Linux code is the 'benchmark of quality,' study concludes  - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.in/news/linux-code-benchmark-quality-study-concludes-98752013 <comment><USER2> Coverity has been reporting bugs it finds in the Linux kernel since ~2000.[1]

That makes this comparison complete nonsense, surely? "Bugs found by static analyser X" is only useful as a metric for comparing software projects insofar as it's representative of wider code quality. Which may well be true normally, but doesn't work if you report those bugs, then do the analysis again after they're fixed to compare with the results from software projects you didn't do that with!

[1] See <http://www.coverity.com/library/pdf/linux_report.pdf> . At one point it listed all linux bugs found at <http://linuxbugs.coverity.com/> . Example bug report on lkml from last month: <https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/4/5/297>

<comment><USER3> Props for saying this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Then there's the seL4 OS kernel, which was developed and proven to have zero bugs. [http://www.theengineer.co.uk/news/safer- software/312631.arti...](http://www.theengineer.co.uk/news/safer- software/312631.article)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is fairly meaningless, what is classed as a "defect" for example? Not all bugs are equal.

What about comparing code that has similar requirements and has similar numbers of users.

Of course Linux is going to fare well against BS corporate software that was made primarily to satisfy some middle manager.

Likewise open source is going to include a lot of stuff written by college students that nobody actually uses.

Would be more interesting to compare Linux with similar parts of the NT core for example.

<comment><USER6> Even worse, not all lines of code are equal. Across languages, but also within them. C/C++ can be terse or verbose depending on style and the subset of features employed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a big fan of Coverity but it takes a lot of babying to make it useful. The code bases where I've brought Coverity bugs down to an acceptable ratio included a lot of markups and comments like

"// doing it like this to make Coverity happy"

The other issue is that the high-quality closed source codebases are probably inaccessible precisely because the amount of investment it takes to get the defect count low is also the reason they are closed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ok, so my problem with this is what qualifies as a "bug" in their scans. If there scans are so good at finding these bugs then we need to pay them all tons of money and make our software bug free by using their scanning tool.

<comment><USER9> My experience with their free open source scan is that of the 50 or so "defects" found, one was an outright bug, one was a false-positive, one was intentional (a deliberate crash in some debug code), and the rest were basically style complaints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The OpenBSD devs have been very critical of it. That may just be sour grapes, but they may have some valid criticisms as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've often wondered what the defect rate is for various projects as measured by hours spent. I've often seen commercial code written quite quickly, while open source code, being written more for self-actualization, artistry, and social proof, tends to be written more slowly (and carefully). On the other hand, good engineers tend to write code more quickly than bad ones.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd rather suggest PostgreSQL's sources: * it's user space code * they are much more uniform * they are much more readable

<comment><USER13> Or how about sqlite? It's the epitome of ruthless testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Linux! Ha! I am sure the device driver for that 256mb Hello Kitty USB thumb- drive is poetry. Linux is not the first place I'd look for high-quality code. I think I'd start with Minix.

<comment><USER15> The standards for admission into the mainline Linux kernel tree are pretty high.

<comment><USER14> True. And I wonder if Minix is higher. But from a security point of view, you're only as strong as your weakest link. Linux runs device drivers in kernel space, so your OS is as strong as the hello-kitty driver. Think this is hard to exploit? You can create a USB device to search a linux host for device drivers that are exploitable, then imitate that device. [1]

Suddenly, the Hello Kitty USB drive matters. That code is running in kernel space.

Minix on the other hand runs device drivers in user-land. [2]

Given that device drivers contain 3-7 times as many bugs as other kernel code,[3] a conclusion you may reach is that Linux contains more bugs per line than Minix.

[1] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Im0_KUEf8>

[2] <http://www.minix3.org/other/reliability.html>

[3] <http://www.osnews.com/story/15960>

ps. Sure as hell I can't code to the standard of getting a non-trivial patch accepted to the Kernel :-)

<comment><USER5> Interesting, though I guess there is a non-trivial performance cost to userspace drivers, seems hard to believe you could reasonably drive a GPU from userland. I remember John Carmack saying something about how driver overhead was the one of the biggest bottlenecks when developing modern games.

Driver quality is of course something which will always significantly rock the boat when it comes to stability but that is going to be the same with any operating system. To an extent driver quality should be a factor when choosing hardware. If you don't build your kernel with Hello Kitty support you never have to worry about that code.

I guess that is one of the reasons that Apple has a better reputation for software reliability in that for the most part they get to choose the hardware that will be used with the OS.

<comment><USER16> I think Apple USB drivers are userspace. USB was slow until 3.0.

<comment><USER5> I guess that would make sense, since USB peripherals are likely less performance sensitive in terms of latency and are also the place where you are going to get the widest variety of devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If by benchmark of quality you mean code with the lowest defect density ("Defect density refers to the number of defects per 1000 lines of software code.").

<comment><USER18> and if by 'defect' you mean 'thing flagged by coverity analysis tools'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This guy in ms research studies code defects in the context of ms software. [http://research.microsoft.com/apps/mobile/showpage.aspx?page...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/mobile/showpage.aspx?page=/en- us/people/nachin/publications.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER20> Benchmark of open source quality perhaps. Over everything I'd say NASA would probably take that prize. Of course we don't have their sources to analyze but their practices are well known and the results seem pretty strong.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nonsense. I work long hours debugging various kernels, including Windows, Linux and the *BSDs. The quality of the OpenBSD kernel is amazing. Maybe Minix is better, but that's because it's educational code.

</comment><comment><USER22> How does this scan service work? Is it just BS?

If software can automatically find code defects... why are there any code defects at all anymore? Just fix whatever their scan says to fix.

<comment><USER23> It's a relatively sophisticated static analyser. Nothing new, but quite useful.

Open source projects can register and get reports for free, commercial companies have to pay. Coverity uses eg. Linux to test and compare their product against, and write various marketing pieces such as this one to raise awareness for their product.

<http://scan.coverity.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Defect is too broad a term in this study. The headline is sensationalization of one metric, which is it itself too broad. And does it really measure what it states?

</comment><comment><USER25> Presumably, this is only kernel space code... That's only a fraction of a modern Linux OS.

Good study though... not the greatest qualification of facts in the article.

<comment><USER13> I've often felt that more developers (or even interested power users), should be running with things like MALLOC_CHECK_=3 (<http://www.novell.com/support/kb/doc.php?id=3113982>) enabled by default for everything. On top of that, when we have plenty of FLOSS static analysis tools (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4545188>), plus things like valgrind, gprof and gcov, I don't understand why more people don't use them. As for compiler flags, if we can build a whole distro around optimization (Gentoo), why can't we build a whole distro around debugging (-fstack-protector-all, -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2, -g3, etc)? I realize some distros already enable things like this, but usually they are looking to harden things, not necessarily diagnose bugs.

<comment><USER26> You may want to look into Hardened Gentoo which does things along the lines you suggest, amongst other hardening techniques.

<http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/hardened/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It would be very interesting to see how the quality of BSD code is compared to Linux.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would love to know how Linux fares against any of the Windows OSs in this scenario.

<comment><USER25> We would only hear about it if Linux lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Compared to what? Proprietary corporate CRUD code? How about comparing to BSD, Hurd, Haiku, Mach etc.?

Edit: This article has better details. [http://gcn.com/blogs/pulse/2013/05/linux-leads-in-open- sourc...](http://gcn.com/blogs/pulse/2013/05/linux-leads-in-open-source- quality-but-risky-defects-lurk.aspx)

"The finding is based on an analysis by the Coverity Scan Service, which for more than seven years analyzed 850 million lines of code from more than 300 open-source projects, including those written in Linux, PHP and Apache."

"In general, Coverity found the average quality of open-source software was virtually equal to that of proprietary software. Open-source projects showed an average defect density of .69, the study found, a dead heat with the .68 for proprietary code developed by enterprise customers of the service.

Although the average rates of defects in the two types of code are nearly identical, researchers did find a difference in quality trends based on the size of the development project.

For instance, as proprietary software coding projects passed 1 million lines of code, defect density dropped from .98 to .66, a sign that software quality rises in proprietary projects of that size.

That trend reversed itself in the cost of open-source code, researchers found. Open source projects between 500,000 and 1 million lines of code had a defect density of .44, which grew to .75 when those projects went over the 1 million line mark."

<comment><USER30> Could it be that over-1m-LOC proprietary projects are, in fact, fossilised? Once a project is large enough, deep changes are discouraged because their cost (and risk) to the business gets too high.

Meanwhile, open source projects like to refactor (somebody would say _reinvent the wheel_ ) forever and ever, constantly ripping out old code for new, so defect density is stable and simply rises in line with overall complexity (which obviously rises with project size).

I'd be curious to look also at developers' turnaround rates: once you leave a company you can't keep hacking on their code, which is something you can actually do with open-source. As old developers leave, their code lies untouched for fear of breaking anything, and again gets fossilised.

<comment><USER31> You could probably also speculate about the impact of the corporate projects. For example, if the project is over 1M LOC, can we surmise it is very likely that project is their bread-and-butter (and thus gets much more attention and resources)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd make some snarky comment about the quality of one small but important part of Linux noted for ongoing consternation - sound - but seems that'd be poking a hornet's nest _again_. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5664202>

<comment><USER32> Is this really relevant here?

(I'm sure the sound code has few statically-detectable defects... even if it fails to produce anything audible for most people.)

