U.N., Unicef, Red Cross Under Ongoing Mobile Attack - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/un-unicef-red-cross-mobile-attack/149556/ <comment><USER2> If anybody has doubts how bad this could end for aid workers, here's an article about their current situation in Syria[0].

Summary: they are somewhat certain to die when Assad's army takes over northern Syria and manages to identify them as aid workers, even remotely connected to anything we would consider "good". The agencies are trying to burn all their local paperwork to protect their employees' identities.

[0]: [https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/10/am...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/10/america- policy-syria-deadly-end/600682/)

<comment><USER3> > Throughout eight years of civil war, Syrians who tied their fortunes to the > changing whims of American policy have been systematically arrested, killed, > and driven from the country.

> First it was protesters chanting for democracy—many took encouragement from > Barack Obama's statement in the summer of 2011 that the country's dictator, > Bashar al-Assad, should step down. But the U.S. government looked on as > protesters were killed or disappeared into the regime's teeming prisons.

It's as though the US government is on a mission to prove they should not be trusted. I hope most can get out of there somehow, this is very unfortunate

<comment><USER4> > It's as though the US government is on a mission to prove they should not be > trusted.

I would consider that mission solidly accomplished at this point.

<comment><USER5> Seriously, does anyone in the US or outside the US, in government or outside of government, anywhere in the world trust the US government? I seriously doubt it.

<comment><USER2> Yes, of course people usually trust the US government. We do so every time we get on a plane, keep money in USD, or run Windows, MacOS, etc.

That doesn't mean the US was flawless before Trump. It had its flaws, just like any other government. But generally, they were trusted in scenarios like above, but also, for example, by diplomats to at least try to keep their word even across administrations, or by travellers not to be asked for bribes at the border.

People have become rather cynical and won't believe me, but still it is worth mentioning: before Trump, politicians, including the presidents, almost never _lied_. On occasion, they would try but fail to make good on a promise. Or they would err, or go to great lengths to avoid answering a question.

But actual _lying_ , as in saying something wrong and repeating it even after it was pointed out to be wrong? It barely ever happened.

<comment><USER6> _> Yes, of course people usually trust the US government. We do so every time we get on a plane, keep money in USD, or run Windows, MacOS, etc._

Trust isn't binary, nor does it exist on a single dimension. I might use the products and services of US companies, I might conditionally trust the judgement of some US government bodies, but there's always a heavy set of caveats.

I wouldn't trust a drug that had been approved by the FDA until it had also been approved by the European Medicines Agency. I would trust a NIST standard for metrology, but I certainly wouldn't trust a NIST standard for cryptography. I wouldn't ever allow a European customer's data to be stored in the US, or to transit US networks in plaintext. I trust US-made hardware and software about as much as Chinese-made hardware and software, which is to say I assume it's heavily backdoored. I haven't ever trusted the words of a US administration, red or blue; I do broadly trust that Merkel or Macron will mostly keep their word and mostly honour international law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > They noted that mobile web browsers also unintentionally help obfuscate > phishing URLs by truncating them, making it harder for the victims to vet > the legitimacy of the pages.

JFC... I never understood why that "improvement" was necessary in the first place. Now its causing real harm out in the world. Kind of infuriating.

<comment><USER8> It's the same with email and email phishing. They should show the full email address.

I think it's MS Outlook that only shows the name in email chain when forwarding. So once the first person tricked forwards the email, info is lost and prevents future readers noticing the phishing email address

<comment><USER9> >I think it's MS Outlook that only shows the name in email chain when forwarding.

I complained to support about Outlook iOS doing this, not just for forwarding... but all received emails display only the name. I receive AppleID phishing attacks constantly to my old hotmail account, Microsoft helpfully sends all them to my inbox and Outlook shows them as from 'Apple' unless I click the sender name and then it shows something like email@example.com. Their link scanner is effective around 50% of the time. It's not good enough.

Microsoft does not consider this a bug or a threat in any way. I have been active about this on social media and have had my screenshots and complaints picked up by largish accounts like @swiftonsecurity.

At this point Microsoft is complicit with the phishers. Oh well, not the first time an entire industry thrived off their lack of security.

<comment><USER10> They do this on desktop Outlook as well. It's really great when you work at a company where two people have the same name, and you have to click seven buttons to see who sent the mail. Or you get added to a forward chain and you really can't tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _They noted that mobile web browsers also unintentionally help obfuscate phishing URLs by truncating them, making it harder for the victims to vet the legitimacy of the pages._

I hate when my phone / browser truncates or hides URL's.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why is this article so focused on TLS/SSL (8 mentions) certificates? They present it as like having a certificate is something hard or unique.

<comment><USER13> You know how we've spent four years training users to expect https, by deprecating http in the major browsers? That's resulted in many, many people believing the padlock icon means the site is "safe". I expect that applies to the person who wrote the article as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > There are two domains that are hosting the phishing content, live since > March 2019. The associated IP network block and Autonomous System Number > (ASN) are known to have hosted malware

At which point the article fails to include the one actionable piece information - the IP blocks and ASNs.

It's so like the tech press to write a comprehensive article that omits the only info that could actually help.

