Everybody Can Make DeepFakes Now [video] - sahin-boydas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUfJOQKdtAk <comment><AUTHOR> I see this kind of thing, and I think, how will a whistleblower survive the slander?

Snowden and Assange both were subject to information warfare (lies is a better word) that facts don't refute. As they say "a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its pants on."

I bet a large number of people still remember that Clinton was involved in pornography distributed from a pizza shop. Except it was not true at all. But the hatred of her lingered.

What's to happen when a normal person attempts to reveal something and then video of them surfaces showing them saying all kinds of horrible things. The scariest thing about this is you could take a picture of them from their college years and make them out to be a pedophile, and if it gets repeated enough, it will become the truth. If I admit that I had a drinking problem twenty years ago, it will "all add up." That kind of imagery is impossible for our brains to fight.

<comment><USER2> I don't really buy it, the general public is more clever than they're often given credit for. Editing photographs became widespread due to Photoshop and now people are correctly skeptical of photographs. It's mainstream to wonder if outlandish or startling photographs have been manipulated.

Sure some people will believe the bullshit, but I think _" want to believe"_ is a big part of that. The sort of people who think Hillary Clinton eats babies believe it because they hate her, rather than hating her because they believe it.

<comment><USER3> No, the public is dumb.

The last 20 years the entire continent allowed PC software to be stolen and made client server, now every piece of software is spying on us because of mass computer illiteracy.

20 years ago hackers and nerds on slashdot feared Microsofts and the industries move towards hardware and software drm when the internet was just reaching the masses.

The last 20 years has been the public buying client-server drm infected software en masse.

Everything that used to be a local PC app is being pushed client-server, in such a world on privacy can exist and the public rewarded Ultima online, Everquest and world of warcraft.

For those of you who don't know, two or more PC's in a network behave as a single machine, that means whoever programs the machines in the network LITERALLY OWNS THE ENTIRE NETWORK. AKa it's the ability to rewrite the laws of every computing device on the planet and the speed of light is fast enough to take over every machine on the planet.

It's no longer merely "programming apps". It's literally stealing software en masse from the public. AKA to program now is "issuing commands", so now software can be infected with commands that take over your PC and remove your control and ownership. This is what windows 10 is about.

Some of you make complain that software was always "licensed" and I'd tell you that those laws were bribed into being by corporate lobbyists because Capitalist governments have always been ruled by corporate elites that have rubber stamped their own laws, if in doubt see the last 200 years of IP law. The public interest lost every time, that is a blow out of the public interest never winning once.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/media/File:Tom_Bell's_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg)

The fact that so many are gung-ho about "software as a service" here not grasping the huge political implications, you can't possibly audit all the software apps on google play, mobile, or steam, uplay, origin, etc. So these companies can do whatever they want and since our mind did not evolve to respond to these threats, many of the public just shrug their shoulders, because the human mind did not evolve in a technocratic society, so won't perceive nor act upon the danger.

So no, the push towards locked down filesystems you can't access in windows 10, encrypted binaries and vm's, UWP, is the big push to put bombs in honest binary blobs to make software unpreservable.

All these incentives exist because they know the public is dumb, the fortnites of the world and TF2's hat economy, told valve and big tech companies to keep pushing because the public will eat endless amounts of shit because they most of them don't care.

Imagine it's the 90's and you're buying your first PC and microsoft sells you windows, except it requires an internet connection (aka the hardware dongle) and parts of windows files and functions are held hostage on remote servers in microsofts office, most hackers of the day would not buy those PC's.

That's what "software as a service" is for many of the dolts on hackernews, its hardware dongle enabled software by way of internet and splitting all of what used to be local applications into two pieces.

It's the end of local applications on our PC's and mobile devices and most of you don't seem to be alarmed, it's the end of privacy permanently.

Because we didn't get any property rights to own our software outright with source-code, this is why steam, world of warcraft, and all new PC games like quake champions, overwatch, exist.

The end game from the early 90's was this dystopian state where all PC's on the planet are turned into dumb clients and the entire society moves to a mainframe model where no one owns their devices.

Without software ownership, our devices our useless and given the criminal way in which IP law was written for software, privacy is not coming back.

So to say the public is bright when it handed everything the nerds feared to the corporate world on a platter is bullshit.

The entire silicon valley industry is having a part at how dumb the public is, the "client to cloud" revolution is LITERALLY, stealing local apps and trapping them on company servers so they can finally turn software into property and kill the "local file" loophole on PC's to "kill piracy" by way of software as a service, the public has no idea what NTFS is.

Microsoft is now testing remote control of your file system and PC via gamepass, where companies can now set permissions to files on your PC via remote.

This is what the nerds feared in the 90's on slashdot and it has come true. The fact that hackernews is basically pro "cloud" is disturbing enough on its own.

Here's the industry celebrating the death of local user control of PC's.

[https://tifca.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V...](https://tifca.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_Vision_V2.pdf)

<comment><USER4> I have nothing to contribute to that, I just want to thank you for the effort you put into this writeup. I'm not sure if it's worth to keep up the fight, but I sure as hell will and I hope others do so as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Will this be the 'spam' that destroys our civilized world? When we cannot believe our own senses, then our only refuge will be a construct that WE made so we know we can trust it? Will we voluntarily enter the matrix to escape the chaos that we have corrupted our reality into?

<comment><USER6> Scary thought - but a practical question is how will deep fakes influence video as courtroom evidence? Some countries have laws that only approved recording devices are acceptable for recording such evidence, but is this the end of phone recorded evidence?

<comment><USER7> Did photo evidence end because of Photoshop? Honestly asking, I don't know.

DeepFakes just seem to be adding video to the list of fakeable things, which already included photos and audio.

<comment><USER8> There was a marked decline in attorney's ability to utilize private detectives to spy on opposing parties or to present still shots as alabi's that started (at least in my area of the US) somewhere around 2005. I'd say it took a while for the distrust of stills due to the possibility of generic 'photoshopping', but actual and test juries are less likely to definitively base decisions on stills if the opposing lawyer can in any conceivably reasonable way claim it's edited.

As a side note, I am less concerned with the use of deep fakes to frame (civil or criminal) a person, it is more the potential for an attorney to put big wholes in a jury's trust of video evidence by showing a faked image as counterproof and then flat out telling jurors that one is fake and therefore the other side can't prove it's case.

Caveat -> this doesn't apply to police generated evidence, because a majority of jurors, to a statistical certainty barring exceptional circumstances, ALWAYS believe cops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In a certain way, I find the fact that everybody can make deepfakes positive for society.

Because we will finally stop trusting videos and images as a reliable proof, when they clearly aren't all the time.

<comment><USER10> No, we won't.

People already know videos and images can be faked, but they still trust whatever they _want_ to be true as a post-hoc validation of their existing prejudice, not as the result of a rational attempt to judge evidence on its own merits.

Just look on Youtube for various "paranormal" videos, things like "real proof" of reptilians, ghosts, aliens, etc. Most of those videos are laughably fake looking, but people who already believe in these things take them as gospel, anyway.

Politically speaking, look at Pizzagate as another example. Whether or not you believe the "evidence" tends to depend on what you already believe about Democrats/progressives/leftists/the Clintons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Think about that. You open a page in web and you SEE YOUR FACE telling you that you liked this product and how it changed your life! Scary times ahead.

<comment><USER12> No. You will just see a person who does not exist. People that do not exist do not demand pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder when the first ad-network based solely on getting celebrity deepfakes to endorse products for cheap will pop up.

is it even illegal? even if it is, could we do anything if they operated out of Russia or the middle East?

<comment><USER10> That's already basically very much a thing[0,1].

[0][https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2017/06/12/the- bra...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2017/06/12/the-branding-of- dead-celebrities/)

[1][https://www.wired.com/story/messy-legal-fight-to-bring- celeb...](https://www.wired.com/story/messy-legal-fight-to-bring-celebrities- back-from-the-dead/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If wonder if we're getting closer to our brain's "algorithm" which takes reference images from the real world and generates newly imagined scenes when we're dreaming.

</comment><comment><USER15> How long until someone uses this to make a new Bogart film? Or a new home alone movie with young Macaulay Culkin? I see a lot of great possibilities there.

<comment><USER16> Have you seen the YouTube channel Ctrl Shift Face?

[https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCKpH0CKltc73e4wh0_pgL3g/video...](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCKpH0CKltc73e4wh0_pgL3g/videos)

Here's a pretty well done one in which Bill Hader does impressions, during which his face is replaced with the one of the people he's doing an impression of: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjI- JaRWG7s](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjI-JaRWG7s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not ready for advertising on the internet to be mining social media for producing targeted deepfakes.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if it'll ever become a good idea to preemptively deep fake yourself saying outrageous things and release them.

