A Garbage Collector for C and C++ - <AUTHOR> http://www.hboehm.info/gc/ <comment><USER2> This has been around for a long time. The problem is, GC is not just something you can bolt on, it's a fundamental part of the language that colors everything you write -- and it fundamentally clashes with the way C++ is normally written.

In particular, C++ (and Rust, etc.) stresses RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization), in which you write classes with destructors that cause the object to release its resources as soon as it goes out of scope. "Resources" here often means heap memory, but can also mean a whole lot of other things (file handles, child processes, network connections, arbitrary resources on remote network services, etc.).

In GC'd languages, the GC really only handles heap memory. Yes, you can sometimes rely on finalizers to free other kinds of resources, but generally you will find this doesn't work out well: most GC algorithms do not make any guarantees about how soon an unreachable object will be cleaned up, and they tend to use heuristics that assume that the cost of not cleaning up an object is exactly whatever RAM it is using, nothing more. Often, if your process is not allocating any new objects, the GC will never run at all.

Thus in GC'd languages you often see classes with methods like `.close()` or `.dispose()` for eagerly releasing non-local resources. These resources have to be managed manually, just like heap has to be managed in non-GC languages. The beauty of RAII is that you can use it to manage any kind of resource, but GC languages don't typically support RAII because it does not mix well with GC semantics.

These differences completely change how APIs in these languages are designed. Essentially, adding GC to a language -- or removing it -- gives you a _different_ language that happens to share some syntax, and probably not a very good language since all that syntax was designed around a fundamental assumption that no longer holds.

I kind of wonder if a preference for GC languages is in part responsible for the way distributed systems are typically designed these days -- namely, the emphasis on stateless servers, which avoids the need to do remote resource management (which is hard without RAII), at the expense of requiring a lot more machinery to make performant (e.g. complicated caching layers because all state changes have to hit storage which is sllloowwwwwww).

<comment><USER3> > In particular, C++ (and Rust, etc.) stresses RAII (Resource Acquisition Is > Initialization)

But there is no reason that the RAII pattern couldn't be completely orthogonal to memory management.

<comment><USER4> Could. A hypothetical new language _could_ be created to facilitate whole- program escape analysis and thus completely avoid both GC and manual memory (resource) management.

<comment><USER5> This sounds awfully like the ownership concepts used in Rust...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why would this outperform malloc for multi-threaded programs? Is that a property of GCd programs in general?

Edit: That is, is it typical for GCd programs to outperform manually-memory managed programs in multi-threaded environments?

<comment><USER7> Fans of GC claim that GC outperforms malloc() based on some studies that were done a long time ago. The argument is that repeated malloc/frees are less efficient than a bunch of GC allocs and then a single garbage collection.

The reality seems to be a bit different. In practice GC programs tend to use significantly more memory which can impact performance. And the trend towards low GC pause times costs additional CPU. Beyond that we're now using much larger multi gigabyte GC memory pools which can also lead to poor GC performance.

So overall people these days see lower performance with GC systems compared to malloc.

<comment><USER8> Many of the claims that GC outperforms manual memory management compare running dlmalloc to allocate _all data_ with a well-tuned generational garbage collector on something like the Da Capo benchmark suite. Naturally, they find that the ability to get bump allocation in the nursery of a good generational GC ends up outperforming a malloc implementation that was never really designed for that kind of workload.

But the real question, in my mind, is whether a well-tuned systems-level program that uses stack, arena, and heap allocation with a good allocator like jemalloc ends up being better with a garbage collector. And it's really hard for me to see how that could possibly be the case. Performance-conscious systems programmers will use the stack as their nursery, gaining all the benefits of the nursery without the copying, tracing, or delayed reclamation. Modern mallocs like jemalloc or tcmalloc are incredibly good at minimizing fragmentation and satisfying requests quickly, using thread-local caches to avoid synchronization. Most of the time, the tenured generation needs the same bookkeeping that a modern malloc does, so you're not really gaining anything by using GC for that generation. And a GC always has some kind of mark or tracing phase (not to mention at least a write barrier if you want your pause times to be reasonable), which is pure overhead over manual memory management.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but in a language like Modula-3 you can have your "well-tuned systems- level program that uses stack, arena, and heap allocation with a good allocator", and still have a GC at your disposal.

Sadly HP/Compaq killed the Olivetti/Digital unit and Modula-3 died, but its ideas can still be applied in modern languages, assuming similar capabilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would it be conceivable to implement Automatic Reference Counting for C/C++? Basically gets you the advantages of GC without the performance impact of GC cycles, because it does all its magic at compile time.

On a related note I'm excited about Apple open sourcing and porting Swift to Linux with an eye towards server-side code, specifically because of ARC. Garbage collection has been a concern for web services in particular when it comes to 99th percentile latency. Things run fine and then boom, GC runs, slowing down a few unlucky requests. ARC just makes memory-management performance deterministic, no tuning needed.

<comment><USER9> C++/CX does ARC for C++ for those of us on Windows, but it comes with the cost of making C++ classes into COM ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like that it can be used as a leak detector! I'm not sure I understand the point beyond that but then again I am in love with RAII semantics so I'm probably a bit biased here.

<comment><USER12> Consider it a safeguard. One one hand it can detect (some) leaks. On the other hand if/when your app leaks it can mitigate the consequences of those leaks.

For some very specific types of apps it can also be sufficient to ditch traditional C/C++ memory management, and you can actually even gain speed doing so.

Consider e.g. code that runs a job. Most of the time you know it will need less than 32MB (or whatever) total over the (short) lifetime of the process.

So you tune the GC accordingly to not trigger any collection at all until above that level. Now most of time, a collection will never get triggered, and you're happy - all the memory is just returned to the system at the end in one swoop.

But if occasionally a job requires lots more, the GC may provide sufficient cleanup to still make it viable not to include any memory management.

My first large CGI-era webapp was in C++ and relied exactly on lots of hacks like deferring all memory de-allocation until exit to improve performance (and it worked very well - it had a considerable performance impact; other hacks included static linking to drastically cut the loading cost). We didn't use a GC; instead we had to take extra care when we knew we were going to make large allocations to do manual de-allocation in those cases if the request was potentially long-running. I'd have loved to use the Boehm GC for that.

<comment><USER9> Walter Bright uses this trick in his D compiler. Memory is not freed, just by the OS.

[http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/increasing-compiler-speed-by- over...](http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/increasing-compiler-speed-by- over-75/240158941?queryText=Walter%2BBright)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A Lisp that uses the Boehm GC:

[https://github.com/rongarret/Ciel](https://github.com/rongarret/Ciel)

<comment><USER14> CLASP ([https://github.com/drmeister/clasp](https://github.com/drmeister/clasp)), a Common Lisp, can optionally use one of Boehm or the Memory Pool System ([http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps](http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps)).

Open Dylan ([http://opendylan.org/](http://opendylan.org/)), a Lisp-like language without Lisp-like syntax, also can use Boehm or the Memory Pool System.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I feel that this library is a testament to the power of C and C++ (and their ecosystem).</comment>


Why You Can't Just Block EU Visitors, EU Customers, or Any EU Traffic Under GDPR - <AUTHOR> http://www.gettingemaildelivered.com/why-you-cant-just-block-eu-visitors-eu-customers-or-any-eu-traffic-under-gdpr <comment><USER2> As somebody who values privacy greatly something about the GDPR just doesn't sit right with me, which is confusing and conflicting because somebody who values privacy should be naturally aligned with it.

After thinking long and hard about the GDPR the part that bothers me the most is the expectation from the EU that foreign entities enforce their regulations because the EU cannot bare the political consequences of doing it themselves.

Imagine if China decided that Chinese citizens accessing foreign servers was a breach of national security due to the ability of these foreign servers to collect private browsing information, and imagine if China decided to make laws that fined these foreign entities in violation of their laws. It would be a fucking joke and it would be ridiculed internationally for good reason. China obviously knows this and they are prepared to get their hands dirty and implement the Great Firewall of China because they have no problem appearing as a controlling and authoritarian state.

So why doesn't Europe just do what China does and build their own firewall? If they really wanted to restrict collection by foreign servers which exist in non-EU jurisdictions and apply the regulation internally in the EU then they have the technical capacity to do so with a firewall.

Europe just can't bare the consequences of building such a firewall because it would destroy them in the court of public opinion. If EU citizens suddenly lost access to American services all hell would break loose. On a more political level the EU is a place which is generally known as being liberal and open and the construction of a mechanism designed to enforce their regulations by closing them off from the outside internet would be the construction of an authoritarian tool of censorship and restriction of freedom.

<comment><USER3> >After thinking long and hard about the GDPR the part that bothers me the most is the expectation from the EU that foreign entities enforce their regulations because the EU cannot bare the political consequences of doing it themselves.

That sort of thing happens all the time - except the US is usually the one coercing foreign entities. Remember the DMCA? ThePirateBay's raid in 2006? Or the Megaupload debacle? Or how Japan was pressured by the US to adopt stricter child pornography laws?

Note, I'm not saying the people behind these were supporting moral and noble causes that the US was wrong to clamp down on. I'm certainly _not_ saying people should comply to China's expectations on free speech and flow of information. Simply, if you feel infuriated that a foreign power is enforcing its worldview and related regulations onto you, an American citizen, know that that's what _literally everyone else_ has been experiencing for the last decades from the people you've put in power.

