Ask HN: Good resources to learn GIS as a programmer? - <AUTHOR> I have been working with Geographic data for the last month as part of a project, and I truly enjoyed it. Do you know of any resources to learn more about GIS? <comment><USER2> MIT has a python workshop [https://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=176295&p=1161397](https://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=176295&p=1161397)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I will take a look at this</comment></comment>


Dn42 – a big dynamic VPN - <AUTHOR> http://dn42.net/Home <comment><USER2> Your access will never be limited on any website. Access any geo-blocked website like Netflix, Facebook, YouTube, and hundreds more. Enjoy global access to any website of your liking. [https://www.ivacy.com/](https://www.ivacy.com/)</comment>


Freeloaders Unite to Fight Subway Fares - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703580004576180383768578942.html

<comment><USER2> If they stop charging, where will the money come from? Taxes. You're still going to pay. At least with a usage-based system you can have some say in how much and how often you pay (by riding less).

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. It's a childish attitude, to say the least.

Still, the idea an informal insurance fund to pay fare evasion fines is interesting -- this is why I posted it.</comment></comment>


Sentiment Analysis – Improving Bayesian Methods - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kennycason/bayesian_sentiment_analysis <comment><USER2> In the spirit of picking at nits, why not call the technique by its name, "bagging" or "bootstrapping"?

Also, I would like to see a better metric than simple accuracy. Maybe harmonic mean of precision and recall?

Otherwise, great to see more stuff like that in more languages (Kotlin, here).

Edit: Oh, hang on, I missed this bit:

>> more developed tokenizers that understand language

"understand language"? Really? What about "can handle"?

<comment><AUTHOR> >"understand language"? Really? What about "can handle"?

I would definitely qualify this as "picking at nits" haha :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would anybody explain me what is the takeaway from this approach?

When I run the code I see something like: 38/100 = 42.0% - 38.0% accuracy, 90.47619% accuracy of rated data.

90% is nice, but it looks to me like a tradeoff between precision and recall, where we just label those samples with the highest probability of pos/neg...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the confusion.

The primary take away was meant to be that a clustered Bayesian classifier (each trained on random samples of training data) offers significant improvements over traditional single Bayesian classifiers. Nothing revolutionary, just wanted to share a practical example that out performs most Bayesian implementations I have came across. I also wanted to share the results of model pruning and that tokenization matters.

I originally coded this without much intent on sharing, so the post write-up could probably use a lot of work. :)

<comment><USER3> Thank you!

How does it compare to the state of the art methods that used those datasets? Is it better or comparable?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess I didn't completely answer. If you force the classifier to rate 100% of the data, I expect ~80%.

If you set a reasonable confidence threshold, I expect mid 80s to low 90s.

In both cases, the clustered Bayesian classifier outperforms the single classifier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My favorite finding was the clustering of Bayesian classifiers all trained on random samples of data resulted in significant improvement. (Think Decision Tree -> Random Forest)

<comment><USER4> Or you could think of each NB classifier as a convolutional filter, followed by maxout / selection by voting at the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps the most important thing I took away from this write-up is the motivation: even though state of art NNs can perform better, they are impossible to debug for humans. Bayesian methods like the decision tree allow humans to interpret the underlying model, and so are often more useful in practice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Being a huge NN fan, I have to say I have been surprised of the number of cases where Bayesian classification have proven useful. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I never know exactly what they're referring to when they talk about "accuracy" in these kinds of papers: what was the precision and recall across the various categories (sentiments?) into which we are classifying the data?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a good question. Typically accuracy for something like this is "what percentage of the test data does the model accurately predict". In this example, the model is not punished for "not rating" text, and that is captured in the "percent rated" column. This example only demonstrates two classes of sentiment, positive & negative.

The main purpose is to demonstrate techniques to gain improvements over traditional/common Bayesian methods.</comment></comment>


Top 1% Control 39% of World's Wealth - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/100780163

<comment><USER2> If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn't mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

source of quotes: <http://occupywriters.com/works/by-lemony-snicket>

<comment><USER3> Did you read the article? This isn't about Occupy Wall Street at all. It's not criticizing the 1% and doesn't seem in line with your comment here.

<comment><USER2> Do you know what the occupy movement is about at all? I don't think so. It is not about Wall Street.

<comment><USER3> No, but Wall Street is the biggest success (that I know of) of that movement.

I'm not saying your ideological stance is wrong, I'm saying it doesn't seem relevant to this article.

<comment><USER2> I up voted this reply. Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And yet they only have 24 hours in the day to live their life like everybody else. I only envy people's wealth up to a point, after which having more money doesn't really do a whole lot for you because enjoyment of that wealth just doesn't scale. And if everybody's wealth is increasing worldwide, what good does it do us to point out that it's increasing faster for some than others? After all, their wealth is increasing faster because their risking it in the stock market, which drives the growth of the economy. Doesn't bother me in the least.

<comment><USER3> The article wasn't deriding wealth in tune with the usual tone of that headline. But you're right, it shouldn't bother you.

Friends of mine react with disgust that someone can make $200k or much, much more as a programmer, consultant, startup entrepreneur (particularly in the last case).

"Who needs all that money? What are you going to _do_ with it all?" These are typically people who wouldn't _mind_ having that much money either. It doesn't matter what's _done_ with it all. Successful people drive the economy. It's the opposite, being miserly with money, that's bad for the economy.

<comment><USER4> It's hard to see headlines like this and not think it's deriding the wealthy. It could have been put in a much more innocuous way, like "99% of the world's population controls 61% of the world's wealth". That just doesn't seem to have the same punch, though.

<comment><USER3> No, it doesn't, because 99 people in a room controlling 61 pieces of a pie aren't as influential as 1 man controlling 39 pieces of pie.

He has very real, formidable power. The least influential of the 99 will dislike that. They all have to share their 61 pieces - in practice, a significant fraction _have no pieces of pie._

Analogy aside, the way this model of wealth plays out is that the 1% are typically the only outlier, and the other 99% don't all control the remaining wealth in the same way - they don't have a disproportionate amount to their own percentile, or a number larger than themselves.

But disproportionate amounts of money is potentially _good_ \- think of what billionaires can do if they are so inclined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a red herring. Rather than control of wealth, we should be concerned with control of consumption. Poor people make lousy capital allocators (they don't have the right education, they don't have access to industry contacts, and they don't have a history of successful investing).

We constantly talk about redistributing income, taxing the high income earners. We have to stop this. We have to start taxing the high consumers, we need a progressive consumption tax. If someone makes a very high income, but saves it all rather than buys that flashy (frankly, worthless) car - then they should be allowed to keep all of that.

<comment><USER6> > Poor people make lousy capital allocators

Do they? My intuition would be that giving a thousand people a thousand bucks each would mostly have better results than giving one person a million bucks. Occasionally the rich come up with a Gates Foundation or whatever, but there's an opportunity cost to handing billions of dollars to billg too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate headlines like this. Wealth is not finite.

<comment><USER3> The sensationalism surrounding this is really kind of sad. It also drives a knife through the intellectual aptitudes of my circle of friends. People don't really understand game theory or sociological models well enough to understand that this sort of wealth distribution makes sense, when you look at data.

The biggest impediment to this, in my experience, is that people expect reality to intuitively make sense, and operate according to _their intuitive ideals of what's correct._ Nature has no reason to do this, and is often...very unintuitive.

<comment><USER8> This sort of wealth distribution is almost without precedent in the modern economy. It happened before in the 1920s and didn't end well.

If you understand "game theory or sociological models well enough to understand that this sort of wealth distribution makes sense, when you look at data", can you explain it to me? I was under the impression that it's a disturbing trend and would love to be comforted.

<comment><USER3> A good jumping point would be the "Matthew Effect" - the sociological theory of accumulated advantage. This is usually paraphrased as "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" in lay parlance but it is a legitimate academic theory in sociology. It illustrates a model of wealth distribution - particularly wealth disparity, and how it's somewhat inevitable despite repeated system "tweaks".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh so it's not World's wealth but worlds private wealth. Why not to misrepresent it - remaining 99% is a good target market to get some readership for this trash.

The face value of financial derivatives market if 6 times higher ($791 trillion) than the world's private wealth. Bond market and stockmarket are of a similar value to private wealth. Who owns majority of those? Governments, pension funds, insurance firms...

</comment><comment><USER10> I think every one should read: <http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html> to understand the difference between wealth and money.

</comment><comment><USER11> So 99% control 61% of the wealth.

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent motivation to become wealthy, but not necessarily new information.

<comment><USER12> How is it motivating? If anything, it highlights the growing disparity of wealth in the world. Seems like humanity is going backwards.

<comment><USER3> Which side do you want to be on? The side that controls the greatest piece of the pie or the side that _is_ the pie?

Does that sound too cynical to you? It's just my opinion, but I'm not going to hold it against mankind that some people have A Lot More Stuff. Wealth is not a finite resource, it can be had in a variety of different ways for the creative. Inheritances aside, if getting rich is the side effect to booming innovation, I'm not too bummed about it. It's business, and the rich have no compuctions about selling you something to feel better about mankind's slow devolution into hedonism, so why not get on board with them?