Saw something like this in a Neal Stephenson book I believe.

<comment><USER19> Yes, that was in _Fall_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The faces are too wooden.

</comment><comment><USER20> We need software to detect deep fakes

<comment><USER21> I've seen a number of attempts to identify deepfakes and other forms of manipulated images using AI. This seems like a fool's errand since it becomes a never ending adversarial AI arms race. Instead, I haven't seen a proposal for a system I think could work well. Camera and phone manufacturers could have their devices cryptographically sign each photo or video taken. And that's it. From that starting place, you can build a system on top of it to verify that the image on the site you're reading is authentic. What am I missing that makes this an invalid approach? I do understand that this would require manufacturers to implement, but it seems achievable to get them onboard. I even think you get one company like Apple to do this and it's enough traction for the rest of the industry to have to follow suit.

<comment><USER22> Such a system would require _all_ devices to be secure against key extraction. Otherwise the attacker need only choose the most vulnerable device, extract a signing key from it and sign their deepfakes with it.

It would also allow any device manufacturer to sign anything they like, as well as anyone who can coerce a device manufacturer to do so.

<comment><USER21> Apologies for a late response here (by HN standards where conversations last only a number of hours). I agree that an attacker could compromise weaker devices and sign their deep fakes with them. But then hopefully those keys Or that manufacturer would be blacklisted. In my mind, a company like Hauwei could implement this, but I as a consumer of media wouldn't necessarily trust photos from their devices. But photos signed by an iPhone where Apple has a better privacy record, I could trust more.

Thanks for replying though, this does help me understand the challenges in a system like this.

<comment><USER22> It's not really a matter of privacy record. In general manufacturers don't do it on purpose.

For example, it was discovered that it's possible to extract keys from Intel SGX enclaves using certain speculative execution vulnerabilities. Intel SGX predates Spectre. It isn't a _category_ of vulnerability they knew existed when they were designing it.

Vulnerabilities are regularly discovered in almost everything, iPhones included. Diligent vendors are quick to patch them, but an attacker only needs to wait until the next vulnerability is discovered and then extract the signing keys from a device that hasn't been patched yet.

You also have no way of knowing which keys they are -- if a million devices of a particular model have a known vulnerability then any attacker could extract the keys from any of them, and even blacklisting all of them (which would tend to dissatisfy their innocent owners) still wouldn't save you from an attacker using an unpublished vulnerability against a device you don't even know is vulnerable.

To put this another way, this is basically the same class of technology that Hollywood uses for DRM. Now, how many Hollywood movies can you say have not been pirated by anyone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Crypto to the rescue! I predict, Deepfakes won't cause as much issues as people think.

<comment><USER24> How would crypto solve deep fake? You're generating new fake content, nothing to crypt here.

<comment><USER23> You're looking at the problem the wrong direction ;)

<comment><USER24> Point me in the right direction.

<comment><USER25> Not that guy, but at a basic level one possible approach is that everyone will have a digital signature, everything posted can be verified against the signature. A faker could create new content but they won't be able to sign it correctly.

The tools for digital signing already exist and are used in niche industries but not really something everyday people are concerned about. It's more a social awareness problem and this will come with better tools, integrated with the apps and channels ordinary people use daily so that it is something that happens in the background.

In addition to digital signing, public distributed ledgers can establish provenance or a chain of ownership for signed content, so digital content that is altered and redistributed can be sourced back to its origin more accurately.

Ordinary people with the right tools built into their devices will be able to see very easily "Is it in the chain?" based on a simple enquiry to the ledger, and if the answer is no, then it's untrustworthy.

If the answer is yes, then they will ask "Does trace to the origin?" and if it does not, or the origin isn't signed by the alleged owner, then it is untrustworthy.

That's one possible way crypto can help defeat disinformation / fake news content. The underlying techniques exist but there is a lot of work to do to bind it to everyday use.

<comment><USER26> > Ordinary people with the right tools built into their devices will be able > to see very easily "Is it in the chain?" based on a simple enquiry to the > ledger, and if the answer is no, then it's untrustworthy.

Not that I disagree, but the first thing that came to mind when I read this part of your comment was that this approach reinforces the Monopoly of governments and media companies on the flow of information. On the one hand it's great that we could protect in this way from unverified, "not-in-the- chain" messages, but on the other hand being a contrarian, producing and coming into contact with information outside of the chain, not necessarily really fake videos, but other types of information is crucial to social evolution and civil discourse.

The "public" and "distributed" would be major priorities of mine in the scenario you describe.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Experienced hacker looking for CTO/VP of engineering roles in SV/SF - <AUTHOR>

I am a technology consultant with 15 years of experience mainly in the Microsoft application stack. I have been working on an app called Skillendar (http://www.skillendar.com) for the last six months and applied for the YC in March 2011. But unfortunately our application has got rejected. I am a British citizen currently living in the UK and am planning to move to the Silicon Valley/ San Francisco. If you are looking for a Senior Architect/CTO/VP Engineering, please contact me via linked-in http://www.linkedin.com/in/sunsai
I would also appreciate if someone could recommend a person/company from whom I can get some help with this.
Thanks in advance <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.linkedin.com/in/sunsai></comment>


BBC Have Your Say: What has been your costliest mistake? - <AUTHOR> http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?sortBy=1&forumID=5096&start=0&tstart=0&edition=1&ttl=20080712181112#paginator

<comment><USER2> Not diversifying my portfolio as soon as I had the chance.</comment>


Disrupting supermarket industry by giving college students access to free food - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VHPqjF3oTPN3nGRfGyG3ZgaPI3aRT24A?usp=sharing <comment><USER2> Do you have at least a small text description? How can it be free?

The last post was title "Sell/buy groceries (used/unused) from your neighbors with Pantry (prototype)" that makes more sense as a business model than "free".

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey gus_massa! If you click on the link and watch the video of the prototype you'll see that consumers have the option of setting the price of items to $0 if they choose. Since they are selling off items from their own Pantry (2nd hand groceries) it would be entirely possible that., for example, certain college students could give away their semi-drank Coke away for free since they don't have much use for it anyway!</comment></comment>


Tina is now accepting Beta Testers - <AUTHOR> https://asktina.io/?context=hackernews <comment><AUTHOR> Lets see if you can stump her...</comment>


Did California plastic bag ban result in San Diego's current hepatitis outbreak? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2017/sep/08/stringers-plastic-bag-ban-led-hep-health-crisis/ <comment><USER2> No. Lack of universal health care and a proper social safety net resulted in the Hepatitis outbreak.

Hepatitis can be prevented through vaccination, which a universal health care system would provide. Through treatment, which a universal health care system would provide. And proper sanitary conditions, which taking care of people so they don't have to live on the streets would provide.

<comment><USER3> We still get hepatitis outbreaks here in Canada despite our universal healthcare. Universal healthcare does not automatically solve the problem of getting vaccinations to vulnerable populations or prioritizing the right interventions at the right time given limited resources.

Maybe our situation is better here in this regard, I don't know the statistics, but it's demonstrably false that universal healthcare automatically prevents hepatitis outbreaks.

<comment><USER4> Some people might not vaccinate their kids for dumber reasons than not having insurance.

<comment><USER3> Part of my point was that the homeless are a particularly difficult population to reach with health interventions like vaccinations even with universal healthcare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How many public health crises in the USA can be boiled down to "the USA fails to provide a safety net that ensures a certain standard of living"? If this plastic-bag hypothesis bears out, it'll be yet another.

<comment><USER6> There people living in the streets pooping in bags.

And you think we just need more safety nets?

<comment><USER7> ....Yes?

The support system in the US is drastically underfunded, which leads to it being understaffed and underprovisioned for the tasks it tries to accomplish. There's a second layer of ideological opposition to helping poor people that exacerbates the problem.

Proper funding and removing ideology-driven sabotage for safety nets would remove a sizable amount of street bag pooping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does it seem to anybody else that having widely available public restrooms would be a way better (including way more hygienic) way to address this issue?

<comment><USER9> But nobody wants to build (and keep clean) a bathroom in their backyard (the _for homeless people_ is implied). And anyone who did would have protests from their neighbors.

Lava Mae addressed this by building portable showers out of old buses (to the tune of ~$1M per bus) and trailers (cheaper).

<comment><USER10> That makes me think of Rick and Morty:

Beth, do you still love me?

Ugh, what kind of question is that?

The "yes or no" kind?

Jerry, do you want homeless people to have homes?

Yes.

Are you gonna build them?

No.

Then what good was the "yes"?

Wait, is loving me the house or the homeless people?