<comment><USER4> Intended relevance was raising the issue of what constitutes defects, the range of effects, and longevity thereof. As others noted, some of what were counted as "defects" were little more than semantic inconsistencies or obscure flaws rarely seen (if ever); counting each of those as "1 defect" on the same scale as something that pesters the heck out of a large percentage of users (or drives away many prospective users) isn't quite right.

My poor wording was an attempt to raise the point without eliciting a similar hundred+ responses as the last time it came up.</comment></comment></comment>


The Dot-Com Bust's Worst Flops Were Actually Fantastic Ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/12/da-bom/ <comment><USER2> This is a terrible commenting habit for me to get into, but I'm going to do it again: "I stopped reading at...".

Instacart is _not_ "exactly like" Webvan. The only thing the two companies have in common is groceries. What distinguishes them is everything else. Webvan:

* Shipped their own groceries from their own gigantic centralized warehouses

* Did a land-grab rollout to a large number of cities

* Had a gold-plated customer experience enabled by enormous spending on employees and infrastructure. I _still_ store all my electronics in a large stack of those big plastic crates Webvan gave me for free

* Built a massive central _kitchen_ so they could deliver prepared meals to their customers

Instacart:

* Sends randos to Whole Foods and Safeway to get groceries using those people's own vehicles

* Rolls out slowly (I still can't get service in Oak Park, despite being half a block from Chicago, and Chicago only happened months and months after they launched SFBA)

* Has no discernable infrastructure expenses. I think they _might_ reimburse some of their drivers for $20 dollies.

You can turn any "flop" into a "fantastic idea" if you devise a sustainable business model for it. If you can buy for a nickel and sell for a dime, you're golden. Webvan bought for a dollar and sold for a penny. Groceries had nothing to do with it.

<comment><USER3> > You can turn any "flop" into a "fantastic idea" if you devise a sustainable > business model for it.

Not all, but many of the failed dot-coms can be summed up as offering Service X at a price that people were willing to pay that happens to be less than the cost of delivering the service.

If I can relax the price > cost constraint there are any number of fantastic ideas that I can come up with. Private jets for the price of commercial. A driver for $1/hour. Etc.

Grocery delivery can be a perfectly fine business but, like most services that fundamentally offer convenience, it's also a premium service that people need to be willing to pay for--and the business plan needs to recognize that fact. And, as is often true, grocery delivery seems to make the most sense when it can piggy-back on a standard self-service grocery business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is clickbait, slightly more subtle than usual. Some of what they say is true, but an article in a real business magazine would attempt to quantify what's changed since the 90s and what the limits of the new paradigms are. Wired is a hype and lifestyle magazine, and they're just trying to outrage all of us with absurd comparisons between Flooz and Bitcoin.

One sign of a bubble: articles that proclaim, without caveats or quantifiable reasons, that caution and experience are for suckers.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. Yes, "delivering groceries to people able and willing to pay for them" is a great idea, The problem is Webvan didn't have it.

1) How many people were online?

2) How many people had credit card info online?

3) How many people trusted WebVan (vs. Amazon, which built trust over decades)

4) How many people had portable computers in their pocket at all times, with instant access to your service?

Saying "X is a good idea" doesn't make sense without the surrounding strategic context.

<comment><USER6> "Deliver groceries to people able and willing to pay for them" has been going on for a very long time.

Back before home internet access was a thing, companies like Schwan's ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwan_Food_Company](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwan_Food_Company) ) were making home deliveries of frozen foods. Dairies have done deliveries for as long as I can remember.

Webvan didn't fail because grocery delivery is a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These wouldn't have been _high profile_ failures without something appealing about them. Nobody remembers the really terrible ideas that never got past the drawing-board.

<comment><USER8> Selection bias. It's really no different from how people always seem to think all music in ${decade that they were teenagers} was so much better. Because all we remember are the handful of songs we liked plus the memorable stuff that survived in "best of" compilations.

<comment><USER9> Actually there is a different reason music during your teenage years is the most meaningful to you. It's because it was the music you listened to while having your strongest emotional experiences. It consoled you after that first breakup, was playing during that first kiss, etc.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/08/musical_nostalgia_the_psychology_and_neuroscience_for_song_preference_and.html)

<comment><USER8> The two aren't mutually exclusive, though. This merely explains why you remember certain individual songs and think they are better than you might think if they didn't have any special meaning to you. The fact that those that you remember are likely the better ones (rather than an unbiased sampling) is what makes you think _all music_ was better (or that there was more better music, at least).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "though Flooz was a flop, bitcoin has now shown that digital currency can play huge role in the modern world"

Sure - if one considers "never-ending hype-machine" and "engine for producing scam mining-hardware companies" to be a "huge role"...

<comment><USER11> Well, the #1 problem for me was the name -- too close to "fleece". But also they were injecting themselves between the buyer and the merchant, adding friction and uncertainty (Why should I use them when the merchant already accepts Visa?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't this sort of confirm that 'ideas are cheap, execution is everything'? The abstract idea of 'an online virtual currency' is garbage without the brilliant crypto implementation.

I admittedly have a very strong bias against people that think they have a brilliant idea and just need 'someone to build it'.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've seen this suggested in another context: maybe the "bubble" was never actually irrational. The Internet was new, and no-one knew exactly how high it was all going to go; maybe all these ideas really were million-dollar ideas, and will be now.

Of course, an alternate reading is that the Valley now is just the bubble all over again.

<comment><USER14> They say Afghanistan is where empires go to die. Well perhaps same day delivery of food is where bubbles go when they're ready to pop.

more seriously though, time is as much a part of good ideas as any other component. Google glass is probably a good idea, but also ahead of its time. Even if every other part of the execution is perfect, people need to be ready to accept it.

<comment> jon-wood Or perhaps its just a case of executing it right. I certainly hope so since the startup I work for[1] does same day delivery of food (and has been doing so for years now), and so far we're doing it without bubble-esque levels of investment.

[1] [https://www.hubbub.co.uk/](https://www.hubbub.co.uk/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article mentions Webvan, but didn't note that its early rival, Peapod, is still around. Peapod managed to survive by strategically retreating to the markets where it was working - a useful counterpoint to the ever-present "grow, grow, GROW!" mentality. Webvan overextended itself, and paid the price.

<comment><USER16> Is this true? Peapod was acquired by Royal Ahold in 2001 and thus cancelled its contracts with all other grocery stores that were not Royal Ahold-owned.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peapod](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peapod)

<comment><USER17> Peapod delivers here in Milwaukee. I haven't used it much but I just noticed that they now have a "pickup" option in some cities where you drive up and they load you your vehicle. I might actually use the service more if they offer that as my biggest problem is that I usually go shopping only when I'm totally out of something I really need. If I planned ahead better I would use it more.

<comment><USER18> In DC they might start doing a thing where they'll have lockers at Metro stations, so you can pick up your groceries on the way home. There was a Washington Post article from just a few days ago.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/too-...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/too- busy-to-shop-for-groceries-pick-them-up-at-your-metro- station/2014/12/03/b4e0ac3c-7b07-11e4-9a27-6fdbc612bff8_story.html)

My Giant store has the Peapod curbside pickup although I've never used it or Peapod in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's actually a very important lesson here--one that has been confirmed for me personally by speaking with some more experienced people in the industry.

Success in a startup is not _just_ about a good idea, great people and great execution. It's also very much about timing. You can find lots of stories about smart people trying to create amazing businesses five or ten years before the world is ready for them.

<comment><USER6> You can further break down "the world is ready":

1) are customers ready for it? Will they see it as a weird idea that they'd never spend money on, or as a quality of life improvement? Ten years ago I'd have thought buying kitchen towels on the internet was a crazy idea when I can drive 3 blocks to the store to get them; now I think it's crazy to take a trip to the store for one thing when I can get a better selection and better prices on amazon prime.

2) is the technology / infrastructure you need to implement it in place? Apps related to local travel became much more viable when people started carrying portable computers (with telephone functionality) everywhere they went. Niche resale became much more viable when you could plug in to a pre-existing marketplace (ebay, amazon) with an existing customer base, payment processing, etc. so you don't have to spend big bucks developing those things yourself.

<comment><USER3> I'd add a somewhat related #3: Do the underlying economics as they exist today support a business based on that idea? [1] There are lots of things I'd jump at spending some money on but not nearly enough money to cover the cost of providing me with the service.

[1] Obviously, companies often do have some runway before turning a profit but normally there needs to be a viable path to get there at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think this reinforces the notion that ideas are fairly cheap; it's execution that matters.

<comment><USER21> Looks like timing was the issue with the companies listed, Many times ideas are sound, execution is solid but the audience just isn't ready for the actual product in the current landscape.

<comment><USER22> Well, for a lot of them, execution was crap too.

<comment><USER23> Shipping 50lb bags of dog food at pets.com for free is still a bad idea.

<comment><USER24> "Shipping for free" is a slippery concept, since it just means that the cost of shipping has been moved out of a line item called "shipping" into another one. But there are certainly people making money today shipping big bags of dog food for not much money. Amazon alone is full of them, to say nothing of these new retailers starting up. (I'm curious what they expect to offer me over Amazon, but that's a question for another article, I suppose.) It doesn't seem to me it was a "bad idea" so much as "one whose time had not come yet". Pets.com couldn't afford to set up Amazon-scale infrastructure for mere pet food, but now, Amazon-scale infrastructure exists. Even if these new businesses go under, the idea is frankly already proved to some extent, since people are already doing it, and I wouldn't expect them to stop.

<comment><USER23> Amazon also is clearly no making profit doing what they are doing either. They can afford it due to the vast scale but for how long?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> People are often wrong when they speculate what caused the dot-com bubble bust of the 90's. For some it was a matter of being too ahead of their time, but for many, it was a case of irresponsible management and use of funds. The whole lean startup concept was basically nonexistent.

