Students Find Ways To Hack School-Issued iPads Within A Week - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/09/27/226654921/students-find-ways-to-hack-school-issued-ipads-within-a-week

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of the various ways we found to defeat school firewalls when I was in high school. At the time we simply took it for granted that those in power (i.e. the school itself) were going to try to censor us, and it was our "little secret" that we could defeat that censorship.

As an adult I look back at those days and make comparisons with the situation in China...

<comment><USER3> I was going to say this too, I remember initially using web based proxies like proxify and hidemyass until they were all blocked then we figured out the blocking system didn't work on a wildcard so www.facebook.com would be blocked for example but bypass.facebook.com would not.

So a few of my tech savvy friends and I setup a web based proxy on a free host which just wildcarded the sub-domains, I can't remember exactly how we did it but we had that going for a long time.

Pretty sure we used a script like [http://www.phpmyproxy.com/](http://www.phpmyproxy.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm guessing this merely involved removing the mobile device manager certificate from the iPad through the Settings. Once the certificate is removed, any "lock downs" and settings the school pushed out are removed with it.

<comment><USER5> I think you might be right. I listened to the NPR piece - there's a part where the interviewer asks a kid to show him the hack. As the kid is doing it he says, "you just go to Settings, then General, then ... oh it looks like someone already did it". In other words the whole "hack" was done just by messing around in Settings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> At our school in Australia, everyone was issued laptops last year. The rollout began with seniors (y12) and progressed down through the years. Within about 2 hours of having the machines most of my year had installed chrome, bypassed the web filtering, installed iTunes and copied their music to the laptops. The school knew immediately, and came around to the classrooms to inform everyone that we had now been restricted to 10GB of space on the laptops, and that they had removed iTunes and chrome.

For the remainder of the year everyone found ways to play games and to log onto various school servers and mess with things. It was more a point of we could. A lot of people still used pen and paper, or their own laptops. The most common use of the school issued laptops was free Internet, and thus youtube/ pandora.

From my understanding the younger years don't act such ways as we did being in year 12, and I think it's just a time thing. For them the school laptop is part of their schooling equipment, but for us we went through 10yrs of schooling without a laptop, so getting one was novel.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like they all learned a bunch. Mission accomplished.

</comment><comment><USER8> > The students are getting around software that lets school district officials > know where the iPads are, and what the students are doing with them at all > times. This software also lets the district block certain sites, such as > social media favorites like Facebook.

ThT paragraph could be taken straight from Cory Doctorow'a Little Brother

<comment><USER9> I was going to quote the exact same sentence.

"Knowing where the iPads are at all times" is an invasion of student privacy. If a student (or their parents) claims the student's sick, but the GPS shows their iPad spent the day riding roller coasters, can they be busted?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The students are getting around software that lets school district officials know where the iPads are, _and what the students are doing with them at all times_."

(Emphasis added.)

This is not in the lead, not in any way suggested by the headline, and not mentioned again anywhere in the article. So I guess this feature of the district's monitoring isn't really worth thinking much about and it's okay to condition young people to get used to it?

<comment><USER11> I dunno, I could see that really resonating with parents who want complete knowledge of their child's location at all times. And what they were doing.

That type of technology satisfies every parent: those who want to be helicoptering, can see where their child is at this very moment. The parents who don't care, can do nothing.

I applaud your general cynical outlook. However, I tend to think schools can only control 1 thing: parents being upset. Politicians / standardized scores / etc., all are generally outside of the individual school (staff, admin, teachers) control.

So schools optimize to minimize parental complaints and staff time, because it's one of the few knobs they can turn.

<comment><USER10> Parents != school staff. I don't think anyone asked parents, "Let our IT staff monitor your child's location and activities at all times, on campus and off."

Even if it were parents alone instigating this, I'm not okay with conditioning teenagers to get used to this kind of surveillance. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District)

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_Hv- Rrq...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_Hv- Rrqr8PsJ:thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/school-accused-of-using-webcam- to-photograph-student-at-home/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe now we can all just give them tablets with root access, intentionally designed to be "hacked".

Even better, give them Raspberry Pis' and let them code what they need to get to Facebook and every other site. 5-10x cheaper than an iPad, substantially more instructive.

<comment><USER13> You want them to code a Facebook-capable web browser? I mean, I'm in favor of handing out hackable hardware, but at least let them install a pre-built browser. :)

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Of course the students are going to find ways to reclaim their device. The point of flooding in iPads isn't to actually improve the standard of education, but to give out an illusion of progress and keeping up with contemporary times.

Besides, the fact that it's iPads in the first place shows you something.

<comment><USER14> A good observation, although you missed the somewhat creepier "anything thats not compulsory is (and should always be, for everyone) forbidden" meme. Why, all tablets should have whitelist censorship, its for the children after all. And if a parent owns a tablet without censorware well thats not going to punished, yet... But we can't have people thinking freedom is possible or a good thing, so something has to be done...

I have relatives in the .k12 .edu biz including one who teaches a class with like 5 ipads for 20 kids... now its not like there's a line in the budget for apps, and if there were one, what existing program should they cut? And its not like the school day has increased in length, so what subject gets cut so the kids can play Angry Birds? Reading? Math? And if every kid has one, it could kinda work, but what can you do with only 5 per class room? Example #6749235 of non-educators very expensively trying to tell educators how to educate, and failing as they always do. They do make nice shiny paperweights, till the glass breaks anyway.

<comment><USER15> > And if every kid has one, it could kinda work, but what can you do with only > 5 per class room?

I don't know. When I was in school at about age 10 we had a handful of palmtop computers[1] between a class of 20-30. I didn't get to spend much time with them, but found it exciting and enlightening when I did, especially given that we didn't have something like that at home. Time with the devices was used as an incentive for good work in class, so it helped with that respect too (wasn't allowed to use them until assigned work had been completed and was correct).

It also taught a more subtle lesson, which was about responsibility. The devices were clearly expensive for the school, but if you showed you could be trusted, you could get away with using them without active supervision.

All in all I'd say it was a success. It certainly got me interested in computing, even within the fairly restrictive sandbox that they were. I can't see why the modern equivalent (iPads) should be any less of a success, especially in areas where children are less likely to be able to afford and use one at home.

[1] e.g. something like this [http://www.palmtoppaper.com/images/HP200LX_1.gif](http://www.palmtoppaper.com/images/HP200LX_1.gif)

<comment><USER2> The problem is not with the iPad specifically. The problem is that the students are in an educational environment where censorship is _the norm_. I understand that schools have to have firewalls or they risk losing their funding, but the immediate question is what those schools do with students who learn how to defeat those firewalls? Do those kids get punished for their unauthorized knowledge (so far the punishment is just, "no more iPads at home," but it could have been a lot worse)?

<comment><USER16> When I was in high school (~4-5 years ago), I was often "caught" for using a proxy to get around the firewall. Other kids were often caught, too. In both cases, the proxy would become blacklisted. However, in all other regards the school would turn a blind eye and never reprimand me because they knew I was visiting sites like gamedev.net (a game development/programming website that was blacklisted because it had "games" in the description). However, most other kids were punished because often times they were visiting porn sites and infecting the computers with viruses/malware/etc.. Unfortunately, the majority of kids (in my school, at least) fall into this camp who aren't bypassing firewalls for productive reasons, but rather for reasons that usually at least cost the school hundreds of dollars in fixing the computers.

The take-away I'm trying to convey is that, in my experience, (a) schools dole appropriate punishments -- it's not a black and white "you disobeyed rule X, which means punishment Y follows" \-- and (b) the (limited) censorship is also a cost saving measure and usually warranted.

<comment><USER2> My experience is a bit different. First, my high school was profoundly hypocritical, allowing teachers unfettered access while forcing students to deal with a firewall -- I know this because one of the ways we discovered to defeat the firewall was to give your computer an IP address in the range assigned to the teachers' computers. Second, the punishments are neither appropriate nor acceptable in many cases, with suspensions, ludicrous bans on even touching school computers, and other draconian measures being doled out for things such as _modifying boot scripts to display a message_ (my own pride and joy from middle school).

