Can Washington Be Automated? - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/05/washington-automation-congress-politics-lobbying-policy-216216 <comment><USER4> Private Wealth Management and Real Estate are two industries I once believed would easily be automated. And there have been a number of moves in each space to do so [Wealthfront and Betterment, Zillow etc].

But I've come to understand these industries are NOT built on rational, dispassionate decision making. The reason they only have a foothold in automation is because at their core, they are deeply relational industries. Even for incredibly sophisticated, "rational" individuals.

People simply want a person to talk to and walk them through things - <USER2> when they have all the facts generated from sophisticated algorithms giving them an unequivocal "correct" answer.

It seems like lobbying is the same. There is an important role for automation. But I believe it will simply augment the existing offering rather than completely supplant it.

Politics is the most relational of professions. Rational policymaking is an idealists dream - and I say this as a metric-driven, lover of numbers who once believed in that dream.

<comment><USER5> I think there's a generational thing going on here.

I'd love nothing more than to be able to buy stocks, real-estate etc through an online interface with 0 human interaction. Everyone I know above 40 seems to be the exact opposite.

Sometimes progress is made one funeral at a time.

<comment><USER6> Similar. Our generation is more used to getting things done on our phones or computers, including human interaction.

I for one hate to run errand where i need to talk to someone. It is very inefficient, and socially awkward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unlike in business, the question in politics and policy is not primarily efficiency and profit, but justice (including liberty and democracy) and human welfare. The relationship between automation and efficiency & profit is relatively clear, but the relationship between automation and justice & welfare is not. I think the questions are:

1\. Automation can reduce transparency, by moving open discussions and reasoning into obscure, sometimes proprietary computer code. Effectively, the person writing the code, or the person who controls the coder, decides the policy. For example, some courts now use software to determine prison sentences; what was once decided based on established principles and transparently detailed by the judge is now decided in some cubicals by developers and written in C (which is often prioprietary). Why are you going to jail? The software (i.e., the developer) said so. Also, remember that code is mysterious and obscure to most people outside HN; they have no understanding of what it is, of its significance, what it can do, etc. Many can't define the word "algorithm" or even "web browser"; even open source code provides no transparency for them (and doesn't for us, unless someone makes the extraordinary effort to review the code).

2\. To whom will automation shift power? The lobbyists with the best algorithm? The people developing the technology and solutions (see #1)? Will automation democratize power or further restrict it? Note that the developers of one solution in the article went to Harvard. Sounds to me like the same people running Washington, and the same gateways to power.

3\. Lobbyists who have more data about constituents in general and about major players in particular will have an advantage. It could increase competition to erode privacy in its most important context - politics.

4\. Will it result in better policy - more justice and better welfare - <USER3> just more power for the few with the data and algorithms?

If I were devious and wanted to change judicial policy nationwide, for example, I'd buy the companies making software for courts. I'd be surprised if I was the first to think of that.

<comment><USER8> The entire thing is that those who want this sort of thing are not interested in justice and welfare, they see politics as a way to enrich themselves.

<comment><USER7> I think that's always the major issue in politics. IMHO:

It's an issue of individuals: People are neither completely altruistic nor completely greedy. A very important factor is, where are the elite on that continuum? My humble hypothesis is that that's the main difference between a banana republic and first-world civilization and society. IMHO, the elite in the U.S. have swung far toward greed; the tax bill is a good example: There is no policy reason for it, not even a figleaf discussion of economics, and even the principles of conservatives (deficit reduction) are thrown by the wayside: They just want more money.

It's also an issue of systems: How do we design a system that marries power, on one hand, to justice and welfare on the other? Then those who seek power also seek justice & welfare, intentionally or not. Democracy is an (incomplete) solution to that problem: Power flows from making the people happy.

Despite the problems, the U.S. and other major democracies work and have worked for generations, and they work better than any other system of government. Somehow, I'm not sure how, that happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tangentially related:

I'm not sure if automated decisions are a good idea. But it would be really cool to improve productivity of politicians.

How can we expect our politicians, let alone our lay people, to understand all of the law's in a country? There is just too much text to grok.

Software developers build abstractions, write tests, refactor and simplify older code, yet no such trend seems to be occurring for law. Why not?

Politicians already do use references and bucketization, i.e. write a law for schedule one drugs, then add or remove entities from the schedule one bucket. Can't we abstract even more?

Recently I've been wondering if it is feasible to create a syntax for lawyers. Like a law language with a compiler, package manager and similar tooling to compile laws rather than write them from scratch.

Anyone familiar with such research?

<comment><USER10> I think what you're describing is fundamentally against the incentives of lawmakers. Complex laws make it possible to decouple legislative goals from public-image goals: when was the last time you saw something that actually had to be _explained_ come up in a televised debate?

<comment><USER11> unfortunately while cynical i do believe this comment captures the reality of the situation. whatshisface, what do you think can be done to take back US society and make it a little closer to what our seemingly more critically- thinking predecessors had lived through?

<comment><USER9> I agree this is a reality.

Just like the cynical reality that C/C++ programers don't want to encourage package managers. The higher the barriers to entry the more you're talents are worth.

The reality is, regardless of any one groups desire, the productivity wins of package managers are too great and the momentum of the larger software development community is moving towards package managers for every language and will one day include C/C++.

Similarly, lawmakers are a select few of a larger community of domestic but more importantly international lawyers. You give the larger community a 10x productivity win, and just sit back and watch the domino effect work.

<comment><USER12> Lawyers already study the laws of other countries. It is common for precedents established in one country to be imported into another country by "persuasion". It is also common to more or less copy and paste legislation or other legal wording.

Draftsmanship is not the hard part of law. The hard part is everything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >A couple more clicks after that, and we're looking at a summarized version of a bill tackling cybersecurity that the software has considered and rendered a judgment on, when it comes to the probability that it will become law. We're not talking a rough estimate. There's a decimal: 78.1 percent.

No way in hell is it producing probabilities calibrated to 3 significant digits. If some kind of testing of calibration produces proof it's even within 1 percent calibrated I will be shocked.

<comment><USER14> It's spitting out 3 digits for sure. The reporter is just too ignorant to realize that they're not 3 significant digits.

<comment><USER13> Obviously. It's both a concerning detail about the company (why are they displaying probabilities to a level of accuracy they can't possibly claim) and an indication the reporter didn't do due diligence. They actually use it to claim the company must have sophisticated software to get that kind of accuracy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm somehow skeptical whenever I see a CEO holding a pen on a glass wall with random math formulas on it

<comment><USER16> Especially when the first line is a _mangled_ version of Bayes Formula -- the p(y) and p(x) are in the wrong places!

<comment><USER17> It looks fine to me. Mirror the image and see if you agree.

<comment><USER16> Yikes, you're right! _Mea culpa._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure it can be but I certainly want it to be. My representative is a poor representation of me. I'd rather answer a questionnaire and feed the data into a virtual representative script that voted on laws on my behalf instead of a human.

<comment><USER19> On the flip-side, I _don 't_ want to live in a country where law is purely decided based on popular opinion. It is probably impossible to have a nation of purely rational, informed, soundly-minded voters for that kind of system. We are certainly very far away from that dream today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Already, clients are signing on to the idea: Toyota and the National > Institutes of Health, to name a couple.

Toyota I can understand & accept, but is it appropriate for a branch of the executive to hire lobbyists to lobby the legislature? Just feels a bit unseemly to me.

> Quorum says its system also powers one well-known late-night comedy show—it > won't reveal which one—helping staffers scan YouTube to pull together almost > instantly a selection of footage about topics they might use on that night's > show. Says Wirth, "They're like, 'What kinds of Roy Moore clips do we > have?'" The software has already machine-read heaps of video footage, > turning them into tagged transcripts, and sends off exactly the correct clip > to that evening's show. Millions of Americans, without knowing it, are > getting their political news curated for them in part by a Quorum bot.

