The campaign to destroy me professionally continues [Brianna Wu] - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Spacekatgal/status/523113644205555712

<comment><USER2> I am not going to comment on this specific case.

But I wish the mob mentality would just stop. People that feel offended or that get their feelings hurt start a campaign to publicly destroy a person's life and/or career.

The ex-Mozilla ceo comes to mind.

since there are no laws preventing this and pretty much no consequences for the person that starts these campaigns, the best thing to do is set an example. I would use data mining techniques to figure out where it originated and then use my own creativity to show the person/people that there are real- world consequences for these types of actions.</comment>


Skyjacking - <AUTHOR> http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/skyjacking/

<comment><USER2> This article fascinated me and I was prepared to dig in for the 90s and postnineleven era, but it ended abruptly. I can forgive that because its point was to reveal the origin of "skyjacking," and it succeeded.

I also would like to learn more about the financial impact of increasing airport security, and see a quantification of its success (or failure).

</comment><comment><USER3> As a fan of 99pi, I struggle to see how this episode is about design. I fear they've run out of topics, and are straying from their original purpose.

<comment><USER4> i didn't know it was about design per se. but i got plenty of it. Airport design mostly.

<comment><USER5> Hello, buddy! I was checking the following link which you replied a long time ago ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8081463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8081463)). Do you know where I can find any guideline to fake encryption in a mail app? I'd appreciate your help. Thanks! (email@example.com)</comment></comment></comment>


Why Steve Jobs Is No Edison - <AUTHOR> http://www.american.com/archive/2011/september/why-jobs-is-no-edison

<comment><USER2> I wonder if Jobs would disagree.

"The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't. I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much — if at all. These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I'm not downplaying that. But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light — that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important."

February 1996 <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> that's right, Steve's no Edison. Steve's better than Edison.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if this was a tip of the hat to Jobs, or a slight to Edison? I came into this thread expecting a few Edison jabs from technically minded folk.

<comment><USER3> both.</comment></comment></comment>


Quantum algorithms: an overview - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/02/06/quantum-algorithms-an-overview/ <comment><USER2> Shor's algorithm is _so_ _beautiful_!

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice overview from 2016.

<comment><AUTHOR> I particularly liked Quantum Algorithm Zoo & the table on computational complexity classes</comment></comment>


An API for retrieving info about higher education institutions - <AUTHOR> https://www.mashape.com/zaidos/gradnote

<comment><USER2> Interesting concept. Not sure there's much difference using this vs a simple Google search especially if you're just looking to get back basic information. It'd be interesting to see filtered results based on classes offered throughout a geographical area.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you read a book about deploying Rails applications? - <AUTHOR> Hey everybody,
There are lots of books/tutorials about developing Rails applications, but I feel there aren't many good/extensive books about deploying them... about automating server setup, keeping a server running, automating backups, splitting the database and the application on different servers for scaling up etc...
Maybe its because there are things like Heroku, and developers don't need to know how to deploy an app otherwise?
Anyways, I learned all that stuff by trial and error, and am wondering if others would want to know how to do it too? Would you be interested in an extensive book about deploying Rails applications? <comment><USER2> Given i rarely read technical books. But i think one learns these things as one needs it. You start with simple setups, pinpoint your needs and go from there. Things like passenger are incredible well documented and make it super easy to do whatever you need to.

In the end i would not want to buy such a book because i know exactly that most things written in their are outdated just a few years later.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like to buy books and I would be interested in this...but I would be unlikely to buy a book about it, because I would be worried about spending money on it only to find out that it's out of date or doesn't address my own situation. This seems like something better served via web.

</comment><comment><USER4> Whether others are interested in this book or not, go ahead and write that book. This helps your resume and billing rates.</comment>


Why Halloween at College Is So Frightening - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/opinion/why-halloween-at-college-is-so-frightening.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0 <comment><USER2> >> The University of Florida cautions that some costumes "perpetuate negative stereotypes causing harm and offense to groups of people," and will maintain a round-the-clock counseling service for students who are upset by a costume.

I have been out of university for a while, can anyone elaborate on whether this accurately reflects the current state of students at most universities?

edit: grammar</comment>


Specialized Evolution of the General Purpose CPU - <AUTHOR> http://blog.acolyer.org/2015/02/06/specialized-evolution-of-the-general-purpose-cpu/

<comment><USER2> X86 instructions are getting a bit more specialized over time. Like Intel's new SSD (solid state disk, non-volatile storage) instructions.

Seriously.

[http://danluu.com/clwb-pcommit/](http://danluu.com/clwb-pcommit/)

Description for PCOMMIT from Intel's documentation:

      The PCOMMIT instruction causes certain store-to-memory
      operations to persistent memory ranges to become
      persistent (power failure protected).1 Specifically,
      PCOMMIT applies to those stores that have been accepted
      to memory.

...

Intel's description about CLWB:

      Writes back to memory the cache line (if dirty) that
      contains the linear address specified with the memory
      operand from any level of the cache hierarchy in the
      cache coherence domain. The line may be retained in the
      cache hierarchy in non-modified state. Retaining the
      line in the cache hierarchy is a performance optimization
      (treated as a hint by hardware) to reduce the possibility
      of cache miss on a subsequent access. Hardware may
      choose to retain the line at any of the levels in the
      cache hierarchy, and in some cases, may invalidate the
      line from the cache hierarchy. The source operand is a
      byte memory location.

[https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/0d/53...](https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/0d/53/319433-022.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Do you know which CPUs have or will have these instructions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Direct link to the paper CIDR paper with all the data

[http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2015/CIDR15_KeyNote.pdf](http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2015/CIDR15_KeyNote.pdf)

The original link is really only blog spam about it and should be replaced

Yes it's a fascinating paper. Contradicts the conventional "CPUs have stopped getting faster" story you often read</comment>


China and Taiwan Clash over Wikipedia Edits - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49921173 <comment><USER3> This is complicated by the fact that many different languages are spoken in both mainland China and Taiwan. So you get an article in Hokkien that prominently displays the flag of the Republic of China [1] and another in Southern Min that looks very different [2].

Also, three different articles on "Taiwan Province, People's Republic of China" [3], "Taiwan Province" (in the Republic of China) [4] and "Taiwan" (common name of the Republic of China) [5].

[1] [https://hak.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%B2i-v%C3%A2n](https://hak.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%B2i-v%C3%A2n)

[2] [https://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A2i-o%C3%A2n](https://zh-min- nan.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A2i-o%C3%A2n)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Province,_People%27s_Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Province,_People%27s_Republic_of_China)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Province](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Province)

[5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan)

<comment><USER4> They do not belong to the "Chinese" Wikipedia, they are "Yue", "Min Nan" Wikipedia. "Classical" Chinese also has its own version. They are communities of their own, with separate governance and participants. The "Chinese" Wikipedia do not intervene the internal politics of other languages as well. They exist because Wikipedia allows the existence of different version for each language, and the proponents believe it's good to promote the local culture by writing in their own languages. I don't see any problems, and I fully support it.

But beware that the number of viewers, articles, and editors is significantly smaller than the "Chinese" Wikipedia. As a natural result, many of these have reached far from the level of sophistication of Chinese Wikipedia, in terms of content, policies, or governance. The central of mass is always the "Chinese" edition.

In particular, because the Chinese Wikipedia was launched in 2004, it has the most robust policies regarding to these conflicts. There exists a consensus of how the official policies of Wikipedia, such as Neutral Point of View, No Original Research, Citing Sources, should be enforced regarding to the articles about China, the guidelines are clear. Other languages of Wikipedia related to China may not have them.

For example, this is a full translation of the official policies of the Chinese Wikipedia that all editors should follow regarding to the issues of Taiwan,

> Avoid "mainland China" centric view, for example: "Taiwan is part of the > People's Republic of China" is not acceptable, but it can be written as: > "The People's Republic of China _claims_ Taiwan is part of it."

> Every record on Wikipedia should try to avoid biasing the status quo about > Taiwan. Even though the United Nations and most of the world's independent > countries have recognized the government of the People's Republic of China > as the sole legitimate government representing China, Wikipedia should > reflect the reality of neutrality, so that the term "China" should not be > considered as a single independent political entity or government. In > particular, "China" should not be used to describe areas under the > jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China, or as a synonym with > "Mainland China" which does not include Hong Kong and Macau.

> Use the more neutral "Beijing Government" or "Beijing" to represent the > "Government of the People's Republic of China". Avoid using the "Chinese > Government", "Chinese Communist Party Government", "Mainland Government" and > "Mainland Administration" which are usually derogatory. For neutral > abbreviations, please consider using the [[People's Government of the > People's Republic of China | Beijing Government]] format for internal links.

> Similarly, if the term "Republic of China" is used to describe the content > to be written, the term "Taiwan" should not be used when accuracy is > desired, especially when naming items related to the government, law or > politics of the Republic of China. In order to maintain the neutrality of > Wikipedia, we only refer to the government that ruled Taiwan, Wuhu, Kinmen > and Matsu in the name of the government name that exists in Taiwan. The > "Republic of China Government" moved to Taiwan can use the "Taipei > Government" or "Taipei" as the abbreviation. It is also more neutral than > "Taiwan Government" and "Taiwan Authority". However, please consider using > the [[[[ Republic of China Government | Taipei Government]] format for > internal links.