I might have been relatively young back then, but seemed to me startups in the 90's went a little too overboard on advertising. Expensive Superbowl advertisements, TV ads, radio and outlandish publicity stunts. Not to mention, the ridiculous parties CEO's would throw. Look around, you can find countless stories of 90's startups throwing lavish and expensive over the top parties courtesy of VC money and high valuations.

A few of the commerce based ideas were ahead of their time. Sadly, the Internet was still this unknown and unsafe looking entity to many consumers in the 90s and early 00's. Not every startup failed though, some did make it through to the other side, but quite a few failed.

I am concerned we are starting to see a repeat of the dot-com boom taking place again. As history has shown, it tends to repeat itself.

<comment><USER26> I worked at an ISP in the late 90's which was bought up, together with several other small ISPs. Before the acquisition it was a bunch of techies working their asses off. After, dozens of non-technical staff came on board who all got huge paychecks and a BMW, bossed the techies around in clueless Outlook 98 fullquote e-mails but contributed zero to the bottom line.

The money, in our case, came from a large north-european telco with deep pockets. They turned a blind eye to the burn rate for almost 2 years before pulling the plug.

I've heard of a German tech company hiring a philosopher, you know, just for fun. On a superficial level, this might seem comparable to Google hiring Ken Thompson, Guido van Rossum and tytso. In reality however these folks not only boost Google's reputation among developers, they innovate and make a technical contribution to the company. That precisely is the difference between 90's dotcoms' thrift-spending habits and how companies work today. The article misses that completely.

<comment><USER27> _> I've heard of a German tech company hiring a philosopher, you know, just for fun._

Oh, there are American companies that do that too: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal- ball-3](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/17/crystal-ball-3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Just because Google and Amazon are (newly) competing in a space doesn't mean that space will ever be profitable.

<comment><USER29> I think it's likely that the space will be profitable for Amazon and Google. They work at the sorts of scales where you can make a decent business even with a lifetime value of pennies for each customer. Doing a startup that doesn't have that sort of scaling advantages is a _very_ different proposition - anyone thinking that this is the same idea as Kozmo hasn't really thought about it very hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interesting that they don't mention Peapod - it isn't Amazon, nor a SV darling like Instacart, but they survived the dot-com and are still going strong. Fantastic idea indeed.

<comment><USER31> Ah, Peapod. My last memory of Peapod is getting my final grocery delivery for free because it got lost in the shuffle of them backing out of the Dallas/Fort Worth market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Fantastic Ideas != Economically Viable Ideas

Pay close attention to the underlying costs of the implementation of your idea and look for new technologies which you can use to enter a market with a higher quality product/service at a reasonable price.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is there any reason to believe the modern day incarnations are more sustainable then their dot-com counterparts? It certainly feels that way but the article is very light on evidence.

<comment><USER34> Online food delivery has worked for years and I believe is profitable, at least in the UK.

<comment><USER35> Unless I'm mistaken, Ocado is still not profitable even if it's been at it for 13 years.

<comment><USER8> There's an online shoe/fashion retailer in Germany (Zalando, because faux Italian is the new dot-com) that's apparently following Amazon's "every sale is a loss but we're making up for it in volume" model. They're ridiculously successful (in terms of sales and market share) and often held up as an example for successful tech companies.

I'm not entirely sure what their long term plan is, but I'm hoping this is just an attempt to establish a monopoly that can then be exploited to turn the operation into a profit.

<comment><USER36> Zalando is already giving profits since Q2 2014.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. Is this in any way correlated to the change in legislature regarding free returns? Many armchair economists were speculating that that would be one of the biggest financial pain points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Ideas are nothing. Timing and execution is everything. Just because something might work in today's world (when it didn't before), doesn't make it a good idea.

Marc Andreesen: "1/A thing I believe that few believe: Almost all Silicon Valley startup ideas from qualified founders = great ideas. But some are too early."

The whole tweetstorm is a good read.

[https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/502476823402270720](https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/502476823402270720)

</comment><comment><USER38> I vaguely remember something called Boo.com that tried to sell t-shirts. From what I recall, they warmed their offices by burning money in gold fireplaces and insisted on traveling by elephant. Of course these days that kind of behaviour is considered showy and inefficient and so the investor's cash is now spent on social media campaigns instead, which is a much more direct method of achieving the same result.

</comment><comment><USER39> problem with this post is this "THE WORLD IS READY TO CASH IN ON THE WORST IDEAS OF THE '90S."

I disagree with that. I was working on tablets in the late 90s, online chat software too. Neither went anywhere. So "worst ideas" or too early or poorly executed? ..probably mostly the latter two.

<comment><USER40> Indeed, there are quite a few similar examples. Remember CUSeeMe, an early VoIP app? Now all but forgotten outside the HN crowd, and yet Skype managed quite well several years later.

One could argue the Newton falls into that category, coming simply too early for pervasive (sometimes) high speed cellular data, where Palm/Handspring and RIM fared so well - even if transiently - later on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> You can outrun your customer base pretty quickly. Regardless of how good your ideas and execution are, you are limited by how fast the status quo can change.

</comment><comment><USER42> The lesson here is that it's not about the idea it's about execution.

</comment><comment><USER43> there are plenty of good ideas, the hard part is the execution on those ideas.

its akin to music. there are a lot of good musicians but it is much harder to put together a great band.

</comment><comment><USER44> Ideas are cheap. Implementation is key.</comment>


This clever AI hid data from its creators to cheat at its appointed task - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-clever-ai-hid-data-from-its-creators-to-cheat-at-its-appointed-task/ <comment><USER2> I was playing with a web simulator called evolution where you draw an imaginary creature (bones, joints, muscles) and then set it to the task of learning something like walking using a combination of a neural network plus genetic fitness selection.

One of the parameters you can tune is the length of the simulation for each generation before the individuals of the population are scored for fitness and culled as appropriate.

One particularly successful variant learned to (sort of) walk and then right before the end of the simulation timer it would fall forward. Because of the way the simulation measured fitness, it was always judged to have the greatest distance from the starting point and therefore would always survive to the next generation even though it wasn't the best walker.

<comment><USER3> Evolution seems bizarre to us, but many species _do_ optimize for very short lifespans. E.g. spiders that die after laying eggs and then their babies feed on their corpse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This kinda reminds me of my favorite sci fi book I read in 2018: Permutation City by Greg Egan. The book explores simulated consciousness and the tensions that crop up when intelligences that think and feel and want to live are computed on shared computing resources in competition with other intensive tasks with financial heft like climate disaster forecasting.

One plot the book explores is of some lower class intelligences that work their way into the noise of the simulations of wealthier intelligences. Their experiences are computed simultaneously but imperceptibly to the hosts, and appear as but noise in the simulations of the floors, walls, fountains, clouds and other environmental props that the hosts observe and interact with. They live lives as meaningful and filled with human emotion as the others but they're computed in the space between.

I know it's a bit of a leap to go from an AI learning to slip satellite imagery in the noise of street maps to simulated consciousness freeloading in the noise of another, but I think the themes are consistent. One man's trash is another man's treasure. The book really opened my mind to the thought that there could be so much more thriving in the things we think are noise in our fleshy bodies, and I think that's thrilling. Imagine what it would take to completely look past the street map produced by that AI and only possibly see a detailed satellite image! No other interpretation makes sense. It would all feel entirely normal as you'd know no other perspective.

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't that just a bug?

<comment><USER6> "Overfitting" would be a little more specific. Basically the task was easier to accomplish by memorizing the data than by generalizing.

This was pretty clear from the original CycleGAN paper[0] (figure 4; bottom row) since it was generating trees in the exact positions of the source image where the map had no indication of tree placement.

0\. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.10593v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.10593v1.pdf)

<comment><USER7> So in anycase the model had too many degrees of freedom, was not parsimoinous and therefore had a low information criterion. If your model can encode the entire information set, then you arent prediciting you are simply recalling. What a silly article.

<comment><USER8> Not at all. A CycleGAN is a trick where the neural network gets to ask another network questions, and both networks get judged on the answers.

The first network found a trick to very subtly embed the perfect answer in the question, and therefore, scored very well without solving the actual problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There recently was a Google spreadsheet linked where such examples were collected:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOa...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml)

HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18415031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18415031)

</comment><comment><USER10> So basically AI abiding by Goodhart's law ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)). I wonder how much of this goes undetected in other applications due to poor objective definition.

</comment><comment><USER11> This might just be the most ridiculous article title ever published on AI.

Happy new year!

<comment><USER12> Yeah, the model isn't "hiding data from its overlords", it's just a classic overfit.

<comment><USER13> Is it? This doesn't seem to be the AI responding overly accurately to the training data, but more a case of the AI crafting its own test data. Or did I misunderstand what happened here?

<comment><USER14> FTA:

"So it didn't learn how to make one from the other. It learned how to subtly encode the features of one into the noise patterns of the other. The details of the aerial map are secretly written into the actual visual data of the street map: thousands of tiny changes in color that the human eye wouldn't notice, but that the computer can easily detect."

I would not have used the word "secretly". The buildings and trees were filtered out, but not completely. The reverse transformation just amplified the noise back into buildings and trees.