Finally, the censorship is not limited, at least not by any definition I would use. You yourself said that your school's firewall blocked a website that had the word "games" in it. I have seen hackaday.com blocked for having words like "hack" in it. When I was a kid these firewalls would also block websites that had the word "vagina," "penis," "breasts," "semen," "nipples," and so forth appear enough times -- like, say, a medical website. This article mentions a ban on _streaming music_ and social media. The blacklist is so long I have to wonder why they do not just switch to a whitelist, or why they even bother with Internet access at all.

Even if the censorship were limited, I cannot see how it would be justified. Suppose only hardcore pornography were blocked -- how is that acceptable? Would it not be better to punish students caught watching pornography at school by having them write a lengthy essay about the history and politics of pornography (and wouldn't the ability access at least one pornography website be necessary?)? If the goal is _education_ shouldn't the focus be on _educating_ , rather than on trying to shield students from the world? Consider the flip side of this: as a kid I was once sent to a summer program for programming, and one of the other students was caught installing back orifice on the computers. His punishment was to explain the software to everyone, along with the ethics of installing it without permission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is certainly not an issue with iPads, specifically. Students probably spend more time using computers for entertainment and social networking than they do for school, but that doesn't stop teachers from taking their students to computer labs to type essays. Just because something can be used for fun, doesn't mean that it has a place in schooling. Moreover, students very commonly get around the very weak security procedures in place, which, more often than not, prevent students from doing legitimate school work, rather than preventing abuse.

</comment><comment><USER18> Honestly, I'm a little surprised they weren't all completely open by lunchtime the first day. Kids, when given access to technology in a school environment will _always_ find new ways to (primarily) play games, and those ways will evolve as the schools desperately struggle to keep up, but the school will always lose that particular arms race.

</comment><comment><USER19> The schools are indirectly proving the old computer security saying which holds that there is no security without physical security. As soon as the school hands the iPads to the students, there is nothing the school can do to ensure they remain in control of the device.

</comment><comment> SG- So what's the actual "hack"? A proxy?

<comment><USER20> More like Un-proxying. The devices have a proxy installed that limits where you can go and they just remove the proxy.

This is the equivalent of going in to your phone and changing the APN.

I don't know which software they are using, but most either intercept the DNS or use a constant Transparent Proxy.

<comment><USER21> I go to one of the schools that implements this program. Most of these schools have software from Bradford Networks ([http://www.bradfordnetworks.com/](http://www.bradfordnetworks.com/)) that acts as a transparent proxy. In addition to blocking many websites, it blocks all ports besides 80 and 443. To get around it, I connect to an OpenVPN server on port 80 through TCP. Why do I circumvent it? I need access to port 22 to push to GitHub and connect to my VPS. I also need access to port 21 to access various educational FTP servers.

Removing restrictions on a school-issued iPad is significantly easier. Removing current profile on the iPad also removes all of the imposed restrictions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is that tracking that important? Did officials learn anything useful from it (other than a fact that people hate being tracked by officials)?

</comment><comment><USER23> "Hacking" their iPad, as in running a widely available pre-complied exploit...

<comment><USER24> hacking- routing around obstacles

cracking- breaking obstacles

sounds legit imnsho

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The solution: just use fucking _books_.

Yes, they're heavy and a pain to drag around, but do you seriously have a better idea? They're infinitely versatile and aren't scared of getting tossed around.

iPads as an educational tool has to be the most ridiculous attempt yet at "digitalizing" education.

There's a little-known Steve Jobs video ([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q82weiAJmaA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q82weiAJmaA)) where he says that computers and technology are absolutely no substitute for an environment that promotes curiosity and a thirst to learn.

Also, books don't cause eyestrain, they have insanely fast refresh rates, and you can flip to any one section quickly and easily without tearing your eyes out.

<comment><USER26> What about something like, let's say, a kindle made for school, which stores the student's textbooks and readings. I'd think that this would be a much better alternative since it has limited use to begin with.

<comment><USER25> That's feasible, but schools are too interested in looking "modern" and "sleek" by using Apple devices, so they won't use Kindle because its interoperability with Apple devices is not as good as something like iBooks. Part of it is a ploy to impress parents, part of it is just the "because we can" attitude of the administration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We all know there are three ways to ensure something gets done: (1) Do it yourself. (2) Hire someone else to do it. (3) Forbid your kids to do it.

But I'm surprised that this surprised the LAUSD. They chose to pit their intelligence against the collective cleverness of a high school's worth of teenagers that wanted their Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Angry Birds, and Minecraft.

LAUSD: Did you know that if you put a little hat on a snowball it can last a long time in hell? (Yes, I stole that line from a _Dilbert_ cartoon. That's what this whole episode resembles.)

</comment><comment><USER28> These master hackers should all be put in solitary for 30 years, for deliberately circumventing a digital protection system and thus breaking the CFAA.

Perhaps then people may begin to understand why these laws are ridiculous.

<comment><USER29> No. Tech-savvy people already understand why they're ridiculous. The non- techies are still generally scared of or intimidated by tech stuff, and would simply view that as acceptable punishment for 'hackers' ('hacker' being defined as someone who uses a computer for more than facebook and angrybirds).

<comment><USER28> Non-tech-savvy folks I would hope would understand the wrongness of a bunch of children being thrown in solitary for wanting to play Angry Birds.

If the American people can't and won't see the wrongness in that, then America truly is utterly doomed, and its populace deserves the darkness that will ensue.

<comment><USER29> I don't specifically see 'tech ignorance' in the US - the few places I've travelled (spain, uk, australia, russia) - tech ignorance is the norm. Get beyond turning on the table/phone/desktop, sending emails, using facebook, etc - the average person is effectively lost.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Many Facets of Natural Computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~lila/p72.pdf

<comment><USER2> Communications of the ACM is outstanding, every month it has great articles. Long may it continue.</comment>


Python for Data Analysis (new O'Reilly book from creator of Pandas) - <AUTHOR> http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023784.do <comment><USER2> Note, this is the "Early Release" version, code for "not done yet". I'll be putting the wraps on the full draft with luck by end of June.

<comment><USER3> Consider browsing the criticism of Data Analysis with Open Source Tools(O'Reilly) for suggestions. Many people, including myself, expected a book that would have been more in line with what your book is probably trying to accomplish.

<comment><USER2> I was also very disapointed with DAwOST; it's a book about data analysis techniques with a bit of code mixed in. This is a book about _programming tools for working with data_, pretty much the exact opposite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As I get my feet wet again in programming, I've gone through phases in dabbling with web, app, and game programming.

But about a month ago I realized, "You know, what I really loved about my studies back in academic years was _numbers_. That's what I want to do with code; _I want to crunch numbers_ "

This realization made me switch over from learning Ruby to learning Python. This book is going to be _perfect_ for my interests.

Wes, thank you for your efforts in putting this book together.

<comment><USER5> If you really want to crunch numbers, I highly recommend Haskell. It falls short of Python in terms of libraries and by some accounts, readability, but it is substantially faster and excels at number crunching. I find it easier to express number crunching in functional rather than object-oriented style programming. Python has lambdas, but usually theres a more pythonic way to express something in Python. Although I must say, I find Haskell's list comprehension syntax slightly more elegant.

<http://tryhaskell.org/>

edit: I take it back about Haskell's list comprehension syntax. At the end of the day they're both great. Haskell's syntax just feels like reading set theory notation.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure I believe you that Haskell is faster than Python. In general, most of your python operations will be raw matrix operations handled by blas/lapack/etc.

While Python's functional programming constructs leave a lot to be desired, they are usually good enough for numerical work. Instead of using reduce(...) to sum an array and having it compile down properly, you can just use arr.sum(), which is implemented in C by numpy anyway.

I love Haskell (and want it to beat Python), but at this point, Python is the clear winner for numerical work. Libraries matter more than language in this case (as matlab demonstrates).