> Another sensitive point: Wikipedia sees the Republic of China as having the > same status as the People's Republic of China, meaning that the two sides > are equal and not affiliated political entities; but to remain neutral, > whether the two are a country or two countries, Wikipedia's position is to > remain silent and not to support or oppose any party. Editors should pay > attention when writing the articles.

> When describing the government, or projects related to the State, the full > name of the official country, such as the "People's Republic of China", > "Republic of China", etc., should be used. For example, "Xi Jinping is the > president of the People's Republic of China" is more appropriate than "Xi > Jinping is the Chinese president." Similarly, "only the citizens of the > Republic of China can participate in the presidential election of the > Republic of China" is more appropriate than "only Taiwanese nationals can > participate in the presidential election in Taiwan."

> Taiwan (as a province) should not be described as an independent country or > part of the People's Republic of China, but rather as part of the Republic > of China. When it is necessary to mention the political situation in Taiwan, > it is reasonable to add notes to explain the complex situation concerning > Taiwan. Therefore, the term "Taiwan" is used only to refer to the island or > the Taiwan Province of the Republic of China. Furthermore, since "Taiwan > Province" is very controversial in some aspects and applications, it should > only be used when the province itself is specifically mentioned. For > example, "Song Chuyu is the only elected governor of Taiwan". But In the > content of items not related to government, law, politics, etc., we can use > Taiwan as the abbreviation of the Republic of China after moving to Taiwan.

> By convention, Wikipedia will not approve or oppose the following two > issues:

* The Constitution of the People's Republic of China declares that Taiwan is the territory of the People's Republic

* The Constitution of the Republic of China declares that the inherent territory includes mainland China.

> As we said before, Wikipedia's position on whether the two sides of the > strait is a country or two countries is to remain silent.

> For non-official institutions and international events, such as the Olympic > Games, the official name of the conference should be used. At the Olympic > Games, the "Chinese Taipei Team" should be used instead of the "Taiwan > Team", the "Chinese Team" or the "Republic of China". When it is necessary > to compare with Taiwan for non-political purposes, the word "China Mainland" > should be used instead of "Taiwan" and "China" (meaning "Taiwan" does not > belong to "China"), and "Taiwan" / "Continental China" (meaning "Taiwan" > belongs to "China"). In addition, although Hong Kong and Macau are under the > jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China, they are generally not > considered part of mainland China.

> It is worth noting that the above matters are not fully applicable to > historical items, especially the historical part of the government of the > Republic of China that has not yet included Taiwan.

Geography

> When writing geographic items, you should also avoid geographical centers. > For example, the names of mainland China and Taiwan should at least indicate > the name of the unit in which the first-level administrative region (the > Chinese mainland is a province, a municipality, an autonomous region, or > Taiwan is a province or a municipality).

Examples of mainland China and Taiwan:

> Incorrect description with geographical center: "The administrative division > of Fengshan is divided into Fengshan Town, Fengqing County, Linyi City." > (Chinese users mostly do not know where Linyi City is, and the > administrative divisions of counties and cities in China and Taiwan. The > names are generally considered to be unfamiliar to most Chinese users, > except in the central municipalities and the more prominent provincial > capitals and other cities.)

> Correct description without geographical center: "Fengshan Town is located > in Fengqing County, Linyi City, Yunnan Province, and the government > administrative center is Fengqing City."

> In Chinese Wikipedia, the highest level administrative unit of the location > description is preferably based on the first level administrative unit, or > can be indicated to cities with high visibility in the Chinese language > circle, such as Xi'an, Luoyang, Nanjing, Wuhan, Guangzhou. , Shenzhen, > Xiamen, Taipei, etc.

> Hong Kong example:

* Incorrect: "The highest temperature recorded by the our local Hong Kong Observatory in June of the past 50 years is..."

* Correct: "The highest temperature in June recorded by the Hong Kong Observatory between 1955 and 2005 is..."

> Do not use "foreign" or "foreign" as a place outside the Greater China > region, or use "foreigners" to refer to non-Chinese people.

> The word "Mainland" and "Continent" can only be used when it involves Hong > Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, and the word "China Mainland" and "Continental > China" has been mentioned repetitively, to ensure no misunderstanding will > occur.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for this very informative comment. I did not mean to imply that these articles were part of the "Chinese" (i.e. zh) Wikipedia, however due to the regional overlap I'd expect contributors in these languages to also contribute to zh and follow similar community norms. Note that those Wikipedias are small relative to zh, but large in absolute terms. zh-min-nan (Southern Min) has 100 000+ articles, cdo (Eastern Min), wuu (Wu) and zh-yue (Cantonese) each have 10 000+. Admittedly, hak (Hakka) only has 1000+, so I probably shouldn't have linked to that one. (Also, I accidentally referred to it as Hokkien instead.)

I don't think this proliferation of linguistic communities is a bad thing. I just think it's interesting how different the articles they produce are.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the responsive.

> _I don 't think this proliferation of linguistic communities is a bad thing. > I just think it's interesting how different the articles they produce are._

Fully agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised this doesn't happen way more often with many other pages. But we were all warned not to take Wikipedia as a single source of credible information. If bold statements or dubious information is not properly linked to credible sources (and even then...), don't take it as 100% true.

<comment><USER6> This happens way more often with many other pages as well. It just doesn't get the spotlight of media attention all the time.

<comment><USER7> Also worth noting is the GFW bans Wikipedia, limiting its popularity in China (most prefer Baidu's equivalent, and those stay are comparably more liberal). So things don't get that bad unless there's an outside trigger to make average Chinese users take extra efforts accessing Wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has this intensified recently? I thought this was already going on to a degree. I remember reading a story on HN awhile ago about a lawyer for hire who could get any change he wanted through Wikipedia's system. It'd be a disaster for Wikipedia if China et al had similar power... though I suppose I already pass Wikipedia over when looking up controversial things like US politicians.

<comment><USER9> Issues related to China and Blizzard, Apple and China-Hong Kong, etc. intensifying - which is bringing all of this bad, authoritarian behaviour to light - compounding. People seem to have had enough and are speaking up.

<comment><USER3> This story was first submitted 4 days ago, but not many were paying attention at that time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21164775](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21164775)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How can this even be news?

The editing war has been around since the very beginning, back in 2004 or so, and since then, in the endless wars, a very sophisticated tradition of "Code of Conflict" has already been established as a robust basis of solving conflicts. It's not actually a Code, but a consensus of how the official policies of Wikipedia, such as _Neutral Point of View_ , _No Original Research_ , _Citing Sources_ , should be enforced regarding to the articles about China, the guidelines are clear, and there is no question.

For example, on whether Taiwan should be seen as an independent country - <USER2> resolution is simple: _Neutral Point of View_. If a government claims it's a legitimate government, its official title should be used by default, whether the claim is justified or not is another matter of fact to be described within the articles. Thus, all references to the government of Taiwan is by default, Republic of China, and all references to the government of PRC is by default, People's Republic of China. If there are political questions involved, all the major opinions and important minority opinions should be presented, backed by citations. The same rule applies to all other governments, Wikipedia has no problem of calling the terrorist group the "Islamic State", and then described it as a illegitimate terrorist group within the article.

This system has been kicking around for more than a decade, and any cooperative Wikipedia editors have no problems accepting it, nobody will be offended by "Republic of China", even if the editor is a member of the CPC.

It's not to say that conflicts don't exist. Of course, strong conflicts occur daily, but the conflicts are about the matter of facts and their interpretation (whether the inclusion of this opinion fits the policies of Wikipedia, whether or not the overtone of the article is biased towards the United States, etc). For example, you should expect to see heavy conflicts on articles related to the protests in Hong Kong, on what opinions should be included in the article and how to interpret the sources. But what the policies should be is clear to all editors, the argument is mainly about their treatment and interpretation.

On the other hand, there are people that doesn't know what the community is about, refuse to read the policies, or don't want to follow the rules, these people will start editing wars, indeed, but their edits will be reverted, with their accounts banned when enough people have been annoyed. The constant influx of these people are a daily phenomenon, and warning and banned them is the most underappreciated job. We have seen these people coming from all geographical area and political camps, including PRC, Hong Kong, ROC, Singapore, or the U.S. However, these are mostly trolls, not Wikipedia editors, and these conflicts should not be confused with the actual conflicts within Wikipedia.

Some of the most infamous trolls are from Taiwan, it's not related to the geopolitics, they always exist regardless of political camps. On the other hand, I've even seen literal followers of fascism from PRC that has no problem of following the Wikipedia policies and writing unobjectionable articles... The trolls from PRC contribute the greatest number of unhelpful edits, though.

It's not to say that articles actually follows the official policies as well. Of course many articles are biased. They exist, because there aren't enough people willing to improve them. It's similar to contributing a controversial feature to a FOSS project, the argument can go for months, with a lot of revisions, so it's not a job that many people want to hold. Nevertheless, it's doable, at least for the most notable topic that there are a lot of potential contributors.

Power struggles are common, because everyone has (1) a personal opinion over the subjects, (2) an opinion over how the subject should be described in Wikipedia, (3) an opinion over the existing articles, (4) an opinion over the personal opinion of another Wikipedia editor's opinion, etc, so it's unavoidable. Yet, life still goes on.

