing the police != being rude to the police. You're conflating the > two.

I was trying not to. In the original comment, I wrote, "I don't know at what point yelling at police officers starts getting in the way of that work, but there is that point somewhere." I'm not sure where the line is, and I'm not making a judgment call on Gates' arrest. I did mention the officer wrote in his report (which may be false or falsified - I don't know) that Gates followed him into the streets yelling at him. At some point, a person doing that is crossing a line from protected speech into interfering with police work. Again, _I don't know where that line is_ \- it's a particularly sticky subject. Police should probably err on the side of letting people air their thoughts in the form they choose.

> 2\. ... This whole question is specifically addressed in the article.

Very briefly - and I get worried that some young person here, who is really idealistic, gets into trouble by asserting their rights to an officer while in college or whatever. For my part, I can't stand customs officials who go over the line and search me repeatedly and generally waste my time, but I'm extremely friendly and respectful and talk about the local sports even though I can't stand that scum. Y'know why? Because they'll mess with you if not. My part of the comment isn't an apology for bad policework, it's a practical note so people whipped into a frenzy don't get into trouble. [Also note - the two times I mouthed off to customs officials, I got an arduous, detailed search afterwards. I learned that real life lesson the hard way]

> 3\. This article is specifically about systematic abuse of police power. > That's a real problem. Its truth has no dependence on them complimenting the > police who don't abuse their power. This is completely irrelevant to whether > the article's argument is true.

Right! Systematic - that means happening all over the place. I don't think it is - the article points out a few brutal abuses of police power and doesn't give statistics for how common it is or put it in context of other nations. Our officers in the USA are pretty good. I'm a big rights guy - very big - <USER3> implying there's a huge problem when in fact it's a few isolated incidents would be a bad thing. Or who knows - maybe there is a systemic problem, but the article just has a few anecdotes and no statistics. And certainly, all of those anecdotes and no statistics are hostile.

> In short, your 2/3 of your arguments are irrelevant to the article > completely. Your first point, while engaging the article, is essentially > contradiction by assertion (you provide no evidence that the kinds of abuses > discussed in the article could ever be considered interference with police > work). So that's a very very weak point. That's probably why you were voted > down.

Well, I'm voting you up for taking the time to respond. Thank you for the discussion, and I look forward to more whenever you please.

<comment><USER18> > _"Systematic - that means happening all over the place. I don't think it is > - the article points out a few brutal abuses of police power and doesn't > give statistics for how common it is or put it in context of other > nations."_

Amnesty international does that.

<http://www.amnestyusa.org/us-human-rights/page.do?id=1011100>

This article was focused on the issue of how little most Americans care about the excessive powers granted to their police. Your own reaction only serves to emphasize the point.

If you really don't see anything wrong with having the largest prisoner population in the world (beating out Russia and China both in absolute and per capita terms) the second highest rate of executions, hundreds of people being tased to death by officers, officers being able to arrest people in their own homes for exercising their rights, and widespread surveillance on citizens without warrants, then reason.com may not be the site for you.

<comment><USER19> _If you really don't see anything wrong with having the largest prisoner population in the world_

The U.S. also has a very high crime rate compared to China and the European countries. More criminals means more people in prison.

The American legal system is like the bad parent who alternates between being over-lenient and being violently strict. Much of the time policing is actually far too lax. Most people selling drugs are never caught, most gang killings are never tracked down, and most home burglars are never captured. This lax policing allows too much crime, and eventually the police are forced to react. They do so in a blunt and ham-fisted manner. Cops break into the wrong homes in an attempt to make headline grabbing drug busts.

Think of it in terms of math: which has a higher prisoner population, the country that catches the perpetrator of 98% of crimes, or the country that catches perpertrators only 10% of the time? The answer is the second country has a much higher criminal population. The lower probability of getting caught increases the amount of crime, which means total jail population is much higher.

Asian countries like Singapore and China on the other hand are the consistently stern parent. In Singapore there is a 99% chance of getting caught if you murdered someone. Thus there are virtually no murders, and a very small prisoner population.

Both sides of the law and order debate need to realize that American law enforcement is simultaneously _too tax and too heavy handed_. This is not a contradiction, its the reality.

Many American cities (Philadelphia, Baltimore) have homicide rates that have been unseen in Western civilization since medieval times. This is a huge problem. It needs to be addressed. Any proposed reform that tries to lower police abuse without also lowering the crime rate will result in failure ( and by increasing crime, will in the long term actually increase police abuses).

<comment><USER14> > The U.S. also has a very high crime rate compared to China and the European > countries. More criminals means more people in prison.

That's a natural result of outlawing so much victim-less behavior. If for example, drugs were legal, much of that crime would simply disappear and our prisons would be much less crowded.

<comment><USER19> Neither Singapore nor China allows drugs, yet their crime rate is much lower and their prisons much less crowded. Most European countries also outlaw drugs.

<comment><USER18> They don't have a "war on drugs", either.

Here in Taiwan, there are some very strict drug laws on the books, and yet weed and club drugs are pretty common, as they are in Singapore. Unlike the US, though, enforcement of drug laws isn't a high priority. There are people in jail for drug selling and production, but very few for casual use.

<comment><USER19> _There are people in jail for drug selling and production, but very few for casual use._

The U.S. is the same way: <http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/demand/speakout/10so.htm> "The Michigan Department of Corrections just finished a study of their inmate population. They discovered that out of 47,000 inmates, only 15 people were incarcerated on first-time drug possession charges."

<comment><USER18> No, it's not the same. Even a cursory look at the issue shows that much of the US prison population is due to "3 strikes" laws. By looking only at first time possession charges, that entire group is missed.

Furthermore, police in the US have the power to seize cars, seize money, and quite number of other things without warrant, based upon the _suspicion_ of drugs being involved. They can't do that here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Simply reverse the situation, if two white guys would have been in that building when the police arrived would the situation have turned out the way it did ? If not then race was a factor, either on the part of the police or by mr. Gates himself.