Loving you is work, Jerry hard work, like building a homeless shelter nobody wants to say no to doing it, but some people put the work in. So, what do you say? Do you see me working here? Does this conversation seem tedious to me?

Sort of.

Then I obviously sort of love you, don't I?

<comment><AUTHOR> While we are on jokes about this, could you imagine if someone raised the argument back in November... "If California bans plastic bags obviously bums will poop everywhere, and hundreds of people will get Hepatitis until we bleach the streets."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related: Plastic Bag Ban Responsible For Spike In E. Coli Infections, Study Says

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/plastic-bag- ban_n_2...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/plastic-bag- ban_n_2641430.html)

<comment><USER12> and the rebuttal, which argues that nearly all of the increase in infections is due to a bacteria wave that started before the ban and was international in breadth:

[http://berkeleyblog.wpengine.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/...](http://berkeleyblog.wpengine.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/SF-Health-Officer-MEMO-re-Reusable-Bag- Study_V8-FIN1.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the article:

 _The best defense is getting vaccinated — which is free because of the epidemic. The vaccine used to cost about $100. If you've traveled to the third world, you've probably gotten the two injections a month apart. It's good for life — no boosters needed._

</comment><comment><USER14> Grumble grumble grumble... the description of Hepatitis A as a 'hardy virus' and claims "It thrives in cold temperatures and you have to heat it to 185 degrees to kill it" are idiotic and contribute to ignorance. Viruses are not alive. You can not kill a virus. You can destroy it, but it is already dead. All viruses are this way.

"It can live for months outside the body." is simply straight-up patently false. It is not alive, and unless it is somehow destroyed, it can remain infectious effectively forever. This is how viruses work. They can't move, they can't reproduce, they have no metabolism. They are not living things. They are merely a fortuitous compilation of parts that, if put in contact with a particular kind of cell, cause that cell to begin producing copies of the jumble of parts until the virus explodes.

I'm sorry, but this sort of thing bugs me to no end. We can never expect people to learn the basics of infectious disease if we actively lie to them. And no, the intent of making it 'easy to understand' by lying is no excuse. "Good intentions are the opposite of good actions."

<comment><AUTHOR> Define 'life'. (bonus points for not using wikipedia)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe bio-degradable bags would work for the purpose referred to in the article? The kind from a material that can be used for kitchen waste (food scraps).

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems like a good opportunity to design and distribute plastic bags specifically for people poops (sort of like the bags for dog poops).

<comment><USER10> Or maybe fix the low cost housing problem and maybe create better homeless day centers and public bathrooms? Just an idea...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hang up doggy bag distributers on telephone poles downtown - sure just give me an afternoon.

Also, fix the homeless problem. - [https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks.png](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/tasks.png)

<comment><USER17> It's interesting to me that now the "figure out if the picture is of a bird" task is becoming "gimme a few hours"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As usual the answer to the question in the headline is no. You can read the article for more.

</comment><comment><USER19> If enough people are sleeping rough, Hep A is an issue among others.

</comment><comment><USER20> /me search thread for "paper"

No hits

<comment><AUTHOR> ?</comment></comment>


Facebook Gives DEA BIO METRIC FACIAL RECOGNITION DEVICE More of the Story - <AUTHOR>

The matter I am still in the midst of is dire. Here's my story. At this very moment as I write this email I am still under DEA surveillance. Let me be clear, not investigation. But surveillance. Their investigation is over, because they have caught who they want. My aim is to get the word out and protect the privacy and rights of all American citizens.<p>My friend and artist AO has been under DEA investigation. He comes here to write, thus my house has been under DEA investigation. Basically the DEA is using Facebooks software and some other devices that I have not been able to identify in order to surveil my house. A DEA agent currently resides in my house and I am able to communicate with the agents through some sort of fluke. I know this sounds crazy, but I am able to pick up their communication system with my mind. It's like a receiver. I thought I might be going crazy, but the apartment building where they are based is above my backyard. Their voice projects into my backyard like a sound-box. That was my physical confirmation. Other illegal DEA activities during this process include: Black Hat Hacking (On Sunday June 21, 2015 between the hours of 7PM to June 22, 2015 12PM. Websites include Hacker News, Americas Political Chat Room, LinkedIN, also I had a shifting url when I tried to access my Google Contacts at 9:59PM), Invasion of privacy (Recording my girlfriend and I having sex), Conspiracy (Not just with Facebook. But I believe other companies are involved. The only other one I could identify was At&T. They are my service provider. And I am not under investigation. So they needed a warrant to trace my phone. My friend and artist AO was picked up because I called him to wish him a happy fathers day.) There is probably so much more. I just got lucky and caught a signal, and began my investigation. These truths were arrived at by the process of elimination. I am not much for conspiracy theories, but this one happens to be true. <comment><AUTHOR> Yes I know. That is why I posted it to Facebook and contacted the DEA. Because some-one will know I'm telling the truth.

</comment><comment><USER2> "but I am able to pick up their communication system with my mind. It's like a receiver."

That definitely makes you sound crazy.</comment>


Ask HN: Looking For Good Systems Integration Blogs - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for some thought leaders, best practices, open source coverage blogs that can help me learn more about Systems Integration, specifically in the area of billing and CRMs. I googed some but couldn't find anything distinguishable. <comment><USER2> Hey, look for Enterprise Design Patterns book, in J2EE, hope it will provide some insight details.. in addition go for ESB Concepts ( OpenESB or Mule) or see Spring Integration.</comment>


AWS EC2/RDS Outage in us-east-1 - <AUTHOR> https://status.aws.amazon.com/?date=2019-08-31 <comment><USER2> Just wanted to add a quick note before we get the usual deluge of "you should be running in multiple AZs and regions" posts: These outages are relatively rare and your best decision might just be to accept the tiny amount of downtime and keep your app simple and inexpensive to run.

I of course don't know the tradeoffs involved in running your system, but I know for a lot of my situations the simplicity of single AZ with a straightforward failover option is usually the right tradeoff.

<comment><USER3> For us this is exactly the correct approach. We could have spent millions of dollars and thousands of man hours hardening things to be resilient to single region outages. But for what? We aren't GE or Google. If our conference line goes down for 2-3 hours per year because we don't have apocalypse-proof infrastructure, literally nothing bad happens to our business. In this exact outage we are discussing, all of my coworkers are at home having breakfast with their families and doing various weekend activities. No one but me will know there was even a problem until I log into the AWS console and find the alerts. Worst case, I have to reboot or restore a few affected instances on Tuesday morning.

It seems like a lot of businesses are chasing this ideal of perfect and end up much worse off than if they had just stuck whatever application on a single server in a semi-reliable part of the world.

<comment><USER4> 2-3 hours per year is a lot of downtime. Most competent bare metal providers see maybe one major outage of less than an hour every 3-5 years. Nothing other than a facility wide power outage, if the load somehow gets dropped because the generators don't start right away as they should, or a misbehaving (only partially failing) core network infrastructure device should result in major outages when all the proper redundancies are in place.

Specific providers aside, there's more complexity involved in a large cloud provider's infrastructure and much more that can go wrong as a result. Having a code update, or some orchestration issue from your infrastructure provider be potential points of major outages are huge and unnecessary risks. You don't need that much scale, just utilizing enough resources to fill up a few whole physical machines for a few hundred dollars a month. Add some globally distributed BGP Anycast DNS and database replication and you have enough redundancy to withstand most of the worst major infrastructure failures.

I would understand if AWS was super simple and convenient, but these days the learning curve seems far greater than setting up the above described bare metal solution. While being almost an order of magnitude more expensive for the equivalent amount of resources.

How did we end up here? Does brand recognition just trump all technical and economic factors, or what am I missing?

Disclaimer: I run a bare metal hosting provider

<comment><USER5> 3 hours of downtime per year equals to 99,96% uptime.

In what world is that a lot of downtime?

<comment><USER6> In a world where you have SLAs with your customers, in which you commit to something better?

<comment><USER5> Damn, these ships must really be run tightly.

In every company I have worked for, the amount of outages caused by bugs and other post deployment issues was already above that number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://status.heroku.com/incidents/1892](https://status.heroku.com/incidents/1892) \- it appears Heroku is being particularly affected. We've had multiple sites on multiple accounts go down in the past few minutes.

EDIT T16:31Z: It appears Heroku has failed over their dashboard, but dynos are still failing to come online. We had assumed that they had multi-region failovers for their customers. Incredibly disappointing.

<comment><USER8> We cannot even restart/turn off the dynos or get into the dashboard to turn off and kill our background tasks for some of our clients.

<comment><USER9> Is it best practice to run the dashboard and the cloud service in the same region of the same cloud provider?

