FBI used Etsy, LinkedIn to make arrest in torching of Philadelphia police cars - <AUTHOR> https://6abc.com/fbi-etsy-linkedin-used-to-make-arrest-in-police-car-arson/6252215/ <comment><USER2> LinkedIn has become basically a requirement for applying for many jobs making it one of the hardest public profiles for the privacy conscious to hide from Google. I have a pretty common name, which is normally a good anonymity cloak, but if you also know my profession then my Linkedin profile pops up as the first Google result revealing many accurate personal details about me.

<comment><USER3> Is it really that popular nowadays? I remember it feeling like it was an antiquated platform 6 or 7 years ago before my latest job, and in my head I now imagine it as a MySpace-like dinosaur website. Has it made a resurgence? I might just be ignorant.

<comment><USER2> The reason employers love LinkedIn is that it makes it a lot harder to lie about your work history since it links all your companies and coworkers. In a way it serves a similar function to credit reporting bureaus in providing an accurate background check. This is also why cops love it.

<comment><USER4> Terrorists too. I've read about ISIS using it to learn more about people they kidnapped

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jesus. A 33 year old massage therapist with a peace tattoo. This is getting surreal. I feel a little sorry for her, not because she got caught (the crime, if she did it, is what it is) but because over and above that, she is about to become the target of a torrent of pent-up rage and counteragression from the right, who now have a perfect symbol to direct it at. (I feel the same way for the targets from the left too. My sympathies are with witches, not witch hunters.)

<comment><USER6> Under normal circumstances, society gets pretty angry at arsonists irrespective of their political beliefs. Do you also feel bad for the guy who mailed CNN pipe bombs?

<comment><USER7> I don't expect to see this kind of childish logic on HN. You really think burning an abandoned police car is the same as mailing explosives to a news team?

<comment><USER6> Is this some sick joke? Do you really not see how arson and explosives are absolutely comparable crimes? The arson which accompanied looting in Philadelphia caused a massive fire in downtown Philly which could have easily killed people. Your apologism for serious crimes because I guess it suits your political biases is not OK.

<comment><USER8> Repeat after me: Cars do not have feelings. Cars do not have families.

<comment><USER9> Fire spreads.

<comment><USER10> Are you claiming that fire from an unoccupied police car somehow spreads over non-flammable cement/asphalt? If so, you may have some misconceptions about the nature of fire.

I think it's fairly clear that this fire was not intended to spread and had little chance of spreading.

To be clear, I'm not saying what she did was right--but I am saying that if we look at intentions and what was likely to happen, this clearly was not done with the intent of destroying anything but property.

And to be clear, if you look at the George Floyd murder and protests, and your biggest concern is the torching of two unoccupied police cars, you aren't concerned about justice or public safety.

<comment><USER9> Cars are usually filled with gasoline that can spill and spread. Sparks and flames can blow quite some distance and start secondary fires. Police cars probably have ammo inside too, that can ignite. Toxic fumes can blow quite some distance, even into people's homes.

I'm sure that wasn't her intention, but serious fires are started by people who didn't intend to do anything more than have a campfire or fireplace. It's reckless, and it's counter-productive, turning people against the protests.

And just to be clear, it's entirely possible to be concerned about both police brutality and arson.

<comment><USER10> > And just to be clear, it's entirely possible to be concerned about both > police brutality and arson.

Well, first of all, "police brutality" is not the worst problem or the problem that incited these protests. Police _murder_ is.

Second, if you're concerned about both of these things, then there's no reason to talk about putting protestors in jail. She didn't set fire to a police car because she didn't know there might be consequences. She set fire to a police car because those consequences _don 't matter to her_. If you care about both police murder and arson, then you should be talking about stopping police murder, because that's the cause of the arson.

Focusing on the violent components of the protests is part of a strategy that controls the narrative. At every turn, kneeling on a man's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds while he begs for his life and slowly dies is being downplayed --calling it "police brutality"\--the same term used for slamming someone against a cop car while you handcuff them. And at every turn, things like burning a police car are being _played up_ , calling it arson--the same term used for torching a city block with children inside. And in fact, people in this thread won't even call it arson when Philly PD actually _did_ torch 61 homes, killing 5 children[1]. Where are the people insisting that we call _that_ arson and bring the perpetrators to justice?

So yeah, it's possible to be concerned about both police brutality and arson, but "police brutality and arson" is not what's happening. "A police officer murdering a man and a woman setting fire to two unoccupied, isolated police cars" is a much more proportional description of the events. And if your main concern here is making sure that the woman who lit the police cars on fire is brought to justice, you _aren 't proportionally_ concerned about both these things.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fun fact: the Philadelphia Police Department also likes starting fires. 35 years ago, they used plastic explosives to blow up the house of the MOVE group, killing most of the people inside (including five children). Instead of putting out the fires, the city allowed a good chunk of the predominantly black working class neighborhood to burn to the ground. The city did get sued in 2005 in a civil trial for burning down the houses, but no one from the city government has been criminally charged for the attack. That seems like the kind of terrorist act that the FBI would investigate, but I guess they have different priorities.

<comment><USER12> How is that related? Are you justifying violence?

<comment><USER8> Just saying, certain people are very very happy to point out the violence of the oppressed, yet throw a hissy fit when people point out the violence of the oppressor.

<comment><USER12> Justifying is not pointing out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is precisely why black bloc tactics [1] are employed: cover tattoos, wear generic clothes and everybody looks basically the same. I'm sure it's far less effective today but avoiding this kind of thing was the original point.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc)

<comment><USER14> Well we do want arsonists brought to justice, don't we?

<comment><USER15> Sure, but let's prioritize murder and aggravated assault before property crime.

<comment><USER16> Arson is not generally considered a property crime, because it is a major threat to public safety.

<comment><USER17> The Swedish word for arson is even "mordbrand", literally "murder fire".

<comment><USER18> That's pretty metal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm surprised that the people charged with investigating her clicked on every single link in google and read every review. That shirt is all over the internet. Seems like a needle in a haystack.

<comment><USER5> Parallel construction? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction)

<comment><USER20> I'm also suspicious that the article keeps emphasizing "amateur photos given to authorities" as if they are deliberately steering away from the term "police surveillance footage" or perhaps "images obtained by scanning social media".

While I have no issue with police investigating lawbreakers, the public should know what the police are doing and how, so they can be confident that police are correctly following the law while executing their duty.

But perhaps I'm reading too much into that wording, and in fact some protesters who took photos thought the arson was over-reach, so they supplied the photos to the police.

<comment><USER21> You're definitely right. This twitter thread uses excerpts from the charging documents to explain the steps the FBI took: [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1273098216775524355.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1273098216775524355.html)

<comment><USER22> That thread suddenly disappeared, and one which is claimed to be a "reconstructed" copy in another profile has disappeared too, it's so weird. It's not like the original PDF isn't online still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One interesting note - she's being charged federally, not by local Philly PD.

<comment><USER24> She crossed state lines?

<comment><USER25> It isn't necessary to "cross state lines" to be charged with a federal crime.

<comment><USER26> Did it affect interstate commerce?

<comment><USER27> I don't have a copy of the indictment, but in other police car cases they've used the fact that the car itself was imported, therefore destroying it affects international commerce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The article says she faces upto 10 years in prison plus $250K fine. Doesn't 10 years in prison seem excessive for destroying two cars?

<comment><USER29> Not as bad as 38 years in prison for a $9 robbery.