Crowley seems dodgy and Gates seems a bit too eager to blow this up using it as a platform. I don't have much respect for either attitude.

After all the police _was_ checking up to see if Gates wasn't about to lose a part of his property. Once you start asking police for their badge numbers you are effectively escalating the confrontation, which puts you in the drivers seat. You then also should take part responsibility for the consequences of that.

This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's another perspective ([http://crookedtimber.org/2009/07/23/police- discretion-a-diff...](http://crookedtimber.org/2009/07/23/police-discretion-a- different-perspective/)) from a police captain/philosophy student.

</comment><comment><USER22> Aside from the political nature of this article (davidw, where are you?) I thought the author took up the mantle against conservatives a little too easily.

I'm a libertarian, and I support that "be nice to the guy with the gun" stance. I know liberals and conservatives both who agree. I think it probably has more to do with having some kind of experience in law enforcement or the military, but I'm just speculating. It's definitely not just a conservative position.

No matter who you are -- even without one person having the gun and authority -- being polite is always a good strategy in any discussion. If you're ugly to people, they're most likely going to find a way to be ugly back to you.

I think this article misses the difference between political theory and practical human experience. In theory, I should be able to hurl profanities at people I don't like. In practice, they have a tendency to punch me in the nose. I'm all for the theory -- in fact, as far as the photographing of police, it should be a felony to stop someone from videotaping a police officer in the line of duty. But in practice I live in a world where politicians have passed so many laws that are so open to interpretation that if the cops don't like you, they can find some way to mess with you. That's just life.

I don't like the current state of affairs, but that doesn't mean I should be blind to reality either. Instead of whining on about how the real issue should be control of police powers, I think a more practical position would be to single out certain areas (like the videotaping) where small changes can have a big effect. This turns a rant into a call for action.

But we didn't get that.</comment>


Microsoft: Will Have Four Versions Of Windows For ARM - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-exec-spills-the-beans-on-microsofts-tablet-plans-2011-5 <comment><USER2> I wonder when they'll drop the concept of "versions" and just ship "Windows".

</comment><comment><USER3> Great we can expect Student, Home, Media, and Professional Editions that no one knows what the difference is.

This strategy is going to fail--the tablet market has been consistent and uniformed since the iPad, none of this gimmicktry that works in the PC/phone markets by released dozens of SKUs with only slight changes. People won't fall for this when they can just buy an iPad that will be current for a year or more.</comment>


3D IC Combines CNT Transistors, ReRAMs and Sensors - <AUTHOR> http://www.eenewseurope.com/news/3d-ic-combines-cnt-transistors-rerams-and-sensors-0 <comment><USER2> Very interesting, what they did is a kind of an "super-SoC". They managed to put many things on top of common CMOS digital circuits: reram and mems.

The idea has merit for one big reason: if you can put memory on same die as the core you can largely eliminate the memory bottleneck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Totally Awesome. 3D is definately the way to go, even a few extra layers would vastly improve performance if you can get around the heat problems</comment>


YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth  - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssfmTo7SZg

<comment><AUTHOR> I particularly enjoyed Jawed Karim's speech about the concept of killer app starting at 8:56.</comment>


Wikimedia telnet interface - <AUTHOR> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway <comment><USER2> The revision history of this page indicates this is an April fool's thing. Besides images, I might actually totally love using Wikipedia from the command line. It would fit in well with my general command line usage. The Tor feature is particularly cool.

(Just to be clear, this post is not a joke. I actually use a terminal all day for various tasks so it might fit in well.)

<comment><USER3> It might have been set up as an April Fool's joke, but it is also a real thing that works.

<comment><USER4> A lot of viable products came out that way. Gmail, I think.

Edit: Looks like it wasn't intended as a joke, but was initially received that way because of the timing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Public_releas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail#Public_release)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, kind of sad that this is an April Fool's joke and not a serious interface. I would love to be able to quickly look stuff up from the terminal.

<comment><USER6> I was hoping that telnet was making a comeback. It feels like an old friend.

<comment><USER7> Its called ssh. Telnet is pretty much dead to me.

<comment><USER8> Yes and no.

Telnet is perhaps the internet's debugger.

While the most common use was to access a CLI Somewhere, most of the "traditional" internet protocols can be operated via telnet.

Note btw that there is no login needed to access this "joke". Just enter the address and presto.

SSH is a single use tool in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's funny to me is how incredibly much faster the joke telnet interface is than using a web browser. Well, 'funny': it's actually pretty sad that we slow down our network usage so badly.

<comment><USER8> It seems that as hardware improves, software degenerates.

This in most part because software keeps being abstracted from the "hardware".

Also, graphics. As bandwidth has gone up we have gone from newline encoded ASCII to video at 1080p or higher.

I "love" it whenever i want to look up something and what i get pointed at is not a simple text document, but a 30+ minute video on Youtube of someone basically reading the same information.

<comment><USER10> Graphics are no longer the issue. The issue these days is that your browser has to download an entire is apps with all it's dependencies before it can start rendering the few KB of text.

<comment><USER8> While i agree on the "app" thing, and something i tried to capture with the comment about abstraction, i have seen way too many sites default to massive images that they expect the client to scale as needed, taking up both bandwidth and client hardware resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool. I would use this quite often.

I hope [https://github.com/cscott/wikipedia- telnet](https://github.com/cscott/wikipedia-telnet) gets more contributor love now. Especially a pager would dearly be needed.

I vividly remember the telnet interface to the library system at my university. It was easy to use and fast. There were even some old terminals you could use (my only real exposure to real terminals).

Then they replaced it with a slow html page. :-(

</comment><comment><USER12> Joke or not, this is awesome! I could imagine using quite a few apps in the terminal like time tracking or chat. It feels so much quicker and quite frankly when browsing the web a lot of pages are visually heavy and chaotic that I fall back to the Safari reader mode very often anyway.

<comment><USER13> Well, what you're looking for is Emacs

<comment><USER12> Never got along with emacs. More of a vim person. I might misjudge of ignorance but emacs seems too heavy and complicated and this do it all attitude hits my as not very unixy.