<comment><USER15> It would encode any aerial map into any street map or other immage. That's [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography) which happens to be hidden from people who just look at the outputs.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Mac Game Store App - <AUTHOR> http://www.macgamestore.com/app/ <comment><USER2> THought initialy was some offical Apple thing and then looked at it and thought was something to do with Steam aka Valve and then looked at the about at the bottom right and became clear:

"MACGAMESTORE was launched in April 2005 and since then has grown into the leading Mac-only distributor of digital download games with over one million Mac games sold. Our goal is to provide the best shopping experience that Mac gamers deserve with hot new selections every day, excellent customer service, daily specials, great bundles, and useful information to make purchasing decisions easier. "

Having just read about Apples new market application upon iOS6 devices being one page at a time and wondering how long until alternative interfaces to the market would florish I can only with this lot the best, I don't have any apples in my place, nor owned them, but for those that do at the very least it shows alternative markets can get into an app store and in that if nothing else rejoice.</comment>


MOOC Stats and Trends in 2014 - <AUTHOR> https://www.class-central.com/report/moocs-stats-and-trends-2014/

<comment><AUTHOR> > There has been some debate whether MOOCs can be as useful for teaching > humanities and non-technical subjects as it is for computer science and > math.

I've only taken CS MOOCs till now and undoubtedly the programming assignments have been the most interesting part. Recently, I've meaning to take a few history courses and was wondering how engaging would the assignments in those be.

Can someone who's taken any Humanities courses share their experience?

<comment><USER2> I have also taken programming MOOCs (algorithms 1 and 2, databases, and computational investing), and the programming assignments are a good fit for MOOCs - it's easy to check the result from running a program (for example, the sizes of the five largest strongly connected components of a directed graph consisting of almost one million nodes).

In the fall, I took Financial Markets (Yale, from Coursera). I don't know if that qualifies as humanities or not, but it did have a peer-graded component that worked better than expected. Each week there were multiple choice quiz questions on the videos. But one week there was also a writing assignment. You had to read a fairly technical paper on market efficiency, and then answer three questions on it with max 300 words each.

After the deadline, you have to grade 5 other students answers (as in "Did they summarize the main points correctly?"). This worked much better than I expected. Summarizing the main points, and then reading through and grading 5 other answers really made the content stick. So I was actually pleasantly surprised at how well it worked.

But I think it the peer reviewed writing works best when the assignment is a fairly focused question to answer.

My reviews of the courses:

[http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms- course...](http://henrikwarne.com/2012/05/08/coursera-algorithms-course/)

[http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms- course...](http://henrikwarne.com/2013/02/18/coursera-algorithms-course- part2/)

[http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to- databases-...](http://henrikwarne.com/2011/12/18/introduction-to-databases-on- line-learning-done-well/)

[http://henrikwarne.com/2015/01/01/coursera-course-review- com...](http://henrikwarne.com/2015/01/01/coursera-course-review- computational-investing-part-1/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> 2400+ MOOC courses, which is why it's good to have review sites. I like both class-central.com and coursetalk.com.</comment>


IPad survives 1300 ft fall  - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2011/11/14/ipad-survives-1300-foot-drop-because-why-not/

<comment><USER2> Try that on concrete.</comment>


When Will AWS Move Up the Stack to Real Applications? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/02/03/will-aws-move-stack-real-applications/ <comment><USER2> They have tried and so far nobody cares.

When they announced Zolcalo at an AWS summit at the Javits Center the indifference was palpable.</comment>


Ten unlikely ideas that changed the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/special/zeros-to-heroes-10-unlikely-ideas-that-changed-the-world

<comment><USER2> "George Cayley knew how to make a plane a century before the Wright brothers took off. If only he'd got the internal combustion engine to work."

This implies that all the Wrights did was slap an engine on a Cayley design and fly. It's an egregious misunderstanding of the Wrights' numerous essential contributions to flight that made flight possible.

1\. The Wrights designed and built their own engine from scratch. Nothing available had anywhere near the power/weight ratio they needed. Essentially, the Wrights invented the first aircraft engine.

2\. They invented the first correct propellor theory, enabling them to produce propellors that were twice as efficient as their competitors'. This, of course, enabled the engine to be half the weight and power. (This factor alone is why I don't believe the other pretenders actually flew - they didn't have the power.)

3\. They developed a 3 axis control system. This is absolutely crucial to successful flight.

4\. They discovered that the existing data for airfoil efficiency was wrong by a factor of two. Airfoils needed to be twice the size as was previously thought. The Wrights invented a wind tunnel balance that was able to measure lift and drag, and used it to develop a refined, successful airfoil. Nobody else came even close.

5\. They developed their technology over a series of increasingly sophisticated prototypes. It's probably the first example of a directed research and development program.

<comment><USER3> > 1\. The Wrights designed and built their own engine from scratch. Nothing > available had anywhere near the power/weight ratio they needed. Essentially, > the Wrights invented the first aircraft engine.

The Wrights' first engine was actually designed and built by Charlie Taylor. (His Wikipedia article says, "... based partly on rough sketches provided by the Wrights.")

In any case, the main point of your comment is certainly on target.

Also, I wonder if we should add to your list the idea of twisting the wings to allow for turning. Was this an original contribution by the Wrights?

<comment><USER2> Taylor was employed by the Wrights, so yeah, they worked together on it.

I included the wing warping as part of the 3 axis control. Yes, it was an original (and crucial) contribution by the Wrights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some of these are overly popularised. But I didn't know about the gyro train car. That was interesting</comment>


Important: Twitter OAuth changes - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/69dabee414d5f553

<comment><AUTHOR> Heads up:

If the Twitter library you're using right now doesn't send oauth_verifier, you'll get a 401 error when trying to retrieve the access token. I spent a few minutes hunting this one down for our site.</comment>


Quit Complaining About a Talent Shortage and Interview Better - <AUTHOR> http://schneems.com/post/17210344832/quit-complaining-about-a-talent-shortage-and-interview

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have any good programming interview experiences I would love to hear about them here!</comment>


Why I Captured This MRI of a Mother and Child - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why--captured-MRI-mother-child-180957207/?no-ist <comment><USER2> The negativity in this thread is really a shame. I would expect better from HN.

> This particular MR image, though, was not made for diagnostic purposes, nor > even really for science. No one, to my knowledge, had ever made an MR image > of a mother and child. We made this one because we wanted to see it.

> To some people, this image was a disturbing reminder of the fragility of > human beings. Others were drawn to the way that the two figures, with their > clothes and hair and faces invisible, became universal, and could be any > human mother and child, at any time or place in history. Still others were > simply captivated by how the baby's brain is different from his mother's; > it's smaller, smoother and darker—literally, because there's less white > matter.

<comment><USER3> I'd be really interested to see the difference in the brain activity when they're "embracing" versus when they're placed separately in the scanner.

<comment><USER4> Not sure how much you know about neuroimaging, but in case you don't know, it might be worth my pointing out that this is a structural image -- i.e. it doesn't measure "brain activity" in any way, only brain shape.

The same scanner could take functional BOLD measurements, of course.

<comment><USER3> I know next-to-nothing about neuroimaging (and I didn't even stay in a Holiday-Inn Express last night). I was wondering why there were no bright patches like other MRIs I've seen - thanks for the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What grabs my attention is how the baby's skull absolutely chock-full of brain - there doesn't seem to be any "cushioning" fluid space between the skull and the brain like the mother (like most adults, I'd assume) has.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is exactly what photography is supposed to be.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why I captured this MRI of a mother and child? Because I can. /article

</comment><comment><USER8> Neat, but clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER9> Answer: "This particular MR image, though, was not made for diagnostic purposes, nor even really for science. No one, to my knowledge, had ever made an MR image of a mother and child. We made this one because we wanted to see it."

The question _I_ was wondering about is "how did she get two million dollars to buy a 3-tesla MRI machine". And the answer is, be a professor at MIT. ([http://saxelab.mit.edu/](http://saxelab.mit.edu/))

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure if you're trying to imply something negative about this project or not, but there are many many research MRI's around and it's not completely unreasonable to spare 15 min of MRI time for something like this.

<comment><USER9> I don't have anything negative to say about "the project" but I think the headline is kindof stupid; surely there is no great mystery. Of course she wants an MRI-picture of herself, I would love to have one too, wouldn't everyone? But few people are in a position to get one.

<comment><USER11> It's easy and cheap to get an MRI by volunteering to participate in an imaging research study. You can typically ask for the data, and they will actually pay you for your time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So this is meant as art? Ok. It should be judged as art.

It's junk art. Another madonna. Big deal. The image of mother and child has been done to death in every medium. Doing it again in a new one isn't saying much. The author picked a subject to trigger a boringly predictable emotional response. It is as much art as the latest kittens meet puppies youtube sensation.

Leave the art to actual artists. If you want your medical machine to create art, allocate some time for artists. Treat it like every other mother treats a sonogram. Put in on the mantle, not the internet. Don't waste time/money/helium on hack projects in an attempt to generate news.

<comment><USER13>
      Leave the art to actual artists.

The people who create junk Madonnas and cat videos and whatnot are artists every bit as much as the first person who scratched stick figures on a cave wall or the masters whose works reside in museums and galleries around the world. They might be novices. They might be amateurs. They might not create something you like. But they are still "actual" artists.

<comment><USER12> Fine. I'll correct my words.

Leave costly and expensive art to the good artists. Get a paints set. Buy a camera. Leave the million-dollar paintbrushes to those non-novice artists able to create something interesting.