[https://www.essence.com/news/willie-simmons-life-prison- alab...](https://www.essence.com/news/willie-simmons-life-prison-alabama- habitual-offender/)

<comment><USER30> Meanwhile, Wall Street is still at large.

<comment><USER29> And funnily enough it looks like the top end of town is at it again:

[https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wirecard-shares-slump-over- mi...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wirecard-shares-slump-over- missing-110421720.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> While it's not exactly a novel technique (I've read similar stories since the early 2010s at least), I'm continuously surprises by how much people are able to glean from inferences and online sources. The saga of the "he will not divide us" flag is particularly impressive.

<comment><USER32> It's called OSINT and it's been around a lot longer than 2010.

<comment><USER33> _It 's called OSINT and it's been around a lot longer than 2010._

I listened to a 1940's episode of Dragnet a couple of days ago, and it was pretty much the same thing. Burglar was identified by photographs, his job, and a tattoo.

This is just normal police work. People make a big deal out of it because it's "Cyber" this and "e" that.

<comment><USER34> _Dragnet_ is good, but I much prefer _Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar_

<comment><USER33> The man with the gold-plated expense account!

<comment><USER35> "action-packed" expense account, actually :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's impressive how anyone can be "doxxed" these days. A few clues, each with a few bits of information, and soon enough you have a unique identifier.

<comment><USER36> Related: an analysis on Light's mistakes in Death Note [https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note-Anonymity](https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note- Anonymity)

<comment><USER37> Maybe the FBI has someone with Shinigami eyes on staff

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > During the violence that began around City Hall following peaceful protests, > Blumenthal allegedly set fire to both vehicles.

I love how the msm feels the need to specify that the protests that resulted in Police cars bring burned, stores bring looted and cops being shot were "peaceful protests" up until the incident. Imagine if they talked about the Charlottesville rally as largely peaceful until the deadly car attack.

<comment><USER39> I dunno; I feel like there's something about white supremacy, fascism, and literal nazism, that maybe precludes calling it "peaceful".

<comment><USER38> That sounds sort of like the reverse-halo effect fallacy. Believe it or not terrible people don't necessarily do terrible things every time they do somethings. For example, Fidel Castro caused Cuba to have one of the highest literacy rates in the world. That is true no matter how many people he imprisoned, tortured or killed. Similarly people can peacefully protest even if they are white supremacy, fascism, or _neo_ nazis (pet peeve of mine, but I wouldn't call someone a literal nazi unless they were literally a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party between 1920 and 1945).

<comment><USER39> When people are wearing swastikas on their arm and giving Hitler salutes, I'ma call them a literal nazi regardless of it no longer being 1945.

I'm also not really concerned what 'positives' their agenda might include, given the violence that is explicitly part of the ideology they are identifying with.

Even for those who aren't literally wearing symbols of the Nazi party, white supremacy isn't a non-violent ideology. It fundamentally seeks to supress, remove, or otherwise contain non-whites. Putting non-whites in camps is still violent. Expelling them from the country they were born into and lived in their entire lives is still violent. Etc. And if there's a "nice" white supremacist, who is "well, I think whites are better, but you know, live and let live, right?" I'm pretty sure they're not out marching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Probably used [https://clearview.ai/](https://clearview.ai/) ?

<comment><USER41> lol, no. they just looked at the t-shirt she was wearing in the videos, found where the t-shirt was sold, saw a review which said they were in philadelphia, googled the username of the reviewer, and eventually found the place they worked

actually investigative work

no subpoena's, no user profile aggregators

its the most acceptable use of public resources and is hardly news in 2020 but its nice to read that public servants will do some basic stuff like this.

<comment><USER40> or parallel construction.

<comment><USER42> Would finding this path through parallel construction be easier than finding it through forward construction? The forward construction just seems more logical to me.

<comment><USER43> The point is that the path potentially being concealed could be illegal.

It if were parallel construction, the intent would be for the forward construction to seem more logical to you.

In this case, you could be proving the efficacy of the tactic.

<comment><USER42> > It if were parallel construction, the intent would be for the forward > construction to seem more logical to you.

Yeah I agree that when parallel construction happens they make the parallel case a logical one. But that involves making a parallel case. You're saying that the shirt -> Etsy -> Poshmark -> Linkedin chain was not created in that order and was created in some other order. I don't see how it's logical that it could be created in some other order, even with illegal evidence.

<comment><USER43> I don't know what happened and haven't looked closely enough to have an opinion. I was only noting in response to your comment that in the hypothetical case of parallel construction, the parallel case would seem logical.

Beyond this specific case, I think the point of parallel construction is an interesting one because it makes it really difficult to know the "truth" where law enforcement have significant control over the flow of information.

Sometimes traditional or other media can help with the information asymmetry but sometimes, perhaps, not.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, I think I agree. My main original point wasn't simply that the accused parallel case was logical, but that it was more logical than any other case even if we assume illegal evidence was involved.

This is as opposed to say a police officer pulling over a drug dealer's car full drugs for failing to use a turn signal. If we assume illegal evidence was involved there, it's most logical the police were given some heads-up that there would be a drug dealer with a car full of drugs in the area to pull over, and the failing to signal on a turn was just used as a convenient excuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Part of me wants to argue if this is even newsworthy. "Person arrested for arson was identified through investigation of publicly available information" is not a novel headline, but the moment you mention that the information was online is the moment Jo Public thinks the police hacked the internet. People in this thread have already mentioned Open Source INTelligence, or OSINT, so I don't think I need to say that Google search is not the same as cracking accounts.

</comment><comment><USER45> Seems like these two links might be relevant. The case [0] and the charge [1]

[0] [https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17253155/united- states-...](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17253155/united-states-v- blumenthal/)

[1] [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/844](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/844)

</comment><comment><USER46> There's no way the evidence listed is sufficient to pursue prosecution. A peace tattoo and an etsy t-shirt? I certainly wouldn't allow that to go to trial if I were on a grand jury.

She'll likely plead out, so we'll never know what they actually have on her.

<comment><USER47> Not just any peace tattoo, but a particular peace tattoo. A particular color, position, size, etc. There are plenty of bits of information encoded in such a thing, I think you're understating it a bit.

</comment></comment><comment> bra-ket awesome work

</comment><comment><USER48> Massage therapist lol. Bet she has a PHD too.

</comment><comment><USER49> Maximum sentence is 10 years, she's unlikely to get that, but _minimum_ is 5 years IIRC. That's a _long_ time. And then you're a felon and you can't find a decent job. What was the calculus there, I wonder? Under what circumstances would a person rationally consider torching a police cruiser to be worth the risk of 5 years in the slammer?

<comment><USER50> Apparently she picked up an already burning piece of wood and threw it in. So it's less likely that she left the house that morning with the intent of torching cars.

In the moment, with everyone and everthing going on around her, I doubt she was thinking rationally or even knew that torching a car would be a long prison sentence. (if someone asked me before reading this article, I would have assumed a large fine + some community service maybe; then again I am not American so I have no idea how sentences compare).

<comment><USER33> _In the moment, with everyone and everthing going on around her, I doubt she was thinking rationally or even knew that torching a car would be a long prison sentence_

"Everyone else was doing it" didn't fly with my mom, and probably won't get a pass from Judge Wapner, either.

<comment><USER51> "Everyone else was doing it" is pretty close to "nobody else got in trouble for it".

Which is the logic behind Qualified Immunity.

<comment><USER52> No. The reasoning is to protect police from frivolous lawsuits and financial liability in cases where they acted in good faith in unclear situations. If you want to get rid of it, get rid of it for all government employees, including elected officials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I wonder if when they found someone who set a police car on fire, will he be charged to pay for it or whill they put him in prison and feed him with tax (or printer goes brrrrr) money?