<comment><USER14> That's because it's lispy!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great stuff! A bit like the old BBS days albeit not as great an interface. Someone with a sniffer should see what traffic size is during article load on Telnet vs web version w/ cache cleared. I'm curious if it's more or less efficient.

On a related note, I was digging up info on old systems. OpenVMS this time. One company that still supports terminal ("green screen") and web apps had interesting things to say.

[http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/openvms_notes_my_OpenV...](http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/openvms_notes_my_OpenVMS_system.html)

In paradigm changes section, they pointed out they had been doing textual apps because they were easy, worked, and ran really fast. They apparently supported tons of users on a few VMS boxes that way. Hardly any company was interested unless they had a web interface. Switching to Web made the services 2-5x slower, necessitating hardware and software upgrades. They also had security troubles. Business is booming, though.

Lots of lessons to be learned. Old way was fast but harder to use and inflexible. Web is easier interface but slow and insecure. I still think client-server w/ minimal GUI's (eg REBOL) w/ efficient protocol is best middle ground.

<comment><USER16> I keep reposting this comment, but whenever telnet is mentioned (fun simulation of 1980s):

telnet telehack.com .... . usenet

I with they had trn installed.

<comment><USER15> Naturally I did some googling on "telehack" before typing it into the terminal. ;) So, I run it and see some familiar things. Talking to Eliza is a trap. I try StarWars expecting a banner or game. What I find... the movie rendered as text art... is _awesome_. The level of detail and compromises they made were great.

Thanks for the link as I'm sure I'll find more interesting stuff on here. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's case sensitive :-(

That's worse than it sounds thanks to Wikipedia's archaic capitalization constraints, so it's neither going to be the "official" case-sensitive name of the page nor the Title case, you could very well need to do SomeTHING like_THIS to read an article.... and then it gave me the German version for some reason?

I wish it had search.

        >>> easybcd
        easybcd
        Sorry! Could not fetch "easybcd" for you.
        No worries. There are lots of other pages to read.
        Pick a different title.

        >>> Easybcd
        Easybcd
        Sorry! Could not fetch "Easybcd" for you.
        No worries. There are lots of other pages to read.
        Pick a different title.

        >>> EasyBCD
        EasyBCD
        EasyBCD

        EasyBCD ist ein Programm, das von NeoSmart Technologies entwickelt wurde.
        Es wird zum Konfigurieren und Anpassen des von Microsoft entwickelten
        Bootloaders Bootmgr verwendet, der Teil der Boot Configuration Data (BCD)
        der Windows-Versionen Windows Vista und jünger ist. EasyBCD kann benutzt
        werden, um eine Multi-Boot-Konfiguration zwischen diesen und vorhergehenden
        Versionen von Windows, sowie Linux, BSD und Mac OS X zu erstellen.
        ....

<comment><USER18> > It's case sensitive :-(

Also IP-protocol sensitive :(

      $telnet -6 telnet.wmflabs.org
      telnet: could not resolve telnet.wmflabs.org/telnet: Name or service not known

No AAAA RR.

<comment><USER19> Sadly, this does seem to be a limitation of our labs infrastructure. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I connected and spent a few minutes poking around to try and understand the usefulness of this. Something for those in countries where web traffic is blocked? Is this a power tool just for Wikipedia editors?

Oh, wait, ugh... is this an April Fool's joke?

<comment><USER19> Accessing Wikimedia content while being Really Really certain that there is no downloadable code being executed, or browser exploits being inserted. Browsing for the paranoid.

Here's a bit more: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-03-30/Technology_report)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm actually incredibly disappointed that this isn't a thing. I had a screensaver that would curl a random wikipedia page and display it - but it always looked like hot garbage, due to a bunch of extraneous stuff that I didn't want to bother filtering out. This would have been pretty great. :/

<comment><USER22> Have you not tried it? It's working great!

EDIT: With the exception of the connection being closed on the Wikipedia end relatively often.

<comment><USER21> Sure, but will it be up on April 2nd?

<comment><USER19> If you use it, we will keep it up.

<comment><USER21> Turns out, I don't know how to do that with telnet as a one-liner :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow! This even has auto-completion and other shell goodies.

However, there seems to be a bug in the auto-completion:

When pressing TAB immediately after the prompt appears, the whole telnet session hangs and does not respond anymore.

<comment><USER19> Fixed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> April fools joke aside, I'd actually use this, but it doesn't seem to fully work. Most articles would not resolve for me and welcome page was joke content.

<comment><USER25> Try typing "use en.wikipedia.org" first.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, the domain setting was leaking between sessions before. Oops. Fixed now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> See [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway) for technical details. The technology behind this is used for Wikipedia's Visual Editor, PDF export, and plain text export, so it is very likely to be supported if enough folks find it useful.

<comment><USER19> Oh -- and report bugs/feature requests at [https://github.com/cscott/wikipedia- telnet/issues](https://github.com/cscott/wikipedia-telnet/issues) please. Patches are even better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's a joke, but it really works :)

</comment><comment><USER27> I almost skipped it, but I tried anyway. Wonderful! I like the wiktionary:

        use en.wiktionary.org

Feels dictd on steroids.

Somehow I got disconnected frequently. Is it intentional? Or is it just my company's network hate telnet?

<comment><USER28> It's quite possibly because they're getting a lot of traffic. As people are realizing that it's actually functional I'm sure they've got more telnet connections than all the MUDs in the world combined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Much faster than the web interface. Even over Tor! The fast disconnections are a bit lame, would be a bit better if it used curses so that it would start scrolled up.

</comment><comment><USER30> Out of interest, is it possible to set up an anonymous service with SSH? Or would it rely on configuring an SSH server to accept any user-provided credentials?

<comment><USER31> The public NetHack server at alt.org has an SSH interface alongside the telnet interface. Try

ssh email@example.com

It works properly with no password. It would be cool if Wikimedia would set up a similar thing for this service.