Sounds a bit like Last Week Tonight.

In the cases of lobbying & clip-selection alike, what I worry about is how we'll groom the higher-level people without running them through their lower- level paces (since the lower levels will all be automated). What I mean is that a lower-level job has at least two purposes: one is to perform a job, and the other is to audition for the next higher job. The former is what AI excels at. It's really, really easy to automate the job of an 18-year-old who answers phones and hands them to the next person. It's not so easy to automate the job of a 24-year-old who answers phones and hands them to the _right_ person. It's really, _really_ difficult to automate the job of a 36-year-old who answers phones and decides whether the topic is important enough to hand to his boss. It's really _supremely_ difficult to automate the job of a 48-year-old who answers phones and makes decisions.

The problem is that every 18-year-old answering phones isn't just answering phones; he's also auditioning to be that 24-year-old finding the right person (experience he gets from the job itself). Likewise, every experienced 24-year=old is auditioning for the job of the very experience 36-year-old. And all those 36-year-olds are auditioning for the few slots as decision-making 48-year-olds.

We can really easily automate those lower levels away. But what will be our 'farm team'? Where will we grow the talent and depth of experience necessary for the higher levels?

<comment><USER21> > The problem is that every 18-year-old answering phones isn't just answering > phones; he's also auditioning to be that 24-year-old finding the right > person (experience he gets from the job itself). Likewise, every experienced > 24-year-old is auditioning for the job of the very experience 36-year-old.

Having interned in a political office, the other problem is that the 18- and 24-year-old described often doesn't exist, because there aren't enough to people to have the heirarchy you describe exist at all; the 18-24 year old answering phones is doing much more what you describe for the 36-year old (answering phones, logging constituent positions appropriately if it's a position call, directing constituent services calls (and any other calls they don't handle themselves) to the right staff person. And, on top of that, doing a lot of non-phone tasks like drafting correspondence, assisting legislative staff with research, etc., etc.

Of course, lots of staff are never college interns and do their first staff job as a graduate fellow, or as professional staff often after completing a law, business, or public policy and/or administration degree.

So, I'm both not worried that the lower level will be automated easily or much concerned that there won't be an entry path if it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can it be? Probably. Should it be? Hell no, lobbying is bad enough with humans doing it, let alone algorithms.

Hopefully no Silicon Valley startups think this is the next multi billion dollar industry to 'disrupt'.

<comment><USER23> Wouldn't those concerns be resolved by being open source? Could run the new automated system in parallel for some years first, like a second umpire in sports.

<comment><USER24> How does open source make policy decisions more transparent to the majority of people? Are you assuming that everyone in the country can read and understand the code? I get why programmers and readers of Hacker News could be enchanted by this idea: government by code shifts the power from one set of elites (the wealthy/connected) to another (programmers with a specialized skill set that can read the code). But I'm unclear on how that benefits the nation as a whole.

<comment><USER23> Why would you need everyone in the country to read and understand the code? You just need a sufficiently large group of academics, programmers, developers etc to identify issues.

<comment><USER24> > You just need a sufficiently large group of academics, programmers, > developers etc to identify issues.

I don't attribute any sort of sainthood or trustability to academics over other segments of society. It's certainly not clear that programmers are especially qualified to craft public policy. Again, instead of one group of elites that can understand what's going on you're substituting another.

Look, with Open Source software, programmers are mostly the consumers of that open source software. The customers of that software can more or less switch and aren't forced to use it at the barrel of a gun (and in the cases where big companies DO have monopoly power, the fact that they use Open Source software doesn't really stop them from exercising it in ways that are clearly for their benefit but less clearly for the benefit of their users). But if you're saying that software is now going to determine who can be arrested and who can go free, how long prison sentences will be or who can go on welfare or receive public money, there is HUGE incentive to game the system. Right now I might find Academics trustworthy because they don't get a huge financial benefit depending on the outcome of their research. But if public policy is controlled by software the incentives to cheat are huge. Now you can say they'll patrol each other, but that just means the incentive will be to collude collectively, as an entire group, for their own benefit against society at large.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A big problem with the current incarnation of democracy is that there is no accountability over time of the various goals that officials claim to pursue.

If someone running for office says that they will make sure the local firehouse gets an X% increase in budget and that unemployment in the district will go down by Y%, there should be an unambiguous way of tracking, over time, how they are doing on their promises.

This "goal verification" seems like an important first step if one wishes to introduce meaningful computational processes in Washington. Ideally, over time, we would have a system against which we can run such promises: "The ministry of health says increasing the budget of X will lead to outcome Y, and our model agrees with this decision with a confidence of 90%".

Eventually, this system might even build excellent models of what happens in various parts of society when various parameters are modified. It could predict where new schools need to be opened based on the natality data provided by hospitals and local employment rates, what the plausible long ranging effects of lowering or raising corporate tax by x% would be, whether the opening of a certain factory requires increasing the budget of the firehouse in the neighboring district because the district is now over a certain threshold for fire risks, and so on.

<comment><USER26> Any analysis of the promise "unemployment in the district will go down by Y%" will be worse than useless, because politicians have little control over the unemployment rate. You would be judging them based on a coin flip. You have to include the quality of the initial promises.

As for modeling the effect of policy on the real world, lots of people already try to do this, and their results do not agree. It's a very hard problem, perhaps impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Isn't this just building a guide to Congressmen based on their stats, and selling it to lobbyists? I don't mean to say "just" to minimize it, it sounds like a valuable product, but if you tripled or quadrupled that 160 headcount, I'd bet you could build this guide to the same quality and usefulness without using computers.

It doesn't threaten lobbyists, it's a product _for_ lobbyists.

</comment><comment><USER28> Bah. I was hoping this article was about automating away the politicians, not just the analysis of their neural network state :(

</comment><comment><USER29> TLDR: backoffice work in Washington can be automated just like backoffce work in corporations. FiscalNote wants to advertise the message that anything involving capturing backoffice data flows is actually "A.I", which means the career of every politician is in jeopardy, without FiscalNote.

</comment><comment><USER30> If Washington=Government probably 99.9% can be replaced easily. Maybe even more easily than most factory jobs. The idea that their jobs would be more complex is an illusion. The only stressful thing they do is fighting each other for more power.

However I bet it's one of the last places that actually gets automated. The value of the government is to give people reason to believe that everything is fine, that someone will deal with the big problems, etc. This story cannot be sold equally well if it's done by robots/AI. So even if we are really governed by AI some day these jobs will probably still exist. The show must go on.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you can elect a dog as a mayor[1], I think the answer is yes... even without reading the article.

[1] [https://roadtrippers.com/trips/16260761?lat=40.80972&lng=-96...](https://roadtrippers.com/trips/16260761?lat=40.80972&lng=-96.67528&z=5)

</comment><comment><USER32> Yes, but automated for the people and not corporate lobbyists: [https://united.vote](https://united.vote)

</comment><comment><USER33> Should it be automated is the better question.

<comment><USER34> And should it be transparent? All measure of sins and inefficiencies cannot survive unblinking illumination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Automation is about doing more with less. Washington strives to less with more.

</comment><comment><USER36> I would say it should have been the first thing automated.</comment>


Photoshop's CAF (content-aware fill) - unbelievable? Not quite - <AUTHOR> http://o3.tumblr.com/post/470608946/photoshops-caf-content-aware-fill-unbelievable <comment><USER2> Infilling tools have been around since 2003 (e.g., see Microsoft's "Smart Erase" in Digital Image Pro, <http://www.microsoft.com/athome/morefun/photoedit.mspx>). Nice to have it built in, though. (And it keeps getting faster and better, of course.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow. I'm certainly no GIMP fan - to be honest, I hate it - a bad attitude to have towards a piece of software I know, but technically so promising and continually let down by bad UI issues I kind of feel it's like an ex- girlfriend.