But then, what the EU is trying to enforce here - more power to Internet users, essentially - is fairly benign when compared to what other foreign powers would like to enforce. If there were matters of infuriation to be had on that account, I'd start with the Mariott debacle [1].

[1] [https://boingboing.net/2018/01/15/willfull- liking.html](https://boingboing.net/2018/01/15/willfull-liking.html)

<comment><USER4> The DMCA does not magically apply extra territorially.

It's applied through an established legal framework either through bilateral trade agreements or through WTO rules.

The majority of copyright enforcement outside of the US has nothing to do with the DMCA but rather copyright holders using local legal frameworks.

The problem with the GDPR is that it's extraterritorial application as expected by the EU is also extrajudiciary.

I would have no problem with the EU seeking ways to expand GDPR through new legal frameworks which the people that would be impacted by these changes can actually control through their own political system.

What I have a problem with is the EU essentially forcing compliance through extortion and sooner rather than later it will employ the companies that the GDPR was in spirit intended to protect us from to enforce it.

I don't see the EU being able to enforce the GDPR even internally without essentially deputizing the likes of Google, Amazon and PayPal to enforce it across all of their customers in order for them themselves to be compliant.

Even with the fines possible under the GDPR the EU can not enforce compliance by targeting 100,000's of small companies without going essentially bankrupt. It can however effectively target the big ones and worse make it impossible to operate within the EU without using their "GDPR complaint" platforms.

The GDPR might be a great thing on paper and even in spirit but the uncertainty and the inability to enforce complex regulation on a mass of small entities would likely cause it's real world repercussions to be quite different than from what was imagined or intended.

<comment><USER3> >The DMCA does not magically apply extra territorially.

>It's applied through an established legal framework either through bilateral trade agreements or through WTO rules. >The majority of copyright enforcement outside of the US has nothing to do with the DMCA but rather copyright holders using local legal frameworks.

That means essentially the same, in effect. Very few countries have copyright laws that do not align with interests of US lobbies. If any country with significant partnerships with the US decided to tell "screw the MPAA, you can now download anything from the Internet" to its citizens, the said lobbies would pressure the US government to pressure that country through the trade agreements you mentioned, until it relented. This is something that actually happened, during e.g. the TPB raid. We can argue about the moral legitimacy of such things but the reality of the matter is, it's all power plays.

>What I have a problem with is the EU essentially forcing compliance through extortion and sooner rather than later it will employ the companies that the GDPR was in spirit intended to protect us from to enforce it.

>I don't see the EU being able to enforce the GDPR even internally without essentially deputizing the likes of Google, Amazon and PayPal to enforce it across all of their customers in order for them themselves to be compliant.

>Even with the fines possible under the GDPR the EU can not enforce compliance by targeting 100,000's of small companies without going essentially bankrupt. It can however effectively target the big ones and worse make it impossible to operate within the EU without using their "GDPR complaint" platforms.

Three objections:

-The use of 'extortion' is rather harsh - the EU isn't out there to suck money out of the poor American startups, they simply want them to treat user data in a sensible manner. Now you may object to what is considered 'sensible' just like someone in Sweden (e.g. anakata) may object to what is considered a 'copyright breach' but the point here is that they are not looking to make money from fines. If you are found to be noncompliant you wouldn't get sued by troll lawyers, you'd get a couple warnings along with guidance on how to be compliant again. Fines are simply there to say they mean business so people stop ignoring the regulations like they've done with existing country-specific ones for the last decades. Again, power play.

-I really doubt Google, Amazon and Paypal would cut off the entire EU market just to avoid going through the hassle of setting up an updated privacy policy. The EU population is 500 million, way more than the US. More likely, they'll do a cost-benefit analysis that will tell them it's worth paying their lawyers to do the compliance work. It's not actually a big deal. Also, these tech giants do have offices in the EU, usually in Ireland, so it hardly counts as extraterritorial extortion.

-As for the poor hundreds of thousands of companies - well, see the above. They don't want your money, they want compliance. A fine is the absolute worst case if you are repeatedly and outrageously negligent on a very large scale. The most likely case, however, is that the GDPR isn't going to care about these startups because the European public doesn't care about them either. I don't mean to be harsh or condescending, but while lurking HNs and reading headlines about such and such service shutting its doors to European user, I couldn't recognize any of the names. No one is going to sue your ten-man startup that develops a niche/superficial app whose use cases only fit twice that many people to a EU court. It is far more likely that it will fail by itself, because that's what startups do. Should it grow, however, and be in a position to deal with enough customers data that negligence or nefarious intent when handling it would cause significant harm - that's where actual GDPR enforcement would step in.

You may say: 'but there is no guarantee', 'it's all very vague', 'this much vagueness only opens the way to corruption and preferential treatment', but that's mostly how most of the law is written here in the EU - clarity of intent and concision over clarity of wording and exhaustiveness. Against all odds I'd say it's working out pretty well for us and the vast majority of people here do not feel any defiance toward their institutions (at least when compared to other countries), so I feel confident in the GDPR's enforcement, jurisprudence cases and their future effects on the handling of my data. You may feel slighted that a foreign entity, its views and its legal culture are being imposed on you, though, and I understand. Again, power play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No. (Usual caveats, not a lawyer, not an expert).

If you aren't storing the data tied to a specific person, you aren't profiling, otherwise "receiving an http request and logging that" would violate the GDPR, which it doesn't.

Second, country isn't pii under the GDPR, the location would need to be more precise to be relevant.

I think blocking the entire EU is lazy, but this is the non-est of nonsense.

<comment><USER6> Whenever I read "Blocking entire EU" I classify it as a romanticized revenge daydreaming.

No sane western corporation will willingly eliminate an entity about the site of USA out of spite and take a profit hit just because of new PII protocol. Just look at FB, Google and the rest of the advertising companies. They bent over backwards trying to accodomate the law.

But: GDRP _will_ filter out businesses that existed in the legaly grey area because technology was faster than the law in this type of busines competitive advantage features.

<comment><USER7> FWIW the first serious startup I worked at chose not to do CE compliance (the EU governing body for electronic devices that may interfere with RF). Thus we did not sell our product to Europe.

Every single blog post had a set of people raging that we were assholes for doing this, but the reality was the cost of compliance just didn't make sense for the MVP. It was high 5 figures in cost which was just too much at the time. If we had achieved product market fit then the obvious move would have been to do that compliance to gain more customers, but we never quite got there.

I doubt GDPR gets to that level of cost, so the ROI looks a bit different. But I still think it's a reasonable decision to say "I simply won't do business in the EU because it costs more than I'll gain". A lot of companies also don't bother to go through the effort of printing the dual language labels required to sell their products in Canada, even though it's a decent sized market close to the US.

Tech, specifically the internet, has grown without regulation for a long time. But that era is over. These kind of decisions are routine in non-internet businesses where distribution, borders, and regulations exist. I suspect we're going to have to think a lot more about this in our work in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So the GDPR was vague, and while I would say poorly written, many have claimed that the EU will focus more on the spirit of the law vs the law itself.

Anyone really believe they'll litigate against companies that block them entirely? That want nothing to do with the EU market as a result of this law?

I seriously doubt it, but this is a great example of the 2 years of legal arguments and debates happening in companies because of GDPR.

<comment><USER9> > _Anyone really believe they'll litigate against companies that block them > entirely?_

All it takes is a single populist data regulator in one of the EU's twenty- eight members,. Will they win? I don't think so. But in the meantime, you'll be dragged through costly regulatory negotiations. Those negotiations would become much more expensive if one had any European users.

<comment><USER8> Allowing 28 separate, politically diverse and motivated data regulators to litigate a vague law against publicly unpopular multinationals is a recipe for capricious and arbitrary action, but I believe that was rather the intent.

Litigating on this particular issue would be an incredible stretch though. Offends basic sense of fair play imo.

If Turkey gets EU membership, it would be a hoot to see how Erdogan uses this law.

<comment><USER9> > _Litigating on this particular issue would be an incredible stretch_

At least litigation has a clear end. The problem is more endless requests for information, each requiring research and drafting by expensive EU lawyers. A burden irrespective of whether you did anything wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The E.U. has no legal authority or enforcement mechanism to stop foreign, online companies from not doing business in the E.U.

<comment><USER11> It's NOT about stopping them from doing business, it's about businesses taking personal data more serious.

E.g. the right to be forgotten, EU has it US doesn't. sanctions when you forget to disclose a massive data-leak on your private escort website? $0 in the US, hopefully very expensive in the EU. Your nemesis publishes lies on the net? EU helps you have that deleted. Your supermarket tracks your shopping and knows you are pregnant before you do (this happened in the UK!), won't happen anymore in the EU. Shady Sunshine Ltd bought your email address and purchase data to spam you, bad and expensive for them. facebook won't allow you to continue unless you agree to face-recognition? This might be the first case in courts.

Wait and see for the good sides once the panic has quieted down.

<comment><USER12> Thats all well and good. However, if a company chooses not to do bussiness in the EU, then it does not matter what the GDPR says; even if the mechanism they use to block the EU violates the GDPR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have ~600 small business customers from the EU who are using my SaaS product and until now I received zero requests regarding GDPR. It seems it was the right decision to ignore this law, because no one cares about it. The same thing was with the cookie banner. Never built it into the product and in 6 years not even a single person asked about it...