<comment><USER19> Patches welcome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I thought it was a funny joke - I was curious how far they took it. Wholy crap, `telnet telnet.wmflabs.org` works and the searches do too. Nice job :)

</comment><comment><USER33> [https://tmp.kitenet.net/oldskool-4-1-2016.png](https://tmp.kitenet.net/oldskool-4-1-2016.png)

</comment><comment><USER34> This is really nice for those of us who run vintage computers (e.g. Apple II) with ethernet adapters. I hope they keep this around.

</comment><comment><USER35> No money but lots of time and ideas I see.

<comment><USER19> It's actually a 269-line test case for more serious projects at the foundation: the Offline Content Generator and Parsoid. We're allowed to have fun in the service of the greater goal. More technical details at [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Telnet_gateway)

<comment><USER35> I was meanly poking at Wales mails and hyper disrupting popup for money (you guess how much I like all this).

That said, I friggin love the telnet access point. I am a bit fed up with the ever more weighty web so simple text link + repl gets my vote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I would really like it if HN could mark things that are jokes as such, or constrain them to one thread.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not just a joke; the interface is working (apart from some bugs you might expect at this stage) and while the announcement is clearly a joke, the interface is IMHO pretty cool

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> hrmf, for some reason it disconnects me seconds after giving the prompt.

Edit: Never mind, was using an overly "clever" terminal emulator...

<comment><USER37> I was immediately kicked off when using real telnet, but it worked fine with netcat (nc). I think this service gets confused if you send it the telnet control stuff.

<comment><USER8> Could be. but using a "dumber" terminal seems to allow the connection to last longer...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The comments in this thread make the joke even better.</comment>


Your World of Text, my current side project. Requires FF3+ or Safari 4, I think. - <AUTHOR> http://www.yourworldoftext.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> An explanation from the author: This isn't a startup, it's just an idea I thought would be cool. I'm announcing it on HN first, hoping to get technical and aesthetic feedback before I throw the URL around.

The two browsers in the submission title are the only ones I have on this machine. Right now it doesn't run as smoothly as I'd want in FF3. There are a couple big optimizations ideas I have, but I was comfortable enough to post this without them. Was that a mistake? If you can try it out in some other browsers I'd appreciate that. I have no idea what IE will do.

That's all. Hope you have fun.

<comment><USER2> works OK in Opera 9 and 10

<comment><USER3> If it works in Opera, then it is too CPU-heavy on this older machine. I don't understand what it is, and can't interact with it.

<comment><USER4> Using opera 10 beta, and all I see is a grey screen :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This site proves the old "normal person + anonymity == total retard" maxim. Trending topics seem to be "gay", "penis", and "Django sucks" - lol.

<comment><USER6> Me and about 5 other people were talking about slashes, for like an hour. Made up a good joke out of it:

\--Two slashes walk into a bar, one says to the other, "you got to make sure you help me 'escape' from here"

Totally had a blast \\\\\\\\\

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe have a minimap feature? In the right hand corner, or a way to jump to the activity? I scrolled around for a while before I found where all the action was.

Or a search feature. I think the trending topic is penis right now.

<comment><USER8> I added a top feature requests table with a votes column. Time to get our collaboration on!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.yourworldoftext.com/newsyc>

<comment><USER10> Does it take the path as the name of the world?

<comment><USER11> Yes. <http://ianab.com/yourworld/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of the 34th Street wall. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/34th_Street_Wall>

</comment><comment><USER7> A few other suggestions:

It is too chaotic but I can see you taking this in different directions. You need a way to direct the flow, potentially even in a useful direction (I am thinking Yahoo/Mahalo Answers), or just like a trending topics feature in which different worlds are based on tags.

Another thing you could do is to have a reset or form a new world every few minutes. This way there is a new slate.

What you will probably need to end up doing in order to monetize this idea is to build a site around it. User profiles, trending topics, different links, regional worlds, answers, /random/, and /ANSI art/ (read: penises)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's painfully slow, and I ran into some glitches (ctrl v outputting only first letter). pretty fun, anyway.

what about different (random) colors for different users, and a fade over time so older words decay?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ctrl-v is intentional. I want to keep it "natural" as long as possible, although I'm sure someone will start crafting spammy POSTs soon enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had a lot of fun when I drew a face, and then got to watch other people alter (and improve!) it...until someone smeared through it with letters...

</comment><comment><USER15>
      ...................I love it!............................
      ........cool..........dont' overwrite thiWhere is my dog?
      .......................................I can't find u.....
      ..What about zoom?.........*&^*#$&^@*#&@*......this sux...
      ..........How about timeout?---Can't overwrite for x secs.
      ...-----..................................................
      Why are there no girls in HTML5 Canvas Experiment.........
      . . ................... ...              ....
      . . ..         8675309
      ....                                          ...
      .....                     ...                 ...
      Creativity:10  ..........   Usefulness:Now a word from...
      ..a little too slow
                                  CCCC  OOOO   OOOO  LL      ...
      ... needs.....             CC    OO  OO OO  OO LL
      . .  cut                   CC    OO  OO OO  OO LL
           and         ..        CC    OO  OO OO  OO LL
      .   paste                   CCCC  OOOO   OOOO  LLLLLL
      ..
      .....
      .                          It's lonely down here

<comment><AUTHOR> btw, this comment made me really happy :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Brilliant. Obviously the front page is full of spam but this will be super- cool as soon as subcommunities establish what their page will be (yourworldoftext.com/whateverpagehere) and I figure out how to find them. I love it already.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't get it, what are you supposed to do?

<comment><USER18> Read and write. (You can scroll by dragging)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love how everything's penis, or gay, or some variation thereof. Scrolling around to find the more erudite conversations was remarkably fun though. I kind of like it just as it is..

<comment><USER10> if you find the good conversations, try to make breadcrumbs to them, but nothing that attracts vandals

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool, it's multiplayer notepad!