<comment><USER16> She was charged criminally. The PD could also bring a civil suit for her to pay for the damage, but they probably won't bother.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm shocked less by the fact the person was identified and more by the fact the person didn't feel the need to cover up an identifying tattoo or a limited-run t-shirt _they left a review for_ while committing a felony. I'm starting to think criminals are stupid.

<comment><USER54> > _I 'm starting to think criminals are stupid._

That is a really dangerous move and doesn't really line up with my experiences. This woman was pretty stupid. She's not a criminal though, she's a massage therapist.

<comment><USER55> Wait, what!? How does torching a police car not count as a criminal act?

<comment><USER56> There are at least three readings of hoorayimhelping's post:

1\. This person is not a criminal in some particular all-encompassing sense of the word. I.e., some people commit one-off crimes of passion while others make a lifestyle/career out of crime. Presuming that the latter are stupid because the former are stupid is dangerous because organized criminals have learned good internet op-sec. That's interesting.

2\. Thinking of people who commit crimes as "criminals" and making blanket assumptions about the criminal element is a mistake. That might be a well- trodden critique, but it's interesting enough that there have been some (quite influential) books written around the topic. This seems like the more likely intent. Thinking about how the social phenomena induced by the internet and social media interact with those 20th century ideas about identity and subjectivity might result in an interesting conversation. E.g., suppose torching a cop car was an act of passion and this person's name is now forever associated with a crime of passion. That seems... new and different... relative to 30 years ago. Back then, you could just move somewhere new where no one knew your past; as long as you didn't become a criminal in that new place, you could basically start over. What might be the societal implications of continuing to assign "criminal" as a dominant identity in the age of an internet that never forgets?

3\. hoorayimhelping believes that there is no law in the US which prohibits the torching of cop cars.

The first two are charitable interpretations that might result in curiosity- driven conversation (in which you may or may not want to participate). The third.... isn't so charitable and is unlikely to go anywhere.

<comment><USER57> Whether someone "is a criminal" should have something to do with how much of a regular part of their life it is. Just like someone who smoked a joint once 20 years ago isn't considered a drug user, someone who committed a one-off crime isn't a criminal.

<comment><USER58> We are down pretty deep into pedantry at this point, but... Current definition is that someone who has committed a crime and been convicted is a criminal. If that crime is a felony, they are also a felon. Depending on the state of residence, felons may have voting rights suspended, may be disqualified from jobs, loans, educational grants, etc.

You are right to point out that we usually use the noun "criminal" more to refer to someone that makes a habit of crime or makes their living from crime.

And I'll also add that the word "criminal" is often used to imply someone is subhuman. Possibly subconsciously, but it's common to see people outraged by police brutality only if they think an innocent person is the victim. Things like "no innocent person should be treated that way." I think this is the primary objective of the ever-present ad-hominem attacks such as "well he was no angel."

<comment><USER56> I don't think this is "deep into pedantry". I think it's probably one aspect of _the_ most important conversation we need to have about the effect that "organizing the world's information" has on society.

The extraordinary permanence of certain aspects of identity ("criminal", "felon", "rapist", "racist", etc.) in the information age is radically different from how identity has worked for the past 100 years or so. The possibility of "starting over" is gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I mean... good?

Sounds like the kind of internet sleuthing I'd expect to see on 4chan. Glad to see the FBI was able to leverage those techniques too.

<comment><USER60> I'd expect the FBI to be better at it than 4chan though.

<comment><USER61> HWNDU and that air strike in Syria were pretty impressive though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> TL;DR the suspect wore a T-shirt sold by an etsy shop where they left a review.

Reading the title, I was wondering whether an artisanal torch was used on the police car.

<comment><USER31> [https://youtu.be/TBb9O-aW4zI](https://youtu.be/TBb9O-aW4zI)

<comment><USER63> Keep some of this on hand: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUv7NQelex0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUv7NQelex0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> They catch them with Etsy and LinkedIn. Or at least construct that evidence path post facto? Ok, sure. Seems normal.

But is there a Kickstarter legal defense fund?

<comment><USER65> I'm curious if you really think that it is ok to set fire to a police car? If so, what's the logic? Because my understanding of the first amendment (i.e. the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances) does not protect you if you commit crimes.

<comment><USER66> If the police are indiscriminately killing members of my race simply because they're afraid of people from my race, I don't think a little property damage to draw attention to that fact is really an equivalent response. So yeah, I'm OK with setting fire to a police car in this circumstance.

But the bigger question is, did they really find the person doing the work they claimed or did they use parallel construction to hide illegal use of surveillance tools?

<comment><USER67> Based on the metrics I have seen, police are not indiscriminately killing any particular race - deaths from police are not too far off of the crime rates by race. Police killings is a problem, but does not seem to be a problem targeted at any particular race.

<comment><USER68> I looked into it a few years ago. Because it's also about structural racism, you need to compare rastes and numbers with comparable international figures, as there are biases stacked upon biases if you only look at domestic relative rates. Those crime statistics you cited, try to compare them to some other first world countries. Look at incarceration rates, convication rates, ratio of jury trials, and percentages of subpopulations in prison at any one time, and as long as you are willing to accept it, you'll soon start to see a very clear pattern. You'll see that US crimes statistics over ethnicity and income doesn't look like anything, or anywhere else at all. It's bizarrely skewed, not subtle at all.

<comment><USER67> Crime statistics are definitely skewed, and discrimination is a huge part of that. But the question is not whether black people are being killed at a higher rate due to discrimination, the question is whether black people are being killed at a higher rate because the police are targeting them due to their race. The answer to the former is definitely yes - due to a variety of factors including discrimination black people commit more violent crimes and as a result are killed by the police more frequently. I think the answer to the latter is no, there is not strong evidence that police officers are more likely to kill black people over white people in the same situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'd bet the police did none of this but a hive mind somewhere which handed the info over.

<comment><USER70> You're getting downvoted but you're probably 1/2 right. It probably wasn't a "hive mind" but it probably was a 3rd party that is an expert in computer forensics. It's pretty common for the government to hire 3rd party contractors for this type of thing.

<comment><USER71> 4chan internet detective!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Now they have to find the clown who stole the rifle from a police car in Seattle and got disarmed by Shooter Rughi.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVAMUejexa0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVAMUejexa0)

</comment><comment><USER73> This is why black bloc: it's a tactic, not a group. Mass anonymity, reduce individual identifying marks.

</comment><comment><USER74> Ironically, doesn't this partially disprove one of the major complaints against the abolish police movement that we need police to solve crimes? Preventing and solving crime usually doesn't require a gun. It may be time to specialize and have less generic police and more non-violent investigators, social workers, mental health experts, crisis workers, etc.

<comment><USER75> I think most countries most cops don't carry guns. Even in the US most security guards don't. My preference would be ban handguns and have far less armed police. And much higher vetting for cops that do carry.

<comment><USER76> > My preference would be ban handguns

We can't even get assault rifles banned, good luck banning hand guns.

<comment><USER16> All rifles combined -- including "assault rifles" \-- are involved in fewer murders than knives. Also involved in fewer murders than hands/fists. This is true even in states where laws for obtaining them are very lax:

[https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in- the-u.s.-...](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in- the-u.s.-2018/tables/table-20)

<comment><USER75> That's my point. For all the demonization of rifles and assault rifles, handguns are the bulk of the problem.

<comment><USER76> But I think handguns would be even harder politically to ban.

