Please Prove You're Not a Robot - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/opinion/sunday/please-prove-youre-not-a-robot.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> The last few paragraphs go kind of bonkers:

> The problem is a public as well as private one, and impersonation robots > should be considered what the law calls "hostis humani generis": enemies of > mankind, like pirates and other outlaws.

> Improved robot detection might help us find the robot masters or potentially > help national security unleash counterattacks, which can be necessary when > attacks come from overseas. There may be room for deputizing private parties > to hunt down bad robots.

<comment><USER3> I thought this entire article was almost comical, and posted here for laughs. There's nothing new about the weak-minded being influenced by something as simple as being exposed to 10,000 political campaign signs in their neighbors yard. And ticketmaster was already screwed up before bots made it worse, it's just a bad system that has ruined going to concerts for me.

It's helpful for more people to realize how many bots are out there, and where social media spam comes from. But I don't believe it's crashing democracy so much as it's just another tool for corrupt, power-hungry politicians wanting to further entrench the supporters already on their side.

<comment><USER4> "The weak-minded"

Sounds foolish. Even strong-willed individuals can be influenced if the level of external stimuli is high enough.

It's usually those noting that "no, not I!" who are most oblivious to the affects of such forces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On the note of CAPTCHAs, there is a US software patent on blocking requests by presenting unsolveable CAPTCHAs[1]. Just thought that was an interesting thing.

[1] [https://www.google.com/patents/US9407661](https://www.google.com/patents/US9407661)

<comment><USER6> It seems that there's plenty of prior art in unreadable captchas already

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Read all your Philip K Dick. He became popular but he had a very paranoid way of going about exactly this as the article says with the Blade Runner example (which is a Dick story if you didn't know and the article does not mention). The problem is if you mix Bostrom with PKD you get PKD again; a robot law 'telling you are a robot' will never work because once you cross the threshold you will change your circuitry to never tell that. Or maybe even tell it in a joke 'yeah, I am a robot hahaha'.

<comment><USER8> > Or maybe even tell it in a joke 'yeah, I am a robot hahaha'.

In "Surely your joking", Richard Feynman tells how he got away with hiding the door to one of his fraternity brother's room by answering in such a fashion. Interestingly, apparently it was so convincing that no one present even remembered that he had confessed.

<comment><USER9> "Tim: did _you_ take the door?"

"No, sir! I did not take the door!"

"Maurice. Did _you_ take the door?"

"No, I did not take the door, sir."

"Feynman, did _you_ take the door?"

"Yeah, _I_ took the door."

"Cut it out, Feynman, this is _serious!_ Sam! Did _you_ take the door . . ."—it went all the way around. Everyone was _shocked._ There must be some real _rat_ in the fraternity who didn't respect the fraternity word of honor!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > When science fiction writers first imagined robot invasions, the idea was > that bots would become smart and powerful enough to take over the world by > force, whether on their own or as directed by some evildoer. In reality > something, only slightly less scary is happening. Robots are getting better, > every day, at impersonating humans.

This is actually the main plot point of Asimov's 1946 short story Evidence, which was later republished in I, robot (1950). Stephen Byerley is running for office and the main protagonists are trying to figure out if he is human or a robot.

Edit: Removed spoiler

<comment><USER11> wow... that spoiler was actually a spoiler. I was thinking "I should read that" till I hit that last line.

<comment><USER12> You should still read it. It's a very rare gem in the sci-fi literature.

It's amazing in any way you can imagine. In something like 40 pages you get presented with problems from several _very different_ domains -- and proposed solutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have been saying for a while now that our current systems are all relying on the inefficiency of an attacker.

Soon, video and audio of an event or speech be proof of anything.

The only way to prove identity will be to have a device which can do challenge-response.

Without it, you won't be able to prove you're not a robot over the internet.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14786863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14786863)

Forget "hacking elections". A botnet will be able to hack our trust in one another ( _see CIA reputational attacks_ ), AI will be used to chat up girls online better than any person ( _see fb AI sales bots_ ), and so on.

Computers can already beat us at Chess, Go, etc. How much different is humor, honor and reputation once companies add one more breakthrough to deep learning to model them?

An attacker that can make 100,000 jokes a second each of which is excellent? The missing breakthrough is how to automate the "human judging" factor. This is the problem when figuring out diets or treatments etc. Clinical trials take a long time. Same with textbooks.

Once we figure out how to speed that part up, we are going to be able to make AI that knows what's probably going to be funny ahead of time.

PS: _See what I did there? Hint... inefficiency of attacker_

<comment><USER14> >Computers can already beat us at Chess, Go, etc. How much different is humor, honor and reputation once companies add one more breakthrough to deep learning to model them?

ha

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've found Google's RE-Captcha or whatever they are calling it now so frustrating lately. First off, it always seems to be about cars and roads, and it seems pretty obvious they're using this to help their self-driving car technology program. I don't know why but this rubs me the wrong way. It makes me feel like I'm being used to do free work for Google - like a digital miner of sorts.

Second, it doesn't work that well, as in it tells me that I was wrong when I should have been right, and it keeps throwing images at me, making the logging experience quite frustrating. This especially seems to happen around signs, like when you miss a part of a sign's pole or something. Although other times it seems to act the opposite way, and it only wants the middle larger sections. That uncertainty about what you're even supposed to do _exactly_ makes for a bad experience.

The part where it continuously changes the images on you is even more annoying, because you're left there wondering "Do I have to pick many more of these?! Because I almost want to give-up trying to login."

Whatever they did to "improve it", like a year ago or maybe a little less than that, seems broken to me.

<comment><USER16> I've had the same experience. It seems like a lottery as to whether it'll decide I'm not a robot, or want me to help train their computer vision system. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just a few images and took 2 seconds, like text CAPTCHAs, but yesterday I had one that probably took a full minute to complete, as it just kept showing me more pictures of cars. It was really annoying.

<comment><USER17> Even more frustratingly, if you're on a VPN or such, it takes even longer. When at the Chaos Communication Congress (whose uplink goes over a VPN) I gave up after some 3-5 minutes of trying to solve an image classification reCAPTCHA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "A simple legal remedy would be a " Blade Runner" law that makes it illegal to deploy any program that hides its real identity to pose as a human. Automated processes should be required to state, "I am a robot." When dealing with a fake human, it would be nice to know."

what a genius idea. there's no way at all that could be used against people except for spammers

<comment><USER19> And where do you draw the line? If you schedule a tweet to be sent in the future, is that a "bot"? And how to you make sure APIs aren't being used by bots - do you force users of 3rd party apps to enter a 1st party captcha to refresh their session every day?

<comment><USER20> Twitter already identifies what app was used to post a tweet, if you're looking through the API not their app. It would be trivial to display that information and distinguish between apps sent by humans and by automated programs.

<comment><USER19> Sure, but then you're either pushing the responsibility on twitter to monitor how every API key they give out is used and label certain apps as bots, or on the user to look up an app and determine for themselves if it's a human or a bot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Might be easier to establish such a framework of laws and norms if nation states weren't the leaders in this area of technology for manipulating public opinion.

So first try to pass laws to make it unlawful for your government to use tools like these against its own citizens. Then you might have a chance to tackle it more generally, if you can get that far against the self interest of those with the tools and the companies that furnish them.

</comment><comment><USER22> There are also "prove you are a robot" schemes, like proof-of-work.

<comment><USER23> I did a job application once where as part of the application you had to solve a simple math problem that was displayed at a specific URL[1]. The catch was that the math problem was different every time and expired in half a second, so the only way to do it was to script it. I guess its a time-based proof of work kind of thing.

[1] IIRC, the URL would give you a simple arithmetic formula to solve and you would hit another URL with the result, something like /foo/<result> and it would give you a code. You then included the code in the application.

<comment><USER22> That's perfectly automatable, but I guess no one took the time to implement a robot for it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Git a blockchain? - <AUTHOR> Git is based on a merkel tree and I think it makes git the first widly used blockchain.
What do you think about this?
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree <comment><USER2> The key element of the blockchain is proof-of-work as a way to establish consensus: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of- work_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system)

git doesn't have (or for its purposes, need) this, so it doesn't meet any common definition of blockchain.

Prior question: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9436847](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9436847)

<comment><USER3> It's nuanced, but proof-of-work is instrumental in achieving consensus... right now. Truly, the key element is the consensus itself which can be achieved (theoretically) in a number of other ways.