<comment><USER14> The GDPR has been in effect for less than three days, two of which have been weekend. A bit premature to say, "nobody's enforcing this law", isn't it?

The cookie banner is different because everyone knew it was completely meaningless. Whether GDPR is or not remains to be seen; it's certainly not an "everybody knows" situation yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's still the issue of enforcement. If the operators and servers are all outside the EU, how would a user effectively get courts to enforce the GDPR?

<comment><USER16> Arrests when an operator visits an EU country? I mean, that's how the US seems to get gambling company CEOs and internet betting site operators...

<comment><USER17> I find it pretty problematic that the US does that to gambling site operators. People who do things that are legal where they live should not have to fear that they'll get arrested when they visit a foreign country just because those things are not legal in that country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Assuming the article is correct in its interperatation of the law, it is still missing the point. If you do neot operate out of, or do business in, the EU, then the EU has no claim for jurisdiction.

The only simmilar case I can think of is the Isreali law which prohibits entry into the country by anyone supporting BDS. Notably, in this case they are not even claiming that everyone on the planet is required to not support BDS; because it is obvious that they have no jurisdiction to do so.

EDIT: You also have China and Saudi Arabia who have internet restrictions. However, they also do not claim jurisdiction over foreign sites. They only require compliance by sites that operate within their jurisdiction; and have built the infrastructure to enforce their digital border.

<comment><USER18> Then why block the EU to begin with? The argument is clear, blocking users is not a panacea.

<comment><USER12> Because if you do not block the EU then the EU can claim to have jurisdiction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Juristiction. By this same logic you have to comply by the rules of the Great Firewall of China.

<comment><USER20> Or Saudi Arabia's content rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a ridiculous interpretation of the law. Brought to you by some «experts» in Colorado.

If you had followed EU policy discussions over the last 10 years, you would realize this is about creating a single, unified online market.

Meaning a citizen living in Poland should have access to the same online services as a German, unless there are valid reasons for denying him.

</comment><comment><USER22> Site got hugged. Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.get...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.gettingemaildelivered.com/why- you-cant-just-block-eu-visitors-eu-customers-or-any-eu-traffic-under- gdpr&strip=1)

In short: the opinion expressed by that link appears to be _plainly wrong_ as the organization using IP addresses to restrict EU traffic for the sake of GDPR would need the ability to actually identify people from that information, a power arising from access to other information. The vast majority of entities lack that additional, so for them, IP addresses are not 'personal data' under existing case law.

In long: I'm not providing legal advice, only forwarding details (again, non- representative) conversations I've had or been party to with various lawyers on this topic. Notably: the consensus opinion is that determining a potential IP range is specific to the EU is not the same as geolocating them as that location information is not specific enough to determine who the person is, and partly as a result of a lack of this capability and others, IP addresses cannot alone be determined to be personal data.

Related: [https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/court- confirms-...](https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/court-confirms-ip- addresses-are-personal-data-some-cases)

> The CJEU decided that a dynamic IP address will be personal data in the > hands of a website operator if:

> 1\. there is another party (such as an ISP) that can link the dynamic IP > address to the identity of an individual; and

> 2\. the website operator has a "legal means" of obtaining access to the > information held by the ISP in order to identify the individual.

> On the facts, if the BRD has the legal power to compel the relevant ISP to > disclose sufficient information to identify Mr Breyer, then Mr Breyer's IP > address will be personal data in the hands of the BRD.

By precedent (unless I'm missing more recent case law), for the vast majority of entities possessing IP addresses e.g. through request logs, an IP address is not "personal data," and determining the continental whereabouts of an IP would therefore not be considered "profiling."

I'm not a lawyer; I'm only relaying what's come up in conversation between attorneys covering the topic. I'm open to seeing the position I'm relaying above proven wrong.

</comment><comment><USER23> Someone on reddit noted that this may be true for one more reason: the law does not allow automatic profiling of the user (Article 22)

> The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based > solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal > effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.

<comment><USER22> "Article 4 (4): 'profiling' means any form of automated processing of _personal data_ "

CJEU case law has determined that IP addresses are not considered "personal data" except in certain cases ([https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/court- confirms-...](https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/court-confirms-ip- addresses-are-personal-data-some-cases))

> The CJEU decided that a dynamic IP address will be personal data in the > hands of a website operator if:

> 1\. there is another party (such as an ISP) that can link the dynamic IP > address to the identity of an individual; and

> 2\. the website operator has a "legal means" of obtaining access to the > information held by the ISP in order to identify the individual.

> On the facts, if the BRD has the legal power to compel the relevant ISP to > disclose sufficient information to identify Mr Breyer, then Mr Breyer's IP > address will be personal data in the hands of the BRD.

The vast majority of entities do not meet the requirements for #2. Therefore, automatic profiling rules could not apply since the automatic analysis being performed is not against personal data.

<comment><USER23> I hope that IPs will stop being considered PII for the same reason. It's much easier to anonymize them at the ISP level rather than doing all these acrobatics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a lot of discussion about GDPR from an American perspective. I'm curious about the Chinese one. Does the EU really expect Baidu, WeChat and Tencent to comply with these rules? Or is this just a roundabout way of extracting bureaucratic benefits from American technology companies?

<comment><USER21> Yes, of course. If they do business in the eu, they will need to comply.

If they don't do business in EU, then they dont have to follow eu rules.

<comment><USER9> If Facebook certifies deletion of certain data, and somebody doesn't believe them, they can sue in an American court. If WeChat certifies deletion of certain data, and somebody doesn't believe them, they're SOL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a clear mis-reading of the law. Look at the examples that you can't use profiling (including geo-IP) for:

> which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly > significantly affects him or her, such as automatic refusal of an online > credit application or e-recruiting practices without any human intervention.

Blocking someone from reading a news website is clearly not a decision along these lines. Obviously this would need to be tested in court, but I would bet on it being allowed.

Also, the GDPR only applies _at all_ if the business operates in the EU. If they clearly don't (e.g. by blocking European visitors) then the GDPR does not apply and you obviously can't use text in the GDPR itself to prove that you can't do that.

This article is nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm a traveler, just because I'm not coming from EU IP address range, doesn't mean I'm not EU citizen with rights established by EU.

<comment><USER26> The GDPR's scope is based on geography, not citizenship. If you're an EU citizen currently in the US, you do not necessarily enjoy whatever rights and protections the GDPR might offer you if you were within the EU. If you're a US citizen currently in the EU, you do enjoy those protections.

<comment><USER25> Hmm, that's interesting, I was convinced it's based on citizenship.

<comment><USER26> It's a common misconception, and has been widely reported even in the mainstream media. FYI it's Article 3 of the GDPR that specifies the territorial scope authoritatively.

Fun fact: The word "citizen" doesn't actually appear in the GDPR at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Except the purpose of that block is clearly defined and it doesn't need to _store_ personnal/private data to work.

</comment><comment><USER28> I predict secretive offshore entities which exploit activities banned under GDPR which have sufficient economic value. Entities which are essentially judgment proof in EU. Maybe directly affiliated with a foreign government.

Being able to do certain kinds of background checks or financial risk calculations is the first use case which comes to mind.

</comment><comment><USER29> ignore the gettingmaildelivered blog... one certainly can take active measures to exclude EU visitors as a way of avoiding scope of GDPR. Get real legal advice if curious rather than relying on a blog.

<comment><USER29> rest assured you would not see major newspapers doing exactly that without them having checked the legality. The analysis in the blog is wrong because the first question to be asked is "is the business within the scope of the GDPR", and _if you are a business in scope_, then you can't process personal data or track/monitor EU residents. However, you are not a business in scope of GDPR if you don't have a business presence in the EU and don't hold out your services to EU residents. Blocking that region demonstrates clear intent _not_ to offer services to EU residents and thus puts your business out of GDPR scope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What happens when an EU citizen travels to the US and accesses a website?

<comment><USER31> U.S. law applies, just like normal, unless the website is located in the EU. The EU claiming jurisdiction over transactions entirely in another country would be a major breach of sovereignty, which is why the law uses the phrase "data subjects in the Union".

Note that EU law does apply for visitors, so look forward to data tourism!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is it intentional that the site is blank for me (in the EU), or is their JS just crap?

<comment><USER33> I guess the site got hackernewsd (old lingo is slashdotted).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> You can't force people to operate in your country. The EU does not have sovereignty over the whole world. This is nonsense and is certainly not what is contemplated by the law.

Making it undesirable for some businesses to operate in your country is part of the cost-benefit analysis you have to do when passing laws.

<comment><USER35> The EU is overplaying its hand by claiming global sovereignty. If the EU really wants to play hard ball, the rest of the world can impose sanctions against the EU and bureaucrats who try to enforce illegal laws

<comment><USER36> Nobody is claiming global anything, the rest of the world is not the US, and illegal law is an oximoron.

<comment><USER37> The supreme court and the constitution would beg to differ.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What does an Oracle audit look like? This one certainly wasn't pretty - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/3024858/enterprise-applications/what-does-an-oracle-audit-look-like-this-one-certainly-wasnt-pretty.html <comment><USER2> It's a pity that the article didn't mention what I'm sure is a dirty word to Oracle: PostgreSQL.