<comment><USER75> Big problem is the Supreme Court said states can't ban handguns. Which is sort of insane because they allow states to ban 'assault weapons' and sawed off shotguns.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Voice isn't Dying - <AUTHOR> http://blog.2600hz.com/post/45190932101/voice-isnt-dying

<comment><USER2> Great post Josh. I agree 100%! Voice is much different than when I was climbing poles 13 years ago. The overall landscape is changing. The demand for more bandwidth means VoIP is going to just keep getting better and better. That coupled with better compression like WebRTC will help companies move to a more agile solution. The days of the heavy box PBX are coming to an end.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm actually bearish on the end of massive PBX systems. Frankly, I still see value for them, and given that there are a number of crossbar systems still in production, I don't think they're going to completely disappear. Think about how many pagers are still in service?!?!

We, at 2600hz, think that voice cost structures are going the way of the dodo, thanks largely to IP and the migration away from copper. Voice as a service has to evolve to handle the demands of a connected world.

In my personal opinion, I see voice as the method of last resort, but the critical lynchpin of communication. SMS and email are fantastic when you can handle an asynchronous response, but when push comes to shove you better believe I'm ringing the phone.

Lastly, on the subject of WebRTC; I believe it will rock for small conferences but it's anything BUT agile at scale.

Consider a 10 person video call. If I use a polycom bridge there are 2 streams coming from any given participant; one in, one out. This is not the case with WebRTC.

With WebRTC, I have one stream to each participant; ergo 90 total stream and (at 300kbps streaming) that's 2.7mbps per participant. The numbers only get worse as you scale.

My contention is that WebRTC is a product for a mesh world and we live in a Hub n' Spoke reality. It will be hard for WebRTC to compete at scale.

<comment><USER2> Big box PBXs are just going to be dumb switches. There will still be a need but just to route traffic from another service. Softphones will get better, SIP phones will become cheaper, and cloud communications will become more feature robust. The ability to create a phone system in the cloud with the same features as an enterprise PBX is becoming easier. Within the next 5 years virtual cloud communications will eclipse what folks like Avaya, Siemens, and Cisco have been doing for a while. Even Avaya is seeing the writing on the wall. A few years ago they stopped rebranding the HP Pro Curves. They've been saying for years that they just want to be a software company. Today, they are playing catch up.

<comment><AUTHOR> >Big Box PBXs are just going to be dumb Switches.

They already are ;).

What's really changing in our industry is the barrier to entry. It doesn't cost $100M to compete with AT&T anymore; anyone can do it with $20 and an AWS account. That is going to bring transformative change and companies that can't respond will die (this cycle happens about once a generation in telecom and results in industry consolidation).

Avaya is funny; those HP Pro Curves worked fine but paying 2x markup for the Avaya brand name never made sense to me.

This is the classic innovator's paradox. Companies like Avaya can either be Motorola or Lenovo; and today I'd rather be Lenovo by a wide margin. Wake up and change it up or face the consequences.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't Quit When It Gets Hard - <AUTHOR> http://dariusforoux.com/i-quit/ <comment><USER3> > No matter what you do, it's time to stop watching Netflix every night and > browsing webshops for the newest clothes.

This is a very narrow view of the world. Success is not explicitly defined as spending every waking hour working. A person who is content with their lot in life, at any level, is already successful.

<comment><USER4> Someone from our office just died over the weekend, we all found out about an hour ago. They were the type of person that essentially spent their waking hours working for this company. Crack of dawn up, and last to leave, working after hours, and on weekends.

I'm betting in their final hour they didn't wish they were still at work, or got more hours in. Busting your ass working IS a waste of life. You can be passionate about your work, but don't be ridiculous. You're only here once.

<comment><USER5> > Busting your ass working IS a waste of life.

Maybe, maybe not. That's your opinion because the only source of truth here is your own feelings.

> You can be passionate about your work, but don't be ridiculous.

You can be whatever you want and if you're fine with that, then great. Everybody is different. Average people/workers/earners obviously think and behave differently than those who are above average.

> You're only here once.

...as far as you know.

<comment><USER4> No, that's a fact. No one on their death bed has wished they worked more. They wished they spent more time with family/friends/traveling/vacations/reading/sports/whatever. Working until you died is what slaves did.

<comment><USER6> I'm not on my death bed, but I wish to hell and back I could work more. I'm sick to death of being poor. I'm broke today. I hate it so fucking much.

Half of that equation is that I have health issues, so sometimes I am just too sick to work. The other half seems to be that I am a woman, so good luck getting taken seriously.

I spend a lot of my time wishing I were dead because being unable to get enough work is such a shitastic experience. So, you know, speak for yourself. The feminization of poverty is real. Working to benefit other people without getting paid for it is the actual definition of what slaves do. It also nicely sums up what traditional _women 's work_ is all about, which most women still do the lion's share of.

<comment><USER7> If you want the traditional work experience for men with health issues, the equation is very simple. You "man up" and go to work and pretend that you are not sick, regardless of pain, fatigue or dizziness. You will be taken seriously, but only if you can hold up the perception of male persona with perfect health and strength. Otherwise you will not just loose the ability to be taken serious at work, but society in general will reject you.

<comment><USER6> I have done plenty of manning up. I paid down debt while improving my income while homeless. I also appear to be the only woman on the leaderboard of Hacker News, so I appear to get taken a helluva lot more seriously than most women. It still fails to translate to serious income, even though a recent resume job I did was for a CEO who indicated he knew me via Hacker News and I had impressed him.

Getting taken seriously _for a woman_ is apparently still pretty damn pathetic. I would like to get taken seriously without such qualifiers. Such qualifiers are always a huge negative. _Women only_ awards are basically a dunce cap with a crown drawn on it to pretty it up. They are akin to the Special Olympics. The fundamental message there is that "you can't really compete."

<comment><USER7> The only one that can compete is the few lucky percent at top that have health and strength to do so. Manning up is not an achievement, it is a symptom of the core issue in cultural differences in how women and men are treated.

The general cultural view seen in for example health care is that men are assumed healthy and strong. This is great if you are that, but catastrophic if you aren't. Treatments get delayed, problems worsened, and in psychology there is a recognized problem of not seeing mental illness in men. For women its not perfect either. While assumed poor health do generally lead to faster treatment and better contact with the health care for women, the doctors don't believe in actually curing problems so health care for women has disproportionation amount of only addressing symptoms. In averages, some treatment is still better than no treatment which is reflected in the statistics and increased life span.

This pattern show up all the time in gender studies. Men end up as majority at the top and bottom of the charts, women at the middle. The fact that you are a woman should in average give you an advantage at work in comparison to men with same health issues, pushing you towards the middle. Men can pretend and hide the health issue for a while (ie manning up), but its unlikely to work and carries with it some major health risks, not to mention that shitastic experience. In all its a bad situation for everyone with health issues, regardless of gender.

<comment><USER6> I have been working on both my health issues and my income. I have seen improvements in both.

To my mind, this is not terribly relevant to the issue I would like to see resolved. I have done all that. It hasn't exactly resulted in accolades, so to speak. In fact, it appears to me that I am so competent that people routinely think I am just making shit up. They think I am an egomaniac, liar, deluded or something along those lines.

I don't like where this conversation is going at all. I think my time would be better spent talking to myself in a corner in the form of blogging.

Adieu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you don't quit, maybe you'll never start the next thing that will succeed. A blind 'just work harder' ethic doesn't necessarily mean success. It's such crap to say that everyone who never quits succeeds.