When you become rich, you will have more power, influence and resources to Save The World. Start there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> you can create wealth</comment>


Show HN: Lapis – A web framework for MoonScript and OpenResty - <AUTHOR> http://leafo.net/lapis/ <comment><USER2> Leafo, this looks great. I was not familiar with your MoonScript language prior to this.

Say, since you cite the benchmarks project, would you mind submitting a test case for Lapis?

Also, just out of curiosity, what did you use to create the canvas animation?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd definitely like it to be part of the benchmarks project. When I get some time I'll submit a pull request for it.

As mentioned in the other comment I use this for recording animations: <https://github.com/rprichard/x11-canvas-screencast>

<comment><USER2> Great! You are prolific! A language, a web framework, sites built upon that framework, and all of the documentation. You sure you're just one person?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> People need to get out of this habit of embedding view/template in the backend code. It's impractical and problematic in any situation where there's division of labor.

Otherwise interesting web framework, makes me want to look into MoonScript.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice work!

This has pretty excellent documentation. Like really excellent documentation. But jumping into the code itself is a little bit of a beast with no tests or comments.

so: is testing on your roadmap?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I'll have a better testing setup in the near future. (Right now there are individual unit tests scattered in the modules themselves)

Glad you like the documentation, I try to take pride in writing detailed documentation. :)

<comment><USER5> Pushed native moonscript support to busted[0] this morning. :D

[0] [https://github.com/Olivine- Labs/busted/blob/master/spec/moon...](https://github.com/Olivine- Labs/busted/blob/master/spec/moonscript_spec.moon)

<comment><USER6> Busted is awesome - really nice test framework.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting performance numbers. I am happy to see something past java frameworks working out so well.

</comment><comment><USER8> Would be nice to add support for not-inlined templates with high-performance template engine like CTPP2 (ngx_ctpp2)

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks interesting, but the use of "\" instead of "." is really a turnoff. Why do languages (I'm looking at you, PHP) think that using the backslash in any other way than escaping is a good idea?

<comment><USER10> Couldn't agree more. I've am looking at Lua for a new project and got excited when I saw this. However, that syntax looks terrible.

What's worse, is it is inconsistent. Take:

      csrf.assert_token @
      Users\create name: @params.username

I don't get why they both can't be '.', which would be very readable and approachable to everyone.

All that said, this looks great given it is built on OpenResty (whose performance seems outstanding at initial blush). Wonder if anyone has deployed anything really big with it.

<comment><USER11> I've used moonscript a lot, and don't particularly like the \ syntax. However, you get used to it quickly, and it stops seeming like such a big deal.

It would be hard to have both be '.', because of lua semantics: '.' means "get the property from the table", while ':' in lua and '\' in moonscript mean "get the function from this table, with the first parameter for that function bound to the table itself".

Javascript/Coffeescript can get away with both being '.' because of the horrible mess that is implicit 'this'. All functions have an implicit first parameter, that non-method functions usually ignore, and '.' in javascript does the equivalent of ':' and '\' in moonscript (for functions). I find the lua approach much simpler and cleaner, and think it is actually more approachable than the javascript way, because the difference between '.' and ':' or '\' is conceptually simpler than all the rules behind 'this' in javascript.

Programming in Lua explains ':' in <http://www.lua.org/pil/16.html> , and probably has a better explanation that I wrote :).

<comment><USER12> Would you recommend learning Lua first before going into moonscript ?

<comment><USER11> I learned them concurrently, translating lua in Programming in Lua into the equivalent moonscript. It's a pretty strait-forward translation and is definitely doable. I already had experience with a reasonable variety of languages before learning it though, and for people still getting into programming, I think Lua is a simpler and still awesome language.

I don't think it's possible to learn moonscript without learning lua concurrently, since lua makes up so much of the underlying semantics. So I think the choice is either (a) learn lua, or (b) learn lua and moonscript for some nice syntactic sugar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> amazing work man! I was thinking in creating something like that but with mruby. Lua is a good option too. It is a perfect fit to use with Angular.js</comment>


Find a $1,000 a Month Business Idea from Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://startupcountryblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/find-a-1000-a-month-business-idea-from-reddit-forums-where-people-post-about-things-they-want-to-buy/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like "Sales Safari" from Amy Hoy :)

I tried this with industries I deemed interesting, but found out it wasn't that easy. Most easy wins were already solved. Then I was stuck with getting deeper and extrapolating pains they might have but don't see, etc.</comment>


New facts about the leadup to the Beirut explosion - <AUTHOR> https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/a-hidden-tycoon-african-explosives-and-a-loan-from-a-notorious-bank-questionable-connections-surround-beirut-explosion-shipment <comment><USER2> So, in a post-911 world, it's not even possible to categorically determine the owner of an international cargo ship due to the fact that mazes of opaque offshore (shell) company ownership is still not just possible and easy, but effectively "the norm".

No invasion or bombing of any country is going to affect the facilitation of terrorist funding anywhere near the action of restricting trade for companies that have these byzantine ownership structures that shield the actual owners and profiteers from identification. Anything other than shutting this farcical, gaping, cargo-ship sized hole in "international business" is, purely and simply, only theatrical effort against terrorism. It's actually worse than that because it's appearing to do something; claiming that efforts are being made, whilst it continues unabated.

<comment><USER3> This comment is hilarious - you are aware that there is no "post 911 world" in 90% of the world, right? Its just a blip in a history book. Pretty sure any regulation which was put in place in America after 911 has nothing to do with any of the countries which are involved in this story.

<comment><USER4> Yeah... that's very good point. From my point of view as Polish citizen 911 is a problem that US developed for itself through their actions in the Middle East.

I don't want to sound insensitive, 3 thousand people is of course a tragedy, but on a scale of entire Earth I think it is preposterous for US citizens to get obsessed after this one when more kids are dying to malaria every single day or for multitude of other problems.

Looking from my point of view, it is that US rallies for some causes where it seems to suit US interests. There are so many countries that need help but in recent years whether a country gets US presence seems largely dependent on whether there is oil there and US is all too happy to turn their face away if the government of the oil-rich country is collaborating with US. This is a sore to many eyes and I just can't help to remember it whenever I hear of US trying to seem to be beneficiary in something.

This unfortunately adds fire to the trouble in the Middle East. If you are islamic radical it is extremely easy to recruit people by showing them factual, real, undeniable misbehavior of US. This lack of moral grounding is exactly the reason why actions by US do not bring expected effects. Local population treats US forces with resentment not because they are fundamentally anti-US but because they see US as a corrupt replacement for their current corrupt government.

A larger lesson is that you want somebody teach virtuous behavior you need to be able to show the virtue yourself or you are not going to achieve very much in terms of results.

\---

Also, my experience about downvotes is this kind of comment even if genuinely to show what's an example of sentiment outside of US, will typically get a lot of upvotes during US night time and then gets suddenly killed when US wakes up.

Just an interesting thing I noticed which, for me, validates the whole point that US doesn't like to acknowledge resentment it gets from most of the world and that US problems aren't actually the same as world problems regardless of how US would like to portray it.

<comment><USER5> > _I don 't want to sound insensitive, 3 thousand people is of course a > tragedy, but on a scale of entire Earth I think it is preposterous for US > citizens to get obsessed after this one when more kids are dying to malaria > every single day or for multitude of other problems._

> _will typically get a lot of upvotes during US night time and then gets > suddenly killed when US wakes up._

I don't know about the downvotes, but you're presenting a false equivalency that doesn't make any sense and is kind of insulting to me as an American. Specifically about Malaria, which a US president has created a program to address [https://www.usaid.gov/global-health/health- areas/malaria](https://www.usaid.gov/global-health/health-areas/malaria). America sends billions of dollars worth of aid and supplies around the world every year. But to hear Europeans talk about it, the only thing America does is cause problems for them with our imperialism.

Sometimes I wish America would just listen to Europe and let them fend for themselves. Let their navies handle global piracy and securing global shipping lanes for their interests. Let their armies deal with Russian and Chinese saber rattling and the effect that will have on trade. Sometimes I wish I could go back and tell the government to let European militaries spend their own money to launch and maintain GPS systems that the entire western world has been given and using for the past 40 years, paid for by American taxpayers.

> _A larger lesson is that you want somebody teach virtuous behavior you need > to be able to show the virtue yourself or you are not going to achieve very > much in terms of results._

Very ironic, since you're doing the same thing to America / Americans. What part of you and your society is so virtuous that you feel the need to give America a lesson on how to be virtuous?

<comment><USER6> US has lost its high moral standing in the world in the same way that Google lost its standing with the technologists on HN. But those on the inside tend to be oblivious to these facts.