There are use cases where Postgres isn't appropriate. But there are many use cases where it (or some other cheap/free database) could and should replace Oracle.

<comment><USER3> Why would it? It's an article about a company suing another company over how a licensing agreement should be enforced. It's not an article about alternative software products. It also didn't mention MS SQL or sqlite That's not strange at all.

<comment><USER2> _Why would it?_

Because migrating as many applications as possible away from Oracle is IMO the _only_ prudent action for any company to take in the longer term. Instead of just reporting on the current situation, the article could have provided some value added by suggesting alternatives.

Oracle's business model (which it shares with many other companies) is to lock in customers and then to periodically shake them down for as much cash as possible. All IMO of course. This is not the first time I've read of audits like this.

Their business model is not "win win", it's (to steal from Goodfellas) "fuck you, pay me". If I were the CTO of a company dependent on Oracle, I'd run away from them as quickly as prudently feasible.

This is a new millennium. There are viable alternatives to expensive proprietary database software.</comment></comment></comment>


South Korea unveils plan for near-supersonic hyper-tube train - <AUTHOR> http://inhabitat.com/south-korea-unveils-plan-for-near-supersonic-hyper-tube-train/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand the desire of journalists to compare speeds to "the speed of sound." The speed of sound varies wildly depending on air density and sound frequency.</comment>


The End of Cuisine - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/15/style/tmagazine/endofcuisine.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> What are the things out of modernist cooking that I can actually, you know, use? I'm not going to "mold casts from real kumquats" and then use them to serve "sugar cubes that were rubbed on kumquat skin to extract its flavor". I like to cook, and I like to eat, and I'd have little qualms about using modernist cooking techniques, but they all seem to involve an expense of time and equipment that I'm not willing to invest given the alternatives.

I guess sous-vide is making it into some regular kitchens beholden to the laws of time and space.

<comment><USER3> I have a similar skepticism of modernist cooking. I have very egalitarian ideas about good food--it should be for everyone. This has probably never been true, but the fact that people are trying to make new foods that are even harder for the common person to achieve rubs me the wrong way.

Of course my idea of a perfect meal trends towards amazing Banh Mi from a food truck rather than Kobe Beef fillet mignon, so YMMV.

<comment><USER4> _Of course my idea of a perfect meal trends towards amazing Banh Mi from a food truck rather than Kobe Beef fillet mignon, so YMMV._

This reminds me of the Iron Chef intro where we see Masaharu Morimoto eating a hotdog (or something) sitting on a step while reading a newspaper.

As a foodie myself I'm not sure why you have to choose one meal over another. I've lined up for Banh Mi, and warm jam doughnuts being sold from a truck, and I've spent hundreds of dollars on multi-course meals. They were all 'perfect' meals in their own context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "Cooking at this level is like giving a concert," he said. "No one in their > right mind gives 300 concerts a year."

Many musicians, even famous and successful ones, do just that.

I love food, including expensive, fancy food. I grow vegetables, and I have a CSA where I get local vegetables weekly.

Food like Myhrvold's, to me, is rich, ignorant assholes behaving like rich, ignorant assholes. I say ignorant because while they may be well versed in certain areas, their knowledge is very narrow and skewed. They fancy themselves adventurous intellectuals, when in reality they are precisely the opposite. They are some of the most closed minded people you will find.

Also, for anyone who doesn't already know, Intellectual Ventures (Myhrvold's IP troll firm) is one of the worst. A little Googling on their actions tells you everything you need to know about what kind of person he is.

<comment><USER6> Can you give some more examples of the kinds of closed-mindedness you're trying to get at? I'm trying to understand your line of thought. Are you saying that Myhrvold is being an asshole because he's elevating what he is doing to a much higher level than it justifies?

Not agreeing or disagreeing - genuinely curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find interesting that high level cuisine is growing more and more detached from "eating". It is more similar to an spectacle, when one should be surprised or even shocked, and it's not designed to be done everyday.

It is more and more about creating an experience, and ends up being totally different from some sort of "high quality feeding".

<comment><USER8> This what I really like about "modernist cuisine", and why I think it's silly that some people consider it the future of cooking. It's really fun and delightful to very occasionally enjoy food as prepared by a mad scientist, you know? If I'm shelling out $200 for a meal, I'd rather experience it as this sort of ephemeral performance art rather than yet another perfect, but ultimately unmemorable, traditional dish. But aside from the occasional technique or two (sous vide), nobody's gonna be doing this sort of stuff at home.

<comment><USER9> I agree, this is what I find intriguing (although I've never experienced it). It seems to be a little bit like thinking, "okay, we have these various very sensitive chemical and touch receptors in our mouths, what else can we do with them?" The answer of course is still "food" but only because we don't want to consume things that are poisonous or inedible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nathan Myhrvold appears to be a co-founder of Intellectual Ventures.

<comment><USER11> So? He also an amateur paleontologist whose work in that field has been published in Nature, has masters degrees in both space physics and mathematical economics, a PhD in theoretical physics, has worked as a postdoc for Stephen Hawking, is an award winning nature photographer, won first place at the Memphis barbecue championship, and is one volcano lair away from true mad scientist territory with his proposals for large scale geoengeering to deal with climate change.

People at his level somehow manage to have both a very diverse set of interests and to excel at all of them. It's kind of annoying...I have a very diverse set of interests, and I suck at most of them. How do they do it?

<comment><USER12> > People at his level somehow manage to have both a very diverse set of > interests and to excel at all of them.

I guess it helps a lot if you are really really rich and have time to do whatever you want for days on end.

I also guess some people would say Nathan Myhrvold is rich partially because he is running a very successful extortion scheme (my mind is not made up.)

<comment><USER13> My guess is he's rich because his company got bought for $1.5 million in Microsoft stock in 1986.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Was anyone else rubbed the wrong way by that closing paragraph? It almost seems like in bad attempt to sound 'deep' makes little of everything that went into the meal.

Interestingly Nathan has a recipe for the 'ultimate burger' [http://modernistcuisine.com/2011/12/the-ultimate- burger/](http://modernistcuisine.com/2011/12/the-ultimate-burger/)

<comment><USER15> Not me. Though the author is gracious to Mhyrvold and recognizes the rare opportunity to join in this meal, he does not seem especially complimentary to the food. Actually, he seems unimpressed. Despite all the technical wizardry, the meal might have simply fallen short of something prepared simply. It's a valid opinion.

<comment><USER14> Then perhaps he was the wrong person to do the article considering thats quite a contrast to Adria's (who has quite established ethos in tasting/food) seemingly positive opinion of meal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The more I read about Myrvhold, the more I don't like him. Seems like a billionaire who needs to find a way to define himself.

<comment><USER17> There is a lot to dislike about him. A man who becomes the preeminent patent troll after already having a enough money to do anything he wants-- worst kind of person, if you ask me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Only tangentially related: if you like cooking and understanding what you do, Jeff Potter's Cooking for Geeks is a wonderful book.

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596805890.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596805890.do)

</comment><comment><USER19> 'Page not found' for that URL.

This one works though: [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/15/style/tmagazin...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/15/style/tmagazine/endofcuisine.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER20> Thanks; changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is completely unrelated to the point of the article, but this struck me:

> To fight malaria, the lab has invented a "photonic fence" device that > identifies, tracks and zaps female mosquitoes (only females bite humans).

Can anyone explain why it's important enough to _only_ kill the females that we might want to add (presumably expensive) sex-identification technology to mosquito zappers that are aimed at eliminating malaria in poor countries?

<comment><USER22> I don't think this is what you're talking about but one of the ways of killing mosquitos is to lace a gallon of water with a chemical that attracts adults and kills them along with any eggs. In practice, this would basically target only females.

After a quick search I found this link leading to a page of Intellectual Venture's

[http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventions- patents/our-i...](http://www.intellectualventures.com/inventions-patents/our- inventions/photonic-fence/)

It's pretty cool but unfortunately looks tied to IV. My first guess might be to avoid any criticism that by killing ALL mosquitos, they're harming the ecosystem. I guess that's wishful thinking for a company that I kind of despise even being on their website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting tidbit at the end on Dicks, and I completely agree. As simple as it is (only four variations on the burger, cheese, no cheese, all the fixings, double with everything, one size of fries, shakes, and that's their entire menu), one can really appreciate it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Funny that this is called Modernist Cuisine. It's very ornamental and inventive. Most Modernist movements had their heyday in the early 20th century. Maybe it is because of the technological focus.

</comment><comment><USER25> 50 courses?

Disgusting.</comment>


Why 'Little Women' Endures - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/150579/little-women-endures-louisa-may-alcott-anne-boyd-rioux <comment><USER2> The Atlantic also had an article in the last issue - I didn't know that Alcott wrote a bunch of "sensationalist stories about murder and opium addiction" and felt that was her sweet spot.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/little-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/little- women-louisa-may-alcott/565754/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It endures because it is a fairy tale. It is a tale from a more simple time, but one with very modern characters as needed to soften the edges. In little women, it is the men that are softened. They arent the sexist pigs that were the norm of the time. The princess in the stone castle gets to marry the prince on the horse because she loves him, not to cement a deal between kingdoms: fairytale.

Tolkien's hobbit/tlotr is much the same.