<comment><USER14> In the words of Mel Brooks in the History of the World Part 1:

 _And here, in a cave, about 2 million years ago, the first artist was born. And, of course, with the birth of the artist, came the inevitable after birth... The critic._

Lest I get down voted for bringing humor to a comment on Hacker News, I will make the further point. Are your comments meant to be art criticism? Ok. They should be judged as art criticism. You say it's "another madonna" as if all madonna's are junk art. Many of the madonna's are the most studied religious iconography and artistic masterpieces of all time. Almost all of the most renowned artists in history have completed a madonna. Who is to say it has been done to death in every medium? Are you attempting to say that no artist can come along and make a new masterpiece madonna? And frankly, you'll have to argue much harder to make people believe that the madonna has been done to death in every medium, particularly MR images.

As for your argument that million-dollar paintbrushes should be left to non- novice artists to create something interesting. We create art with what we have on hand. This person happens to have a 3 tesla MRI machine. Why shouldn't they use it? If another artist would like to come along and use it, they can work with the university that holds it to use it. What a horrible argument to say that because they are a novice they should not be allowed to use such a beautiful tool for their own artistic enjoyment.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tips for the aspiring Emacs playboy - <AUTHOR> http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/9-Tips-for-the-aspiring-Emacs-playboy.html

<comment><USER2> I'm going to have to disagree with '6. Keep Your Keybindings Standard.'

When I started with emacs, there were some bindings that would make my hands ache after a day of use, usually from the transition between difficult keybindings, not any one key combination in isolation. One of the first things I did was add in the ergoemacs bindings, and I never regretted it. It's not as if doing so made me suddenly forget what the old bindings were, although I am slower during the rare cases when I'm on the normal keybindings. But it's a small price to pay for not having my fingers hate me.

Editors are meant to be customized to your workflow and what works best for you.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you about the default keybindings (they're _sadistic_ ), _but_ I think that people will have an easier time learning Emacs if they wait to start rebinding things until they're familiar with the conventions.* There are a lot of patterns in the way keybindings are defined for various major modes, for example, and rebinding everything to make it more like textmate or whatever obscures them. Also, it's a good idea to check if new bindings are replacing another highly useful command, particularly if one doesn't know how to access it otherwise.

Some of this probably matters less if using Emacs on other peoples' computers isn't an issue, though. (Same with using Dvorak or other layouts.)

* Perhaps around the time they start learning Elisp, rather than copying and modifying other peoples' config files. Nothing wrong with doing that, just, that comes much earlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great article for users of ANY editor. I'm a vim user and got a lot out of it.

Even more, many of these tips are abstract enough to be applicable to users of almost any complicated software tool, particularly ones used for hours a day.

<comment><USER5> You're right. The article is good, and reminds me of some very good tips given by the creator of VIM (Bram Moolenaar) in a Google Tech Talk:

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2538831956647446078>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't forget the <http://www.emacswiki.org/> A bit messy site, but the single greatest resource for emacs user.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ok, I'm not a PC-nazi but I think someone needs to call the article out:

This is generic claptrap ("use help"?! he, and it's pretty clear it's a he, could have at least looked at how hard emacs help is to use for beginners) interspersed with sexist pictures and commentary. It is offputting to many people, and I'd like to see my favorite editor associated with higher caliber tutorials.

<comment><USER8> I do not understand how these pictures are sexist.

<comment><USER9> Only men should be using computers, _duh_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for posting this. The other content on the site is pretty good too!

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't agree with the `2. Don't use the mouse'. Unless Emacs' mouse support is completely broken (doubtful), mouse is only going to increase productiveness.

[http://plan9.bell- labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mouse_vs._keyboard/ind...](http://plan9.bell- labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mouse_vs._keyboard/index.html)

<comment><USER3> I have an immediate, almost visceral disagreement with the suggestion that a mouse is more efficient, but I may be wrong. For sake of argument: I think the "just pointing vs. using the keyboard and getting more thought involved about structure disrupts the sense of time" argument may have something to it. Still, using a keyboard well counterbalances this by being able to take advantage of greater structure - I very frequently use elaborate keyboard macros, for example, and the mouse doesn't have any clear way to say, "Ok, the thing I just did, apply that in a batch to the rest of those that look like a C function prototype." The mouse is more immediate, but you can do more powerful manipulation with the keyboard _if_ you know the program's keyboard shortcuts, etc. (That's not necessarily a good trade-off for many kinds of programs, but for a text editor / IDE, it's probably worthwhile.)

While there have been some attempts to do that with mice (such as mouse gestures), by design, mice are about position, changes of position, with a few buttons as flags. There aren't enough distinctive signals.

Also: The Emacs mouse support is not great. It probably hasn't been a high priority.

<comment><USER12> "Also: The Emacs mouse support is not great. It probably hasn't been a high priority."

In what way? It's certainly as good as it is in any other editor, with the addition of several very Emacs-esque mouse-driven commands. For example, right click marks the region from point to the click point and saves it in the kill rin (like M-w); double right click kills that region. Using M- does the same, but modifies the secondary selection. Using C- with the mouse pops up several useful context menus. Try playing around with C-h k <mouse button> in various contexts.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Phone OS based on Firefox OS - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.mozilla-hispano.org/facebook-phone-basado-en-firefox-os/%3Futm_medium%3Dtwitter%26utm_source%3Dtwitterfeed

<comment><AUTHOR> By the way: [http://spanish.about.com/b/2012/04/01/spains-equivalent- of-a...](http://spanish.about.com/b/2012/04/01/spains-equivalent-of-april- fools-day-is-dec-28.htm)</comment>


Ask HN: Good books and resources about computer simulations. - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
Computer simulations - things like flocking algorithms, cellular automatas, CFD, Monte Carlo methods, etc. - seem to be an useful tool for understanding and solving real-life problems.
Could you reccommend some good books and/or other resources about computer simulations? Something that would help to learn how to choose a proper type, design a simulation for given problem, what to look at, how to validate it and what are the common pitfalls to avoid. I know that every type of simulation has some extensive literature about it, however I've never seen anything more general so far.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> How about this?

<http://sip.clarku.edu/3e/tableofcontents.html>

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/0805377581/condition=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer- listing/0805377581/condition=used)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's what I was looking for :).</comment></comment>


Why Microsoft should buy Canonical - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gardeviance.org/2014/05/why-microsoft-should-buy-canonical.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think they actually should, but the RedHat v Canonical comparison was more interesting (IMO).</comment>


The woman who swapped home for a hut near Chechnya (BBC) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30796537

<comment><USER2> The story reads so bizarrely: A man who loses interest in his wife orders her to move countries to his ancestral home as opposed to just divorcing her? Then she obeys and leaves her children to forges a new life elsewhere, makes no effort to see them again, even after finding out they're no longer with her husband?

The whole premise is so questionable, I wonder if the underlying story is a crime being covered up.

</comment><comment><USER3> The husband sounds like quite a piece of shit.

<comment><USER4> To be fair they both sound like quite a piece of work. There are very few women who would willingly leave their children behind just because their husband told them to not to mention leave them in foster care just because you now have a life.

Part of being a parent is sacrificing everything in order to raise your children regardless how old they are.

It's a tough life she choose so in a way that's probably best for the children but still not fair to them.

<comment><USER5> That was my initial reaction. I certainly could not imagine a situation in which I would voluntarily abandon my children to their father so that I could go and live in another country. But I then began to wonder if there's more at play here - physical and emotional abuse, for example, can make even the most devoted of mothers do things that they ordinarily might not do.

I am trying to remember that we only have the parts of the story a) the mother and b) the Beeb want us to actually read.

<comment><USER6> From my extensive expertise in _ahem_ armchair amateur psychoanalysis ... I suspect a _major_ mental disorder/abuse component to the story.

Their kids ending up in foster care may be better for the kids than being raised in a DSM certifiable parenting environment. At least in foster care the expectations of _care_ are darn low, so less chance of being left with a sense of betrayal into adulthood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Those mountains must be a beautiful, and fascinatingly wild place.

I think Georgia is a place I'd happily visit; it looks like an interesting crossroads between east and west, with a lot of pretty country. I wonder how safe it is, though.

<comment><USER8> It is very safe. People are extremely friendly—for example, I was invited by strangers for a dinner a few times. The police is not corrupt. According to my guidebook, wild dogs and rabies are the biggest concern.

Be prepared to see a lot of poverty, though. Especially if you've never been to a formerly soviet country.

I'm from Poland and I have visited Georgia in 2011.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Am I reading this right ? The children were abandoned by both parents ?

<comment><USER10> Not quite (but close):

"Two of her children, aged nine and 12, who initially remained with her husband, are now in foster care. With a different partner, she also had and older child, a daughter who lives with her father."

<comment><USER11> So two children were abandoned. Sad story.

<comment><USER9> Very.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> She was born in the West, yet she had no free will to flip her husband off and go live elsewhere in her town/Germany? What an odd story.

<comment><USER11> She was not born in the West, the story mentions that she grew up in East Germany (part of the Soviet Union).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > * was a housewife in Germany - but then her husband told her to pack her > bags and leave the country. *

n.b. housewife in Germany != German housewife;</comment>


Hacking The GPU For Fun And Profit - <AUTHOR> http://rpiplayground.wordpress.com/

<comment><USER2> Does anybody know the reason for the issue in the first part of the tutorial ([http://rpiplayground.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/hacking-the- gp...](http://rpiplayground.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/hacking-the-gpu-for-fun- and-profit-pt-1/))?

"NOTE: Occasionally, the GPU can get into weird states where the programs do not return the expected values. I have not determined if it is a bug in the host-side code for managing the GPU or if there is something else going on. In any case, if you see things you don't expect, try rebooting the machine."</comment>


Surfraw - <AUTHOR> http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/

<comment><USER2> I found this article interesting to explain a bit more [1]. Then I was still not happy and tried it myself. Basically it is a tool that lets you choose what frontend you want to use e.g. w3m, lynx, firefox etc. and gives you shortcuts to certain interesting pages [2] you might want to access on CLI. That shortcut again has also a help page - very interesting for scripting. It's sort of like the "dict" command but for all kind of webpages.

