DEC64: Decimal Floating Point - <AUTHOR> http://dec64.com/ <comment><USER2> If you want a default decimal floating-point type, the only defensible choice is the decimal128 type standardized by IEEE 754. It has a fully-defined arithmetic, specified by experts who have spent their careers thinking about the issues involved, and is wide enough to exactly represent the US national debt in every currency used on earth.

There are situations where other decimal floating-point types are appropriate, but if you do not understand the tradeoffs you are making, you should be using decimal128.

I don't agree with everything in Jens Nockert's "silly review", but he's right about a lot of things: [http://blog.aventine.se/2014/03/09/a-silly-review-of- dec64.h...](http://blog.aventine.se/2014/03/09/a-silly-review-of-dec64.html)

I made a few notes the last time I saw this type come up somewhere:

\- It has significantly less exponent range than IEEE decimal64 (it effectively throws away almost three bits in order to have the exponent fit in a byte; 2^56 is ~7.2E16, which means that it can represent some, but not all, 17-digit significands; the effective working precision is 16 digits, which actually requires only ~53.15 bits).

\- Even if you weren't going to use those extra bits for exponent, they could be profitably used for other purposes.

\- Lack of infinity is a mild annoyance.

\- Rounding is biased for add/sub/mul, broken for divide.

\- It's not significantly more computationally efficient than the IEEE formats, despite handwaving by the author.

\----

Edit: I would be remiss not to note that Intel has made available a well- tested complete implementation of IEEE 754 decimal64 and decimal128 under 3-clause BSD: [http://www.netlib.org/misc/intel/](http://www.netlib.org/misc/intel/)

<comment><USER3> Also see Intel's own page about their decimal floating point library: [https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-decimal- floa...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-decimal-floating- point-math-library/)

I don't know how much effort Intel is allocating to this project; I sent a bug report to the author listed on that page in 2015. The bug was acknowledged and fixed, with a new release out in "several days", but nothing yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The flaws raised three years ago when it was posted to HN are still relevant:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365812)

<comment><USER5> That thread is rather depressing, being mostly just kneejerk and insults. From what I can tell, the actual criticisms are just:

1\. "rounding modes and overflow behavior are not addressed", which is incorrect.

2\. "Where's exp(), log(), sin(), cos()?", which you can find in dec64_math.c.

3\. "There are also 255 representations of _almost all representable numbers_ ", which is incorrect.

4\. "it will take around FIFTY INSTRUCTIONS TO CHECK IF TWO NUMBERS ARE EQUAL OR NOT" in the slow case, which is probably true but is unlikely to be common given the design of the type. It can undoubtedly be improved with effort.

5\. "The exponent bits should be the higher order bits. Otherwise, this type breaks compatibility with existing comparator circuitry", which seems like an odd comment given the type is not normalized.

6\. "With both fields being 2's compliment, you're wasting a bit, just to indicate sign", which AFAICT is just false.

7\. "there's no fraction support", which I don't understand.

So the only _valid_ criticism I saw in that whole thread is #4, and even that is only a tenth as valid as its author thought it was.

<comment><USER6> Re 1: it is true that there is a single paragraph "discussing" rounding in [https://github.com/douglascrockford/DEC64/blob/master/dec64....](https://github.com/douglascrockford/DEC64/blob/master/dec64.asm.html) \-- which is not much. If there is more, I did not find it, and would genuinely appreciate a pointer! In the meantime, though, alternative rounding methods are missing, and those can be quite important for both scientific and business computations. I guess they could be added. But, a lot of things "could be done". Fact is, they were done so far. In so far, DEC64 is mostly a proposal for people to sit down and work out an actual standard. Perhaps this will happen one day, but it seems so far not so many people are convinced it's worth investing efforts into that (I am also not sure if the author is interested in feedback and collaboration? I see no indication for that anywhere)

Re 2: these are at best toy implementations, at worst dangerous (in the sense that they may provide wildly inaccurate results, due to convergence

Re 3: agreed. Though there is still a gargantuan number of values which have 2 or more representations, and that makes all kinds of comparisons more complicated. Dealing with that efficiently in SW is difficult, and more so in HW. It might be worth it if the advantages outweigh it, but at least I personally don't see it.

