Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/01/02/bob-swartz-losing-aaron <comment><USER2> MIT Played a key role in Aaron's Death: [http://gothamist.com/2013/01/15/aaron_swartzs_lawyer_mit_ref...](http://gothamist.com/2013/01/15/aaron_swartzs_lawyer_mit_refused_pl.php)

They refused to sign-off on any deal that did not involve Jail time. This was THE one point that weighed more on his mind than any else per the recorded statements of his partner.

MIT's pig-headedness in this aspect really destroyed any respect I had for that institution. JSTOR made a much more reasoned statement [http://docs.jstor.org/summary.html](http://docs.jstor.org/summary.html) \- Clearly indicating that they had NO INTEREST in any further prosecution (since they were the primary wronged party).

<comment><USER3> > They refused to sign-off on any deal that did not involve Jail time.

It's not up to the victim how the perp gets prosecuted. It has absolutely nothing to do with them - it is up to the prosecutor alone.

<comment><USER4> > _It has absolutely nothing to do with them - it is up to the prosecutor > alone._

The "absolutely nothing to do with them" is patently false. Prosecutors listens to victims about such things and are influenced by them all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm still more disturbed by the laws in play.

Aaron was facing a cumulative maximum penalty of 35 years in prison.

The roommates of one of the Boston bombers was only facing 25 years in prison[1] if found guilty of helping Dzhokhar Tsarnaev dispose of a laptop, fireworks, and a backpack in the aftermath of the bombings.

I understand it's not a straight comparison, but no matter how I try to re- arrange those numbers in my head, I can't reconcile the impact to punishment.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombings#Dias_K...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombings#Dias_Kadyrbayev.2C_Azamat_Tazhayakov_and_Robel_Phillipos)

<comment><USER6> I also find the sentence Aaron faced to be excessive.

For additional context, David Headley received a 35 year sentence for his active participation in the Mumbai bombings which killed 160 people.[1] The median sentence for murder and non-negligent manslaughter in the US (effective 2000) is 24 years, 3 months.[2]

I can't help but find Aaron's prospective punishment to be far more abhorrent than his crimes. It continues to sadden me that MIT used their influence in such a hurtful manner.

[1]: [http://www.propublica.org/article/david-headley-homegrown- te...](http://www.propublica.org/article/david-headley-homegrown-terrorist)

[2]: [http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/Fssc00.txt](http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/Fssc00.txt)

<comment><USER7> _It continues to sadden me that MIT used their influence in such a hurtful manner._

I don't think this is a fair description; it would be fairer to say that MIT failed to use its influence in a helpful manner. (Even then I'm not sure it would have made a difference; it seems to me that the prosecutors were intent on "getting" Swartz and weren't listening to reasonable arguments for backing off.)

<comment><USER8> Whether it would have made a difference or not, the institution had the chance to act for what was right, and they did not.

<comment><USER7> True, but that's failing to use its influence helpfully; it's not the same as using influence hurtfully.

<comment><USER9> No, in this case it's the same. MIT is not average Joe, it's one of the top Universities in the world. I believe people on the board understand repercussions of _taking_ and _not taking_ action and the responsibility that comes along and if they don't they are not suited for the position.

<comment><USER10> I've always thought it a nice feature of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (bear with me here...) that the general confession covers "those things which we ought to have done" before mentioning "those things which we ought not to have done".

All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.

<comment><USER7> _All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing._

That still doesn't make doing nothing identical to doing something. You may consider them morally equivalent, but that doesn't make them identical.

My point was about how to correctly describe what MIT did. If we start muddying our language because, oh, well, it's all morally equivalent anyway so it doesn't matter how we describe it, we end up not being able to think clearly. And if we can't think clearly, we can't tell good from evil, so we end up doing even more evil.

<comment><USER11> If you see a drowning man and do nothing you are guilty of inaction. In this case they knew what was happening and before issuing an informal warning went for the nuclear option.

<comment><USER7> _If you see a drowning man and do nothing you are guilty of inaction._

Yes. But if you take a man and throw him in the water with chains around his arms and legs so that he drowns, you are guilty of something worse. I'm not saying MIT is blameless; I'm saying that there are degrees of blame, and the prosecutors deserve more than MIT does, because MIT failed to help but the prosecutors actively sought to harm.

 _In this case they knew what was happening and before issuing an informal warning went for the nuclear option._

I'm not sure what you mean by this. What "informal warning" could MIT have issued? They didn't know who had broken into their network until after Swartz was arrested. As for "the nuclear option", see above.

<comment><USER11> The article implies that MIT knew that students were downloading JSTOR files illegally.

<comment><USER7> Swartz wasn't a student, so even if MIT had issued some sort of warning to students, he wouldn't have seen it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Suicide is completely a personal choice. MIT had no reason to try and defend an outsider who hijacked part of their network, and trying to make them seem like they caused him to hang himself smacks of tunnel vision.

It's a natural response to a suicide; we try and search for something to blame. But unless you argue that MIT should have known Aaron was mentally unstable, saying MIT "caused" him to kill himself is illogical. People who commit suicide may desire to because of what they feel about their lives, but the final decision is one's own.

It's sad that it takes a death to bring attention to the IP issues that Aaron's trial had raised.

<comment><USER13> A desire to kill oneself is a diagnosis of mental instability.

<comment><USER14> I'm genuinely curious, is that a widely accepted position on suicide and mental stability? I can think of a number of situations where suicide might be preferable to continued existence.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it may be widely accepted, but I also think it's nonsense. As you allude to, someone with a terminal and painful disease could have an entirely rational desire to commit suicide based on a sensible projection of the future as containing a persistent unacceptable level of suffering.

I think we should only invoke "mental instability" when someone's projection of their future level of suffering is clearly mistaken.

<comment><USER13> I think it's theoretically possible for someone to arrive at the decision to end their own life via careful evaluation, but it's quite unlikely (and at this point, the only real acknowledgement of it in the psychiatric field is in the case of terminally ill patients, when the calculus is pretty clear).

Regardless, the vast majority of suicides are the result of a combination of depression and loss of inhibition, both of which are psychiatric symptoms that can be brought on or exacerbated by severe stress. The assumption can and should be that this is the case, not that an individual who was self- admittedly under huge amounts of personal stress performed a rational evaluation of their own future prospects in life and determined that it wasn't worth living.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Several comments have talked about 35 year or longer potential sentences.

Those big numbers come from simply taking the maximum possible sentence that can ever be given out for each charge, and adding them all up.

There are two things that make that unrealistic in most cases. First, the defendant is almost always charged with several similar or related crimes that have mostly the same elements. If convicted on more than one charge from such a group, they are only sentenced for one of the convictions.

Second, the sentence takes into account the severity of the particular acts that constitute the crime, and the prior criminal record of the defendant. To get the maximum possible sentence you'd need to have gone way beyond what ordinary violators of that particular law usually do, and you'd have to have a serious criminal history.

What Swartz was actually facing if he want to trial and was convicted was something ranging from probation to a few years, depending on just how much damage the court decided he caused.

If he took the plea the prosecutor was offering, he was facing up to 6 months.

Details with citations on the above are available at [1] and [2].

In the dozens of discussions of the Swartz case we've had in the last year here, the 35 year or 50 year myth has been repeatedly busted. Yet it keeps coming up in each new discussion--often from people who were in some of the previous discussions! Why is it so persistent?

[1] [http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz- charges/](http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/)

[2] [http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges- agains...](http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against- aaron-swartz-part-2-prosecutorial-discretion/)

<comment><USER16> Because you are wrong. It doesn't matter whether the chance to get such a high sentence was a realistic one, it is about the fact that there was a time when Aaron was facing such a long time in prison, that he couldn't know for sure it would not happen. From the article:

 _Aaron was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, and "unlawfully obtaining information from" and "recklessly damaging" a "protected computer." There would be 13 felony counts in all. At the time of the indictment, the U.S. Attorney's Office said he could face 35 years in prison._

<comment><USER17> Please stop belittling Aaron's intelligence. I know many people on HN feel like they have to defend Aaron's life and want to find someone to blame but he's not an idiot. He knew as well as anyone that actual jailtime would be very minimal. He had lawyers and a brain (a smart one).

So claiming that he killed himself over a number that wasn't even a possibility is damaging to his image. To me it seems like a bright man got caught doing something illegal and couldn't face the music.

<comment><USER16> It is highly questionable to claim to know for sure how long the jailtime would have been. It is not like the USA isn't known for overly hard punishments.

Besides, I still think that such a possible outcome can be a hard burden, even with the knowledge that it is unlikely.

> _To me it seems like a bright man got caught doing something illegal and > couldn 't face the music._

"Face the music"? we are not talking about a game here, but about jail and a real life. Besides, that comment totally ignores how far the prosecution stretched the law to define the illegality of his actions.