<comment><USER4> Times are as simple as our lack of information about them. When there are few sources of information about a time, we over value the ones that survive and end up with a false picture. I think if we were teleported back we'd see the same panorama of human nature that we see today.

<comment><USER3> This is literature, not history. The times were simple because the author made them simple. Whether the author's fictional world comports with historical truth is beside the point. The world of Little Women is objectively simpler because we are limited to the information given to us by the author. We don't see the complexity because it is denied us, something true of all historical fiction. People and information move more slowly, which facilitates the storytelling. Diseases are quickly diagnosed, and resolve themselves one way or another quickly enough to not stall the story. That is the simpler time/world that the author chose to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes I wonder why Little Woman has been/is being adapted for film so many times, where as there hasn't been a proper adaptation of Huckleberry Finn.

<comment><USER6> It's been a long time since I read Huckleberry Finn, but _could_ it be adapted these days? A faithful adaptation would be heavily criticized for the racial slurs and an unfaithful adaptation would probably lose much of the flavor.

<comment><USER7> I reread some of the book after the last n-word-in-English-class controversy, and Jim comes off as witty and sympathetic. I don't know if that is enough to pacify the armchair mob. I also think it could probably survive the removal of one slur. It's a great book.

<comment><USER8> It's just about the language, and it's not just an armchair mob. Serious people have serious issues with the book. I don't think it should be banned or even removed from curriculums, but it should be taught carefully, with a lot more instruction than just "this is a great book with some bad words that we don't use anymore".

The characters are obviously racist, but the question is whether the author and/or the book are racist, and if so that needs to be called out explicitly and discussed in the classroom. Here's a good essay on it: [https://www.vqronline.org/essay/jim-and-mark-twain-what- do-d...](https://www.vqronline.org/essay/jim-and-mark-twain-what-do-dey-stan)

> In the middle of Huck Finn, Mark Twain let Jim step out from behind the > racist stereotype that has proven a lot harder to destroy than slavery. The > effect of the ending, though, is to put him back in blackface so the whites > of his eyes will show more conspicuously when they roll. The ending of Huck > Finn has been recognized as a problem for more than 50 years, although > almost no one has emphasized how it changes Jim's status within the novel. > Charles Neider, in a new edition that Doubleday published for the > centennial, grandly chose to cut 8300 words from this Tom Sawyer section. It > does go on and on, becoming the longest episode in the novel—but that is the > first thing that must be noted about it. The second is how hard Twain works > in it to make his reader laugh, piling up witches, rats, mashed teeth, > pouring melting butter over the whole. When he went back on the lecture > circuit in the winter of 1884—85, he used the Evasion chapters as the basis > for his new program, and in his letters home he brags about their > effectiveness as a comic tour de force, a continuous series of snappers. > That, especially in view of our modern unhappiness with the ending, should > be the third thing to note: Twain used the 1884—85 tour to promote his > forthcoming novel, and this was the part of it he chose to represent the > whole.

> [...]

> We obviously cannot say what might have happened, either in the book or to > the book's reception, if Twain had not decided to turn Huck into Tom, and > Jim into a comic stereotype. We must, however, reckon the price Twain paid > for that decision. Huck can't free Jim. Jim can't free Huck. Between them, > Huck and Jim could not free Mark Twain from the pact his need for popularity > forced him to make with his public's self-protective prejudices. Twain's own > sense of remorse is only a partial compensation for his betrayal of Jim. By > Jim's definition, which is surely entitled to be definitive, the ending of > Huck Finn is "trash." It is trash, though, that we cannot afford to throw > away until we have finished learning what it has to teach us about our > culture's appetites.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coronavirus epidemy in Iran past crisis level - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/aliostad/status/1233668766124400640 <comment><USER2> Unsourced comments by somebody without on-the-ground knowledge about the matter he's talking about.

</comment><comment><USER3> any Iranians on HN who have first or second-hand knowledge of what is going on there?

<comment><USER4> Iranian here. The author of tweet is also an Iranian. All the reasons he mentioned is absolutely legit.

1) it was just before election and needed high turnout --> This is true. State sponsored TV started announcing Corona death cases exactly after election day. It is impossible to get the virus and die in same day. Obviously they knew that virus is in early phases of spreading before election.

2) due to political need, did not stop flights to china ---> As you remember in early days many airlines refrain carrying Chinese. Mahan Airline was pretty much the only carrier that transported Chinese back to China from middle east which is through Tehran IKA. This airport is roughly 1 hour away from Qom.

3) source seems to becleric students from china arrived in Qom --> This is also true. Qom has the biggest religious school in middle east and it has many students from east/central Asia.

4) did not close religious shrines --> Which is obvious

Note that there are only few cases that this virus can get into Iran which is more or less an isolated country:

1\. Chinese coming into Qom as becleric students

2\. Chinese working in Huawei in Tehran's office.

3\. Chinese working in oil sector in southern cities.

Other than above three cases there is pretty much no other way for this virus to get into Iran as there was no other case in Turkey/Emirates/Pakistan, ... since they started putting Chinese into quarantine a lot earlier than us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This Twitter thread seems like a random collection of pictures without source and some guesses as to what's seen in them.</comment>


Brands That Will Disappear In 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/brands-that-will-disappear-in-2010-2009-12

<comment><USER2> I don't disagree with the general argument here, but the headline may be overstating things a bit-- I tend to think that some of these brands may be able to limp forward for a few more years before ultimately collapsing. There's an art to circling the drain...

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do they bother saying "Brands" when everyone knows that never happens?

Motorola, Kodak, Newsweek... whether they get bought out entirely or sold piece by piece, those brandnames are not going anywhere. They may get new management or aggressively downsize but there will always be Kodak products to buy, Newsweek will always be on the stands, and same for Motorola.

So why say the "Brands won't exist"? I don't get it.

<comment><USER4> Why do you say that "never" happens? Brandnames definitely do go away when they become liabilities and not assets.

<comment><USER3> Which won't happen to the brands he listed.

The only brands that have actually become net liabilities are a small handful of corrupt ones - Enron, WorldCom, stuff like that.

But Newsweek "disappearing in 2010"? Impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The source article, in one page: [http://247wallst.com/2009/12/02/the-ten- brands-that-will-dis...](http://247wallst.com/2009/12/02/the-ten-brands-that- will-disappear-in-2010/)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's so frustrating to have to click 10 times to see the list. I thought "Hey, there's a printer-friendly version - I'll click that button!". Of course, it only prints the page you're currently on.

Thanks for the amazing user experience, Business Insider.

<comment><USER7> And the strange thing is, they only put 4 adds per page, so it's not like they are breaking up the article to increase ad space. They do pimp their own content alot though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Must have been more than one writer involved—items 7–10 are in serious need of punctuation and general editing. ('Kodak won't cease to exit.'; 'Its fate as a standalone company is however looking more and more like an inevitable fate.')

<comment><USER9> _'Its fate as a standalone company is however looking more and more like an inevitable fate.'_

It sounds like a 1980s videogame localization team wrote this bit of copy...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hate when articles like this are split across multiple pages. Sure they want to increase the number of their page views for ad revenue, but I'd love to know the bounce rate on these multi-page lists. I did not bother to go further.

</comment><comment><USER11> In an odd twist of irony, all ten companies post gains in 2010 while the domain businessinsider.com is sold for $200 to a porn company looking to bank on office affairs.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can we just say that advanced smartphone manufacturers who attempt to compete with the iPhone will suffer massively for it?

<comment><USER12> No. In fact HTC came out of nowhere post-iPhone.

<comment><USER13> What? HTC was the largest manufacturer of Windows Mobile phones as early as 2006, when it was #3 in BusinessWeek's IT 100 (and #11 in 2005): <http://www.businessweek.com/it100/2006/3.htm>

The company's sales and market cap grew explosively in the years just before the iPhone launch in 2007. Since the iPhone launch, its stock is down 40%: <http://www.google.com/finance?q=TPE:2498>

<comment><USER12> Hrm, I stand corrected. There's a case of my own experience creating a bias. I don't ever remember seeing HTC products before the iPhone, and now I see them everywhere.

Shouldn't assume I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there some point to that photo of Buffet eating a popcicle?

</comment><comment><USER14> I have a brokerage account at etrade. Is my money in danger?</comment>


Ask HN: What's the first smartphone? - <AUTHOR>

First, let's define what I mean by 'the first'.
The first smartphone, I'd say, should be defined as the first device that was attributed to be a smartphone (either coined the term or was introduced as a smartphone) and as would have been available for purchase by the mass market (even if it was expensive). I think it could be argued that the first designed or prototyped smartphone should be considered and thought about, but I think a product that actually made it to market is more worthy of that title.
I've been looking around a bit and the most prominent out there is Simon (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-06-29/before-iphone-and-android-came-simon-the-first-smartphone) but not sure if that's exactly the case.
Would love to hear everyone's thoughts! <comment><USER2> It's always a tricky thing to pinpoint when great tech first came this way. Sometimes, we're not even sure if it was great tech when it makes a splash so that may be part of the reason.