But kudos to the GIMP team for doing it first.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmm this is confusing your before park bench picture has all the items removed by PS. So the before and after picture are the exact same?</comment>


CSS Stats for websites - <AUTHOR> http://mrmrs.github.io/rprtr

<comment><USER2> Your website really hurts to attempt to focus on and read. I think it's some combination of the dark black on white comic sans and large font. My eyes just sort of gloss over.

The idea is otherwise really awesome. Super great job.</comment>


Thoughts on the monkeypatching debate: it's a matter of culture - <AUTHOR> http://lhorie.blogspot.com/2008/07/thoughts-on-authority-vs-people-debate.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this really is a good understanding of the monkey patching debate. Jeff Atwood and Reginald Braithwaite are living in two very different worlds, with their respective legitimate perspective on what's good and bad, with their own references/assumptions.

As it is often the case, there is no debate if you're clearly living in one of those 2 worlds. The fun starts when you happen to be in the gray zone (e.g. with a mid-size company), and you need to make trade-offs between the 2 perspectives.</comment>


Containers vs. VMs: It comes down to state management, networking and sprawl - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/3031020/virtualization/containers-vs-vms-it-comes-down-to-state-management-networking-and-sprawl.html <comment><USER2> The article is incorrect that Docker was designed to run stateless containers. From the beginning Docker supported explicit host volumes allowing to manage the state as one please.

But it is a spot on observation that Docker has no support for moving stateful containers to another machine. Such movement has to be done explicitly by pulling an image on new machine, copping the data and starting the container. There are tools that automate load-balancing for a container cluster, but they assume that containers either use a network storage or one copies data manually or application itself knows how to replicate its data across the cluster.</comment>


Should Undergrads Stop Majoring in Business? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304072004577323754019227394.html

<comment><USER2> If by "majoring in business" we mean majoring in "business" rather than any particular actual line of work, __YES! __And bloody obviously so!</comment>


Microsoft Continues to Hoard Patents While Using Them Against GNU/Linux - <AUTHOR> http://techrights.org/2017/03/15/still-using-patents-to-coerce/ <comment><USER2> On June 19, 2014 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International that "merely requiring generic computer implementation fails to transform [an] abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention." [5][6][7] The ruling continued:

[...] the mere recitation of a generic computer cannot transform a patent- ineligible abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention. Stating an abstract idea "while adding the words 'apply it'" is not enough for patent eligibility.[] Nor is limiting the use of an abstract idea "'to a particular technological environment.'"[]. Stating an abstract idea while adding the words "apply it with a computer" simply combines those two steps, with the same deficient result. Thus, if a patent's recitation of a computer amounts to a mere instruction to"implemen[t]" an abstract idea "on . . . a computer," [] that addition cannot impart patent eligibility.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Any time you do business with Microsoft, or any of the Business Software Alliance companies (the BSA lobbies for software patents), you fund this behaviour. Don't let their occasional contributions to open-source fool you - they want to take your money, and restrict your actions.</comment>


Out Of the Tar Pit (2006) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.mac.com/ben_moseley/frp/paper-v1_01.pdf <comment><USER2> I thought you were inventing functional reactive programming, but then I saw it was relational. But I think, due to the relational aspect, you end up achieving the same thing. Anyone interested in this should also look at Jonathan Edwards paper, Coherent Reaction <http://coherence- lang.org/Onward09.pdf> which takes a similar look at separating control, but achieves it in a more imperative looking language.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://web.mac.com/ben_moseley/frp/paper-v1_01.pdf>

<comment><USER4> Isn't that the same link as in the post? Am I missing something?</comment></comment>


Yahoo Mail users hit by widespread XSS exploit - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/07/yahoo-mail-users-hit-by-widespread-hacking-xss-exploit-seemingly-to-blame

<comment><USER2> Whenever I hear something negative about Yahoo, I feel really sorry for them. Yahoo used to be a great company a few years back. Their messenger was one of the best products they ever had, their mail used to be REALLY good (in the early days). But soon, they failed to adapt with the market's needs and they are now here where they are. They COULD have been a great company if they had put in as much effort as their competitors had put in, in understanding their market.

The best example was about how they failed to respond to Gmail's popularity. Gmail gave almost every single feature away for free, that Yahoo charged (and still charges?) a premium for. For example - Mail forwarding, (POP, IMAP too?) and so on. I personally used to have a .co.uk address with them and eventually moved to Gmail because their ads were into my face, unlike Gmail's, where they are very subtle.

Also the UX on most Yahoo's sites are terribly poor. Ever visited their homepage? Looks like a cluttered fish market.

<comment><USER3> Bad UX killed Yahoo. Intrusive, animated advertisements and a cluttered home page are how I will always remember them. I often joke about how I test Internet connections by going to yahoo.com in the browser since no one goes there anymore and I won't be deceived by cache :P

<comment><USER4> In the US, perhaps. The "cluttered homepage" design is popular in Japan.

<comment><USER5> It's not quite that simple: [http://www.tofugu.com/2012/05/15/japanese-web- design-why-you...](http://www.tofugu.com/2012/05/15/japanese-web-design-why- you-so-2003/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that, that was quite enlightening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, why does the browser send yahoo.com cookies to a request to abysswhatever.com when the user clicks on the link in the email?

he just created a pretty valid link with no shenanigans... last i checked, a XSS attack was about making a site churn out javascript code when it was not intended to and then you could make a request that passed that domain's cookies to you.

<comment><USER7> The browser doesn't send yahoo.com cookies to abysssec.com. The way XSS's work in general is that the attacker's landing page probably has an invisible iframe that GETs or POSTs to yahoo.com, with the right parameters, to trigger an XSS with js code that sends the cookies back to abysssec.com All this is invisible in the video, as the author does not want to disclose the technical details.

<comment><USER8> It sounds like disabling 3rd party cookies fixes this, right?

<comment><USER9> The cookie is a first-party yahoo cookie that is sent via a GET parameter to a remote server in plain-text.

So nope that won't help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> eric-hu I believe my Yahoo account was hit by this, since my sent mailbox showed messages with links similar to one I accidentally clicked (from a Gmail account!).

The comments in this thread suggest that the attackers now have my cookies. What can I do to invalidate old cookies for Yahoo mail?

<comment><USER10> The least you can do is change your password. I don't know if Yahoo! can log you out of your account in other locations, the way Gmail does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Exploit in action: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBXvebXo-F4>

It is currently being sold for $700 in various semi-public blackhat forums (hence widespread usage).

</comment><comment><USER12> A little heads up to the Yahoo Security team probably would have been appreciated!

<comment><USER13> It's not like this was someone revealing the vulnerability, though. The first knowledge of it was an in-the-wild attack; not much you can do about it at that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So does YMail have anything to do with this -- if you were logged into Yahoo and visited the bad page then Evil, Inc would still get your Y and T cookies, right?

I have received "Check out this cool link" emails from friends who use Yahoo mail, but I assumed that it was just scraping their Yahoo address book...

</comment><comment><USER15> Would following their advice of changing your password actually help in this situation? While it's a good practice in general, if I'm understanding this right, the attacker never has your password.

<comment><USER16> It's an xss attack that takes advantage of the fact that you're logged in, they don't need your password. The best way to avoid it is to only log into your account in a separate browser that's in incognito mode. That, or log out of your Yahoo account immediately after you've done your business with them and don't hit any other web sites while you're logged in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I personally witnessed two instances of this attack as early as December 8. I couldn't figure out until now how it was done.

<comment><USER7> How did you "witness" them? Were they doing js popups from yahoo.com?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Already, two of my Facebook friends have reported they have been hit with this vulnerability.

<comment><USER7> How technical are your friends? Sometimes people think they have been "hacked" when their contacts receive spam with their name in the From: header. That is not the case at all. Spammers simply spoof the From:. No hack required.

Beside, this XSS vulnerability is silent by nature. The victim has no idea and no visual indication that clicking a link ends up stealing his/her Yahoo auth cookies.