 _edit:_ I never claimed he killed himself over the number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What were MIT's obligations to Aaron? While there is a whole lot that MIT could've done to help Aaron (even if only just taking the JSTOR route and stating they were backing off entirely) and that would've been commendable, I don't really see why MIT had an obligation to help Aaron, so I have a hard time holding MIT morally culpable.

If anything, I'd think screwed up laws and an overzealous prosecution are the real issue here, and I'm not sure what pointing fingers at MIT accomplishes.

<comment><USER7> _I don 't really see why MIT had an obligation to help Aaron_

The Abelson report's take on this (with which I basically agree) is that, while MIT perhaps had no "obligation", it certainly missed an opportunity to use its position to educate the US government about a technical area in which the government is, to put it bluntly, clueless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Bostonian of the Year!! This makes me profoundly sick.

"United States Attorney Carmen Ortiz, in the midst of a prosecutorial tear that would lead the Globe to name her 2011's Bostonian of the Year, held up Aaron's indictment as a warning to hackers everywhere."

<comment> shawn-butler "Section 11H. Whenever any person or persons, whether or not acting under color of law, interfere by threats, intimidation or coercion, or attempt to interfere by threats, intimidation or coercion, with the exercise or enjoyment by any other person or persons of rights secured by the constitution or laws of the United States, or of rights secured by the constitution or laws of the commonwealth, the attorney general may bring a civil action for injunctive or other appropriate equitable relief in order to protect the peaceable exercise or enjoyment of the right or rights secured. Said civil action shall be brought in the name of the commonwealth and shall be instituted either in the superior court for the county in which the conduct complained of occurred or in the superior court for the county in which the person whose conduct complained of resides or has his principal place of business."

[https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleII/Cha...](https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleII/Chapter12/Section11H)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wouldn't call MIT "responsible" as that would open the door to a world of "look what you made me do" thinking. It is sad that MIT had a chance to be _differnet_ than the paranoid schizophrenic mess that the US security apparatus has become and reaffirm themselves as champions of free thought and somewhat rebellious free thinking. They chose to do the opposite. That is very sad indeed.

</comment><comment><USER21> MIT clearly did something wrong here... The Secret Service seemed to get involved by accident, due to the fact MIT do a lot of "Super secret stuff, that China want". MIT should have immediately moved to limit how seriously this was taken, when they understood who was perpetrating it (and why). Kind of like if a kid accidentally (because he didn't know it was one) spray pants the side of nuclear missile silo, we would treat them differently to someone trying to sabotage a nuclear missile silo (I hope!)

The article hinted at the fact MIT ran an "Open network" which ran counter to the charge of "unauthorised access". MIT should have commented on that in their report.

MIT worked with the prosecution to help build there case, that's fine, but talk about "neutrality" as that clearly isn't.

Anyone arguing that MIT didn't do anything wrong, I would say, just isn't rational.

But we still haven't gotten causation (Are they to blame for Aaron's death?).

There is always some people who say that suicide is only the victims fault, no one else. But do you apply that to people being tortured? Or people with no hope to live out their life as they thought they would. Was it the jews fault for committing suicide rather than face the camps?

Now applying that extreme analogy to the US legal system, and in particular, the plea bargain system... isn't it the same dynamic? They want to make the proposed outcome so bad that you take an easy way out. In the process they destroyed parts of your life (in Aaron's case it was his friendships, girlfriend, family, wealth).

Thus, aiding this system (the prosecutor) (as MIT did) certainly deserves some of the blame, no?

<comment><USER7> _MIT should have commented on that in their report._

Do you mean the Abelson report? That was published after the fact. (And it does address the issue you mention.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What makes me absolutely, terribly sick is the extent to which the USG waves its hands to dismiss the seriousness of the extent and reach of the NSA's domestic data gathering activities and at the same time deciding that Swartz's data gathering was worth going to the mat over.

<comment><USER23> The USG also claims it's wrong for people to shoot each other all while maintaining an army of hundreds of thousands of people empowered to do exactly that, _and worse_ , in the right situations.

<comment><USER24> When "we" decided to grant the government a monopoly on violence, there was nothing in the contract about letting them hack and sabotage American computer systems or commit other crimes at will.

<comment><USER23> Has NSA _sabotaged_ American computer systems? Most IP 'pirates' seem quite willing to claim that copying data is not at all destructive, and the NSA can make similar claims.

But either way, "we" also didn't put anything in our "contract" that let them make nuclear weapons, air forces, computer inter-networks, or social security/welfare programs.

<comment><USER25> Do you not consider this[0] evidence of them sabotaging cryptography systems?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6944118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6944118)

<comment><USER23> In the context of NSA specifically, not really; the algorithm is meant to be secure for all uses _except_ against NSA. I've noted before that I disagree with NSA's actions here but this isn't a case of them shipping crypto with a backdoor that anyone could target (contrary to the claim of the top comment from your link, _only_ NSA could break the crypto in Dual EC DRBG).

<comment><USER25> Suppose I take your claim that "only the NSA could break [it]" on good faith.

You're missing the word "presently."

That back door is there. Others not having figured out how to interact with it yet is a matter of security through obscurity[0], and the system is still weaker for it, even though it's not _yet_ fully cracked.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> _[U.S. Attorney Stephen] Heymann subpoenaed Aaron's girlfriend, Quinn Norton, to give grand jury testimony. That was bad enough, but even before the jury convened, Norton agreed to meet with Heymann—against Aaron's pleas. Norton would say later that she thought she could talk Heymann into dropping the prosecution. Instead, he grilled her until he had what he needed: Norton mentioned that Aaron had coauthored the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (remarkably, the prosecution had failed to read through the blog posts of the Internet activist they had intended to charge). For Heymann, this was a key piece of evidence: It established a motive._

I never realized Norton agreed to talk with the prosecution against Aaron's wishes.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's just a sad story. I do know one thing, don't tell your significant other, or anyone else Anything-- "Instead, he grilled her until he had what he needed: Norton mentioned that Aaron had coauthored the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto "

I am on the end of a civil suit. It's nothing big, but I have never felt so helpless. I can't imagine what Aaron was feeling.

I don't know if MIT was complicit, but a few things suprised me--50k charge to public libraries.

</comment><comment><USER28> What's clear is that the prosecution only got out of control once it got into the hands of the federal government, at which point Ortiz and Heymann threw the book at Swartz when he wouldn't take a plea deal.

Swartz's death was the result of institutional failure. The criminal justice system and more broadly the US government are very sick institutions if their standard operating procedures can result in a tragedy like this.

</comment><comment><USER29> What would be a less strict university in USA, more libertarian, less police state if you would?

<comment><USER30> What's more libertarian than calling the police when someone misuses and infringes on your property?

<comment><USER31> Libertarians (at least consistent ones) call out intellectual property for what it is: government monopoly.

In libertopia... Aaron would only face life in prison if he entered into a contract with MIT agreeing to life in prison for accessing the systems in the way he did.

In libertopia... you cannot consent to terms you cannot negotiate (IE accessing a website does not magically enter you into some agreement).

<comment><USER30> First, all property is a government monopoly, unless you're one of those religious libertarians that believe God created rights in real and chattel property. But I meet lots of libertarians that reject the idea that adultery should be illegal, so maybe there's some other holy book they follow.

Second, the root of the CFAA charge wasn't intellectual property, but physical property: MIT's network. Libertarians certainly do recognize non-contractual violations of property rights, i.e. various incarnations of trespass.

<comment><USER32> The CFAA charges were dubious at best, and were only pursued because the copyright charges were looking pretty shaky. The prosecutor also tacked additional charges on when Aaron decided to exercise his civil rights. I do not know many libertarians who support that kind of abuse of prosecutor power.

<comment><USER30> The premise of the CFAA charge is entirely consistent with libertarian thinking: owners of private property, like computer networks, are entitled to exclude people from their use, or revoke a previously granted license of use, for any reason at all. This charge makes sense even if you don't believe in intellectual property: it doesn't matter what he was doing on the network, only that he had reasonable notice that his license to use it had been revoked when they banned his MAC, but then continued to use it, thus trespassing. That's "get off my lawn or I'll call the cops." That's as libertarian as it gets. If you're talking about classic libertarianism, prosecuting trespassers (I.e. Securing property rights) is one of the few legitimate functions of government.

Arguing that violation of property rights is justified by some greater social purpose is distinctly unlibertarian.

As for "abuse" of the process, that's orthogonal to libertarianism. Classic libertarians believe in limited government, but once the legitimate object of government is implicated, in this case protecting property rights, they do not have any tendency towards favoring more forgiving or lenient prosecution.

<comment><USER24> Banning a MAC from an open network isn't "get off my lawn or I'll call the cops", it's more like "quit taking all the potato chips; save some for others and come back later."

<comment><USER30> That's an utterly ridiculous characterization. Its an attempt to convey that someone is no longer welcome to use your property. Not only is it such that a reasonable person would take it to have that meaning, which is all that's required, but Aaron actually understood that he was no longer welcome to use the property because his subsequent accesses to the network were under disguise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> MIT's report on their involvement in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz: [http://swartz-report.mit.edu/](http://swartz-report.mit.edu/)

</comment><comment><USER34> > They watched via video feed as their suspect removed the laptop, this time > with a bike helmet obscuring his face.