Not only that, but it means that if you decide to do something else, you'll feel like it was a moral failure to stop doing what you were doing. So you'll blame yourself, and you won't examine honestly why didn't it work, what was things were out of my control. Learning from the experience is the most valuable part.

I spent close to 10 years on something that didn't succeed. The problem was it didn't fail either, so you just keep telling yourself that it's going to happen one day. Looking back on it objectively it was never going to work.

Take an honest view, don't just sing in the choir of the church of you.

<comment><USER8> On reflection - what you shouldn't quit at is having a growth mindset and always improving. Definitely do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Know when to quit and when not to quit" is better advice then just "don't quit". However, I think this article is aimed at the situation where you know you shouldn't quit, but you do because it's hard. For example, regular exercise.

Something that has worked for me is committing myself to a short amount time doing the thing I don't want to do. I'll tell myself "after 5 minutes, if I still don't want to do this then I'll stop". Nearly always once I start washing the dishes or start a run, I'm happy to finish.

<comment><USER10> Apparently, the Navy SEAL's have a similar philosophy during BUD/S, and particularly during Hell Week where they go five days of gruelling physical challenges with a total of about 3-4 hours sleep.

<comment><USER11> This article seems to reference a personality trait that seems to be lacking in modern society: grit. Just my person opinion. Heck, I've lacked grit, in some situations.

For a good (motivational) read about the definition of grit, who's got it, and why it matters, I recommend Angela Duckworth [link][http://angeladuckworth.com/](http://angeladuckworth.com/)

<comment><USER12> I don't think it's a lack of grit. I think a lot of it is a lack of motivation, or a lack of explanation of why they should continue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If only it were so simple.

It is that simple when you are, say, running an endurance race. Abide "don't quit" and you will finish.

But in real life, you're presented with a continual stream of alternative opportunities.

And these days "I quit" has subtly morphed into "I pivot."

<comment><USER14> > It is that simple when you are, say, running an endurance race.

It isn't. If things are starting to cause pain, or bleed, or you're vomiting, or ... there are many sensible reasons to cut short or abandon an endurance race.

> Abide "don't quit" and you will finish.

Or do yourself damage that will take months to recover from.

<comment><USER14> As a personal anecdote, I cut short a 24h race this summer at 17h because, even though it was ~20degC, I spent an entire lap shivering even though I had t-shirt + thick hoody + hat. That was a pretty big warning that I'd pushed too far and further would have laid me out.

<comment><USER13> There's no shame in stopping. Sounds like you were hypothermic, which is a common reason for DNFs.

From my experience, I would say that you wouldn't have been able to continue even if you needed to.

Also, always beware of the spectrum. Some people would say running for 17 hours is impossible. Others would say they shivered uncontrollably at 17 hours and roughed out 3 more hours before dropping. Others still would hit 24 hours and wish they could keep going.

<comment><USER14> > There's no shame in stopping.

Oh, I know. I was there primarily to support a 100-miler anyway which made the decision a lot easier.

> I would say that you wouldn't have been able to continue even if you needed > to.

Yeah, I spent the next couple of hours just slumped under a table trying to get warm and eat food.

<comment><USER13> Excellent motivational speech -- skip to the 6 minute mark: [https://youtu.be/b3q0dvwEmsQ](https://youtu.be/b3q0dvwEmsQ)

<comment><USER15> I think you linked to the wrong video; it's only 53 seconds long.

<comment><USER13> Oops -- this one: [https://youtu.be/3cZlvRnBnWs](https://youtu.be/3cZlvRnBnWs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> An important lesson I have learned recently is that doing hard things never pays dividends in the shorter run; in fact, it make you miserable in that period. The benefits are only realised in the longer run. What if you commit yourself to send one newspaper pitch every week? Quite likely, you will face rejections and it will make feel dejected. However, gradually, your pitches will start improving, you'll get better at writing them, and eventually, one of yours will get accepted. Then, probably another. Hurray! you have broken into publishing industry as a freelance writer.

From all the things related to writing I have read, this advice is present in almost every one of them. The recipe sounds simple but it's easy enough to quit with just one rejections. In writing, business, dating or anything that requires effort. If you persist, however, don't take failure personally, it doesn't take long to get better at that.

<comment><USER17> Stephen King tells a similar story in his book On Writing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like to face difficult problems, but I do expect to gain something in return. I also expect actual challenges and not just a pile of annoyances.

Unfortunately, most of the time the reward is that you just get to work on even more annoying problems.

<comment><USER12> Far too many mistake annoyances for challenge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't quit just _because_ it gets hard.

But don't persist if it isn't worth it. Which decision should be made independently of personal discomfort.

(Also, in general don't take life advice from 20 something Internet marketers. Why do you clog up the interwebs people? Please quit! Not because it's hard but because volume of SEO junk to sell some coaching books is simply not needed by humanity. Lets improve the quality of the net with original ideas rather than rehashing again and again. Do something worth doing or do not do at all.)

</comment><comment><USER20> >> Darius Foroux: "I'm an entrepreneur, author, and podcaster. I also research tools to build a better life, career, and business. Join my free newsletter if you want to get my latest articles delivered to your inbox."

Another collection of pseudointellectual predigested positive platitudes.

<comment><USER21> These type of blogs are popping up like flies, just rehashing what others have said without any added substance or power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I agree when the challenge is getting to the goal, but people often quit when they don't believe in the goal anymore.

</comment><comment><USER17> In the Coursera course about learning, one thing one of the professor say is that every successful people have this in common: persistence. Nothing can be achieved without persistence.

</comment><comment><USER23> On the flip side of that, don't stick with a failing endeavor just because it is hard and you have put a lot of energy into it. Make an intelligent analysis of your current position and trajectory in life, and decide whether or not to change your direction based on your long-term goals. Sometimes sticking with it is the right answer... sometimes it isn't.

</comment><comment><USER24> I doubt it's that simple. There are things you should just quit - things that mess with your mental stability. Then there are things that exercise the right muscles but is downright hard, the ones you should persist for the value you gain at the end of it. Being patient is a great virtue till it isn't.

Edit: typo

</comment><comment><USER25> I like that drawing. In music I represent learning as a black map, with gray areas around tiny white spots, which are valid intuitions/concepts.

Learning something really knew, means whole black map, blindness, you can only walk randomly and think you hit a white spot but it's only a gray area. Then you have more gray areas but they don't work right yet. After a while you can finely tune the walk and locate the white spots. When you have lots of white spots, you know.

And if you're fast, it's just because you don't have to walk anymore, you can jumpskip right to the appropriate white spot to evaluate a situation or phenomenon.

</comment><comment><USER26> Never quit on your own goals.

Its fine to quit when other peoples goals involve using your man-power for their own gain and you see less and less reason to continue being a part of it.

</comment><comment><USER27> He is speaking in the context of once you set a goal then don't quit. Eg: I have to get a job in one month. Now, once you define a goal that is measurable and is important to you. Will you be able to watch netflix if you are consumed by your goal day and night? If your thoughts are fooling you,then you will get discouraged by every small failure. I think it helps to be less emotional and mechanical in the pursuit of a goal.

</comment><comment><USER28> Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward by Henry Cloud.[1]

"Endings:The Good Cannot Begin Until the Bad Ends"

Sometimes you have to quit the bad or good so that you can start the good or better.

[1] [http://amzn.to/2yJiImE](http://amzn.to/2yJiImE)

<comment><USER29> > "There's a trick to the 'graceful exit.' It begins with the vision to > recognize when a job, a life stage, or a relationship is over — and let it > go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past > importance to our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every > exit line is an entry, that we are moving up, rather than out."