<comment><USER5> I think you're right that Python will be faster than Haskell when it's calling blas/lapack for matrix operations.

Found this old comment relevant: <http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/2720#comment-40694>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Python is great for doing weird transformations of data that ideally you shouldn't have to do, or normalizing legacy things into modern standards. I like developing in several languages, but I often pop open Python to really "look" at something. I sadly haven't had much of a reason (yet!) to use Pandas too much, but anything we can do to get the word out about these kinds of techniques will hopefully increase procedural literacy in the world, and help ease the flow information even.

</comment><comment><USER8> Don't forget to brush up on the basics (with Python!):

<http://greenteapress.com/thinkstats/>

<comment><USER9> And don't forget to say that this guy publishes a free pdf version in the website above. I'm reading it now in my Kindle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm thrilled that Pandas is named Pandas and not Pyndas.

</comment><comment><USER11> Pandas is an extremely solid, well-tested and super-powerful library. Congrats to Wes on the release of this book.

</comment><comment><USER12> wesm, do you cover using cloud-based computing resources for tackling computationally intensive data analysis problems? I use Python and PiCloud to turn what is an hours-long data analysis problem on my Mac into a minutes-long job on Amazon's hardware.

I don't know MATLAB, R, etc. well enough to say whether they can use the cloud as easily as Python, but it sure was easy with Python.

<comment><USER2> The focus is primarily on data manipulation / preparation / cleaning / processing tools, data algorithms, visualization, and practical analysis case studies. The platform where you use them is a separate matter-- I will have some material on distributed computing tools, however.

<comment><USER12> Sounds good. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have a book like this coming out. I'm very interested in using it as a text for an instrumental analysis class I'm putting together. Thanks so much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ayone have experience as to how Python compare to R, Matlab (Octave) and other tools for data analysis?

R has great libraries but I would prefer to use Python.

<comment><USER14> I've done a lot of work using both R and Python, and a little bit using Matlab (and SAS and Stata).

Matlab is behind R and Python for both data cleaning and analysis. This is especially true if you have string variables and factor variables. Matlab's great if you are doing matrix operations of clean data (and you don't need to do anything fancy in how you report them). But, I don't find it worth using for real data analysis.

Python and R are both great, though they feel pretty similar to me. Python obviously has the big advantage if you want to do general purpose computing too. Python has been faster than R in most cases I've compared them. For my work, development speed is more important than execution speed... so this hasn't been a huge factor for me.

R has a couple of big advantages. First, the libraries. This is a big deal for me. I saw that there is a python equivalent to ggplot2 in the works. This will definitely strengthen the case for python, but the availability of libraries in R is awesome.

Second, the community and help resources in R are amazing. I rarely run into a problems in R that haven't already been addressed on stackexchange.com.

Perhaps I should be more proactive about asking python questions when I run into them, but I usually just work it out myself (which is more time consuming than looking the answer up online.)

Lastly, I'm not an expert on big data. But, spending relatively little time with both R's bigmemory and Python's PyTables, it seems easier to get up to speed on big data with R at the moment.

Though I haven't met them, my sense is that Wes, Travis Oliphant and the other relevant python developers are putting in a heroic effort to get Python up to speed. I have every expectation that Python will be my choice of the future.

<comment><USER15> This is a really detailed comparison and seems balanced. Thanks for that. Do you not use both in conjunction (R for the stats libraries and Python for the more general computing)? Having done some background reading (but without yet getting down into the weeds with them), that was my take on the relationship.

Edit: re-reading your last paragraph, I guess you're saying that Python can reach parity with R's libraries, at which point it's elegance and speed will win out. R's decades of lineage do seem to hobble it in terms of style and syntax, after all.

<comment><USER14> Even though I hear complaints about R's syntax, I don't know exactly what people dislike about it. In fact, I kind of like R's syntax.

As an example, I like the ability to use expressions on the left side of an assignment (e.g. names(df) = "stuff"). But, it sounds like you are right that the python developers are getting to learn from R's mistakes and avoid getting locked into to legacy ideas.

As far as libraries... R has a lot. So I don't expect python to totally catch up soon. But, I only use 10 or 15 R libraries, and those are really popular libraries. So, unless you do an incredible range of stuff, python probably doesn't hvae to completely catch up.

One major advantage for R is the package management system (CRAN). The uniformity of the interface... the ability to search for stuff in it... that's been really useful for me. Not sure if anything like that is in the works for python.

Lastly, there are a lot of little helper functions that I've written for myself in python that are part of base R. The first example that comes to mind is head() to view the top few lines of a data structure. It seems strange that python would be missing these little helper functions, but I never found it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I recommend reading this blog,for those interested in crunching numbers on python <http://slendrmeans.wordpress.com/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Looking at the table of contents, this seems like a great reference book for several technologies. I think I am sold, especially with the free updates.

</comment><comment><USER18> does this include numpy, or is it just pandas?

<comment><USER2> NumPy, IPython, matplotlib, pandas, a little bit of SciPy, scikit-learn, statsmodels, and plenty other fun stuff

<comment><USER19> Sold! Any suggested prerequisites?

<comment><USER2> Some working general purpose Python knowledge would be helpful but not required

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can we get the table of contents?

<comment><USER21> If you're in the LinkedIn "Python Data" group, I posted a comment with a list of the ToC (hope you don't mind, Wes!)

[http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=4388870&...](http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=4388870&type=member&item=115808571&commentID=81103690&qid=043286c4-a34b-4614-8cde-95b8a79b8087&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-cmn&goback=%2Egmp_4388870#commentID_81103690)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Where's the table of contents?

</comment><comment><USER22> can we use it for trade analysis?

<comment><USER2> Without a doubt (how I got my start in Python)</comment></comment>


Can now "rent" Kindle editions from Amazon? - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Histories-Medieval-Renaissance-ebook/dp/B000OI16H4/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2

<comment><USER2> It seems that a 30 day rental window should be cost less than that.

For a book costing $14, it still costs 60% of the price to rent it. Even blockbuster at their prices was 25-30% of a new release price, with red box being 10% or so.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's not new. Although, I haven't seen it for relatively inexpensive books very much.

<comment><USER4> I believe it's targetted at the textbook market.</comment></comment>


Top Gear caught faking another electric car "failure" - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/aug/05/top-gear-bbc <comment><USER2> I find this extremely frustrating. It must be hard enough attempting to push forward a big change with a new product that many consumers don't know about and when a program with such a large audience actively tries to sabotage the effort I just don't understand it.

At least this time they're not trying to take down a new company, but the damage they try and cause to electric vehicles' reputation is unfair. The strange thing is that there are some reasons not to get an electric car (if you need to make extremely long trips often, the potential battery replacement issue after ten years) and rather than discuss these they make up reasons and fake failures. For many people electric vehicles are a great option and hopefully the direction manufacturers continue to go in.

Why try to destroy them?

<comment><USER3> If you read into the Tesla incident a bit more you find there's a lot more to it and Tesla have also lied (claiming that the brakes didn't go when their own engineers confirmed it on the filming day).

A hundred mile trip is not an extremely long trip, my Dad used to regularly commute that for example. You seem to be forgetting you need to drive back.

Also this article's extremely biased too, quoting from Tesla's press releases and not even mentioning any of Top Gear's rebuttals.

So an article complaining about editorializing to make a better story is, shock horror, editorializing to make a better story. I mean what's all the nonsense at the end about boy racers dying.

But 'Of course I'm not blaming only Top Gear for this'.

Only? He does actually blame Top Gear? Even though the Tesla's a sports car. The guy's a bit of a plonker.

The Guardian's a very left wing paper in the UK, don't think that this is a balanced piece.

<comment><USER2> I found the ending to this article annoying as well and off topic.

I have read into the Tesla piece and the breaks 'going' didn't actually make the car undrivable the pedals were just harder to push. Since they actually had two vehicles there to test it also shouldn't have been an issue.