Works in Chrome for Mac.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hate to get spammy by commenting too much, but now that I've been using this for two days, words fail to convey how brilliant I think it really is. It's beautiful. It's art. It's a type of thing people rarely experience. I love it. Thank you for creating it :)

edit: i want timestamps saved to some place every 10 minutes so that i can explore it chronologically.

</comment><comment><USER21> Fun, but someone kept deleting my Angband game.

</comment><comment><USER22> So, it's chaos, and a lot of it is junk, but there's a good bit of good stuff in there too.

If the interface were better (navigation & editing commands) that would be sweet.

Privacy would be a matter of picking a distant enough location, if you could jump to it.

I also want zooming, but that would be a pretty major undertaking.

</comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me of the Million Dollar Homepage.

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

You could probably convince people to buy letters close to the "origin".

</comment><comment><USER24> Doesn't work for me in Mosaic.

</comment><comment><USER25> It does not appear to work for me in FF3 or Chrome at 6:23 PDT (linux).

<comment><USER26> Working here. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:188.8.131.52) Gecko/20080827 Firefox/18.104.22.168

ah. try ff2 maybe? Other possibility is that what ever issue you were having has been fixed in the last five days.

Absolutely brilliant idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there any way to navigate by keyboard?

</comment><comment><USER28>
        ==.
      /     \
     | 6  6 /
      \  - )  I am God.
       )  (

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting. :) It works in OmniWeb 5.9 (WebKit-based, though an older version).

</comment><comment><USER30> It works in IE4. Just kidding.

<comment><USER31> doesn't work in links2 either ;0)

<comment><USER10> he should add telnet support

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Like it a lot! Its fun how it is, more features might take away the appeal.

</comment><comment><USER33> Backspace doesn't work for me but everything else does - I'm on Chrome.

<comment><USER34> Same on webkit nightly. Needs more backspace!

<comment><AUTHOR> I disabled backspace because I wasn't sure whether it should delete the char before the cursor (better for typing) or under the cursor (more natural if you click on something to delete it). Guess I'll just pick one... or have it delete under only if you clicked there?

<comment><USER8> Definitely the character before. Delete key should delete the character under the cursor.

<comment><AUTHOR> It works now btw. You probably have to refresh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm not sure what it is good for, but it looks and feels awesome.

</comment><comment><USER36> I enjoyed this immensley. I tried to make a kingdom of "x"s.

</comment><comment><USER37> Isn't working in FF3.5, but works fine for me in Safari 4.

<comment><USER38> Worked fine for me in FF3.5.1

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Cool, but it's starting to drop some keystrokes for me.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'd be interested to know how you did that.

</comment><comment><USER41> That is a really clever idea, I like it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Doesn't work in Shiretoko 3.5.3pre.

</comment><comment><USER43> Works in Chrome 2.0 on Vista.

</comment><comment><USER16> subdirectories are case sensitive? pros and cons people, discuss!

</comment><comment><USER44> wow that is addictive

</comment><comment><USER45> Very cool :)

</comment><comment><USER46> Cool buddy.</comment>


Half a Million People Signed Up to Storm Area 51. What If They Show Up? - <AUTHOR> https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/half-a-million-people-signed-up-to-storm-area-51-what-if-they-show-up-2068928 <comment><USER2> As Jim Morrison of the doors once sang, "they got the guns but we have the numbers".

It will be an interesting social experiment, with far reaching implications.</comment>


Simple Google Sheets interface to track time - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/anvaka/time <comment><USER2> Cool stuff! Looks like you're using it to track your programming... have you seen [https://wakatime.com](https://wakatime.com)? It took more than ~10.5 hrs to build it but it's fully automatic!</comment>


Ask HN: Who are you using to manage your email campaings? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a company to send and manage email campaigns for a client. It's been tough to research because anytime you search for anything related to email marketing you are instantly knee deep in junk. I've looked into companies like MailChimp, Contactology, and Campaign Monitor and I was wondering if people had any other suggestions? There are a couple requirements that even some of the companies I just listed didn't meet. We need to be able to send transactional emails and have them tracked and included in reports. A web accessible API is a must but it seems almost every company has that these days. Pricing isn't as much of a factor as functionality is but obviously it needs to be considered. The best option I've found so far is Contactology because it lets me create automated triggers like 'send this email when user is added to list' type thing. That's what we are looking to do, more one at a time emails then massive campaigns. Any help is most appreciated. <comment><USER2> MailChimp works pretty well for us. They have great API. Not sure if they have "send something once new user joins" as we send such things from our app.

<comment><USER3> MailChimp has some pretty awesome integrations, goes right into freshbooks for automatic invoicing, formstack for forms, and a ton more. Works great for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not sure these fill your needs for <http://sendgrid.com> and <http://postmarkapp.com> were two I was looking at recently for transactional emails.

</comment><comment><USER5> "lets me create automated triggers like 'send this email when user is added to list"

This look a lot like an Autoresponder feature, of which it is already provided for in MailChimp and CampaignMonitor. Also, it helps to provide your contact details in the profile, so help can find the way to you. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> I really like CampaignMonitor and their reseller options are great.

</comment><comment><USER7> Check out MOJO Mail: <http://www.mediaplex.com/mojo-mail>.</comment>


How Does App Store Ranking Affect Sales? (Numbers Post) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilesort.com/blog/how-does-app-store-ranking-affect-sales.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN: inspired by Trevor's recent posts, I've decided to share some of my App Store sales numbers. I'd love to know what you think!</comment>


Gmailctl – Declarative Configuration for Gmail Filters - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl <comment><USER2> This is interesting; what benefit/advantage does it have over IMAP-level email management tools like imapfilter[1]?

I don't ask that to be confrontational; I've successfully managed several email inboxes on several different providers for years with plain old IMAP rules, so I'd like to know if there's anything I'm missing.

[1]: [https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter](https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter)

<comment><USER3> You offload all the processing to the gmail backend? No compute needed on your part?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I made something like this a while back for myself, and it worked all right, but I ended up never even using it myself. The main problems I had were:

\- You end up with multiple sources of truth for what's happening to your email. And/or you won't be able to easily edit your filters from multiple machines.