<comment><USER8> I believe it's not.

As a PaaS I would think that they would run a high availability cluster on at least 2 multiple regions so that they would have a mechanism in place for events like these. I know it's expensive, but if you charge 250 for 2.5GB of RAM I believe you would have enough money to cover it. I also think as you hinted that they should separate services across different regions..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks to have been caused by a loss of utility power and subsequent backup generator failure at one datacenter.

> 10:47 AM PDT We want to give you more information on progress at this point, > and what we know about the event. At 4:33 AM PDT one of 10 datacenters in > one of the 6 Availability Zones in the US-EAST-1 Region saw a failure of > utility power. Backup generators came online immediately, but for reasons we > are still investigating, began quickly failing at around 6:00 AM PDT. This > resulted in 7.5% of all instances in that Availability Zone failing by 6:10 > AM PDT. Over the last few hours we have recovered most instances but still > have 1.5% of the instances in that Availability Zone remaining to be > recovered. Similar impact existed to EBS and we continue to recover volumes > within EBS. New instance launches in this zone continue to work without > issue.

[https://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/ec2-us- east-1.rss](https://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/ec2-us-east-1.rss)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've noticed both Twitter and Reddit were having issues this morning, so this makes sense.

<comment><USER12> [https://reddit.statuspage.io/](https://reddit.statuspage.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I got paged 50 minutes before AWS updated their status page. We are running on AWS's managed Kubernetes offering (EKS), and about one third of our nodes were running in the affected availability zone. We were then able to move all of or traffic out of that AZ, which solved our issues. The main symptom was HTTP requests made by our backend to 3rd party APIs failing, but only on requests originating from that AZ.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reddit has been quite dysfunctional for me the past hour or so.

<comment><USER15> Same. I thought it was my WiFi at first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Amazon JUST had an ec2/RDS failure in one AZ in Tokyo last week; the cause was a bug in their HVAC that led to overheating. I wonder if this is similar or just coincidental.

[https://aws.amazon.com/jp/message/56489/](https://aws.amazon.com/jp/message/56489/)

<comment><USER17> US-East-1 was the first, IIRC. Lots of early adopters have grown significantly but have various hardcoded assumptions about running there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The Spinnaker project is looking more appealing with every outage. Outage detected in X provider in Y region? Deploy infrastructure to Z provider in Y region.

<comment><USER19> This outage is only affecting a single availability zone, so taking on the complexity of multiple cloud providers would not be necessary to be resilient against it. AWS best practices would already have covered you.

<comment><USER20> Where does it say it's a single AZ?

<comment><USER21> Every "more" drawer/dropdown

> We are investigating connectivity issues affecting some single-AZ RDS > instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm surprised by how much of the "internet" seem to be affected by a single AZ going down.

<comment><USER23> We wouldn't have this problem if people just used application-layer protocols and federated services like the early internet.

<comment><USER24> Wait, why wouldn't we have these problems? Back in the 1980s, if a university campus connection goes down, you can't telnet in or read your university POP2 email remotely. It's down.

The only difference between then and now is that we're online (seemingly) at every waking minute expecting a hundred different services to be functional at any given moment.

<comment><USER23> Modern services such as reddit and Twitter effectively usurp the role that Usenet/NNTP and similar distributed protocols used to fulfill, but without the advantage of decentralization / lack of large single points of failure that such protocols embraced. That's what I was getting at, and maybe I'm full of shit.

In the 80s if a university campus internet connection went down, only that university was affected. Now, when a single AWS availability zone goes down, a much wider swath of users is impacted. Such consolidation / centralization shows a disregard for the spirit of the early internet and design considerations that went into it.

Again, maybe I'm full of shit. Lots of people here seem to think so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> us-east-1 continues to have continually worse uptime than other regions (for, likely, good reason too, it continues to be the default region).

I've avoided that region and I can't remember the last time I had downtime caused by Amazon.

<comment><USER11> Also, it is one of the regions that gets new features first, which makes me wonder if it contributes to lower stability.

<comment><USER26> This is not true. The region where new software is deployed first is different team by team (or service by service).

<comment><USER11> Perhaps, but I can't recall a product launch that wasn't available in us- east-1 from day 1.

<comment><USER27> I believe us-east-1 is one of the regions included in the minimal set of regions for a new AWS service to be considered 'available'. If I recall, eu- west-1 is another such region.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Leaseweb Virginia is having a major outage as well. Maybe it is related?

[https://www.leasewebstatus.com/incidents/updated- connectivit...](https://www.leasewebstatus.com/incidents/updated-connectivity- issues-in-part-of-our-network/ci25t2jr)

</comment><comment><USER29> Copy that. Happy Labor Day weekend everyone.

<comment><USER29> It's been 2 hours and they still don't have a red flag on [https://status.aws.amazon.com/](https://status.aws.amazon.com/)

<comment><USER30> Cognito went down completely a couple of months ago (started returning rate limited to every request) and despite our contacting AWS to see if there was anything going on (and their confirming that there was) they never updated the status page. The way we got updates was by calling our AWS contact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This seems to affect a broad swath of the internet, perhaps because the us- east-1 region is so popular? My side project StatusGator shows approximately 15% of the status pages we monitor (including our own) with a warn or down notice right now, a sizable spike over the baseline.

</comment><comment><USER32> >We are investigating connectivity issues affecting some instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 Region.

Well there's your problem, people. Use multiple AZs.

<comment><USER33> Easier said then done if that would mean synchronizing database and filesystem that is heavily written to.

<comment><USER34> Depends on what you use. RDS can span AZs and failover in events like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Curious. Lambda not effected. EC2 being physically tied to a box does introduce extra risk I hadn't thought of.

<comment><USER36> Lambda would be just as affected if you were running inside of a VPC [1] and you ignored the multiple warnings about setting up your lambda to run in only one AZ.

[1] technically your lambda never runs "inside your VPC" but it's a colloquialism that everyone understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is pretty good common sense post on not having your failure moods correlate with your client's failure modes.

[https://trackjs.com/blog/separate- monitoring/](https://trackjs.com/blog/separate-monitoring/)

I don't work for any of the entities mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER38> Had an app doing fine until about 12 minutes ago, when Heroku tried to move it to a new server. Alas.

<comment><USER38> Setting dynos to 0 and back got us up, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> For folks here, my RDS instances in us-east-1f are doing okay (knock on wood!) Not sure which AZ is suffering most.

My client's Heroku instances are online, thankfully.

Can anyone here speak to their experience with the Ohio region? I'm considering leaning on that more and more.

<comment><USER40> Your us-east-1f is not the same one as on other accounts. The letter is randomly assigned to the AZ to spread load.

<comment><USER39> Interesting, never knew that. I guess that is why the announcements never explicitly pointed to a single AZ by name.

<comment><USER41> Essentially everyone picks "a" because it's the first az. There's some internal mapping to "your az a is actually datacenter q". You can _kind of_ figure out which AZs match across accounts if you've got enough accounts you can send traffic between.

I've been told that the "a" AZ you get was the least populated at object creation time (ie the first time you make an object that lives in an az), but I don't know how valid that is.

<comment><USER39> Aside from spinning up an EC2 node in each AZ and doing ping or tracing tests I wonder if there is a quick-n-dirty way to map AZ's between different AWS accounts. I've never had to approach that scenario (cross account, low latency requirements) but in the future I'll keep this in mind.

<comment><USER42> Go to your Subnets tab in the EC2 console. You'll see the actual AZ numbers there, vs. the 'random' lettering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is there no way at all to reach Amazon EC2 instances in us-east-1 or is just the default route to the internet broken?

Is there any way for the owners of the instances to reach them?

</comment><comment><USER43> Is this why Reddit and Duolingo weren't working properly? I've had issues since 9pm Sydney time so about 4 hours or so.

</comment><comment><USER44> I remember reading about how not all AWS regions are similarly operated and that one was a snowflake. Is it US-East-1?

<comment><USER45> Yes. us-east-1 is the first AWS region Amazon made publicly available. It's also historically used by a lot of customers as "default region" where they launch all workloads where they don't have special needs of launching them somewhere else.

That has lead to us-east-1 being the largest AWS region by far, also compromised of the largest number of availability zones (6) of all AWS regions.

<comment><USER44> Ok so it is this one. I was talking more about how the region itself has features, exceptions/quirks that are different than other AWS regions. Basically a quirks-mode region with differences that may, or may not impact you at some point in time. Or you do have special needs and US-East-1 is the only region that has the special non-standard ability you want to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Has anyone else noticed that there seems to never be outages in us-east-2 and somehow everyone keeps putting instances in -1?

Why?