Aaron Swartz did not attempt to obscure his face. The DOJ just chose a screenshot of when the helmet happened to pass over his face, making it falsely appear as though he was. That's malicious on the part of the DOJ, and that's slanderous and sloppy journalism on the part of Janelle Nanos and _Boston_ magazine.

[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/swartz- video/](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/swartz-video/)

</comment><comment><USER35> [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge- approves...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge- approves-1-9b-drug-money-laundering-accord.html)

Zero jail time.

</comment><comment><USER36> Frankly, my main takeaway with respect to Aaron Swartz was his willingness to terribly damage the people close to him. Could he have had insufficient self esteem to understand that consequence? Because if the answer to that is no, his behavior becomes sociopathic and all the blame that is being thrown around is misdirected.

</comment><comment><USER37> Quinn Norton proving one again that you should never talk to the authorities. Especially not without a lawyer.

<comment><USER38> This article she wrote for The Atlantic gives some idea of the sort of legal representation she was getting:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/life-i...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/life- inside-the-aaron-swartz-investigation/273654/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Universities are supposed to protect our youth and foster freedom and free academic exchange. Shame on MIT.

</comment><comment><USER40> Whats disturbing is that law turned a blind eye to one of America's most promising young men- And No One- No One cared to do a thing about this. History will remember this as a shameful moment when the deprived world lost a messiah when the rich and influential were busy playing poker</comment>


Ask HN: Would it be possible to open-source healthcare.gov? - <AUTHOR> Sounds crazy, but why isn't public software, well... public? <comment><USER2> Healthcare.gov interfaces with so many internal systems, and was subcontracted to so many parties (including big players like Experian who are exceedingly private about their software), that you couldn't untangle the hairball.

If my experience with CMS and other goverment (F, S & L) is any guide, you'd have to have extensive documentation about their particular applications running on everything from Oracle to DB2 to VSAM tables, taking input from ONC RPC calls, ZMODEM file uploads, CORBA requests, and TTY emulators. Not exactly something that you can just jump in and work on.

Beyond that, even if h/c.gov was, say, thrown up on GitHub, you couldn't just tweak some files and issue a pull request; everything has to go through FISMA audits, which make your traditional waterfall change request look like updating a blog post.

<comment><USER3> The main site is a static file generation stuff build by Development Seed. The marketplace was mostly likely built on cruft enterprise software built by government consulting firms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was thinking the same... the source code for the portal is in fact open source: [https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov](https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov)

But the code for the marketplace isn't.

I think if the marketplace was open bug fixing would be faster.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. Do you think anyone would contribute?

<comment><USER4> Yes for two reasons:

1\. "Scratching your own itch". There are several hackers / freelancers that want to enroll in healthcare and want that website to work.

2\. "Altruism". There are plenty of hackers that want better healthcare for the USA and would gladly help to make that happen. Even if they aren't from the USA.

<comment><USER5> This.

There are already so many hackers working on open source projects for the government, even healthcare in government, that there would be no shortage of willing helping hands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've worked with contractors that own have built web applications for the government.[1] Sadly this par for the course with respect to the scalability and usability of these sites. These teams are typically only concerned about following documentation processes and meeting their security standards. I can't cite anything to prove this, but I'm really not going the route of slander, just speaking from personal experience.

[1][http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2013/aca- contractors...](http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2013/aca-contractors/)

</comment><comment><USER6> It certainly should be, as well as most other such software funded by taxpayer money.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ask the company who was contracted to build it

[http://www.cgi.com/en](http://www.cgi.com/en)</comment>


Graphene supercapacitors are 20x as powerful, can be made with a DVD burner  - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122763-graphene-supercapacitors-are-20-times-as-powerful-can-be-made-with-a-dvd-burner <comment><USER2> Underdiscussed point: one reason we want such high capacity power storage is that recharging takes _hours_. Society has internalized long charging times as normal. Would we fuss quite so much about run time if a recharge took seconds instead? (Am thinking cell phones/tablets here, not the dangerously high power issues of recharging a car in one minute flat.)

<comment><USER3> For many applications, we can get the equivalent of fast recharging by swapping batteries. Yet, we still want long battery life because swapping is inconvenient.

Fast recharge is also inconvenient. Just as you must have a set of batteries to swap, you must have the means and opportunity to fast recharge. Note that a fast recharger is probably at least as big as a set of batteries. And, I can swap batteries in places where I can't plug in the recharger.

Yes, fast recharge is less inconvenient than slow recharge.

<comment><USER4> I don't think swapping batteries is a good analog for fast recharge. For one, the cost of a kilowatt hour in AA batteries well exceeds $100, even buying in 20-count lots. From the wall, it costs less than a dollar. Swapping batteries is also significantly more effort than plugging in a microUSB or whatever.

<comment><USER5> Still way to cumbersome. I would love to be able to get a quick fix but I won't trade any battery life for it.

If I'm ever around to recharge quickly I can just as well let it sit there for a while, at least the vast majority of times. Please note how convenient it is to charge from a USB-port, a micro usb cable is all that is needed to be able to charge pretty much anywhere (and they are cheap enough leave one at home/work/laptop/pocket. With a fast charger I'd have to bring it along and plug it in everywhere - not worth it. And I most definitely would like at least the same poor battery life that we have today, otherwise you wouldn't be able to last a day without a charge and that it just unacceptable regardless of how easy or fast it is to recharge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Taking the article at face value, it sounds like they're talking capacitors with an energy density comparable to lithium-ion, and that's on the first try. (Although just looking at the chart it looks more like at least an order of magnitude lower.)

But we're used to being disappointed by articles about graphene... Anyone got a reason this isn't as good as it sounds?

<comment><USER7> A key point here is the tradeoff between energy density (how much energy the battery or capacitor can hold) and power density (how quickly the energy can be released).

I'm not an expert, but just working from the graph in the article, the best energy density they show for the new graphene capacitors is roughly 1/8th the best energy density for lithium-ion batteries. What's interesting is that capacitor has roughly 500x the power density of that battery. Or if you look at a battery tuned for power density (lower-right end of the red arc in the graph), there's a capacitor that can offer 200x or more power density with the same energy density.

More simply: for low-discharge-rate applications, lithium-ion still wins, though the new capacitors may narrow the gap a bit. For high-discharge-rate applications, these capacitors win by a mile. (Ignoring considerations not covered in the chart -- cost, durability, temperature sensitivity, safety, etc.)

<comment><USER8> What's an example high-discharge-rate application where Lion could be displaced?

Toy helicopters? EMP weapons?

Weight would be an interesting graph axis!

<comment><USER9> It is not just about high discharge. In return you also get fast recharge. Something that can suck in a large chunk of power, hold it for a short time, and then dump it out again rather quickly has certain advantages. Consider the energy storage system for regenerative braking, for example, which needs to absorb a lot of energy quickly -- the trick is then figuring out what to discharge it into, starting a vehicle rolling is the prime candidate but there may be other uses of an intermediate storage device like this.

In most cases I think that this will not displace Li-ion but would instead augment the existing battery setup.

<comment><USER6> Yeh, that's the really cool bit-- would you be okay with your iPhone only getting an hour of battery life if you could fully charge it in a couple of seconds?

I mean, obviously not, but it's interesting to think about.

<comment><USER8> But what about a hybrid system where you could add an hour or two of usage in that first few seconds of charging?

Would be great during a layover in a typical US airport where you might have to sit on the floor in a corner to use a power outlet. You could plug in for 10s to fill the cap, eat lunch while the cap charges the battery for an hour, plug in again for 10s before you fly out having something close to a full battery.

<comment><USER10> A cellphone battery is say 1 Amp Hour. Assume an equivalent capacitor is 3600 Amps for a second. Assume the capacitor is charged to 10x the Voltage, and is charged in 10 seconds. That needs 36 Amps - copper wires a bit thicker than those in a kettle cord. Bad approximations made, but right order I think.

Also there are real safety issues with something that can be charged that fast, because it usually implies it can be discharged faster. A shorted Li ion battery may burn, but a low-resistance capacitor will cause an explosion. Capacitors are fun :-)

<comment><USER11> An iPhone battery is roughly 1400mAh at 3.7V, which gives 5.2Wh or 18720 watt- seconds. A standard power outlet in the US supplies 15A at 120V, for a maximum of 1800 watts. So if you could charge your phone using the maximum power available from a standard outlet, it would take roughly 10 seconds. A typical laptop might take about 1-2 minutes. (That's assuming 100% efficiency, which is unrealistic.)

<comment><USER12> He's talking about the wire to the battery, not from the outlet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've got solar panels on my house. During the day, on good days, they generate more power than I use in a 24hr period, except I'm grid tied because I can't economically store that power.