\- Either the source code or the generated code ends up being hard to read.

\- There's imperative (and sometimes counterintuitive) behavior in Gmail regarding labels, and that can interfere with declarative reasoning.

\- Filters have a size limit! So you might need to take that into account if you have complicated filters.

<comment><USER5> `gmailctl` resolves a few of these, actually. The big one is that there's a command to diff your config file with what's in gmail, so you can capture any accidental changes that happen in gmail-land. This also helps with version- controlling your configuration, since it shows you when you just forgot to upload your config.

The imperative behavior and filter size limits are still annoying, granted. You can deal with it by staging through multiple labels, but it's not great.

<comment><USER4> Oh cool! Version control is useful. I might give it a shot sometime. I didn't have anything of the sort.

If you're curious, the tool I came up with had a DSL like this:

      $excom = from:example.com
      $exorg = from:(example.org OR example.net)
      if ($excom AND $exorg) AND -(to:me OR in:spam)
        archive
        if cc:person
          label "Person"
        end
      end

and it'd auto-translate to this:

      <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
      <feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:apps='http://schemas.google.com/apps/2006'>
        <entry>
          <category term='filter'></category>
          <apps:property name='hasTheWord' value='(from:example.com from:{example.org example.net}) -{to:me in:spam}'/>
          <apps:property name='shouldArchive' value='true'/>
        </entry>
        <entry>
          <category term='filter'></category>
          <apps:property name='hasTheWord' value='(from:example.com from:{example.org example.net}) -{to:me in:spam} cc:person'/>
          <apps:property name='label' value='Person'/>
        </entry>
      </feed>

which it would translate back to this:

      if (from:example.com from:{example.org example.net}) -{to:me in:spam}
        archive
      end
      if (from:example.com from:{example.org example.net}) -{to:me in:spam} cc:person
        label "Person"
      end

It didn't treat the filter as a blob (it actually parsed it and removed quotes etc. if appropriate) but it also didn't really change the underlying language either.

But it had variable and did let you nest conditions which made it easier to write some things. (Or so I hoped. In the end I didn't feel it was worth it...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Another advantage of gmailctl is it uploads the filters using the API, so you don't have open Gmail settings and manually import an XML file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Huge respect to the author for ealizing this - however, I'm honestly sceptical of including yet another turing-complete configuration DSL without sufficient debugging capabilities.

Seems to me, now you've added several more sources of complexity:

\- You have to get the JSONnet syntax right and learn about th various functionalities and expressions.

\- You have to ensure Jsonnet is correctly translated into the GMail filter chain.

\- You _still_ have to ensure the GMail filter chain works correctly - this is one of the original problems this project set out to solve, but I don't understand what additional tools the project gives you to archieve this.

<comment><USER7> Author here. I understand your concerns, and in fact one of the last things I added is unit tests: [https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl/blob/master/README.md#tests](https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl/blob/master/README.md#tests)

Getting things right is not easy, especially in complex languages like jsonnet. In my own experience though, every time you limit the expressivity of config languages you end up inventing even more complex workarounds in the end (e.g. external templating and things like that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use something like this that a Googler shared with me.

It's super helpful to get around the way Gmail doesn't really let you order rules.

This helps you generate mutually exclusive rules, so the ordering doesn't matter.

[https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl/blob/master/README.md#chain...](https://github.com/mbrt/gmailctl/blob/master/README.md#chain- filtering)

</comment><comment><USER9> The real benefit Gmail has over most other email solutions, including Outlook, is labels for emails which are like virtual mailboxes. Almost all IMAP-based solutions I've seen don't attempt to solve this problem, which is why people keep using Gmail. If something like this was automated through Dovecot, people would be much more likely to host there own email.

</comment><comment><USER10> That's a pretty awesome project! I wrote something to automate label manipulation too, but I used a simple scripting language.

I migrated from self-hosted mail where I had the power of procmail, to gsuite, where I had less flexibility. Making simple filters via the google UI is easy, but it gets complicated when you want to look at both the subject and the sender - to file "Facebook comment replies", "Facebook messages", and "Facebook event invitations" under different labels for example.

It's a pain to authenticate, but once that's done I like my solution. Downside is you need to run it under cron:

[https://github.com/skx/labeller/](https://github.com/skx/labeller/)

The appeal of this gmailctl is that it keeps everything native, and doesn't require a server to run a cronjob. Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if a terraform provider for gmail would make sense.

<comment><USER12> I have one that I've been using for some time now: [https://github.com/remilapeyre/terraform-provider- gmail](https://github.com/remilapeyre/terraform-provider-gmail)

It should work without issues, I need to document it though. Let me know if you have some troubles using it.

<comment><USER13> Oh well, I pretty much did the same thing at the same time! Albeit with some tests/docs :D [https://github.com/ndrpnt/terraform-provider- gmail](https://github.com/ndrpnt/terraform-provider-gmail)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If the author comes along, are there any plans to support FastMail for those of us who don't use Gmail? I'd be willing to pay a bounty.

<comment><USER8> Fastmail already supports Sieve, so I'm not sure you'd need something like this.

[https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve- howto.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve-howto.html)

<comment><USER14> TIL! Thank you kind stranger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice tool. Pretty popular at my workplace.