<comment><USER3> For us, it's mostly a matter of historical convention. Our entire stack currently lives in -1 (we've had instances there for ~5 years now), and to move to a different region under these pretenses is a bit of a pain in the ass for us considering how transient the impact of these things has typically been to our business.

If we move anywhere, its going to be completely out of AWS and into on-prem or some bare metal provider. Hopping regions hoping to win at some reliability metric game is not a good way to run a business IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Funnily enough Heroku in Europe also seems to be malfunctioning. Cannot deploy my app for at least an hour now.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm in Australia and Reddit/Twitter ground to a standstill - request timeout after request timeout. I presumed it was an outage somewhere but was surprised to learn it was with AWS us-east-1? I would have thought surely that my connection would have referenced a different region based on my location.

<comment><USER49> usually, DB servers will live in a small number of locations with good connectivity between clusters and the frontends (which terminate the user's TCP connection) live much closer (likely Sydney). Good design means that there are few roundtrips between the FEs and the backend but they are not unavoidable.

Designing truly resilient and available applications with DB servers that replicate across continents is hard.

<comment><USER50> Is true master-master replication across continents even possible?

I guess partitioning can help, but then isn't it just turning the DB servers into pizzas of master-slave where the Hawaiian slice is master only in Hawaii, and slave everywhere else?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Yeah, you're gonna hit CAP _hard_ at that distance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> That must be why reddit and twitter are failing on me.

<comment><USER52> This leads me to believe it's more than a single AZ failure, despite what AWS is reporting. Not having multi-AZ, auto failover or replication doesn't seem like a thing Reddit or Twitter would skip out on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It looks like it was localized to zone D.

<comment><USER53> Zone designations are account specific; zone D for you is not zone D for me

<comment><USER32> The affected AZ appears to be use1-az6. You can map "your" AZ name (us- east-1c, us-east-1d, etc.) to the actual, canonical name of the AZ in the 'Subnets' tab on the VPC console.

<comment><USER54> What makes you say use1-az6 is the culprit? I only ask because none of our workloads in az6 have experienced any issues. ....yet. We run critical workloads across 3 AZs thankfully, but still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Aha. Experienced some NPM lag too.

</comment><comment><USER56> is that why xda developers doesnt work

</comment><comment><USER57> My little instance died and I had to bring it back from the image.

Glad to know that it wasn't anything personal over any Hacker News gags I've done.

</comment><comment><USER58> Well, this outage says something about the companies that religiously depend on it.

If your entire service just went down as soon as this happened, Congratulations! You didn't deploy in multiple regions or think about a failsafe/fallback option that redirects from your affected service or instance.

<comment><USER59> Very few companies or systems need near-perfect uptime. Multi-region cloud engineering, especially once data is involved, is incredibly expensive. If you do need the kind of resiliency you usually engineer it for just a very specific component rather than the entire system.

An outage like this happens how often?

Edit: Looks like this is affecting a single AZ... so bit different situation, but I would agree if you're not capable of surviving a single AZ outage in 2019 then your engineering team should be replaced.

<comment><USER60> > your engineering team should be replaced

My engineers are all React and CSS web developers. They don't know anything about multi tenant data resiliency. But they can make a real pretty "system down" page.</comment></comment></comment>


Oden: experimental, statically-typed functional language, built for Go ecosystem - <AUTHOR> http://oden-lang.org/ <comment><USER2> I'be been mulling over a similar concept for a while, really excited for this. Go has such great tooling and a nice ecosystem, but could use some language improvements, like coffeescript or the alt JVM languages.

I really want sum types, strict semantics, and untyped IO, and a good ecosystem.

<comment><USER3> > Go has such great tooling and a nice ecosystem, but could use some language > improvements, like coffeescript or the alt JVM languages.

I'd like to see a language that compiles to Go, but also to Javascript, so that code can run on both client and server without changes.

That language should not equal Go, because, honestly, some aspects of this language are quite strange: [https://golang.org/doc/faq#nil_error](https://golang.org/doc/faq#nil_error)

<comment><USER4> Note that that issue makes perfect sense, and the odds of it affecting you are very very very small. I've written a lot of go code, and have never been affected by it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finally, a language that exposes Go's polymorphism abilities to the user!

<comment><USER6> I have to admit that I laughed at that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why use :: for type annotations instead of the more standard single colon?

<comment><USER8> :: is what Haskell uses, and this is a Haskell derivative.

<comment><USER7> Haskell is a bit of the odd man out in terms of syntax for type annotations. Scala, OCaml, Agda, Idris, Elm all use single colon. I'm actually unsure why Haskell is the way it is.

<comment><USER9> Haskell's designers wanted single colon for the cons operator, and the cons operator is legal on the left-hand side of an "equation" (sorry, don't recall the official terminology) because Haskell allows pattern matching there.

(I'm not saying I agree with the decision.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks pretty cool! Are there any plans for having polymorphic interfaces? I bet that could lead to some really neat code.

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks interesting but does anybody else think that the code of conduct might drive people away from the project?

[http://oden-lang.org/code-of-conduct/](http://oden-lang.org/code-of-conduct/)

My gut feeling is that an early stage project such as Oden should simply focus on the technology, grow the community and then at a later stage consult with the community if they want to introduce a code of conduct.

<comment><USER12> Though I really shouldn't care, I admit it kinda turned me off when I saw the prominent code of conduct. I don't think they are needed (you can ban a troublemaker without a document) and I don't think they are effective (never met a bully that cared if a piece of paper said "be nice"). But mostly, seeing these codes pop up everywhere bothers me because I like to think of hobby software as one of the last realms on earth where you can have a meritocracy without the politically correct nonsense that eats at your soul the rest of the day. I feel like the open source community is starting to get tainted, somehow, and I hope in time there's a strong reaction the other way.

<comment><USER13> I agree that political correctness should not be the focus of a technical discussion, and like-wise there shouldn't be anything remotely offensive in those kinds of discussions either. Just as political correctness eats away at your soul, racism/sexism/etc... do too. You're free to run your own projects however you want; the maintainer of Oden obviously doesn't want to work with people who require the freedom to be offensive in public forums. If that offends you then don't work on it.

<comment><USER14> It's more nuanced than that: Many people have no intention of being offensive but don't want to be regulated either.

CoC projects often attract the worst politicians who are just acceptably polite on the surface but absolutely cold and ruthless in their actions. Ironically, these people also often tend to blog about politeness in OSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> An ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Haskell

<comment><USER16> Please don't post snarky dismissals of new work to HN. Substantive criticism is fine.

<comment><USER15> How is this _not_ exactly what I said it was though? The author even says in the readme that it's a NIH version of Haskell.

I love PL mental masturbation as much as anyone else, but stuff like this is equivalent to an oil spill in a freshwater lake with 20 endangered species.

<comment><USER16> The problem is the genre of the snarky dismissal. Perhaps there was a solid point behind what you said, but you didn't express it that way.

It's a tragedy of the commons. Posting such coments never feels harmful, but once they get above a certain level the whole community becomes filled with toxic fumes. This threshold is lower than it seems—the damage isn't only in the fumes your comment gives off, but in the encouragement it gives others to do the same.

Tragedy of the commons plus broken windows theory is not an auspicious combination, so we try to be proactive about asking people not to do this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cool stuff. Although I'm getting a little tired of seeing Haskell-like languages everywhere, it is interesting to see it target Go.</comment>


Grub with the Scobleizer - <AUTHOR> http://www.grubwith.us/restaurants/bossa-nova-san-francisco/meals/125

<comment><USER2> Wish I was in SF for this one. Eddy, I think you need to bring Scoble to sweet home Chicago. We can take him to that Chipotle rip off place near Beard Papas ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> not having vegetarian options is a huge issue for someone like me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there, I'm one of the founders and actually vegetarian too =) We try to do most of our meals half veggie / half meat but we couldn't make it work with Brazilian, so we had to go all meat on this one. We're definitely going to build in more options for people with dietary restrictions though!</comment></comment>


How-To Spy on Competitor Signups - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-flux/how-to-spy-on-competitor-signups-bb60dd92e41e <comment><USER2> Countermeasure is obfuscating the ids, e.g. [https://github.com/namick/obfuscate_id](https://github.com/namick/obfuscate_id)</comment>


Ask HN: How would you build a game streaming service (eg Gaikai/OnLive)? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Having designed one and worked with another, it's all about constraints. I'd start by asking some questions.

What kinds of games? Text games? 2D games? Animated games? 3D games? Existing games? New games? Twitch games? Slow games? Multiplayer games?

If existing games: What platform are they on? Windows? Do they use DirectX? Which parts? Which versions? OpenGL? What do they use for music? Mac? Are they PPC or x86? What version of OS X? Linux? I don't even know what questions to ask for that.