<comment><USER7> What countries have high moral standing in the world?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The usual sorry tale of rickety ships, dubious owners, shady ports of registry (I didn't even know Moldova had a harbour for seagoing ships, but turns out that they have, since 2006, after a territorial exchange with Ukraine: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Giurgiule%C8%99ti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Giurgiule%C8%99ti)), crews stranded aboard for months because the owner doesn't care etc. Be that as it may, the blame for storing 2750 tons of a dangerous chemical in a warehouse without proper safety measures in a port located at the heart of Beirut for six years still rests firmly with the Lebanese authorities...

<comment><USER9> > the blame for storing 2750 tons of a dangerous chemical in a warehouse > without proper safety measures in a port located at the heart of Beirut for > six years still rests firmly with the Lebanese authorities...

The problem is, which ones?

<comment><USER10> From wikipedia:

By order of the judge, the cargo was brought ashore in 2014 and placed in Warehouse 12 at the port,[32] where it remained for the next six years.[16][17][23][33] The MV Rhosus sank in the harbour in February 2018.[34]

Customs officials had sent letters to judges requesting a resolution to the issue of the confiscated cargo, proposing that the ammonium nitrate be either exported, given to the army, or sold to the private Lebanese Explosives Company.[b][17] Letters had been sent on 27 June and 5 December 2014, 6 May 2015, 20 May and 13 October 2016, and 27 October 2017.[17][36] One of the letters sent in 2016 noted that judges had not replied to previous requests, and "pleaded":[17]

In view of the serious danger of keeping these goods in the hangar in unsuitable climatic conditions, we reaffirm our request to please request the marine agency to re-export these goods immediately to preserve the safety of the port and those working in it, or to look into agreeing to sell this amount ...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion)

So the customs office did their jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand why so much effort is spent on who initially owned the ship or the ammonium nitrate.

No matter what they were guilty of, it's the Lebanese government that confiscated 3000 tons of explosive material and stored it in conditions that lead to the explosion. It was _their_ ammonium nitrate when it blew up and their responsibility.

All this "who owned that ship" stuff smells of finger pointing to hide the real guilty parties.

<comment><USER12> Are you suggesting that no one should investigate how this became the government's problem in the first place? That is absurd.

<comment><USER11> Yes I am. It became the property of the Lebanese government in 2014 and it blew up in 2020. Any attempts to blame the explosion on the original transporter are pure propaganda.

>There had been suggestions that it was meant for Beirut, to be used by Sunni militants or Hezbollah, and the final destination of Mozambique was a cover.

Aha. So? Good job confiscating it then. Lousy (or criminal) job not getting rid of it after.

Besides, did those "suggestions" only surface after the explosion by any chance?

<comment><USER13> I think it is fair to look at all possible root causes to identify all contributing causes.

It would be great if the solution they implement is to fix the broken bureaucracy _and_ prevent the trafficking of high explosives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Summary:

\- Grechushkin (Russian) was transporting ammonium nitrate from Georgia to Mozambique

\- Grechushkin Ordered a last minute stop in Beirut to pick up additional cargo in the form of trucks, but the plan was abandoned when the first loaded truck almost broke the deck

\- Lebanese officials then detained the ship for safety reasons

\- Grechushkin declared bankruptcy and disappeared and the ship was impounded

\- The ammonium nitrate was moved to a warehouse at the port and the ship eventually sank behind a breakwater, where its wreckage remains

\- 4 years of complicated secrecy, corruption, shell companies, and "flags of convenience" involving Cypriot shipping magnate Manoli, the Portuguese illicit arms trafficking Vieira family, the Mozambique ruling elite, and Ukranian middle-man company Savaro, stymied solutions

\- Lebanon then tried to offload the material to several organization including the Lebanese army and a local explosives manufacturer but they refused

\- Lebanon then tried to return the cargo to Georgia but did not for unknown reasons

\- On July 20, 2020, two weeks prior to the explosion, Lebanese security services warned the president that there were serious flaws with the storage of the ammonium nitrate

Then disaster.

<comment> iso8859-1 To me, the biggest revelation is that Grechushkin wasn't the owner. If you lease a vessel, it should be seaworthy. Manoli was the owner, how could he provide a broken ship? So the attention on Grechushkin is exaggerated.

<comment><USER15> Because his own (other) company certified it seaworthy. It's almost as if you can create companies according to the corner you want to cut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tangential to the primary issue, but TFA mentions the crew being detained on the ship for 10 months after docking, which is absolutely mind-blowing. I assume they weren't completely oblivious to the contents of their cargo. Imagine not only sailing, but then trying to sleep for _ten extra months_ aboard a ship carrying thousands of pounds of explosive fertilizer. Insane.

<comment><USER17> hell we just did it with crews of many cruise ships in the US and likely elsewhere[0] the numbers being over 100,000 in total. Most were stranded in US ports because of arduous restrictions by the CDC and the home countries of the crewmen.

So yeah, it might not be an explosive but being trapped on ships with a potential to be sick isn't exactly fun. Sadly a lot of this has to do with out of sight out of mind, these crews are not generally seen by people even though when out on a cruise you physically see them each day.

[0][https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/tourism- cruises/ar...](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/tourism- cruises/article242565281.html)

<comment><USER18> This sounds like the worst game of "would you rather?" ever. Explosive cargo ship abandoned by the world or plague cruise ship abandoned by the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The big story for me is in the last paragraphs: this wasn't the full shipment exploding:

> According to three European intelligence sources investigating the blast, > who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity, the amount still > stored in the warehouse by August may have been smaller than the initial > 2,750 tons. They said the size of the explosion was equivalent to as little > as 700 to 1,000 tons of ammonium nitrate.

That means to me someone, somewhere is building bombs.

<comment><USER20> 1000 tons of CLEAN ammonium in good shape. It's rather hard to explode all mass of pure ammonium or even ANFO in mines, it's routine to find unexploded pellets all over the place. It's even harder to explode whole mass of ammonium which sat for several years in humid conditions (ammonium nitrate is VERY higroscopic).

<comment><USER8> I was wondering about that too, especially since when investigating the state of the cargo they found out that already in 2015 "most of the one-ton bags containing the ammonium nitrate — approximately 1,900 — were ripped and had their contents spilling out". So some of it may have surely been stolen over the years, but not 1500-2000 tons...

<comment><USER20> Yeah, consider logistics of stealing 1000 tons of something. If it's not organized big truck removal, you are looking at ferrying max 200-300kg at a time with small car, loading one ton of fertilizer with shovel will also take more than a hour during which thieves can be nabbed. After two years in humid environment you can't use shovel anymore, you have to use pickaxe to split it apart into large chunks (and explosion risk is relatively high for such operation). That's why no company was interested, it was not easily useful for anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Aside: These issues with shady ownership and responsibility are going to continue to be quite the issue. In the US, the current administration just relaxed rules for liquid-natural-gas transport on rail. Specifically, the LNG cars can now go 50mph+ in heavily populated areas, with no limit on the number of LNG cars [0]. When an issue occurs and someone dies, I suspect there will be a similarly long chain of shell companies for these LNG cars.

[0] [https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bomb- tra...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bomb- trains-1046481/)

<comment><USER22> Liquid natural gas is not flammable and a tanker of LNG cannot explode unless hit with a missile. (correction, sorry, somebody could blow one up)

<comment><USER21> That's just plain false:

[https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/lng/faq.html#900](https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/lng/faq.html#900)

Yes, it needs an oxidizer. 5-15% LNG vapor to air is sufficient. Like in the case of a rail car being ruptured and leaking LNG.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> anecdotal evidence here, but I grew up on a farm. I know exactly what ammonium nitrate is. Here in America the ATF does almost everything it can to keep you from storing or purchasing any more than a sack at a time unless you can prove youve got the soy or corn to feed with it.

a quick Wiki shows Agriculture in Lebanon is the third most productive sector in the country after the tertiary and industrial sectors. It contributes 3.6% to GDP and employs around 4% of the active working population.

Is it feasible for a subset of 216,000 people to steal this chemical rampantly over five years? absolutely. it never goes bad, and you can trade it with neighboring farmers almost like a barter system for things like seed, dung and tractor parts. Should you ever store it? absolutely not, but im willing to venture Lebanese farmers arent millionires and dont really care.

if just 300 people strated looting this chemical theyd only need 20 pounds a piece. theres 3000 tonnes right there.

TL;DR: i do not think this is being used to make explosives.

<comment><USER24> > if just 300 people strated looting this chemical theyd only need 20 pounds a > piece. theres 3000 tonnes right there

That's 3 tonnes... (And as the saying goes, what's the difference between 3 tonnes and 3000 tonnes? About 3000 tonnes.)

<comment><USER25> How many working days are there in five years?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I read last week about unconfirmed reports that the fire was caused by workers welding a door. It would be tragically ironic if a report that highlighted security concerns about a missing door is what caused the explosions.

 _In a July 20, 2020, report to the president and prime minister — just two weeks prior to the explosion — Lebanese security services warned that there were serious security flaws at the facility that left the ammonium nitrate open to theft._

 _One door of the unguarded warehouse was missing, while there was also a hole in the southern wall, the report said._

<comment><USER15> Ammonium nitrate is notoriously hard to detonate, I would rule it out but I think any evidence of such chains of events, or otherwise, has been vaporized.