<comment><AUTHOR> In software development using git (without the help of centralized solution as github), the consensus is reached by mail and discussions betweens human people who build software and decide where is the trunk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://medium.com/@shiyan/ethereum- summary-a53c4a8e66d](https://medium.com/@shiyan/ethereum-summary-a53c4a8e66d)

"I found blockchain resembles Git, the source code management system a lot. Git is decentralized, each programer has a local duplication. What's saved by Git is a journal of updates to source files (commits). To get the latest file, you apply a series of patches onto the initial commit. You can generate local git commits. These commits will not be written to other people's Git repository yet, until you perform a "git push". This is like having a local Bitcoin block, but only when you have won a lottery (mined a lucky number), you have the opportunity to write your local block to the blockchain. You also cannot write random data to the blockchain. Your change has to be verified by others, just like doing code reviews before a "git push". Or in Bitcoin, a commit (a data write to the blockchain) has several recent transactions. Each of them needs to be cross verified by others."

</comment><comment><USER5> Ask yourself - is git decentralized? No. Therefore it's not a blockchain. Its bytes live in one single location.

<comment><AUTHOR> Git has been design with decentralized development in mind. It is decentralized by design ... Many user use git in a centralized maner (with github for instance like the old svn and so on ...) but it doesn't make the git core a centralized tool.

So, in my opinion, you're wrong; its bytes lives in many locations.

[https://git-scm.com/book/it/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-W...](https://git- scm.com/book/it/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-Workflows)

<comment><USER5> It's a cloud based architecrure. You work locally, you synch to a cloud. It's not a P2P based architecture. It is centralized.

Is it a blockchain? No.

<comment><USER6> Git is a peer-to-peer tool, but flexible enough to let you use a workflow with a more-equal-than-others peer, or even communicate with actual centralized servers that expose a git interface.

Git doesn't swarm in a way that often gets associated with the idea of "p2p" by the prevalence of more popular p2p protocols used for file-sharing or cryptocurrencies. Nor is it geared towards world-readability. But none of those are intrinsic properties of peer to peer protocols.

I can (and do) use the git software on my computer to pull from co-workers development desktops running the same git software as me. And they pull from me, all with no external servers used coordinate that exchange of trees. That makes git peer to peer. No amount of tools built on top of git that require treating one peer as the a point of centralization can undo that. It just means that _those_ tools aren't p2p.

This distinction is often invisible to users, and I don't blame people for missing it because the business model of GitHub and GitHub-competitors rests on everyone thinking they're necessary.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your accurate answer!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Configuring a secure Ubuntu Linux Virtual Private Server - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dhananjaynene.com/2009/10/configuring-a-secure-ubuntu-linux-virtual-private-server/

<comment><USER2> Nice Article. Good post, Linux can seem tricky to many people with all the flavors, options and settings, ect...

One thing to watch out for when picking a Linux flavor is compatibility with your backup system, or intended backup system. For instance to hot back up the actual operating system of the server Retrospect supports only certain packages such as Red Hat and Suse, plus a few others, many are not supported at all.</comment>


The Crazy Coverage of Facebook's Unremarkable 'AI Invented Language' - <AUTHOR> http://www.skynettoday.com/content/news/facebook-chatbot-language/ <comment><USER2> Many AI doomsday scenarios, e.g. the "paperclip maximizer", all revolve around a common theme: we build a system to do something innocuous and helpful to humanity, but due to its complexity we unwittingly include a reinforcement mechanism that incentivizes it to do something harmful.

It's amusingly ironic how closely those scenarios resemble the clickbait journalism described in this piece. We have a large, opaque system (the news industry) intended to be helpful (by informing us of important events) but which, due to broken reinforcement mechanism (optimizing for clicks), ends up harming us (with alarmist and inaccurate articles).

<comment><USER3> The media has become a "click maximizer" due to its hunger for data.

Maciej Cegłowski has some really good essays and talks (unlike most programmers who do talks, in his case they're kind of the same, especially if you use the transcripts) that touch on this. They are similar, but have enough variety of angles to be worth going through:

[http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm](http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm)

[http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm)

[http://idlewords.com/talks/build_a_better_monster.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/build_a_better_monster.htm)

[http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you....](http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm)

<comment><USER4> > The media has become a "click maximizer" due to its hunger for data.

Oh my god, it's even a pay-per-click maximiser. That is just too good.

<comment><USER5> ...is it possible for a pun to distill the zeitgeist more perfectly than that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the Facebook post near the end:

> Analyzing the reward function and changing the parameters of an experiment > is NOT the same as "unplugging" or "shutting down AI". If that were the > case, every AI researcher has been "shutting down AI" every time they kill a > job on a machine.

How long until this is sensationalized as "Brave Scientists Kept Skynet at Bay for Decades"?

</comment><comment><USER7> Even though I'm an anthropomorphised AI sceptic, I still like to think that somewhere, there's a couple of newsfeed parsing algorithms exchanging amused remarks at the escalation of the whole thing in some weird repetitive pidgin dialect of English

story evaluate ai wrong i i no this story ai ai bad bad wrong wrong i i i next story ai ai ai bad bad bad bad wrong i i i

Or better still, the AI trying to understand human language by modelling how many scary adjectives will be packed into the next iteration of the story and how many more clicks it will garner as a result.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am reminded of the two Google Home devices "talking" to each other: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv2CiA1taF0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv2CiA1taF0)

<comment><USER9> Something similar happened over 50 years earlier:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/when-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/when- parry-met-eliza-a-ridiculous-chatbot-conversation-from-1972/372428/)

EMACS used to have a command called M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead, which generated a conversation between Eliza (M-x doctor) and Zippy the Pinhead.

<comment><USER10> Immortalized in an RFC: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc439](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc439)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really love the way that this article is written. It's super condensed and informative (with plenty of links) in a way that made me immediately subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for sharing

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you think so! We intend to keep writing news coverage in precisely this style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems that the real story about invented language is how the AI manipulated the media to come up with increasingly less credible headlines and stories about an AI research paper. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of the hype that surrounded the Creativity Machine in the late 90's, if anyone remembers that.

[http://www.imagination-engines.com/](http://www.imagination-engines.com/)

Along with pointing the finger at "media sensationalism" I think we should also implicate the strong fear/desire we have towards achieving a strong AI. If anything looks like it could belong to a strong AI, _holy crap, could this be the start of a strong AI???_ I'd draw a parallel at how eager we are to hear that there might possibly be some sign of life on another planet. Perhaps this sort of confirmation bias comes from our sense of loneliness as a species.

</comment><comment><USER14> I, for one, am looking forward to the next AI Winter.

</comment><comment><USER15> > "AI models optimizing to use nonsensical communication is not surprising nor > impressive, which makes the extremely hyperbolic media coverage of this > story downright impressive."

Exactly! However, there is one thing common between those clickbaity articles and the language they claim AI bots invented: "Nonsense"!

</comment><comment><USER16> What is interesting about a bot-on-bot negotiation? if the AI had any performance against a human it might be worth caring about.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sadly, overblown coverage of the latest blog post by Google or Facebook seems to be norm, especially since those two companies in particular have been loudly beating the AI hype drum over the last few years. Tech news sites are of course more than happy to oblige in the interest of driving clicks.

The root of the problem is that most tech writers aren't actually technical experts at all, let alone engineers with a degree in the field they're covering. So while they love to look down their noses at the mainstream media's clumsy coverage of scientific and medical advancements, these same "tech journalists" can routinely be found making the same kinds of inaccurate and outright misleading claims.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> TLDR: "AI models optimizing to use nonsensical communication is not surprising nor impressive, which makes the extremely hyperbolic media coverage of this story downright impressive."

Part of our new project Skynet Today - Accessible and informed coverage of the latest AI hype and panic.</comment>


Ask HN: What forums/communities do you frequent aside from HN? - <AUTHOR>

It could be any community around any interest. I'm trying to broaden my horizons in terms of communities.
I reminisce upon old days of forum browsing. After awhile it feels like your home on the internet. You know most users, you get personal with users, you develop a community. On websites like Reddit and HN it's hard to establish that level so I'm looking to get back into foruming.
What are some cool communities out there? <comment><USER2> Funny, I have spent years trying to escape the small town/small-minded feel of most online communities. I favor larger sites these days, where there is somewhat less entrapment or entrenchment due to personal politicking.

That being said, I currently spend more time on MetaFilter than on HN. I sometimes don't show up here for months at a time. As an openly female member, I have found this boys club in many ways less than welcoming. Possibly not a good thing to admit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ruby Rogues Parley - a paid email list (that is now a Discourse forum) around the Ruby Rogues podcast.

It's basically a private forum for technical topics in Ruby. Pretty high signal-to-noise ratio.

</comment><comment><USER4> At a risk of stating the obvious... StackOverflow/StackExchange. Not a forum per se, but definitely a community. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean in the more traditional forum sense. That layout still doesn't make me feel like I know anybody, and it's missing the crapshoot banter/offtopic forums.

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Obviously Slashdot. It isn't quite as huge as it once was, but it's still thriving and has some great headlines (though the quality of comments has been stuck in Eternal September for a while now).