If new-but-existing games: Are you expecting them to be recompiled or ported to your platform? What's involved in that? What constraints does your platform exhibit?

If new-exclusive games: Why on earth would anyone build for your platform? What's your penetration?

That both informs and places constraints on your hardware and software infrastructure, which in turn places constraints on your ongoing costs to keep the lights on, as well as on how end users will experience your games.

Of course, all of this assumes you've done all the customer development and market research that would justify building one after both of those essentially failed in the market.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now I would just buy a Grid rack from Nvidia.</comment>


A collection of Christianized aliases to sanctify your Git workflow.  - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexmacarthur/christian-git <comment><USER2> Why not all religions?</comment>


Ask HN: Are you advancing in your career as planned? - <AUTHOR> I was browsing through my HN historical submissions and found the following one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7314582. Surprised to know that I'm with the same doubt nowadays and now I'm wondering if I really advanced or just kept repeating the same patterns. Check yours :). <comment><USER2> I put less value on "advancing" as I do enjoying what I do.

Two years ago I quit a ~20 year career in networking and frankly I was kinda tired of the industry I was in.

I decided to do a coding bootcamp (I had always been interested in coding). Loved it (found I was a far better student at 40 than 20), and got my first job for less than half what I used to earn.

My pay has risen dramatically and while I don't make what I used to and I'm not as "advanced" in my career as I was... I'm far happier.

A lot of folks seem to see "advancement" as what makes them happy in their job, I worry for them that such things are fleeting and hollow.</comment>


Senator Franken breaks his silence on PIPA. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alfranken.com/2012/01/20/lets-talk-about-intellectual-property/

<comment><USER2> Too little too late... And, this quote (from the article):

"If we don't protect our intellectual property, international criminals — as well as legitimate businesses like payment processors and ad networks — will continue to profit dishonestly from the work these Americans are doing every day. And that puts these millions of jobs at serious risk."

...is some serious FUD.

<comment><USER3> Yes. That and this, "If this bill really did some of the things people have heard it would do (like shutting down YouTube), I would never have supported it." indicate that he still doesn't technically get it.

<comment><USER4> I think the issue is that it is technically correct that this bill wouldn't 'shut down' YouTube. There is no language in the bill that prohibits sharing of non copyright infringing videos on the internet.

However, the language of the bill would make a website like YouTube a practical impossibility. They wouldn't be able to keep their doors open because there would be too much overhead in complying with the new laws, and they would be under constant threat of being shut down tomorrow, because someone claimed infringement.

I sympathize that someone who really doesn't understand how websites work and how something like YouTube functions would not understand this distinction.

However, if you don't understand the technical details about this, you should have a hearing and defer to experts rather than asking a bunch of MPAA and RIAA lobbyists to write a bill for you. It is like asking a militant vegan to design your slaughterhouse.

<comment><USER5> To be very literal, I don't think that Youtube itself would have been in much danger of being shut down if the bill(s) had passed. They're too big now. But tomorrow's Youtube, that's another matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These laws just give these corporations a blank check to wield with minimal due process and without recourse if they abuse it. The DMCA is currently being abused by these companies but no politician talks about that.

The issue isn't that this bill may or may not shut down Youtube. It's more that it might make Youtube, or future sites like Youtube, too legally difficult to run. That the responsibility for policing piracy would be an unfair burden on legal Internet businesses. Or that the lack of due process and consequences will result in legitimate sites being wiped from the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER7> Strangely, he didn't include his large campaign contributions from the Entertainment industry in his analysis of the laws.

I might respect his position a bit more if he commented on this. However, I can see the position of these guys since this is really the ONLY way to hurt non-US-based sources of pirated and "fake" merchandise.

Of course, no analysis from the industry or Congress has every shown any conclusive evidence that piracy or "fake" consumer goods causes any major financial hardship towards manufacturers. Many people contend that these goods would just not be purchased if people's only option was the "full price" or "legal" versions.</comment>


The Ross Spiral Curriculum - Visualizing the evolution of human consciousness - <AUTHOR> http://spiral.rosslearningsystem.org/spiral/#/ <comment><USER2> At first I didn't notice that they actually have STEM classes here.

The spiral does however have maths and sciences, the titles mislead me at first but it appears to go through calculus 1 and physics 2. Newtonian dynamics is covered, electromagnetism is covered...

However about a third of the advanced curriculum is devoted directly or indirectly to Astronomy. "Archaeoastronomy", "Maya Astronomy", "Islamic Astronomy" etc. etc. through "Cosmology"

Biology is covered with heavy heavy emphasis on human spirituality (I presume), with courses devoted entirely to the brain and mind. Evolution and Human anatomy are covered, but I'm guessing taxonomy and the boring stuff like how kidneys work or what ATP is pays the price.

Chemistry seems to have drawn the short straw here.

Not going to lie though, I'm jealous of that History schedule, that looks really tight.

At first I came in with a really judgmental statement, but I've eased back quite a bit. I still, however, would not send my child here.</comment>


Garry Kasparov, the Man Who Would Be King - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/magazine/garry-kasparov.html

<comment><USER2> I was a much bigger fan of Garry Kasparov before I found out he was a follower of the "new chronology" psuedohistory. Though I still hope he can help bend Russia toward democracy.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_\(Fomenko\))

<comment><USER3> Wow.. I'd never read that before. There's some pretty crazy stuff in that.

I'd note that it seems likely that people may have an open mind about some of the theories espoused without believing the whole thing.

For example, the statement _In 1887, Edwin Johnson expressed the opinion that early Christian history was largely invented or corrupted in the 2nd and 3rd centuries_ has some basis in historic facts: The Nicene Creed wasn't written until 325, and it's influence on what is considered "standard" Christianity cannot be underestimated.

One of the links on Wikipedia[1] makes Kasparov sound more sceptical than saying he is a follower: _I do not advocate Fomenko and Nosovsky's theory. However, as a man with an analytical mind-set who is used to analysing all the information that I receive, I am very sceptical about the constructions and findings of official history. I believe that Fomenko and Nosovsky have rightly pointed out numerous inconsistencies and gaps in the official concept. Instead of pursuing their work by asking questions and dismantling schemes which are often mythological, they have put forward a new theory, which unfortunately is subject to the same problems. Because it is clear that today we still lack the information needed to create another, alternative concept. And that is why the main attacks on Fomenko and Nosovsky's work are not related to the critical aspects of their work but, rather, to what is put forward today as its positive outlook.'_

[1] [http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/newchronology.html](http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/newchronology.html)

<comment><USER4> I agree with Kasparov. I've never known a historian who didn't agree that there were major gaps and distortions in historical records. Fomenko may be a radical and an outsider, but he does have a very logical approach, which I appreciate. Sometimes it's worthwhile to question everything you assume is correct and reason from available evidence alone. This approach should be celebrated and encouraged, especially when it produces such different and interesting results. If it's wrong, great! We can still learn from it. Many political problems could be solved with a similar approach. There's too much investment in established ways of doing things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kasparov's twitter feed at [https://twitter.com/Kasparov63](https://twitter.com/Kasparov63) is a must read for all those who want to understand what goes on in Putin's Russia.

<comment><USER6> Correction. It is a must read for those who want to MISunderstand Putin's Russia. Kasparov is against the Russian constitution and openly called for a violent overthrow of the current Russian government. Russians do not approve of Kasparov's political views because of what they see as a biased viewpoint that ignores any economic policy successes of the current government and exaggerates any failures.

<comment><USER7> >Russians do not approve of Kasparov's political views

Speak for yourself. Kasparov is a great guy and I would vote for him anytime.

<comment><USER6> The biggest problem of the Russian nation are its intellectually lazy intellectuals. Lazy enough to uncritically parrot foreign propaganda.

<comment><USER8> As opposed to lazily parroting locally created lazy propaganda, I suppose. What does trolling western blogs pay these days in Russia?

<comment><USER6> Actually I get paid in United States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nigel Short, an English chess grandmaster, made some interesting allegations in this article: [https://www.facebook.com/GM.NigelShort/posts/101542204061900...](https://www.facebook.com/GM.NigelShort/posts/10154220406190094)

</comment><comment><USER10> >Envisioning a new era of international attention for Kalmykia, Ilyumzhinov then built a Chess City on Elista's outskirts, including a glass-domed palace intended as a venue for matches and tournaments that he had almost solitary power to organize.

it is almost impossible to explain to non-Russians that they are dealing with. The best way to start is "12 chairs" :)

<comment><USER11> At least they appear to have a sense of humor about it - apparently there's indeed a statue of Ostap Bender there.</comment></comment>


Snips and Home Assistant: on-device voice commands at home - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/snips-ai/integrating-snips-with-home-assistant-314723645c77 <comment><USER2> Hi I'm a co-founder of Snips, we are building 100% on-device AI to respect people privacy, so you can enjoy AI interface in your home, without wondering if what your children or friend say will be logged to a Google server

We would love to see people use our AI in home automation setups, so we built an easy way to connect to the great HomeAssistant code

If you have successfuly added Snips to your home, send us a message and we will showcase you if you would like!