Re 4: if it can be "undoubtedly improved with effort", why hasn't it been done in several years? Sure, it may be possible, but I will keep my doubts for the time being :-)

I agree with you on 5, 6 and 7.

<comment><USER5> > In the meantime, though, alternative rounding methods are missing, and those > can be quite important for both scientific and business computations.

My inexpert understanding is that modifying rounding modes is super niche and poorly supported by most things, so this doesn't strike me as much of a problem. A saner replacement to rounding mode flags would just be to offer different operations for those rare cases they are wanted.

> Dealing with that efficiently in SW is difficult, and more so in HW.

Not really; you never really need to normalize values and not doing so makes basically everything other than comparisons cheaper. I don't see how normalizing around every arithmetic operation would make the hardware any simpler.

> if it can be "undoubtedly improved with effort", why hasn't it been done in > several years?

Because this is one guy's project and it hasn't seen much (any?) use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://blog.aventine.se/2014/03/09/a-silly-review-of- dec64.h...](http://blog.aventine.se/2014/03/09/a-silly-review-of-dec64.html)

<comment><USER8> >Incidentally, binary floating point can also represent almost 16 (roughly 15.955) decimal places accurately

That's false. The author do not understand the limitations of binary floating point.

 _0.2 is a periodic number in binary floating point_.

People need to first understand why _0.2 is a periodic number in binary floating point_ before writing a blog post.

<comment><USER6> I see no contradiction here, as long as the period is >= 16...

<comment><USER9> Yep, it seems people need to understand the details of base translation before writing a comment :p

Anyway, IIRC you can round-trip 15 decimal digits correctly with an IEEE double. Don't know if it's floor(15.955) or something else, but it's close enough for me to consider DEC64 quite useless compared to existing, quite well-designed and widely used implementation of FP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does this relate to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754) (2008 edition) which added decimal floating point in a couple of sizes including 64 bit? It's strange to publish something in the same space without any reference to that. It appears to be incompatible (IEEE 754 decimal64 has 53 bits of significand and 11 bits of exponent; this thing has 56 bits and 8). How is that helpful?! Libraries and hardware supporting IEEE 754 exist. What am I missing?

Edit: it does say "A later revision of IEEE 754 attempted to remedy this, but the formats it recommended were so inefficient that it has not found much acceptance." at the end. Hmm.

<comment><USER11> I don't think hardware support for '754 in decimal mode is very common, but the other points still stand.

<comment><USER12> Still lot more common than hw support for dec64

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This has got to be very slow, both in hardware and software implementations, compared to IEEE packed decimal float.

Addition and subtraction on anything other than matched exponents is going to need rounds of multiplication-by-10, however you implement it. Using IEEE-754 packed decimal, you only need a handful of gates per digit to unpack into BCD.

<comment><USER5> > both in hardware and software implementations

Software multiplication is pretty fast? BCD is comparatively hard to do in software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _In modern systems, this sort of memory saving is pointless. By giving > programmers a choice of number types, programmers are required to waste > their time making choices that don't matter. Even worse, making a bad choice > can lead to a loss of accuracy or destructive bugs. This is a bad practice > that is very deeply ingrained._

Boundless arrogance, minimal information.

If you want a decimal floating point type, use the IEEE formats, there are high quality implementations everywhere, and if you're using C++ you can probably switch without much more than a string replacement and a couple header includes. Douglas Crockford can be forgiven for having apparently no concept of computing at the limits of the machine (in terms of cache latency, memory size, and CPU throughput), but if you get comfortable with this level of ignorance and aren't famous, you will be highly replaceable.

Added:

Moore's law is effectively dead. This means that for a given CPU microarchitecture family and your monetary or spatial budget for memory, you have limited resources to achieve your goals. If you write an inefficient program with no regard for performance at the numerics level, your program will no longer automatically get much faster and cheaper to run, you will instead be contributing to the pile of performance debt your successors will be cursing and shedding tears over.

Furthermore, with his "loss of accuracy" comment, he seems to imply that his 64 bit decimal types are even remotely large enough that common users will not lose accuracy (by which I suppose he really means _precision_ ).

</comment><comment><USER14> > DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of > application programming languages.

Intended by whom? A lone voice (however correct), a standards body, or an industry consortium? This article should really carry some authorship information.