I was able to find this that corroborates with BW on the Simon : [http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/09/18/20-years-ago-the-first- sm...](http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/09/18/20-years-ago-the-first-smartphone- was-developed-whats-next-for-mobility/)

If you're ignoring the "phone" bit of "Smartphone", it's basically a PDA first. So the first PDA would be the Organizer by Psion : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Organiser](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Organiser)

If you want to mix PDA and phone proper, the first time that happened was with the Nokia 9000 : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator)

</comment><comment><USER3> I had a sony ericsson walkman phone which had an app store. I installed a nice chat application which let me chat on Google talk and facebook. It's email client was pretty decent (for the time), it ran Opera mini, and it also had a twitter client. I guess that was smart enough to be called a smart phone. The phone was also about a centimeter thick, and in that time (probably even for now), it was sleek and beautiful. I miss that phone.</comment>


Poppy Humanoid 3D-Printed Open-Source Robot Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.poppy-project.org/creatures/poppy-humanoid/

<comment><USER2> When ever I see any humanoid robot model, I always wonder if its not possible to replace all those motors with a single powerful one and somehow direct the power to all those joints.

<comment><USER3> That's usually done using muscle-like hydraulic or pneumatic actuators, with one central pump and pipes/tubes to direct the pressure to different pistons/actuators.

[http://sreal.eecs.ucf.edu/people/phd/rpillatproject8.php](http://sreal.eecs.ucf.edu/people/phd/rpillatproject8.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Over 8000€ for the diy kit. Are there any similar projects more oriented to hobbyists?</comment>


A bug-fix 12 years in the making: Windows Unicode Support in OCaml 4.06.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.dra27.uk/blog/platform/2017/10/30/ocaml-unicode.html <comment><USER2> Less than acceptable support for Unicode or it being a second class citizen is the most frequent reason why I ditch some interesting "exotic" languages.

<comment><USER3> Note that the key word here is "Windows", not "OCaml".

Less than acceptable support for Unicode or it being a second class citizen is the most frequent reason why I ditch some popular operating systems.

<comment><USER4> > Note that the key word here is "Windows", not "OCaml".

why is that?

<comment><USER5> I don't think you can write a standard ANSI C program on Windows that opens a file specified on the command line where the file name contains characters not representable in whatever legacy charset Windows is using at the moment. At least that's what the situation was for many years. The article hints at some UTF8-related changes in Windows 10.

For almost every other system, the obvious code (fopen(argv[1], ...), basically) does the right thing. On Windows you have to enter some crazy non- portable parallel universe where not even the signature of main() is the same.

That's the reason why many programs don't support Unicode on Windows, despite there often being no reason for those programs to care about character encoding at all.

<comment><USER6> POSIX has zero support for GUI code or proper Unicode, of course it requires platform specific APIs, even if the target platform would be fully POSIX compliant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very detailed article.</comment>


The founding of the MIT Artificial Intelligence laboratory [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2001/AILab.pdf

<comment><USER2> that was an amazing read, but boy it is long...

Some of the stuff in there is common knowledge, but plenty is not and you could probably set up a nice cookies file from all the quotes in there.

<comment><USER3> I took one of Patrick Winston's classes last semester, and I've never known someone to dispense so much invaluable advice about, well, everything. I have a notebook full of his quotes on topics like how to interview well, how to become a professor at a top university, the proper way to do A.I. research, how to write well, how to threaten people, how to get people to change their minds, etc etc. Brilliant guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Enjoyed the bit about hacker culture and the milliblatts :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Also Hackers by Steven Levy is a huge source of data on the Lisp/Cellular Automation days.</comment>


My journey to NoSQL - <AUTHOR> http://progfu.com/post/18309177396/the-journey-to-nosql

<comment><USER2> Damn I actually went there hoping for a few usage patterns (in one or more of the platforms). Sorry got a bit disappointed.</comment>


Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailydrip.com/topics/elm/drips/elm-phoenix-socket <comment><USER2> How come no one (seemingly) uses Elm, despite all the love? I've noticed a lot of quick, drive-by posts in Elm related threads about how great the language is. This thread ("This is a great little webstack!") and today's other front- page elm thread[1] both do this.

With such high praise, I would expect the language to be more popular. What's with the disconnect? My hypotheses:

1) There are no unhappy users because unhappy users just don't use it. 2) HN goes easy on technological curiosities, saving harsh criticism for large projects that deserve it 3) While there may be a widespread lovefest for Elm, there is too much momentum behind current technologies.

Any other thoughts as to what the disconnect is? Moreover, how do we get to a world where the webstack we all use is "a great little webstack"?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11846707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11846707)

edit: clarity

<comment><USER3> I'm looking at Elm for a product that I'm working on at the moment. The language is great and I've wanted an excuse to do actual work in an ML-like language for a long time.

The difficulty I'm having at the moment is just trying to find examples of non-toy application architectures. An application with multiple top-level screens, for example.

For a bit of context, the product I'm working on is a customer-facing kiosk. It'll be driven by a C# ASP.NET back-end. We have several different products using common back-end code but exposing different sets of features to the customer. We're moving from an old architecture that was your standard WinForms UI to something using HTML5 as the UI layer (definitely a big mindset change!).

Right now I'm trying to figure out what the front-end Elm code structure would look like. Is it going to be one huge monolithic Elm project that covers all our cases? Can it be broken up? Does the front-end have to know in advance what screens will be available? (the back-end uses the typical 'load features as plugin DLLs') etc. These are all questions I'm facing right now.

This is especially exacerbated by the recent change from 0.16 to 0.17. The changes themselves seem extremely positive (I jumped in at 0.17, so I'm only going off an impression here) but much of the example material that I've found which might be useful is still using stuff from 0.16 and I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it right now.

So from a commercial dev perspective, Elm, like anything else so new, is massively risky. I'm pushing on for the moment (would love any pointers if anyone has them!). I'm aware of the huge element of "not knowing what I don't know" that I've taken on right now. I'm hoping the payoff will be worth it :)

<comment><USER4> I'm also looking for more structured examples but so far haven't found much. These are some apps that go a little beyond the "hello world" kind. Some of them are being updated to elm 0.17.

[https://github.com/plentiful/shop](https://github.com/plentiful/shop)

[https://github.com/srid/chronicle](https://github.com/srid/chronicle)

[https://github.com/CultivateHQ/seat_saver](https://github.com/CultivateHQ/seat_saver)

[https://github.com/NoRedInk/elm-blogger](https://github.com/NoRedInk/elm- blogger)

[https://github.com/massung/elm-hn](https://github.com/massung/elm-hn)

[https://github.com/sporto/elm-tutorial-app](https://github.com/sporto/elm- tutorial-app)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Josh from DailyDrip here. My first realization that this was here was that we started getting a ton of traffic. :) We just ran the first Remote Elm Meetup today so my attention was elsewhere: [https://www.bigmarker.com/remote- meetup/1-Elm-Remote-Meetup-...](https://www.bigmarker.com/remote-meetup/1-Elm- Remote-Meetup-by-DailiDrip) (yes, I know our company name is misspelled in the url :-\ )

I'd love to chat with anyone that wants to know what we're doing and why we do it :)

<comment><USER6> I'd never heard of your site before but after looking at your video library I'm about to be a customer. Great, great work.

<comment><USER5> Obviously thrilled, thanks. All we want to do is keep making awesome content, and every customer helps us on that path. Let me know if you have any issues, ok? Obviously I've tested the crap out of it, and we have a decent number of customers, but this is our biggest traffic day by 4x already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Elixir, Phoenix and Elm have absolutely rekindled my love of web application development.

<comment><USER8> PureScript + learning Erlang/Hakskell rekindled mine :)

I ended up learning Erlang after hearing about Elixir and not being a fan of the Rubyish syntax and immutability comporomise, which has been a very rewarding experience. Haskell even more so. And Purescript has some nice Elm inspired libraries [2].

[1] [https://purescript.org](https://purescript.org)

[2] [https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=language%3Apuresc...](https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=language%3Apurescript+elm&type=Repositories&ref=searchresults)

<comment><USER5> pedant mode on...

there is no "immutability compromise" in Elixir. Static Single Assignment != Immutability. Elixir is entirely immutable - it has to be as it just runs on the Erlang VM!

I think a _legitimate_ complaint along these lines would be "pinning is confusing and error prone for beginners" and I think it's fair. Christopher Meiklejohn mentioned this on Twitter yesterday, and it's a point that's caught me plenty and I write more Elixir code than most people by far.

<comment><USER9> > Elixir is entirely immutable - it has to be as it just runs on the Erlang > VM!

No, variables are mutable in Elixir.

       Interactive Elixir (1.1.0-dev)
       iex(1)> x=1
       1
       iex(2)> x=2
       2

Notice how x is 1 then x is 2. Variable x mutated.

In Erlang:

       1> X=1.
       1
       2> X=2.
       ** exception error: no match of right hand side value 2

Variables are immutable in Erlang.

I suspect you misunderstood gp's post and thought they were talking about data, which is immutable in both languages in general.

<comment><USER10> Actually, variables in Elixir can be _re-binded_ :

> x = [1, 2, 3]

> x = 2 # the structure [1, 2, 3] still exists in memory, but now the variable > x is _bound_ to the value 2

All data is still immutable, the BEAM itself requires so. Dave Thomas explains this in its "Programming Elixir" book.

<comment><USER9> > the structure [1, 2, 3] still exists in memory, but now the variable x is > bound to the value 2

I wasn't talking about data, I was talking about variables. Yeah you just called it "re-binded". I called it "changed" or "mutated".