Then again if you're looking for message boards, I don't really participate in any, so I can't help you there.

<comment><USER5> Slashdot still generates some great discussion and has quite a few smart people participating. The moderation system is brilliant and keeps the perceived signal-to-noise ratio of the comments high, even if there are a lot of pointless comments (they're just made effectively invisible).

I still worry what Dice will do to the site when they inevitably get around to redesigning the desktop interface. The new mobile interface is IMHO much less functional than the old one.</comment></comment>


Occupy Big Business: The Sharing Economy's Quiet Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://euraeka.com/articles/9310005-Occupy-Big-Business-The-Sharing-Economy-s-Quiet-Revolution

<comment><USER2> Forgive me for the analysis, but I feel like the author lumps way too many things together and the argument is too scattered. What the article is really about is how entrepreneurship is changing the way business is done, but the author jumps around from social responsibility to collaborative consumption to mutualism without drawing the ties between them sufficiently.</comment>


Is Firefox winning the browser war? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techzim.co.zw/2012/05/is-firefox-winning-the-browser-war/ The recent news that Chrome had overtaken IE had me wondering about the future of Firefox. Surprising the browser has some good news on the marketshare front! <comment><USER2> As someone who has used IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox and Chrome I can't help but think that this is all irrelevant, IE is failing, slow and ugly.

MS can try to redeem it but the damage has already been done, companies and home users are switching over to chrome and FF, either for speed or plug-ins.

In my personal opinion, Chrome usage will rise, Google will use it to push their google+ service and this will either succeed or push "purists" who prefer non-conformity or hate to be forced in to viewing the same adverts again and again for a service they don't want to use to swap to FF.

Regardless of the future war between FF and Chrome, Microsoft are too slow moving and get left behind, they are not innovative enough in the modern day ,although so.cl looks to be a promising addition to the social networks we already have and will hopefully improve the accuracy of searches made on bing through its use.

I and many others will continue to use Chrome, until Mozilla come up with some amazing new functionality, IE will drop users till it dies (lets face it, most of the users only use it because they either got it with the computer and don't know there are other browsers or because their corporation has had it for years and refuses to change. Don't forget that military organizations who had plugins made for IE6 which aren't forward compatible refuse to move, I have direct experience of asking one of my British special forces friends from high school why exactly he was browsing in IE6) and then the internet will rejoice, for microsofts clunky browser will no longer be dragging back W3C innovations with it's lack of inter-release support.

Anyway, that was extremely longwinded and biased.

LT;DR: IE is dying, long live Chrome and Firefox.</comment>


Handling 1B requests with Symfony 2 - <AUTHOR> http://labs.octivi.com/handling-1-billion-requests-a-week-with-symfony2/ <comment><USER2> Click bait. They mention that they can handle 700 req/s with Symphony, then HAProxy helps to scale up to 1600 req/s. The 1B figure is in 1 week.

<comment><USER3> More specifically, requests are routed through HAProxy to Varnish, and then, if not cached, they'll hit the backend. I'm surprised they couldn't get up to 5-10,000 req/s, honestly. Maybe payload size/bandwidth limited.

500+ req/sec is decent for a Symfony app, so they should've focused on that metric and the app itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please update title: 1B/week requests

</comment><comment><USER5> or using units not chosen for dramatic effect: 1653 req/s

<comment><USER6> How they got Varnish to run so slowly is indeed an interesting result :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Damn, that dependency injection code inside comments... How long will developpers tolerate this kind of mess ?

</comment><comment><USER6> In what, a decade?

Seriously though, this is "Handling 1B connections in a week with Varnish".

</comment><comment><USER8> So basically strip Symfony2 to nearly nothing? (they removed rendering engine and orm)</comment>


Mailbox App Revolutionizes Gmail Productivity – Will Google (Or Apple) Buy It? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/02/17/mailbox-app-revolutionizes-gmail-productivity-will-google-or-apple-buy-it/

<comment><USER2> I sincerely hope not. I think the problem is the way the App Store makes companies race to the bottom in price. Why can't they charge me (and the other 1M users on the waitlist) $1 a month as a subscription fee? I realize things will not even out completely (not all 1M users would pay $1/month), but I really do think it would be enough to sustain a true business. When these companies get bought their true feature set (and thus user base) dies out. Just look at what happened to Sparrow...

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anybody recommend a similar mail client for Mac? I've just been using Mail's flags to maintain inbox zero but am always looking out for a better alternative.</comment>


Qian Xuesen dies at 98; Co-Founder of JPL and China's space program (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-me-qian-xuesen1-2009nov01,0,2865408.story <comment><USER2> Linus Pauling quit Caltech over this, having fought to the highest levels of the government to allow Tsien to visit his dying (father? grandfather?) in China.

The man was accused of being a Communist so harshly, he decided he'd rather actually be one and returned home regardless of the US refusal to grant him a visa to make it a round-trip.

What a waste.

re: [http://books.google.com/books?id=NrG7fgW0ybEC&lpg=PA112&ots=...](http://books.google.com/books?id=NrG7fgW0ybEC&lpg=PA112&ots=2ftc1TuHSh&dq=pauling%20tsien&pg=PA112#v=onepage&q=pauling%20tsien&f=false)

and [http://archives.caltech.edu/news/tsien.html](http://archives.caltech.edu/news/tsien.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> In his [autobiography][1] von Karman has a whole chapter (or two) dedicated to justifying why deporting Tsien just based on suspicion was a bad decision.

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Wind-Beyond-Theodore- Pathfinder/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Wind-Beyond-Theodore- Pathfinder/dp/0316907537)

<comment><AUTHOR> Imagine, in your twilight years, being able to watch the culmination of your life's work.

 _" The elderly Qian was able to watch China's first manned space mission on television from his hospital bed."_ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen)

Whatever the politics, he was recognized by his peers as being a genius, a great rocket scientist, and that will be his legacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would not forget that he was co-founder of China's missile program too. And given how many Chinese-Americans turn out to be passing secrets to China, it's pretty disingenuous to go 'oh, he only worked for them because the US mistreated him!' He would be far from the first person whose loyalties turned out to lie where you would expect them to lie.

        Let them go home? This issue has come up before. The Feds locked up H. S. Tsien [Qian Xuesen] back in the 50s because they thought he was pro-Chinese and would aid the Chinese rocket program. When they finally let him go, that's exactly what he did.

        There have been many cases in which key individuals have been allowed to go home and fight with their homies, due to chivalry or some other form of stupidity. in 1861, the Feds let many officers go home and fight for the Confederacy. Radomir Putnik, chief of the Serbian general staff, was taking the waters in Austria when the First World War broke out. They let him go home – were they ever sorry! Gernot Zippe, an Austrian POW in a Siberian camp, built a workable centrifuge for separating isotopes. Yet, to my lasting surprise, the Soviets let him go in 1956. He became the Johnny Appleseed of nuclear proliferation [along with Eisenhower - Atoms for Peace].

[https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/who-can-you- trust/](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/10/01/who-can-you-trust/)

<comment><USER5> Oh yes, as a Chinese let me remind you that from news we have learned that there isn't just Chinese American accused to betray the US government, but other ethnic groups too. So, maybe all of us are guilty then.

What kind of stupid idiot you are, by your stupid accusation.

Because of your stupid reasoning, let me construct some ideas:

By your reasoning, we should stop hiring Chinese and Russians because they are known to be hacker-active states. I should be thankful that I received a security internship back in summer and my employer should be glad I had a great chance of being a Chinese spy, injecting backdoor, because I care about my origin and I read Chinese newspaper in addition to New York Time because I happen to like NYT.

And so when certain ethnic groups celebrating their ethnic holiday (Mexican, African Americans), we should be careful because they have a spiritual attachment to their origin (or their parents' origin) that they are also likely to be spy or going to be working for their mother country.

Sure we can't assume they won't. I mean I see American born kids turn into terrorists and there are people who just decide they have enough of US government and run to another country (right, you know, those run to North Korean).

We should also note that UK immigrants might have a tendency to take back US as UK's colonies, and Canadian should be careful of US immigrants because there is some people who believe US should own Canada too.

Right?

<comment><USER4> > Oh yes, as a Chinese let me remind you that from news we have learned that > there isn't just Chinese American accused to betray the US government, but > other ethnic groups too. So, maybe all of us are guilty then.

No. Different groups have different risks. That is the point. Someone ethnically Chinese born and raised in China has a different risk of being a spy for China than a white Mormon who has never set foot outside North America.

> What kind of stupid idiot you are, by your stupid accusation. Because of > your stupid reasoning, let me construct some ideas:...Right?