</comment><comment><USER16> F### GMail.</comment>


Uber files lawsuit against India's biggest startup, Ola - <AUTHOR> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/uber-accuses-ola-of-making-false-bookings-on-its-platformdrags-the-firm-to-court/articleshow/51511724.cms <comment><AUTHOR> Pretty interesting story actually.</comment>


Netflix Misses U.S. Subscriber Growth Targets, Stock Plummets - <AUTHOR> http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/netflix-misses-u-s-subscriber-growth-targets-stock-plummets-1201617949/ <comment><USER2> Do you think the reason why Netflix is losing subscribers is because they increased their monthly subscription by $1.00?</comment>


AWS Mobile Hub – Build, Test, and Monitor Mobile Applications - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-mobile-hub-build-test-and-monitor-mobile-applications/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. Is it just me or it reminds the reader of Spring Initializr[1]

[1] [https://start.spring.io/](https://start.spring.io/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how long will other mBAAS service like kinvey survive</comment>


Ask HN: Is unconventional computing popular? - <AUTHOR>

Are people excited and interested about the possibilities of things like autonomic computing/amorphous computing and other non- Von Neumann style systems?
There seems to be a lack of coverage in geek news, despite a healthy academic community/journal etc and I was wondering why.
I've got my own reasons for not being enthused about  the current field, but I am curious what other people think. <comment><USER2> I, for one, am ridiculously excited by the idea of an entirely new computing paradigm. I know some at HN abhor anything that isn't practical this very second, but I think they just lack imagination. I'd be interested in any articles submitted in the vein of non-traditional computing.

<comment><USER3> It would be more exciting if there hadn't been so many in the recent past, like quantum computing that's been going to have a practical application Real Soon Now for the past decade.

<comment><USER4> One problem with any new technology is that the 'get rich quick' crowd and their marketeers will jump on it to avoid missing the next possibility to easy riches. They'll over-hype the product, create unrealistic expectations and move on to the next hot thing when they've given it a bad name.

Modern day locusts is what they are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microcontrollers (e.g., the Atmel AVR chip line which is the basis of the Arduino open source hardware platform) are often modified Harvard architectures, where the instructions are read from flash and SRAM is used for volatile stack/heap memory.

There is a lot of activity in this area which has been dubbed "physical computing". See e.g. O'Reilly's Make quarterly and Sparkfun, which apparently does > $10 million in sales annually from selling electronics components and kits to hobbyists. I'm eagerly awaiting my first Arduino starter kit from them! ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> Build a widget with it I can buy, or ship a piece of software written in/with it, and I think there will be much more interest it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh, of course I'm excited and interested (although not enough to follow it so closely as to be able to guess what you're de-enthused about) but I think it's still a recondite enough area that most HN readers won't know to upvote it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have a browse through the table of contents of the International Journal and you might get the same impression as me.

<http://www.oldcitypublishing.com/IJUC/IJUC.html>

Basically it is too unconventional (chemical), faddy and not focussed on producing something usable by the average geek.

That sort of stuff is still interesting (for computing in odd situations) but is not what I am looking for. I suppose I wondering why there isn't the computer equivalent of a space elevator. That is something most people know about that can't be done with current tech but is physically plausible (but might still might be too hard to do). Something that might spark the equivalent of the spaceward foundation, but for computers.

The fleet architecture represents a different face of unconventional computing. One that geeks can get behind. However it concentrates on speed of processing. Looking at the costs of computing, increasing computational power per watt or flops is useful but does not address the dominant cost of owning and running a computer. The dominant costs, I think, are the costs of learning the system, administering them and programming them. This is not addressed by either of the above threads of research.

I have my own odd-ball ideas. Which I'm excited about. I just wanted to gauge opinion of HN type people.

<comment><USER7> It seems like what you're interested in is more like UI or UX research than hardware innovation? The universality of the machine, strengthened by the ubiquity of compilers and software written in high-level languages, almost totally disconnects the user experience from the computing hardware, except for efficiency differences; instead it's tied to the I/O devices and the user interaction techniques, and increasingly, to the data the user is interacting with.

But I do see a fair bit of discussion of researchy and novel UIs here, don't you? On the front page right now I see Heroku (reducing the cost of administering systems), Hummingbird (real-time web site analytics visualization), Android vs. iPhone (which is largely about ubiquity and UI), Chatroulette, the death of files in the iPhone/iPad UI (which sounds like goes right to the core of the "dominant costs" you're talking about), Nielsen's report on iPad usability, and UI design in Basecamp. And that's just above the fold!

<comment><AUTHOR> There are three ways to tackle the human costs of computing.

1) Make the things humans have to do easier. UI/UX

2) Reduce the number of things humans have to do. While all modern hardware can calculate the same things (are universal) they have different security models which can affect how much maintenance the user has to do. Take capability based security, an old idea implemented in hardware in the IBM AS 400. Languages (E, Joe-E) based on it are currently being touted as a way to reduce the risk of malware infection, even if malware does get on the system it can't do much because the language VMs operate under a principle of least privilege.

If we are changing the Arch for performance (e.g. fleet) and can't make use of the performance with standard software we may want to change it in this way as well, to take advantage of the system.

To give a concrete example of how computer architectures can be changed for the better. If windows had capability based security at the low level it could pass bits of memory to the user land process by sharing a capability that gave it write access. Then the user land process could populate it, once it had finished and the kernel wanted to read it, they could revoke the the writeable permission. This would prevent this sort of attack

<http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1331025>

See this for an intro to the philosophy

<http://www.erights.org/talks/virus-safe/index.html>

3) Make the computer do the work for the human. Yes this is mainly an AI problem, but it also an architecture problem. If you want the system to manage things like your graphics card drivers for you, you have to make some decisions about the hardware. Which programs are allowed to try and manage the graphics card drivers, how can the user communicate what she wants in terms of graphics card drivers in a way that the computer will find unambiguous.

So yep, UI and UX, is important but it is only one possibly angle of attack, and not the one I'm interested in. Because people are doing fine work on it, while the others languish a bit.

<comment><USER7> > it could pass bits of memory to the user land process

> by sharing a capability that gave it write access.

> Then the userland process could populate it,

> once it had finished and the kernel wanted to read it,

> they could revoke the the writeable permission.

> This would prevent this sort of attack [apparently,

> confusing auditors with TOCTOU attacks on system call arguments]

Virtual memory mapping hardware is already roughly a capability system. The CPU doesn't maintain a list of ownerships and permissions for every page of physical memory; it puts capabilities to those pages into page tables. That's how KeyKOS was able to run efficiently on stock hardware.