― Ellen Goodman

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Idk much about other things in this essay, but his goal is always on imagination line, while in reality it is, well, constrained somewhere on reality curve (at most).

Given that imagined goal = real, it is pretty easy to not quit. Hard part is, complex goals are often just a mirage.

</comment><comment><USER31> 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds' — Emerson

</comment><comment><USER32> To look at this article from my own viewpoint(who else's?), this is about "do I stop out now, wait, or move my stop loss and hope it turns around(hah!)".

Know when to keep going, but more importantly, _know when to quit_. Not knowing when to quit is how you go bankrupt, die, and/or cause other people to do either.

</comment><comment><USER33> I just want to make enough to where I don't _have_ to work in this industry, at least for a little while. It's fucking awful.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if Darius has heard of Borderline Personality Disorder. I immediately thought of it reading this post. I suffer from BPD myself, and I've noticed far greater symptoms of wanting to quit compared to people around me - <USER2> grass is always greener, and I want something until I have it. That has resulted in very unstable jobs, careers, and relationships.

Just like Darius's post, actually following up and quitting didn't make me happier. Rather, worse. There's a honeymoon period, but soon I disliked the new thing, and wanted to go back to the old thing.

Deep down, it turns out this is a symptom of not loving myself and being happy with who I am - and feelings of neglect, shame, and guilt from childhood.

I seek new jobs, experiences, friends, and relationships because I think that will make me content - but that's flawed as you will never love anything until you love yourself; and surprisingly my empty self identity _is_ the cause of hating programming, or hating product management, or hating my work.

Other symptoms of BPD are seeing things in black and white ('splitting'), wide emotional swings, intense fears of detachment, chronic feelings of emptiness, and more. Those are usually traced to childhood abandonment; whether it's losing parents, moving countries, or a troublesome upbringing.

If any of this sounds like you, I'd suggest looking more into BPD. There's a book called "I hate you, don't leave me"; that while not perfect and critiqued in some areas, is a great explanation of BPD. But also, don't self-diagnose; don't think you have BPD just because you want to quit.

<comment><USER35> Not being able to love yourself sucks. You can't find happiness when you don't want it, don't feel like you deserve it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Good read

</comment><comment><USER37> If you quit, you must know you have given another human a chance to do better than you did.

<comment><USER38> Make sure during your Race of Life you stop and enjoy it.</comment></comment>


Living with nuclear waste means remembering on a different scale - <AUTHOR> http://reallifemag.com/clearings/ <comment><USER2> Why does nuclear waste require remembering on a different scale because it lasts for 100,000 years, but chemical waste which lasts literally _forever_ does not?

It seems like a long but definite timespan leaves open the possibility of a solution so people see a goal to strive for. Mercury and arsenic and a million other things have to solution so we just dump them into the atmosphere or whatever.

<comment><USER3> Made me wonder what people think about the naturally occurring radioactive sites in nature.

<comment><USER2> I don't think there are any naturally occurring sites whose radioactivity comes anywhere close to that of high-level nuclear waste.

<comment><USER4> Radon leaking into buildings has killed many orders of magnitude more people than nuclear accidents and nuclear weapons combined, no matter how liberal your estimates.

<comment><USER2> That's only because radon is way more common.

<comment><USER3> That's kind of the point.

<comment><USER2> I don't get the point. It's quite reasonable to treat a pervasive, small risk differently from a rare, large risk. You're far more likely to die from sunlight than from botulism, but we treat the latter far more carefully. That's only to be expected, since the risk _from exposure_ is far higher for botulism.

What I'm pointing out is different behavior when dealing with substances that have similar risks. If I had a basement, I'd much prefer to have naturally occurring radon in it than either high-level nuclear waste or toxic chemical waste, if somehow that was my choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It depends on the waste. The long-term waste is mostly plutonium and other transuranics; fast reactors can use that as fuel. The remaining collection of fission products goes back to the radioactivity of the original ore in two or three centuries.

Russia has two fast reactors in commercial operation, and various companies are working on their own designs.

<comment><USER6> I guess it's not that simple. Say you have a factory that made Plutonium triggers and that same factory was pretty awful at following safety and containment protocol. Now that Plutonium is in very low levels within the actual soil of where the now decommissioned plant resides. Do you mine that soil for the Plutonium, or do you make all that soil nuclear waste?

In Colorado, we've decided to open up the area as a Wildlife Refuge.

[http://e360.yale.edu/features/rocky_flats_wildlife_refuge_co...](http://e360.yale.edu/features/rocky_flats_wildlife_refuge_confronts_radioactive_past)

<comment><USER5> Plutonium triggers have nothing to do with nuclear power. The nuclear _bomb_ industry has a horrific environmental record, which isn't surprising considering what they were building.

If the plutonium is valuable fuel instead of waste, then a commercial operation has a good incentive to hold on to it, even aside from the regulations that commercial power has to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One should also consider the possibility that if we fall back to the point where we can't reason about radioactivity cholera and dysentery will likely bounce back to the leading causes of human death.

</comment><comment><USER8> This idea of needing to protect nuclear waste for 10,000+ years is absurdist. Over this timescale there are threats that are just more dangerous [1]. What about conventional war over scare energy? That is a real threat.

And this argument is assuming that the next 100 years have absolutely no advances to a science that didn't exist 150 years ago. I find that unlikely.

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

</comment><comment><USER9> Already been solved, it's safer than than other forms of power generation [http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html](http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html)

<comment><USER10> It's solved just like poverty has been solved. There is enough food, energy and shelter for the 7bn people.

It's just those pesky humans hoarding, cutting corners, cheating, fighting, using more than their fair share, etc. Because nuclear lives inside of a fallible society it requires additional safety considerations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish this bogus eye watering bullshit will just stop. I'm as big a fan of dystopian future planet hell as the next guy, but it will not involve "nuclear waste" in any shape or form. Nuclear war, sure, fallout yes. But waste, no. There is no such thing as nuclear waste. If ever there was fake news, and a dead horse whipped to the bone....

<comment><USER12> Care to expand? I am not convinced of planetary-scale ecosystem restructuring due to nuclear waste, but certainly leaks of such waste could poison large areas for quite some time.

(I prefer to call it ecosystem "restructuring" rather than "destruction" because clearly under almost every possible scenario _some_ organisms would prosper. The term "destruction" only makes sense if you suppors a selfish view that the ecosystem is designed to be congenial to humans, and anything else is "wrong". It is interesting to speculate if the sentient cockroaches of 100 megayears hence would detect any traces of us).

<comment><USER11> Because that 'waste' is fuel for 4th generation breeder reactors and will be used as such. The result of that process is low grade waste that you can dump a meter of topsoil on and build a park or kindergarten on top of. Guarapari beach is more radioactive. There is no such thing as nuclear waste.

<comment><USER13> Maybe you should talk to some actual nuclear engineers and not just read starry eyed proposals. The engineering tasks of building and maintainig said reactors plus digging up the waste and shipping it there is tremendous. Especially sodium cooled proposals get the most face palms from people who actually work in the field. "There's a reason psysicists don't design reactors but engineers do" is a quote I remember from the last time I met a nuclear engineer and discussed transmutation proposals.

Bottom line: Nothing is solved and it will take decades to get to a design that consumes new waste, let alone old waste that is currently rotting under ground and is ever harder to get to.

<comment><USER5> Russia seems pretty happy with their sodium-cooled reactors, they have two in commercial operation and are building more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 Are nuclear waste that toxic for that long?