No. Please read what I have read, and not what you think I have read. Your absolutist reasoning, without any probabilities but with tons of exaggeration, is not applicable to what I have said.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been." Theodore von Kármán

<comment><USER7> "Too often is the inventor the faustian idealist, who wants to improve the world, but fails at the hard realities. If he wants to realize his ideas, he has to cooperate with powers which have a better sense of reality than him. Today such powers are, without making a value statement, primarily military and managers. [..] From my experience the chances of an individiual to defend themselves against such pacts are rather low."

\-- Konrad Zuse

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen#Return_to_China](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen#Return_to_China)

He seemed to have had a very interesting political career in china as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Back I was in China, I remember reading news that appears Chinese government was really happy Dr Qian was forced to return. Dr. Qian is really high profile in the sense of academic achievement. I don't think there is high enough salary to attract him back to China with his own free will. It got me thinking. Speculatively, is it possible that Chinese government made a deal with US government secretly to get him back? There are a lot of deals between two governments...

<comment><USER10> I can't imagine what that deal would have looked like but I guess if they were clever enough they could have caused him to fall under suspicion pretty easily.

<comment><USER9> I'm thinking more in the form of technological trade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So was he really a spy, or the suspicions were unfounded? If latter, then the cost of losing his talent and subsequent achievements to another nation seem quite high.

<comment><USER12> > his brilliant career in the United States came to a screeching halt in 1950, > when the FBI accused him of being a member of a subversive organization

Yep, looks like the FBI created the problem they were ineptly trying to prevent.

<comment><USER13> And everyone needs to ask how many deserving scientists are being mistreated in a similar manner by being labeled as bogeymen with _du jour_ -isms of our time.

<comment><USER14> James Watson for starters</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stream and Go: News feeds for 300M users, built on RocksDB and Raft - <AUTHOR> https://stackshare.io/stream/stream-and-go-news-feeds-for-over-300-million-end-users <comment><USER2> What issues did they run into with Cassandra? It's not easy to build a scalable database like Cassandra. There are good reasons to write your own distributed storage system but the authors need to add more details about Keevo and specific issues they ran into with Cassandra.

<comment><USER3> Main developer of Keevo at Stream here and you ask a very good question. I've asked myself the same question quite a lot. And I think it actually warrants it own dedicated blog post at some point. To give some idea though, the main reasons are, cost, simplicity, control and wanting to have a very good understanding of the database internals.

Cassandra is very scalable, but it's not very efficient. The hosting costs for our cassandra cluster were so big that it was infeasible to run it in another region as well.

Appart from that we've had (partial) downtime a couple of times because one node just started going crazy because of unclear reasons.

Keevo solves this by not trying to be cassandra, but be much simpler. It doesn't do schema's or indexes. All it is is a very fast ordered key value store that is stored to disk and replicated automatically to multiple servers (using raft). Any other features we need, we build on top of this usually outside of Keevo itself. This simplicity saves us a lot of hosting costs and makes its performance much more predictable and easier to debug.

Last but not least a very important advantage is control and understanding of the database internals. Because we build Keevo ourselves, we know the performance and consistency tradeoffs it has and can change/improve them when needed.

I hope this helps in understanding our choice. It's definitely not something I would recommend for most companies, but since our product is storage at its core it makes sense for us.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the comment and look forward to the dedicated blog post :)

Was Riak KV ever considered?

<comment><USER5> Wasn't riak, like, less efficient than cassandra ?

<comment><USER6> What do you mean? I think Riak is much simpler and after tuning it beats Cassandra on the same HW same use case in my anecdotal experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> @tschellenbach: congrats on your achievements!

This is yet another Python success story. You created a viable product with Python and moved critical parts to Go when there was real need for doing so.

Considering Go has _only_ been your primary language for 9 months, as the beginner's style code base is optimized for all that Go has to offer you'll continue to see more performance gains, albeit probably not as significant as you saw between v1 and v2. Good on you for not being tied down with optimizations and actually releasing.

"With Python we often found ourselves delegating logic to the database layer purely for performance reasons. " \-- you mean you wrote postgres functions.. or.. views!? _gasp_! heresy! Why would you migrate something working perfectly well in postgres away to Go, though? You probably didn't achieve any performance gains with that. Were postgres functions really gobbling that much memory up? Or.. maybe my assumptions are wrong here.

<comment><USER8> I actually think that's not a "Python" or "Go" success story. It's a story of how both of them lack something significant: Python lacks speed and light memory usage, Go lacks dev speed and expresiveness. There is no reason why a single modern language can't combine them, and that would be much better than managing a codebase in two languages, so it's a success story of a useful compromise

<comment><USER9> The article says they saw improved productivity after switching to Go, how does that point to Go lacking dev speed or expressiveness?

<comment><USER8> I am disagreeing with the parent's point. His point is that Python is better for prototyping which implies that in the beginning people can be quite more productive with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dis-sys The title contains "rocksdb and raft", but the article doesn't give any details on how the Keevo key-value store is designed using rocksdb + raft. You can not figure out how they manage data with raft (how many raft groups in the system? do they split the group when it reaches certain stage?), there is no mention on the design choice of not using etcd raft which is the most popular one in Go. They didn't mention how they test the system, Jepsen or in-house monkey testing? They do have a Keevo link in the article but it says "Sorry, we couldn't find that page".

On the Go side, since they mentioned that rocksdb is written in C++, I am interested to know the cgo issues they might had when using Go and rocksdb together, but of course they didn't mention that. Same goes for the GC stw pauses.

I strongly believe that articles like this largely used as soft ads materials without much detailed technical meat should be banned from Hack News. If it is all about "we built system X using building blocks Y and Z in language T!", what is the real value for readers?

<comment><USER10> We currently use the Raft Go implementation from Hashicorp (the article links to the Github project). We found Hashicorp implementation mature enough and easier to work with than the one from etcd.

Using Rocksdb with Go has indeed its own challenges because CGO calls are far from cheap and have an important consequences on Go applications. For performance reasons, we ended up moving some logic from Go to C in a few hot- spots (eg. moving the retrieval of large amount of keys from Go to C).

Disclaimer: I work for Stream and I am one the two co-founders

<comment><USER6> Could you elaborate on Keevo? Could you compare it to Riak or Cassandra for example? Do you have any plans to open source it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I envy you guys to build such great technical product and being able to sell it.

I would love to know also the "business history" of the product: how you started, the first sale, the marketing approach and how you move from there...

</comment><comment><USER12> Stream always looks interesting, until I hit their pricing page, where I see this:

Starter, $59/month, 5 million updates

Growth, $269/month, 9 million updates

Wait, what? To increase the updates by 80%, the price jumps by 356%.

I understand they're throwing in higher processing and custom ranking. That's still approximately the most absurd pricing variance on one plan to the next on a scaling service that I've ever seen.

<comment><AUTHOR> The difference is large because we have a free tier of 3 million feed updates. So practically the first plan is paying for 2 and the 2nd for 6. The free and small plans make it easier for developers and smaller startups to start using Stream. I see that you're founder, want to send me some examples of pricing that you like? (email is in my profile)

<comment><USER12> You do realize that what you actually just said is: the difference is large because your valued customers in the second tier with the gigantic 356% price jump, are paying for your perhaps overly generous free plan.

What you maybe should have said is (speaking from a sales perspective): the reason there's a 356% jump in price, is because of an incredible value proposition step up of 1,000% in what you're getting!

I think that price gap is a classic, and very large, opening for a competitor. There's a ~$89-$129 style plan missing in there, that is a logical step up from $59. That's obviously just my opinion. I also happen to be a big fan of charging more rather than less, in the service space; that under-charging is a common mistake young companies make. And I still can't make sense of $59 to $269 as a step.

I launched a new business in the last quarter. It has a user feed system that is fairly standard. I've built several feed-like features in the last decade. I looked at Stream a while back, having run across it while trying to avoid building my own again. The good news is, I like your product, it got my attention. That price jump between plans, for a very modest increase in service volume, made it a non-starter. It's too easy and cheap to build my own, which then gives me tight control over its evolution over time as well. It's basically impossible at your price points to compete with what I can just do for myself relatively quickly; that $269 product can be run on a low-cost Digital Ocean droplet in terms of its actual resource demands. You're charging for the quality of your software product primarily, and some support, which makes perfect sense. The problem, is that I can build that and scale it to the $899 plan and save myself $10k a year. If you could do 10 million updates at ~$50-$75 / month, with normal plan stepping from there, it'd be interesting. 250k to 350k updates per day is not an immense sum, just 20,000 daily active users can saturate that pretty easily.

<comment><USER3> Engineer at Stream here and I'm really not the guy to talk to about pricing.

However, I can tell you that our features that are hardest to implement in a scalabale way are aggregated feeds (e.g. one message with "tom watched 10 videos") and custom ranking (reddit/HN style ordering with time decay and points). If you're feed system doesn't have either of these features it might indeed be possible to do it cheaper than our more expensive plans.