<comment><USER15> It feels like you are supposed to blindly believe them, and if you are left with questions, well, you are just a nerd so they don't care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The original source has more information and wider list of targets (UC San Diego, Heritage Foundation, United States Institute of Peace): [https://blog.lookout.com/lookout-phishing-ai-discovers- phish...](https://blog.lookout.com/lookout-phishing-ai-discovers-phishing- attack-targeting-humanitarian-organizations)

</comment><comment><USER17> What kind of dirtbag would choose those organizations to attack? That's the lowest of the low.

<comment><USER16> They've always been intelligence targets. Any organization closely tied to regional conflicts, and therefore intelligence agencies and the military, is going to be a target.

Red Cross and Unicef show up everywhere there's a serious conflict. Often the very first western organizations there. The job of most intel agencies is to keep their governments up to date on those conflicts. Especially one involved in plenty of global conflicts like Russia.

I'm sure the US embeds agents with them all the time.

<comment><USER18> Also good for outrage, the main ingredient of modern media. Once the enemy fires on a Red Cross branded outpost, they must be the bad guys, no matter how many of the doctors were actually intelligence operatives.

Using NGOs like this should be as unacceptable as using outright human shields, but as always, it's different when the perfidious foreigners do it.

<comment><USER19> > Once the enemy fires on a Red Cross branded outpost, they must be the bad > guys, no matter how many of the doctors were actually intelligence > operatives.

I mean, yes? At what number of intelligence operatives would firing at Red Cross workers be a good thing?

> Using NGOs like this should be as unacceptable as using outright human > shields

Yes. But, like human shields, firing on them with disregard will indeed make people think you're the bad guys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The unusual aspect of the campaign is that it identifies mobile devices; > once detected, it then logs keystrokes in real-time as the user enters them > into the phishing page.

You don't even have to hit submit, hopefully not autofilled.

<comment><USER20> Auto password fillers don't fill on the wrong site; they are actually a great defense against this kind of thing if you get it right the first time and then are very suspicious if it ever doesn't auto fill.

IMO, browsers should have site bookmarks to replace EV certificates, where you can bookmark a site and give it a name and the name appears where the EV company name used to.</comment></comment>


A California DMV employee who napped at work every day for 3 hours - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/california-dmv-employee-napped-every-193200185.html <comment><USER2> FTA: "The unnamed data operator will reportedly not be disciplined because the infractions weren't documented properly"

That pretty much says everything you need to know about California government service.

<comment><USER3> I think this has less to do with California's "government service" and more with general mismanagement. This kind of thing probably happens at every job, and a competent supervisor would have recognized and corrected this at the very first infraction.

From the actual article: >The employee's supervisors failed to discipline her, despite noting in her performance evaluations that she routinely slept on the job, the audit said.

[https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/California-DMV-worker- sl...](https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/California-DMV-worker- slept-3-hours-a-day-on-the-13101363.php?t=6928e007fb)

<comment><USER4> With this s kind of history of brazen dusregard for your responsibilities, this person will do this many times over.

If they eant to fire her, they will get their chance sooner or later, all they have to do is br dilligent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The stuff that happens in the private sector is far more f'd up than any of these anecdotes we love to talk about in government.

<comment><USER6> But I'm not paying for those

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is why government jobs are not the answer.

<comment><USER8> Yahoo News doesn't cover cases of lazy private sector employees.</comment></comment>


Instafall – Location based multi column viewer for Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://instafall.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been using Instafall quite a while and it was continuously being improved. For the time being besides a viewer like TweetDeck i.e adding users or tags as columns, it also supports nearby posts and locations as columns.

Instafall also has a Twitter account[1] and as far as I can see they listen to their users.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/instafallapp](https://twitter.com/instafallapp)</comment>


Ask HN: How Much Experience Required Before I Become Self Employed? - <AUTHOR>

I have a dream. I want to work from home and eventually form a partnership with other programmers and have sort of a virtual office where we work on a (one or more) software products, all of us from home.<p>My question is, how much experience with a 'real' programming job would you expect/want me to have before taking me seriously? At the moment I only have 2 years professional experience, one of those years at one of the biggest tech consultancies in the world (for what it's worth). <comment><USER2> i would take you seriously after two things happen:

1) you take yourself seriously, and

2) you can show me examples and proof that you should be taken seriously (i.e., past work, competent answers to questions, etc.)

thats about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Give me a link to your code repo and then we talk.

</comment><comment><USER4> Save up a year of living expenses.</comment>


HN new startup feedback: Taskforce - collaborative task manager - <AUTHOR> http://taskforceapp.com/

<comment><USER2> I've seen so many "collaborative task managers" -- I doubt that the tool is the problem. More the fact that people don't like to do this type of tracking, reporting, etc.

<comment><USER3> I am often tempted to make my own. I am held back by the fact that there are so many out there and I am unable to articulate what is wrong with them exactly. Which leads me to believe that I am not really looking for that kind of tool - I just think that I am.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice one! I'd like a bit more description on the screenshots - I could tell there was an iphone app and something added to gmail, but a quick tagline like 'Manage tasks through your inbox' could be nicer :)

<comment><USER5> I agree some more text under the headline would be good, as at first I wasn't sure specifically what I could gain from this, compared to the plethora of task mangers out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I stayed 30 seconds of the page and I didn't really understand what taskforce could do for me as a developer. Here's what I think it does.. maybe it will help you make the main page clearer for others.