<comment><USER19> Sure, but if the victim sends the same email to all of their friends, he or she will surely end up finding out.

<comment><USER7> Spammers also have ways to determine your social circle (eg. scraping Facebook), so they can send mail to all your friends.

<comment><USER20> Depends on how visible your name->email is. I got one yesterday to my current non-public email address (never used for anything except person to person email, and usually not even that), from the one guy I know who uses yahoo email. Told him he might want to make sure his AV is in shape and change his password. Still no idea if it's from this or something else, he discovered that he had a bit of malware (nothing extreme, your average user level) so it could have been anything, but the timing is pretty suspicious considering his setup has gotten infected exactly once over about the four years I've known him (that I know of, but I have no doubt I'd be the first to know).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> People still use Yahoo mail?

<comment><USER22> More than use Gmail -- [http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it- work/email-...](http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/email- clients/)

<comment><USER23> read the fine print, it could mean that iOS mail client don't care that much about privacy. Almost all mail client hide external image by default (and a whitelist mechanism).</comment></comment></comment>


Open Whispersystems Flock being shutdown - <AUTHOR>

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.anhonesteffort.flock
[I tried to submit via the url instead of title a number of times but it didn't work.  ]
I wonder what's going on? There's no news yet on the OWS blog or twitter.
I presume this isn't a business decision though it might be. Either way I guess it shows the value of concentrating the distribution / withdrawal method in the Play Store.
"Flock will shutdown permanently on October 1st, 2015. Upon shutdown, all active subscriptions will be refunded and account information erased. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for supporting the project.
Registration of new Flock accounts is disabled in the latest release (0.9.7), existing users may use the new 'Export data' feature to move their contacts and calendars out of Flock or install one of many available 3rd party export apps." <comment><AUTHOR> Explanation here, seems that WebDAV was just too dated / hard to with [https://gist.github.com/rhodey/873ae9d527d8d2a38213](https://gist.github.com/rhodey/873ae9d527d8d2a38213)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Flock](https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Flock)

Nothing I can see on the github page to explain things either...</comment>


How I Work Without a Full-Blown IDE - <AUTHOR> https://nofilter.ee/how-i-work-without-a-full-blown-ide/ <comment><USER3> Uhm... In command line? And with a good stand-alone editor? There's really little to brag about, especially that there are people who do that for living three, four, or ten times as long as you do in total.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not bragging about anything really. What got you so upset?

<comment><USER3> Oh, sure you're not bragging, first writing the article, and now submitting it to an aggregator _yourself_.

It's just that undertrained kids that know it all irritate me so much, and I remember quite well your "don't write like it's 2009" article that was so arrogant. You also never explained what makes code look like it was written 2009 or what exactly was wrong with 2009.

<comment><AUTHOR> This post was all about how I make it work without a full-blown IDE, I never mentioned this was the one-and-only way to do things. In fact, if you think my set-up could be improved upon and I'm pretty sure it could, you can always pitch in - hence me posting it here.

As far as the post you refer to, I'm pretty sure I explained it - <USER2> separating views from logic and basically just spaghetti sauce-ing it all the way is what I was referring to when I meant 2009. Some call it enterprise, some call it spaghetti.

<comment><USER3> > This post was all about how I make it work without a full-blown IDE [...]

And if you left it hanging on your blog, I wouldn't bat an eye. I've written such posts myself. But yet you bragged about this trivial, uninsightful matter by submitting the post.

> [...] not separating views from logic and basically just spaghetti sauce-ing > it all the way is what I was referring to when I meant 2009.

Dude, you have just a couple of months of experience, there's high chance that _you have never seen_ typical code from 2009. Plus, your own code is probably as much crap as what you've quoted. You haven't seen enough long term development to bash anybody's code yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems to me this conversation really leads to nowhere, but you just bashing me more. If you actually read the post, you could see I wrote that "I don't have anything against IDE's per se, but for my use case they always feel like an overkill." Did you notice the "for my use case" part? Probably not.

I don't know where you took the information that I have "just a couple of months of experience", which is a complete fabrication, but this is a free world and all, so while I do not agree with what you are saying, I support the ability to say it 100%.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


AWS charged me $500 over 4 years for a "free" micro instance - <AUTHOR> AWS "free" offerings can cost a lot more than you think - I tried out a "free" t2.micro instance in 2016 and received a surprise bill for $500 recently.
It turns out that AWS does not terminate unused free instances when the 12 month free trial runs out - they will happily bill you until the end of time, irrespective if you ever log in to their service, run code, etc.
When I got in touch with AWS customer services about this they just told me to get lost.
Legally AWS may be skirting around consumer protection regulations with the way they market AWS free as free credits rather than a free service.
There are laws like 15 USC Ch. 110: ONLINE SHOPPER PROTECTION §8403. "Negative option marketing on the Internet" which are designed to prevent companies from automatically and silently upgrading customers from a free trial to a paid product.
Companies like Amazon will keep doing this for as long as we let them get away with it - do what you can to protect yourself from outrageous costs; use a prepaid credit card with a limited balance when signing up online, and spread the word about AWS' bad behavior. <comment><USER2> While I don't like the business practice, it is a very common business practice to give something for free for a time and then bill you if you don't cancel it. There is nothing illegal about it as it's all spelled out in the terms and conditions you didn't read.

I avoid engaging in these offers entirely. If a company tells me it's free then fine but I won't be providing a credit card number or any other billing related information. It's not free if you ask to hold on to my money is just a scam so you can bill me later.

I deal with this with Delta's Clear program. They say it's free for diamond medallion status, but they always want my credit card. That's not free then. That's just you're not charging me now and hoping I forget later.

<comment><USER3> The credit card rules converting the free trials to paid got a bit more strict recently, e.g. notifying the users before it starts [https://blog.recurly.com/visas-new-free-trial-mandate- what-y...](https://blog.recurly.com/visas-new-free-trial-mandate-what-you- need-to-know)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> AWS went from no invoice, no billing email for 3 years to a single $500 invoice covering multiple years? No previous contact? At 0.0116 USD/h that's about 720 days, I'm surprised they wouldn't invoice sooner.

<comment><USER4> Something is either missing or just isn't accurate in the OPs description. The likelihood of this happening is extremely remote at best but frankly IMO highly improbable period. I honestly don't believe this happened as described, but that isn't to say surprise bills don't exist on all the cloud providers. So I could see maybe the OP got a $500 bill unexpectedly, but most likely because someone found/stole an old account credential out of a public git repository (or similar) and the OP just didn't realize/know it. That makes a ton more sense and I have seen it happen quite a few times, it is an honest but costly mistake. If that is the case though, usually AWS is wiling to work with you if you just talk to them and are honest. So I am not saying the OP didn't necessarily get a surprise bill but maybe he/she is misunderstanding what happened or is just anti-AWS for whatever reason and is trying to make some point.

I have been using AWS almost since the public release and I have had a few clients who hit hard times and didn't pay their AWS invoice timely over the years, a few more clients where things went from free to need to pay and they didn't. Each of them had services terminated after 30 to 60 days max, usually a smaller dollar amount AWS will let go for ~2 months but you will have received numerous emails from them first before they will terminate the account. Also, if you contact AWS and ask for a payment extension they are also usually pretty decent about it, but no, they wouldn't allow an unpaid instance to run for years. If by some chance this happened (highly doubt it) it could be a software error on AWS's side and raising it to AWS would likely result in them forgiving the bill and fixing the issue because they don't want to miss out of revenue either.

My last soap box point, AWS is very clear you are responsible for the instance/service termination to avoid charges, so is Azure and GCP for that matter. They all are clear on how it works, you are responsible for reading the information and complying with the rules. IME all the cloud provides give you some latitude on payments though because if they were too aggressive with account suspensions/terminations they could get smacked for that as well, possibly even sued over lost revenue etc, so they have significant warnings/out reach which document their attempts too contact you and resolve it before they terminate to avoid that scenario.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it definitely wasn't a stolen credential. It's just ~$15/month for 4-5 years, which I didn't notice due to changing banks and an international move.