However keep in mind, a lot of the cost is in the availability and reliability of our service. Basically for every type of server we run (including databases), we need to run at least two to be able to stay online in case one dies. Finally building and maintaining a feed system is not cheap in terms of developer cost (try finding a dev for $10k a year).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Let's do some math and take their metrics and divide by their number of servers:

\- 6.3 million feed updates per day per server

\- 111 API requests per minute per server

If you guess 4 cores per server it even sounds worse.

(Ps, will HN ever support better formatting?)

<comment><USER14> They measured their response time using average. Collecting metrics to look good.

Since we can only speak in broad terms, those requests/updates aren't going to be evenly distributed throughout the day and they might not be consistent from day to day so some over-provisioning is reasonable.

Since they're on EC2 a) they shouldn't be _that_ over-provisioned though and b) are getting comparatively (to bare metal) awful performance (say 2x-8x depending on exactly what they're doing) and paying for the privilege.

I'd like to better understand why "Fanout-on-write" wasn't their go-to solution. All they said was that it was "expensive".

<comment><USER15> How does fan out write help?

<comment><USER14> Lets you shard and makes your reads dead simple (1 table, 1 predicate, 1 sort)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like you guys have gotten some surly comments from people here but I enjoyed reading this. It was just enough information to get me interested in researching some things for my own project.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting, what do you think about rocksplicator [https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/open-sourcing- rock...](https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/open-sourcing- rocksplicator-a-real-time-rocksdb-data-replicator-558cd3847a9d)? And also pika ([https://github.com/Qihoo360/pika](https://github.com/Qihoo360/pika))

</comment><comment><USER18> The Stream Framework[0] is still in Python with Cassandra. The Go version with RocksDB is not open source.

[0]: [https://github.com/tschellenbach/Stream- Framework](https://github.com/tschellenbach/Stream-Framework)

<comment><USER19> This blog post does raise the question of what's going to happen to Stream Framework, now that the hosted version is diverging so clearly...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd be interested in reading, even if very high-level, some additional details about Keevo. I'm most interested in what the API exposed by Keevo looks like, how it's utilized, and what parts of it are nice/lacking.

</comment><comment><USER21> The jagger logo is indeed awesome! ([https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger](https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger))

</comment><comment><USER22> Sometimes it's so hard for me to determine whether half of the stuff on HN is real news or just advertisement.

A news feed for 300M is child's play when you consider that the content is pretty much static.

"Go and RocksDB and Raft" hit all the keywords but what makes this post relevant for HN?

</comment><comment><USER13> Yeah! More product ads masquerading as technical blog posts. Even submitted by the CEO.</comment>


Linkedin is down - <AUTHOR> http://linked.com <comment><USER2> You know it's been years since I saw a website with a loading graphic that would sit there and spin before the main page rendered.

And yet, that's what LinkedIn's new design has managed to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also they seem to have pivoted to business management system

</comment><comment><USER4> You had ONE job and it was to link to linkedIN.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh yeah, I can't update the URL now, fail on my part.

<comment><USER5> for a moment I thought that was clever spam

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> linkedIN.com is up for me.</comment>


Japanese color chooser - <AUTHOR> http://nipponcolors.com/

<comment><USER2> Clicking each color changes the background color to match and displays the Japanese word in kanji and more importantly, roman characters.

</comment><comment><USER3> In Opera 11.01, I can only pick one color, then the squares stop having any mouseover or onclick effect.

What is this for?

</comment><comment><USER4> The munsell effect makes very impressive use of 3D CSS. (At least in Safari.)

</comment><comment><USER5> for people having issues, this thing requires Safari</comment>


My companies don't buy advertising or pay famous people to fake endorse-ElonMusk - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/977258647641141248 <comment><USER2> besides himself of course.</comment>


Radiolab takes down episode "Truth Trolls" - <AUTHOR> http://www.radiolab.org/story/truth-trolls/ <comment><AUTHOR> When I heard this I had to listen to it. Found it here: [https://iono.fm/e/461744](https://iono.fm/e/461744)

I love Radioloab, and anticipated sympathizing with them in this episode. However, I must say I think their coverage was rather callous and sympathetic to the trolls. Their thematic point was pretty tenuous. While the trolls' abilities are impressive, they are pitiful assholes.

We don't have to think Shia's art is good to respect that he's attempting something very moral. And even people with a dark sense of humor (me) should respect when that humor makes others feel truly sad and afraid.

Some opinion: [https://davechen.net/2017/08/radiolab-removes-truth- trolls-p...](https://davechen.net/2017/08/radiolab-removes-truth-trolls- podcast-episode/)</comment>


Show HN : unhackable, atmost secure credit card terminal (pos) - <AUTHOR> http://www.psfk.com/2012/06/pay-with-finger-swipe.html

<comment><USER2> It's a cheap fingerprint scanner, probably coupled with an access code. Unhackable? Seriously??

There is a reason those things disappeared from all the laptops over the last few years.</comment>


How did we discard the idea of college faculty? - <AUTHOR> https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/2019-03-27-childress <comment><USER2> "We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded local auto mechanics: by making all of the systems and regulations so sophisticated that they now require an army of technicians and specialized equipment."

This only means that technology changes and many industries are maturing. This is a good thing.

"We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded bookkeepers: by finally letting women do it after decades of declaring that impossible, and then immediately reducing the status of the work once it became evident that women could, in fact, do it well."

I never saw any supporting evidence that we are suddenly paying professors less because we know more women are getting positions.

Once a professor is tenured, they can pretty much do anything they want and have a job for life. I can't really say that about any job I've ever had.

I also don't think being a professor was ever a path to riches and wealth. It was a way to do what you love and still make a living.

<comment><USER3> > We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded cab drivers: > by leveling the profession and allowing anyone to participate, as long as > they had a minimum credential and didn't need much money.

This is hardly an apt comparison. The skills required to drive a cab were never worthy of credentials beyond a driver's license and and a background check. The ride sharing companies didn't lower the bar for this job at all. They just rightly opened it up to a lot more people.

<comment><USER4> > The skills required to drive a cab were never worthy of credentials beyond a > driver's license and and a background check

In some cities, taxi drivers were expected to know the vast majority of the streets, such that a passenger could get in, say where they wanted to go, and the driver would know where to go and how to to get there. No looking up in maps, or using an A-Z, just go. They would be tested and certified in this too.

Ride sharing companies + navigation/route planning apps have reduced the barrier to entry tremendously, but they have also reduced the quality of the drive, as drivers no longer actually know where they're going. They have also reduced the ability for abuse, thanks to being permanently tracked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems pretty obvious to me, lots of people want to be professors and there are only a limited amount of spots. Being a full professor is highly, highly prestigious so many people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot to attain that position. That drives pay down and makes it very competitive to get some of the few spots available.

Also the commoditization of education has made full "professors" less necessary from the perspective of the college/university. For the vast majority of students at the vast majority of colleges who just need to take the required classes to get their chosen major so they can get a certain type of job, they don't need research professors, they need someone who knows the material and can teach a class. I don't think adjunct teaching positions should pay as little as they do but since so many people want to be adjunct professors as opposed to pursuing careers in other fields, it drives down the cost of hiring adjuncts.

What can we do to fix the problem? The federal government can require a certain ratio of PhD student:professor positions to receive federal research funding, so the ratio balances out across all the school. Decouple being a research professor with being a teacher of tertiary education (adjunct professors aren't really professors in the same sense as a full professor anyway). Get rid of tenure so universities don't perceive giving out full professorship positions as risky.

<comment><USER6> > It seems pretty obvious to me, lots of people want to be professors and > there are only a limited amount of spots. Being a full professor is highly, > highly prestigious so many people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot to > attain that position. That drives pay down and makes it very competitive to > get some of the few spots available.

The real problem is that the people who should know better, the people who run Ph.D programs for disciplines whose only career prospects are in academia, decided to graduate more Ph.D's that they were willing to hire. Those guys control _both_ supply and demand, and are perfectly capable of balancing them.

<comment><USER5> I don't really think it's on the onus of the individual lab to ensure there are enough jobs for all their PhD students _within the same lab_. It's kind of both a tragedy of the commons (individual labs/departments don't want to hire more PhDs and less full time researchers/professors because it reduces output/$) and externality (research groups have no responsibility to ensure it's actually a good career move for their students to get PhDs) issue. That's why I think part of the solution needs to come from the top down to balance things out. Can't happen at the scope of the individual university

<comment><USER6> > I don't really think it's on the onus of the individual lab to ensure there > are enough jobs for all their PhD students within the same lab.

I didn't mean the department should hire its own students, just that it shouldn't graduate a higher number than it's willing to hire. So if they have 5 open positions, they should hire 5 from the market, but then only train and graduate 5 or so students (who can find jobs elsewhere) to maintain balance.