<comment><USER3> Are there any plans for a voice input Home Assistant component similar to [https://home-assistant.io/components/conversation/](https://home- assistant.io/components/conversation/)?

I would prefer to simply use the iOS app as a voice input instead of a dedicated mic + raspberry pi.

Otherwise, great project :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea! We haven't looked into this yet, although we are preparing iOS and Android versions of Snips which run entirely on the phone.</comment></comment></comment>


Robo-Ethicists Want to Revamp Asimov's 3 Laws - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/07/robo-ethics/ <comment><USER3> This is pure Bullshit! Robots, or AIs don't have a conciousness (and probably they never will). And as long as we've not created a robot/AI with a real concious mind we need not to worry about 'punishing' robots or giving them ethical rules. It wont work! I think people who write something like this, or theorize around that topic have time to kill or other issues, since they're solving a non-existant problem.

<comment><USER4> >AIs don't have a conciousness (and probably they never will)

"Computers can't beat men at chess (and probably never will)"

You're making a very strong (and in my opinion, unjustifiable) claim. You really shouldn't state things like that without backing them up.

That said, it is very silly to suggest that robots today need a code of ethics, because today they are certainly not conscious.

<comment><USER3> Well the first half of my statement is obviously true (todays computers are not self-aware). The second half contains the word "probably". My point was that it is silly to talk about robot ethics or something like that, since it just distracts from the real problem: the men building and using these robots/machines need ethics!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"If you build artificial intelligence but don't think about its moral sense or create a conscious sense that feels regret for doing something wrong, then technically it is a psychopath," says Josh Hall, a scientist who wrote the book Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of a Machine._

What!? How does this possibly work? Will the AI gun say "you still didn't fix that null pointer dereference that caused me to go haywire and kill people, but at least this time when I do it I'll feel bad?" This is one of the most ridiculous quotes I've ever seen.

<comment><USER6> Damnit! I should have built that moral and conscious sense into my Roomba! It is a sociopath for not feeling regret when it repeatedly runs into the dog while she is trying to sleep?

For that matter, I probably should build this into my car, that way it can feel regret if the anti-lock breaks malfunction in a crash.

These people really have no idea what robots are like these days. They're just complex tools. We set them in motion with rules we have described for them. They don't have a consciousness, they don't have morals, they don't have regret, and they don't even have a psyche to be psychopathic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Already iRobot's Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner and Scooba floor cleaner are > a part of more than 3 million American households. The next generation > robots will be more sophisticated and are expected to provide services such > as nursing, security, housework and education.

Riiiiight. Next-generation automobiles are also expected to fly.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone come up with a situation involving robots that isn't already adequately covered by current tort law?

<comment><USER9> I hope this is tongue-in-cheek :) Just in case it is not, they are not referring to that kind of law.

<comment><USER8> They cite examples where a robot malfunctioned and hurt someone. I fail to see how that is any different from other machine malfunctions, except semantically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article has little to do with Asimov's laws. Asimov's laws address "three fundamental Rules of Robotics, the three rules that are built most deeply into a robot's positronic brain", i.e., an engineering construct. The article mostly addresses a legal issue: "Accordingly, robo-ethicists want to develop a set of guidelines that could outline how to punish a robot, decide who regulates them and even create a 'legal machine language' that could help police the next generation of intelligent automated devices."

I also love how the article ends with "Morality is impossible to write in formal terms", and yet, it expects to see complex enough robots to warrant the article in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER11> I posted this before but it also seems appropriate here. It's David Langford's Three Laws for military robots:

1\. A robot will not harm authorized Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.

2\. A robot will obey the orders of authorized personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.

3\. A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.

Langford is an SF writer. You might know him from his "basilisk" stories--if not, go read them sometime.

</comment><comment><USER12> wow, this is seriously a bunch of bull. It doesn't say anything interesting about the problem at all, and just claims a bunch of speculation and improbable comparisions.

Like, "punishing a robot" ...? No AI scheme I've seen ever has a sense of self worth. You can give it a negative reward, but the AI doesn't care much for its _current_ reward, it only performs actions to maximize the expected reward. Which means you can tell it to avoid doing these bad things, but punishing it after the fact would just leave it confused about why its reward system changed, and then go about trying to maximize its rewards again.

I for one, am all for the 3 laws of robotics, but it probably won't work for a much simpler reason -- it can't identify the terms. How would an AI recognize when a human is at harm? Would it show the drowning patient a picture of distorted letters and ask what the word is? Or would it jump in to save posters from being damaged? And that's the easy part... how would you define harm? These questions need to be answered before anyone tries to figure out the ethics guidelines for robots to follow.

You would seriously learn more about robot ethics from I, Robot than from this poorly written article.

</comment><comment><USER13> Asimov's 3 Laws were there to provide a constraints for a story to exist i --, they are the equivalent of a dead body found in a locked room.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I find it hard to believe that people are considering elements in fiction as a starting point for (what they perceive to be anyway) a large ethical question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm far removed from the AI industry, but even I was under the impression that Asimov's 3 Laws had been considered outdated for decades.

<comment><USER16> I too am far removed from the AI industry, but I was always under the impression that Asimov's 3 laws have never been considered by the AI community.

Aside from the absurdity of implementing the laws, the whole point of the 3 laws in Asimov's stories were that they didn't work.

<comment><USER6> Asimov's stories also pointed out that when we really do create conscious AI we can't expect them to obey simple laws as if they were tools. They will be just the same as we are and we'll either have to treat them as such or destroy them.

Of course, being closer to the AI community I know that we aren't anywhere near having to treat AI as conscious creatures.

Personally I think we have to realize the people are just complex biological machines first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is a dog a biological robot?

If I program a robot to act like a dog, and express pain when kicked - <USER2> the robot actually feel pain? Does the biological dog actually feel pain?

<comment><USER18> How do you know dogs (or other humans for that matter) actually feel pain?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Robots--for the foreseeable future--don't have a psyche, and thus cannot become psychopathic.</comment>


Build your PiZero Swarm with OTG networking - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alexellis.io/pizero-otg-swarm/ <comment><USER2> The PI Zero was introduced over a year ago, yet it's next to impossible to buy it in more than one piece, assuming it is in stock somewhere. Why should I build any of my projects around a board its own designer has showed no intention to sell and is kept in production in very small quantities, probably at a loss, only to keep diyers away form the competition? No thanks, For everything that is not a video player I'll keep using Orange PIs and Nano PIs or whatever is being introduced by vendors that play nice to their customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Btw if anyone is looking for Raspberry Pi Zeros, they are easy to get hold of now. Microcenter stock them in the US and [http://stockalert.alexellis.io](http://stockalert.alexellis.io) shows other locations and quantities.

<comment><USER4> "Pi Zero only There is a maximum of 1 unit per customer for this product."</comment></comment>


Why isn't the logo language developed into a proper programming language? - <AUTHOR>

I really like the logo programming language, it's strong support for cellular automata is especially nice. It has a similar syntax but does not contain as much parenthesis as lisp while retaining still retaining all of its power. Why hasn't there been work done to turn logo into a general purpose language complete with and IDE and everything? <comment><USER2> There are a number of modern Logo languages like NetLogo and so forth, and even older Logos were actually capable of quite a lot more than advertised (Color Logo for the TRS-80 Color Computer even included a chapter teaching recursion!)

The trouble is that little teaching with Logo ever goes that far, focusing on a very imperative simple base syntax to make the little turtle move around, and then promptly moves to some other language to teach actual structured programming.

A language needs people to grow up and keep using it to survive, and no one grew up just using Logo; they all moved to Basic or JavaScript or Python or Scheme. And since Logo doesn't do anything any other Lisp can't already do, there really wasn't much point with sticking with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rebol ([http://rebol.com/](http://rebol.com/)) and Red ([http://red- lang.org/](http://red-lang.org/)) may be considered "proper" (i.e., production-ready) programming languages derived from Logo. They share a good chunk of its parentheses-optional syntax.