<comment><USER27> Apparently there was a secondary cache of fireworks stored next to the ammonium nitrate. Probably placed there under the assumption that if there's already an astronomic amount of explosive material they might as well store it in one place. Which completely overlooks the fact that the fireworks made a perfect primer for the detonation as ammonium nitrate is actually somewhat difficult to set off on its own. That's why we often see large amounts of it going off somewhere making the news every few years - it's misleadingly safe to store. Similarly, diesel won't catch a spark but I'm not going to advocate storing fireworks in a storehouse of the stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's only so many arms manufactuers and shipping companies and supporting businesses who are willing to work the bottom of the barrel market. The first world is always on their back because they're the people who do things "wrong" enough (they and their customers would say "right") to meet the price points of the third world. This is like the shipping equivalent of the local bottom dollar machinery moving service that has cash discounts and is always getting hassled by the DOT for clapped out trucks and questionable load permits.

Until the whole world is rich enough to not have to cut corners this kind of stuff (the shipping story, the chain of events leading to the explosion in downtown Beirut is exceptional which is why they're so pissed off about it) is normal.

</comment><comment> dmch-1 This is pretty much Murphy's Law in action. Murky business dealings, poor governance and mismanagement is a norm in big parts of the world. Then from time to time things go wrong, and that is just statistics.

</comment><comment><USER29> Improper storage sadly happens here too: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyBdAT_yCFQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyBdAT_yCFQ)

</comment><comment> BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 Once a government authority seizes cargo, the authority takes on the entire responsibility,incompetence notwithstanding. Should have scuttled it offshore.

</comment><comment><USER30> That's an awfully long article about a ship that sank some years ago. While interesting, it has very little to do with the explosion or its cause.

<comment><USER31> Sure, but it has to do with something potentially much more interesting. Sometimes, things that remain hidden become public due to sheer bad luck, like seems to have happened here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Savaro Ltd:

[https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/05841913/filing-h...](https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/05841913/filing- history)

Is that the sort of outfit that you would order nearly 3000 tons of stuff from? They were registered as dormant. The level of corruption all the way through this chain of events is quite something.

<comment><USER33> Look how many companies are registered at the same address!

[https://suite.endole.co.uk/explorer/postcode/e2-8dn](https://suite.endole.co.uk/explorer/postcode/e2-8dn)

<comment><USER34> This is perfectly normal. I don't want my home address out in public so I use a registered agent service to act as the address for filings like these.

The same is true for both the US and UK (both places where I have founded companies.)

<comment><USER32> I run a UK company. I absolutely want my identity known as far as is possible.

Please don't confuse security with obscurity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > The new revelations show how, at almost every stage, the Rhosus' deadly > shipment was connected to actors who used opaque offshore structures and lax > government oversight to work in the shadows.

This is an apt description of the international shipping industry as a whole. Flags of convenience, shells upon shells upon shells, where nobody knows who they work for, or who should be sued, fraudulent certification, all enabled by port authorities who are hesitant to seize incompliant ships.

</comment><comment><USER36> It seems like richer countries could start refusing docking privileges to ships that fly flags of convenience. This would at least curtail some of the nefariousness.

</comment><comment><USER37> We in the US should thank our lucky stars that massive and endemic corruption which is rampant overseas is not present here in the United States. I have long since lost the idea that the rest of the world will ever modernize and institute the rule of law.

<comment><USER38> I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but I think corruption has taken its toll on the United States. Maybe not to the same extent as other countries, but there is certainly room for improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The homemade bomb used by ABB to murder eight people at the Norwegian government building on 22 July 2011 was made by common fertilizer components; so called ANFO, which is ammonium nitrate mixed with fuel: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANFO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANFO)

<comment> 08-15 And Timothy McVeigh used ammonium nitrate with nitromethane to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma city.

What's your point? That terrorists use shitty explosives if they can't get the good stuff like Semtex?

Meanwhile, much larger amounts of ammonium nitrate are used as fertilizer. Makes me wonder why the Lebanese authorities didn't sell the stuff as fertilizer to get rid of it.

<comment><USER39> My point was merely to inform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Just a small excerpt of human nature. So much underhanded crap going on in this world to enrich a few individuals while billions struggle on trying to make an honest living.

</comment><comment><USER41> it's the weapon factory that should be responsible for the explosion because they made the KNO3

<comment><USER42> So if I manufacture boulders and some dumbass stores one at the top of a steep incline it's my fault if that boulder rolls into town and crushes people? That doesn't make sense to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> looks like an opportunity for an SV unicorn startup to revolutionize shipping.

</comment><comment><USER44> > the Shia militant group Hezbollah

AH yes, the Hezbollah, just a militant group, not a bunch of terrorists.

</comment><comment><USER45> >the causes of the disaster appear to be tied to bureaucratic ineptitude."

I'd say it's a trend from the top leadership. Unfortunately, despite this fact, they are going to try to pin it on someone.

</comment><comment><USER46> Perhaps the journalists could have avoided a lot of the loaded terminology such as "actors", "opaque", "mysterious, "shadows", and many related adjectives.

I want just the facts please.

<comment><USER46> More information about the use of loaded terms. [https://bobyewchuk.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/loaded- words/](https://bobyewchuk.wordpress.com/2019/05/21/loaded-words/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Meh,

It's only because the government wanted to steal/use/sell/recover $ this happened.

It's just common fertiliser. Used everywhere. Transported everywhere.

If they really didn't want it they could have dumped it at sea and got some carbon credits.

Rickety ship's are a story, but nothing to do with Beirut.

<comment><USER31> Rickety ships being used to ship explosive precursors by people trying their best to hide their involvement in that activity, to people implicated in illegal arms trading, seems like a pretty important story.

<comment><USER47> If you are saying 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate was being transported for military or militant use, that to me is pretty crazy but interesting.

But you'd need to say it rather than imply something Qanon style. What is going on?

My theory. It's a ricky ship transporting ammonium nitrate for use farming or mining. To differentiate you'd have to see if this counterfeit ammonium nitrate really does cost more to be mining grade or it's just in the name and is for farming.

How would illegal arms play out in an alternate theory?

<comment><USER31> Well, the article says pretty much right at the start:

"The ultimate customer for the ammonium nitrate on the ship, a Mozambican explosives factory, is part of a network of companies previously investigated for weapons trafficking and allegedly supplying explosives used by terrorists.The factory never tried to claim the abandoned material."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News Headline Generator - <AUTHOR> http://www.blarworld.net/hackernewsgen.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A buddy of mine created this bad boy for us all to enjoy. Hopefully you don't find it too mean-spirited; it's all in good fun.

Also worth checking out: his "tech article comment generator" at blarworld.net.

<comment><USER2> I appreciate that it's meant in fun, but it does beg the uncomfortable question: Have we become so predictable?

<comment><USER3> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "A fully functional Death Star in 5 lines of WebGL"

Good stuff.

<comment><USER5> Lisp can do it in two:

        (with-sufficient-macrology
           (make-generic-star :type 'death))

<comment><USER6> Python can do it in one

        from past import deathstar

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Funny: "Ask HN: Am I crazy to attempt to understand common sense?"

Sad: "Ask HN: Should my company make unmarketable products?" and "Ask HN: How do you program vaporware?"

Accurate: "Ask HN: Does my startup need to try to market to potential customers?"

</comment><comment><USER8> This thing is psychic. It gave me a headline for a project I started working on this weekend!

<comment><USER9> All that time for 9 lines of F#?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't wait for "Hacker News Headline Generator in 3 lines of Erlang"

</comment><comment><USER11> It really needs to add things like:

How a kid/student made $20 million (mixergy interview)

or

How AMAZING BUSINESS was made with only $3.50.

</comment><comment><USER12> Let me guess: A markov chain based text generator trained on a set of HN headlines from before.

Something else?

<comment><USER13> Check out the source, it's randomly generated Javascript

<comment><USER14> Of course the Markov-chain approach would also be worth trying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "How I turned coding unicorn picture technology into a $12 million a year business"

Bonus points for madness!

<comment><USER16> Interesting since I got "Ask HN: Does my startup need to steal unicorn picture technology?" followed up with "Review my startup: www.makeunicornpicturetechnology.org". Looks like that unicorn picture technology making guy finally hit the big time.

<comment><USER17> It's a little-known fact, but lisp-driven unicorn picture technology is going to be the main driver of Web 4.0

Damn, I think I could make an HN _comment_ generator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Classic: "How I turned stealing pointless iPhone apps into a $12 million a year business"

</comment><comment><USER18> "How I turned hating on unmarketable products into a $10 million a year business"

</comment><comment><USER19> "A Facebook clone in 9 lines of CSS" :-)

</comment><comment><USER20> "A '93 Ford Taurus in 8 lines of Megan-Fox-picture"

Hahaha

<comment><USER21> "A fully functional POSIX-compliant 64-bit multitasking operating system in 12 lines of Javascript"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Now someone needs to make a blog post generator to go along with the headlines.