The 55 mile range the claimed to get was also completely made up based on what 'they determined' to be accurate. The Tesla actually has a 250 mile range so a 100 mile commute would be fine. Few people drive as much as that anyway ([http://news.discovery.com/autos/range-anxiety-nissan- leaf-11...](http://news.discovery.com/autos/range-anxiety-nissan- leaf-110715.html)) and for most people the range of a Leaf is good enough. Electric vehicle ranges will also only continue to improve.

The Chevy Volt which uses gas to power a generator for the electric motor has an all electric range of 40 miles and then will just use gas to power the generator until the next recharge.

Top Gear's rebuttals from the Tesla issue were weak, whiny and largely ignored Tesla's complaints, this situation with the leaf only serves to show they really are trying to make electric vehicles look bad.

<comment><USER4> > Top Gear's rebuttals from the Tesla issue were weak, whiny and largely > ignored Tesla's complaints, this situation with the leaf only serves to show > they really are trying to make electric vehicles look bad.

Tesla's rebuttals to the Top Gear complaints were largely the same. They said the brakes didn't fail despite being broken. Power assisted brakes in any vehicle _ARE_ broken if the power assist fails. It doesn't make the car undriveable, it does however make it untestable. You can't have non-power brakes on a high-performance sports car.

IIRC they did use the other vehicle. Because the Tesla needs time to recharge, whilst other vehicles just need a fuel change, one vehicle was for testing and one was for filming. This would provide them enough mileage for the one-day filming they do for a review. However with one vehicle down they used the 'test' vehicle they used to get a feel for the vehicle. This put the car into the recovery mode, which the Top Gear crew made fun of.

Tesla _wanted_ a review. Top Gear isn't a non-biased program, they don't advertise to be. Tesla's vehicle had failures, they got exploited for a show _KNOWN_ for being satirical, humorous and exploitative in its reviews. Tesla gave Top Gear a match, and Top Gear used it to burn them. They supplied their own failure, simple as, because ultimately _they_ provided vehicles that _failed_. You review the material you have and not some idealistic bullshit green-freaks want to see.

Top Gear has a viewership higher than the population of the US. If you're reaching that many people, get your marketing and advertising execs to fork over some money to give additional vehicles when you're not able to fuel up the vehicle.

Tesla was dumb. Tesla got burned. Sucks to be Tesla.

Edit: Note that Tesla failed to recognize that they had almost a 5-minute spotlight on their vehicle, in front of an audience of approximately 350 million simply for the use of their vehicles (that _is_ top gears only condition, is that the vehicles are provided for testing).

If you think the review is harsh, go watch reviews Top Gear has done for Hummer and for the F150. They make _fun_ of the impracticality of vehicles.

<comment><USER2> They showed them pushing a Tesla into a garage as if it couldn't be driven, that's misleading. The 55 mile range figure was never justified even at track levels of abuse.

They make fun of other vehicles practicality, but with the Hummer and F150 it's different. Their impracticality and large size are part of their brand and well known by their target market.

Exacerbating minor issues with the Tesla to make it look unusable was mean and unnecessary especially considering the company was new. This alone would have been one thing, but when adding fabricated facts along with it and then doing a similar thing for the other electric vehicle that came out it looks like a pattern of bashing on EVs.

>some idealistic bullshit green-freaks want to see

That isn't necessary, if they just stuck with the truth it would have been good on its own.

<comment><USER5> The whole show is mean and unnecessary. That's why we love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is why I stopped watching Top Gear. None of the "tests" in Top Gear are serious, and most of it is just great entertainment... until it becomes malicious.

When it comes to subjects like electric cars, or environmentally friendly technology in general, Top Gear has the same ethics as one of Rupert Murdochs tabloids or Fox News.

<comment><USER7> do you expect an iPhone blog to give glorious reviews to an Android phone?

Taking the guys on Top Gear as legitimate motoring journalists is the same as taking Stephen Colbert as a legitimate Republican.

Top Gear is about three idiots who love cars. Watching Top Gear for car buying advice is like watching Jersey Shore for dating advice.

<comment><USER2> I'd liken it more to The Daily Show actually, a news show with a comedic twist. While there is comedy involved viewers expect what they're seeing not to be lies or fabricated stories. Hiding behind the "we're an entertainment show so we don't have to have facts" whenever someone questions a review is lame.

<comment><USER8> That's not very accurate. The Daily Show has a history of calling people out on misrepresentation. Jon Stewart went on Hardball (or whatever it was called) and chewed the hosts out for destroying journalism and dialog in America.

If you want to liken it to The Daily Show, then all of Top Gear is much more like Stephen Colbert's and Steve Carrel's old bits.

<comment><USER9> > Jon Stewart went on Hardball (or whatever it was called)

Are you referring to his infamous Crossfire appearance?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recall an episode where they ridiculed a Prius's fuel efficiency because it didn't out-perform a sports car on their test.

Their test was to loop non-stop around a race track at the Prius' top speed, which is pretty much what the sports car was designed to do.

They neglected to do a round in stop-and-go traffic, which is what the Prius was designed for.

<comment><USER11> If one watches a few more episodes of the show, it would become obvious that the Prius fuel consumption test was a joke, like everything else in the show. Come on, we can do better than expecting a fair review of a hybrid car from a guy who comes up with increasingly witty descriptions of his erections caused by the power and speed of various sports cars.

 _Edit_ : it probably didn't come across like it, but I think that the show is hilarious and it is one of the very few reasons to own a TV. But a car review show (as in, the source of information on the automotive industry) it is not, and is not meant to be.

<comment><USER12> Compared to a typical European car, such as the Diesel Passat station wagon, the Prius IS a joke. It has worse fuel consumption, carries less, and has a massively more complex drive-train.

Sure, the Passat is a bit of a slug, but light-footed, I made an estimated 50 mpg in Italy, 4 up with luggage, AC on, during an Italy trip, something you couldn't do in a Prius.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> " _The car unexpectedly ran out of charge when they got to Lincoln_ "

That's not how I remember it playing out. They had plenty of warning and made numerous references to the battery meter and its "miles left" estimation. As they were looking for a charging station, James May said something to the effect, "He's running on whatever the electric equivalent of gas fumes is."

If you just read this article, I encourage you to watch the episode before getting all wound up.

<comment><USER9> There are two claims in the article that were not made clear in the episode:

1) The Leaf had a full charge when delivered, but it was drained to 40%

2) Clarkson drove around in circles until it died, in Lincoln.

Now I can understand both of these things from a television perspective. Obviously everything in Lincoln was staged, including their arrangement with the university to charge there. Clearly they drained the battery _so that_ it would die in Lincoln, as that's where they had prepared to shoot.

It makes sense from a TV perspective but it's unethical, especially given the direct harm it can have on livelihoods and the effort to transition off fossil fuels. There's no substantive difference between doing what they did, and merely pretending that the car died when it had half a charge left. Top Gear is a comedy show, but it isn't satire. The audience has no reasonable expectation that when the hosts make claims about certain cars, they are being dishonest for the sake of comedy. Sure, we know the challenges are staged, but that's not what this is about. It's as if, in testing the new Ferrari, they replaced the rear tires with winter tires then complained about how the read end was uncontrollable. This crosses the line directly from creating an entertaining narrative to slander. Given JC's very public views on anything to do with the environment, as well as their previous run-in with Tesla, you'd think they would be careful not to give the impression that they will intentionally lie to disparage electric vehicles. With this latest incident, that is exactly the impression they give.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recognize they are going about it the wrong way, but their point, as far as I can tell, is to show you that the infrastructure to support these isn't in place, and even if it was, the downsides to charge times are anathema to motorists who love to drive.

I do think they could go about it differently, and if they had simply added "This is what happens were you to run it dry on a trip" would have smoothed all this out. I do wish they would have done so, as their point will now be lost in the screaming and shouting over their bias.

I do think it's a point worth making. An electric car is only as useful as the distance you want to drive it. As soon as your round trip exceeds the limit, you have to charge it for hours.