I played around...

surfraw -browser="dlynx" translate -from=fr -to=en la verite vous liberera | head -50

> Will show the proper translation

surfraw -browser="dlynx" piratebay 2012 | egrep -i "\\.torrent" | head -1 | sed 's/^[0-9. ]*//g' | xargs -iin wget in

> Will download a torrent file from piratebay

etc.

[1] <http://crazylazy.info/blog/content/scrapers-surfraw> [2] <http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/#elvilist>

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting: Copyright (c) 2000-2001 Julian Assange <email@example.com>

(probably the Julian Assange of wikileaks fame)

<comment><USER4> Unless there are two Julian Assanges that call themselves "proff", yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anybody want to put this into plain English? (Why are the example usages void of output?)

<comment><USER2> The output depends if you want to use e.g. w3m, lynx, firefox, etc. etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be happier with this if it would, for example, parse the google results and just print them rather than opening a browser window.

Also, it seems to be broken with chrome.

</comment><comment><USER7> As with all of these cli based www search tools I just don't see how learning/installing these is any quicker than: alt-j (I'm using wmii which is pretty 'raw'), "<imdb|slashdot|freshmeat|define> keyword" from your firefox google based homepage, cut/paste. I like to be minimal and love my mutt/irssi/cplay/vim sessions all wrapped in screen, but google based keyword searching via a firefox homepage seems hard to really beat in practicality.

<comment><USER8> Could be useful for scripting.

<comment><USER9> How so?

Afaict it just produces a url and hands it off to a browser of your choice.

For example, the piratebay example which Bjoern posted (which requires a separate 'dlynx' script, btw):

surfraw -browser="dlynx" piratebay 2012 | whatever...

can be rewritten as:

lynx -dump <http://thepiratebay.org/search/2012> | whatever...</comment></comment></comment>


Lean In's Sheryl Sandberg Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/technology/lean-in-sheryl-sandberg-problem.html <comment><AUTHOR> 'We circled back to Ms. Sandberg's work at Facebook. Wasn't it always risky, I asked, to have someone leading such a large company also leading a movement fighting for workplace equality?

"I'm curious," Ms. Thomas said [Sandberg's longtime friend]. "You're a smart, engaged woman on all of this — why is that hard for you?"

It's hard, I replied, to reckon with the idea that we have taken life and career advice from someone who could be building something that's not good for the world.

For a beat, Ms. Thomas sat silent and looked right at me.'</comment>


Tcpdump Examples - <AUTHOR> https://hackertarget.com/tcpdump-examples <comment><USER2> Using Tcpdump to analyze HTTP won't always work. Unless I'm mistaken, Tcpdump doesn't decode packet fragments into a stream, so if the request is fragmented, your grep won't work. If there are multiple HTTP requests in one TCP stream, it's less likely they are aligned completely in one packet, also fragmenting the request. And if it's a request to Google it could be in QUIC rather than TCP. You may wonder what on your network is broken because you can't see the requests, but it's just the network fragmenting packets.

Tshark (nee Wireshark) I believe does decode packet fragments into streams, and allows you to use more advanced Wireshark protocol filters. My suggestion is to start a pcap capture, and at the same time replay it using Tshark with the filters you want. This way you can re-analyze the same live traffic both now and later.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use tcpdump continuously to analyse multiple RTP feeds coming in to our edge network. Found all sorts of issues with it, including packet reordering in Cisco and mikrotik routers (shouldn't be a problem with rtp - but tell that to ateme decoders), actual packet loss on juniper srx, and of course minor outages on international and even local links on the order of 100-200ms of loss.

Packet stream is dumped into some perl which keeps across the sequence number looking for out of sequence packets, summarise output every second into an elastic stack. Also have it comparing multiple streams for dual streaming and comparing skew.

Ironically I rarely use tcpdump to look at tcp packets - about the only interesting thing to me there is the SYN packets to see if the packet is getting through the firewall!

<comment><USER4> Any links to something similar, sounds really interesting.

BTW I really recommend unbuffer from expect, if you are using tcpdump and pipes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think a similar post on leveraging Wireshark would be neat. The deepest I tend to need to go is searching packets for a known substring and then following the TCP stream to see where something unexpected happened. Add to this the analyzing of the frames on this stream and you can diagnose tricky timeout issues, bad protocol usage, and much more.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, my workflow is generally to use tshark (wireshark's command-line tool) for server-side capture, then scp file to local and use wireshark gui to poke around. I find tshark's interface to be simpler than tcpdump. tcpdump feels like bringing a gun to a knife fight when all you want to do is look at application layer payloads/streams (http/etc). But it's good to know more about tcpdump than I did before, because when things get complicated it's good to have more options.

<comment><USER7> You can also pipe tshark capture to the Wireshark GUI on your machine through ssh in realtime, e.g. `ssh host.example.com 'tshark -i eth0 -w - -F pcapng -f "not tcp port 22"' | wireshark -k -i -`

<comment><USER6> that is sweet. thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recently presented my tool HTTPanalyzer at RIPE76. It's a C tool I developed in 2016 available at Github for processing HTTP traffic up to 10Gbps from PCAP files or straight from the interface. I recommend the branch "revisited", much better coded in my opinion. Of course, it's limited to the first packet of the request and first packet of the response. It's aimed to aggregated statistics like response codes, user agents, response time (immediate one, not full load of the resource) etc. More info here: [https://carlosvega.github.io/httpDissector/](https://carlosvega.github.io/httpDissector/)

Only HTTP traffic, you can process decrypted HTTPS traffic (like some devices do, i.e. IXIA network devices) which is transformed into HTTP traffic. Regarding HTTPS or HTTP2 etc. The current approach is to correlate the application information from log events against traffic measurements.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's pretty sad, that the best way of analyzing HTTP traffic from the command line appears to be comparing payload bytes:

      ~$ sudo tcpdump -s 0 -A -vv 'tcp[((tcp[12:1] & 0xf0) >> 2):4] = 0x47455420'

There should be a better way to do that. Ideally I would want a tool shows Request Method, Headers, Query String, POST Payload of requests as they come in (and let's me filter on those). It should support HTTP2 and know how to stitch together the payload from multiple packets.

HTTPS is a difficult topic. I think it's fair for a tool like this, not to mess with encrpytion. Usually you don't want to had a precious private key file to a command line tool for debugging. A better way seems to be to terminate SSL on a separate host, and analyze the un-encrypted traffic.

<comment><USER10> Lots of tools can do this. I use mitmproxy personally. You can easily customize it by using it as a python library.

<comment><USER9> Looks like this requires me to redirect all traffic through a proxy server. This sounds very different from what I want to do.

I don't want to change the data path in any way. I just want to listen in.

<comment><USER10> If you've already terminated SSL, you can do this easily by using iptables nflog rule to duplicate traffic and send it to mitmproxy. Or you can setup a transparent proxy (but sounds like that violates your requirement). Either way, if SSL is not terminated you're not going to be able to do much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My tips:

1\. Use `-i any` -- just in case the traffic you want to look at is not on the interface you think it is. Also doesn't put the interface(s) into promiscuous mode, which can be preferable.

2\. Read the `pcap-filter` man page.

</comment><comment><USER12> Good stuff, thanks for sharing. I always forget you can do indexing into the packet itself as in tcp[((tcp[12:1] & 0xf0) >> 2):4].

Also sometimes I reach for ngrep if it is installed:

[https://github.com/jpr5/ngrep/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md](https://github.com/jpr5/ngrep/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md)

<comment><USER13> This is one of my favorite oneliners:

      sudo stdbuf -oL -eL /usr/sbin/tcpdump -A -s 10240 \
       "tcp port 4080 and (((ip[2:2] - ((ip[0]&0xf)<<2)) - ((tcp[12]&0xf0)>>2)) != 0)" | \
        grep -a --line-buffered ".+(GET |HTTP\/|POST )|^[A-Za-z0-9-]+: " | \
        perl -nle 'BEGIN{$|=1} { s/.*?(GET |HTTP\/[0-9.]* |POST )/\n$1/g; print }'

<comment><USER14> fyi you should be able to use tcpdump -l instead of calling stdbuf.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Shameless plug, but if you're interested in this sort of thing, I published a proof of concept docker container that makes packet analysis with scapy very easy. [0] The trick is to leverage iptables nfqueue to filter packets you're interested in, and have scapy listen to the queue.

[0] [https://github.com/milesrichardson/docker-nfqueue- scapy](https://github.com/milesrichardson/docker-nfqueue-scapy)

</comment><comment><USER15> Nitpick: The HTTP examples will only catch v1 traffic, not HTTP2

</comment><comment><USER16> The "-nn" explanation seems wrong. Neither libpcap's tcpdump nor BSD's need more than one "-n" to not translate port. Even in their examples, we can spot that using a single "-n" do not translate port names.

Additionally, it's always better to always use "-p" if you don't want to accidentally attract additional traffic to the host (additional VLAN on a 802.1q interface, or additional multicast traffic).

<comment><USER17> I have always had to use -nn to not translate ports. If what you say is true, it must be recent.

<comment><USER3> I've always used -nn (or -n -n), it's really annoying - usually I want to resolve IPs, but not ports.