You have a function, and you see x=1 first and print its value. You'd see "1". Then you can have x=2 maybe a few lines or pages below, print it, you get "2". Variable x has changed its value. I even illustrated with a short example.

> All data is still immutable, the BEAM itself requires so. All data is still > immutable, the BEAM itself requires so

Agreed. I don't think I ever talked about data being mutable. Having used BEAM VM for the last 5 years, yes, I noticed data is immutable ;-)

<comment><USER11> It's not mutated or changed it points to a totally different memory location. It's called immutable data not immutable identifiers. Immutable data is what eliminates a large number of potential bugs. Having a ton of intermediate variable names could actually be a source of bugs plus you have to care if someone reuses the name above the point in code you used it. By allowing rebinding you only care about the code below the place your introduced a variable.

<comment><USER9> > It's called immutable data not immutable identifiers.

immutable/mutable data and immutable/mutable identifiers are two different things. One is not called the other, they are separate things really.

> It's not mutated or changed it points to a totally different memory location

So you said it yourself. It points to a different memory location. So how is x not mutated then? "Mutated" is a synonym for "change", or so I thought apparently.

I don't see how one can look at a variable being reassigned and say "nope, variable didn't change", where it clearly has a new value in the line below.

> Immutable data is what eliminates a large number of potential bugs.

Agreed. Was using Erlang for many years and tried Haskell before. Immutable data is pretty nice most of the time.

> care if someone reuses the name above the point in code you used it.

Wait, is it the opposite of what you were trying to say? Wouldn't you want to care if you are now randomly re-using or changing variables someone else assigned. I thought immutability was a good thing.

> By allowing rebinding you only care about the code below the place your > introduced a variable.

Unfortunately in my code base, the code above the place where variables are introduced is just as mission critical as the code after the place. Maybe I am using a strange coding style or paradigm ;-)

<comment><USER11> I obviously phrased it poorly as not to copy too much text the post by Jose Valim on the topic: [http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2016/01/comparing- elixir-an...](http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2016/01/comparing-elixir-and- erlang-variables/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Author of elm-phoenix-socket[1] here. I'm happy to answer any questions about the library, Elm, or whatever.

[1] [https://github.com/fbonetti/elm-phoenix- socket](https://github.com/fbonetti/elm-phoenix-socket)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm impressed by the Hacker News crowd. Pretty cool to see a topic as esoteric (and awesome) as Phoenix / Elm hit the top spot. Very good post!

<comment><USER11> I does look like Elixir/Phoenix is growing fast enough that it will not be considered esoteric in fairly near future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We love this stack, and dailydrip and elixirsips have helped us get a lot of the knowledge we have. Josh does an awesome job at explaining the technology in a step by step fashion that is both concise and easy to understand.

</comment><comment><USER6> Elm and Phoenix really seem like a perfect match for each other

<comment><USER15> They're both very functional, but it's an interesting matchup given that Elm is very strongly typed and (according to my understanding) Elixir is totally dynamic. For those who are developing with both, I'd be interested in hearing if there's a reason why types would be more useful on the client than the server or whether there's another motivation for those particular choices.

<comment><USER16> Look at Dialyzer and [http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/typespecs-and- behavio...](http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/typespecs-and- behaviours.html#types-and-specs)

Also, Elixir community... there seems to be a paucity of awareness of Dialyzer and Typespecs. Perhaps they could be more prominent? They're included in the reference docs, but not really so much in a way that indicates what they are or how one would use them when writing their own software in Elixir.

There are many, many classes of problems that can be discovered before they're discovered at runtime. It's made a little harder in Elixir-land due to limited Map support in Dialyzer and Map usage being extremely common in Elixir code, but still spec'ing your functions is a good practice and habit to get into anyway.

<comment><USER5> The latest Erlang release fixed the Map problem with Dialyzer. It was entirely the reason I was lax with specs. I'd love to get a workflow more like this one: [https://medium.com/@barruumrex/seeking-simple- satisfaction-2...](https://medium.com/@barruumrex/seeking-simple- satisfaction-2a098902ddff)

<comment><USER16> For the uninitiated...

Erlang 19's included Dialyzer improves the scenario of type-checking maps in useful ways. Namely that now you can represent an empty map, an arbitrary map of any type, and a partially arbitrary map which must include certain key type and value type associations but is not limited to those. Which leaves out one representation which is a map which includes _and only includes_ a specific set of key type and value type associations.

Erlang 18's Dialyzer has basically just #{} =:= map() which is equivalent to the union of #{none() => none()} and #{any() => any()}, so it was basically a giant escape hatch in the type-checking system, and thus not particularly valuable.

Looking forward to a pending change in laxness as a result of the coming changes in 19. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I absolutely love dailydrip.com too on top of Elixir and Elm...those languages paired with such a great learning source is simply phenomenal.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a great little webstack!

</comment><comment><USER18> What makes Elm + Phoenix so good together? I use Elm professionally and love it, but a back end is a back end. Is the love just "I really like Phoenix?" The way people talk about it makes it sound like it is uniquely suited to Elm, which I don't understand.

<comment><USER19> Out of curiosity, where do you work? And are you hiring? Haha. I only know if ~5 companies currently using Elm</comment></comment>


Anybody fed up of those php frameworks? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nblackburn.ca/post.php?post_id=25

<comment><USER2> I guess I see your point, but there typically is a lot going on behind the scenes when $response->write("helloworld"); is executed.

There could be several types of validation, xss/csrf protection, maybe storage to a session variable taking place that makes it unfair to directly relate it to echo 'helloworld';

I think it's about choosing a framework that seems to provide the right tools to solve the problem. Whether you're looking at one that is massively full featured or one that's rather bare, it's really about choice and proper research. Maybe even a day or two of testing out a couple.

</comment><comment><USER3> Frameworks are for those of us tired of reinventing the wheel.</comment>


TastyTrip - <AUTHOR> http://TastyTripApp.com Tasty Trip is the perfect app to use when you are travelling and you want to experience traditional food of a foreign country.
How this app helps you: + Experience Top 20 traditional food and local flavors in foreign countries + Before you order explore how the food looks and how it's cooked.
+ Detailed ingredients information available. + See calories and chef recommendations for each menu
+ Share your experience with your friends + Offline access – app data is kept on your device and can be used without internet connection.
How it works:  1. Select country
2. Slide and choose what traditional food you want to experience.
3. See details for the food you are interested in before you order 4. Share your tasty experience with your friends. <comment><AUTHOR> Please send us your feedback!</comment>


UK Government to stop charging VAT tax on Bitcoin. - <AUTHOR> https://www.accountancylive.com/hmrc-abolish-vat-bitcoin-virtual-currency

<comment><USER2> Guess it's not really fair to tax something that's not worth anything.</comment>


Why there aren't more Googles, redux. (Umair Haque), an alternative perspective to PG - <AUTHOR> http://feeds.harvardbusiness.org/~r/harvardbusiness/haque/~3/271545603/response_to_how_to_fix_venture.html

<comment><USER2> I liked his link about the tech IPO market being dead because of the types of businesses being built not because of lack of interest from the market. Here's the link he was talking about: [http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/how-to-fix- ventur...](http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/how-to-fix-venture- capital-part-2-the-opening-is-as-important-as-the-endgame/)

Does anyone know of any companies that they thought should have been able to IPO but couldn't?</comment>


RSA-210 factored - <AUTHOR> http://www.mersenneforum.org/showpost.php?p=354259 <comment><USER2> To clarify, this is not a new factoring record for products of two primes. RSA-768, a 232-digit number (22 digits longer) was factored in 2009, and that record still stands. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_numbers#RSA-768](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_numbers#RSA-768)

The algorithm used here is GNFS (general number field sieve), which is the same algorithm that's been used for about two decades. In other words, this has no impact on the security of RSA.

More information: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization_records)

<comment><USER3> While it does have no impact in the expected complexity of factoring larger keys, this kind of thing is informative of the maturity of public factoring software: a single person with (presumably) access to a number of machines can pull off this kind of job on their own. Given the number of things that can go wrong in a complex method like the NFS, this is noteworthy.

<comment><USER4> How many servers does Google have? from search results it seems more than 1 million.

I don't know the details of the algorithm but can we assume that Google can factor 20 bits more?

<comment><USER5> The answer to "I don't know what I'm talking about, but can I assume..." is always 'no'.

<comment><USER4> You are wrong, my intuition was correct, the algorithm is pretty parallelizable and I worked in the computer security field.

I wrote an speculation based on the difficulty to read and understand papers before this post is gone.

<comment><USER5> See, now you haven't assumed it, you've researched it.

But are you saying Google could factor all that... if they took all their servers that they ordinarily use for their business, turned their business off, and instead used them to factor an RSA key?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "RSA-210" is the official name for this challenge, but it is a bit of a misnomer. The modulus has 210 _decimal_ digits but about 210 * log2(10) = 697 bits.

EDIT: Wikipedia article says 696 bits.

<comment><USER7> Ah, thank you. I hadn't heard of the challenge and didn't know the size of the number being factored. So this will mainly affect 1024 bit keys, rather than 2048+ bit keys, I presume.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't really even affect 1024 bit keys as even the largest RSA keys factored (this one is close but isn't) are quite a bit far away from 1024 (remember factoring difficulty scales exponentially with number of bits, not linearly). But 2048 bit keys are recommended I believe.