First, I'm not sure if it's a mac application, iphone app, gmail app.. all of them?

Second, in the gmail screenshot, there's a kind of window on top of the email, does it look actually like this? Is it the application that parse the email..? I didn't get it.

Third, what's the flow of the operations..? I mean, I register.. is it an app I download or a web app? Then, I create a project.. and I add other developper in it? How they join and use my project to view tasks?

Fourth, say I don't use my email to assign task to other developpers, what taskforce does differently?

As you see, I'm a bit perplex about what taskforce does :D

</comment><comment><USER7> Please focus on expanding your website's information. What is Taskforce, exactly? What are some of specific features that make it better than every other task manager out there? These are key questions that should be addressed right off the bat. Right now users are forced to go through a registration and evaluation process just to learn the answers, and most people (including me) won't bother.

Also, please be careful with hyperbole: it's unlikely that Taskforce will actually save "hours per day" on something that most people perceive as taking only minutes per day.

This criticism is well intended, and I wish you the best of success.

</comment><comment><USER8> Something I think would be very useful: recurring tasks that allow anyone in the company/team to complete them, or with round-robin assignment. Would be used for those things that have to be done but nobody wants to do them.

<comment><USER9> That's a good idea. I regularly see people just dropping stuff they don't want to do. One could just create a simple algorithm to work through say a client services team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really like the Chrome extension! Look forward to seeing it on my cell too. Things.app is too specific, this looks a little more collaborative.

</comment><comment><USER11> The slideshow on the front page could be much more effective. With the speed of the transitions and smallness of everything in the pictures, I feel I didn't get a good representation of what the product does. I think it might be helpful to have a short product description (more than 'making work easier' - very ambiguous) in a large font above or below the slideshow.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would like to see #twitter style hashes that could be easy to use in the updates. Also, this hashing may be helpful with any medium communication. For example, if there were to be a posterous style update let's say via email with a #subject, Taskforce can perhaps automagically bring up relevant emails re:#project. Just a wild thought :-)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> HN people can sign up at: <http://taskforceapp.com/register>

<comment><USER13> Finally a solution to task mgt and email integration that makes sense!! Thank you task force team!! I like the chrome extension - wondering when I'll be able to get it on my desktop (windows user). Oh and btw I love the user interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> the mac app won't launch for me

<comment><USER8> It doesn't launch from the within the .dmg, but it starts if you put it in /Applications (at least for me)

<comment><USER15> That works, but launching the application gives me a swirl that hangs forever.

<comment><AUTHOR> The hanging swirl should be fixed. Thanks for the feedback.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Photos at Microsoft Corp (1979) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sound-photo.com/microsoft/microsoft.htm <comment><USER2> And this is what these folks are up to now.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-1978-photo-2011-1?o...](http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-1978-photo-2011-1?op=1)

Some of them have done reasonably well.

<comment><USER3> _After that, it doesn 't look like she did much else. She raised her children and became a volunteer_

Not a great way to phrase things...

<comment><USER4> Or we've all just become hypersensitive to something that doesn't necessarily mean what you are implying.

...is what I was going to reply with, with examples of how replacing the component parts of the sentence may change how it's interpreted. Then I looked at the source article, and saw that it's a followup sentence after describing how she sued Microsoft for sexual discrimination. Regardless of how it was _meant_ to be interpreted, that's some pretty poor awareness of context on the author's part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the guys (white shirt and brown corduroys) is Mike Courtney. He and I worked together at Seattle's Retail Computer Store, alongside Bob Wallace (Quickwrite & Shareware) and Tim Paterson (MS-DOS).

</comment><comment><USER6> For those of us who've spent our entire careers in the networked, computerized office, it's interesting to realize that at the time Microsoft was setting the goal of having a computer on every desk, there wasn't even a computer on every desk _at Microsoft_.

<comment><USER7> Given that we still haven't achieved the paperless offices that many want, sometimes I start feeling like not much has changed over the last couple decades, but this album really illustrates the difference. It is rather humorous to look at just how much PAPER they used in development. Developers using paper binders of documentation, tractor feed prints of code, etc... it's nice that at least those days are mostly over!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If it were possible to send a modern software engineer back in time to that era, would they have _any_ usable or employable skills in such an environment? (besides the uncanny ability to correctly predict the future)

<comment><USER9> Would they want to be _employed_ in such an environment?

Imagine spending long hours trying to fit your code into 128k?

<comment><USER10> Try 64K on a PDP-11. Or writing assembly to fit into (say) 16K of ROM on a Z-80 or 6502; that's terrifying, because ROM is forever and you do a 6-8 week spin if you make a mistake. (EEPROMs? Sure, at about 8X the cost of a ROM).

Mostly you'd be up against:

\- No Intenet to look up reference material. For that you have books. I'm not sure how much of a revolution the online Unix man pages were, but I'd not worked on any other system that had that kind of documentation. Hope you have lots of bookshelf space (I did :-) ).

\- No GUIs anywhere. There was Emacs, kind of. Mostly you got along with ed and regexprs.