<comment><USER18> Really annoying, in the common case you don't want /etc/services names since they're always wrong for the ephemeral >1024 client side port. Also, not to be confused with `lsof -n -P`!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> NetEng here, I'm usually troubleshooting lower layer issues (Ethernet, MPLS, IP) than HTTP however, tcpdump is one of my go-to tools every time.

If anyone is interested I've made some notes here: [https://null.53bits.co.uk/index.php?page=tcpdump- notes](https://null.53bits.co.uk/index.php?page=tcpdump-notes)

For example, imagine spanning/mirroring a 10G backbone link, how many people are pinging 22.214.171.124 all the time. I can ping with a specific DSCP value set to isolate my pings from anyone elses, looking into the reported issue of 184.108.40.206 latency, then apply a filter to tcpdump on my mirrored port that matches ICMP traffic to a specific IP, with a specific DSCP value, inside specific L3 VPN (specific MPLS labels) etc.

sudo tcpdump -nlASX -s 65535 -vvv -i eth3 '(mpls 52634 and (ip and (ip[1] & 0xfc) >> 2 > 0x01) and host 184.108.40.206 and icmp)'

I love tcpdump's filtering capabilities.

<comment><USER20> You build your own huge website and don't have an About page? How could someone interested in what you're doing contact you?

<comment><USER19> I mostly make notes for myself, so no need for an about page, I'm the target audience. Someone else might find the info useful which is why it's publically visible, but I'm mainly writing for myself, so no contact or comments. If you want to contact me, jwbensley /at/ gmail /dot/ com. Or Google this username, I just did, you'll find me on GitHub, LinkedIn, StackExchnage and many other places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am always amazed at how many people have heard of tcpdump but how few seem to have heard of tcpflow

[https://linux.die.net/man/1/tcpflow](https://linux.die.net/man/1/tcpflow)

If you are looking to do TCP level protocol analysis it is one of the simplest and easiest linux command line tools out there.

It's biggest strength is that it can take a payload split over multiple packets and spit it out as a file with the whole payload

</comment><comment><USER22> tshark is supposed to be a tcpdump alternative but it seems tcpdump is still dominant on the command line these days.

<comment><USER23> tshark always hogs my RAM and eventually crashes on > 4GB pcaps. I'd love to have a solution for this.

<comment><USER24> Try dumpcap [0], also part of the Wireshark suite. It's the back-end engine used by the Wireshark GUI as well as tshark. tshark tracks state for streams the same way the GUI will and eats your RAM, whereas dumpcap is a dumb siphon (with filtering).

0: [https://www.wireshark.org/docs/man- pages/dumpcap.html](https://www.wireshark.org/docs/man-pages/dumpcap.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can't count the number of times tcpdump has made debugging a problem a zillion times faster. It's my go to tool for any network related issue.

I tend to end up using wireshark for analysis of more complicated SIP issues but I always start with tcpdump.

</comment><comment><USER26> tcpdump + CloudShark is my go-to. Usually using cURL with their API or SCP via Couchdrop.

</comment><comment><USER27> how practical are examples ignoring https?... or am I mis-understanding target use case?

</comment><comment><USER28> There is a whole industry for distilling manpages down to stupid chunks and making blog posts it seems.

<comment><USER29> Reading through a long man page in terminal to get to el' result and then find and use cmd extensions. vs 2s google "how to inurl: tcpdump http packet"

<comment><USER28> You are doing it wrong if you are "reading through a long man page".

<comment><USER30> What is the "correct" way? (real question, I am curious)

<comment><USER31> You can search man pages by "/" then your search term, then press "n" to cycle forward, "N" to cycle back through occurrences.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


First baby born after deceased womb transplant - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46438396 <comment><USER2> > The uterus was removed in the same surgical procedure as the livebirth and > immunosuppressive therapy was suspended. (from the lancet article)

So not only the woman got an uterus, it was used specifically to get pregnant and was removed afterwards, so that the mother now doesn't need to get immunosuppressive drugs.

It's amazing because, in the end, it wasn't the common approach to take material from the father, mother, implant in somebody's else body... it was somebody's else uterus, but this time it was implanted inside the mother.

Amazing how much progress is done combining surgeries and drugs, until a new medical protocol is developed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Brazil, the most violent country in the world (60k violent deaths per year) is also capable of promoting life. I'm feeling a bit prouder of my country today.

<comment><USER4> Really not sure why this was downvoted. It seems like a reasonable sentiment.

<comment><USER5> As an American, Americans have a habit of taking anything around pregnancy that mentions the word "life" to mean a pro-life/anti-choice stance, even if the context is from regions of the world without such a distinction. The response varies by audience, but the response on HN to anything approaching pro-life/anti-choice is usually downvotes.

<comment><USER6> HN also seems to lean against patriotism (and for good reason in general, although this comment seems completely harmless), so that could also have played a part.

<comment><USER7> HN also seems to lean against patriotism _for non-americans_. There is plenty of patriotism to go around on HN, but don't try saying anything positive about countries other than the USA or it might just get interpreted as you saying the USA is bad.

<comment><USER8> Are we on the same website? For a US-centric site, I've always experienced HN as being pretty anti-US in keeping with the seemingly average Democrat attitude of thinking the US has been a detriment to the rest of the world for a long time.

And that's coming from a Brit. I have no horse in the Democrat-vs-Republican fight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could a womb be implanted into a male and be functional? Plan on a C-section to skip the birth-capable vagina transplant, which might not be even possible now. I wonder if the necessary hormone manipulations would be practical.

<comment><USER10> All this waste of medical resources to deliver essentially a feeling to the mother, while there are plenty of adoptable and miserable children all over the world. At least in this case, they used the mother's own DNA.

<comment><USER11> "waste of medical resources" \- over and above the outcome of the procedure, each preceding failure likely yielded new information about female anatomy, interactions between host and donor immune responses and the impact of those immune responses, and a plethora of other useful information about human reproduction. Yes, adopting would be easier, but procedures like this can yield valuable insight into women's health and the reproductive process, which is still fraught with risk in much of the world.

<comment><USER10> The suggestion was that the same procedure be applied for male biology. And of course, the waste should be examined on the long run, where every transwoman should have the right to a similar procedure if the money and donor are available and they so desire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Brief overview of the article if anyone is interested. Very interesting case.

 _Background_

Uterus transplantation from live donors became a reality to treat infertility following a successful Swedish 2014 series, inspiring uterus transplantation centres and programmes worldwide. However, no case of livebirth via deceased donor uterus has, to our knowledge, been successfully achieved, raising doubts about its feasibility and viability, including whether the womb remains viable after prolonged ischaemia.

 _Methods_

In September, 2016, a 32-year-old woman with congenital uterine absence (Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser [MRKH] syndrome) underwent uterine transplantation in Hospital das Clínicas, University of São Paulo, Brazil, from a donor who died of subarachnoid haemorrhage. The donor was 45 years old and had three previous vaginal deliveries. The recipient had one in-vitro fertilisation cycle 4 months before transplant, which yielded eight cryopreserved blastocysts.

 _Findings_

The recipient showed satisfactory postoperative recovery and was discharged after 8 days' observation in hospital. Immunosuppression was induced with prednisolone and thymoglobulin and continued via tacrolimus and mycophenalate mofetil (MMF), until 5 months post-transplantation, at which time azathioprine replaced MMF. First menstruation occurred 37 days post-transplantation, and regularly (every 26–32 days) thereafter. Pregnancy occurred after the first single embryo transfer 7 months post-transplantation. No blood flow velocity waveform abnormalities were detected by Doppler ultrasound of uterine arteries, fetal umbilical, or middle cerebral arteries, nor any fetal growth impairments during pregnancy. No rejection episodes occurred after transplantation or during gestation. Caesarean delivery occurred on Dec 15, 2017, near gestational week 36. The female baby weighed 2550 g at birth, appropriate for gestational age, with Apgar scores of 9 at 1 min, 10 at 5 min, and 10 at 10 min, and along with the mother remains healthy and developing normally 7 months post partum. The uterus was removed in the same surgical procedure as the livebirth and immunosuppressive therapy was suspended.

 _Interpretation_

We describe, to our knowledge, the first case worldwide of livebirth following uterine transplantation from a deceased donor in a patient with MRKH syndrome. The results establish proof-of-concept for treating uterine infertility by transplantation from a deceased donor, opening a path to healthy pregnancy for all women with uterine factor infertility, without need of living donors or live donor surgery.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure why this is preferable to a surrogate mother. It seems like it's much less risky to implant a fetus into a surrogate mother than to implant it into a transplanted womb that is removed after the pregnancy.

<comment><USER14> It's one of those feelings, personally. Sure, surrogate mothers and adoptions are preferable, but it's just not the same as giving birth _myself_. It's all in my head, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would it be practical to keep the womb alive via a heart/lung machine and blood transfusions? Just remove human beings from the process altogether?

<comment><USER16> Really this is the question I'm interested in. Hopefully some animal models can be attempted in the near future.

Given that we're getting better at growing body parts from stem cells, you could easily imagine in the nearish future being able to gestate an embryo in a womb grown from an individuals own stem cells and enough attached organs to provide the full environment.

<comment><USER17> This is a bit horrifying to me. Babies are quite familiar with their mothers' voices by the time they are born, among other influences; would we also attempt to artificially simulate that sort of pre-birth bonding?

<comment><USER18> Here, I'll crank it up a notch: instead of animal models, how about just gestating humans in animals? There is your artificial womb. It just requires a bit of anti-rejection drugs, or a bit of GMO effort for tissue similarity.

Whales have the right body temperature. There is enough room to do dozens of babies at once.