Back when maxwell tech [1] was using them to start diesel electric locomotives I did the math to figure out how many I would need in my house foundation to 'carry me' over from day to night, and it was an additional $128,000 and probably 1000 sq ft of 'foundation' space to hold them.

Graphene, and other high surface area + high conductivity solutions seem like they will make this configuration more feasible in the future. It would be interesting to be 'off grid' but without the cost/hassle of maintaining a bunch of batteries.

[1] <http://www.maxwell.com/>

</comment><comment><USER14> I read this with great interest when it came across another site. I have watched many of people explode bolts or something with homemade capacitors. This seems to imply that a home a solution for experimentation could be derived, but at this time it seems that while a DVD burner may be in the mix, it is in the middle of a very advanced lab and the further processing such a material would require for application.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know or have the capability to accurately estimate what the volumetric power density of these capacitors are (assuming they commercialize well)? In terms of replacing cell phone batteries or something, that's what matters, and I only see areal densities.

<comment><USER16> Maybe I'm not understanding correctly, but isn't that how they're presenting their findings(W/cm³)?

[http://www.extremetech.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/03/energy...](http://www.extremetech.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/03/energy-density-graphene-capacitor-640x399.jpg)

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

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't you care more about _energy_ per volume or weight? In other words Watt-hours/cm³.

<comment><USER18> Thats the discussion. In reality, you care about both. Power density to move the energy into and out of the cell quickly to shorten charge times and supply thirsty loads. Energy density to run lower loads for longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> These might replace other kinds of capacitors, but at the listed energy density, there is no way they are going up against cell phone batteries or car batteries. According to wikipedia, the lithium iron phosphate battery has an energy density of 220 mWh/cc. These are weighing in at 1.36 mWh/cc, according to the article.

And existing battery chemistries can already charge fast enough such that the limiting factor for electric car recharge times is the grid. My Nissan Leaf can charge most of the way in 25 minutes at a L3 charging station. But PG&E levies enormous fees for people who want to pull down that kind of power, so there isn't a single operable L3 station in the whole bay area.

<comment><USER20> That's 220 Wh/L for lithium iron phosphate batteries, or 0.22 mWh/cc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To me the most astonishing part of this article is that they can 'bake' graphene out of graphite oxide with consumer-grade tech. Did I miss something, or is that not a huge step forward for graphene synthesis?

<comment><USER21> All it takes is a pencil and some scotch tape, it does not get much more low tech than that.

<comment><USER22> And if lightscribe can produce usable graphene for super capacitors an industrial machine that does the same thing faster and better shouldn't cost too much, and I can't see any reason why the low-tech approach can't scale up easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What about micro-fuel cell + hydrocarbons?

The energy density of gas/petrol is fantastic. Recharge time is quick ("pour some in").

[http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/12/a-gallon-of-petrol-can- pow...](http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/12/a-gallon-of-petrol-can-power-an- iphone-for-20-years/)

<http://www.mtimicrofuelcells.com/>

Sure, we have limited supplies of hydrocarbons in the ground, but to me the key energy technology would be "synthesise hydrocarbons from water + CO2 + energy in". i.e. stop focusing on hydrocarbons as a _source_ of energy and start thinking of them as a 'transport' of energy.

That would also mean we can move to clean, renewable power generation without retooling the globe's transport fleet.

<comment><USER24> I had the chance to analyze a solid-state gas engine a few months ago, based on this technology:

[http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/sun-free- photovoltaics-07...](http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/sun-free- photovoltaics-0728.html)

The solid-state engine has much lower efficiency than a regular power engine would (a hypothetical 12%/realized 5% vs. a realized efficiency of about 30%), but it can be made much smaller - and even at a 5% conversion rate, the energy density just blows everything else out of the water. Aside from being energy dense, it's also much cheaper than high-end lithium-ion batteries; and unlike regular fuel-cells, the technology is just based on regular photovoltaics, and is relatively easy to manufacture.

<comment><USER23> Awesome, so we'll have the tech to consume the hydrocarbons, but where is the production side?

What do we need to be able to hook up a nuclear power plant, a supply of clean water and a big air pump and starting sucking in H2O+CO2 and piping out CnH(2n+2) and pumping out O2?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here is a video from the author of the article on the process used

[http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2012/0315sp_capacitor.shtm...](http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2012/0315sp_capacitor.shtml)

<comment><USER26> Youtube version of same video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oEFwyoWKXo>

Yes, it is very informative/clarifying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'll preface this by saying that I want my next vehicle to be electric.

Here's my concern with regards to electric cars: There's a huge difference between failure modes of electric vs. gasoline powered vehicles in crash scenarios.

In a great deal of cases a crash with a gasoline-powered car results in no spills or fires. No problems. In a few cases a spill might result. Fires are only a factor when gasoline vapors are involved.

If a pure electric vehicle has a range equivalent to that of a gasoline- powered vehicle, say, 200 to 300 miles, this means that it is storing a tremendous amount of energy. Also, due to i-squared-c losses it is very likely that the system will be a high voltage system (hundreds of volts).

In the case of a bad accident this energy could be released violently. There might come a day when we hear of an entire family electrocuted to death in their car after a crash. I hope this never happens, but I have a feeling it could.

As I see it this is the PR problem with the technology: Huge amounts of energy that could do serious damage if something goes wrong. In contrast to that, a gas tank is a relatively harmless device.

Yes, there are safety measures that can and are being utilized, like fusible links between batteries and intelligent management systems. Still, it doesn't take much at, say, 500 volts, to cause a lot of damage quickly. As someone who has worked with and designed very high power DC motor controls and have tested many designs to destruction I have to say that this is an area that really needs to receive a tremendous amount of attention.

The last thing the industry needs is the media devoting weeks to cover how a family got fried in their electric car while the fire department was powerless to aid them until the batteries fully discharged (which could take a long time). That would be a truly horrific sight to behold and a potential industry-killing event. Close your eyes and imagine that for a moment. Then imagine trying to convince someone who saw that on TV to buy an electric car.

Super-capacitors could help in this regard in very meaningful ways. If we could get battery packs to be small enough that leaves a lot of room for creating a crash and intrusion protection barrier around the battery.

Today battery packs are very large and heavy. And, while I am sure that a lot of work has gone into safety, they could be made far safer if the batteries had higher energy capacities.

The other way super capacitors might be able to help could be as paradigm shift enablers. Picture the case of not needing a range of 300 miles. For most of us, 60 miles might be enough. If that battery pack is small enough gas stations could morph into battery pack swap stations. The fact that a super- capacitor has a useful life of tens of thousands of cycles means that there would be no concern of receiving someone's almost-dead battery. The cost of re-fueling would include some amount of money to deal with packs near or at their end of life. If you did need to go farther maybe cars could be designed with room for a second range-extension pack or some other means to connect a larger battery pack.

From a safety standpoint, I want to see the kinds of tests companies like Volvo and Mercedes are known for: Fling a car through the air and roll it multiple times. In other words, extreme stuff that is unlikely to happen in most accidents. After the tests the cars have to remain in a state that is safe enough for egress as well as for rescue personnel to approach, touch and render aid.

In other words, electric cars have to be better in terms of safety than gasoline powered vehicles.

<comment><USER28> Driving any sort of car has such a high likelihood of killing you and your whole family in so many dozens of ways, it's hard for me to see how the battery issue is something to get hung up on (not that any safety improvement isn't a good thing).

But I agree that a death-by-car-electrocution scenario would be big news, and not a good thing for electric car makers.

<comment><USER29> A capacitor could internally short, releasing all of its energy at once. Imagine all of the gasoline in your car going off at once. Its a bomb. That's quit a different scenario from other car-crash situations.

We've all seen the laptop-going-nuclear videos when Li-Ion batteries short. This could be worse, given the high discharge potential mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER30> > That's quit a different scenario from other car-crash situations.

Only if it happens frequently. If it happens in one of ten thousand fatality accidents, you won't even be able to see it in the statistics.

<comment><USER27> ...but you will see it on TV. And that is what will stop the industry on its tracks.

People are used to gasoline. They are comfortable with it, if you will. Electricity is another matter. People fear electricity. They don't understand it. If electric cars are seen as roving high-tension wires that can electrocute you and your family in a crash that will be the end of the industry. People don't care about statistics but they react very readily to anything that triggers fundamental fears.

<comment><USER31> Families have burnt to death horribly in gasoline fires, too. They don't tend to show that kind of thing on TV at all (and I don't think that burning to death is significantly less horrible than electrocution).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's quite a few practical details that weren't addressed. Whats the self discharge of these caps? Sure, maybe they can hold a ton of energy in a small volume but who cares if it bleeds off in 2 hours? What's the performance over temperature? Does the capacity drop off at temperature? Does the available power drop off? A lot of conventional supercaps can even permanently age quite quickly at moderately high temperature.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow, this is fantastic news!

One of the fantastic things about grapheme is that it is so easy to work with and abundant material.