\- Frustrating toolchains; pre-ANSI C, with 7 characters of significant symbols on earlier systems. I don't remember if any Unix debuggers had symbol information, but they were all command-line driven at the assembly level, with no source information. That's okay, you could pretty much tell where you were by the assembly, because the optimizers were terrible.

\- Email? Hoo boy. Might as well just go across the hall to talk to somebody, because unless you were on ARPANET that's about all the farther your email would get.

It'd be frustrating, but kind of fun.

Nice things:

\- Tinier software. You've got skillz dealing with hundred thousand line programs. Things were smaller back then, mostly.

\- No security worries. I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but DES was pretty controversial (the whole 56-bit key thing) and US citizens couldn't say anything to foreigners about crypto. No network, no crypto, right? (Unix passwords were encrypted with a rotor engine similar, and I think that salts came later).

\- Boot times are about the same then as now. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ah, the good old days, when interacting with a computer often meant printing out 20 pounds of paper and then laboriously going through said printouts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Gordon Letwin went on to troll OS/2 users in the early 1990's on Usenet. He had some sort of bet that Windows would have a specific feature (multitasking?) before OS/2\. The bet was the loser would fly the winner to any city the winner desired (probably US) for dinner.

<comment><USER13> I was the one on the other side of that bet (not under this name.) It was multiprocessing. I said OS/2 would be there first and he said NT would. I'm not sure who won but we were pissed off at each other enough by the end of it, with some weird threats having been made, that dinner was pretty much out of the question.

Odd that you would remember that. I thought I was probably the only one who did.

<comment><USER12> I was there as the 'melling'. Trolling the Internet was more fun when you didn't have to worry about down votes and karma. :-). I tried to stay reasonable but the OS/2 guys were rapid. Those were the days before Microsoft was "evil" and people rooted for them against IBM. It might be time to root for Microsoft again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have one of the pictured terminals (the adds regent 20) set up for my daughters to play hunt the wumpus on a raspberry pi (mounted inside the voluminous case, it even gets decent wifi with a usb dongle)

Oh, were there people in the pictures? The hardware overshadows them!

</comment><comment><USER15> Towards the bottom of the page, there are two pictures of the mainframe that they used. The desktop computers in the other pictures were probably just terminals that were connected to it. It was a DECSYSTEM 2020. It ran the TOPS-20 operating system.

The text of the link calls it a minicomputer, but the links that I found called it a mainframe.

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/gbell/digital/...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/gbell/digital/timeline/1978-2.htm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20)

The fans of TOPS-20 were nearly as anti-Unix as the ITS partisans. This may help explain why Microsoft has not been so fond of Unix and the Unix way of doing things. At least in its early days.

<comment><USER16> If I'm not mistaken to create NT Microsoft hired a bunch of DEC people and put Dave Cutler at the helm. Like you say, none of those people were particularly fond of Unix.

<comment><USER17> NT was the weird mutant love child of VMS and Windows.

There was a lot to like about VMS, including early sharding, solid security, and an impressive file system.

NT managed to lose most of it, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A lot changed in 14 years, but this reminds me of the video of a visit to id Software in 1993: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65xJfVkiaI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65xJfVkiaI)

</comment><comment><USER19> In one of the photos there's a shot of a TRS-80 model 1, level II, with expansion interface and three drives. Microsoft did the BASIC ROM for that machine in Z80, as they did with a number of Micros. Full floating point version in 12k. I cut my programming teeth on that in 1979 in BASIC and assembler.

They also did a cut down version of BASIC for the Model 1, Level 1 machine, without floating point and single letter variables A-Z (!) It had just two string variables A$ and B$. It had precisely three error messages: "How?", "What?" and "Sorry". They squeezed that into a 4K ROM.

</comment><comment><USER20> I love the 70s computing aesthetic along with the fashion. So unapologetically idiosyncratic.

<comment><USER2> Just curious, what do you find idiosyncratic about the 70s computing aesthetic?

<comment><USER21> He just likes to use idiosyncratic in a sentence.

<comment><USER20> Bingo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In case anyone gets curious about the big computer with a large tape drive, [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20)

</comment><comment><USER23> Since the author is wanting to sell the original photos, you'd think someone at Microsoft's corporate archives dept (I assume they have something like that) or PR would snap these right up.

<comment><USER2> Looks like that will happen now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So much paper.

<comment><USER8> Those noisy line printers must have been running constantly all day long.

<comment> mark-r Actual line printers were pretty quick and wouldn't have been running for long periods of time, and were likely to be tucked away in a back room somewhere. Now get a few 30-character-per-second DECWriters buzzing... And those were a vast improvement over the 10-CPS Teletypes that were the rage before video terminals were affordable.

<comment><USER25> I sort-of miss nursing a flotilla of chain printers for IBMs now. Sort of.

<comment> mark-r A former coworker had a story from when he used to service those things. He was doing a cleaning and was tossing the solvent-soaked rags into a garbage can on the other side of the printer door. Someone came by and tossed a cigarette into the can - managed to blow out quite a few ceiling tiles. He was always a bit hard of hearing but I never determined if it was connected to this incident or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I like how every office has a cork board instead of a whiteboard.

<comment><USER27> I like how every office is an office.

<comment><USER28> I wonder... how did they collaborate?