Example code (taken from [http://www.rebol.net/cookbook/recipes/0004.html](http://www.rebol.net/cookbook/recipes/0004.html)):

        foreach file read %./ [
            if find [%.txt %.text] suffix? file [
                write file replace/all read file "web" "rebol"
            ]
        ]

The same with parentheses:

        (foreach file (read %./) [
            (if (find [%.txt %.text] (suffix? file)) [
                (write file (replace/all (read file) "web" "rebol"))
            ])
        ])

<comment><USER3> I should correct what I wrote above: Red is not yet production-ready but it aspires to be a more modern, open source alternative to Rebol 2 for use in production. (Rebol 2 is now closed-source freeware; it used to cost a lot of money and be marketed towards the enterprise.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What implementations are you using? FMSLogo seems pretty full featured, and aUCBLogo has an IDE looking editor.

[http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/](http://fmslogo.sourceforge.net/)

[http://aucblogo.org/en/Screenshots.html](http://aucblogo.org/en/Screenshots.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think one of the motivations behind Logo is being a low complexity environment for learning about computation. Bloating it up with all the trappings of professional software development would seem to defeat the purpose.

</comment><comment><USER6> _Why hasn 't there been work done to turn logo into a general purpose language complete with and IDE and everything?_

The big fuzzy picture of languages includes a community of speakers/users. The community is what distinguishes living and dead languages. The Logo community has not developed tools for doing tasks for which are not part of the ecosystem it inhabits.

Let the base case be the set of reasons you have not developed an IDE, etc.

The proof is an induction.

</comment><comment><USER7> It already _is_ a GP language, it just happens to be specialized, by design, to serve a particular niche.</comment>


Show HN: an open source HTML5 + CSS3 course - <AUTHOR> http://instructormatters.com

<comment><USER2> My browser is not supported (I'm using IE9). I dont like the statement, that IE is crap. Sure it was. But that was 3 versions in the past. IE9 and IE10 is much secure than the old versions and it is compliant to industry standards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. We are strongly opinionated, since we have been developing with IE support since version 5.5 (that we don't miss much, truth be told).

The course has an entire module dedicated to make things work in IE: [http://html5.instructormatters.com/0.3/browsers-and- seo.html...](http://html5.instructormatters.com/0.3/browsers-and-seo.html#/9)

You are right that IE10 _is_ a standards-compliant, really good browser (not so much IE9). We were rushing to get the contents out and probably should re- check our browser assumptions.

Thanks for the heads-up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Images in slides often go outside the screen at the bottom so you can't see them. (FF16).

<comment><USER4> Yes, you need a big screen to see them properly, although in a projector they look fine.

For the moment, we rely on the browser zoom. Adapting them for smaller screens is on our to-do list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't trust a website with lousy stock photos to teach me HTML5

<comment><AUTHOR> I am afraid there is no graphic designer among us. We are all IT guys.

<comment><USER6> If you take them out it looks better imo

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right, it looks better now. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool stuff, I must say</comment>


Refined (Slack extension) shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://g3rv4.com/2019/07/bye-bye-refined <comment><AUTHOR> Seems completely reasonable -- my only take on this is that I'd like to see web extensions be given more control over pages.

In particular, this is the second time I've seen an extension author complain about CSP headers blocking development (Greasemonkey being the first). If this is expected behavior, it seems weird to me that extensions can't bypass CSP headers -- a webpage shouldn't be able to control what an extension does.

If it's not expected behavior, it would be good for Firefox devs to clarify better how extensions are meant to handle CSP headers, since it seems like multiple extension authors have gotten bitten by them.

I can't think of any instance where I would want a webpage to be able to decide what capabilities an extension can have.</comment>


Swimming in Broth: Medicated Baths in Eighteenth-Century Europe - <AUTHOR> http://recipes.hypotheses.org/5986

<comment><USER2> Nowadays, to do this, you'll need to make your own bone broth, or buy it from a place that makes the "real" stuff. The nutrients from traditional broth is now generally substituted with an MSG-based stock for flavoring.

</comment><comment><USER3> The phenomenon prevailed in the U.S. as well during the same time period. "Mineral waters," i.e. iron-rich springs, were valued for their supposed medicinal qualities, and resorts sprang up around them at places such as Saratoga Springs, NY and Schooley's Mountain, NJ that catered to the cream of society at the time.

</comment><comment><USER4> In Germany we still have a category called Heilwasser (literally healing water) for mineral water with a high content of one mineral and is treated by law as medicine.</comment>


This is the wallet i am searching for - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/e-ink-wallet-the-next-generation-wallet-gadget-gadgets <comment><USER2> My first thought, "GPS & cell modem‽ How thick is this thing?", but "shockingly" it doesn't seem to list anything about that. Or really any tech specs at all. It doesn't even seem to have any photos of it that aren't of it open & facing flat toward camera.

Good luck with all that.

Also, in the FAQ:

> pls re-write this line.</comment>


Reputation Search - <AUTHOR> http://barracudalabs.com/?page_id=3179 <comment><USER2> So I entered four valid places and/or things and got no reply, and no results.

What now?</comment>


Meet the Octobot - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603046/meet-the-octobot/ <comment><USER2> I love this quote at the 1:07 mark in the embedded video: "To get the [soft] bot to move, half-strength rocket fuel is pumped into reservoirs in the body."

Depending on the strength, hydrogen peroxide[1] has a wide variety of uses from disinfectant to propellant.

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


Ask HN: Stripe for Sending Payments? - <AUTHOR> I am really impressed with how far payment processing has come from just Paypal, including all of the layers on top like Spreedly, Recurly, and Chargify, to better end to end products like Stripe and Braintree.
This is great for those wanting to accept payments, but what about those who are trying to send payments, the other thing Paypal is used for.  As far as I can tell there really hasn't been a lot of movement on this front.  You seem to have to rely on the solutions all of the above mentioned services are trying to fix namely, Paypal and Amazon FPS.
I think what makes it harder is the fact that there seems to be a need for some type of pseudo bank account, like Paypal has, to manage deposits.
With the exception of WePay, which I think is the only company working on this front, are there other solutions?  Is this on the road map for processors like Stripe?  Or is it really not that big of a market? <comment><USER2> Founder of WePay, here.

Quick clarification: We're actually not really working on solving the problem of helping people "send" money. Our primary focus is making it dead simple for anybody to get-up and running, _collecting_ /accepting payments online.

We think that collecting money is a bigger pain point and a larger market.

"Sending" money falls into two categories: P2P transfers and remittances. Remittance is a pretty large market, with old (Western Union) and new (Xoom) players alike. It's not very exciting to us, and it's a difficult business to break into.

P2P is a little sexier, but the pain point is not as high, people are incredibly sensitive to cost, and it's a problem that will be "absorbed" by the bigger companies (Amex/VISA now have solutions, PayPal offers it for free, your bank will offer it soon). It's more of a feature than a real business. I actually think Venmo has an awesome product and does a great job solving this problem, but I'm guessing that it'll be hard for them to build a big business on that alone.

<comment><USER3> Would I be right in thinking Stripe is your biggest competitor?

{Closest to your business model as opposed to WU or Xoom and even PayPal}

<comment><USER4> Bill from WePay here...

We love the guys at Stripe, they have an awesome product. They provide a super simple gateway for developers. WePay provides super simple tools for anyone (mostly non-developers) to accept payments.

We LOVE to see innovation in user experience disrupting the payments industry from the likes of Square in mobile POS, Stripe for developers, BankSimple for checking accounts and WePay for SMBs & non-profits.

I should mention that we offer an API, but it's mostly for folks that want to allow their users to accept payment via their site (i.e. for marketplaces, fundraising tools, or event planning) - it's not really for recurring billing or merchant processing like Stripe. For more information, see wepay.com/developer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the biggest hurdle is the regulation that would be faced from a say start up PayPal now.

As you might of heard Facecash nearly died because of the money transmitter act.

You might not need banking regulation but a money transmitter in every state would be very, very costly indeed.

However there is Venmo.

<comment><AUTHOR> All things equal, is there really that big of a difference in regulation between accepting payments and sending payments?

<comment><USER3> I don't think that is the issue. I just think it is point blank the cost of a license that I 'believe' costs around $500,000 in California.

See here: <http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/brown.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From what I know about Stripe they are purely making it easier for developers to accept payments and as far as I know they aren't looking at developing technology aiding the sending on money.

* Unless they have some underground project that their website doesn't mention.

</comment><comment><USER6> I personally would love to see a service like you are talking about.

I recently did an ask hn in search of a payment service and someone else posted a similar question today. Seems like there is some need for that sort of thing.

</comment><comment><USER7> If FaceCash were legal in CA you could use it to send payments. Right now it can only be used in MA, SC, MT, NM, AL, and ID. LA and WA are pending.

See [http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/whitepapers/heldhosta...](http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/whitepapers/heldhostage.pdf).</comment>