<comment><USER15> I believe its Douglas Crockford:

[https://github.com/douglascrockford/DEC64](https://github.com/douglascrockford/DEC64)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A much better discussion and design for decimal arithmetic on binary computers was done by Mike Cowlishaw ([http://speleotrove.com/decimal/](http://speleotrove.com/decimal/)) He shifted the entire computation chain into decimal (representing decimal digits in a packed form as well)

</comment><comment><USER17> Ugh having an explicit bit prior to the decimal was a mistake intel made in x87 - it introduces a pile of horror as there end up being multiple representations of the vast majority of numbers, which means you have to normalize prior to any comparison operation, or accept the your comparisons may be wrong

The explicit leading bit directly halves the space of addressable bits (which is how you get space for multiple representations)

If you want insight to how awful this is, x87 has pseudo infinities, pseudo /nans/, unnormal values, and pseudo denormals

The solution intel eventually took was to recognize that the leading bit was useless but require it to be as though it were implicit and treat any case where that is wrong as being invalid.

So yes you do want a format that requires normalization, because the alternative is one that requires normalization anyway, but is also insane for any kind of comparison, and wastes precision needlessly.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice. It is unbelievable that none of today's widely used programming has standard support for handling money correctly. I don't want to know how many programs use (binary) floating point to do it.

(Disclaimer: I don't work with any financial figures and I have not checked whether the dec64 proposal is a sound one.)

<comment><USER19> Java and Python, for a start, have decimal number types in their standard distributions.

<comment><USER20> In Java, the java.math.BigDecimal is not a primitive data type. It also has an awkward api due to lack of operator overloading (thanks to BigDecimal not being a primitive data type it seems).

In Python, the story looks slightly better:

        from decimal import *
        >>> getcontext().prec = 6
        >>> Decimal(1) / Decimal(7)
        Decimal('0.142857')

But neither of these data types is even close to being a first class citizen in either language.

<comment><USER18>
      .getcontext().prec = 6

makes no sense for money. You need 2 digits after the decimal point constantly, whether it is 0.01 or 1000000.01

AFAIK (and I don't do this for work), after every calculation you manually need to call quantize as in

      cents = decimal.Decimal('.01')
      money = price.quantize(cents, decimal.ROUND_HALF_UP)

<comment> the-dude How would you handle prices for components which do have more significant digits than 2? ( I have examples if you wish ).

<comment><USER18> Of course more digits than 2 exists. In Germany petrol/gas has always been priced with 3 decimals. And in B2B it's even more common. I'm talking about 98% of consumer business where the precision is full cents for each transaction.

In general you need to know when to round and to how many digits. But my complaint was that languages have a natural API for binary floating point, which is useful for scientific number crunching, but rarely anything comparable for commercial calculations.

I have not tried to design a natural API for fixed (but parameterizable) decimal precision and the implicit rounding required. But I would be surprised if it's impossible to come up with anything less verbose (explicit constructors everywhere) and less error prone (forgetting to call rounding).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The most important part of IEEE decimal arithmetic is the (weakened, made optional) mandate that decimal floating point perform exact arithmetic— deterministic cross platform results on the same inputs. This is important not just for financial accounting which motivated this departure from binary floating point (where error is tolerated), but for any distributed system that needs reliable computation in the presence of heterogeneous hardware or compiler optimizations. It is embarrassing that we live with this state of affairs in 2018 with no way to do deterministic/ exact real number arithmetic in programs without emulating the FPU in software.

<comment><USER9> IEEE binary floating point is deterministic. There is no such thing as tolerated errors in compliant implementations.

Non-compliant implementations are widespread for performance reasons, but that is a completely different story.

Also I'm not sure about GPU, but FPU are typically compliant in HW, and it is typically the compilers that have faster approximate modes, and I think for mainstream ones only when you explicitly enable such optimizations, which are disabled by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of > application programming languages.

Sure, but to get there it'd need to interface with the current generation of languages which still use double.

</comment><comment><USER23> I imagine this would be useful for applications which do a lot of conversion from/to ieee754 to/from text... Programming languages and spreadsheet software come to mind.

Has anyone ported a non-trivial application to use DEC64, and compared the results?