</comment><comment><USER17> "A fully functional POSIX-compliant 64-bit multitasking operating system in 14 lines of CSS"

That I'd pay to see.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Ask HN: Who here actually trys to market unmarketable products?" lol

</comment><comment><USER24> "Review my startup: www.hackunmarketableproducts.com"

</comment><comment><USER25> "Ask HN: Does my startup need to make common sense?"

</comment><comment><USER26> An Amazon clone in 9 lines of Megan-Fox-picture

</comment><comment><USER26> A Twitter clone in 13 lines of CSS

</comment><comment><USER27> I enjoyed "An Amazon clone in 14 lines of Clojure" -- that would be something to see.

</comment><comment><USER28> s/^.+(?= Generator)/Spam Subject/</comment>


Enhanced heartbleed: consistently get 64k of heap - <AUTHOR> http://pastebay.net/1422064

<comment><AUTHOR> According to @puellavulnerata: _examining my own tests closer, if you use a payload length above 16k, it sends back an ill-formed response exceeding the maximum TLS record length. A lot of the proofs-of-concept can 't parse it properly - the payload length in the heartbeat response doesn't match the TLS record length._ That's what this code fixes.</comment>


4chan's moot takes pro-anonymity to TED 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/staff/palatine/2010/02/4chans-moot-takes-pro-anonymity-to-ted-2010.ars <comment><USER2> Ahh, 4chan.

I don't think 4chan, and /b/ in particular, get enough credit for being the... unique sociological artifact that they are.

There are many that extoll the virtue of "free speech", but how many are able to gaze unflinching at its unrestrained exercise? The teeming, faceless horde that is 4chan's population is perhaps the truest, purest exemplar of the free exchange of ideas; unshackled from the restraints of purpose, propriety, coherence, and even (at times, on /b/, at least until the moderators notice) legality.

It is likely impossible, in the course of normal social situations, to escape certain limitations; be they social, cultural, or even biological. Reputations are built or destroyed, relationships formed, a complex and pervasive network of interconnections. A person may be taller than you, or shorter; younger, or older; attractive or ugly; hesitant or confident; wealthy or poor; or any of countless factors that subtly, deeply, and inevitably color the way people interact.

But in an environment like 4chan, all that is stripped away. No status games, no authority, no obligations, no expectations. What you say one minute matters not at all the next, crude obscenity and pearls of wisdom alike slipping into the seething, aimless morass. Cloaked in anonymity, where even the flimsy identity of a pseudonym is cause for mockery, what emerges is a shocking sort of honesty. Revolting, yet oddly beautiful; an ever-shifting, ephemeral monument to every embarrassing thought, guilty pleasure, squelched impulse and repressed desire--in short, an expression of _humanity_ , in basest form.

...well, either that, or it's just about porn and cat macros. I'm not entirely sure.

<comment><USER3> Some credit may be due to Shii, who was the admin on 4chan who implemented FORCED_ANON on /b/. See: <http://shii.org/knows/Shii>

Some of his thoughts and findings on anonymity can be found here:

<http://shii.org/knows/Anonymous>

<http://blog.topix.com/archives/000106.html>

<http://wakaba.c3.cx/shii/>

<comment><USER4> Moot disagrees.

<comment><USER5> Can you provide more detail?

<comment><USER4> I showed him the comment and he gave a longer response that I don't remember entirely. But basically it has more to do with the original cloned software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It always struck me that 4chan is not the most positive example of what happens when an unlimited number of people are given unlimited anonymity.

Sure, 4chan was there for Anonymous, which engages in some political activity. But 4chan also spawns a massive amount of graffiti, grossness, shock images, juvenelia, etc. Most people don't think of 4chan as the brave home of political protesters; they think of it as in immature dumping ground for memes and shock porn.

If the goal is really to show the importance of anonymity online, a protester from Iran or Wikileaks would be taken far more seriously. Sending somebody from 4chan will just focus attention on the many ways that anonymity is abused.

<comment><USER7> "The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H.L. Mencken

I would agree that it's not the most wholeheartedly positive example, but I think it's one of the most honest examples in a sense if you really want to evaluate anonymity on the internet in context and show the bad with the good.

<comment><USER3> Excellent Mencken quote. Another relevant one: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." --Oscar Wilde

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I disagree that being non-anonymous on the Internet via social networking (etc.) is harmful. You can be non-anonymous and still be anonymous when you want to.

For example, it's clear that I'm jrockway. It says right above my comment. If you Google the name, you will find that that is pretty close to my real name, and you can reasonably make a guess about who I really am. (And where I live, and who I work for, and how old I am, etc.) But that's not really important -- what the world knows about "jrockway" is completely under my control, and anything posted under that name is intentionally designed to be linked back to a certain real person.

The important question is, "what other online IDs does that real person have"? And because of anonymity, you will never know.

<comment><USER2> There's an interesting distinction to be made between _true_ anonymity and "pseudonymity", though. In particular, a pseudonym identity can eventually acquire as much baggage as a real identity--the more social connections and reputation that become associated with an identity, the harder it is for someone to discard it.

Total anonymity, with no expectation of moment-to-moment continuity, is in many ways a very different beast.

<comment><USER9> indeed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quoting Ars:

"but moot didn't speak to the dangers of anonymity"

Not entirely true: he did speak about the guy torturing a cat.

</comment><comment><USER11> is the video of his talk up yet? I cant find it on the ted site

<comment><USER12> They start putting the videos up a few at a time after the TED conference itself is over. I think it is still going on.

<comment><USER13> Some take months to go up, from what I hear. It was an okay talk.</comment></comment></comment>


Exploiting the Math.expm1 typing bug in V8 - <AUTHOR> https://abiondo.me/2019/01/02/exploiting-math-expm1-v8/ <comment><USER2> The fundamental bug here is _really_ slick. The static analyzer in the JIT incorrectly believes

         Math.expm1(x)

can't return -0. But if x is -0, it can. That, in turn, means it believes

         Object.is(Math.expm(x), -0)

must always be false. But if x is -0, it's true, not false. That, in turn, means that the JIT believes

         array[Object.is(Math.expm(x), -0) * INDEX]

must be array[0], no matter what INDEX is. But if x is -0, it'll be array[INDEX]. That's a big problem, because the optimizer, guided by the static analyzer, removes the bounds check if the bounds check can't ever fail.

But it's not quite that simple, because another consequence of of the static analyzer's misperception is that

         Object.is(Math.expm(x), -0) * INDEX

is the constant 0, no matter what value x takes and no matter what INDEX is, and the JIT will simply constant-fold 0 in for the whole expression, so the bounds check really won't matter.

But constant folding is an optimization, not a security boundary, and easily "defeated": replace the -0 constant in that expression with an object reference:

         obj = { o: -0 }
         Object.is(Math.expm(x), obj.o)

You can read that code and see that it's the constant -0, but the static analyzer needs to do escape analysis to make sure the object reference really does just evaluate to a constant, and escape analysis happens after the typing analysis, so the constant folding doesn't happen.

The end result of the bug is a sort of "black magic zero/one chimera" that, mixed into an expression, tricks the JIT into stripping bounds checks. It's an extremely cool exploit primitive. It's doubly cool because if you don't have Andrea's writeup or a really nuanced understanding of v8 internals, you could stare at that exploit for eternity and never understand why it works.

<comment><USER3> Here's what I don't get. Why isn't Math.expm1 just implemented in JavaScript?

        Math.expm1 = (x) => Math.pow(Math.E, (x)) - 1;

With this monkey patched version, Math.expm1(-0) now returns 0. I've been writing JavaScript for a long time and I didn't even know Math.expm1 was a thing. Was it really necessary to implement this inside V8?

<comment><USER4> Because you lose all your precision there due to how floating point math eorjsy. expm1 is for very small x that where exp (x) is close to 1.

<comment><USER4> oops, s/eorjsy/works. That's what I get for typing on my phone in bed at night...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting how at the end, after acquiring out-of-bounds write access, that it was easiest to leverage the WebAssembly infrastructure to execute code than to build a ROP chain.

Apparently WebAssembly heap memory storing generated code is not write protected _at_ _all_. I guess whatever architecture they have for managing typed memory chunks doesn't make it sufficiently easy to manipulate protection bits dynamically, and the WebAssembly folks were content to leave compiled WebAssembly chunks are RWX.

It's unfortunate that this thread hasn't been upvoted. It really drives home the futility of expecting something as complex as V8 to ever be safe enough to sandbox arbitrary code. And it has little to do with the language of the implementation--the same engine re-written in Rust would have been just as susceptible to the two exploits.

I guess it's just too inconvenient to accept reality. I'm still surprised that Cloudflare and AWS have actually convinced themselves they can make such architectures secure[1]. Less shocked that everybody is else is so credulous.

Though, I _am_ shocked that Netflix is so credulous. A recent blog post described how they use AWS Lambda functions to manage their CA private key. But, again, because of how limited KMS is I guess it's too inconvenient to not trust Lambda. KMS really should support asymmetric key operations; it's ridiculous it's still not supported. I guess AWS's KMS "cloud HSM" solution just wouldn't scale (in terms of CPU) if people could do that.