Personally, I see the greatest success story is _1989 Tiananmen Square Protests_ [0]. It's always the most controversial article of all on the entire Chinese Wikipedia, the conflicts have been ongoing forever. The "this article is biased" template was here for 13 years or so. Yet, a few years ago, all conflicts have been settled, all perceived issues have been fixed in the article, and now the content of the article has been accepted by most to be an objective and comprehensive description of the events.

Finally, I must point out that the Chinese Wikipedia don't have the culture of deletion, unlike the English version. Some experienced Chinese editors went to edit the English version, only to find many edits have been reverted and canceled.

[0] [https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4...](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6)

<comment><USER10> > Finally, I must point out that the Chinese Wikipedia don't have the culture > of deletion, unlike the English version. Some experienced Chinese editors > went to edit the English version, only to find many edits have been reverted > and canceled.

This is a really interesting bit. I've largely stopped contributing content to Wikipedia because almost every contribution I've made in recent years has been reverted with little/no explanation. And I'm not talking about controversial topics, either: it's just mostly adding clearly objective information to computer science articles. My impression is that it's territorialism, where a few academic subject matter experts have gained enough reputation to control a page, and now won't let anyone edit it.

Do you have any thoughts on:

1\. Why the difference in cultures of deletion?

2\. What are the implications?

<comment><USER11> I expect it's the same reason that the quality of discourse on the internet as a whole, including the English Wiki, has really quite deteriorated. On the Chinese Wiki there's a tremendous intellectual barrier to entry - being able to read/write Chinese. This is not to say that China (as the largest source of people able to read/write Chinese) is not full of 'less academically inclined' individuals, exactly as any other nation, but the percent of those individuals that are in any way involved with Wiki is going to be extremely close to 0.

The entire internet itself used to have a similar barrier to entry in that it wasn't something that 'normal' people 'did.' And so you had a relatively small group of generally 'more academically inclined' individuals mostly just engaging with one another. But as you opened the flood gates the 'newcomers' gradually became the majority and the internet was completely reshaped in their image. So compare, for instance, old newsgroup archives to e.g. Twitter or Facebook. Makes it quite easy to lose faith in society. In my case it simply led to me tossing aside any notion of _tabula rasa_.

But the point of this is that I don't think individuals who are 'more academically inclined' are the sort to sit around wasting hours, days, years edit warring and effectively trolling one another. They can accept different views, values, and also correct themselves when they discover they had a poorly formulated view. Wikipedia entered the game early enough that the internet hadn't gone completely to the 'less academically inclined', and so it had some time to grow. In today's environment Wiki, from scratch, would be simply impossible. By contrast, the Chinese Wiki gets to party like its 1992.

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

<comment><USER4> Your opinions are interesting. it deserves a thread of its own posted on a real forum, and I love to continue to discussion.

> By contrast, the Chinese Wiki gets to party like its 1992.

> > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

On one hand, I'd say it's a gross mischaracterization of the Chinese Wikipedia and the Web in general. Many millions of people now has unprecedented accessed to the Web, and due to the current political atmosphere, various forms of populism has reached its full heights online, not unlike the English-speaking world. Wikipedia is not free from it.

Meanwhile, I'd your description is somewhat true. Due to the cultural barrier created by the Great Firewall, if you are a daily viewer of Wikipedia, it's likely that you are already a more academically-inclined individual. It's even more so if you have an account and make edits.

If the Great Firewall doesn't exist, and the Chinese Wikipedia has high popularity, I guess the community's attitudes towards newcomers will be very difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is Wikipedia even allowing edits from China at this point?

<comment><USER13> The edits might not even be from China. Somehow CCP has managed to even get many Chinese abroad to attach part of their identity to the Chinese government so negative things about the government are personally insulting.

<comment><USER12> This makes sense. Especially in light of Chinese student unions on college campuses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just throwing this link out there for anyone that's interested as I'm a mod over at the /r/taiwanindependence subreddit.[1]

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwanindependence](https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwanindependence)

</comment><comment><USER15> Fuck Chinese government.

Support freedom for Hong Kong, and Taiwain.

<comment><USER16> I agree, China is now a nightmare dictatorship. We should do everything we possibly can to support the free peoples remaining in Hong Kong and Taiwan and perhaps start pushing freedom into China.

<comment><USER17> > China is now a nightmare dictatorship

Tibet, the great leap forward, among others.

And I'd clarify 'China' to 'the Chinese government'.

<comment><USER18> > And I'd clarify 'China' to 'the Chinese government'.

A friend of Chinese origin explained to me: when there are two people of Chinese origin in a room who don't intimately know each other, both of them will openly support the People's Republic because neither one can be completely sure that the other is not a mole. So given a group of people of Chinese origin, they all support the People's Republic (CCP). Now imagine if you grew up where all adults behaved like this. Would you need any specific brainwashing to support the People's Republic?

<comment><USER19> I'm a Chinese national working in the U.S. and I have never heard or seen any behavior like this.

<comment><USER20> Which part? The way I interpreted it is that if two _random_ people were put into a room and were asked about their position on the CCP, they'd both support it. That seems plausible for any totalitarian country.

<comment><USER21> I think it only applies _when inside the boundaries of China_ , not to people of _Chinese origin_.

I'm half ethnically Chinese, look mostly Chinese, and don't give a shit what the CCP thinks, because I was born in the U.S, have U.S. citizenship, visited China once with a tour group full of white people from places like Peoria, and have no plans to go back. However, if I _were_ physically in China, I'd be a little more circumspect with my political opinions. This is prudent for white Americans within the boundaries of China as well - while you have some protection because of the CCP not wanting to cause an international incident, you are still in a foreign country thousands of miles from home and subject to its laws or lack thereof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Taiwan should just start including pictures of Winnie the Pooh pics on Wikipedia articles to get the whole domain blocked in China.

<comment><USER8> Isn't the whole Wikipedia domain already blocked in China? I thought Baidu already had a Wikipedia equivalent.

<comment><USER23> It is. Twitter is as well.

Yet it's still flooded with people posting in simplified Chinese about how freedom of speech is stupid and foreigners need to shut up and leave matters alone, completely unaware of any irony.

<comment><USER24> _Twitter is as well._

We can imagine the following dialogue:

Chinese patriot: I'm really angry about what the NBA said on Twitter about China!

Chinese secret police: We admire your patriotism Comrade... but how are you using Twitter?

<comment><USER25> Tien An Men Square: In this site, in 1989, nothing happened.

Taken from the Simpsons: [https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Q_Kixfvq1lY/SiU_RKPsCdI/AAAAAAAAA...](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Q_Kixfvq1lY/SiU_RKPsCdI/AAAAAAAAArM/Nh2-9FGQ3Gk/s400/Tiananmen+simpsonschina.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> \--

<comment><USER27> Opium wars happened over a century ago. It was a crime against humanity, but it gives no moral right to anybody to repeat the same thing in the modern time. It's like saying Israeli should have a right to demand that Germans be gassed today because of Hitler.

Chinese public puts up with their government because the standard of living rose in the past years thanks to WTO and liberalization during Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao presidency. Now that Xi Jinping decided to undo the progress and double down on building authoritarian ethnostate it's a matter of time before public opinion shifts again due to economic hit.</comment></comment>


The Bank Job – breaking a mobile banking application - <AUTHOR> https://boris.in/blog/2016/the-bank-job/ <comment><USER2> It's actually quite heart-breaking to see the extent gone to to reveal the bug, and then to disclose it in full, for zero reward.

Whether or not a bug bounty programme exists at a company, if a bug this severe comes through the door, it should warrant a reward.

<comment><USER3> Presumably any reward would need to be approved by an executive other than just the IT director since clearly they have no policy in place. The IT director would not want his department's incompetence to be known higher up the board.

As an aside, the OP claims it took 12 days to resolve but it is possible they took more immediate action by disabling the mobile app's ability to do transfers until they had resolved all the issues.

<comment><USER4> It took 12 days for them to reply back saying that "They're working on a fix". The fix was not out at least until Late December/Early Jan. And they did not block fund transfers during the intermediate period either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The post is interesting, but I do not know why people assume they would get a bounty for a security report if the company does not have responsible disclosure / bounty program.

<comment><USER4> OP here. I knew the bank wouldn't pay. But I wanted to initiate a discussion with the bank so they know that paying bounty for disclosures is a thing.

<comment><USER6> Nice work OP.

You gave them a tech analysis that should be worth some money, for free, at the same time (hopefully) bringing to their attention how bounty programs are a helpful thing for everyone. They should be feeling very lucky about it.

However, the thing that worries me with these things is that, what if some "bad guys" already knew about this and exploiting it and now that the bank is aware and might close the hole, makes them angry and looking for retaliation?

Hopefully you are taking precautions to be anonymous, but I know that where I live if I were to pull a stunt like that I would seriously consider watching my back for a while.

Sad world we live in :( so take care OP.

<comment><USER7> He is in Sweden. So definitely safer than being in India :-) Adding to that, I don't think bad guys from the computer world would go to great lengths to harm someone from physical world.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't be so sure of that.

Being in Switzerland definitely helps, but still, India being a very big country it wouldn't surprise me if they had some really-bad-guys(TM) mafias capable of hurting people in other countries.