</comment><comment><USER24> This ought to be built into everything so financial applications can stop using slow software decimal types.</comment>


Adding layers to the middle of trained network without invalidating the weights - <AUTHOR> https://svilentodorov.xyz/blog/add-layers <comment><USER2> There's at least one existing paper about this idea ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05641](https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.05641)). Also, it is possible to initialize a convolutional layer so that it passes through its input, but initializing the weights properly requires a little more work than calling tf.keras.initializers

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be interesting to see neural networks that can grow layers as needed using this technique. Perhaps you could have the network occasionally monitor its own progress on a tune set somehow and adjust the model capacity based on the amount of over/underfitting observed.

<comment><USER4> Exactly my thoughts on this.. if you could detect when the network was getting saturated or over fitted, spawn new layers. Maybe this would allow starting with much simpler networks, operating on lower rez inputs, and then scaling then up as you feed them more data, instead of burning cycles slowing training a large network from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Author jumps straight into how to implement this in code before giving any clues as to what the strategy or purpose is.

The idea is funny, but it would be nice if there were some arguments as to why it might be useful, and even better with an example of a model being improved by this.

<comment><USER6> The Hug of Death seems to have killed the page so I can't really tell what it's about, but here's an example of inserting new trainable layers in BERT: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00751](https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00751)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's Hug of Death even since it's not actually that much traffic and it's not down for me. Cloudflare + Github Pages just seems to be a much less reliable combination than I believed before I moved to it a year ago (it sometimes goes down even with almost no traffic, and then is up a second later).

This paper is definitely relevant though!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Creative ideas to activate communities? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN.
We were brainstorming on ideas for how we can activate our first community for our product Roomvine (www.roomvine.com). By "activate" I mean getting people within a 200M radius to download the app, check-in to a local chatroom and having their first interesting group conversation. Since we need a geographically dense user group, we are naturally leaning towards a campaign for university students or attendees of an event.
Any wild/interesting ideas? <comment><USER2> Why not employees on a corporate campus since there is a strong shared context for discussion?

Or not. I think the the first order issue for apps for better yapping and yammering is not proximity but something worth discussing. Proximity doesn't change the need for channels, even if the channel topic is implicit as is the case for an app like Tinder.

Good luck.</comment>


Show HN: Newzly-phantom – Asynchronous type-safe Scala DSL for Cassandra - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/newzly/phantom At newzly we use Cassandra for a variety of services. We loved Foursquare Rogue for MongoDB and we created a similar tool for Cassandra.<p>Phantom is still in its early stages, but we look forward to your feedback and contributions! <comment><USER2> It's great to see new asynchronous NoSQL drivers popping up regularly now. I guess the Play framework team started something when they made ReactiveMongo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it. We were indeed inspired by ReactiveMongo and Foursquare Rogue.

Looking forward to more feedback!</comment></comment>


The best data visualisation I've ever seen - <AUTHOR> http://brendandawes.posterous.com/the-best-data-visualisation-ive-ever-seen

<comment><USER2> Great idea. Thanks for posting this!

Reminds me of an advice my friend gave me once. I was writing a small game with a ball flying between planets in 2D space. Sometimes the ball would travel outside of the screen boundaries. I used to draw a marker on the proper side of the screen to point to where the ball is. The friend suggested much better idea - a circle centered on the ball should be drawn, with radius big enough to make it visible on the game screen. The continuous change of the curvature and length of the visible part of the circle provides feedback on the ball-to-screen distance in the same way that, in your example, hand gestures can provide information on the distance between the car and the wall.

Screenshot: [http://temporal.pr0.pl/devblog/download/projects/ClozeCall/s...](http://temporal.pr0.pl/devblog/download/projects/ClozeCall/screenshot- marker.jpg)

Note the part of the circle visible near the bottom of that picture.

<comment><USER3> That is a much better solution than the "marker" or arrow approach that I've seen in many video games. The arrow approach basically only gives directional information, doesn't offer much feedback in terms of distance from the edge of screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I too have seen this before, but I believe the point that the author was making was an observation of the hand signal's simplicity.

It's an unabiguous indicator of the physical situation he's observing, and doesn't involve any added complication of an ad-hoc signalling system (like waving for "come on" or "slow down" or "left/right", which are often somewhat ambiguous or at least require a second or two's thought).

A fleshy progress bar, if you will!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm guessing the author has never watched an aircraft being guided into it's parking spot at an airport. The ground crew does the same thing with the handheld cones/flashlights.