[1] Absolute security is impossible, but as complex as this exploit was it's obviously still far too trivial. It's a totally unwarranted and unreasonable expectation that bad actors are incapable of reading (if not manipulate) co- hosted Lambda or Cloudflare Worker projects. Writing a non-JIT'd engine with a simplified memory architecture is not only feasible, it would be an obvious candidate for formal verification. But the demands for performance are just too strong and so, as always, security takes a back-seat to performance and speed-to-market.

<comment><USER6> Hi, TLM of the WebAssembly runtime in V8 here.

TLDR: it's asm.js's fault. And yes, complexity.

The reason that WebAssembly JIT code memory is still RMW (for now) is actually really unfortunate. As you might know, V8's JIT code memory for JS is only writable when the application is quiesced (i.e. JS is not running) and the JIT is either finishing a function or the garbage collector is moving JITted code. It's read-execute otherwise. It's never both writable and executable at the same time. We generally refer to this as WX protection (i.e. writeable/executable exclusive).

In the case of WebAssembly, it's asm.js that's the real culprit here. Internally in V8, asm.js code is translated to WebAssembly by a very quick custom-built parser that validates asm.js's type system while parsing and emits WebAssembly bytecode along the way. The WebAssembly bytecode is then fed to the WebAssembly engine for compilation.

Well...not so fast. In order to meet our performance goals for fast asm.js validation and startup, the WebAssembly engine does not do up-front compilation of Wasm code coming from asm.js. Instead, it does on-demand compilation of asm.js code, compiling the Wasm bytecode corresponding to each asm.js function upon first execution. We call this "lazy compilation".

We originally shipped lazy compilation cooperating with the WX mechanism executable for JS code. That is, upon every (lazy) compilation of asm.js code, we'd flip the permission bits on the code space in order to write in the little bit of machine code generated for each function. Problem is, that permission flip is expensive--like really expensive. So expensive that we had to unship WX protection because it made asm.js code unusably slow.

We're working on fixing this, as we are keenly aware of the risk exposure here.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure how asm.js is relevant here. The issue is that function-level lazy compilation makes compilation too hot to allow for an mprotect call, no? Wouldn't a function-level lazy Web Assembly implementation have the same problem?

It seems to me that the solution is the same for both wasm and asm.js: make the unit of compilation larger than the function, so as to amortize the cost of mprotect.

<comment><USER6> You and I both know that the comments section of HN lacks sufficient space to discuss all the things we thought of / could think of :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would love to know how v8 is properly secured in the instance of things like Cloudflares. Im curious to know if this goes through v8 isolates, and if something like lxd containment would be a viable alternative.</comment>


IMUNES – open source network emulator for Linux using Docker and Open vSwitch - <AUTHOR> http://imunes.net <comment><AUTHOR> There's a separate repo with examples you can download and try out: [https://github.com/imunes/imunes-examples/](https://github.com/imunes/imunes- examples/) Just load an .imn file in IMUNES. The development team is looking for testers to report bugs and suggestions so if you find anything report it on the Github page. There's also a very useful blog post that gives some background: [http://www.brianlinkletter.com/imunes-on- linux/](http://www.brianlinkletter.com/imunes-on-linux/)</comment>


Is genius simply the product of hard work? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703805004575606490403919122.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5

<comment><USER2> > _yet it still fails to account for the impenetrable mystery that enshrouds > such birds of paradise as Bobby Fischer, who started playing chess at the > age of 6. Nine years later, he became the U.S. chess champion._

What's the mystery there? Bobby Fischer was completely obsessed with chess and played and studied it incessantly.

9 years of manic dedication and he "suddenly" got good.

His mother spoke something like 8 languages and his father was a Hungarian physicist who headed the Theoretical Mechanics section of the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and was an expert in elasticity and fluid dynamics.

One famous story about his memory:

"One day when he was in Iceland, Fischer called Frederick Olaffson, Iceland's only Grandmaster. Olaffson's Icelandic-speaking daughter answered the phone and explained her parents were out and would return at suppertime. Fischer understood nothing that was said because he did not know the language. But he listened, apologized and hung up. Later that day Fischer met with another Icelandic player who spoke English. He explained what had happened and repeated every Icelandic word he had heard on the phone, imitating the sounds with perfect inflection. The Icelandic player translated the message word for word for Fischer."

Despite being prodigiously "intelligent", it still took years of dedication to get good, and years more to get _really_ good.

Plenty of average people undoubtedly beat him at chess when he was a kid. When you think about it, it should be obvious that he was _always_ that smart. Just because you're a kid and don't know anything yet doesn't mean you aren't _smart_. "Smarts" is not the same as _skill_.

Incidentally, his record as the youngest grandmaster in history lasted for many years until it was broken by Judit Polgar, whose father was explicitly running an experiment with his daughters to prove that prodigies are made, not born. All three daughters became chess experts. He explained that Judit, the youngest, was the most successful because _she worked the hardest_. She's the only female ever ranked in the top-10 of the "Men's" ratings list.

Since then, many people have gone on to break the youngest-grandmaster record at younger and younger ages. I can only assume that if being a classical composer had as much of a "lobby" as chess (parents pushing their children into it, reward structures), we'd see more Mozarts as well.

The reason it takes HARD work is because even geniuses aren't that genius. If you look at the top level of any objectively measurable and well-subscribed field, there is generally less than a 1% difference between the best, whether it's sprinting, bike racing, weight lifting, or chess.

Knowledge builds on knowledge and skill builds on skill. If you think of it like compound interest, a few percent difference between two individuals at any given moment eventually turns into a huge dividend a decade or three later.

For chess, if you take two average players rated 1500 each, and one improves at 2% "interest" and the other at 4% "interest", in 10 years the former player will be rated in the 1800s (moving from class C to class A), and the latter will be rated in the 2200s (National Master).

To become a Grandmaster (typically 2500+) in 10 years, that's an "interest" rate of about 5.3%.

Meanwhile, a super-genius with a 7% compounding rate who puts in 7 years and then burns out will be stuck at ~2400, International Master level.

Humans occupy a pretty narrow raw talent niche. The best people tend to be pretty tightly clustered together. I'm not smarter than I was when I was young, but I have compounded YEARS of knowledge and experience to the point where I can vastly outperform my younger, smarter self.

<comment><USER3> IIRC, one of the reason Judit Polgar is so good at chess is because she uses the part of her brain that recognizes faces to remember certain board configurations (ever wonder how people can recognize faces they've seen briefly before so easily?). Her memory was trained from a very young age, but I'm not sure if the "rewiring" of her chess memory was intentional, or if it was just a case of the brain adapting (probably the latter).

They once did an experiment where they sat outside with her and a truck drove past with a particular chessboard configuration on the side. She glanced at it, then recreated the entire board in a few seconds. Then another truck drove past with a different configuration and she couldn't recreate it. She remembered the first one because it was from a game she'd seen before. She'd never seen the second one before so she couldn't remember it.

<comment><USER4> I think the story comes from GEB, but I've heard that good chess players (not even anything-masters) can recreate boards from actual games from memory much better than non-players, but are no better than non-players when dealing with randomly arrayed pieces. The theory is that they can abstract out the few hints they need to put the majority of the board together when it comes from an actual game, but those abstractions don't exist in a random placement.

As an analogue, you and I can memorize speeches relatively easily in our native tongues (I would suppose it's fair to say we're domain experts in the languages we know), but it's not easy at all to memorize and repeat (a) random strings of sounds, or (b) sentences from languages that don't have any common base with the languages we know.

<comment><USER5> This is the classic Chase & Simon (1973) article. Similarly, programming skill has been described as being based on the ability to remember abstract solutions (programming schemas e.g. Davies, 1994; Détienne & Soloway, 1990; Soloway, 1986) and applying them. From the perspective of a non-programmer, a program is just a wall of text. I remember someone did the same basic experiment with program fragments (real vs. random) and got similar results.

Experts can write the focal elements (e.g. pseudocode) first and then expand them into a full program. A good example might be the fizzbuzz test, or generating the permutations of a string, you'll have an idea of what the problem involves because you've done it before. If you can't visualize the problem in terms of something familiar, you'll have a hard time taking a top- down (e.g. memory-recall-based) approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This chap, Mr. Teachout, is the drama critic for the WSJ ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Teachout> ), he's also a musician and librettist. The arts, and arts journalists in particular, have a vested interest in genius. If we suddenly find that genius isn't that magic "je ne sais qois" we thought it was for all those years, all that purple prose we wrote about artists in the past suddenly looks a bit stale.

In truth in the arts you have an almost unrestrained version of the Matthew effect - early success either through luck or hard work breeds more and more success. This is more true in drama than music - it is more difficult to tell a good actor from a bad actor than the equivalent violinists for example.