This simple method of reduction means you could create a machine for making long sheets of grapheme just with an uniform focusing laser bar, this means mass scales and super cheap. Very exciting!!

</comment><comment><USER33> I can't wait for a DIY version of this. Turning old cd/dvd's into super capacitors.

<comment><USER34> The discs appear to serve only as a temporary platter for holding the graphite oxide film. Once scribed by a laser, the graphite oxide is converted to graphene and peeled from the disc for further processing. The discs aren't used in the capacitors. The article says that blank discs are used, but doesn't mention if they are reused or even if they must be blank, but I get the impression that a viable method of production probably won't depend on wasting disposable discs.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Align sun eclipse images with python for a timelapse - <AUTHOR> http://michilehr.de/timelapse-of-the-sun-eclipse-with-the-help-of-python/

<comment><USER2> Nice one!</comment>


Semantic note taking app for Android - <AUTHOR> https://market.android.com/details?id=com.quesucede.notesmappr&feature=search_result <comment><USER2> This looks cool.

The problem I find with these taking-taking apps is that once you create bunch of notes, exporting or relating them to the "rest of the world" becomes hard.

It's kind of the same problem real-world post-its have. Either you only use them a little and they're not terribly useful or you use them a lot and keeping track of them in tandem with everything else you keep track of becomes a problem.

Caveat: I'm working an app aiming to tie lots of things like this together.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a little skeptical. When I'm taking notes, I don't have time to spend on encoding elaborate semantics (especially when I'm typing on a touchscreen). Does this do anything to help?</comment>


Ask HN: ChromeOS or Windows 10? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I'm shopping around for a new laptop, & I see the cheapest ones are Chromebooks.
The deal-breaker feature I need is some sort of 'secure boot', so the motherboard can't be infected with malware.
I see ChromeOS & Windows have different approaches to do secureboot, & I'm wondering if the Chromebook version will protect me as well as the Windows implementation.
I also have a ton of Windows software that I don't know if they'll run on a ChromeOS- I'm thinking they won't.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> I think I'm missing something in your post... Malware infected motherboards? How is this possible?

Chromebook will not run any windows software. It runs google's chrome OS and Chrome web browser. it's a total Web-based operating environment and all applications are web based (although some apps may run offline).

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a new Windows 10 laptop that's the same price as chrome books -

[http://www.omgchrome.com/169-acer-cloudbook-is-a- windows-10-...](http://www.omgchrome.com/169-acer-cloudbook-is-a- windows-10-chromebook/)</comment>


Ask HN: Any sales techniques I should learn for my business? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN, I am starting a business which is pretty much all sales.
How can I learn to make sales? What are some techniques I should use? Could any experts provide some insight?
I read a little of the sandler method but did not really get it. <comment><USER2> A significant portion of "sales training" involves peddling snake oil and/or dressing very basic concepts up as science.

Essentially the most effective manner of selling something depends on what people buy - are they buying a solution to a specific problem, a commodity, or is it an entirely unnecessary luxury which they might decide is a good idea.

\- if it's the first, try a "consultative" approach which consists of asking probing questions about the businesses' problems in a relevant area, listening very carefully, and then matching up the benefits of the solutions you can offer. Bonus points for being able to find an approximate cost of the problem you're solving (or value of the benefit you're offering). Being able to ask clever questions helps, but it's mostly about listening.

\- If it's commodities, simply ensure you're speaking to enough people that might be interested in purchasing your offer (and ensure your pricing is competitive). It's mostly a numbers game.

\- if it's the third, it's mostly in the charm...

With all three of them, it's practice, particularly _within your chosen field_ that makes perfect. And especially once you've mastered the basic techniques, _aiming to always talk to the people most likely to be able to influence a buying decision_. That often doesn't mean the most senior person, and often doesn't mean anyone in a purchasing department.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's countless sales "techniques" out there, but in my experience it just boils down to being a congenial person. I've been selling professionally for two years now and the most significant improvements I've made are all based on my attitude. Being relaxed, confident, and friendly makes my potential customers feel the same way. When they're feeling good, they'll reach for their wallet. Make sure everything you do is natural and honest though-- selling is not about pulling a bag over some poor saps head.

Aside from that, there are certainly tricks of the trade you might find helpful. What I've described here is widely called "consultative sales". Steve Blank has some excellent writings on this topic at [http://steveblank.com/2009/06/25/convergent-technologies- war...](http://steveblank.com/2009/06/25/convergent-technologies-war- story-1-%E2%80%93-selling-with-sports-scores/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Prob a good place to start

[http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion- Busine...](http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business- Essentials/dp/006124189X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1293478833&sr=8-1)

<comment><USER5> without affiliate code:

[http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion- Busine...](http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business- Essentials/dp/006124189X)

<comment><USER4> umm.. thanks... not an amazon affiliate though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Start cold-calling -- you will learn a lot from experience. Try to dedicate at least a good block of time each day to this. Rinse and repeat.

</comment><comment><USER7> (free) The Superstar Salesman's Handbook: 150+ Greatest Tips on selling [http://bighow.com/news/the-superstar-salesmans- handbook-150-...](http://bighow.com/news/the-superstar-salesmans- handbook-150-greatest-tips-on-selling)

</comment><comment><USER5> Visit customers. If your not a natural sales person think of it like R+D. Ask questions. See there pain points and try to solve them.</comment>


What Are 'Data Brokers,' and Why Are They Scooping Up Information About You? - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjpx3w/what-are-data-brokers-and-how-to-stop-my-private-data-collection <comment><USER2> I think its always worth clicking on random ads to feed random interests to these guys. Yup I'm really interested in Peruvian pottery and Polka music. If its on an interesting site that you want to give revenue, even better. Would be nice to have a bot do it in the background.

EDIT: mesothelioma is a great search. Highest pay per click by ambulance chasing lawyers.

<comment><USER3> This is what you're looking for:

[https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)

<comment><USER2> > Built atop uBlock Origin, AdNauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, > registering a visit on ad networks' databases.

Nice. Pity its banned on Chrome.

<comment><USER3> I agree to an extent, but using Chrome to begin with kind of seems like it would be antithetical to the use of AdNauseam, or at least somewhat self- defeating given the support you'd be giving to Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lol, I've been emailing back and forth with LogMeIn, trying to understand the privacy policy regarding Lastpass. This is my fourth reply, starting to get a bit of details, reps statements are in italics:

 _While we may have some level of customization in our advertising to each user (if the product they are using has in-product advertising)_

I'm going to assume "may" can be understood as "do" and the section before and then inside parenthesis can be taken as:

if the web page is serving ads, "we use http ad-removal & ad-injection to replace those ads with our own" , however the "our" part is still unclear...

Do you serve those ads solely in house?

Do you only have ad servers injecting pages for "your own" products?

Is it possibly you use 3rd party ad-servers/ providers?

Do you preform requested targeting on behalf of someone else using this marketing profile data? And if so, do you get compensated somehow other than "for profit purposes"?

 _they may opt-out of external marketing, and as stated, we are not selling their marketing profile data to a third party for profit purposes._

</comment><comment><USER5> Stuff infosec people have known about for many years continues to break through into the public as if it's something new.

<comment><USER6> Even worse: stuff people involved in IT had been screaming about for years, but always got dismissed as paranoid nerds.

<comment><USER7> I am often reminded of a friend's quip: "Stallman may be crazy, but he is not wrong."

Emblematic of the overall dynamic between IT insiders and the general public.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://www.abine.com/deleteme/](https://www.abine.com/deleteme/) Anyone have direct experience with Abine's deleteme service?

<comment><USER9> But the issue is that they only delete stuff that's public - the issue with data brokers is that it happens underground - you can't just search your name and get all the data brokers that have your info.

So while this might be a good service for people who had their personal information disclosed publicly (doxxing, etc), it will do little against data brokers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Name a keyword or audience and I'll post the number of unique devices in the audience, the cost, and broker who provides it.

<comment><USER11> Hacker News Readers :P

<comment><USER10> [https://i.imgur.com/aKhr8uW.png](https://i.imgur.com/aKhr8uW.png)

<comment><USER12> Where do you find that? Is there proof it's legitimate?

<comment><USER10> It's from the trade desk's data management platform (ttd dmp). You can probably find other screenshots online.

It's where advertisers find audiences, I think the minimum for ttd is $10k/mo spend to use the platform.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Give a Perfectly Adequate Conference Talk - <AUTHOR> https://benmccormick.org/2017/10/29/adequate-talks/ <comment><USER2> Those are amazing tips for giving a conference talk! I've been currently organizing a conference. I'm looking for an unusual conference venue that is different from a normal business / corporate hotel. Something that offers 4* accommodation and facilities for around 130 people, but has lots of natural light in the meeting rooms. I found a website that helps me to narrow down my options [http://findmeaconference.com/](http://findmeaconference.com/)</comment>


Java Goes Visual Basic: Jabaco - <AUTHOR> http://www.jabaco.org/ <comment><USER2> "Jabaco is completely object orientated"

That inspires confidence.