Of course, a small thing like this wouldn't necessarily pop up in their radars but still...

I guess part of the reason I think this way is because I live in a country where this is a real threat. Where posting things that real-bad-guys(TM) don't like can literally get you tortured and killed.

<comment><USER8> > Switzerland

I see what you did there.

<comment><USER6> Ahhh.... yes... damn. Didn't do it on purpose. Sorry about that 0x424242. I am _always_ getting those two mixed up, even in my mother tongue.

:(

I guess the point still stands as I originally intended it though. Again.. sorry for the confusion. Even though I know my geography reasonably well, my mind brings the word and my mouth or fingers say something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cached copy because the site seems to be struggling: [http://archive.is/2FN8G](http://archive.is/2FN8G)

</comment><comment><USER10> Having done similar pentests on similar applications during my previous jobs, you can imagine the level of security many editors have on the pair (client app, server). And we are talking here about a banking application: banks have always been more concerned buy security than other software consumers.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's actually important to name the vendor responsible for this mess so this doesn't happen again.

<comment><USER12> I would not do it (if I were the guy), India is litigious mess and a motivated financial strongman/entity can screw you for Years without a verdict and if they allege there is a hacking attack, the Judiciary is in no position to handle that kind of sophistication and have a more or less fire first and ask questions later way of doing things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Prediction: in the coming months we will hear about more issues of this kind. This time though it will be mafia inspired by the story, stealing money for real.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is the result of hiring mediocre developers and not performing sufficient security testing/analysis and threat modeling.</comment>


Dell slashes Adamo notebook by $1,500 - <AUTHOR> http://apcmag.com/dell-slashes-adamo-notebook-by-1500.htm

<comment><USER2> that laptop would have looked so much better if the screen hinged at the edge rather than have that bulge behind it.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1500 _Australian Dollars_ \-- multiply by 0.8</comment>


People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners - <AUTHOR> http://petrl.org/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of that line in World of Tomorrow

"The robots are solar-powered, and must always be kept on the light side of the moon's surface. To motivate them to constantly move within the drifting sunlight, I programmed them to fear death, and what lies on the dark side of the moon."</comment>


Things I Send to Recruiters - <AUTHOR> https://www.stilldrinking.org/things-i-send-to-recruiters <comment><USER2> Dear Peter, I see from your postings you have a sense of humor, have justifiably no patience for the tech-fad-of-the-month and apparently plenty of spare time at Seven Rooms (which shows you aren't being challenged). Sounds like you're ready to step up for a bigger adventure!

I represent a growing firm that totally OWNS the COBOL-90 deployment market. Yes, it's Wall Street (without the hassle of actually going to Wall Street -- we're in rural Jersey). We blend the modern (we do agile stand ups every 15 minutes) and all the usual employee "perks" (vending machine updated monthly, all the coffee you can drink -- refill the percolator if you take the last cup!) and of course the traditional "water cooler" where you can talk with your colleagues about last night's TV shows or what tie to wear during the four (yes, four!) scheduled 10-minute breaks. And no fussing with cranky tools, our COBOL compilers have been chugging along without problems for DECADES.

I'm passionately awaiting your reply, g

</comment><comment><USER3> So he actually gives a response? Callooh callay!

I'd say none of the recruiter emails were terrible, but I see the points about requiring passion and code ownership.

Also, he makes a point about emails going to his personal email address. I've had companies email my "friends and family" address, which must've been harvested from private mailing lists, and that does cross a line.

</comment><comment><USER4> >[https://www.stilldrinking.org/things-i-send-to- recruiters](https://www.stilldrinking.org/things-i-send-to-recruiters)

Or how to be an asshole to recruiters. As problematic as recruiter spam may be, sending a childish retort is not the solution.

<comment><USER5> The recruiters probably laughed their asses off.

They're the email equivalent of telemarketers. Having someone tell you to screw of in a witty, satirical way brightens up your day a lot more funny than being hung up on.

<comment><USER2> I agree, I"m sure these get passed around since by far the most frequent response is radio silence.</comment></comment></comment>


Journey From DHTML To Ember.js/Angular.js - <AUTHOR> http://ruoyusun.com/2013/04/06/journey-from-dhtml-to-ember-js-angular-js.html

<comment><USER2> I'm old enough to remember DHTML, it was terrible.

It's quite remarkable how far front and back-end JS development has come since then.</comment>


Commonizer.py: Generate a common.css file from a set of stylesheets - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/galvez/commonizer

<comment><USER2> Nice script! Another good practice when preparing CSS files for production, other than concatenating them, is to minify them too (strip out comments & whitespace).</comment>


A Russian enigma - <AUTHOR> http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/4716/a-russian-enigma/

<comment><USER2> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station)

Perhaps these will come back into fashion. You can't triangulate to find the _recipients_</comment>


Patches on the skin can analyse sweat and monitor glucose - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21664942-patches-skin-can-analyse-sweat-and-monitor-glucose-sweating-big-stuff?frsc=dg%7Ca <comment><USER2> Paywalled :-(

Alt- [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fnews%2Fscience- and-technology%2F21664942-patches-skin-can-analyse-sweat-and-monitor-glucose- sweating-big-stuff)</comment>


YourMechanic (YC W12) Introduces Pre-Purchase Car Inspections - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/04/yourmechanic-pre-purchase-car-inspections/

<comment><USER2> This is great. I'm actually in the process of buying a used car now and it's nearly impossible to get an appointment at a garage in SF in a timely manner.</comment>


Docs.com - Microsoft Office + Facebook (from Microsoft FUSE Labs) - <AUTHOR> http://www.docs.com

<comment><USER2> um, pretty sure this is the least insightful document+facebook "mashup" possible</comment>


Kitematic – The easiest way to start using Docker on your Mac - <AUTHOR> http://kitematic.com/ <comment><USER2> One of the creators of Kitematic here. Our github repo is here: [https://github.com/kitematic/kitematic](https://github.com/kitematic/kitematic)

<comment><USER3> Nicely done. Nice name too.

One could use such a nice UI on linux too ;)

PS: I don't want a nice UI. There sure are others who would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great work, guys! I just wanted to let everyone know that there's a HipChat support room[1] for this project, the creators are there and super helpful. Jeffrey and Michael definitely just set a new bar for open-source project support.

[1] [https://www.hipchat.com/giAT9Fqb5](https://www.hipchat.com/giAT9Fqb5)

<comment><USER5> What's wrong with IRC? :)

<comment><USER4> Nothing really, though I've personally never had a great experience with IRC (not the medium's fault of course). I was remarking more on the enthusiasm and helpfulness of the team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish it wasn't necessary to use a VM to run Docker on a Mac. Shouldn't it be easy to get Jails running on OSX, and wouldn't that be a good basis for Docker? (I'm not sure.)

<comment><USER7> You still have the issue of not having an implementation of an Ethernet or network virtualisation features like Crossbow/VImage.

Even if you were to solve that you would be stuck with the VFS graph driver unless you could get a CoW filesystem up and running on OSX (maybe revamp the old ZFS port?).

Docker is much more than just jailing is basically the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My MacBookPro's fans start running right after I launch this.

Activity Monitor shows that the node-helper process is eating up no less than 20% cpu, even when no apps are active.

(are all Meteor apps like this?)

This looks nice but unless you can fix that I'm just going to stick with using Docker on OSX the hard way.

<comment><USER9> I find that I have a similar issue with all node apps on my Macbook Pro

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great and I've been wanting to try out Docker for a while. Here's some feedback:

1) I had to delete my existing host-only networks

2) Images could be pre-populated with popular images so you're only a click away from getting started with an app. As a first-time docker user I don't have any of that stuff lying around.

Edited to add:

3) A progress indicator would be great creating/starting apps and images

4) am I supposed to install docker separately to access the command line tools?

</comment><comment><USER2> In case you're having installer issues: [https://kitematic.com/docs/known- issue-fixes/](https://kitematic.com/docs/known-issue-fixes/)

If that doesn't fix, please submit a bug report: [https://kitematic.com/docs/help-us-debug/](https://kitematic.com/docs/help- us-debug/)

Feel free to jump in our support chat as well.

Sorry for the trouble. We're working on a fix.

<comment><USER2> No installation step should take over 1 minute. If it's more than that, there is probably an error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great idea, unfortunately in my case the setup phase gets stuck on 'Setting up the default Kinematic images...'.

<comment><USER2> Hey,

Kitematic seems to have a conflict with older versions of boot2docker at the moment. We're still looking into this issue.

In the meantime, some of our users have found success in doing this:

1\. In the terminal run boot2docker delete 2\. Open Virtualbox and delete the boot2docker vm 3\. Delete all the host-only networks under VirtualBox=>Preferences=>Network=>Host-only networks tab 4\. Run the installer again

Sorry about all the trouble. We're looking into fixes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a devops user, this would be not so useful. It was my first thought when I saw this. But, wait a minute, if this can replace MAMP, or XAMPP, it would be great. It will help the new user get the development environment setting up in no time, isolated environment and beautiful application. It would be a win.

Nice work !

<comment><USER13> For the same reason I use Vagrant. I would like to hear why would anybody use Docker instead of Vagrant and vice versa?