(Sour grapes alert :-)) I trained as an actor, and I know from my cohort that the ones who are really successful now weren't objectively any better than most of their colleagues at the beginning. Their entire careers now rest on the fact that they had two or three really lucky breaks in a row very early on - choosing the right speech at the showcase and getting that good agent, getting a good tv job early on etc. The upshot is that ten years later, they've been working on their craft constantly and so now ARE objectively better than the classmates they left behind, no contest. It is extremely unusual, though not unheard of, for someone who was unsuccessful at the beginning to go on to develop a high profile career and even then the examples you read about in the press are probably fabrications or half-truths (the cliche of the overnight success for example).

I find that arts journalists consistently misrepresent the element of luck. Perhaps because they don't understand, or it undermines them in some way. I've never read an article about an actor friend of mine that has told the truth about how they've come to be successful. It's always something along the lines of "they always new they were special", or "hard work got me where I am today". I'm not suggesting that the actor is lying, although I wouldn't blame them if they did. Your reputation is your career, and if you declare yourself to be a lucky chancer you might damage it. I've always thought that it is more likely to be the journalist justifying why we should look up to the interviewee.

In any case, does anyone here know what happened to Mozart's sister? Perhaps it was harder back then for a woman to be a composer than it was for men? The last orchestra I saw was 90% male, so this wouldn't surprise me one bit.

</comment><comment><USER7> I read once a thought that sums up genius, intelligence and skill acquirement well I think, and you probably also think the same- along the lines of:

"IQ, talent, and circumstance define your upper bound. Hard work gets you there."

<comment><USER8> I think that's fairly accurate.

I think the key is a metric which is just a strange thing we are born with as I can't exactly explain why I like computers. They are just neat.

Given a metric and enough hard work, a work will be considered genius quality by someone else. The number of other people is going to be what determines if someone goes down in the history books as genius.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the "ordinary" and the "magicians." An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician's mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom [Freeman] Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an "ordinary genius,". . . ._ (Quoted from Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography, by Mark Kac. Harper and Row. 1985. p. xxv.)

from <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman>

<comment><USER10> It's a nice quote, but it physically must be the case that Feynman was not doing _magic_ , but was doing thinking with human thought processes, within the confines of a human brain and all that entails.

We gain nothing by pedestaling it and calling it magic, we gain everything by trying to work out if it is a process or habitual way of thinking or a fluke biological rewiring or something else.

If I was the right amounts of different and better in the right directions I could as easily be Feynman as Bethe. I could never be Gandalf.

<comment><USER11> Feynman was just making the point that there is a point where no matter how hard your work your little tail off, you will simply be at a disadvantage compared with someone who has genetic gifts or the like.

This thread is curious because it's treating the nurture vs. nature debate as if it were some novel concept.

In America, we're taught to believe that if we work hard, we can be anything we want. This thread largely stinks of people clinging on to this belief, if only for their own sanity. It's no secret that the HN crowd holds itself in high regard intellectually and it would be damning to believe otherwise, as all of a sudden you wouldn't have a shot at being the next Bill Gates or the next Linus Torvalds or whoever it is you worship, on the basis of your hard work alone.

This ideal is highly romanticized and is part of our education problem. We strongly belief EVERYONE should go to college, and EVERYONE is equal, when in reality, some people would be better suited to work with their hands as a mechanic than some paper pusher at an insurance company.

In Europe, they are more slanted towards the nature point of view, and this is reflected in their vocational training in education - ie, everyone isn't born equal, everyone doesn't have to follow the exact same path for the sake of appeasing some romantic ideal that we can't prove true either way.

While the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, it's plain foolish to ignore that some people are just born with an innate talent. If you played sports, it would be easier for people to wrap their head around this - a 5'5 basketball player will never play starting center in the NBA. It's just the way it is.

It is part of your responsibility as a human being to find out what those things are that you are most gifted at and exploit them to their maximum potential.

<comment><USER2> > _Feynman was just making the point that there is a point where no matter how > hard your work your little tail off, you will simply be at a disadvantage > compared with someone who has genetic gifts or the like._

Actually it was Hans Bethe speaking about Feynman, and he didn't indicate that it was due to genetics. When I see people multi-tabling poker it looks like magic to _me_ , yet it's just a skill that is developed from years of practice.

> _a 5'5 basketball player will never play starting center in the NBA._

Neither will a 6'6" player like Michael Jordan. They will play the guard position. Earl Boykins has been a starting guard for 4 teams, and he is 5'5". Scored 36 points twice. He has certain advantages against tall, lanky players such as being able to shoot _under_ them, being able to change direction more quickly, accelerate more quickly, and pick balls up off the ground more quickly, including getting under their dribble for a steal.

> _In Europe, they are more slanted towards the nature point of view_

Michael Jordan grew from 5'11" to 6'3" between 10th and 11th grade. None of his family members are tall. His older brother who he used to practice against all the time is 5'7".

Even when you can SEE something very easily, you only see how it is, and not how it _will_ be.

> _This ideal is highly romanticized and is part of our education problem. We > strongly belief EVERYONE should go to college,_

Actually in the startup world, this is not true at all. Peter Thiel even started a fund to pay kids to drop out of school and do start-ups instead.

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/peter-thiel-drop-out-of- sch...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/peter-thiel-drop-out-of-school/)

> _and EVERYONE is equal_

Equal rights, not equal ability. You should have the right to pursue whatever interests you.

> _and it would be damning to believe otherwise, as all of a sudden you > wouldn't have a shot at being the next Bill Gates or the next Linus Torvalds > or whoever it is you worship, on the basis of your hard work alone._

Who thinks "success" is due to hard work _alone_? There's a big luck factor that everyone acknowledges, including things like being in the right place at the right time.

But you can't just "luck into" being an expert programmer or artist; it's not like winning the lottery.

> _It is part of your responsibility as a human being to find out what those > things are that you are most gifted at and exploit them to their maximum > potential._

For all I know, I'm gifted at being a ballerina, and could be the best to ever don a tutu. But I don't care!

My only responsibility as a human being is to achieve my own enlightenment and not harm others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is really simple:

Theorem:

Genius is talent AND hard work

Proof:

1\. Look at geniuses: all worked hard to achive what they achieved.

2\. Look at a group of persons who are all extremely hard working, successful and good at what they do. Like researcher mathematicians, or professional sportsmen. Only a very small minority of them is considered a real genius. (like Terry Tao or Maradona). Why? Because those guys are not just very hard working but also exceptionally talented.

<comment><USER13> While it is true that talent and hard work is a win, talent can be a win on its own. I think people agree Einstein was a genius, but there's no evidence he worked hard at anything when young. Perhaps we should be careful re: definitions, separating insight and genius, favoring the former as more innate?

<comment><USER14> Having read one of the more recent biographies, Einstein did work fairly hard for his insights.

He had a lot of time to think as a patent examiner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Summarizing the article: "Genius is just hard work? Prove it, you have 10 years to produce genius level work. Any takers?"

On this subject, the best book I've read is talent is overrated. They discuss this subject in depth and provide a great deal of research and information to support their claims. _edit_ Oh, and their claim is that there isn't much empirical evidence that supports the notion of genius or even innate talent at all.

<comment><USER16> I'm yet to read the article, but on this:

> Summarizing the article: "Genius is just hard work? Prove it, you have 10 > years to produce genius level work. Any takers?"

two examples that leap to mind are:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r#Background>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography>

Two examples famous in India are:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachin_Tendulkar#Early_years_an...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachin_Tendulkar#Early_years_and_personal_life)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viswanathan_Anand#Personal_life>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the most ironic pieces of good advice on this topic is [http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have- to...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-to-be-a- genius-to-do-maths/).

Why is it ironic? Because it is written by <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao>. While nobody will deny how hard he works, he is also on record as being one of the most amazing math prodigies ever.

<comment><USER12> I think what he writes is true: one does not have to be a genius to do mathematics.

But:

\- He says that a reasonable intelligence is needed (I think it is something like an IQ of at least 120, so most of the population would have no chance. Come on, I know some guys who suffered very heavily from high school math even if they tried hard. But certainly a genius level is not needed to do math).

\- Reaching the level of Terry Tao is impossible without being brutally talented. I have heard it from good, very smart, successful and extremely hard working (and enthusiastic) mathematicians. Other mathematicians achieved big things when they were children but Terry Tao consistently was ahead of even them. (Like winning a bronze medal at the International Mathematical Olimpiad being 10 years old)

Being a genius is an AND combination: talent and hard work. The 'talent is overrated' statement is true: most people underestimate hard work. This is similar to bodybuilding: most people think that steroids alone are enough to be a body builder champion. No: very lucky genetics AND steroids AND extremely hard work are needed.

<comment><USER17> I agree. Which is why I called it good advice.

However I still think it ironic to get that advice from someone who clearly has such extreme levels of raw talent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is anyone else infuriated by the use of vague words like "genius" without a good metric to measure it?

<comment><USER19> In current psychological literature, the term "genius" is developing a generally accepted definition. Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton is the leading author on the subject. The basis idea is that a genius is someone who performs at a level that is reliably superior in a statistical sense (that is, an "expert" in the terminology of K. Anders Ericsson) AND produces a new paradigm of performance in the domain of performance.