<comment><USER7> The problem is: new PhDs are made in just few years, but then they need a job for a lifetime. So, after you've graduated those 5 or so students you're willing to hire, are you gonna close your PhD program for the next 10 years? What about people that want to study out of the genuine interest in the field, but can't, because there are no universities taking students? What if one of them is a new Einstein, that would revolutionize the whole domain?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When are we going to stop being surprised that blind market forces don't always result in optimal outcomes for everyone? Nobody is designing these systems; they're emergent.

<comment><USER9> There are massive subsidies in higher education, especially at the PhD level (many are had for free, plus stipend).

A system with only "blind market forces" would not have subsidies, and many prospective PhD students would look at the job prospects, the tuition bill, the living expenses, and the opportunity cost of working for 5-8 years, and decide to do something else. The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why so many people pursue them. This is a market distortion, not unfettered market forces.

<comment><USER10> >The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why so many people pursue them.

Yet it doesn't explain why they don't leave once they're done. Even the author points out how irrational he is. When I was in grad school a little over a decade ago, the realities of academic life were clear _for anyone who cared to look_. In his day, things were likely different - such information was hard to obtain.

I know it's harsh, but if you have the brains to do a PhD in today's age, you have the brains to do a quick analysis on your prospects in academia.

If someone gets a BS in CS with the aim to get into FAANG, and never does, and has a nervous breakdown because of it - I wouldn't blame FAANG or the software industry.

<comment><USER9> > _I know it 's harsh, but if you have the brains to do a PhD in today's age, > you have the brains to do a quick analysis on your prospects in academia._

Totally agree. For some folks, it's just an easy way to defer making other tough decisions, plus it's prestigious, plus there's optimism bias.

And I think students naively believe that since universities create PhDs and hire them, they would not purposely create an oversupply of PhD grads. This feeling that universities are acting responsibly is probably bolstered by the fact that universities are nonprofits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> University administrators responded to the market glut of PhD's according to the laws of supply and demand, particularly those running huge endowments who in reality only need the university itself as an excuse for the endowment - from this point of view expensive tenured professors should be replaced with the academic equivalent of cheap immigrant labor. This was not a "we decided" as I understand the use of that phrase.

<comment><USER12> Do you have any evidence for these statements?

In my experience, it's generally the budget-strapped universities that choose to replace tenure-track professors with adjuncts.

On the other hand, private universities with very large endowments tend to be prestigious and part of maintaining this prestige means hiring tenure-track professors to teach undergraduates, mentor graduate students, and to do research.

<comment><USER11> Do you have any evidence for those statements?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I frankly blame funding institutions like the NIH and the NSF for this situation. They readily fund lots of cheap graduate students rather than pay for experienced techs. This leads to the glut of PhDs even in fields where there are jobs outside of the academy. Too many of them (myself included) think we can make it in the system, having been sheltered by our supervisors and who themselves may have an outdated notion of what it takes to succeed. So like people who want to be movie stars there are too many for too few jobs. Although we never had a formal union, when administrative jobs were filled by late-career academics it sheltered us from market forces. Now with the corporate-minded boards and professional administrators that shelter has been removed leading to the "cost saving" adjuncts.

</comment><comment> barry-cotter Well, in the case of scientific and engineering disciplines the government decided that having lots of PhDs and having them be cheap was helpful so they set up a system to that end.

> During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower > wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic > study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the > flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private > economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and > demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the > bizarre 'supply only' demographic studies released to the public. Through a > bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the > literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release > of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for > the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of > documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the > NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.

> The title of this study was "The Pipeline For Scientific and Technical > Personnel: Past Lessons Applied to Future Changes of Interest to Policy- > Makers and Human Resource Specialists." The study was undated and carried no > author's name. Eventually I gathered my courage to call up the National > Science Foundation and demand to speak to the study's author. After some > hemming and hawing, I was put through to a voice belonging to a man I had > never heard of named Myles Boylan. In our conversation, it became clear that > it was produced in 1986, as predicted, immediately before the infamous and > now disgraced demographic shortfall studies.

[https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why- gove...](https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-government- universities-industry-create-domestic-labor-shortages-of-scientists-high-tech- workers)

</comment><comment><USER14> The answer to this question is: when the financialization of higher education began. That's when it was decided.

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't it nearly impossible to fire a professor once they earn tenure? Seems like pretty good job security to me.

<comment><USER16> As a former tenured professor (not fired, I resigned to go work on my startup) this is not true. Yes it is nearly impossible to fire you directly, but what the universities do is play musical chairs. Every couple of years (sometimes every year) there is a reorganisation where there are fewer positions than tenured professors. Guess who gets cut when this happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> it's pretty hilarious how my uncle, a prof with almost no teaching background, talks about profs with tenure. "the most spoiled lazy [expletive]" while hes moved to admin, makes the average "upper middle class" salary (in canada), I know a phd in accounting that moved to the states and makes more than his peers (no one wants to do accounting theses)and still trying to maximize earning esp looking outside of academia and lives pretty frugally

<comment><USER18> Maybe tenured professors nearing retirement are lazy, but a basic requirement of getting tenure is working at least as hard and usually harder than all your peers. At a certain level, everyone's smart and the only differentiator is hard work and luck.

<comment><USER17> well... yeah duh

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ever since we created a huge glut of phds by encouraging people to go into fields that have no market demand. Next question. (Fun fact: those underemployed professors are just teaching the next generation of underemployed academics. It's turtles all the way down.)

<comment><USER20> That is certainly part of it. As someone with a phd in a field with no market demand I tell anyone with doubts about whether they want to go to grad school not to. However, there is also the immense growth in adjuncts and non-tenure positions. In the last department I was in there were 5 tenure track positions, 4-5 people on three year contracts (which they have since cut back on) and like 10 of us that were either on one year contracts (which the school eliminated which led to me getting my current job) or "part time" faculty that they didn't have to pay benefits.

<comment><USER21> You say "however", but doesn't this just reflect the same problem? There are a lot of people with phds who want these jobs, so they are willing to accept these adjunct positions. In the past, when there were fewer excess phds, nobody would have accepted a position under these terms.

Personally, I have no problem with professors getting paid less. My only objection is that these savings don't appear to be passed on to students. When we get much more efficient at manufacturing computer hardware, one of the benefits is that anyone can buy a capable device for $300 or less. But when we get more efficient at generating phds, and therefore have a much greater supply of teachers, the savings are not apparent in tuition prices.

<comment><USER22> Tuition will not drop until we see a tightening on student loans. As long as lenders are giving out vast sums of money to kids with no job and no credit, there is no reason to drop tuition prices.

Higher tuition wouldn't really be a problem if it weren't for the fact that many people who take on these massive debts are later unable to secure high paying jobs that let them pay it off in a timely fashion, turning them into debt slaves for the better part of their life (or maybe all of it). That's the risk you take though.

<comment><USER23> Or if student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy.

<comment><USER22> Too late for that now. These debts can never be discharged without grave consequences for the economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> CS, engineering, and business professors make good salaries and have good job security.

I'm a CS professor.

</comment><comment><USER25> Most jobs don't have tenure.

<comment><USER26> Most college instructors in the US today don't, either, and aren't in positions that will ever be eligible for it. That's the point.

<comment><USER5> Why do instructors deserve tenure?

<comment><USER27> The theory, as I understand it, is that without tenure or a mechanism like it people might not feel empowered to research controversial subjects, or draw conclusions which challenge conventions, for example.

<comment><USER5> What I was implying was that instructors =/= professor. Don't really think adjuncts need tenure any more than public school teachers (though I know some public school teachers in certain districts can get "tenure")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's already been said that, essentially, most PhD graduates are in a state of delusion - the truth is that nobody would make a rational decision to become an adjunct. This is very true. What I think still needs to be said that most PhD graduating institutions actively perpetuate these delusions. (In disclosure, I am associated with an academic institution doing academic research, but I am not an adjunct. Thankfully.)

There is really next to no value in taking on PhD work at an institution below a certain threshold. Nearly all tenure-track positions go to candidates with a very select background. They must have graduated from the top 30 (or so) institutions in their field. They usually have done a postdoc at another peer institution in that class. They need to have produced a large number of publications, which usually means having well connected collaborators, especially your PI/advisor. If you do not have this background, you stand little chance of even being considered for the tenure track.

That being said, the lower tier institutions are less capable of supporting their faculty, so they pad this with cheap labor in the form of PhD students. The selection hierarchy begins even before graduate school - whether you attend an elite institution in your field is a major academic accomplishment in itself. Many are tempted to take the consolation prize when they don't make it, and the faculty at the lower tier schools are all too happy to accommodate them.