Once my account was dry I found out via the bank (+associated bank charges on top, of course)

<comment><USER5> Well, if AWS was drawing $15/mo for 4 years from your banking account, as far as they knew you were a happy paying customer. How would they know otherwise? Sounds like you got in a particularly unlucky situation, but I don't think most companies will react sympathetically to "Oops my monthly subscription during the past 4 years was entirely by mistake and I didn't notice that until now. Can you refund the 4 years' worth of money?"

<comment><USER6> IME companies of that scale generally eat consumer-level buyer's remorse as a cost of doing business. Happily, probably not, but not enough to be worth resisting.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not really buyer's remorse if I didn't actually buy anything. I tried a _free_ trial service, as far as I can remember just for an hour or so, and didn't need it.

You may not like this, but I'm posting my experience so that others can protect themselves. Do you at least see the utility in that?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Hidden Cost of Letting Workers Telecommute - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304066504576345782284098222.html?KEYWORDS=telecommuting+tax

<comment><USER2> It's really not that big a deal. At Stack Exchange I think we have employees in eight different states now, all individuals working from home. It's a lot of paperwork but not disproportional to the amount of paperwork you have to do per-employee anyway. It does cost something to deal with but it's a rounding error compared to the cost of those people's salaries. It is by no means a reason not to hire people who work from home in other states.

It DOES require us to collect sales tax for a bunch of different states, though. This would be a big deal if we were an ecommerce company... you'll notice that Amazon is fanatic about avoiding telecommuters; they don't want to accidentally get themselves in a position of effectively raising their prices by 8% on the entire state of Texas just to have one remote employee there.

<comment><USER3> Some questions for Joel/anyone else:

Do you need to pay corporate income taxes in these states as well?

It is possible avoid state income taxes and collecting sales taxes by hiring these employees as independent contractors (if you were willing to give them whatever autonomy was sufficient)?

Do you know if there similar tax consequences to hiring employees who are residing overseas?

(Of course the real answer to all of these is consult an attorney.)

<comment><USER4> We pay proportional taxes on the % of income that comes from other states. For example, if 80% of our revenue comes from Illinois and 20% from Michigan--we only pay taxes on the 20% from Michigan.

"Doing business" (as far as our accountant is concerned) is having billable clients in those states--generating revenue. We've had employees in 3 states (MI, IL and FL) and the only concern is making sure you are meeting that states payroll tax and withholding policies.

On a related note: Some states have different workers comp laws. We we're not required to carry workers comp in Illinois, but did need it in Michigan (and we also had to insure our Illinois employee, because she was now working for a company that was based in Michigan).

It's a confusing mess sometimes--seek help from accounts and lawyers and don't be afraid to call the state and just ask.

<comment><USER5> I've found that calling government offices can sometimes be extremely helpful.

Civil servants are often very smart, and sometimes very bored. Also, unless they are in a position where they regularly face the public, talking to "civilians" can scare them a little - they don't want to be accused of stuffing up. (As long as you are talking off the record, not getting written advice - they hate paper-trails. Written advice is to "double check" that it's all OK).

They can really go out of their way to give free advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like good way for rural states to further depress their economies. You'd think they could use all the tax revenue possible. Having a telecommuting worker pays property tax, income tax, and spends their money at the local food establishments. All this without having to give "tax intensives" for a company to move into the state. What could be better than that?

<comment><USER7> I probably shouldn't have to point this out but the last time I checked New Jersey isn't in flyover country and it's the only example cited in this article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As somebody whose last startup had people working remotely from four different states ... yikes!

With state budgets as tight as they are, it's no surprise to see them looking for reasons to tax out-of-state companies. And it sounds like it's still not clear just how much tax liability this will lead to. But wow, it sure sounds like a minefield for startups.

<comment><USER5> Yep. Better to just hire someone offshore then. Killing domestic telecommuting is _not_ going to be good for jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Discovery (DISCA) faced this issue in 2008 and decided to lay off all employees who lived in a state with this tax nexus law (I was one of them). There were a total of three employees in my state, but there were probably scores of employees around the country. They probably saved several million dollars annually in sales tax by doing this (back of the envelope calculations). A handful of the employees affected in my group were re-hired as contractors.

<comment><USER10> Note that as a company you can't just re-hire as W2 contractors. Generally (as the article states) you need to have the employees form some sort of corporate entity or work for a corporate entity. Both employment and tax law will treat solo W2 contractors (or even single member LLCs) as full time employees if you're working full-time for a single entity.

A lot of times companies will hide these types of contractors behind agencies, but its a tricky balance. Point being if you run a small company and are running into these types of issues talk to an accountant and or an employment attorney before thinking you can just hide full time employees behind a "contractor" label, its not a fool proof solution.

<comment><USER11> Where did he say he anyone was rehired as a W-2 contractor? 1099 could be possible (except for the whole work-for-hire IP issue).

<comment><USER10> For the IRS or Employment law whether or not you are a fulltime employee has nothing to do with how your taxes are filed or paid. My point for those on this board who hire remote employees is that simply re-hiring as a "contractor" does not change them into "not a full time employee"

<comment><USER11> Well, then the case could be made that they were incorrectly being treated as employees and should have in fact been contractors.

The IRS looks at the common law rules between the two entities, based on three categories:

Behavioral: [http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179111,00....](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179111,00.html)

Financial: [http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179113,00....](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179113,00.html)

Type of Relationship: [http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179116,00....](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179116,00.html)

There is even an IRS form, SS-8, which you can submit to the IRS to 'clarify' how the relationship should be treated...

<http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fss8.pdf>

All of this information is available here:

[http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99921,00.h...](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=99921,00.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On the flip side, if you work in Massachusetts but live in New Hampshire and work from home some days, you don't have to pay income tax on the days you worked from home (NH has no state income tax)

<comment><USER13> Of course, wouldn't that also mean that on days that you commute to work you're paying income tax in MA plus the above-average NH property tax?

<comment><USER14> NH property taxes aren't significantly higher than they would be for similar homes in similar towns in MA.

And yes, if you work in MA and live in NH, you pay MA income tax. Also, if you live in MA and work in NH, you pay MA income tax.

<comment><USER15> Oddly, though, if you live in MA and work in MA, it turns out that you have to pay NH income tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's another hidden cost that they didn't mention in this article: benefits and employment agreement requirements that vary from state to state.

We had a few colleagues that telecommuted from California in a startup that I worked at 2 years ago. Just for those two employees, the company had to draw up different benefits and employment agreements to satisfy the local California laws.

Fortunately, these costs aren't usually ongoing unless you change both on a regular basis.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ludicrous! Imagine an employee living out of state doing work at home, like preparing slides for a presentation. No telecommuting, just doing work at a desk. And that's "doing business"?

<comment><USER18> What about happening to answer the phone while on vacation? Or perhaps working on a server that's located in another state?

<comment><USER7> Well, Texas has tried recently to say that simply having a server in their state creates a nexus for sales tax purposes...

<comment><USER19> I have no idea how the US tax system works. But how about this thought: from saying you are taxable if running servers in some state, it wouldn't be a big leap saying "your javascript code runs in browsers on computers that are in our state and you are therefore taxable"...

<comment><USER20> A pretty big one.

A server is, arguably, a physical location serving products. Javascript running in a browser is the product served. Going with a tried-and-true car analogy, a state can't tax a car manufacturer because the cars drive on their roads, but they can tax them if they produce or sell cars in that state.

<comment><USER21> It is not always that easy to distinguish servers and clients.

What about P2P systems such as Skype?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was wondering something similar but for countries. Say that I work for my own company developing iphone apps or something like that. Now I like to travel around so I go to the US and work from there, could it be problematic?

<comment><USER23> As far as I know there is no visa that allows foreigners to travel to the US and work remotely back home. It would be a breach of the Visa Waiver program (or any other visa) which can lead to deportation.