Comment on the submitted article: the Mozart biographical materials I have read suggest that Mozart's sister didn't reach Wolfgang's high level of performance partly because their father really did have a child in whom more was invested, consistent with sexist attitudes of the time. After edit: I guess the author of the essay has ten years to learn how to write a well researched essay on a topic that is well sourced in the standard scientific literature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How did this article provide any new or useful information?

<comment><USER10> How does your comment?

<comment><USER21> I usually come to the comments on HN posts first, to assess whether an article is worth reading. Comments like the grandparent are very helpful to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think the most important point that the article leaves out is that 99% of people don't want to put in those 10000 hours anyhow. Most people can get really good at most things if they really want it enough.

That said, it's ridiculous to suggest that anyone can be the next Beethoven or Einstein (or even Bobby Fischer) just from hard work.

<comment><USER23> you are agreeing AND disagreeing at the same time???!

<comment><USER24> Genius.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Disbelievers in genius are hereby invited to prove their point by sitting down and creating an equally great work of art. You have until 2020 to comply. Any takers?"

This is conflating the claim that expertise can be acquired in 10,000 hours with the claim that genius can. I don't believe anyone is truly claiming the latter is the case. I'll take him up on the challenge the former though. 5 years ago I knew absolutely nothing about programming. I decided I wanted to learn. I started spending few hours a day on learning new things, doing exercises, taking classes and doing projects. I'm far from an expert in the area now, but I'm absolutely blown away with how far I've come in 5 years. If I keep it up I'm pretty confident that in 5 more years I'll be there.

The author also seems to miss the real dangers of "the myth of genius", which should more appropriately be called "the myth of innate talent". I can't tell you how many people I've heard say "Oh I could never learn X, I'm just not one of those people who is good at X". One thing I like to point out is that if it takes you 10 years to be an expert, it probably only takes 2-4 years to achieve an intermediate level of skill, which is pretty damn useful.

</comment><comment><USER26> Even if genius isn't simply the product of hard work, it would still be a useful lie to convince everyone that it was. Hard work might not be sufficient, but it's certainly necessary. And even if genius isn't achieved, you'd still get pretty close with just hard work.

</comment><comment><USER27> What's the difference? We're substituting having superior intellect with having the willpower to work hard. It seems weird to say that at first. But the more I think about it, the more I think there must be a reason why some people _do_ persevere enough to become "genius" level at something, and some people never do.

Personally, I think work ethic, along with intellect and charisma, is something you are partially born with. It's just silly to say that genetics play no factor: do those with severe mental disabilities just not work hard enough? Think about it as your genes defining a range: you can be between the 30th and 75th percentile of human prowess. Where you fall in that range is up to you.

</comment><comment><USER28> "Genius" is 10,000 hours of constant improvement.

Spending 10,000 hours on something is incredibly common. Everyone spends 10,000 hours on multiple things. But we coast. It's what we do by habit. It's habit itself.

To break our own habits over and over again in order to improve, to get into a positive feedback loop of ever increasing ability, for 10,000 hours, is genius.

</comment><comment><USER29> I believe genius and hard work are merely two ingredients into success or excellence in performing a task.

A person of below average intelligence who has studied chess for years and years could beat a genius who took up the game a week ago.

</comment><comment><USER30> No, genius doesn't come from just hard work. You can work hard at the wrong way for a long time and still not get any better.

A genius is someone who sees the world by his own sight. A genius has wisdom because of that.

On the other hand, someone who learns only from school can't be a genius and get wisdom from books, he can only be someone with ability through learning, because he didn't awaken himself and see the principle of the world through himself.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is the notion of 10-X programmers, super cool programmers over-rated?

</comment><comment><USER31> Genius == DNA + Environment

</comment><comment><USER32> Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in 6 weeks. That's genius.

</comment><comment><USER33> Do I even have to say it?

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

</comment><comment><USER34> It can be, or it can not be.

If by "genius" you mean someone who's defined by their actions, then it is [simply the product of hard work].

Otherwise, if by "genius" you mean someone with the potential to be great, then it is not [the product of hard work, but rather one's genes].

Both of these interpretations of "genius" are often used, although there is very little distinction between the two if the "genius" with the potential to be great lives up to their expectations. On the other hand, those who have the potential to be great but don't take advantage of their genes are hard to discover.

Also, the "genius" that -has- potential to be great and -is- great is technically a genius of both kinds. Something to think about...</comment>


The inside story of Yik Yak - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-inside-story-of-yik-yak-2015-3 <comment><USER2> Yik Yak is going to have to fundamentally change to have a future.

It is the most useless app I've downloaded on my phone. Every time I've ever tried to use it I felt like I had completely wasted my time.

There are a lot of users but each new user doesn't bring that much to the experience. In fact, beyond a certain number they just increase the likelyhood that something negative is going to further pollute the community space.

So, not only is it worse that useless, its main metric is actually functioning backward compared to any other social media app.

There are a lot of smart people throwing a lot of money at this thing. I'd love for one of them to explain the reason because I just don't see it.

Edit: I thought of the perfect metaphor just now talking with my friend who'd never heard of Yik Yak and trying to describe it: It is like reading your local bathroom stall. A half a billion dollars worth of stall walls.

<comment><USER3> @clavelle I have to agree with you

I can't for the life of me see what anyone sees in this app.. then again as a non-teenager/college student, perhaps I'm not their target demographic, and I just don't get it.

<comment><USER4> I've tried it, and I just think it's interesting that you can see what people local to the area are saying on it, have conversations with people who might be someone you see daily. Local events might get commented on. I don't get the large negativity towards the app.

<comment><USER5> Well, beyond the local area it allows you to "peek" in whatever geographic location you please. Sort of cool but I've found that, unless you're "peeking" at a real cultural-specific location, everyone just sort of says the same stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yik Yak in any airport during Thanksgiving break is hilarious, hands down. I did delete it though because I got tired of the overzealous moderation.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would like to know if they offered Elizabeth Long a bunch of money to stop her campaign against them. [https://www.change.org/p/tyler-droll-and-brooks- buffington-s...](https://www.change.org/p/tyler-droll-and-brooks-buffington- shut-down-the-app-yik-yak) After all it did happen after they received a ridiculous amount of money. Kind of feels like we are in a bubble and may see another color here.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought it would be fun to give this a try, but the link only opens a blank screen in the iOS app store. I guess I'll pass on this one.

<comment><USER8> I'm guessing it's only available in certain countries. It would be nice if they actually told people that, instead of making it fail with no error.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Admindojo – hands-on sysadmin training [CTF style] - <AUTHOR> https://admindojo.org/instructions/system-packages-usage-1-ub18 <comment><AUTHOR> Creator here!

I've build admindojo because I'm pretty new to Linux myself and couldn't find anything like this. After finding overthewire.org, I found the CTF style pretty motivating and started building admindojo...

It's in a very early stage, but working and any feedback is highly appreciated - it would be nice to know if this is something others would like too.

Thank you for reading!

</comment><comment><USER2> I would suggest fixing typos and grammatical errors very soon.

Those of us who are OCD enough to do this kind of stuff for fun are also OCD enough to be unusually annoyed and distracted by basic things like typos and grammatical errors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback! I did run it through Grammarly again and fixed some typos I missed. Since English is not my first language, I probably should invest in Grammarly premium to get the grammar right. thanks!</comment></comment>


The Sniper Attack: Anonymously Deanonymizing and Disabling the Tor Network [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.robgjansen.com/publications/sniper-ndss2014.pdf <comment><USER2> It's been patched. Here's the Tor Project's take: [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-tor-denial-service- atta...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-tor-denial-service-attacks-and- defenses)

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I correct in assuming this is what was pulled from Black Hat?

EDIT: According to someone on reddit, it's been patched, and the Black Hat one sounded like it hadn't been. [http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/2bf9fl/the_sniper_at...](http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/2bf9fl/the_sniper_attack_anonymously_deanonymizing_and/cj4t0um)

<comment><USER2> If I had to guess what the blackhat talk was, it probably was more about a systemic vulnerability than a specific hack. I'm guessing it got killed over ECPA legal concerns.

<comment><USER2> Actually, it's the Wiretap Act (See 18 U.S.C.§2511), and the Pen Register and Trap and Trace Act (See 18 U.S.C. §3127) you have to ensure you follow when performing this type of research.

Here's an interesting analysis: [http://spot.colorado.edu/~sicker/publications/issues.pdf](http://spot.colorado.edu/~sicker/publications/issues.pdf)

Equally interestingly, the same researchers who assisted with the paper on the legality of network monitoring for research purposes were later accused of wiretapping (although never charged) for monitoring Tor for research: [http://www.cnet.com/news/researchers-could-face-legal- risks-...](http://www.cnet.com/news/researchers-could-face-legal-risks-for- network-snooping/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On his blog it reads:

> 21st Symposium on Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS 2014)

So nothing to do with Black Hat which I thought it was until I saw the comments here. Misupvoted...</comment>