<comment><USER29> 99% of their dumb ideas died a natural death before they managed to utter them to another human. The way work should be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It feels like a 'Mad Men' episode

<comment><USER31> More like a Halt and Catch Fire episode

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I love the giant banner font used in the printouts on Matt McConaughey's desk. And the Trash-80s.

<comment><USER33> It's fascinating just how much printed material there is in these photos. How much of the work they were doing back then was not digital. It's an interesting contrast to the modern era where a very high percentage of the work in software development is done using a computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is it just me or are they not smiling in any of the pictures :(

<comment><USER35> That is true, but you can't infer they didn't enjoy their jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So much paper.

</comment><comment><USER37> The man with the bushiest beard is Gordon Letwin. He single-handedly cost IBM a trillion dollars by making Windows do multi-tasking, killing OS/2 with less than 100 lines of code.

I saw his photo in the 90s, and it still haunts me. I'm an ex-Windows API programmer. I gave up when they changed their database access APIs too many times.

<comment><USER13> Sorry man, but that's not even close to what happened.</comment></comment>


Need help with Common Lisp - <AUTHOR>

Need help with inplenting Djikstras algorithm in LISP.<p>Contact me: email@example.com <comment><USER2> #lisp on IRC Freenode.

And paste your code here: <http://paste.lisp.org/>

Here is a deployed route planning Lisp app: <http://enroutespokane.com/tech- info>

</comment><comment><USER3> Google down or something?

It will even correct your spelling :)

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is that I already have a algorithm but it has some bugs that I need help to sort out.</comment></comment>


Conway's Game of Life Extrusion - <AUTHOR> http://www.qotile.net/blog/wp/?p=600

<comment><USER2> Cellular automata, which includes Conway's Game of Life, is impressive because of the complexity that arises from simplicity. Starting from just a few simple rules and starting arrangements, structures can appear that you would never have expected.

Some people believe that our universe could be a type of cellular automata itself.

There are some interesting connections between our universe and the type of cellular automata like Conway's Game of Life. It is possible to predict events in the future by looking at the big picture. Various levels and hierarchies of structures are formed in Conway's Game of Life (e.g. gliders and glider guns) that seem to obey their own rules. However, these macro rules are nowhere close to the original micro rules of the simulation. While we can look at these macro rules to make certain predictions, the only way we can determine every cell's state in the future is by letting the simulation play out one generation at a time.

<comment><USER3> What I find interesting is that _deterministic_ computation (like cellular automata) does not mean _predictable_ results. Vast complexity, both in seemingly random/noisy patterns and repetitive twisting/scrolling patterns, can emerge from the simplest rules. This seems to indicate that a deterministic model of the human brain/mind (or for that matter, the entire universe) does not lead to the unsatisfactory dehumanizing implication that we're all predictable or lack free will.

<comment><USER4> And yet if a system is deterministic, it certainly is predictable (read: able to be predicted) and does lack free will. So if the universe is a deterministic automata the 'unsatisfactory dehumanizing implication' stands. Despite this, the only way to predict the state of a Conway system n iterations from now is to allow the system to run for n iterations. No one could actually model the universe precisely by creating a cellular automata. The automata would have to contain as much information as the universe, so it couldn't fit within the universe. Also even if the builder did know the system rules and a valid starting condition he could only compute as fast as 1 iteration per iteration of the actual universe...and hence not be able to outpace the universe and predict the future. I think solipsist is right about macro vs micro rules. And the macro rules themselves have macro rules ad infinitum. At some point you get to macro rules that try to describe human behavior (which apparently don't work very well). I don't think the cellular automata reductionist approach will help us too much in predicting the future in our universe for reasons mentioned above. We may be better off with macro rules like Newtonian physics and so forth.

<comment><USER5> By your parenthetical I assume you know of chaotic systems. But yeah, its been some time since I read philosophy but I vaguely remember that you still aren't guaranteed free will just cause things are undeterministic. This is because since you cannot show that an event was caused you cannot prove that your actions led to the event. How do you know that it is because of your actions that some event occurred or you chose to act as you did if things don't necessarily lead from one another? And the other side is true too. Just cause things are determined does not necessitate free will be lost. It was usually sugar coated but I always took it as even with just the illusion of free choice, that ability to be able to seemingly choose what you would have anyways is free will.

I stopped thinking about such things as I always got stuck in a head wrenching recursive loop of futility.

<comment><USER4> : ) yeah I know how you feel

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would never have thought to take the licence of adding film grain, but it really makes the images tangible --- like bizarre long-ignored government surveillance photos.

<comment><USER7> I don't think the film grain was added separately. LuxRender uses path tracing, which inherently produces noise that decreases as the computation progresses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There were similar renderings of Conway's Game of Life in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, but by way of 1D-slices through time and grayscaling the second axis. These have the famous class 4 property that Wolfram raves about, leading to _the principle of computational equivalence_ and such godless sentences.

</comment><comment><USER9> Here are instructions for turning Blender files into RepRap instructions. I would pay to hang something like this on my wall.