</comment><comment><USER6> Seriously ? This is something that I've been doing all the time when I assist someone in parking in a tight spot.

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree, it's an excellent example of good visualization. My dad taught me a few years ago, it's very effective.</comment>


Nasa to reveal 'surprising' activity on Jupiter's moon Europa - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2016-09-nasa-reveal-jupiter-moon-europa.html <comment><USER2> Seems like a good weekend to watch Europa Report. I highly recommend that film to realistic sci fi fans, just hang in there for the first half hour or so with its nervous cuts.

<comment><USER3> That was a great hard scifi movie. I hope with that and The Martian, hard sci fi in film becomes very popular.

<comment><USER2> For some reason I didn't really like The Martian (as in the movie). I guess after having read the book there just wasn't any surprise left, and I felt that this sort of story just works much better in book form. I prefer Europa Report over it. IMO Interstellar is the big popularizer of hard sci-fi though, or wouldn't you put it in that category? For me it took its liberties in just the right places where it's justified due to lack of more knowledge.

<comment><USER4> Coincidentally, I'm watching The Martian right now after reading the book last week. I have to agree, the movie just does not capture the same sense of surprise and careful attention to detail as described in the book. The sets are nice though, and it's pretty cool to see how the production team visualized the scenes and hardware compared to how I had imagined them. Seems like there could be some scientific inaccuracies too (e.g. hab repairs with only hardware store plastic film and duct tape).

Overall, I'd say Interstellar works much better in movie form, although perhaps that is partly due to the scale of the concepts it employs compared to The Martian, which is smaller and more technical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the NASA press release on which this is based: [http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-hold-media-call- on...](http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-hold-media-call-on-evidence- of-surprising-activity-on-europa)

<comment><USER6> Hubble observation of Europa. I wonder if it is something that Galileo missed

<comment><USER7> Hubble made the 2013 observations of possible geyser activity on Europa, but there have been no signs of any plumes since. New data confirming active vents on the surface would be thrilling but not necessarily _surprising_ \- I wonder what they have found.

[http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-europa-water- vapo...](http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-europa-water-vapor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> NASA has said this announcement is not about alien life, despite what this article implies.

[https://twitter.com/NASA/status/778605097798537216](https://twitter.com/NASA/status/778605097798537216)

<comment><USER7> Ugh, those reply tweets are worse than Youtube comments.

<comment><USER9> Aren't most tweets? I recall seeing an unfiltered stream of live tweets from all over the world and the majority were incoherent garbage. I think it's the casual nature of twitter and the ridiculous length restrictions that prevent any meaningful discussion beyond short jokes and announcements.

<comment><USER10> > unfiltered stream of live tweets

Sturgeon's Law, etc. There are a ton of great Twitter communities. Just don't ever click on a trending hashtag or read the replies of someone with >1M followers.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but the comparison was average twitter comment compared to the average youtube comment. Twitter is definitely worse. Not sure why I'm getting downvoted for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS—EXCEPT EUROPA ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE"

<comment><USER12> Already posted, and flagkilled, to this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://2001.wikia.com/wiki/Europa](http://2001.wikia.com/wiki/Europa)

<comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_\(moon\))

"The Galileo mission, launched in 1989, provided the bulk of current data on Europa. No spacecraft has yet landed on Europa, ..."

So far, we've been following instructions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's quite ironic that in a race to be the first to cover a story we now have articles without the central piece of information they are about. It's like click bait with a 2-day wait, but somehow with bigger acceptance.

Well it's actually PR exploiting this race, not just the newspapers themselves.

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice article about Europa mission:

[http://www.popsci.com/europa-or-bust](http://www.popsci.com/europa-or-bust) (Sep 2015)

</comment><comment><USER7> Hopefully more geysir activity.</comment>


Questhub - share your quests - <AUTHOR> http://questhub.io/ <comment><USER2> Technical nitpick: your front-end code blocks on mixpanel, and terminates if mixpanel doesn't respond. Usin noscript and blocking mixpanel, I don't get to see any content on your page.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I'll check this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These don't seem to make use of [http://openbadges.org/](http://openbadges.org/) unfortunately.

<comment><USER3> Founder here. Panicking, because I'm SO not ready for HN traffic! (Not technically, but product-wise.)