I don't think they are out of line by pointing out these problem. I do think they are out of line by staging it without explanation.

<comment><USER15> If the point is valid, why are they falsifying data?

It sounds a lot like they couldn't find a trip where the range would be inadequate, so they pretended the range was inadequate.

<comment><USER14> That's just silly. They could have very easily done a trip which would have required an overnight stay, it's not like these things have ridiculously high mile limits at this point in time.

They were doing it to simply prove a point. They just went about it the wrong way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think it can safely be said now that if you're using Top Gear as a buyer's guide when shopping for a car (and considering an electric car), you're doing it wrong.

I love the show. It's the most entertaining "car show" on television. But I've never had the inclination to take what these guys say to heart. By that I mean, 90% of the time the hosts are reviewing Bugattis, Ferraris and Lambos, which is a world completely disconnected from my own. Can one really expect practical reviews?

<comment><USER17> Can one at least expect them not to lie?

<comment><USER16> That's a valid point, obviously. I haven't seen the Leaf review, and have long forgotten the Tesla episode, but from what I recall it wasn't a "lie" as much as a serious "implication". I could be wrong, but the lawsuit will straighten that out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A lot of the comments here are saying that Top Gear is an entertainment show, and should not be taken seriously. Yet that seems to avoid the main point of the article which is that it's on BBC, yet not adhering to BBC standards of reporting. The article claims they are not held to these standards because they make entertaining TV that brings in big bucks for BBC. Should Top Gear attempt to follow BBC standards, or should they get away with it because they have a great tv show?

<comment><AUTHOR> That could be my fault: I editorialized the title to emphasize Top Gear faking an electric car failure, whereas the original title, _Top Gear's electric car shows pour petrol over the BBC's standards_ , places more emphasis on the question of why BBC is or isn't maintaining its standards.

Mea Culpa, thanks for raising the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've watched, and enjoyed, Top Gear for a long time now, since before they introduced the new magazine format.

I saw this episode when it was broadcast and enjoyed the electric car segment. The programme is an entertainment show and part of that entertainment is that the presenters repeatedly experience various 'disasters' during their filming. I didn't take the various incidents involving range particularly seriously at the time.

When they were discussing the cars slightly more seriously back in the studio, they actually acknowledged the inevitability of electric cars and went over the ways in which the technology was improving. They also correctly pointed out that current technology limits the utility of the models available now, and discussed mitigation ideas such as battery exchange. To be honest I was surprised at the maturity of their analysis! Overall, based on what I know about this area from other sources, I would not consider the piece to have been misleading.

Someone has already pointed out that The Guardian is a fairly left leaning paper and this particular article is a comment piece. Personally I think it's a bit silly for people to get so indignant about something so insignificant. They're just having fun. They're not out to get anyone. I don't believe they have a vindictive agenda. The presenters play caricatures of themselves.

Chill the hell out!

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a pretty weak accusation.

It was quite obvious watching the program that they were aware the battery was running low (they commented on the "miles left" meter several times). They more-or-less willfully ran out of juice in a small town. So what.

The point wasn't that the car can only go 60km versus 100km on a charge, or whatever the numbers. The point was that the car has a range limit, that the limit is not terribly far, that the car takes a while to charge when it dies, and there aren't many charging stations.

Perhaps Top Gear was a bit hyperbolic to make that point (Consumer Reports they are not), but these are all fair points.

I'm sorry. I'm all about calling out bias where I see it, but this just smacks of a car maker trying to spin some largely legitimate complaints with their product.

Not many people could get away with owning a plug-in electric as their only car. Even if it were half as much as a comparable gas car (rather than twice as much). As Clarkson said in the episode, the leaf is actually a really nice ca and electric is obviously the future, but _today_ it is just not practical.

<comment><USER2> >Not many people could get away with owning a plug-in electric as their only car.

This is actually the myth that Top Gear seems interested in forever perpetuating.

Most people don't drive that far ([http://news.discovery.com/autos/range- anxiety-nissan-leaf-11...](http://news.discovery.com/autos/range-anxiety- nissan-leaf-110715.html)) I think Chevy determined the average daily driver drives around 40 miles. The range of these new electric vehicles are actually fine for the majority of people's daily drivers and are only going to get better.

For long drives they're not a good choice yet (since the infrastructure doesn't yet exist and without something like battery swap charging takes too long).

>The point wasn't that the car can only go 60km versus 100km on a charge, or whatever the numbers. The point was that the range has a limit, that the limit is not that far...

Was that really the point? You don't see them driving a gasoline powered car near empty and then acting confused when it can't reach it's destination while suggesting that gasoline powered cars are not the future. I think they went past hyperbolic into misleading.

<comment><USER20> Off the top of my head, 80% of drivers drive less than 40 miles/day in the US, and that number is probably much lower in Europe and Asia. Since cars spend most of the day parked somehwere, you have lots of opportunities to plug an EV in, and so most times when you drive off you have a full battery.

<comment><USER13> That's not the only meaningful statistic in deciding whether or not to buy an electric car.

What's the _farthest_ the average person needs to drive in a given month? I bet it's more than the range of an electric car. That presents a problem.

<comment><USER21> I have to buy a new piece of furniture this month. There's no way it will fit in a sedan. Does that mean I need to buy a light truck, or is there another solution?

<comment><USER22> If you knew you were buying one every other week for the life of the sedan, then would you decide to buy a truck?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think people can take what they want from Top Gear, it's entertainment, not factual TV.

That episode made me wish I could afford a Leaf, it seemed really well engineered and I knew they were being silly about electric cars on purpose because they are "neanderthal" car dinosaurs that refuse to adapt.

They were trying really hard to find ways to insult the Leaf but fell far short - "range" was all they could come up with. Sad to learn they actually had to fake it though, it's pathetic on their part. I'd still buy it with their demonstrated range - if it was twice that, even better.

But 60mpg+ gas/diesel cars are common in the UK anyway, so the Leaf is less dramatic there. I'd love this one too but they will never let Americans have it:

[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_37/b40990604...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_37/b4099060491065.htm)

<http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/02/ford-will-give/>

<comment><USER24> _I think people can take what they want from Top Gear, it's entertainment, not factual TV._

Part of the entertainment is that it's presented as though it is factual TV. Sure if you look at a lot of their antics you can tell they're staged but a large portion of the viewing public doesn't realize this and their impressions of the car will be tainted by what is essentially a misrepresentation of the facts.

<comment><USER23> When you watch Leno on the Tonight Show and he demonstrates a product, do you use that as your factual news source? Do you let his silliness bias you? Or do you realize the type of personality that Leno is and filter everything he says/does?

Top Gear to me is like the Tonight Show of cars. It's entertainment.

Top Gear shows like two practical cars per season among all their other silliness (which is what I actually watch it for, the silliness because it's entertaining).

Ironically isn't the fastest car around their track an electric car? The electric version of the Ariel Atom?

<comment><USER23> @burgerbrain what's funny though is Leno is NOT anti-electric.

I think he also owns a 100 year old electric car, where the motor and battery technology today is really not that far evolved from it, sadly.

(oh here it is [http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/jay- leno/vintage/421594...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/jay- leno/vintage/4215940) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This reminds me of the AC vs DC debate in late 1800s. There were public staged demonstrations showing how harmful AC was. Of course none of this stopped AC from becoming the default standard for long range power transmission. Same goes with electric cars too. Regardless of what these fossil brains try to prove, there is no stopping to new technologies. Once the battery technology catches up, EVs will become more popular.

</comment><comment><USER26> How would they know the car was driven in loops for 10 miles in Lincoln unless the device was recording {the GPS coords, engine state, battery state}.

This sounds like spyware. I'd love to know if that data was being periodically fed back to Nissan wirelessly or read at the time the car was returned.

I'd love to know if this tracking is fitted in all their cars of this model, or just ones they hand out for review.

Such fine-grained tracking doesn't sound like a good thing at all.

<comment><USER27> Trying to track every car they sell would be ludicrous. I'm guessing they put this on the review/test cars. Which makes sense.