I'd like to hear from people who did this, told the immigrations officer about their plans and were not turned back on the border.

<comment><USER24> IANAL, but say you're a manager of BigSouthAmericanCorp (maybe Euro/Asian, etc, your mileage may vary) going to a meeting with BigAmericanCorp. Then you can use the Business visa, which is the same as Tourism visa. As long as you're not working for an American employee, it's OK to be in US on work temporarily.

So if I were going to US to work on my own business temporarily, I'd either go as a tourist or say, "Oh, I'm from Nandemo Ltd., and will go to a business meeting with SP_ Corp, here's their invitation letter". That's similar to what I did when I went to US for a job interview at the headquarters of X Corp. trying to get a job at their Tokyo office. If I had said I was coming to a job interview they wouldn't let me in; even though I had no intention to work in US.

One must be out one's mind to volunteer unnecessarily detailed information to the immigrations officer. Given that there are millions of illegal immigrants actually working for American employers and not getting deported, the odds that a web developer working at home would be deported seems pretty slim.

<comment><USER23> First, you are confusing visas. The tourist visa is not the same as the visa waiver. There is a tourist visa, it's called B-2 and it does not allow you to do any business or work. Visiting with the visa waiver program means visiting without a visa.

Next, for short trips, visiting without a visa is equivalent to having a business visa (B-1). It allows you to meet with US clients, customers, partners, and so on and it allows you to go to conferences. It does not allow you to work.

See as a recent example from Hacker News: <http://www.noop.nl/2011/06/american-learning-experience.html>

<comment><USER5> Exactly. There's a fine line between a business trip, and something that requires a work visa.

I'd imagine that the best way for a foreigner to work in the US on non-US projects is if a body-shop (possibly owned by them - I think most people can own a US company) hires them, then subcontracts them out to the offshore employer. The question is how they get everything set up while they don't have a work visa. I wonder if a business visa would allow them to set the paperwork up? Anyway, it's madness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Also, I spend most of the day wearing just a dressing gown and if I have to appear on a webcam for some kind of chat or conference, I smear the lens with vaseline and hold up a little doll of myself dressed smartly that I made, wiggling it whenever I'm speaking.

This comes at enormous cost to my dignity.

</comment><comment><USER26> I work at a large multinational software company where distributed teams have been encouraged across all projects. I live in Ireland and work in/for a U.S. team. Many of the U.S. team also work from home.

Recently the edict came down that working-from-home for those employees with an office was not acceptable. It listed a large number of negative consequences (loss of career prospects, management visibility, team cohesion, and social interaction). Each and every one of these applies to me as part of the distributed team (which is still being implemented) but apparently the double-standards are ok.

Working from home is a no-no but working from another country is just fine!

</comment><comment><USER27> Loved this comment

> Gee, and to think we were wondering what businesses could do to create jobs?

Clearly, the answer is "what can government do to stop holding back job creation?"

</comment><comment> kill-9 Yet another way in which government is trying to thwart efficiencies developed by capitalist activity.

<comment><USER28> I would say that it's another way for the government to capitalize on capitalist activity.

<comment><USER29> To "parasitize" not capitalize.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That's one way to stop outsourcing...

<comment><USER31> This has nothing to do with outsourcing as outsourcing is usually done on a contract basis. This is a way to stop people from being employed by a company in a different state.

<comment><USER30> "Mr. Bobman offers a potential solution: Have the telecommuting employee resign, form a C or S corporation and invoice the ex-employer for work. But he warns that the former employer would have to pay the former employee more to cover new expenses and lost benefits. And, although it would be a challenge, states could still make a case for taxing the former employer."

It starts with full-time employees and ends with anyone you pay...

Similar to how sales tax started with the location of your company and is now the location of your servers ( in several states ).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The moral of the story is: don't have employees. Have contractors.

<comment><USER2> Good luck with that. The IRS has very specific rules for who can be considered an employee and who can be considered a contractor. Attempting to treat people who should be employees as contractors is one of their number one enforcement goals, because contractors don't have withholding and are therefore far less likely to pay their taxes.

<comment><USER33> Would that matter, as long as the contractors only work one of projects which are time limited?

<comment><USER34> It depends on the degree of control you exercise over the individual, if the individual is offering their services to the public, if the individual furnishes their own tools to perform services, if the individual performs services in their own facilities or yours, among other factors[1] weighted differently in each situation.

PDF warning: [1] <http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/x-26-07.pdf> see pages 3-5</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why can't we come up with great user experiences? - <AUTHOR> I've been working in tech for a while and I consider myself a tech-savvy. I even worked for some of the most "prestigious" tech companies as an engineer. Though, I struggle everyday when I interact with software products. They're all confusing as hell! Why can't we come up with a clean and simple user experience with all the resources we have in 2018?<p>Examples: can't use gmail anymore, thousands of annoying bugs on iOS/macOS, youtube changes its UI every day, enterprise products are expensive and unusable, managing multiple google accounts without getting security alerts or unexpected behaviors, transferring a picture from my phone to my desktop, iCloud crap, reading news on the web without killing our mirco processors trying to load random ads in the middle of the screen, automatically added to subscription lists from businesses, etc. <comment><USER2> We can come up with great UX.

The problem is, most of the products you mentioned intentionally degrade UX because you are not the main customer - cancer peddlers (aka advertisers) are, and dark patterns & bad UX is there to make you look at the cancer and/or accidentally click on it.</comment>


U.S. now 'totally unified' in opposition to U.N. Internet governance - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/u-s-now-totally-unified-in-opposition-of-u-n-internet-governance-7000008382/ <comment><USER2> ICANN is ostensibly supposed to run in a democratic fashion based on input from the international community, but I'd be very surprised if the U.S. government wasn't already abusing their influence over ICANN towards at least two purposes:

1\. Spying on everyone out of paranoia over terrorism.

2\. Doing whatever the RIAA and MPAA's lobbyists want them to do.

That's not so good, but the ITU's express goal seems to be to balkanize the internet into a collection of state-controlled networks. One of the biggest benefits of the internet is that it shrinks the world and grants everyone, regardless of what country they live in, access to the same online community. I probably sound like complete hippie saying this, but I believe the global community created by the internet really is bringing all peoples of the world closer together. Reversing this trend would be far worse than anything ICANN is likely to do in the next decade!

Of course, as bad as the ITU's intentions are, the reality would likely be even worse. The internet is so interconnected that the power one state is granted over the internet in its own jurisdiction would likely translate into power they wield over everyone.

ICANN is, by far, the lesser of two evils at present. I am very concerned about the decline of respect for privacy in the U.S., but things simply haven't gotten bad enough yet to make the ITU look good by comparison.

<comment><USER3> _"I probably sound like complete hippie saying this, but"_

I hate it that sentiments like this are so prone to be cliche that thoughtful people completely avoid them. It is absolutely reasonable to say something like this. The internet has shrunk the world, strengthened global solidarity, weakened our illusions of nationalism.

I'll see your hippiness and raise you a poem. Cheesiness be damned.

      We loved the easy and the smart,
      But now, with keener hand and brain,
      We rise to play a greater part.
      The lesser loyalties depart,
      And neither race nor creed remain
      From bitter searching of the heart.
      Not steering by the venal chart
      That tricked the mass for private gain,
      We rise to play a greater part.
      Reshaping narrow law and art
      Whose symbols are the millions slain,
      From bitter searching of the heart
      We rise to play a greater part.

<comment><USER4> Love cheese and poetic commentary.

<comment><USER3> While I'd love to claim it, the poetic commentary is by Leonard Cohen. The cheese is me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ya know, I'm all in favor of unity and all but it would have really helped us make the argument that "we" (as in the USA) are doing a good job managing "The Internet" if "we" hadn't been seizing and shutting down domains in _foreign countries_ that someone in the US disagrees with. That particular set of actions is coming back to hurt us.