[http://objects.reprap.org/wiki/Using_Blender_for_making_prin...](http://objects.reprap.org/wiki/Using_Blender_for_making_print- sheets)

<comment><USER10> You should get in touch with the artist (Paul Slocum). I'm sure he'd oblige.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What i found very nice is graphs of the population size through generations of metuselah's, with my favorite being the R-pentomino <http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=R-pentomino>

<comment><USER12> Monitoring population size through generations in Conway's Game of Life was the premise of my state science fair project. I ended up going further and changing the rule parameters to see which were the most optimal ones, but if you want to see the population vs. generation graphs for the original rules, here they are:

12 pentominoes: <http://i.imgur.com/wrO3o.png>

Population over 50 generations graph: <http://i.imgur.com/TIRgK.png>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of how the Tralfamadorians see things.

</comment><comment> cool-RR Amazing. These look like fantastic cities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I thought the same thing too - on a larger scale with a couple of smoothing algorithms one could end up with some interesting city landscapes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> These would be amazing to build with a 3D printer. If I had the time I'd try building one by hand using legos.

</comment><comment><USER10> These are amazing, Slocum is pretty great. But, I submitted this before. Can anyone explain how double-submits are moderated?

<comment><USER15> As I understand it, if the URI doesn't match exactly, or the story is no longer in Hacker News's RAM, the duplicate won't be caught. I could be wrong, but I seem to remember pg or someone saying that HN only checks the stories currently loaded in RAM for duplicates.

The benefit of this is that old stories can be rediscovered by new users.</comment></comment>


What the literature says about the earnings of entrepreneurs (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://80000hours.org/2016/02/what-the-literature-says-about-the-earnings-of-entrepreneurs/ <comment><USER2> > This study is evidence that if your aim is to make more money, switching > from salaried work to running an incorporated business is typically rewarded > with a significant boost in earnings.

What about survivorship bias? I.e. most entrepreneurs fail, so you get a skewed sample when looking at existing entrepreneurs.

Also while it might be easier to just analyze two categories (incorporated vs. not), really one should break down entrepreneurial ventures into at least three categories:

\- self-employed / contractor (from baby sitter to software consultant)

\- small business (e.g. restaurant)

\- startup (seeking to become large company)

<comment><USER3> They look at people who switch into entrepreneurship, and then consider the whole sample, so I don't think survivorship bias is a big issue.

I agree it would be good to go more fine grained in the categories though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Published early 2016.

The author wrote this in a comment [https://80000hours.org/2016/02/what-the- literature-says-abou...](https://80000hours.org/2016/02/what-the-literature- says-about-the-earnings-of-entrepreneurs/#comment-2524811609):

> You're right. This data doesn't tell us much about the earnings of startup > founders. We'll be going to that in a later post.

> This post is just about self-employment on average.

Is that post available somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER5> I contributed to this research - interested to hear your thoughts!

<comment><USER6> Aren't you worried that incorporation is a _consequence_ of successful entrepreneurship rather than a predictor?

<comment><USER7> Main point I was thinking of. I'm self-employed, and my business is growing. Once I reach a certain income level, I will incorporate. Before that point, the legal and time costs aren't worth it.

But, this stuck out as something worthy of more study:

>The average incorporated self-employed person is highly able – they did well on aptitude tests like the SAT, they have high self-esteem, and were successful in salaried employment, earning more than other workers with similar characteristics.

There could be a subset of the self-employed that is basically "soon to be incorporated", which is the group I believe myself to be in. In my case, my salaried peer group are graduates of one of the top Canadian law schools. My default non-business option would have been a high salary; I only did business because I thought I could get something comparable, but with more freedom.

You might be able to use the common traits among the incorporated to do further analysis within the self-employed group.

<comment><USER8> Not sure in Canada, but in US you can incorporate same day in most states. You literally goto an office and stand in line behind plumbers and other contract works for 20min, fill one form and your done. Even turbo tax can ha dale basic business taxes so this is not a problem either

<comment><USER7> Are they counting LLC as incorporated? That would significantly change the US situation. My understanding is that LLC is very similar to sole proprietorship in Canada, but with limited liability added in.

My comment may be invalid then. Canada has no such structure, so incorporation is a big threshold. You can still do it easily, but it adds a lot of accounting and admin work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the full version of the study that this article mostly describes, "Smart and Illicit: Who Becomes an Entrepreneur and Do They Earn More?":

[http://www.nber.org/papers/w19276.pdf](http://www.nber.org/papers/w19276.pdf) (via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15006502](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15006502)):</comment>


CDNs Should Work Like Databases - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrometa.co/blog/cdns-should-work-like-databases <comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr - Today's web services, APIs and applications are required to be highly responsive and always online. Managing state across multiple data centers distributed far and wide around the globe is a hard problem to solve. For CDNs to be truly useful they have to work like (Geo-Distributed) Databases.</comment>


Ask HN: A question about vesting - <AUTHOR>

Say me and a cofounder start a company. I decide to drop out. At that point, does my unvested stock goto the other cofounder or does it goto the company, TYPICALLY?
Also, if we have a board and I'm on it, do I still get to keep my board seat?
I always think about this hypothetically. Say a cofounder drops out. Other cofounder gets the company. But a month after getting the company, he sells the company for dirt cheap and gets to keep the dropout cofounder's unvested share AND his own share. Is that how it would work typically? Or is each vesting agreement very different? <comment><USER2> I am unclear if you are talking about bona-fide stock, or _options_.