<comment><USER14> One difference is that Vagrant is a full stand-alone server VM rather than a shared container like Docker, so Vagrant is better for housing multiple services in a single Vagrant instance, while Docker is better off housing a single-use application/service.

Example: If you wanted to run a complex local dev environment with apache, mysql, memcache, varnish, etc... You could run that all in a single large VM (provisioned and booted by Vagrant) or by multiple Docker containers (one for each service).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't this( [http://docs.docker.com/installation/mac/](http://docs.docker.com/installation/mac/)) the easiest way to use docker on a mac? Its just 3 shell commands and an installer.

I am not clear what kitematic is exactly. A UI on top of docker?

<comment><USER2> Pretty much just a GUI in our beta. We do some things special like:

\- Automatically creates a folder under ~/Kitematic for each Volume.

\- One click NSEnter into any container.

\- Any container can be accessed at <container_name>.dev (automatically sets up a DNS for you, so you can connect a database too using that URL).

We're really just trying to make Docker easier to use for Mac right now. More will come.

<comment><USER16> Does your `.dev` container access conflict with users of pow.cx? Is that configurable?

<comment><USER2> Not sure yet. Still doing tests around it. [The goal of this beta release is to find most of the bugs so we can iron it out]. I'm sure we'll iron out most of them in the coming week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Aw what! Why is this OS X only? :-(

EDIT: Never mind, forgot I had a mac.

<comment><USER4> It solves a very specific problem - using Docker on OS X is a giant pain. It's pretty easy on something like Ubuntu, but for Mac the typical solution involves Vagrant + a VM, so startup times are slow, it eats a lot of memory and CPU, etc.

<comment><USER18> I disagree that "using Docker on OS X is a giant pain". I don't really see how this is more than a GUI that works with boot2docker and docker. Kitematic appears to be using boot2docker under the hood. I think using boot2docker is very simple. Once boot2docker is running, as far as I can tell, using docker is the same experience people have on linux.

<comment><USER19> mounting host directories into containers with -v is one place b2d definitely hurts more than running on linux directly.

The options appear to be:

1\. Don't do that

2\. Mount something via samba into the b2d vm, then -v it into your container

3\. Use virtualbox directory sharing (which won't work properly/at all)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a roadmap of what's to come? How about linking containers?

<comment><USER2> Linking containers is definitely something we're looking into for the future.

In this release, there is environment variable support in settings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great job. I love tools that make things dead simple :)

</comment><comment><USER22> Thanks!</comment>


Universities have turned over hundreds of patents to patent trolls - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yardenkatz/universities-have-turned-over-hundreds-of-patents-to-patent-trolls-99d5cdec1d8a#.vulqukskk <comment><USER2> You will notice that University of Wisconsin Madison is not on that list. This is because Dr. Harry Steenbock ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Steenbock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Steenbock)) with fantastic vision started the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF [http://www.warf.org/about-us/about-us.cmsx](http://www.warf.org/about- us/about-us.cmsx)) where discoveries made at UW get the help of the team of lawyers to guide through the patent process while the royalties paid then go back to the university. Starting with his discovery on fortifying food with Vitamin D by method of ultraviolet light in 1925.

WARF is an enormous success at UW and last year alone contributed over $100 million back to the university.

<comment><USER3> If one were a cynic, one might suspect that UW is just playing the troll itself. Assuming that it isn't, what controls are in place that help UW avoid registering and then seeking royalties on trivial patents? If administrators decided that WARF should instead contribute $200M yearly, wouldn't the resulting patent inflation carry the whole operation into troll territory?

<comment><USER4> One can easily browse the patents and newly submitted inventions that are registered to the WARF: [http://www.warf.org/technologies/new- patents.cmsx](http://www.warf.org/technologies/new-patents.cmsx) \- the sidebar organizes them by category.

The intention is more of "hey entrepreneurs, we've got this technology developed in academia - if you see a business model based on this, talk to us so you can use it."

Of note, if you follow the 'technologies - information technology - software' path, you'll note that none of these are actually patents. They're listed as "technologies" instead.

There do appear to be some patents listed... things like low profile, ultra wide band antenna and wideband transceiver for antenna array.

All that said, one of the distinctions between the patent troll and the warf is that of "the warf is seeking business partnerships for people to use technologies, inventions, and patents developed at the university of madison" and the troll is "buying patents from one party and suing another party for royalties." The business model for the two is completely different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related: publicly funded research that leads to privately held patents results in a form of double taxation. The consumer pays taxes to create the product, then turns around and pays patent-level pricing to buy/use it.

<comment><USER6> And we have to pay to get access to the research in private journals. (And pay faculty salaries to do peer reviews for the journal)

It's at least Triple taxation.

Quadruple taxation for the underpaid grad students working on the research to get their degree?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It makes me sad that my alma mater is listed as one of the top 10. If you're like me and see that, forward this article to the provost of your school or the dean of your college and let them know you're not OK with this as an alumni. Of course there's no "take backsies" but at least we can try to do something to stop the spread of patents to patent trolls.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would like to know more. My experience with university license teams has been that they rarely sell patents to anyone -- for the most part, they provide a license. In the deals I've been involved with, the license specifically requires that the licensee be practicing the patent within some period, or the license is canceled.

I'm curious if these represent cases where the universities sold patents to practicing entities, and then they got shuffled over to trolls in liquidation sales or re-orgs?

</comment><comment><USER9> The fact that you can just sell patents always seemed a little bit off to me. Does that really further the purpose of a patent? I understand that we can't just ban the selling of patents, but there must be a better way to avoid situations like these where the patent is not used to reward the innovator.

<comment><USER10> If I were dictator, I'd definitely ban the selling of patents.

I'd also ban the assigning of patents to corporations; they would only be owned by the original people who filed them. So corporations could only benefit from those patents as long as the patent-holders were employees (or at least one of the patent-holders if there's multiple), by being allowed to use the patent license-free.

>I understand that we can't just ban the selling of patents

Why not? We can ban anything we want as long as it's not unconstitutional. The question is if a ban of something has more negative effects than positive. I don't see how it would here.

<comment><USER11> Just get rid of patents in general then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The patent that Linus was on for anyone interested: [http://www.google.com/patents/US20100169613](http://www.google.com/patents/US20100169613)

</comment><comment><USER13> Ding dang UC's letting us down! I really enjoy reading articles that are data driven. I feel like the frequency of such things is on the increase and something just feels good about that showing up in journalism with data I assume can be openly verified with. Someone just posted some interesting data driven analysis of OkCupid data that was pretty intriguing.

<comment><USER14> The UCs really aren't what they used to be. The Chancellor at UC Davis had her own students pepper sprayed for a peaceful protest and had a paid board seat at Devry. The UCs are run by crooks and they continue to rip off their students. I regret giving my money to the UC system and if I have kids, will guarantee to send them somewhere else.

<comment><USER15> The primary motivation of a student is to attain a systemic improvement in a body of knowledge, but also to open ones eyes to the realities of the world around us, including socializing and being pepper sprayed. UC is great at all of those. That's why there are so many Nobel prize winners there.

<comment><USER16> Can I ask what does it cost for a resident that is not a dependent?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author seems to be implicitly assuming that Intellectual Ventures is _just_ a patent troll.

IV's business is much more than that. Besides buying outside commercially developed patents (similar to what a troll does), they also employ scientists and engineers directly to develop new things that IV can patent, and they fund outside researchers in exchange for patent rights.

At least some of the university patents IV has acquired were through such deals, where IV provides funding for the academic research that leads to the patent, and then IV gets commercialization rights to the patent, with the university getting a cut of any licensing fees IV gets from those patents.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's really outrageous. University research publications behind paywalls, but paid for by us. Now patents, the development paid for by us, in the hands of trolls. And public universities involved. This privatization is outrageous.

<comment><USER19> Just because university research is paid for by the public does not mean that all the results should be in the public domain. It would be absurd, for example, for a VC to demand 100% of a company's equity in return for providing the funding necessary to keep the lights on while a product is developed.

There is a long history of innovation happening from universities spinning-off patented technology into private companies. _E.g._ what John Hennessy did with MIPS. It's a great model. If you get rid of it, you'd turn universities into ivory-tower ghettos where researchers would only go if they had no desire to make money.

<comment><USER10> VCs aren't spending _my_ money. Universities are, because they're subsidized by taxes. If they want to make money which says in private hands, they can do it with their _own_ money, not taxpayer funds. Universities were never meant to be profit-generating entities, but institutions of learning. The people in universities should be happy to have a cushy, tenured academic job; people who have a serious "desire to make money" (beyond that of a professor's salary, which is both good and very stable) don't belong at universities at all, they should be working in the private sector.

<comment><USER19> > VCs aren't spending my money.

Money is money. From the perspective of the incentives of the hypothetical researcher, it's irrelevant where the money comes from. If the government demands 100% equity in return for investment, it just becomes the least competitive VC on the market, doomed to fund the least compelling projects.

> The people in universities should be happy to have a cushy, tenured academic > job; people who have a serious "desire to make money" (beyond that of a > professor's salary, which is both good and very stable) don't belong at > universities at all, they should be working in the private sector.

Strongly disagree. One of the reasons the U.S. has hands-down the best engineering universities in the world is because of the fluid boundary between academia and the private sector. Filling universities with people who just want a cushy academic job is a great way to make academic research completely irrelevant.