The tenured faculty will never change this on their own. They are the winners, whose continuing success depends on a ready supply of people who are deceived into thinking that they actually have a shot. For some, this deceit is only a moderate one - if you are at an elite school you have maybe a 1 in 10 chance. For most, the rate is approximately zero. Very few people are willing to really give their students a realistic assessment, but in the end it doesn't matter whether they do anyway. Graduate school is like trying to get published as a novelist, or becoming a professional athlete. Everyone wants that kind of status. Heck, you can definitely support yourself, depending on what level of asceticism you can tolerate and how lucky, well connected, or (rarely) brilliant you are. It is just that the vast majority makes very little money/status, and a privileged few make a large amount. There will never be a shortage of people who try to make it anyway. Some would say the entire enterprise depends on it.

(edit - clarification)

</comment><comment><USER29> Simple answer? They are still teaching with what's been given to them.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why does this article pretend that we collectively made a decision to punish professors and not that the effect of supply and demand in a free market is the cause?

<comment><USER31> It's absurd how many examples of the collective action problem are treated this way every day, on HN or in media more broadly.

<comment><USER32> the article itself does a pretty good job of listing all the other cases where a previously respected and well paid profession has been affected by market forces.

Of course, it ascribes malicious intent for all of them, too.

I think the paragraph about journalism was probably the most pertinent. No-one decided to relabel journalism as "content" to be produced by designated "content providers". Pre-internet only journalists had a way of publishing their opinions. Post-internet everyone does. The simple law of supply and demand means that opinions are less valuable now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wallace Sayre's Third Law of Politics holds that "academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."

</comment><comment><USER34> They forgot buggy-whip makers and telephone operators.

Seriously, good riddance to the ivory towers. College is a racket-- you have to pay big bucks, tenured profs can behave pretty much as they want to, and the books game is legalized thievery. As recent news articles have shown, the rich are shown the short line through.

I can't wait for MOOC 2.0 to bring quality, affordable education to anyone who wants it.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's a pyramid scheme and the top of the pyramid (which was always small) is shrinking.

</comment><comment><USER36> I hate to sound mean spirited, but I have a hard time being sympathetic to intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously don't pay well. If you like being on college campus, teaching, and don't care about money - hey, that's fantastic. More power to you. Be an adjunct professor. If you do care about money - think about a different career.

I just don't get why this is a problem. You chose to study mideval literature. Chose to get a PhD in it. Chose to be an adjunct professor. Kept choosing to keep doing it, etc. If it's a bad job, stop doing it.

<comment><USER37> We should fund medieval literature well too. Some of the best CTOs are humanities people for whom engineering just isn't fully satisfying at intellectual life scale.

Applying symbolic logic, hermeneutics, retroduction, and criticism are higher abstract levels of creative problem solving, via inference to the likely explanation with respect to priors, a.k.a. the scientific method. These kinds of reasoning simply aren't practically doable by math alone yet, not to mention deep learning tools in the field.

The next wave of AI methods will need to go beyond statistics to come full circle, because classification is not reasoning. What else is there? All the GOFAI stuff, prolog, expert systems, knowledge graphs, fuzzy/modal logics. These things were always great at reasoning but the last winter happened because they were bad at dealing with uncertainty. Now the stats methods have solved that problem but they suck at reasoning. It is time for a synthesis.

As a startup I don't want a data science PhD to tinker with an optimal CNN design for a year to eke out that extra 1 or 2 percent of precision and recall. I want an ensemble of specialized models, ideally pre-trained, grafted together in a logically consistent way that is configurable and introspect- able via text/data at runtime.

The economy is misconfigured! That said, humanities people should probably learn how to code as a research skill.

<comment><USER38> When I was doing a training exercise in the military, I was talking to an Air Force General who told us that their best cybersecurity officers had undergrads in non-tech fields. They said that computer science and software engineering undergrads weren't good at thinking outside the box because they were used to questions being provably right or wrong with no middleground. Their officers with political science, philosophy, or other humanities undergrads were better at handling big picture problems that needed a "best" answer, not necessarily a verifiably 100% correct answer. They needed more technical training after graduation, but usually ended up being superior cybersecurity officers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> the same way we decided it was ok for all the other teachers.... Koch brothers said so.

<comment><USER19> Fun fact: US teachers are paid, adjusted for purchasing power, above the OECD average: [http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond- school/48631286....](http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond- school/48631286.pdf). Around the same level as Norway, England, and Finland, and above France or Sweden.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What about school teachers?

</comment><comment><USER41> Since higher education became a commodity, that's how.

</comment><comment><USER42> Let's not leave out decades of state budget cuts. Higher ed took most of the brunt of it. Baby boomers went to college for free, then as soon as they got theirs, voted up all the tax cuts and right wing people leaving the next generation with much less.</comment>


Baidu's CEO Declares He Can Beat Google Again - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-07/baidu-s-billionaire-ceo-declares-he-can-beat-google-again <comment> EZ-E He can and did beat Google because the Chinese government has and will never let Google succeed in its domestic market against the local champions

<comment><USER2> Which, to be fair, seeing how this megacorporations are behaving (data, taxes, ...) makes a lot of sense.

<comment><USER3> How does it "make sense"? Are you implying that the local company will behave more ethically? Baidu is also a mega corporation, that will surely allow the government access to your data at a whim. Right now, it is merely stifling competition leaving the users without choice.

<comment><USER2> It will for sure comply with local tax rules, unless it is doing something illegal.

As it stands, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, ... do not pay adequate tax rates in the EU. If we had local companies, we would not lose billions in tax revenues thanks to tax loopholes created by the US government, to benefit US corporations.

Regarding data management: will that be any worse compared to what the big five are doing? From the cuntry's point of view (and its citizens, one would assume), is it better that your government is spying or you, or that foreign corporations / governments are spying on you?

Put another way: are you more worried (as US citizen I assume) that the NSA / FBI are spying on you, or that the russians / chinese are spying on you?

<comment><USER4> At the risk of going off into the political weeds: define "adequate". The proper tax rate for a company to pay is, by definition, the amount they are required to by law. No more, no less.

<comment><USER2> We have legal framework for taxes. Corporations work around it by creating massive costs by paying phoney IP bills to their mother companies. The EU is trying to end these practices, but it is taking time.

If the companies were local, it would be much easier. Said another way, none of the big local companies in the EU are using this kind of setups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All you people saying all governments favour local companies are, in my opinion, completely delusional.

Counter-evidence one: Google is #1 in Europe. That's sufficient to squash your point.

But also: You seem to have no idea what China is like. Foreign companies will get government-supported mobs to break into your office and trash the place, during daylight hours for hours, and the police will refuse to show up.

The best you can do is call the police and say "this mob slamming at the doors make me fear for my life. If you don't get me out of here I'll call my embassy and say there's a hostage situation". Suddenly the… no the police doesn't show up… the police tell you that the mob will disappear soon, and you have 5 minutes to leave before they come back.

<comment><USER6> That's the first time I read something like that, no sources on google seems to pop-up, nothing on "mobs china foreign countries". It's obvious that China's biggest companies are tied to government, but I would be surprised if this didn't make to the news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> who knew it wont be that hard to crush your competition when you have the backing of your authoritarian government.

<comment><USER8> are we talking about Google or Baidu here?

<comment><USER9> Google has the backing of the US Government?

<comment><USER10> Anyone thinking they don't are incredibly naive. It won't help them in the Chinese market obviously.

<comment><USER11> Last I checked it was still legal to use Baidu in America, which can't be said for Google in China. Please tell me how you think they're comparable, because I guess I am one of those "incredibly naive" people.

<comment><USER12> I betcha if Baidu were to get any significant traffic from the US it would be a different story.

<comment><USER13> Just like we banned Toyota and Honda when they started destroying GM and Ford's marketshare. Or like how we banned Samsung when they started competing with Apple. Or...

<comment><USER2> Let me continue that for you:

\- or when you apply illegal tariffs n steel, cars and whatnot

\- when you apply sanctions to a country respecting the commitments it signed

and so forth ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I mean seriously, what else would any CEO say? 'Sorry, we give up. I instructed our board to shut down the company?'

</comment><comment><USER15> Baidu has some (nice?) open source packages(google stack clone), like tera (bigtable clone), bfs (hdfs clone) etc. Anybody tried using them ?

<comment><USER16> You know "open source" has a very different meaning in China.

<comment><USER17> In China there exist several different terms. But hey, do most people even know the difference between Free Software and Open Source? It depends really on who you talk to; lets say a manager mostly will look at a cost perspective, while a software engineer might see benefits for integration, and even then mostly driven by the fact it is easily available, and perhaps even only consuming it. this is can also be different for most other places; Europe is more idealistic in the approach than America/US.