<comment><USER3> No, it makes perfect sense, within context...

VB6 is not an object oriented language, but needs to play with Microsoft's COM. So they added limited object support which enables subtypes through contract declaration and fulfillment (aka. interfaces), but not inheritance.

The way I read this, it means that Jabaco would extend Visual Basic syntax to support Java-style inheritance (single class, multiple interfaces).</comment></comment>


What's Next for Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-next-for-artificial-intelligence-1465827619 <comment><USER2> >Deep learning, modeled on the human brain, is infinitely more complex [than machine learning]. Unlike machine learning, deep learning can teach machines to ignore all but the important characteristics of a sound or image-a hierarchical view of the world that accounts for infinite variety. -Yann LeCun

I strongly disagree with a lot about this quote, even though it comes from a brilliant man I highly respect (my thesis research was inspired from some of his older work, and in my job we work with techniques he developed around deep learning). What I dislike is it utilizes hype to make deep learning seem mystical; in actuality it's a natural extension of old techniques that clearly fall under "machine learning".

Deep learning is a neural network with 3 or more layers instead of the 2 layer networks that were developed in the 1980s. People tried 3 layers back then, and they didn't work well. Yann LeCunn and other researchers found cool ways to get 3+ layers to work in the 90s and again in the mid 2000s. More recently, researchers have just thrown a ton of data and computational power at them to get them to work. But fundamentally this was an extension of established techniques. This article that recently hit the front page actually breaks it down really well: [https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/07/29/whats-difference- ar...](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/07/29/whats-difference-artificial- intelligence-machine-learning-deep-learning-ai/)

I think my main point here is that deep learning is quite accessible to people who are learning machine learning. It's great at solving some really complex problems (that can certainly resemble true intelligence), but is not the right tool for other problems.

<comment><USER3> Viewed strictly as a neural network, how many layers deep is the human brain?

<comment><USER4> Neural networks are based on a very, very outdated (and incorrect) model of how a neuron works, so your question is roughly akin to asking "how many vacuum tubes are in my GPU?"

Mammalian brains are so densely packed that we don't really know what their internal architecture actually looks like--that's why estimates of the number of neurons keeps increasing over time [1]. Most of our models are based on some autopsies, and rely on things like fMRI or electroencephalography (not often you get to spell that word!) to work out which portions of the brain are involved in certain tasks. We have no hope of being able to build a connectivity graph between neurons at our current state of technology.

The short answer is that the cerebral cortex is usually identified as having 6 layers. These can't be correlated with layers in a neural network, however. I do seem to recall a spitball number of 30-ish in relation to the visual cortex, but I've been unable to find any references as to what that number would actually represent, let alone if it's been superseded.

[1] The current estimate is around 100 billion. If you want to know the number involved in, say, the visual cortex, that appears to be on the order of a few billion.

<comment><USER5> > The short answer is that the cerebral cortex is usually identified as having > 6 layers. These can't be correlated with layers in a neural network, > however. I do seem to recall a spitball number of 30-ish in relation to the > visual cortex, but I've been unable to find any references as to what that > number would actually represent, let alone if it's been superseded.

That short answer is _very_ misleading. Those 6 layers are histological layers of density and structure in the cerebral cortex (eg how the cross sections look a little different). You might have many (30+) layers of cells with high interconnectivity in each of those 6 layers. Current estimate is 100 billion for the number of neurons, but the estimate of inter-connectivity is on the order of 100 trillion synapses. The human brain complexity many _orders of magnitude_ higher than anything we have ever "simulated" in silicon.

<comment><USER6> It's not misleading because they were careful to point out that these 6 'layers' have nothing in common with how layers are defined in Neural networks. In Neural nets, layers are effectively subgraphs that are bipartite. They can also be computational stages in some networks like convolutional.

The brain's layers are both much more loose in their allowed interconnections but also more modular in their functionality. There are different visual areas (usually 5) at different locations of the neocortex that connect to each other (feedforward and back) in complex ways. As residents of the neocortex, each visual area will thus have 6 layers which are in turn dividable into sublayers (often 1 - 4). These layers are structural but are also partially organizational tools for the scientists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >We need to update the New Deal for the 21st century and establish a trainee program for the new jobs artificial intelligence will create.

Maybe I'm being a bit pessimistic, but can AI really create jobs just by taking over old ones? Sure we could train some new "data analysts [and] trip optimizers", but in the end can we really mass replace low skilled blue collar jobs with higher skilled ones with the wave of a wand? In the period between when robots can automate the majority of low skill jobs and virtually all jobs, there is very likely to be some sort of significant turmoil as our economy undergoes a paradigm shift of sorts, and I don't think "just retrain workers" is that viable of a solution.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash When I hear "retraining workers," I usually think of Charlie (of "And the Chocolate Factory" fame)'s dad losing his job screwing in toothpaste caps and coming back in the end as a technician for the machines that took his job.

That is the wrong way to approach this new shift.

There will simply be too many menial jobs made obsolete for blue collar workers to step up into supervision/technician roles.

Instead, they will have to find new _kinds_ of jobs. The kinds of jobs that cannot be replaced by robots without getting stuck in the Uncanny Valley. Jobs like personal trainers, yoga instructors, physical/massage therapists, tattoo artists, hairdressers, and so on. Unless a robot can 100% mimic human form and action, these jobs aren't going anywhere - certainly not overseas.

I'm calling it here and now: as jobs are lost too quickly for people to retrain (or even _want_ to adopt an entirely new skill set) we will see a new push for the legalization of prostitution. If nothing else, you can always sell your body by the half-hour, and no robot could ever truly replicate the closest of human touch.

<comment><USER8> _There will simply be too many menial jobs made obsolete for blue collar workers to step up into supervision /technician roles_

I think you're thinking about this backwards. AI will claim professional jobs like accountants and lawyers LONG before it affects hairdressers and plumbers.

<comment><USER9> This is partly because robotics and computation are orthogonal. We have fast progress in computation, but robotic progress is much slower at the scale of human hands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem with news articles like this is that they attempt to appeal to a general readership through grand promises and fear-mongering. The reporter's basic problem is: How can I make my audience care?

So you call up Nick Bostrom and he very reliably gives you a quote about the existential threat of a superintelligence, even though no one in the industry thinks we're anywhere close to that. (What's next for AI is not superintelligence...) And you force a great researcher like Andrew Ng to talk about job loss among truck drivers, because that's what will make it relevant to people outside AI.

We should be thinking about job loss and how the job market will change, but this type of article never gets past the "Oh No AI Will Destroy US" stage of thinking. But a lot of the questions raised by AI are actually relevant now, in an economy where AI hasn't even made a big impact. That is, they're not AI issues, but we're treating them as though they are. How should our societies treat and support the humans who have become unnecessary? They obviously will not all become data analysts and robot caretakers.

What's next for AI is better natural-language processing. Right now, chatbots are pretty dumb, but in the next few years, they'll get much better, and in more languages.

What's next for AI is the wider deployment of mature technology. Many problems such as image recognition have been solved, but developers and companies have not figured out how to deploy the solutions yet. We still have chokepoints in the number of data scientists who can tune and train models, and the number of engineers who can plug them into existing stacks. So AI will be felt directly, rather than just talked about.[0]

What's next for AI is an arms race. The major powers will be escalating the how they deploy AIs against AIs, embedded in drones or through the creation of adversarial data to slip through filters. Commercially, many smaller arms races will occur in different industries, as AI drives down the costs of interpreting data, and allows rival organizations to compete on price.

What's next for AI is the combination of the flavor of the month, deep learning, with other extremely powerful algorithms like reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search to create goal-oriented strategic decision-making agents.

[0] [http://deeplearning4j.org/use_cases.html](http://deeplearning4j.org/use_cases.html)

<comment><USER11> Any thoughts on support vector machines & kernel methods? Is that stuff dead and buried, or what? (I've been out of the loop now for a while.)

<comment><USER12> I don't have anything valid to back up my claims here, so take what i have with a grain of salt unless you find external validation for it. That being said i will venture a guess:

Yes and no. Neural networks have a lot of nice properties like being easier to grasp, easier to parrallelize(?) and have better tools which i guess is because neural networks are applicable to more problems than SVM's because they are extensible.( see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_neural_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_neural_network) for example).

Either way SVM's still do what they do very nicely and in the field of "Human Activity Recognition" where i did my thesis neural networks are practically never used but SVM's pop up from time to time.

<comment><USER11> Right, scalability is a good point to consider. Along the same vein, my last ml job we ended up using gradient boosting which worked really well, but definitely does not scale to big data (afik.) Robustness is another thing to consider, both svm's and neural networks need a reasonable amount of data- massaging before they behave themselves. Hence the success in image processing where every pixel can be treated equally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> New jobs created by AI: Oxford faculty member pontificating about values for AIs. Who says there isn't job creation.