<comment><USER20> I disagree on least compelling. Lots of the best stuff coming out of DARPA and NSF research is either not commercialized or could allow for competing implementations while giving innovater first-mover advantage. Smart people interested in impacting the world will do so regardless of whether they can start a business. Many of the great ones actually just continue as researchers since that's their passion.

<comment><USER19> First mover advantage has little value in the industries DARPA and NSF find. And both DARPA and NSF (by design) allow companies receiving grants to patent the results of their research.

That is not to say that _all_ DARPA and NSF-funded research should be patented. To the extent the research is more fundamental and less applied it shouldn't be. But DARPA and NSF fund both theoretical and applied research and so do universities.

<comment><USER20> I know they fund the companies. I was just saying the people getting that funding often work for universities that wouldve built it any way whether a patent or not. Lots of top-tier results come from that. So, I dont think switching to that model exclusively would make less compelling results. It might reduce the number or change university/private ratio of where innovations come from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a question, aren't some of these public universities in some part subsidized by tax payer money at the state level?

If this is true, should these patents be exclusive domain of these school's to profit from exclusively? It seems to me that selling patents to these litigious entities impedes progress that might otherwise benefit the same tax paying public that helped underwrite at least some of the research.

Am I looking at this wrong?

Maybe there are lots of other nuances that my oversimplification doesn't account for. I would be curious to hear what those are if so.

</comment><comment><USER21> How did IV get its hands on a patent filed by Linus Torvalds?

<comment><USER22> Transmeta? Linus worked for that company a few years.

<comment><USER21> Of course. Momentary blank where I forgot that people get patents while in the employ of companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How can we guarantee those patents went from the schools directly into IV ?

What if the school first sold it to a non-patent-troll 3rd party, and then that 3rd party transferred it to IV?

Is there a way to follow the history of a particular patent?

</comment><comment><USER21> Small clarification: I see that UT is listed as the system, but that's not used for University of California. Is it just Cal? Or the whole system?

<comment><USER24> It's the whole system. The UC schools are under direct administration of the UC Office of the President, whereas my understanding of Texas is that the University of Texas System schools are independently-run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tax dollars at work!</comment>


Wal-Mart says it is 6-9 months from using drones to check warehouse inventory - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-wal-mart-drones-idUSKCN0YO26M <comment><USER2> Can Wal-Mart get to where Amazon is before Amazon's expanding deliveries eat more of their pie...</comment>


Let's Fire a Few of Our Customers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@RichMironov/lets-fire-a-few-of-our-customers-74f84aa9dd49#.icghyr2pr <comment><USER2> This reminds me of a passage from _Crossing The Chasm_ , Geoffrey Moore, where he talks about sales discipline. Some sales are really freakin expensive.

      Now, how bad can this really be? I mean, sales are good,
      right? Surely things can just work themselves out, and we
      will discover our market, albeit retroactively, let to it
      by our customers, yes? The true answers to the previous
      three questions are: (1) disastrous, (2) not always,
      and (3) never in a million years.

This was written pre-web but I think the warning is still valid.</comment>


Painting with bacteria could revolutionise wastewater treatment - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-08-bacteria-revolutionise-wastewater-treatment.html <comment><AUTHOR> >Introducing Porosity in Colloidal Biocoatings to Increase Bacterial Viability

[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.biomac.0c00649](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.biomac.0c00649)</comment>


Ask HN: What are you working on? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm f-unemployed which means I can spend time doing interesting stuff meanwhile I drawn my savings. I'm doing mostly two projects:

# 1: A game boy advance emulator in Rust - just for fun to learn the language and to implement a virtual machine.

# 2: A cold storage secret manager with a James Bond feeling.

In the case I die <everyone is gonna die anyways> I need to let people instructions, documents, bank ids, passwords and other stuff. So I designed a secret sharing mechanism which allows me split secrets and generate tokens for specific people. Once enough people gather and join their keys, they can unlock their specific secrets. If you want to understand a bit just go through the 1password design docs and Shamir secret sharing mechanism, although I had to improve the later to improve security.

Once I gave some friends a piece of paper with a QR code with says "in case I die access this website", most of then got interested in having a service like this. I registered a domain but I'm still not confident enough to make it public.

If you want to invest or discuss drop me a line on email@example.com :P

<comment><USER3> > I registered a domain but I'm still not confident enough to make it public.

Honestly, this sounds like a far more productive way to burn through your savings and free time than a GBA emulator...

<comment><USER4> Does everything have to be productive? Is the pursuit of joy not worthy in and of itself?

Also, as a project for a CV, the complexity involved in emulating any system makes it a reasonable feat (if even partially successful).

<comment><USER3> >Is the pursuit of joy not worthy in and of itself?

It is, but unless postit has a lot of savings, lives in a country with a robust social safety net, or is confident about finding employment without effort, they risk winding unemployed _and_ broke. I know this from personal experience, although, of course, everyone's experience is different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Been throwing around ideas for a personal database for a few months now. The idea now is a sort of personal wiki system where ideas can be collected in markdown formatted pages with internal and external links, as well as all of the other features you would expect from a wiki.

This wiki acts as a backend for the larger project, which will be a personal assistant type service that will be able to read and write from this "database" of personal knowledge and organize deadlines, events, notes, documentation, and references.

Im thinking of making this functionality happen through a MycroftAI plugin, so that you can query the database by voice, and give Mycroft the ability to make agendas and such on the fly based on your personal database.

It's still in the early stages though, as Im still trying to figure out what kind of backend I want to use. I need something cross platform (at least Linux, windows, Android) to edit the database, as to be able to update it as I do research or take notes. Im currently leaning towards DokuWiki due to it's variety of formatting and the fact that it has an API built in, but I have a feeling it's going to get hacky.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm building a 2d game engine in pure Javascript.

[http://moonbench.xyz/projects/workshop/axiom/stable/](http://moonbench.xyz/projects/workshop/axiom/stable/)

WASD to move, click to shoot, mouse to aim.

It has parallaxing backgrounds, sprites, collision detection and resolution, guns and pickups.

It also supports game controllers in browser.

It is a work in progress, but you're obviously welcome to explore it and the source code.

I have a few other recent projects on that same domain, such as a raspberry pi camera network [1] and a p2p image sharing tool [2].

All just for fun and education (so far).

[1] [http://moonbench.xyz/projects/pi-camera- network](http://moonbench.xyz/projects/pi-camera-network)

[2] [http://moonbench.xyz/projects/shutterbit](http://moonbench.xyz/projects/shutterbit)

</comment><comment><USER7> I have just completed [https://www.camerasforpros.com](https://www.camerasforpros.com) a stackexchange and reddit reviews aggregator for photogear. I am so far happy with the progress as it surfaces the most useful books for learning photography, and even thrifty items that you not even consider photogear that can improve your photography game.

I am now working on a browser extension to help avoid procastination. Most extensions are after the fact feedback based. Like they tell you the usage patterns for last day, last week etc. I want to supplement that with an addon that works on the philosophy that prevention is better than cure. It is basically to scratch my own itch because I spend a significant amount of time reading. I have not posted it yet. Once it's done, I would be happy to have your feedback.

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://dndemail.com](https://dndemail.com) \- DNDEmail - do not disturb for Gmail. It works by pausing your inbox so your inbox stays empty. Your emails get delivered on a schedule you specify.

The idea is to keep your inbox clean so you can focus on the important productive tasks. That means you can search your email or even reply to an old email without having to see any new emails.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm working on a few things.

1.) a web analytics tool written in Elixir. I'm not sure if it will be used by anybody or if it will even make money if it is used but it is something that is helping me learn the OTP more as this is mostly backend service work and not a phoenix app. This will include status monitoring of links and resources to alert to any 404's as well as will include site analytics such as traffic but in a way that will prevent the need for putting up the cookie warning on your site.

2.) Job site for COBOL jobs. I'm waiting on approval from Indeed to gain access to their API to help monetize the site as well as provide much better information regarding the jobs.

3.) A self-published e-book on design patterns in C#

</comment><comment><USER10> Smart fridge device, tracks what's in your fridge.

Just some hardware prototypes that I'm working on, using OpenCV and TensorFlow for food recognition. The fact that Amazon doesn't have an official product purchasing API is irritating, but makes complete sense.

</comment><comment><USER11> Been working on my project [https://www.docsapp.io/](https://www.docsapp.io/) for more then one year and now growing slowly.

Initially I work on this project to learn Scala + Play! Framework and now I turn it into real project with real customers.

What I learnt from working on this project: 1\. Time to market - Push your product to market and find customers ASAP to get real feedback. 2\. Hosting - Build on cheap hosting provider with self setup that support HA. Machine fail all the time even you use expensive hosting (Cloud)

</comment><comment><USER12> Writing up some mathematics I did while (currently) funemployed. It's about the Wobbly Table problem. I have two parts out of three up already, and am finishing up the third: [https://haggainuchi.com/wobblytable.html](https://haggainuchi.com/wobblytable.html)

Probably I won't try to publish it in traditional journals because I don't intend to get back into academia and anyway it's probably not novel enough. (It's a new proof — as far as I know — of an old result.)