Now if we could get the Congress to pass a law that says the US registrars cannot take down a domain of an offshore company unless there is a judicial order to do so, _from the host country_ that would go a long way to making amends. But that would not really impress the content folks.

<comment><USER6> Do you have examples of ccTLDs being taken down? The .com/.org/.net/etc TLDs are designated to the US. Sure, they are the most common TLDs out there, but they are under US jurisdiction.

I'd be more concerned about how the domain seizures have happened basically at the behest of the content industries, with no (appropriate amount of) due diligence done by government officials.

<comment><USER7> .com/.org/.net are not desginated to the US. They are generic top-level domains operated by a US company. Go use .us if you want a ccTLD for the US. Or .edu/.gov/.mil which are sponsored TLDs for use by the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here you can read the draft Recommendation ITU-T Y.2770, Requirements for Deep Packet Inspection in Next Generation Networks: [https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:hZQFa54QIRsJ:...](https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:hZQFa54QIRsJ:committee.tta.or.kr/include/Download.jsp%3Ffilename%3Dchoan%252F%255B2012-1357%255DY.2770.pdf+&hl=en&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiYqxbjxfzsPMyrJWF3n4UxZ9ue6GFXfIleBijvnyPhGjSFtzJYljtQEtVFkL0-NsyLgBUgL82X4_vEcab7kjQICiLTDDIHxQPafPMvowZIioo- Nyk9K7gF96U_Tm61D0pCYWC3&sig=AHIEtbT_Ocax-fYnglRV8MW4LsDBqoqPhg)

</comment><comment><USER9> In principal, as a non-US citizen, why would I want the US to control the internet as opposed to the UN?

This is not a reflection of what is currently being considered at the UN which from what I have read I don't support.

What do other international people think?

<comment><USER10> The US has stronger protections of freedom of speech than (any?) other countries.

"The legal protections of the First Amendment are some of the broadest of any industrialized nation, and remain a critical, and occasionally controversial, component of American jurisprudence."

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

<comment><USER11> As a Canadian I bet I have far more Internet freedom than a US citizen does I don't have to fear being flagged as a downloader of movies by media corp swat teams.

I'd say any person in any western nation would think their country is more fair than the others.

I'm not distrustful of the UN I'm not a fan because it's a huge bureaucracy but the US isn't any better, I bet people in the US wouldn't accept Canada being in control of ICANN.

<comment><USER12> As a Canadian your freedom to torrent is probably greater than your American buddies - the legality of downloading is murky, though uploading is most definitely illegal. Last I checked the two largest ISPs in Canada (Rogers and Bell) both throttle file sharing protocols, though my information may be out of date.

But we're not talking about your right to be a pirate, we're talking about something much more fundamental - i.e., freedom of speech.

We're talking about your ability to go online and talk shit about your neighbor, your city councilman, your MP, your Congressman, your Governor General, or your Prime Minister.

As a Canadian myself, I can tell you that the US takes a _much_ stronger stance in favor of freedom of speech than Canada (or really, any Westminster system country today) and has consistently erred on the side of preserving speech moreso than Canadians - to the point where some Canadians consider the US stance to be rather extreme (e.g., malicious but truthful attacks are not consider libel nor defamation).

As far as protections for both political expression as well as creative expression (i.e., the arts) the US is one of the strongest (if not _the_ strongest) in the world - and this is coming from a Canadian who's mostly cynical about American politics.

The claim that the US is the most free (in terms of speech) country in the world isn't just typical pompous American exaggeration, there is a lot of meat behind the claim.

<comment><USER11> Yes I agree the US has enshrined freedom of speech Canada not so much it's more an unspoken unofficial agreement.

But I'd say it evens since the US seems to push the limits of prosecution on free speech and Canadian authorities just don't really seem to bother.

As for the incidents of lawsuits mentioned in other comments I can't say I've ever heard of them not that it matters but what I'm saying is it seems rare for anyone to go to that extreme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, I think the US is actually doing an "ok" job of managing the internet. If you have to hand over control, give it to anybody EXCEPT for the UN. The UN is a joke, full of even more corrupt politicians than in the US (and we have many!).

As usual, research your own propaganda, but here is one bit to digest: <http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/rosett040406.htm>

<comment><USER14> Well, it's nice if a US citizen would have that opinion... but I'm not a US citizen and I would prefer the Internet to not be under US government control.

Imagine if it was the Chinese government that was in control, or (for the sake of argument) the British or French government. Would you be ok with that?

<comment><USER15> I (and many people) are in favor of give control to the ones less likely to corrupt/change it; unfourtunaly we dont know who that is so is better to stick with the one already in control to avoid surprises.

<comment><USER16> Better the devil you know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The resolution in question is House Concurrent Resolution 127: <http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2012/roll555.xml>

</comment><comment><USER18> If the UN decided to apply new regulations to the internet would they even have the power to do so?

<comment><USER19> Probably not, as they are not a "world government", and the decision would have to be ratified by each country.

However, if they do decide that they need to do this, that is still very very bad for the Internet, even if say US and EU refuse to adopt the proposals. But that means the majority of the countries out there might still adopt them. It would lead to a balkanized Internet, something we feared since SOPA, except with the current proposals, it would be much worse.

Content providers may remain free to distribute their content in EU and US, but they won't be in all the other countries that adopt and ratify ITU's proposals. We could start having the same type of licensing mess we see with books and music all over the world, where some countries have to wait months or years to get that content. Now imagine all of that would happen for just one blog post, or a video, maybe from a smaller service than Youtube.

So it's very important that there is unanimous or at least almost unanimous rejection of these proposals at ITU, because even if US and EU reject it, it would still affect us otherwise, and most importantly, the Internet will cease to be a universal thing for everyone - all in the name of giving more money to some ISP's and aiding some governments to monitor and censor their populations.

Not to mention that if the proposals pass, it means we're losing a battle with the future. It means this trend of making the Internet less free will keep growing, and who knows if next time US and EU will be against it. Maybe they'll see "how well" it works for the other countries to have censorship and whatnot, and they'll decide that maybe it's time for them to adopt all of that, too. This is why I think it's very important to win this battle, too, just like we won with SOPA and ACTA (although unfortunately, 8 other countries didn't, who already adopted ACTA, and India also passed ACTA in bits and pieces through other legislation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article seems to frame the future-of-the-internet issue in a weird way.

The ITU is the body responsible for most sub-sea fiber communications standards and for international radio spectrum allocations. It seems to represent the interests of international telecommunications companies, while the interests of domain registrars are united under the US-based ICANN.

The reason to oppose UN control over the internet is not because it is the UN, but because historically telecommunications companies (with their profit motives) have been more hostile to the free flow of information than domain name registrars.

<comment><USER21> The other reason would be that the Internet worked fine until now and is great just as it is.

It could be better, but when I think of all the things that we could fix, like decentralized DNS, I'm pretty sure any _regulators_ will take it in the opposite direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow. I am really happy with Congress. On a side note, I think we should add the phrase "United Nations Internet Governance" to every bill so that both parties come together to solve challenges in the future.

</comment><comment><USER23> What kinds of governance are even required on mediums used to communicate information?

<comment><USER24> That's a bit of a disingenuous charaterization. The internet is not just HTML anymore. It's a platform for commerce, education, entertainment, etc.

That said, I don't think we particularly need governance on the internet, but more because we have adequate tools to achieve regulatory goals by asserting jurisdiction over meat-space endpoints. E.g. if some phony educational site is scamming people, I think it's adequate to be able to get the operator sitting in Nebraska instead of leveraging regulation on the internet itself.

<comment><USER25> > The internet is not just HTML anymore.

Nor has it ever been, seeing as how it predates HTML by over a decade.

<comment><USER26> ~2 decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's nice the US House did this, but the US Senate approves treaties so it would be better coming from them.

<comment><USER28> The Senate was also unanimously opposed.

<comment><USER27> Where is the Senate resolution?