<comment><USER28> Why would it be ludicrous? At the cost of $11 for an 8Gb flash drive, they could easily build in compressed coordinate logging for a whole lot of journeys for that money, and have them copied off with the diagnostic logs at every service, and fed back to HQ.

All they have to do is say it's for to offer a better product, for roadside rescue and aggregated into a non-personal store after 30 days, and it would probably be fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Top Gear is an entertainment show with cars as the backdrop. Just like Daily show is a comedy show with political clips.

If you want a car review show, take a look at Motor Week.

I think these claims of "faking" are ridiculous when you have episodes where cast members "die" (top gear apocalypse), and characteristics are emphasized for comedic effect (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQh56geU0X8>).

This article claims because of Top Gear's antics, the public is being misinformed about the benefits of electric cars. It completely misses the point that 1. it is not a car review show, and 2. there is a major poetical component of the show that celebrates automotive history. They like exciting cars and bash boring uninspired ones (except if its remarkably boring). Their reviews emphasize a car's essence, not necessarily a list of facts.

I think this view is coming from a place that has a vested interest in electric cars, and not anyone who really watches the show. Otherwise they'd be attacking all the claims ("Some Say") made about The Stig.

</comment><comment><USER30> For reference, here's the discussion of Top Gear's response to the Tesla lawsuit: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400822>

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm wondering how many people actually take this as purely entertainment and not a show where they can glean useful information about new cars on the market.

I've never watched the show, but it seems like they're trying to blur the two lines. When they get called on it, they use the excuse "it's just entertainment" as justification for misleading their viewers.

</comment><comment><USER32> After watching the episode, It seems like the point they were making in Top Gear was that:

A) It's not particularly hard to get stranded in one of these things. B) When you do get stranded, it's non-trivial to get them recharged.

I think those are both fair points. A lot of people seem to be pointing out that "well if you plan ahead this won't happen", but how many times have you had to use your car to get to something you didn't plan ahead for? Maybe there's an emergency, or maybe I'm late, or maybe I just forgot to charge the thing overnight. Electric cars are cool, but for most people I can only imagine them supplementing a gas car, not replacing it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Tesla got a bit of backlash when they sued Top Gear, but it seems they were right to do it all along.

<comment><USER13> I don't see what Nissan's complaint has to do with the Tesla episode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I like Top Gear when they are funny, not when they're malicious, both episodes (Tesla then, and Leaf now) seems to have malicious intent against electric cars.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've seen their review of the Leaf. Clarkson was anticipating the car running out and talking about it while looking at the dial, which he pointed out. What made it "unexpected" in the program, as this article claims, must have been lost on me. There was a point to be made and they let the car run out to make it, again, to me that was obvious. The points made were valid:

* The infrastructure to recharge this thing in the middle of a trip is not there.

* You better be prepared to wait a good number of hours to charge it.

* You better know how far you're going and note how much charge you have left before you head out.

* You will have to replace the batteries after some number of years and it will cost a lot of money.

* Electricity is the future, but these cars are not it. (Yes, they actually said that.)

Which one of these points is all of a sudden not valid?

I'm sorry, the review was spot on.

<comment><USER36> I also seem to remember that one of the last things Clarkson said was how much he liked the the Leaf.

More generally, a 100 mile range would be fine for me 80% of the time, but the other 20% I need longer range without a 12 hour stopover. Electric cars are just not quite there yet for my needs, and I suspect a lot of other people too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> As somebody who doesn't know much about cars, I always thought Top Gear was a serious review show with a few jokes thrown in. Not downright misleading setups and information.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't even have to read this. It's the Guardian. It's just a personal vendetta against people who question the religion of warmingism.

</comment><comment><USER39> How many combustible cars have you seen on the road over the past couple of years?

</comment><comment><USER40> When electric cars become more reliable, easy-to-use, less expensive (overall) then gasoline powered cars, then nothing anyone says will stop the takeover. Short of destroying the company itself, the cars will sell themselves. You can't fool all the people all the time. The happy customers will tell their friends, and nothing the Pope, President and Top Gear can say to hinder that.

<comment><USER41> Which is perfectly fine by me, a right wing libertarian who fits right into the target demographic of Top Gear.

As long as electric cars are not practical enough to sell themselves, I will enjoy Clarkson's rants about them and everything else PC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Top Gear is entertainment.

"at no point were viewers told that the battery had been more than half empty at the start of the trip."

So? They're making _television_. They're showing a valid problem with electric cars. Their review of the cars was actually very positive, aside from the currently inescapable problem of long recharge times and uncommon charging stations. As it is television, you want to do so in a manner which is entertaining and not dangerous. Would the makers prefer that they run out of juice on a busy highway?

The rest of the article degrades into an anti-testosterone rant which has little to do with Top Gear. I was a teenage, aggressive idiot, too, and Top Gear didn't even exist then. They're actually very careful on Top Gear to follow rules of the road, and anyone driving like a fool as a result of it has only himself to blame.

</comment><comment><USER40> Here is the top gear video saying the tesla was a failure in the real world: [http://www.streetfire.net/video/top-gear-reviews-tesla- roads...](http://www.streetfire.net/video/top-gear-reviews-tesla- roadster_206233.htm)

</comment><comment><USER42> maybe they can move the program to Fox where it belongs.

</comment><comment><USER43> tl;dr Reality TV show fails to meet basic journalism standards.

</comment><comment><USER7> they didn't fake anything, they just showed what would happen if your car ran out of juice.

what is it with companies, who expect the media to suspend critical thinking when covering their products.

Electrical cars are great...but the logistics of them still need to be highlighted for consumers to make an informed decision.

to ignore that you are literally up shit's creek if your car runs out of juice...is just intellectually dishonest

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you used the words "intellectually dishonest." sure, you can show what would happen if you ran out of electricity. You could show leaving on your journey with only half the electricity needed to make the trip, you could show the car telling you how far it could go before requiring a charge, you could show the GPS telling you you can't make it to your destination, and you could show the car being driven around a loop to run out of charge.

Would that be intellectually honest?

<comment><USER7> doesn't change the point, that you are royally screwed if you run out of charge outside your driveway

<comment><USER44> Then why don't they show gasoline powered cars stuck on the side of the highway? Maybe even a broken timing belt or one of the litany of other things that can leave you royally screwed if driving an internal combustion powered vehicle. What they have done with EV reviews is just plain dishonest.

<comment><USER45> Perhaps because there's a gas station every 10 feet, but electric charging stations are much fewer and further between.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Top Gear is a great show. Its funny,witty and soooo different from the usual PC shite on the beeb (extreme individualism or Libertarianism,extreme are they serious?),which is why its so popular.

Long live Clarkson.

<comment><USER47> "Its funny,witty..."

Those two descriptions are a matter of opinion, not everyone agrees with that. I'm a huge car guy, yet personally I think Clarkson is a clown. I understand the show is more geared towards entertainment but they use their massively popular show to blatantly lie and misguide people to push their own agendas.</comment></comment>


Show HN: std::vector for c, upto 1/3 faster - <AUTHOR> https://tse.gratis/aArray <comment><USER2> It would be nice to see the benchmark that support the 1/3 faster claim. I don't doubt it, but there are always a lot of hidden assumptions and details that are missing, that I'd like to see the _exact_ benchmark. Is it a small vector? Is it a large vector? What happens for different vectors sizes? What about int vs a complex struct? Too many questions ...

I'd would be better to change the license to an standard license. In the spirit of the current license I recommend looking at the BSD license without atribution. Try to search the different variants and pick the one that is closer to your wishes.

It's funny to make up a license, but does your license protect you of liabilities if a moron uses your software badly? What about if your library has a bug? Also, someone inside a company may prefer a usual license because the company lawyers had review the usual license, but an unusual license needs too many talk with the lawyers to get approved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Graphs are here: [https://tse.gratis/aArray/#details](https://tse.gratis/aArray/#details)

And you're completely right, benchmarking is hard

Edit: To expand on that: I use someone else's benchmark since they have put effort into it, and already received feedback

For std::vector and binary search I performed multiple runs on several architectures, and did things like randomizing the benchmark order (which can have a big impact)

Complex struct is a good question

<comment><USER2> Add a link to it in the main page next to the 1/3 faster claim, something like "see the details".