<comment><USER9> For new keys, 4096 is preferred.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it's that simple. A 4096 bit key is extremely unlikely to get you _fewer_ bits of security than a 2048 bit key. But the thing that makes 2048 bit keys a realistic threat is likely to make the "preference" be for something other than RSA entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In case you've never heard of the challenge: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge)

</comment><comment><USER11> From the logs:

 _> Mon Sep 23 11:09:41 2013 commencing Lanczos iteration (32 threads)_

 _> Mon Sep 23 11:09:41 2013 memory use: 26956.9 MB_

 _> [...]_

 _> Thu Sep 26 07:17:57 2013 elapsed time 51:56:44_

I'm not sure that I'm understanding all the details. Does this mean that they factored a 210-digit number in 52 hours in a single machine?

<comment><USER3> No. What you're seeing in that log is only the two last steps in the number field sieve: linear algebra and the square root step. The rest of the details are missing.

The time of the square root is where you are seeing the 52 hours. That time is essentially 0 in relation to the whole process.

You can also see that the last 1033963 - 1026631 = 7332 iterations of Lanczos (on a 64Mx64M ~24GB matrix!) took 15 hours. We can then estimate that the matrix step required around 3 months on that particular setup.

We don't know anything about the sieving, but I'd venture it took significantly more computing power than the matrix, as is usually the case.

<comment><USER12> The sieving stage can be massively parallel and doesn't require large amounts of memory, with enough machines you could perform the sieve stage in under a day (and with more machines within an hour). A 100,000 node botnet could be very useful in this regard.

Knowing when you've got enough relations is an inexact science given there will be some duplicates amongst relations generated on separate machines, so it's not uncommon for a final bit of sieving to be required once msieve is pointed at the combined relations file (which is seen in the log).

It's the block Lanczos and matrix square root steps that cannot be parallelised efficiently[1].

Interest in the various Number Field Sieve algorithms (SNFS/GNFS) is one of the main reasons I started (and finished!) a part time degree in Mathematics to go along with my Comp Sci degree. Next on the list (after a break from 8 years of part time study) will be the M.Sc. courses[2].

1\. It can be parallelised, but not efficiently, i.e. throwing 10 similar machines at the problem does not get the job done in a tenth of the time, only ~95% of the time. No efficient algorithm exists for doing this. Yet. If that does appear then RSA starts to look very very shaky.

2\. The first of which (M820 The Calculus of Variations and Advanced Calculus) can be downloaded from here:

        http://chilli.open.ac.uk/dr9/

Yes, the entire course can be downloaded, (although it's more of a guided read of Apostol than a series of lectures.)

<comment><USER13> I'm not aware M823 can be downloaded (which is the first of the two number theory courses using Apostol)

<comment><USER12> Yes, sorry, got the courses mixed up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was curious as to how the cash prizes [1] for this challenge compared to playing the lottery. Consider the next smallest one left: RSA-768. By my very rough estimates [2], $1 worth of computing time on a typical desktop gives you a probability of 10^-58 of factoring the prime by picking random numbers smaller than its square root.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge) [2] [https://www.google.com/#q=%241+%2F+(%240.09+%2F+kwh)+%2F+100...](https://www.google.com/#q=%241+%2F+\(%240.09+%2F+kwh\)+%2F+100+watt+*+100e9%2Fsecond+%2Fsqrt\(4120234369866595438555313653325759481798116998443279828454556264338764455652484261980988704231618418792614202471888694925609317763750334211309823974\))

</comment><comment><USER15> What hardware is used for the first round of sieving? Is it "just" distributed computing on normal machines, or are they using special FPGA farms?

</comment><comment><USER16> For us that don't understand, what does this mean? Is RSA less secure now?

<comment><USER17> It's as secure as it ever was, it just shows how advancing technology means that you can brute force a larger number. RSA is dependent on math problems that take a fairly long time to solve unless you know one of the base factors. What this is saying is that on a ~$5000 computer, it will take a bit over a couple days to factor a 697 bit RSA number. This is more a demonstration as to why you need to continually increase RSA keysizes -- at this point, a 1024 bit number is probably within range of something a three letter agency could factor within reason.

<comment><USER18> The implication of the parent is that with a ~ $10000 computer you can take a couple of days to factor a 698 bit RSA number. Or $20,000 can factor 699 in a couple of days - $40,000 gets you 700, $80K for 701, $160K 702, $320K 703, $640K 704, $1.28M 705, $2.56M 706, call it $5M 707, $10M 708, $20M 709, $40M 710, $80M 711, $160M 712, $320M 713, $640M 714, call it $1.2B 715, $2.4B 716, $4.8B 717, $9.6B 718, $19.2B 719, $38.4B 720, $76.8B 721, $153.6B 722, call it $300B for 723. We'll stop here because long before reaching this amount you would have realized massive economies of scale such as running entire plants making custom chips. Then again, we're talking about what can be done in a "couple days".

If we extrapolate couple of days, to 4 days we can add +1 bit, 8 days, +2 bits, 16 days +3, 32 +4, 64 +5, 128 +6, 256 +7, 512 (1.4 years) +8, 2.8 yrs +9, 5.6 yrs +10.

By that time again whatever is sitting there is obsolete.

Still, we're up to 733 bits. If we assume some massive growth and large economies of scale it is quite conceivable that $300B gets you a 10,000,000x increase on the bang per buck based on economies of scale alone (23 bits) working with today's technology; or that by waiting, within 5 years breakthrough technology would cause another 1,000,000 fold increase (call it another 20 bits). We are now up to 776 bits. That is just 248 bits away from 1024 bits:

If we make ALL of the above assumptions, and you throw $300B at the problem for 5 years and get to experience 1 million fold better technology and also a ten million fold better price than the commodity demonstration, you can brute force

1 / 452312848583266388373324160190187140051835877600158453279131187530910662656th of the keyspace.

Thus I would say that the demonstration is NO threat of "advancing technology", on the basis provided.

<comment><USER18> I stand corrected by the two replies!

According to this article: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size)

"For example, the security available with a 1024-bit key using asymmetric RSA is considered approximately equal in security to an 80-bit key in a symmetric algorithm (Source: RSA Security)."

"As of 2003 RSA Security claims that 1024-bit RSA keys are equivalent in strength to 80-bit symmetric keys, 2048-bit RSA keys to 112-bit symmetric keys and 3072-bit RSA keys to 128-bit symmetric keys. RSA claims that 1024-bit keys are likely to become crackable some time between 2006 and 2010 and that 2048-bit keys are sufficient until 2030. An RSA key length of 3072 bits should be used if security is required beyond 2030. NIST key management guidelines further suggest that 15360-bit RSA keys are equivalent in strength to 256-bit symmetric keys."

As such my post contains very grave misinformation and should be disregarded!

The analysis in it applies to symmetric cipher key size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> how did they know it was the product of two primes in the 1st place?

<comment><USER14> It's a competition set up with prizes for factoring some 'semiprimes' (numbers with exactly two prime divisors). So unless the challenge organizers had messed up, they were guaranteed this.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge)</comment></comment>


Why A San Francisco Coffee Shop Stopped Tracking Customers' Phones - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/20/why-a-san-francisco-coffee-shop-stopped-tracking-customers-phones/ <comment><USER2> It is tough times for services trying to make a buck off of personal data. Even when the coffee shop owner and Euclid did everything right they still couldn't make it work. While users generally accept the exchange of some direct benefit for their personal data, we have not reached a point where when the user is not directly benefiting from that exchange are they comfortable with it.</comment>


Want to get an internship position and fun? - <AUTHOR>

Hey,
I am looking for some talented student programmer guy or girl to hire as an intern (* not necessarily student de jure).
First project is pretty simple and could be fun to work with — though there are some chances to face with scalability issues, funny tricks, non-mainstream technologies. Though the most important aspect is that that project is about people's (hopefully positive :) wellbeing.
For those who don't me, you can pay a vist to my blog at http://rashkovskii.com/. I am also one of the guys behind StrokeDB project.
Scope of technologies to be experienced (or not): Ruby, Merb, Javascript, Erlang, AMQP, Io, Lisp, ...
You might be also involved into open source development, like StrokeDB or related project(s).
I can't pay much but I can promise fun and experience. If things will go fine with commercial projects (i.e. they will be launched), I will be able promise some stock options/bonus or something like that.
If interested, please drop me an email at email@example.com
Thanks, can't wait to talk to you.
P.S. Sorry for this duplicate post. I posted it 22 days before but haven't got much responses. I am trying to improve it and post again :) <comment><USER2> I'm very interested in discussing this with you and have sent you an email regarding this post. If you could please take a look at that I would appreciate it.</comment>


Coiza.com – access all your social media and other information in one place - <AUTHOR> http://www.coiza.com

<comment><AUTHOR> A social media hub with a difference - subscribe to a growing list of existing channels and, if you're feeling adventurous, build new channels and publish for all to use.</comment>


Shake Shack Filing for IPO at Valuation of 1B - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-04/shake-shack-said-to-aim-for-1-billion-ipo-valuation.html

<comment><AUTHOR> There are currently approximately 50 locations, so that's a value of $20M per shake shack location.</comment>