Note: European; Now I live in Beijing/China, help projects with consultancy for open source, did this for many years for companies... and now work for Red Hat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's worth noting that Baidu having a global presence allows the Chinese government to use it to attack their cyber enemies, so China has a vested interest in growing Baidu. Last time, China used the Great Firewall to weaponize Baidu's analytics worldwide for the largest DDoS in history against github in 2015 because github hosted two projects that allowed Chinese citizens to get around the Great Firewall and read the New York Times uncensored.

</comment><comment><USER19> > The world is copying from China

Sure. Ask any customs officer. Like it or not, the free markets in the United States created the greatest technological advances of mankind. China has nothing on that. Some lousy chip makers and cheap labour won't be able to compete with anything done in the US.

Also if Baidu was so great, try competing in the US or on neutral ground like Europe.

<comment><USER20> The free market in the US has created the biggest corporations known to mankind. However a drive to monopolise an industry doesn't necessarily equate to technological advancement. In fact often it can lead to the opposite effect where there is a lack of motivation to innovate once market penetration reaches a certain threshold.

The ironic thing is the free market in the US seems to be a one way street. There's a push for deregulation whenever it allows corporations to behave with moral ambiguity. However corporations often love legislation if it raises the barrier for entry for new start ups wishing to compete.

But going back to your original point, there have been plenty of great technological advances from China and Europe. Easily more than enough to dismiss your insinuation that the US has a monopoly on technological advancement, let alone the wider point regarding free markets.

<comment><USER16> That's bullshit. We have insanely large US corporations precisely because RoW didn't innovate. They (US-based tech) simply make better products.

<comment><USER20> Size doesn't equate to quality though. eg even when Microsoft was at it's peak it's fair to say they didn't keep pace with innovation (aside finding new ways for their software to hog memory and CPU). All too often it takes an underdog to shake things up.

However what the size of US corporations does prove is that the American system is better for building dominating businesses. But I'd already said that in my previous post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "We can now, with real knives and real guns, PK them again, win again,"

I read that as poesklap!

<comment><USER22> Dis 'n woord wat ek nooit gedink het ek sal ooit op HN lees nie...

<comment><USER23> Dutch: Dat woord had ik nooit verwacht om op HN te lezen

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thing is 86% of people in a recent China poll indicated they would use Google instead of Baidu. Baidu has the market share but not the love of their users.

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17660364/baidu-ceo- google-...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17660364/baidu-ceo-google-china)</comment>


Bay Area Storm Watch - <AUTHOR> http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/11/0900Z/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-115.81,34.51,1154

<comment><USER2> It took me a few mins to realize that this page is interactive. Press the "Earth" button to set time/date, move to current location, height of wind currents, overlay, etc.

<comment><USER3> It appears to be an interactive control for changing your laptop's fan speed.

<comment><USER4> Web 2.0: making your top-of-the-line i7 desktop feel slower than an 80s mainframe.

But at least you don't have to declare types on the variables! Such productivity!

<comment><USER5> Web 2.0: making the computer work so the programmer doesn't have to. You get a beautiful, interactive visualization with near-real-time data that runs on every platform (even my phone!) with a single codebase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dr. Jeff Masters adds some color to this data on his blog[1]. Also note the second vortex off the Canadian coast[2].

[1] [http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?en...](http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2877)

[2] [http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/11/0900Z/wind/surface/l...](http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/11/0900Z/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-128.81,45.74,1154)

<comment><USER7> I don't know why people are so worried about the lack of snow at this point. There is plenty of room in the reservoirs for rain at this point. Maybe later in the season the snow will become important, but at this point I think CA can store lots of liquid water

Some reservoirs can't be filled this early as the need to leave space for flood control, but the big ones have so much extra room I imagine they can store every drop.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it works that way.

A few of the large California reservoirs, like the San Luis Reservoir and Lake Berryessa, get their water from storm runoff in mountains that don't typically accumulate much snow, but a large amount of the water storage in California comes from Sierra or Trinity snowpack.

Unfortunately, a lot of California storm drainage is designed to move the water to the ocean as quickly as possible, to prevent flooding. I think most of the rainfall in the Bay Area that doesn't soak into the ground will find its way to the delta or to the Bay rather than a reservoir.

Think of it this way: cumulative snowpack is a massive year-round reservoir in California. See e.g. [http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article3505269....](http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/environment/article3505269.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool (eh, hot?) and impressive visualization!

Don't know which was first, but it reminded me of the wind map from hint.fm, originating from 2012: [http://hint.fm/wind/](http://hint.fm/wind/) . That one presents a nice black/white impression of wind conditions in the USA, whereas this visualization from Cameron displays a broad range of weather conditions around the globe with multiple visualization styles. Impressive what's possible with D3...

[Edit: oh, hint.fm was mentioned as inspiration on the GitHub page [https://github.com/cambecc/earth.](https://github.com/cambecc/earth.)]

</comment><comment><USER10> Thats not a storm, this is a storm: [http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/11/0900Z/wind/surface/l...](http://earth.nullschool.net/#2014/12/11/0900Z/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-8.13,51.46,1154)

<comment><USER11> I recall visiting my uncle in Arizona for Thanksgiving one year. In the afternoon, it rained _maybe_ one centimeter. It was the first thing on the evening news.

<comment><USER12> First time I was in California, it was September. I get off the plane and the recruiter picks me up in a convertible.

"See that cloud?" he points.

"Yep"

"That's the first cloud I've seen in almost three months"

I found that a strange thing to say.

A couple of months later, I get off work and go back to the apartment. I'm watching Jeoprady and they do one of these "Action News Storm Team 7" break- ins. They cut to the meterologist who's pointing out breaking news on the triple doplar jetstream radar or whatnot.

It's rain. Looks like a tiny shower, maybe 500 yards across.

The guy says "Looks like this storm will be headed across I5 very soon, so motorist should be extremely cautious"

<comment><USER13> a small snow storm will debilitate the valley and bay area... stuff like that just doesn't happen too often here.

On the i5 rain the threat is real on first rains as the roads have trace oil that will wash off and cars will shed months of carwash soap residue.

<comment><USER14> I've heard that before - is it urban legend, or is there some truth to it?

<comment><USER15> It's in the CA DMV handbook that the roads are most dangerous in "first rain" conditions. You get tested on it!

<comment><USER14> Sure; I've answered that question on that test. It seemed odd at the time, to find an urban legend in the DMV test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Love this visualization. Ben usually references it every day on [https://www.youtube.com/user/Suspicious0bservers](https://www.youtube.com/user/Suspicious0bservers)

</comment><comment><USER17> Very pretty. But, despite what the web site shows, Silicon Valley is currently at 63F/clear/calm. The site shows wind speeds of 36km/h. Not sure where they get their wind data, but it's clearly low resolution.

<comment><USER18> SF is so calm right now; i can't believe all the storm build up; we'll see at tomorrow's commute

<comment><USER19> Yep, it is a few minutes past midnight and I can hear the light rustling of trees. No rain or anything 'stormy' yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> No beautiful graphics, but the stacked graphs and draggable index line seem information rich:

[http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/Sunnyvale.html](http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/Sunnyvale.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> Look very nice on Mobile Safari, gestures and visualization is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks like the storm affected archive.org's datacenter:

[https://twitter.com/internetarchive](https://twitter.com/internetarchive)

</comment><comment><USER23> I would love to see someone use this visualisation as the background to a "the weather in X is" mobile weather app

</comment><comment><USER24> Flying from LAX to SEA tomorrow evening... hope I'm not stranded at the airport :(

<comment><USER25> If you manage to leave, that's going to be one hell of a takeoff.

<comment><USER26> Cancelled my flight from SEA to SFO, which was supposed to land at 9AM Thursday. Pretty sure whether indefinite delays or cancellation I wasn't gonna get on that plane.

<comment><USER27> Doing the opposite; SFO to SEA, but on Friday afternoon. Should be no problem, but you never know with SFO. I've personally had good luck with that airport but delays seem SO common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Where do people in the bay area generally get their news?

<comment><USER29> Got a few options.

[http://www.sfgate.com/](http://www.sfgate.com/) [http://www.insidebayarea.com/](http://www.insidebayarea.com/) [http://www.sfexaminer.com/](http://www.sfexaminer.com/)

[http://www.kqed.org/](http://www.kqed.org/) [http://abc7news.com/](http://abc7news.com/) [http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/) [http://www.nbcbayarea.com/](http://www.nbcbayarea.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> this looks fantastic.</comment>


Amazon Underground – Amazon's Android App Store - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/underground

<comment><USER2> Take a look at the permissions before you install. Remember it can install or alter any software it wants to. And remember that the regular old Amazon app on Android (that was banned from the Play Store for sneaking in an app store) is automatically installing this for you without you asking.</comment>