Capability systems are indeed better for security in several ways, but this isn't one of them. The problem here is that the memory page is shareable between different user threads. You can solve this problem in a variety of ways, including the one you suggest. However, unmapping the page that a system-call argument lives in before invoking an auditor does not constitute implementing a capability system.

To a great extent, it seems like the move toward web apps is exactly a move toward a different security model in order to reduce the maintenance the user has to do, a model in which most apps are fairly limited in their authority. The same-origin policy still falls far short of full POLA, but it's a step. The project in this area I'm most excited about is Caja, which is what MarkM's working on these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about mapping. Wouldn't you get into trouble if the section of memory still had to be readable during the time it is used by the kernel if you unmapped it? Or can you modify a read-write map to a read-only map? I'm just getting into windows internals.

Heh, I didn't know there were fellow people interested in keykos type stuff here. I'm fairly new to that and more interested in the 3rd thing you can do to reduce cost of ownership, having an adaptive computer background.

If you submit a link to caja here let me know and I'll upvote it. The cap-like stuff that the Marks were working on for delegating authority to web apps was also interesting. It does reduce the amount of maintenance the user has to do, they still have to pay for the web apps though, so depending upon the income of the user and cost of the service it might not reduce the total cost by much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How about disappointed? I've seen intriguing non-Von architectures for decades, and they always lose out to Moore's Law and the fact that 1,000X more engineering resources are invested in Von Neumann architectures.</comment>


I'm looking for start-up advice! - <AUTHOR>

I've got some seed money and a social media analytics focus.  What would you do with mid five figures? Also, you're not a developer - yet. Anyone out there with strong opinions? <comment><USER2> I'd take a list of 3-10 ideas and sort them based on different criteria, like "estimated cost", "my knowledge of the field", "potential for profit", "intellectual engagement", etc.

Out of that, a few ideas will bubble to the surface. Start talking with people about those ideas. Dig a little deeper into the numbers and assumptions behind them. Find a cofounder (most difficult part). Design an MVP and do Steve Blank's Customer Development process.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not clear, are you asking for startup advice, or are you offering it?

<comment><AUTHOR> oops - asking. Just fixed the title.</comment></comment>


Google+ User Creates Freedom-Based Alternative as Google Announces End of G+ - <AUTHOR> https://phillipschneider.com/google-user-creates-freedom-based-alternative-as-google-announces-end-of-g-network/ <comment><USER2> I wish they kept Google buzz, I remember using it with a close group of friends almost daily.

<comment><USER3> Or wave. That seemed like a nice idea that just needed some polish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just another Diaspora instance.</comment>


Ask HN: Who is working on visual search? - <AUTHOR> By visual search I mean different ways of searching based on images or colours. Which companies/teams are doing cool stuff in this field? <comment><USER2> I think in different industries you will find varied applications and use cases.

Obviously biased as a founder but we are enjoying helping shoppers save money with Shnap Visual Search for fashion - [https://getshnap.com](https://getshnap.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> Computer vision would probably be the term that would get you best results</comment>


Show HN: Fair Remote – remote jobs need a fresh start - <AUTHOR> https://fairremote.com <comment><AUTHOR> For us remote equals unique. We're all wired differently and have various ways, times of the day, or tricks that make us do our best work. Putting everybody in a cubicle automatically means wiring people in a different way, whilst working remote means "here's what we need, we don't care how you do it, at what time of the day you do it, but we need a solution by date X".

A remote-first company should be built under the umbrella of productivity, freedom, flexibility, responsibility, and discipline.

We're tired of seeing "US Only", "UK Only", "In The Middle Of Nowhere Only" in a job description. True remote companies do know how to work in more than a single country.

What differentiates us from other job boards?

When we say remote, it really means remote.

We believe in fairness, care, and trust. We guide our lives by these values, so of course, they are the foundation of Fair Remote too.

For companies, we'll offer full refunds if you don't find the right candidate through our platform. We'll never check that in any way, we take your word for it because we build our service on trust.

You won't be able to boost your job post. No "Featured", highlight, or other strategies to make more money off of you. We'll charge a flat rate of $199 per job post for all businesses.

As an applicant, you'll find here fair remote opportunities that describe the interview process and include a salary range. So you'll be prepared and know what to expect from the company beforehand.

If you're willing to give us a shout on one of your social platforms or on your website, we'd highly appreciate it.

You can reach out to us via email: email@example.com

We're on social under: Facebook: [https://www.facebook.com/sunergos.ro](https://www.facebook.com/sunergos.ro) Twitter: [https://twitter.com/fairremote](https://twitter.com/fairremote) LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/company/sunergos- ro](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sunergos-ro)</comment>


How to Get an Email Intro - <AUTHOR> http://blog.yesgraph.com/how-to-email-intro/ <comment><AUTHOR> Here are some other great posts about this: [http://also.roybahat.com/post/92544681186/introductions- and-...](http://also.roybahat.com/post/92544681186/introductions-and-the- forward-intro-email)

[https://alexiskold.net/2015/06/24/how-to-write-a- forwardable...](https://alexiskold.net/2015/06/24/how-to-write-a-forwardable- introduction-email/)

[http://avc.com/2009/11/the-double-optin- introduction/](http://avc.com/2009/11/the-double-optin-introduction/)</comment>


Apps that work with Chromecast - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromecast/apps.html <comment><USER2> To save you the trouble of looking, VLC isn't listed.</comment>


Developer Economics 2012 survey - <AUTHOR> http://www.visionmobile.com/survey

<comment><USER2> Seriously, I was more than willing to complete this survey until I got through the first 6 questions and saw that my percentage complete was only 10%. Rethink your survey and reduce the number of questions because filling out the answers to potentially 60 questions is not how I wish to spend my time. I am not everyone but I am sure there are a few people just like me, that passed or bailed half way through your survey because of how long it is.

<comment><USER3> Hey there - we realise that there are a lot of questions in the survey (about 30, actually), but since we investigate most of the key topics and challenges for developers today, there's a lot of ground to cover. Check out the end result from last year's survey - www.DeveloperEconomics.com (free download)</comment></comment>