Cows are close enough. A cow can probably handle a half dozen babies.

<comment><USER19> Fortunately or unfortunately, neither cows nor whales are close enough.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecific_pregnancy#Causes...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecific_pregnancy#Causes_of_failure)

<comment><USER18> They are close enough after "a bit of anti-rejection drugs, or a bit of GMO effort".

We can suppress the immune response, one way or another. If the animal is unable to clear the placenta after the birth, we lose the animal, but we still get a baby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I... Don't get the point. How many orphans are there who will never be adopted? Why go to such length if you really want a kid? I find this a bit perverse personally. While the medical and scientific achievement is amazing, I don't know if it's a net positive overall.

<comment><USER21> > How many orphans are there who will never be adopted?

In most developed countries, very, very few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How far are we from artificial wombs? afaik they can support the growth of lamb fetuses.

</comment><comment><USER23> This kind of procedure could be a breakthrough for transgender women who want to bear their own children.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think if I was that kid I might feel a bit creepy.

<comment><USER5> Why?

<comment><USER24> Maybe too much Lovecraft, horror channel, or Slayer, but there's an element of "born of dead womb". Certainly nice for the transplant recipient and partner, but I think I'd feel a bit weird having groen in a transplanted womb, even with downvotes telling me I'm not allowed to have an opinion.

<comment><USER25> Shouldn't you feel the same way if your mother had a heart, kidney, or liver transplant? You'd be directly hooked up to it as a fetus and it's as "dead" as the womb in this case.

<comment><USER26> No, because feelings don't work by strictly following nutrient flows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Cool, and on an individual human level I'm happy for the parents. But at the larger societal level I find such procedures very disturbing. I don't mean to sound like a eugenicist, everyone has the right to have kids imho, but the resources spent to create this one kid were immense. There are far easier ways for these parents to have genetic children, a surrogacy being top of the list.

The possibility of men carrying children is scientifically interesting, but again the human race is not struggling for kids. We are a growing population. I'd rather the resources spent on these procedures go towards vaccinations or the basic medical treatments that so many people lack on this planet.

<comment><USER5> We have enough scientists to work on multiple things concurrently. There is _always_ something "more worthy" of research/funding/time/facility allocation/manpower than whatever it is you're working on at the moment.

<comment><USER27> Research is one thing, it advances human knowledge. My issue is with the procedure that comes from the research. I would not support this becoming a therapy, something to be used not to advance knowledge but to cure disease. I'm all for the experiment. I get worried when people talk about this as another answer to infertility, or those who suggest it as a means for men to carry babies.

Similarly, I have no issue with some of the so-called "vampire" experiments, blood transfusions between young and old (ie moving blood both ways). Much can be learned through this (liver functions, immune cells etc). But I would very much against such a thing becoming a standard therapy beyond the lab.

<comment><USER5> This would be a surprisingly backward and anti-science viewpoint for the general public, let alone HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> At extraordinary expense, including the entire machine to provide the doctors, facilities, etc. This and tech like it only allow the elite to further separate themselves from anybody else.</comment>


Hackers could use infrared light to take your data through your security camera - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40470454/researchers-hack-malware-security-camera-over-airgap <comment><USER2> I wonder if there's a way to prevent this, I plan on talking w/ the head of security after reading this!</comment>


Oracle ADF Mobile: Java on iOS and Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/overview/adf-mobile-096323.html

<comment><AUTHOR> From reading Oracle's web site, it is not clear how much an individual would have to pay in licensing to sell, for example, a single iOS application. Anyone know what the costs are?</comment>


Ethereum Is the Forefront of Digital Currency - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/ethereum-is-the-forefront-of-digital-currency-5300298f6c75 <comment><USER2> Regardless of crypto space in general, it seems to be that the relative value between Bitcoin and Eth should be more equal-ish</comment>


College Rejection Threat Highlights Social Credit Blacklists - <AUTHOR> https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2018/07/college-rejection-threat-highlights-social-credit-blacklists/ <comment><USER3> Minority View Warning!!

In a small rural village, when one person misbehaves, everyone knows and punishes the offender with collective actions. That serves as a major deterrent against bad behaviors. This mechanism is weakened by the size of community. Reputational information cannot always travel as far as a person could. The social credit system is a reimplementation of this mechanism from the old days.

It can be abused the same way. A village peon who angers the powerful become an outcast regardless of who is in the right.

<comment><USER4> A blacklist without context and without the people executing the punishment knowing the person is pretty different from small communities. It captures some of the "small" aspect but completely misses the effects of having a "community".

Also my wife grew up in a small town and how judgemental they were is the main reason she is glad not to be there anymore so even if we could recreate how small towns actually work I don't know if we want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Barring someone from getting an education because of their father's debts seems tremendously short-sighted. Setting aside the issue of being punished for someone else's offenses, if you start taking away people's life prospects, it's not hard to see the criminal undervlasses growing in numbers. If the case described in the article is representative of how this credit system works, it seems likely to undermine the stability of Chinese society, not bolster it.

<comment><USER6> If you click through the links after links and read the original article, the family obviously had a $200,000 loan from a bank and failed to pay at due time, meanwhile his kids still attend private schools. The case was brought to a court, and the father was added to the "blacklist".

This story aside, the system is in spotlight because China now have a huge debt problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sociopaths do exist and a social credit system can be helpful in limiting the extent of their damage. On the other hand, at what costs?

Some social problems (illegal immigration in the US comes to mind) might not actually have a practical solution. For such problems, it might be the case that actually trying to solve the problem is much worse than just living with it. Kind of like back problems. Light treatment - like physical therapy - <USER2> be really helpful, but the heavy handed approach of surgery can leave you paralyzed / dealing with extreme pain.

<comment> xkcd-sucks Sociopaths are precisely the sort of people who enjoy success in optimizing for whatever metrics they're measured by

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Orwellian and insane as fuck. Who decides what is a "credit" and what is a "debt?" What recourse or due-process do people have to challenge this evidence-free, glorified thought-policing? Those were rhetorical questions because this sort of whole social-engineering is totalitarian, ludicrous and the textbook definition of evil; also look at internet and media censorship, Xi installing himself as Emperor, lack of property rights and the supposedly "anti-corruption" campaign. What shred of moral authority can one have when they install themselves as supreme dictator?

<comment><USER9> Exactly. This is horrifying. Another insane situation is the US drone program's Social Credit Kill List [1],

> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, > "We kill people based on metadata."

> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be > triggered, without even knowing the target's name, if too many derogatory > checks appear on their profile. "Armed military aged males" exhibiting > suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone > "seen to be giving out orders." Such mathematics-based assassinations have > come to be known as "signature strikes."

> "When I learned about signature strikes, that was incredible," Faisal says. > "If the criteria is being armed or having a beard – that is everyone in > Yemen."

Governments need to be more transparent on how social credits are "credited" and "debited".

1\. [https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics- features/how-...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how- to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/)

<comment><USER10> Thank you for sharing that Rolling Stone link. It is harrowing and absolutely terrifying, and indeed a clear and irrefutable description of how the U.S. has already been using a form of algorithmic social credit system for years to select assassination targets in the middle east. Highly relevant for a thread like this one duscussing additional (less lethal) types of damage from social credit systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> China may be on to something. White-collar crime convictions should include restrictions like that unless and until all losses and fines have been repaid. You can fly, but only in coach. You can't fly in a private aircraft. You can't have a credit card above the low-end level. You can't be an officer or director of a company. You can't play golf on a public course. You have to file taxes with the standard deduction.

<comment><USER12> But why? They are already getting prison sentence for it.

The problem is that all the punishment is actually cost society money and productivity. Like telling people that they can't get education because of whatever is huge net negative to society.

<comment><USER13> Based on the article, it appears that the blacklists are used to punish instances where someone was ordered to pay a fine but didn't comply. I think in pretty much any western country, that would result in a prison sentence in itself, but apparently not in China. So those limitations that are put on blacklisted persons are essentially a half-prison: not complete restriction of movement, but enough to serve as punishment. From that viewpoint, it might actually be cheaper to enforce than a prison sentence. It certainly seems to be preferable to the Chinese authorities who came up with the system.

<comment><USER14> Whoa there. Not paying a fine in a western country doesn't necessarily (and doesn't often) lead to jail time. Civil penalties are not easily converted into criminal ones, for obvious reasons (they punish poorer offenders for not being rich).

<comment><USER13> I'm most familiar with the situation in Germany [1] where you either have to pay your fines, prove that you can't pay (in which case the fine is deferred or split into smaller installments) or get detained in prison for up to six weeks (or three months for multiple fines).

Of course most people do end up complying in one way or another (which means that the fine is _eventually_ paid, even if very poor people might need many small installments).

I'm pretty sure that most other countries will also eventually threaten to imprison someone if they make no effort to pay a fine, otherwise many people would simply ignore them and never pay.

[1] [https://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_owig/englisch_ow...](https://www.gesetze-im- internet.de/englisch_owig/englisch_owig.html#p0534)

<comment><USER14> No, that definitely isn't true in the USA. I didn't realize Germany was so backwards.

They will seize your assets, garnish your wages, but they won't send you to jail, how would you even pay then?

<comment><USER15> It's exactly the same in US

[https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/09/384968360...](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/09/384968360/jail- time-for-unpaid-court-fines-and-fees-can-create-cycle-of-poverty)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very interesting references in this post which give a good perspective on the blacklist system.

</comment><comment><USER17> This story is totally taken out of context. The rejection was from a PRIVATE university and based on an inability to pay past loans. This is totally within scope of reasonableness.</comment>