The longer lived an element is, the less radioactive it is, so if some radioactive waste can last for 100000 years, it must be radiating very weakly. You probably could have a barrel of it under your bed and live your life normally, although with a slightly increased risk of cancer.

And finding ways of preventing future generation from digging is thinking little of humanity. That's assuming we won't be able to detect radiation in the future. In fact, this "waste" may prove very valuable.

<comment><USER14> That's the trouble with radioactive isotopes. A hundred thousand years is long enough that it will be radioactive for longer than we can foresee, many times longer than written history, but it's short enough that it's still very active. Even a gram will have billions of decays per second. And while our body is of course capable of repairing a small amount of DNA damage, evolution never prepared us for a continuous bombardement by the subatomic equivalent of a machine gun.

Pu-239 [0] has a half-life of 24k years, and is considered dangerously radioactive.

Of course, this only applies when we're talking about large quantities, like radioactive waste. I have had a bone scintigraphy done, which means I probably have a fraction of a gram of Tc-99 with a half life of 211k years embedded in my bones, which is unlikely to be an issue. But I wouldn't want to store a decent chunk of that under my bed. I would, however, have no qualms about sleeping with uranium 238, an alpha-emitter that lasts many billion years.

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Hazards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Hazards)

<comment><USER15> Why are we talking about 100,000 years, when all we know with any confidence is that things will be so different in 100 that it is impossible to predict most of the problems that will face us then?

In fact I have trouble imagining a future where people still exist, but this problem is not solved or obviated well before 100,000 years from now -- in fact before 100.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's a solved problem, just with a solution too expensive to be adopted: send them on a one-way trip to the sun, BSG-style.

<comment><USER17> I'd actually rather dump them in the moon somewhere. Then if the material turns out useful you could recover it. Otherwise you can use the heat as part of an rtg type system to power a colony or station on the moon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Related - [http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%...](http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm)

<comment><USER19>
      This place is not a place of honor.
      No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
      Nothing valued is here.
      This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
      Pay attention to it!
      Sending this message was important to us.
      We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

Hard to imagine a circumstance in which such a statement is not a lie. In this case it's a real doozy; plutonium is the most valuable substance on Earth.

On the other hand, maybe such a confused people do not deserve it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's hard to think of a worse plan for spent nuclear fuel than burying it in an inaccessible location.

There is no such problem as maintaining nuclear waste for 100,000 years. In reality, events will overtake our plans long before then. For example:

* inevitable flaws in the design of the burial system may cause leakage that burial will likely make more expensive to correct than leaving the waste where it is

* we will want to burn up the spent nuclear fuel in breeder reactors (which actually removes the problem, and simultaneously creates wealth)

* we will find ways to clean up leaks and spills

* we will find ways to prevent and cure diseases caused by radioactivity

</comment><comment><USER12> What, and no mention of Anathem?

</comment><comment><USER20> Put it in Antarctica. Problem solved.

Or we can keep digging up fossil fuels and burning them, in which case there won't _be_ an Antarctica at some point.

<comment><USER4> What are fossil fuels going to do to the land mass? It has the highest elevation on earth.

<comment><USER20> That might be true in a technical sense, I suppose, although I thought Everest was the highest point on Earth. I can't find any references regarding Antarctica having the highest land elevation; any pointers?

And I'm sure it won't _all_ melt.

But if we want to preserve the continent's desirable property of complete inaccessibility to non-technologically literate humans for the next 10,000 or more years, it would be worth considering the effects of ACC. Right now it's a good place to store nuke waste for that very reason.

<comment><USER21> >I can't find any references regarding Antarctica having the highest land elevation; any pointers?

Wikipedia says Antarctica "has the highest average elevation of all the continents", but right now a lot of it is ice. East Antarctica is supposed to be covered with so much ice that a large majority of the land has been compressed below sea level(CTRL+F the wikipedia article for 'isostatic rebound' and view the pictures).

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


Why Python's Lambda is Broken and Can't be Fixed - <AUTHOR> http://xahlee.info/perl-python/why_python_lambda_broke.html

<comment><USER2> They aren't broken, they work exactly as intended.

They are more limited than similar constructs in some other languages, which compels using named functions in situations where in other languages one might use anonymous ones. On balance, this isn't really a big deal.

Also, its quite possible to support multistatement lambdas within Python's indentation-sensitive structure; the decision not to do so isn't a result of technical limitations but of aesthetic judgements.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have never used lambda in years of programming Python. If I need a one time function I define a function and use it once. To me it is more readable and readability is one of Python's greatest virtues.

</comment><comment><USER4> Javascript's syntax for anonymous functions is awesome.

Coffeescript is okay, but it's just a little too terse -- it can sometimes be difficult to figure out what's going on.

The lambda syntax is indeed poor; since it forces the function body has to be an expression, it means you have to jump through hoops to get your implementation to be an expression (or give up and define + use a function).

</comment><comment><USER5> The upshot of Python lambdas is they're really convenient in simple situation. It causes trouble when debugging though. Sometimes, I need to stick breakpoints in places that force me to rewrite a lambda as a regular function. The more that happens, the less I like lambdas.

</comment><comment><USER6> Forgive the amateur question: when would one absolutely need to have a function defined inline?

<comment><USER4> It's not a matter of absolute need; it's a matter of shortening functions. For example, say I have a list of username and number of posts:

      users = [["user1", 500], ["n00b", 15], ["thebestuser", 177]]

I want to sort the users according to number of posts. The sorted() function takes a parameter key=, you can do it this way without lambda:

      def get_users_by_posts():

         def get_post_count(user):
            return user[1]

         return sorted(users, key=get_post_count)

The lambda implementation is a one-liner:

      def get_users_by_posts():
         return sorted(users, key=lambda u : u[1])

Well, technically a twoliner, unless you use lambda more aggressively than most people:

      get_users_by_posts = lambda : sorted(users, key=lambda u : u[1])

In general, you can always expand your lambda's into def's, but it can make your code longer and pollute the code with named functions that do trivial things.

<comment><USER7> No, don't do this. The people maintaining your code will hate you if everything is an unnamed lambda.

A better way to do it is to take your core data structure, in this case a user, and turn it into a class, dictionary or named tuple. Classes are the best way - there are all sorts of ways to put a nice interface on them.

For example:

       class User(object):
            def __init__(self, name, post_count):
                self.name = name
                self.post_count = post_count

            def __repr__(self):
                return '<User name="%s", post_count="%s">' % (self.name, self.post_count)

            def __cmp__(self, other_user):
                # larger is better
                return -cmp(self.post_count, other_user.post_count)

        # set up data
        users_ = [["user1", 500], ["n00b", 15], ["thebestuser", 177]]
        users = []
        for user in users_:
            users.append(User(*user))
        print users

        # sort users by post count by default
        print sorted(users)</comment></comment></comment>


Doug's To Do - Inspired by NowDoThis - <AUTHOR> http://dougstodo.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw NowDoThis in a blog entry posted on Reddit yesterday. I liked it but it was lacking in some features I wanted so I built this in a couple of hours early this morning.

</comment><comment><USER2> You could give people a bookmarklet as insurance against lost cookies. (One of the key values of keeping lists is you can stop worrying that something will be forgotten. A list service with a significant risk of loss destroys that value.)</comment>


Ask HN: Best investment books? - <AUTHOR>

What would be some good introductory books on investing and finance?<p>More specifically, I'd like to be able to make sense of the data and graphs up here: http://www.google.com/finance?q=goog. <comment><USER2> No need to read Ben Graham unless you're already a well educated investor. The theories that Ben Graham proposes are solid foundations and very useful, but at the same time there are more competition nowadays in the industry with the wide and fast spread of information, thus you need to take a different approach than if you would 50 years ago and find the best buys on the Moody's list.