(Moreover, I'd add the graph in the overview page with a link to the complete discussion. I like graphs :) .)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thankyou for your questions. They made me go back and re-test

Saving vectors between runs and comparing their contents, changes things -- to the much more believable result of aArray being slower

Only comparing the array lengths, but not their contents probably let gcc optimize out assignmemnts for aArray, but not std::vector -- leading to an unfair test

Interestingly yes, std::vector now wins by a larger margin for int8_t arrays, and int64_t becomes a tighter match

\-----

Note: I've updated the website to remove the 1/3 claim! But I can no-longer edit the title of this thread

The remaining stool legs of aArray are safety, simplicity, and being generic -- hopefully they don't get kicked out from under it quite so quickly ;^)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've made it as usable/tested/documented as I can over a couple of years

Under 'how/detail/THANKS': explains internals; graphs optimizations; chat about my life

Any feedback would be awesome ;)</comment>


Stop Treading Water: Learning to Learn - <AUTHOR> https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-learning-to-learn-by-edward-kmett-1750

<comment><AUTHOR> Edward is epic in the Haskell world.</comment>


Ask HN: Alternative container technologies for K8s in production? - <AUTHOR> I would love to hear feedback on your or others' experiences of architecting, deploying and maintaining K8s production clusters, using alternative container technologies (e.g., AWS Firecracker & Kata Containers, for micro-VMs, and containerd & Singularity, instead of Docker, for containers). Pros, cons, use cases, tooling, cloud providers support, other aspects you want to mention ... <comment><USER2> GKE has containerd and gvisor as a drop-down on a per node pool basis. We use this to isolate workloads on more restrictive runtimes. Not all containers will work yet

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for sharing your experience. How different is gVisor from containerd? Pros/cons?</comment></comment>


Judge threatens contempt for declining to reveal cellphone tracking methods - <AUTHOR> http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-stingray-officer-contempt-20141117-story.html <comment><USER2> IANAL, but I don't see why the detective shouldn't be held in contempt anyways, along with the prosecutors. It's nothing short of a blatant attempt to deceive the court to present "evidence" in the first place when you're not prepared to observe the defendants' due process right to confront witnesses and have access to evidence. As soon as the so-called evidence was put before the court, the detective and prosecutors should have had but two options: provide all details to the defense or go to jail. It's highly preferable that a murderer go free than the government be allowed to claim private contracts with domestic spying providers, contracts to which the detective and prosecutors aren't even party, are "national security" issues. It's disgusting how the detective on the stand expected those magic words to waive the defendant's rights when told to the judge, if the article is to be believed.

<comment><USER3> But you have to be careful with this lest this incentivizes the creation of parallel-reconstruction-like fabrications of the source of evidence.

<comment><USER4> "If we punish crime, criminals will get smarter!"

<comment><USER3> Touche. Didn't think that my argument would sound like that, but it does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's significant that, rather than disclose their cell tracking methods, the police and prosecutors prefer to discard the evidence. This suggests that obtaining evidence is not the primary purpose of the tracking technology.

<comment><USER6> Or maybe it suggests that the technology is only useful if it can be used for the illegal gathering of evidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great quip in the linked article by a lawyer with the ACLU about nondisclosure agreements:

       "You can't contract out of
       constitutional disclosure obligations"

I think that about sums up the "people's" side of the war.

<comment><USER8> Even better, these two quotes from the judge:

"You don't have a nondisclosure agreement with the court"

and

"I mean, this is simple. You can't just stop someone and not give me a reason."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Getting off the hook by simply discarding the evidence is quite questionable.

For all we know, they had tortured someone to get to that evidence and the torture method was the subject of that 'non-disclosure' arrangement.

(I believe high-ranking American Psychological Association members had such non-disclosure agreements with the federal government for their employment and 'consultancy' in Guantanamo torture sessions.)

</comment><comment><USER10> How illegal it must be if prosecutors are willing to do so much to keep it secret.

<comment><USER11> If they really did sign NDAs, their hands are probably tied.

<comment><USER12> It's likely that civil enforcement of an NDA to recover damages for answering a judge's question in a judicial proceeding would be barred by a court as against public policy, even if the NDA didn't contain an explicit provision allowing disclosure in a judicial proceeding. The theory would be that public policy prevents enforceability of contractual terms that require someone obstruct justice or to disobey court orders.

<comment><USER12> It's not the most perfect example, but

"In _McKenzie v. Lynch_ , 133 N.W. 490 (Mich. 1911), a husband settled a civil claim with a man who had engaged in "criminal conversation" with his wife. As part of the settlement, the husband promised not to "do anything whereby this matter will acquire any publicity whatever." _Id._ The court found this provision unenforceable because it could prevent the husband from "becom[ing] a complaining witness, in a criminal proceeding" against the other party to the contract. _Id._ at 491."

(Alan E. Garfield, "Promises of Silence: Contract Law and Freedom of Speech," Cornell L. Rev. 83, 261.)

That is to say that under these circumstances, one party could not sue the other for breaching a non-disclosure agreement by testifying as a witness in a criminal trial. I'm sure there's more recent and more relevant legal authority out there somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I agree with the decision. I'm kind of confused about the amount of resources going into this robbery--not to mention the level of defense the defendant is getting. I've heard of murder suspects getting less defense! Couldn't the phone record of the cell used to make the initial call provide enough information for the warrant? IANAL but it seems like the prosecution doesn't even need to introduce this evidence... plus doesn't the article say Taylor has already confessed? Why is this even on trial?

<comment><USER14> Just because a suspect confesses doesn't mean they skip the trial process. The normal procedure at that point is to plead guilty and head into sentencing. The police can have the defendant clearly on video describing the crime in exact detail but if he pleads not guilty you get a trial.

Which, even though it might seem odd at first, this is a good thing because how many people in the past were coerced to provide a confession to a crime they did not commit?

<comment><USER13> Yeah I agree. I guess that's what confused me is that maybe he recanted his confession or they weren't willing to bargain his sentence down to something he was willing to accept.

<comment><USER15> Maybe the confession does not support the specific charges they wanted to bring. And now the lack of the phone evidence might let the defendant off the hook for some of the charges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How does this not throw the case into "fruit of the poisoned tree" territory? If they used illegal tracking to further gather evidence, shouldn't all of that evidence be thrown away?

<comment><USER17> Yes and no. There are a number of ways in which illegally obtained evidence, or FOTPT evidence can still be admitted. These are: attenuation, independent source, inevitable discovery, and good faith. Roughly stated, attenuation is when something is too far down the line of causation, time, or there is a voluntary act of free will by the defendant to separate the illegality from the evidence, and the balance rests in favor of admission. Independent source is kind of like parallel construction: if the investigator also discovered the evidence in a legal way completely independent of the illegal search, the evidence will be admitted. Inevitable discovery extends this to evidence which, despite not being discovered legally, would have discovered the evidence regardless of the illegal search. Finally, the good faith exception will allow in evidence where law enforcement is relying in good faith on a warrant which is defective, or that they are proceeding legally pursuant to common law or statute. I've mostly summarized here the sides of the coin that will admit evidence poisoned by an unlawful search, but there are other doctrines that will tip it into the excluded category.

<comment><USER18> Has the cellphone collection they used been ruled illegal? I just thought they withdrew because they didn't want to share the tech they are using to collect the evidence.

<comment><USER17> AKAIK no, that does seem to be their tactic. I just wanted to give an overview of the law surrounding the exclusionary rule, especially since many here think parallel construction and similar tactics equal automatic and sure exclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's obvious that departments have these devices, and everyone assumes they know how they work and what they do.

So then why the secrecy? If we know what they do and how they work and that law enforcement has them what are they hiding?