<comment><USER28> [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi- bin/bdquery/z?d112:SC00050:@@@L...](http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi- bin/bdquery/z?d112:SC00050:@@@L&summ2=m&);

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not surprising the Democrats do not want to hand over power from the federal government. While the Republicans (myself included) do not trust the federal government to oversee the internet, but they certainly do not trust the U.N. to do it either.

<comment><USER30> Wow, what a disingenuous, bullshit comment you've made here.

From the article:

>We need to send a strong message to the world that the Internet has thrived under a decentralized, bottom-up, multi-stakeholder governance model.

While that statement was made by a Republican Congresswoman, I see no reason to think that it doesn't accurately represent the thoughts of most of the House - including Democrats - because, as she points out, it is a _multi- stakeholder_ model. Some of the proposals before the ITU, the very ones the House is united against, would put significantly _more_ power in the hands of the federal government - not less.

Why do Democrats oppose it anyway? Because they aren't fascists. Sorry to be the one to have to tell you.

<comment><USER31> "Why do Democrats oppose it anyway? Because they aren't fascists"

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The Democrats are just as quick to throw millions of people in prison as the Republicans are, and it is the Obama administration that has set the record for "most paramilitary raids on medical marijuana dispensaries."

<comment><USER32> _the Obama administration [...] has set the record for "most paramilitary raids on medical marijuana dispensaries."_

That's like saying during the Bush Jr. administration that they had set the record for the "most paramilitary raids on cloud computing datacenters". The title is meaningless because the measure _didn't exist_ before that administration.

<comment><USER31> First of all, the fact that paramilitary raids on marijuana dispensaries even happen with the full approval of the Obama administration is bad enough. That being said, California's medical marijuana program has been in place since 1996, long before Obama even had aspirations to be in the white house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is "Internet governance" a synonym for DNS?

</comment><comment><USER34> ICANN, ITU, etc., on the other hand...</comment>


Ask HN: How often do you see scam ads on your FB feed? - <AUTHOR> I get them practically every single day. Just now I received a second ad pointing to the same exact fraudulent offering:
https://www.newzem.com/index.php?route=product%2Fproduct&product_id=1445
By a different vendor with a different randomly generated name.
What I'm curious about is whether these scam ads show up in the feeds of American users. I'm residing in Poland currently. I seriously suspect that I'm getting this garbage because the likelihood of a civic lawsuit is negligible in this part of the world. <comment><USER2> Install uBlock Origin.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock- origin...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)</comment>


Turing Tumble – Build Marble-Powered Computers - <AUTHOR> https://www.turingtumble.com/ <comment><USER2> Someone built a in-browser simulator of Turing Tumble, if you're curious.

[https://jessecrossen.github.io/ttsim](https://jessecrossen.github.io/ttsim)

<comment><USER3> That's fun to play with, but it's missing start/pause/stop controls and explanation how to perform such actions :(.

I managed to get it to run after dropping some balls randomly on the main field; the simulator then continued to release one ball after the other.

<comment><USER4> If you click the 'hand' icon on the top left you can then click on the hoppers to dispense balls.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Didn't notice that, because... you have to place your mouse exactly in the right spot, and only then an arrow icon will pop up under it, and only clicking in that small spot will make the hopper dispense a ball.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ridiculous we are still waiting on a Turing Tumble llvm backend that will emit decent marble netlistings. I swear if it doesn't have proper tail recursion, you will have an actual mess when the stack overflows near the mere thought of fib(n=10)

<comment><USER6> This is a complete mis-match for my use case.

I have cats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Creator is on reddit answering questions...

[https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/9d8fck/as_a_kid_i_vis...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/9d8fck/as_a_kid_i_visited_this_store_every_chance_i_got/)

</comment><comment><USER8> The wikipedia page on Fredkin & Toffoli's billiard ball computer[0] mentions a 2011 paper _Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate_ [1] co-authored by Andrew Adamatzky of the Unconventional Computing Centre:

"Soldier crabs _Mictyris guinotae_ exhibit pronounced swarming behavior. Swarms of the crabs are tolerant of perturbations. In computer models and laboratory experiments we demonstrate that swarms of soldier crabs can implement logical gates when placed in a geometrically constrained environment."

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard- ball_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard-ball_computer) [1][http://wpmedia.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/13/2018/02/20-2-2.p...](http://wpmedia.wolfram.com/uploads/sites/13/2018/02/20-2-2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> More refined version of the classic Digi-Comp II and actually turing-complete, according to the creators.

With its 2 Hz speed per "instruction" (ramps, gears) it's not super slow. I would love to see a bigger version and a simulator without board limits.

Edit: no one yet proved that the toy is Turing complete, but the creators believe it is because you can build NAND gates.

<comment><USER10> It couldn't be with a limited set of marbles could it?

<comment><USER11> I think it would be fair to call the system Turing complete if it is theoretically capable of addressing an arbitrary amount of memory. Of course, no physical computer or Turing machine actually has unbounded memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I was a kid a teacher donated an old game to the class that was a rudimentary version of this, Avalanche[1]. None of the kids had seen this game before but the satisfying mechanical movement and thinking it took to get all the marbles to fall all at once made it became very popular. I had these fond memories of Avalanche, and did actually think of it as a visualization when studying hardware in college, but over time my recall had made it more elaborate. Surprising to see how simple the old game actually was. If me and my classmates got so engaged with a primitive ancestor of Turing Tumble this new game could really catch on with kids, as long as it isn't overly complicated.

[1] [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/446/avalanche](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/446/avalanche)

</comment><comment><USER13> Got one in the Kickstarter and my kids love it. Great for the 7-10 age range with adult partnership. The comic story is even decent! I imagine 12+ could get pretty far on their own.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. I was surprised by how much my 6 year old became engaged in the story. He frequently asks to play/solve more so he can find out what happens next in the story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Check out the Turing Tumble Education site [1] for PDFs of the teaching resources (which includes the puzzles included in the actual set) and links to the in-browser simulations of the Turing Tumble, including one in VR.

[1] [https://edu.turingtumble.com/](https://edu.turingtumble.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> When I was a kid I made contraptions similar to this using hotwheels tracks with differently sized holes cut into them and slips of paper. Wasn't turing complete, but could do some things. I would have had a blast with this thing. I might buy one now so I can gift it to my nephew when he's a little older.

</comment><comment><USER17> When it said marble-powered computers I was imagining something like the Marble Machine

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q)

Looks like a cool educational project though.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks cool, but a bit pricey.</comment>


Ask HN: Open-Source IoT Chips? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I was blown away by the Google talk today regarding Coral, they're ML meets IOT platform. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgm25QdF90A
One thing I noticed was that there seems to be a lot of platform lock in. That seems silly when the whole point of building these systems is diversity of useful applications and distributions.
Are there any startups working in the space that have more open strategies, or even fully open sourced chips? If not, I think this could be an awesome opportunity for a lot of folks to build a seriously powerful IOT company, starting from chips all the way through software.
Am i a fool for thinking this? <comment><USER2> Hiya, actually there is an option -- this chip is open source and $14.95 list price. [https://iotdev360.com/articles/2019/04/01/sparkfun-edge- dev-...](https://iotdev360.com/articles/2019/04/01/sparkfun-edge-dev- board.aspx)

Hope this helps!</comment>


Researchers Gave the EmDrive Its Most Sensitive Test and Saw Nothing - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/a-mythical-form-of-space-propulsion-finally-gets-a-real-test/ <comment><USER2> Ultimately if this turns out to be just "thermal drift" it's the result we all expected, but not the result we hoped for. It would've been nice to see a nice to see a revolutionary theory bending leap forward in space propulsion.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's a shame but this is what everyone (well, most people) expected. I am glad that is was properly investigated but it was always too good to be true.

</comment><comment><USER4> Surprised that thermal expansion is so hard to test against--seems like you could just heat up the DUT and compare against the thrust measurements?</comment>