My worry: AIs held only to the moral standards now expected of corporations. Optimize for shareholder value. We're close to this now with machine-learning assisted hedge funds.

<comment><USER14> Ah the upcoming "automation utopia" will "free man from the chains of labour" to pursue their passions -- at least that's what they will tell us while SF firms endlessly drive towards automating more people's jobs away while they rake in the cash. My worry is the lengthy, inevitable in-between time of human suffering and corporate greed until something bursts and we actually pass 21st century laws like Basic income, vote in technology-competent politicians, etc.

It is my worry, as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's smarter, but there's also faster. Historically, robots have been rather slow and clunky. That's over.

Industrial robots have become much faster. Here's Bosch's packaging robot from 2014, looking at small objects and putting them in order for packaging.[1] Then Fanuc built a faster one.[2] Faster CPUs allow using modern control theory that considers dynamics, and fast machine vision. The resulting machines are much faster than humans.

Those are production machines, able to run for long periods. Research robots are even faster.[3] That's from 2012. Progress continues.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAF- ALWwlLw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAF-ALWwlLw) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtAEIKJLHGw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtAEIKJLHGw) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2sUvQ_HsU8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2sUvQ_HsU8)

<comment><USER15> Here's one that's even faster (and relevant to your username): [http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics- hardwar...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics- hardware/a-cyborg-stingray-made-of-rat-muscles-and-gold)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some of my thoughts after reading this article:

Everyone seems to believe that achieving artificial general intelligence is inevitable. I'd argue that it's only inevitable if humanity survives long enough to make it happen. I'm not a pessimist, but the next 300-400 years will be the most difficult humanity has ever faced. In addition to climate change, population expansion, nuclear weapon proliferation, and naturally increasing inequality, humanity will face many more threats that haven't yet been perceived.

I believe building strong intelligence will optimistically take 3-4 centuries. To complete a "system that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can," it is first necessary to understand what defines the human intellect and conscience. Although there is much ethical debate on what defines a conscience, scientifically it is a product of experience, and can be emulated if three requirements are met:

\- The system can accept every input the human body can. \- It can process every combination of stimuli in the same way a human would. \- It can to the stimuli in every way a human would.

For these requirements to be met by software, we must either:

\- Aquire a nearly full knowledge of the human brain (and probably body)'s information-processing mechanisms, and figure out how to implement this in software. \- Build enough processing power to completely simulate the human brain/body, atom by atom.

Both will not be feasible for an extraordinary amount of time, and it's probably better to spend our time worrying about the current existential threats to humanity.

A much more relevant ethical problem for humanity is that of eugenics. Unlike AI, recent advances like CRISPR/CAS-9 make it viable now, through modification of sperm-generating stem cells (not embryos), and like AI, it offers world- changing benefits (the eradication of diseases, lengthened life spans, increased knowledge and strength, etc), while also providing the keys for modern humanity's destruction (designer babies, lack of diversity, separation of humans into casts, etc).

Perhaps increases in intelligence driven by eugenics will even cause computer systems and AI to become obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER17> Let's ask Siri!

"OK I found this on the web for 'whats next for artful shell in tell gins'"

</comment><comment><USER18> The fact is, we don't know how deep Neural Networks work - we simply know how they form. They are adaptive systems that learn to perform complex tasks.

This is scary because it means we don't "design" an A.I., we design an adaptive system and allow it to emerge. Nothing could be more dangerous in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think next step for AI is turing test, where a "machine" recognize that it is talking to a human.

<comment><USER20> A "Turding Test"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know much, but I do know that if somebody were to tell me What's Next for AI, it's definitely not the WSJ.

</comment><comment><USER22> Everyone has piled on the learning bandwagon as the path to "intelligence" but honestly creativity is just as important, and it is hardly even being addressed. Even worse, while function approximation (i.e. learning) is a fairly well defined problem, creativity is nebulous and ill-defined.

<comment><USER10> That's not true, actually. There's a ton of work being done in computational creativity. AI is actually pretty good at sensing similarities between instances of data, and recombining various elements to create something new. There's been a ton of recent work using deep learning, including DeepDream.

[https://psmag.com/rise-of-the-robot- artist-5aa0e6e1b361?gi=c...](https://psmag.com/rise-of-the-robot- artist-5aa0e6e1b361?gi=cb92d4984cda)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the way forward for AI will be in simulating human conciousness processes, including whatever limitations computationally that come with that. In this sense, I feel that the kind of AI that will break barriers first is going to be in a game, and not on a factory floor.

<comment><USER24> Can you elaborate a bit more on this? I'm fascinated by consciousness, and I've often wondered about how it arises in biological systems and how it might do so in artificial ones.

My basic intuition is that consciousness arises as a byproduct of _any_ sufficiently interconnected (i.e. Complex) network which processes input from the outside world. The problem with AI right now is bottlenecking of both kinds — we don't have computers powerful enough to support the level of complexity of the human brain (100bn neurons with an average of 7k synapses each), and we don't have good enough sensors for capturing the real world (hint: touch is a BIG one).

What sort of game do you have in mind? I definitely think a game in which humans interact with an AI in an artificially-supported information-rich environment (say, the VR of 5-10 years from now) could help provide a suitable environment for "growing" such an AI. Consider the insane amount of Stimulation and calibration human babies require for development! It takes years for the visual system to stablilize, for example.

<comment><USER25> > My basic intuition is that consciousness arises as a byproduct of any > sufficiently interconnected (i.e. Complex) network which processes input > from the outside world.

I think you are underestimating the importance of the motor/action system for the development of consciousness. Many neuroscientists and robotic researchers think that the sensory-motor-environment-sensory loop plays an important role for consciousness. This loop allows you to unsupervised learn all sorts of laws of physics and allows you to think that your body actually is you and not just an extension of your mind and therefore also allows the development of the concept of self awareness. Some researchers might call this sensory-motor- contingencies or embodiment. I think when talking about consciousness there it is very important to take into account this loop and not only the sensory perception and building a neural representation of the world...

<comment><USER24> I definitely agree with you — I think interacting with the environment is an important part of "processing" it. The motor/action feedback loop (cf. artificial motor control in monkeys) is exactly what I had in mind when I said that "touch" is a big one.

I definitely should have clarified that point, though, as it's a huge one, I agree!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Neural networks are eating the world.

</comment><comment><USER27> Its some kind of advertising? How can I read it outside of a paywall?

<comment><USER28> Hit the "web" link next to the link at the top of this page, and select the top result from there.

<comment><USER29> That didn't work for me. The top result is still the WSJ URL; however, a few links lower, we can find another URL which does show the same full article:

[http://newspot.me/n/03LT3uuT](http://newspot.me/n/03LT3uuT)

<comment><USER30> It's the same URL, but if you get to it from a Google referer it lets you through the paywall.

<comment><USER31> Not necessarily, I got the link from Google and still saw the paywall when going through regular Chrome mode. However, once I opened the same referrer link in incognito mode, I was able to see the article.

Looks like WSJ is now using cookies to decide whether to show paywall or not.

<comment><USER5> Definitely cookies. If you click the link before doing the web search it will remember. I had to open an incognito tab and then search for the title. Definitely a pain in the ass.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The current state of Garage11 - <AUTHOR> https://garage11.io/blog/the-current-state-of-garage11/ <comment> the-dude Interesting, makes me think of IPFS but browser based.</comment>


Where Are All the Indie iOS Developers? - <AUTHOR> http://inessential.com/2014/07/28/more_on_ios_indies

<comment><USER2> I look at the pricing for app store apps for either iOS or Android and I think there is just no way you can sell enough copies to make real money at the price points people are selling things at.

It seems like it would be fun to play with the sensors, but in a world where it still possible to build web sites that get 250k uniques a month, I don't see the money in apps.</comment>


Next time, could you please use a standardized EULA/TOS - <AUTHOR>

For those of you who bother reading the EULAs, you know how tedious and time consuming the task is. it's also mostly repetitive (don't cause disruptive interference, don't abuse our services, don't hack into our systems, ..etc)
My question is: Why don't we have a standardized EULA, a general license agreement that covers most of what companies want in an EULA?
This way I, and everyone else who bothers reading, can avoid 7-minute long reading excursions in much the same way we don't read the GPL; we already know what the terms are.
Companies that have more specific requirements can append the additional terms to the end of the EULA so that we can skip immediately right to the unique terms and conditions.
Just a thought.
PS: I apologize in advance if my usage of English is incorrect. <comment><USER2> Probably because I'd never trust that the start of it tells me that they're really giving me the standardized EULA and not something else entirely but just saying it's the standardized one.</comment>


The Path Amazon Rejected - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/opinion/amazon-new-york-bill-de-blasio.html <comment><USER2> If Blasio wanted to fight for the deal he could have done more publicly instead of dealing with Amazon in the background. It's easy to wipe your hands clean of the deal when you take no strong stance. This piece just reads as "everyone is to blame but me."

<comment><USER3> Everyone knows that AOC was worried about the residents in her district getting priced out and moving away.