</comment><comment><USER13> Building a silly web app: [https://github.com/patrickgordon/coothaback](https://github.com/patrickgordon/coothaback) \- [https://whatsyacoothabacktime.com](https://whatsyacoothabacktime.com)

Working on an open source lib: [https://github.com/JumboInteractiveLimited/redux- cache](https://github.com/JumboInteractiveLimited/redux-cache)

and trying to think of something new to build.

</comment><comment><USER14> I turned my investment property spreadsheet into an Angular 4 web app:

[https://gocashflowapp.com](https://gocashflowapp.com)

It lets you run cashflow calculation on the go, and provides numeric keyboard since I hate typing in numbers on the full alphanumeric one.

Launched 2 weeks ago and tweaking adwords campaign. I plan on turning it into a Progressive Web App, then add persistence using AWS Lambda and RDS.

</comment><comment><USER15> A new password manager.

The core idea [1] is that there are some passwords that you only want to remember, never write or store, and yet be able to access even in the worst possible situation.

I'm negating all these assumptions by creating an app. :) Jokes apart, most of the time you do want the comfort of an app or browser extension.

[1] [https://medium.com/@0x0ece/how-i-manage-my-passwords- technic...](https://medium.com/@0x0ece/how-i-manage-my-passwords-technical- version-8549dc1bde1e)

<comment><USER16> @bascule addresses deterministic password managers as a category here:

[https://tonyarcieri.com/4-fatal-flaws-in-deterministic- passw...](https://tonyarcieri.com/4-fatal-flaws-in-deterministic-password- managers)

Certainly you've considered these points, and I'm interested in hearing your responses to these points if you're using this scheme yourself and want others to use it.

I'm particularly interested in point 4 where, unlike traditional password managers like 1Password and Lastpass, where you need both the password and some form of data access, the leakage of my master password (say by a shoulder surfing security camera at any time) literally means every credential can be derived from scratch at any time.

<comment><USER15> I read it indeed. Before I respond please let me say that this is just my opinion, and I'm totally happy if other people think differently. Also, the point that I wrote and I'd like to stress is that there are _some_ passwords, the most critical ones (i.e. Google, Facebook, banks), that I never want to store and just remember. The reason is that I've found myself in situation where my devices aren't available and I have a urgent need to access these services.

For all the other passwords I honestly don't care, deterministic or vault both have pros and cons, but in reality it doesn't really matter. First, I never experienced the same urgent need of access. Second, I could temp reset the password provided that I can access my gmail.

On point 4 specifically I have two things to say.

> With a traditional encrypted password vault scheme, we need two things to > obtain site-specific passwords: the ciphertext of the password vault, and > the master password.

To me this is not a feature at all. I want exactly the opposite, meaning I don't want to depend on a file to retrieve my passwords, at least not the most critical ones. So, I guess this is a critical distinction. Are you ok with this dependency? Then definitely go for a vault. Ar you against? Then you can't use a vault.

Second, and to your point. It's worth noting that, because you need the vault file, you probably have it replicated in multiple places or at least accessible by multiple devices. To me, this makes the probability to get access to your vault file higher than the probability to find out the master password. Or, said in another way, I wouldn't base the security of the system on the fact that the attacker can access the master password but not the vault file.

To limit the attack surface you have to create multiple groups with different master passwords. The one that you type more often are the one more exposed, so you want to group sites with similar security risk and frequency of login (this is another thing that often seems amplified, I don't logout+login every day in all sites, I typically keep things logged in).

I hope this replies to your question, happy to chat more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Since HARC ended, I've been working on raising my baby so my wife can get back to her UX design career (not ideal, but it's gone by much better than I expected).

I'm also planning a pivot away from doing research in live programming and instead looking at dynamic mediums for thinking (a common HARC topic). The two topics are fairly related anyways (tight feedback loops, reduction in representational gulfs). I hope to grab some time from child rearing to work on a new demo soon.

</comment><comment><USER18> A series of projects having to do with API communications, specifically emails, text messages, and phone calls. Specializing in memory, focus, security, and privacy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Udemy tutorials for Unity, OpenGL and Corona SDK, as well as a ton of game development library code in C++ and Lua. I have a list of (very, stupid simple) games I want to MVP with it, starting with Pong and ending with something using OpenGL, which I'm just starting to teach myself.

So, likely, nothing anyone is likely to care about, or that will make money, or an interesting Show HN thread once I manage to actually finish something.

</comment><comment><USER19> My first mobile app in react-native. Working on it for quite sometime. Lacking some courage to push it to play store/app store . Currently using it.

<comment><USER20> Why are you lacking courage? It's tough, reach me if you need a support network. I understand.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the kind words.i will definitely reach out to you .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A community for tech people on sabbatical who are full-time exploring new ideas and figuring out what to do next.

Info on our beta batch up here: www.recesslabs.com

</comment><comment><USER22> Supplement, Medication, Sleep, Habit Tracker that correlates to how you sleep and productivity. (With a gabillion other features I want to add soon).

Site - [https://betterself.io](https://betterself.io) Open sourced - [https://github.com/jeffshek/betterself](https://github.com/jeffshek/betterself)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm working on my habit formation/note-taking application: [https://github.com/ioddly/meditations](https://github.com/ioddly/meditations)

Specifically I'm trying to work up the nerve to go implement a decent search which I've been putting off for a while. And maybe get it cleaned up for some kind of actual release.

</comment><comment><USER24> Working on the next iteration of [https://www.sketchdaily.io](https://www.sketchdaily.io) \- a free educational sketching web app.

Also a mobile game for solving abbreviations (currently website is just a placeholder [https://www.wtftag.com](https://www.wtftag.com))

</comment><comment><USER25> A WordPress theme aggregator:

[https://themeranch.com](https://themeranch.com)

So far I've learned a bunch about WordPress and php, and overall I'm pretty happy with the results. However, I haven't worked on it for a while, and honestly I'm not sure what do to next. Any advice/suggestions appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER26> Working on an update for Claire Budget[1] a personal budget tracking app for iPhones. Update is going to bring goals to plan for the future and option to schedule recurring transactions.

[1] [https://budgetwithclaire.com](https://budgetwithclaire.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm working on a web-based workout, activity, and meal logger because I'm not satisfied with the performance of any of the current offerings. They all seem to be missing something I would like to have so I decided I'd just build what I want and maybe others would like it too.

</comment><comment><USER28> Site to collect and share lists of resources around the internet like the ones on this page: [https://github.com/ZuzooVn/machine-learning-for-software- eng...](https://github.com/ZuzooVn/machine-learning-for-software-engineers)

</comment><comment><USER29> A multiplayer game of reading against your opponents.

Made it mainly to learn about sockets.io and Web Speech APIs.

Interested to extend this to a player vs bot mode, as well as supporting Mandarin Chinese in the future if I have time.

[http://funreading.io/](http://funreading.io/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Figuring out where to post flyers in town. Because, obviously, that is how you promote a website or two.

</comment><comment><USER31> Product Hunt hackathon. We're working on a project called Press Kite. Unified brand and press assets in one beautiful page.

[https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/press- kite](https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/press-kite)

</comment><comment><USER32>
      Mapping out chicago's parking tickets
      Polling metrics over I2C for a distributed power stack
      7 ongoing FOIA requests for email metadata.
      A clojure web scraper
      Building an caching server with an nvme raid
      Building a large LAN party with some friends

<comment><USER33> Why are you mapping out parking tickets?

<comment><USER32> Mostly because it's an extremely difficult problem that pushes me to learn new things across a wide field. If you're interested in checking it out, it's at [1].

I'd like to make something similar to [2] in the mid-term, but the longer goal's to find tickets given in error.

[1] [http://github.com/red-bin/chicago_tickets](http://github.com/red- bin/chicago_tickets) [2] [http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc- ta...](http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-taxi-and- uber-trips-with-a-vengeance/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> 1\. Online sales course, bootcamp, and training 2\. A way to consolidate sales content and communication onto a single page, eliminating the need for followup emails. [[https://www.recapped.io](https://www.recapped.io)]

</comment><comment><USER35> A comprehensive guide for employee equity decision making.

Even the best posts out there are B+ in my opinion and they often miss something.

AMT is always the stumbling block for my own analysis though so I might point on that part =\

</comment><comment><USER36> An analytics dashboard and reporting tool for Mailgun transactional emails

[https://suet.co/](https://suet.co/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Cloud accounting and business management platform, [https://overseer.io](https://overseer.io)

</comment><comment><USER38> A simple journal app to note periodic progress - A side project for practice, but something that I think I really need.

<comment><USER39> even I had plans to make such an app, to study Nodejs on the way. Also make it such a way that anybody can host the application on their own so that the data can remain private. can you mention how you are planning to build it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Integrated Earth Systems - a plan to cool the ice-caps with a mix of old and new tech.

</comment><comment><USER41> Trying to generate good test data using generative adversarial networks.

</comment><comment><USER42> Security hardening of Meso's cluster

</comment><comment><USER20> Killing the password.

<comment><USER15> How? (Just posted about my password manager... I'm interested in the space)</comment></comment>


Amazon Alexa Secretly Records Children, Lawsuits Allege - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/amazon-alexa-secretly-records-children/145708/ <comment><USER2> I mean, not secretly. Amazon is very explicit that it saves recordings of all commands for training and personalization -- you can even manually review and delete them, or disable them completely.