I propose all this secrecy is to hide the fact that they can either update the baseband firmware OTA or exploit it OTA and basically root the phone. As an extra incentive to shut up if they disclose any info in court they stop getting new exploit updates and/or baseband updates.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't understand why the Federal government is muzzling the police about this. The use of Stingray is not exactly a secret.

<comment><USER21> If you bothered to RTFA, it's not stingray.

<comment><USER22> "Defense attorney Joshua Insley still believes that police used a stingray to find Taylor. He cited a letter in which prosecutors said they were prohibited by the Department of Justice from disclosing information about methods used in their investigation.

The portable device was developed for the military to help zero in on cellphones. It mimics a cellphone tower to force nearby phones to connect to it.

Records shows that the Baltimore Police Department purchased a stingray for $133,000 in 2009."

<comment><USER23> It is quite likely that there are passive devices that monitor cell phone channels without tricking them into connecting to a phony base station. These technically wouldn't be "stingrays". That is basically what the SIGINT satellites do. It could certainly be miniaturized for local area monitoring. In any case, the cell providers have basic details of what phones communicate with their towers. It doesn't seem like that avenue wasn't used in this case though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What I really do not understand is why the secrecy over methods at all. A cellphone is giving out an identifiable radio signal. Any half decent electronic engineering degree student should be able to cook up something that could track cellphones.

<comment><USER25> I'm not an expert an the matter, but surely something like that could be challenged under privacy laws or even unlawful search and seizure.

The legality of stingrays hasn't been brought before a court yet as far as I'm aware, and it sounds like law enforcement and prosecutors are in no hurry to allow it to be.

<comment><USER26> Passive radio location and broadcast stream decoding of the gsm announcements made by the phone, should be feasable, i dont see why the phone has to be tricked into a conversation with a fake cell tower to locate it. Under those circumstances would it still be a search, is it not the same as the owner of the phone wearing an audio system that broadcast loudly thier name.

See:[http://www.rtl-sdr.com/receiving-decoding-decrypting-gsm- sig...](http://www.rtl-sdr.com/receiving-decoding-decrypting-gsm-signals-rtl- sdr/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anyone want to speculate on what the secret is? Is it the fake cell tower vehicles?

<comment><USER11> I'd wager they can pick up the cell phone pings to the tower. I don't know if these messages are encrypted; if they are, perhaps they also hold the keys, and that is the real secret.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What happens if the prosecution breaks the law. Can the judge toss the case?

</comment><comment><USER29> Judge threatens contempt for not providing sources with drivers.

</comment><comment><USER30> McNulty.

<comment><USER31> You don't know Lester Freamon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Kinda reminds me of this: [http://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2006/01/20](http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/01/20)</comment>


Scaling NSQ to 750B Messages (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://segment.com/blog/scaling-nsq/ <comment><USER2> Despite Segment using Kafka nowadays, I would encourage everyone to give NSQ a try and see if it might not already fit your use-case. For me it's been one of those do-one-thing-well pieces of software that's really well-engineered, where I can clearly understand how it works and what the scope of its features are.

NSQ is my go-to queue whenever I'm working on any kind of service, even more so when that service might be standalone. Consider deploying a service on an isolated box which frequently pushes data into the cloud. Connectivity to the cloud might be intermittent, so you just store every work item to the locally running nsq and you're protected against network outages as well as your data- producing process crashing. Since NSQ is so easy to spin up and easy to interact with (Publish works via plain HTTP), it's not a lot of overhead to add it to your process.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm working at Segment now as a Software Engineer in Infrastructure. We just went through a big effort to remove NSQ (in favor of Kafka). Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER4> What pushed you to move to Kafka?

<comment><USER3> Reliability, scalability and tooling (in that order).

Basically Kafka provides what NSQ is lacking: [https://nsq.io/overview/features_and_guarantees.html](https://nsq.io/overview/features_and_guarantees.html)

Messages are durable (across nodes, not just persisted to the filesystem). Messages are delivered in-order (for a partition). Consumers know all partitions of a topic from startup, it's not eventually consistent.

NSQ has been great honestly, it was just designed with different use cases in mind.

<comment><USER5> Was language a deciding factor? NSQ being Go while Kafka is Java.

<comment><USER3> Not at all. We mostly use Go internally for backend services, so if anything that was a point for NSQ.

<comment><USER6> What about NATS Streaming? Is it a viable alternative (now at version 2.0) to Kafka?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Been using nats for a few projects lately and really enjoying it. One of the many great golang projects. Resource utilization compared to kafka is tiny.

Re: msq: Looks like segment are using kafka these days despite the praise for nsq in this dated article.

<comment><USER8> Out of curiosity, are you using the durable, NATS-Streaming server, or just the ephemeral NATS-server? I'd be interested to hear more about the performance differences you see.

<comment><USER7> Using a single ephemeral instance with request/response mechanics as a kind of load balancer for messages. Publishers have persistency so it is not needed in the queue. 120Mb of memory usage and <2% of one core handling 10000 messages/s (as per nats-top) and it's been up for 2 years without and increase in memory size or failed messages.

The real allure was the guarantee that only one subscriber would get a request much like a traditional load balancer. The performance was an added benefit.

When we put it together a few years ago the cloistering wasn't very mature and the streaming version with persistence wasn't completed. Would look into this over kafka if only for the simplicity in management and track record of go for performance and reliability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jehiah and Matt (the original creators of NSQ) are really talented engineers, I'm glad their work is getting some love.

</comment><comment><USER10> Note this is from 2016

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, I updated the title</comment></comment>


Lens v3.4 (The Kubernetes IDE) is out - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lensapp/lens/releases/tag/v3.4.0 <comment><USER2> Lens looks great! I'm going to try it on Monday :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This has to be one of the best things that have ever happened to Kubernetes for usability/education.</comment>


Three studies on whether media misinformation intensified severity of pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/25/fox-news-hannity-coronavirus-misinformation/ <comment><AUTHOR> Thesis: _Three studies have focused on conservative media's role in fostering confusion about the seriousness of the coronavirus. Taken together, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others._

Reader friendly link: [https://outline.com/c9nfuM](https://outline.com/c9nfuM)</comment>


Senators look to extend ban on Internet taxes - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/280225-senators-look-to-extend-ban-on-internet-taxes

<comment><USER2> The bill sounds like a reasonable idea.

I can see taxing purchases according to the sales tax rates of the buyer's state. There might even be a business niche among payment processors, providing geo-location (or customer-provided) tax lookups integrated into a shopping cart service. Paypal and Amazon probably already have preliminary designs sketched out.

Taxing _access_ , however seems like it would take the growth of the Internet in the wrong direction. The bill would prevent this, if enacted.

Dare I say it? Good one, Washington!

<comment><USER3> > I can see taxing purchases according to the sales tax rates of the buyer's > state.

i would prefer to see tax rate set at the "seller" country, not the buyer's. I hate regional pricing. Setting tax rate for the "seller" instead would mean that countries (or states?) have to compete on taxes, which will force gov't to better utilize resources instead of adding taxes for inefficiencies.

<comment><USER2> If we tax by the seller's location then the sellers will move, at least on paper, to those states whose laws are most convenient. Much like various island nations today list fortune 500 companies in their chambers of commerce. Also, Delaware.

By using the buyer's location to determine taxes, states will still be competing tax-wise; it would be healthy competition, as opposed to a competition where the winning move is one to the Bahamas.

<comment><USER4> If that logic held, then the buyer would move to the state with the lowest taxes in order to pay less on everything they buy. This is not reality.

<comment><USER5> People factor this in all the time. It's reality when considering a new job or retirement. You often see articles on the tax implications of living somewhere and it's factored in to many of the "most livable city" lists.

And even though it's usually illegal not to report it on a tax return, people cross state lines a lot for purchases (cigarettes, alcohol, electronics). Portland for instance has no sales tax while its very close neighbor Washington has no income tax.

This could all play out with Internet taxes too.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>