It's much less certain she could hold that seat if she was forced to listen to actual middle-class families instead of the low-income group she's representing now.

<comment><USER4> One of the great cons in American political discourse was convincing everyone that _they_ were middle class.

Working poor @ 30k/year? Middle class.

Technological Individual Contributors @ 200k/year? Middle class.

Small business owner with $1M in assets? Middle class.

Nowadays, every politician can claim to be enacting policies for The Middle Class (TM), and they aren't obviously lying.

<comment><USER3> Leaving aside the fact that different regions of the countries have different levels of comparative living costs and wealth...

The simple fact is that most people ARE middle-class. The bottom income 25-30% of working-age people contribute little to nothing to income-tax receipts. The top 5% in each region have enough assets to live comfortably but carry approximately 70% of the income tax burden. When you get to the top 1%, it's something like 46% of all income-tax receipts IIRC.

So....the folks in the middle carry the burden of the rest of that load.

FWIW, My numbers are approximate but close enough for this discussion. Since tax policy most directly affects people in the middle, it's very important to get it right. Since tax policy for the very rich affects things like investment and business formation, you don't want to tax those income generators to death. For the bottom, you want them to benefit from the programs in place so they can join the ranks of the middle class and pay something back.

But you assertion that nobody (or very few) is middle class anymore I think doesn't align with the facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think the general consensus was that New Yorkers genuinely wanted Amazon to come to NYC but just didn't want the city and state to pay anything. The optics for subsidies were particularly horrible - the richest man in the world obtaining billions of dollars on behalf of a company with one of the largest market capitalizations in the world. How do you overcome that? Timing is everything and had Amazon's offer been on the table 4-5 years ago the outcome would probably have been different. As it is, since 2008 there's been a festering resentment of companies and while tech companies escaped a lot of that resentment resent issues with Facebook and Google have tarred the entire sector.

<comment><USER5> The tax break argument always seemed like a red herring to me. I live in NYC and was excited for Amazon coming but most of my friends were against it mostly out of a vague "stick it to the system" mentality. Somewhat ironic since most of these friends are in households earning in guessing around/in excess of 250k. Not one of these people gave a moment of thought about city or state budgets/deficits before and it is unlikely they will do so again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Amazon's HQ2 bidding war exemplified that injustice. It's time to end that > economic warfare with a national solution that prevents corporations from > pitting cities against one another.

That's a truly odd statement from someone who directly participated in and then "won" that same bidding war.

</comment><comment> tyler- What sort of jobs did Amazon have in mind for the locals in LIC (if any)? Were they considering providing tech training to hire them into software development roles? Or did they have in mind lower paying jobs? The bigger question is how can tech companies incorporate locals? What sort of training efforts can they provide to those without tech backgrounds? Would they train them in bootcamp style programs, to fail them at the leetcode interview phase, or is there pipeline that could incorporate non-tech folks into such roles?

<comment><USER7> There is bound to be a lot of trickle down effect. If there are high paying jobs, that will create low paying jobs (such as restaurants, services, construction etc.) in order to support high paying jobs. The only exception to this is when the housing supply doesn't deep up with jobs demand. But in LIC, with Queens in the vicinity, housing supply should not be a big issue for some time.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand why people who believe in economic "trickling" think it's local and doesn't cross state lines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Amazon did the logical thing. It chose to NYC initially, not because it had some benevolent intent to improve the city's crumbling infra or create more jobs for its union workers, but because it fit their selection criteria nicely and their were tax benefits. The infra and job part would come regardless of which city Amazon chose and had nothing specific to Amazon's selection of NYC itself. Now that NYC is rescinding on the benefit part and increasingly it looks like the local & state govt are not able to control the public backlash, despite majority of New Yorkers supporting the deal (and the support for this deal is even larger among minorities), then pulling away is the natural outcome.

This is a competitive market and there are enough cities in US who are willing to bend backwards for 25k high paying jobs and prospects it offers (including becoming future tech hubs). NYC loss is bound to some other city's gains.</comment>


It's easy to get more free disk space on iPhone/iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.imobie.com/phoneclean/

<comment><USER2> I'm skeptical.

<comment><USER3> Me too. Given how iOS apps are sandboxed from each other, I don't see how an app can get rid of anything in any other apps' directory.</comment></comment>


Please Review my Site - <AUTHOR> http://kickypie.com/ <comment><USER2> These are just notes coming from a person who's day job is to build websites. The website is clean and nice looking, below however are some points that you could consider to make it look and act a lot better.

1) The responsive aspect of the site seriously needs looking into.

2) Non of the images within the "category" section are centered perfectly within the container. They seem to be off to the bottom-right. Some of the spacing's seem to be off with these too between each category.

3) All websites these days should be using SSL. Might be worth investing in a certificate or using a service such as LetsEncrypt.

4) Update your social icons. A lot of them are using out-of-date icons for the networks. Using a service such as Fontawesome would help you out here.

5) I think the footer navigation menu's would look cleaner if they were left aligned. This is just a personal opinion though.

6) Add a search button. Whilst most have learned that pressing enter works just fine, it's still good practice to add a physical button too.

I'm sure changing some of these points would improve your website a lot!</comment>


Google now for iOS is a huge slap in the face to android users - <AUTHOR> http://pocketnow.com/2013/04/29/google-now-slaps-android-users

<comment><USER2> No it's not, it's just a really clear picture of Android fragmentation, unfortunately.

That said, I can see why he's pissed.</comment>


Ubuntu 18.04 LTS: The Linux for AI, clouds, and containers - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-18-04-lts-the-linux-for-ai-clouds-and-containers/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16931491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16931491)

270+ comments</comment>


The Cape Cod Disaster - <AUTHOR> http://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-cape-cod-disaster/ <comment><USER2> I remember this. Was running an Athlon box at the time. The RDRAM kerfuffle, and the privacy implications of each part being given a queryable unique ID, scared me off getting a Pentium III system.

Remember that time Rambus tried to get a hammerlock on the RAM industry by claiming patent rights over DDR, the industry's alternative to RDRAM?

<comment><USER3> > Rambus tried to get a hammerlock on the RAM industry by claiming patent > rights

Just to be clear Rambus is still a thing, and still doing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >The Pentium III (especially a single CPU) was not a particularly memory- hungry CPU

So CPUs are now wrestling software for memory? What is this supposed to mean?

<comment><USER5> Relative to its clock speed, the Pentium III had a lot of cache, good memory bandwidth, and low memory latency. And back then, disk IO was extremely slow. These two facts meant that common workloads were more often constrained on CPU cycles or disk IO, rather than RAM access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember Asus refusing to accept that there was any flaw with the cc820 at all, and thus not joining in on the recall, it was my last Asus board for a few years as a result (finally turned back to them in ~2006 with a Core 2).

The lack of that recall on Asus brand cc820 based boards, is probably why one commenter notes that they were easy to find in 2014.

</comment><comment><USER7> Being from Cape Cod, I was expecting something else from the title.

<comment><USER8> Also being from Cape Cod I found it completely fitting that the product was expensive garbage.

In order to truly live up to the expectations set by the name customers would have had to have bought it in droves based on some perceived brand image but Intel recalled it before that could happen.

<comment><USER9> Also being from Cape Cod ... I got nothin' just felt like joining the party. Hey Ian!

<comment><USER7> Hey Jose!

This is hilarious. I think of the Cape as pretty tech starved, but I see why we all ended up in the comment section of this post!

<comment><USER10> There's enough of us here to get together once a month!

[https://www.meetup.com/South-Shore-Web- Collaborative/](https://www.meetup.com/South-Shore-Web-Collaborative/)

<comment><USER7> Haha, Plymouth (the big city) is an hour and a half away. I live way out in Eastham...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yeah fuck all that noise the single edge contact cartridge cpus were all so over priced for my 13 year old budget so I went with the k6-2 and overclocked that biatch</comment>


Music using only sounds from Windows XP and 98 - <AUTHOR> http://youtube.com/watch?v=dsU3B0W3TMs

<comment><USER2> Now, if only the composer could have created music without altering the original sounds by transposing them to different keys, it would have been more impressive.

<comment><USER3> He didn't just transpose them to different keys. He sped them up and slowed them down, transposed the keys, and did a lot of other work on the sounds. It's clever and still creative, though I was hoping for unaltered sounds.

I still downloaded the file just for the catchy tune.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Planning a scheduled Attack With Facebook Events - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/events/212430382231974

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a web attack (DDoS and *Injection) planned for tonight (local time at middle east), against Israeli Banks and governmental sites.

It is scheduled in accordance to the president Obama visit to Israel.

We are all prepared, at least our clients (Reblaze), yet, I really hope not too many people used the "report" feature of Facebook to ask to close this down, given social networks are great resource for our intelligence "department".

In any case, just wanted to bring to your attention that today's attack are no longer organized (only) in hidden forums and esoteric IRC rooms. Rather, on Facebook and twitter, under the radar.</comment>