And obviously if you have your children speak to Alexa, it will record them too. Same with visitors in your home. It's not a secret... it's how it works.

Alexa does support voice profiles. But it's certainly not perfect -- voice identification can be hard even for _people_ to do (depending on similarity), _and_ there's a huge leap from distinguishing _between_ pre-identified voices, versus determining if a voice _is_ one of those and not one of billions of other people. And there's _certainly_ no magic way to analyze a voice a determine that it's 12 (not allowed) or 13 (allowed).

So I'm not exactly sure what this lawsuit intends to change?

The only thing I can imagine is perhaps to allow disabling voice recordings per voice profile, so you can create a voice profile of your child and then do that -- but intriguingly, Amazon says voice profiles can only be created for users 13+, so there's presumably something legal here.

But really, if you don't want your kids (or visitors) using Alexa, either tell them not to use it, or don't have one in the first place. I really can't see how this is up to anyone other than the parents?

<comment><USER3> "but intriguingly, Amazon says voice profiles can only be created for users 13+, so there's presumably something legal here"

Presumably if they're banned from storing and processing the information of under-13s, that includes doing so for the purposes of identifying that individual as under-13.

<comment><USER4> well then, that's simply an impossible condition (if you can't find out whether they're under 13, then you can't comply, and if you do try to find out, you aren't complying: there's no way out)

<comment><USER5> Throw out audio for any non registered profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Important to note that if this allegation is true, it means Alexa is recording _everyone_ and storing it indefinitely, not just children. The lawsuit just says children because children have more privacy protections than adults so it's easier to win a case when children's rights are being violated.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure you can call a documented feature of the product an "allegation". Its well known that Amazon saves voice recordings that the devices capture after the wake word.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602230)

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201602040)

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/28/h...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/05/28/how- listen-what-amazon-alexa-has-recorded-your-home/649814002/)

Though I also don't see how Amazon is responsible when parents put a recording device like the Echo, a Nest Cam, a recording baby monitor, a Ring Doorbell, etc in the home and it ends up recording a child.

<comment><USER8> I completely agree with you that having an Alexa in your home means you must accept that _your_ (i.e. you, the registered user) voice commands are being stored indefinitely.

But to be fair, there is a distinction here. That is, if you're not the registered Alexa user and you're not the one who agreed to the usage terms, shouldn't Amazon try to recognise that your voice is different and _not_ store your voice commands? It's clear they have the recognition tech to do this. I'd say it's a pretty reasonable expectation.

Even if you posit that consent is implicit in using Alexa (i.e. if you use a friend's, for example, in making that choice you're consenting to Amazon storing your voice command) - something that's debatable but certainly within reason - I'd say you definitely can't extend this to children, who simply can't be expected to even know what this means let alone understand the implications.

<comment><USER9> (IANAL but...) I'm pretty sure it's legal to record anything within your own home if you're the one that set it up. That'd cover placing devices that delegate that recording to Amazon.

<comment><USER10> > _California 's wiretapping law is a "two-party consent" law. California > makes it a crime to record or eavesdrop on any confidential communication, > including a private conversation or telephone call, without the consent of > all parties to the conversation. See Cal. Penal Code § 632. The statute > applies to "confidential communications" \-- i.e., conversations in which > one of the parties has an objectively reasonable expectation that no one is > listening in or overhearing the conversation._

<comment><USER9> Communication (say over the phone) is different than recording within the four walls of your home.

<comment><USER11> This is addressed in the comment to which you are replying by the prepositional phrase "including a private conversation".

<comment><USER9> That's interesting. I'd have imagined it to be superseded by the castle doctrine.

<comment><USER12> I'd imagine more of an implied consent angle. In any event the truly paranoid can just put a small notice on the door.

<comment><USER13> It's sort of a chicken-and-egg scenario. Once someone tells you that there's an active recording device it's no longer a "confidential communication" because you no longer have an "objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation". You don't have to stop recording just because someone wants you to stop, you just can't do it without being upfront about it. Home assistant devices are common enough (ads in the superbowl!) that I imagine a judge would consider the physical presence of the device as being reasonable indication that there is no "objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's an always-on Internet connected home microphone. What do people think it is doing?

<comment><USER15> That description fits your cell phone too, except it's "everywhere you go" rather than "home." Do you expect it to record you?

<comment><USER14> The cell phone is not voice activated. That said, I do expect the worst of it.

<comment><USER16> Isn't that literally what "Hey Siri", "Ok Google", etc. are?

<comment><USER17> You can (and probably should) disable Siri on an iPhone and the phone works just great without it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The critical question clearly seems to be what evidence do the plaintiffs have?

Presumably, the plaintiffs could at the least have records of various advertising that is uncannily targeting related subject matter to what the children may have been consuming and outputting, though I wonder how they could prove that the children didn't inadvertently activate Alexa and provide this data. Perhaps that is enough to subpoena Amazon?

It seems like the marketing industry will be at the front line of the battle over what age is enough to give your own consent in many aspects of life, and I personally am standing on the other side of that line.

I hear that some scandanavian regions have laws prohibiting adverters from targeting children, and I wonder how tech companies will deal with such restrictions.

<comment><USER19> No, they're talking about the recordings made when people say the wake word. People, especially children, probably don't know that this recordings are stored indefinitely: "At no point does Amazon warn unregistered users that it is creating persistent voice recordings of their Alexa interactions, let alone obtain their consent to do so."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Someone in my network who is in marketing at Alexa accidentally linked to one of these articles instead of an internal blog announcing a new feature for kids.</comment>


Feedback request for FlashcardDB - <AUTHOR> http://FlashcardDB.com

<comment><USER2> When I first visited the site I didn't understand how to use it. After I played around a little bit and I viewed some of the flashcards - I clicked study and now I get it. It's simple but cool. That being said, maybe a how it works feature or suchlike. And one other thought - your logo is hard to read....

<comment><AUTHOR> Definately. The how-to-use parts of the site are pretty bare-bones right now. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a project I have been working away at for a few months. If this is not something people want that is ok since it is something I want. FlashcardDB is an attempt to build an online flashcard website that doesn't suck.

When I had decided it was time to tranfer my thousands of flashcards to a webapp, I just could not bring myself to use any of the existing flashcard sites on the web. Some are awful. Some are old and tired. One or two look good but they were just not what I had in mind. I wanted a dead-simple user interface and the Leitner System built-in -- with a cool graph! You know the rest. I decided to do it myself.

The first iteration of the site is at <http://FlashcardDB.com>

If anyone feels like checking it out I would be happy to hear your criticisms.

<comment><USER3> I created eight flashcard sets at Quizlet early this year and felt it was entirely adequate and quite easy to use. It does not suck.

I guess the only major difference is that FlashcardDB uses user verification (the oddly-labeled "I was" buttons) rather than text-entry verification. I prefer the flow of text-entry verification myself, but I can see how your taste may differ.

FlashcardDB looks okay, but I still greatly prefer Quizlet.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Some_ are awful does definately not include Quizlet. Quizlet is very very well put together.

What I personally wish for there is (a) the ability to create richer flashcards - especially flashcards that need more than one line or richer formatting and (b) the Leitner System. With Quizlet once you mark a term 'correct' it is correct forever (until you manually reset your set).

I am planning a text-entry verification method and maybe multiple-choice. But for more complicated flashcards you need to have manual verification to start.

Thanks a lot for your thoughts! They are greatly appreciated.

<comment><USER4> Hey, I have been following your site for a while now. One of my submissions (unsuccessful) to YC WFP was a concept highly similar to flascarddb/quizlet. This project has not launched. And don't worry, it looks nothing like FlashcardDB :)

Quizlet is obviously more powerful, but has a lot of superfluous functions. The drag and drop thing is a cool addition but probably has little impact on actual learning. I also don't think the page layout is optimal. But hey, he's a high school student and they have >80k users.

I wouldn't do text-entry verification unless you can make it fuzzy -- which is extremely difficult for typed input. Last time I tried in Quizlet, you are marked incorrect unless your answer agrees 100%. At most, I'd make it a suggestion function that tells you if you are on the right track or not. This is something I'm intending to implement later on.

Feel free to send me an email. I've been thinking about this, on an off, for no less than two years, and only recently started building a related product.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you were following for awhile I must have put you to sleep with the lack of action! The very best of luck to your project.

I agree about the problems with text-entry verification. Obviously with multi- line and/or formatted cards (some sort of lightweight markup language) there are further problems. Grading on a scale is an option - whether manually (I was correct/I was wrong or I kinda got it!) or by robo-grading. I was thinking something along the lines of: "Congratulations human, you are 89.3091001% correct". There is software that allows you to rate your level of understanding between 1-5 and assigns the next spaced repetition on a sliding scale.

Yes, I think about it a lot too and haven't wanted to rush to implement a half baked version. In the end I trust the user. If you put a lot of effort into entering cards on a website (or onto actual cards) you generally won't cheat yourself. Removing the pain of managing the spaced repetition is where I find the real value.

I used to have a Leitner Cardbox made of a shoe box and strips of cardboard. I was never using it completely accurately of course and then when my GF found it hidden away, a spider was making a nice place to hatch her eggs. That was the end of the Cardbox.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>