If you have a stock grant with a vesting schedule, the vested shares become YOURS and are irrevocable, like pay. (and yes, I am speaking in the TYPICAL sense here, there are 1000 sub-possibilities).

If you have stock options, then as they vest you earn the right to purchase those shares at the strike price. If you buy them, they are yours. If you do not, those shares go back into the employee pool for potential re-allocation.

And I don't know if you have a specific case in mind, but if you have some "company" and one "cofounder" drops out, it's rather unlikely someone is going to come along and purchase anything for any price.

If your company is a real entity and was put together with even so little as templated "Let's Start a Company" kit from Staples, the specifics of this are likely covered in some manner in the incorporation docs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me make it more clear:

\- assume that a company is worth X amount, meaning there is an offer for X amount.

\- let's say that both founders decide not to sell it.

\- for some reason, founder 1 decides to quit. 50% of his shares have vested. other 50% have not.

\- does the unvested stake from cofounder 1 goto the company or the other cofounder?

what i'm getting to is if the cofounder that did not leave sells the company for 100 bucks, and let's say he had 50% stake before cofounder 1 left, how much of the 100 bucks do each founder get? cofounder 1 at the time he left had 50% of his shares vested...meaning he owns 25% of the company.

<comment><USER2> It would depend on how the unallocated shares are handled.

Let's say you issued 1000 shares of stock upon incorporation. It does not matter how we got there, but you end up with 1 person owns 500 of those shares, another person owns 250, and the remain 250 are still owned by the corporation itself.

When a corporation is "bought", the general concept is that some new entity is buying all the shares from the current share owners. They can do this with cash, or they can do it with stock, where you get shares of stock in the new company in return for your shares of stock in the existing company.

In your case you're obviously talking about a cash sale.

A corporation exists separately from the share holders. One person cannot really sell they company, all they can really do is make a proposal for all the share holders to vote on. Of course, if that person has a majority control position, their "proposal" is basically a statement.

So the person with 500 shares could sell HIS shares, and make a proposal to sell the unallocated shares for some net amount (we'll say $75). The person with 250 shares would end up with:

250 shares and no net change (there is just a change of control). This scenario is similar to what happened with Craigslist where an employee sold their 25% stake to ebay. Granted this was not a majority control scenario.

More than likely the first person was looking for some kind of exit, and the new owners don't want to be left with any hangers-on, so the "proposal" would be that the new company can buy back shares from existing share holders at a set price, and you get a check for $25.

Or it could be that the proposal is the $100 is divided among ALLOCATED shares, and you get $33.3 and the person with 500 shares gets $66.6.

More than likely though, it's none of the above. When you buy a company, you also buy that companies liabilities and commitments. Many times all that the acquiring company REALLY wants is the customer base, or some piece of intellectual property. So the "proposal" is basically:

Incorporate under a new name, with existing share holders remaining with the same stock

Sell the intellectual property and old company name to the new company for a set price (we'll use your $100 number).

You are left with: a shell corporation that has no assets or value (likely) BUT has retained any debt or liability. This allows the new corporation to expedite the "purchase" process without having to worry that they are inheriting some unknown liability.

As for the $100, the majority shareholder could "propose" that the entire amount be paid to him as a bonus of some sort, or could propose to dissolve the company and divide any assets among share holders, or any number of other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Typically they go back into the equity pool of the company as a whole. Whether or not you get to keep your board seat is dependent on how the corporation and your employment agreements are structured. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to these questions, the solutions are unique to each situation.</comment>


Elon Musk: "vehicle logs show Autopilot was turned off in Pennsylvania crash" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/753699861636128768 <comment><USER2> I extremely uncomfortable with a car company that gets all car data sent to it and then uses it for PR. Evidence during an investigation shouldn't be treated this way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good news for Tesla.</comment>


Paradox of Choice May Not Exist - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9cebd444-cd9c-11de-8162-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><USER2> Screw pop psychology... I read something one day, and less than a year later, I read the opposite. This has happened so many times that I feel like I actually know less now than I did in the first place.

<comment><USER3> That happens a lot.

But if it helps, it means it's not a dead field.

If things were easy/obvious the right answer would be known for a long time already.

New things are likely to be hard things, where the person doing the work is not totally sure about things.

But they publish, and people refute, and you get somewhere.

On a related note, I'll believe global warming only when we get some published results (with no obvious errors) that it doesn't exist. Then once you have those results, someone figures out the error, and it's back to it existing.

There is no way global warming is so simple that people got it right on the first try.</comment></comment>


I'm giving a talk at FOSDEM: NixOS, declarative configuration Linux distribution - <AUTHOR> What would you like me to explain? I'll do my best to present NixOS stack in 25 minutes talk. Anything particular you would like to know from the stack?<p>- Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it can ensure that an upgrade to one package cannot break others, that you can always roll back to previous version, that multiple versions of a package can coexist on the same system, and much more.<p>- Nixpkgs is a large collection of packages that can be installed with the Nix package manager.<p>- NixOS is a Nix-based Linux distribution. Thanks to Nix, it supports atomic upgrades, rollbacks and multi-user package management, and it has a declarative approach to system configuration management that makes it easy to reproduce a configuration on another machine.<p>- NixOps, the NixOS-based cloud deployment tool<p>- Hydra is a Nix-based continuous build system.<p>Cross-post from reddit.com: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1st3vz/im_giving_a_talk_nixos_declarative_configuration/ <comment><USER2> Anecdotal experience deploying in the lab with NixOS and/or Nix:

1\. At the time, I was maintaining several heterogenous RPM-based systems, so that was the comparison. I can say with some limited authority that it's easier to make NixOS packages than RPMs, but harder than (say) tweaking /usr/ports in a BSD or Gentoo.