My question to you would first be whether you want to learn investing from a technical perspective, which is analysis of graphs, or fundamental perspective, which goes to the fundamentals of things that positively affect Google=good, negatively affect Google=bad.

How hard is fundamental anaylsis? depends. you just need to make sure you constantly stay up to date with the latest news, ability to analyze financial statements (can get hard). I mean all the stuff stayed previously are just plain old simple speculations, which basically drives for most of the market activities. There's no trick, but if you can somehow know how the people will speculate, you'll be well off.

Technical analysis is voodoo science to some, and best thing ever discovered to others. Some has lost fortunes, and some has been consistently outperforming and winning.

I personally just like Warren Buffet books because they are inspirational. It all really depends on which financial sector or knowledge you want to learn.

</comment><comment><USER3> A great read is "The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham. The main ideas from it aren't about getting rich quick but rather minimizing your losses and securing a consistent return

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor>

<comment><USER4> It's a heavy read. So be prepared before you dive in :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As you read the books suggested by others, I would also suggest referencing ( <http://www.investopedia.com/> ) when you are unfamiliar with investment terminology. Per your link, it's a great tool for defining Mkt Cap., P/E, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> I recommend 2 books:

1) A random walk down wall street

2) The little book of common sense investing

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OpenCourseWare from Yale (Financial Markets): [http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial- markets/content/sess...](http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/financial- markets/content/sessions.html)</comment>


Sunspot observatory: Unexplained FBI raid sparks conspiracy theories - <AUTHOR> https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/sunspot-observatory-unexplained-fbi-raid-sparks-conspiracy-theories/news-story/ccf683ac757091c8ce7e881558573165 <comment><AUTHOR> FBI, New Mexico ... better call Saul!</comment>


Calculator hackers crack OS signing key, opening a closed platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/14/145/145154.html <comment><USER2> A man has just become immortal. TI scene will never be the same again; the TI-83 calculator turns to an open platform today (The 83 is mandatory in U.S. education and sometimes distributed for free, all American High Schoolers use it, and did so for at least the last 10 years.) Bonafide 3rd party OSes can be loaded on it now, no more shells.

Help crack the rest of the keys (Win32 and Linux clients; linux version requires X I just found out):

<http://boinc.unsads.com/rsals/>

 _Some fun statistics:

\- The factorization took, in total, about 1745 hours, or a bit less than 73 days, of computation. (I've actually been working on this since early March; I had a couple of false starts and haven't been able to run the software continously.)

\- My CPU, for reference, is a dual-core Athlon64 at 1900 MHz.

\- The sieving database was 4.9 gigabytes and contained just over 51 million relations.

\- During the "filtering" phase, Msieve was using about 2.5 gigabytes of RAM.

\- The final processing involved finding the null space of a 5.4 million x 5.4 million matrix._

<comment><USER3> > _(The 83 is mandatory in U.S. education and sometimes distributed for free, > all American High Schoolers use it, and did so for at least the last 10 > years.)_

It's a bit off the subject, but this has always struck me as a terrible scam. For the material it is used for (introductory calculus) and the way it is used, one of these TI calculators hurts student learning and understanding more than it helps, and there is no excuse for schools to force students to purchase a $100 piece of electronics without a damn good reason. That these devices are absurdly overpriced compared to the state of the art (~$100 multipurpose netbooks, for instance), and that the models required are made by a single company with monopolistic coordination with standardized tests and textbooks, only make things worse.

Learning how to use a calculator is perhaps a useful skill, but it's one that can be learned quickly if needed and should not be pervasively required: for most math done for math's sake (that is, as opposed to computations for some engineering problem), students would be better off if teachers instead made problems that could easily be worked with pen and paper.

(Personally, I made it through high school and then up through upper-level undergraduate mathematics, physics, econometrics, etc. courses without ever buying a graphing calculator, so it's clearly not strictly mandatory for current curricula, but students and parents get the impression that it is essential, and the vast majority of students do buy them, so the effect is about the same.)

<comment><USER4> And now a cracked OS allows cheating since they have an approved 'test mode" to prevent access to stored files.

[http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/homePage/ns...](http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/homePage/nspire- press-to-test.html)

So blinking the led without any access blocking will be an early task for the subversive TI hacker.

<comment><USER5> Crazy what they have these days. Back when I was in high school (first year they required the 83) our teachers simply required we showed every step. So we could get the answer with a few key presses, but unless we showed how to get the answer we wouldn't get credit. Of course I wrote programs to solve the problems step by step and print out the answer, but I guess the system works because in the process of being clever and writing the programs I of course learned how to solve the problems step by step.

<comment><USER6> I had a nice and crazy little Chinese professor for numbers theory in college. I never knew what he was saying, but he would tell us the questions for the exam the day before. I asked him if I could use my ti-92+ and he said yes, so I just programmed in brute force algorithms, entered in the data, then sat back while the 10MHz processor crunched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately it's a ridiculously shitty hardware platform to be developing for in 2009. It's a _motherfucking Z80_ , for $100 -- a vintage Game Boy minus any decent sprite graphics hardware, with enormous profit margins and a captive market (enforced by regulation) of a million a year.

Yes, the OS on the TI-83 is dogshit, but I have a feeling that it's pushing the limits of what's reasonable on the hardware. The TI-89 has a terrific input language and OS (almost mac-like compared the the apple-II-ness of the 83), but running on a m68k.

Who knows, maybe someone can at least make a firmware that not only forces you to close your parentheses, but gives you some benefit for doing so.

<comment><USER8> But... it's a _calculator_!

And it has a headphone jack! And a bitmap screen! And a full keyboard!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The post on TI forum reminds me of when decss was cracked and an email was sent to the list saying something like: "Here are some random numbers that are good for initializing your card game shufflers and stuff like that" Followed by several dozen keys. It got printed out and put on a dorm room door :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Oh those good memories of the TI-83, my first and only foray into the world of assembler programming, trying to cram a complex algorithm in 6 registers, the good times!

<comment><USER2> You mean five registers, all of them accessible through the sixth! I had a nice hand written note for register allocation for the Z-80; I used an stack- based IR and mapped the TOS to #A. I hope to god my parents haven't trashed my stuff, would love to see those perversions again :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What about my oldskool TI-86? No love for that? :(

</comment><comment><USER11> I guess I have a little taste of what the guys who went thorough school using slide rules felt like when calculators that could do trig functions came out.

I went through high school trig, calculus, and undergraduate college math classes with nothing more than a standard 10-digit "scientific" calculator. Graphs? You plotted those with a pencil.

</comment><comment><USER12> What's the legality of this, I wonder? (Toying with the idea of joining the compute cluster or not)

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this at least technically illegal? (DCMA)

<comment><USER14> You mean DMCA, and IANAL but probably not. The calculator's OS may be a copyrighted work, but the calculator itself is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> hehe, I remember trying to convince my teacher for letting me use the nintendo DS on exams. You have to try, it's funny to see their faces.

Now you can use: 1.Nintendo DS. You can make or port(from linux) whatever you want in c, import Lapack libraries, use eigenmath homebrew for everything else. 2.Iphone.Good support for c too. 3\. netbooks...

</comment><comment><USER16> So, we can get a native MirageOS? Nice.</comment>