2\. Being able to send closures between machines -- i.e. a reproducible recipe for the user's current environment, including all installed and user- acccessible packages, libs and binaries -- is eerie, like alien technology. Think of 'nvm' or 'virtualenv', but granular, and for everything. Once you get used to it, you will never be happy with any other package manager.

3\. Nix' independence from NixOS is both a blessing and curse . On every OS except NixOS, Nix is necessarily a third-party add-on, and it necessarily uses slightly different versions of everything. Thanks to some insanely clever environment management, this never causes things to go plink, but it _does_ mean that I often had a choice between a fresh Fedora RPM -- _on a Fedora machine_ \-- and a slightly stale Nix package. Guess which worked better. Guess which I chose most of the time. (But if you guessed that I was a bit OCD about package freshness, you'd be right.)

4\. Final drawback, and the reason NixOS hasn't yet made it into production at our company: NixOS itself obviously has to use the same slightly stale packages that Nix does. That said, how upset can you really get? These guys don't have the dev-hours that Canonical or Red Hat do -- or even Debian, for that matter. What they have achieved with the resources at hand is mindblowing. What this project needs to really be useful to me is about two dozen new FOSS contributors and like maybe half a million dollars of investment. Any more than that, though, and I'd worry they'd lose their game ;D -- so much of it is based on doing immense amounts with almost nothing, using cleverness as the amplifier. Isn't that what it's all about?

5\. Oh, and also, the devs are responsive. Hi guys! ;D

<comment><USER3> 2 is intriguing. Would this sort of functionality make a reasonable replacement for vagrant?

<comment><USER2> Well, in some contexts, yes, although to be honest I don't use Vagrant myself, so it's hard for me to compare use-cases.

I see Nix as much-needed conceptual competition in the ongoing package-manager vs devops-deployment dogfight, to both package managers (rpm, yum, zypper, dpkg, apt-get...) and devops tools like Chef, Ansible, Salt, and Puppet. Nix is _both_ , and does cool things like try to resolve a binary that will work on your architecture on the fly at runtime, and compiling one if it can't find one in the repo. It's just... better. Go try it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd love to hear more about the potential of Nix for language agnostic isolated development environments: [https://nixos.org/wiki/Howto_develop_software_on_nixos](https://nixos.org/wiki/Howto_develop_software_on_nixos)

Could it be a unified alternative to Python virtualenv, rvm, rbenv, cabal sandbox, etc? This would be specially important for projects needing heterogeneous builds.

It'd also be interesting to see a typical Nix development workflow taking advantages of Nix goodies like continuous integration with Hydra or staging and production deployment with NixOps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, Nix profiles are package manager (or system level) alternative to virtualenv, etc. They can be used to give different evironments, be it development or production.

Actually, your system is a "system" profile. You update profiles independently from each other.

Example of collection of such environments: [https://github.com/chaoflow/skel/blob/master/.nixpkgs/config...](https://github.com/chaoflow/skel/blob/master/.nixpkgs/config.nix)

I'll mention examples with NixOps and how I've used it in practice. Good call about "development workflow", I'll think about how to explain that in minimal words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would love to see some good examples on how to create custom development environments. ie one for erlang, C, oz etc

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't have good examples documented yet, sorry. There are some (rather poor) wiki articles how to achieve that at [https://nixos.org/wiki/Howto_develop_software_on_nixos#Obtai...](https://nixos.org/wiki/Howto_develop_software_on_nixos#Obtaining_an_Environment_from_a_Custom_Definition)

<comment><USER5> I'd also quite like to know how to do automatic image generation for different architectures once all tests have passed. That would be fun to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://zef.me/6049/nix-docker](http://zef.me/6049/nix-docker)

</comment><comment><USER7> How difficult is it to package for Nixpkgs, assuming some familiarity with deb and RPM packaging?

<comment><AUTHOR> DISCLAIMER: I've written a lot of ebuilds (Gentoo), but only tried Deb a few times.

I'd argue it's way easier. Here is an example of packaged nginx [https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/servers/ht...](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/servers/http/nginx/default.nix)

In a nutshell, you need to know the following:

\- be familiar with basics of Nix language (shouldn't take more than an hour reading that chapter in Nix manual)

\- be familiar with basics how _mkDerivation_ function works and how are the phases of packaging bound to it (shouldn't take more than a hour reaind that chapter in Nixpkgs manual)

\- take a simple package you want to try, copy some existing one and modify it to fit the needs

Also see [https://nixos.org/wiki/Main_Page#Contributing_to_Nix_Project...](https://nixos.org/wiki/Main_Page#Contributing_to_Nix_Projects)</comment></comment>