We probably will use openbadges - [https://github.com/berekuk/questhub/issues/40](https://github.com/berekuk/questhub/issues/40). But they are not implemented yet.

<comment><USER5> >not ready for HN traffic!

>product-wise

Are you implying you released a half-baked product? Nothing wrong with that, but you shouldn't wrap it up like that!

<comment><USER3> No, I'm just saying that HN traffic is a rare opportunity, and I know Questhub onboarding experience sucks, so most of these visitors will be lost.

With that being said, of course there are lots of plans for improvements (most of them listed in Meta realm), but people, mostly from Perl community, used it successfully for a few months.

<comment><USER6> I thought the on-boarding was rather pleasant! Keep up the good work!

I expected to be able to attempt other peoples' quests, but I don't seem to be able to. Is that outside your scope, just not implemented yet, or am I simply missing it?

<comment><USER3> Thank you!

If quest is based on a stencil, you can take the same stencil for yourself.

Otherwise, it's a feature called "Cloning", and it's not implemented yet: [http://questhub.io/realm/meta/quest/51f7ab8688a70b5f74000046](http://questhub.io/realm/meta/quest/51f7ab8688a70b5f74000046)

<comment><USER6> About 10 minutes after I posted this, you commented on one of my Quests and ended up turning it into a stencil, thus answering my question before I got back here to read your actual answer!

It's a neat idea, I'll have to check out the meta-quests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The rewards on these quests, suck. I'm going to skip them and just go power level through some dungeons.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why does Perl get its own category?

<comment><USER3> This service was originally Perl-specific, before I decided to expand on the idea, leave my job and work on it full-time.

I'm always looking for new communities, but it's meaningless to create empty placeholders for each other language and expect that people would come, we need some amount of initial content first.

If you want to help me start a new realm, either with ideas for stencils and quests, or with how to bring a group of people to it, please let me know. (My email is email@example.com.)

<comment><USER8> Since you're doing it full-time, how do you plan to generate revenue from it?

<comment><USER3> There are many possible paths I can take, but the one I'm considering the most at this point is freemium with private/protected quests or realms being a paid feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Basically, Questhub is your free public task tracker.

This copy really bothers me. Drop the "basically" \- it's totally superfluous and a bit amateur.

<comment><USER9> Okay, never mind. I read more:

> The more interesting is your quest, the people will upvote it, and the more > points you will get.

Okay, yoda.

Maybe get some (serious) proofreading or ask a friend to write your copy. I don't care how good your app is, the homepage is a joke.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough, thanks.

English is not my native language, but I should've paid more attention.

I fixed the most obvious mistakes and I'll try to find a native speaker to do a real rewrite.

<comment><USER10> I'd be willing to help edit or write (probably better at editing...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> lol @ the 'flying spaghetti monster' on Chaos realm

<comment><USER12> One of the most apt icons on the whole service, to my mind.</comment></comment>


Germany facing power blackouts  - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/9609777/Germany-facing-power-blackouts.html

<comment><USER2> hard to believe this comes from a serious newspaper, they mispelled the chancellor of germany's name, its Angela. Other than that, yea, the switch in Germany is looking pretty pathetic. There could be good ways to go about doing this (piping waterenergy from Norway for example), but of course no one wants waterpipes where they can see them (same deal with wind energy), so Germany's just shutting off nuclear power and can't replace it so this is to be expected.</comment>


Huawei Accused of Technology Theft - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/06/08/730898429/huawei-accused-of-technology-theft <comment><USER2> It's well known in the telecom/internet infrastructure business that Huawei:

a) bugged the hell out of Nortel's ottawa area offices, both physically, by rootkit, and by getting their own people hired to physically smuggle out documents and design data

b) Copied the entire DWDM / optical transport product line

c) Released a nearly identical product a few years later, and sold it at a ridiculously low price, effectively killing Nortel.

Many years later the vacant ex-Nortel office buildings came up for lease. One of the candidate tenants for that large of an office space were parts of the Canadian federal government, ministry of defence, etc. Every serious tenant passed on the space because it's so riddled with bugs.

[https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/the- my...](https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/the-mystery-of- the-listening-devices-at-dnds-nortel-campus)

[https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/dnd-may-abandon-1b-move-to- for...](https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/dnd-may-abandon-1b-move-to-former- nortel-site-because-of-surveillance-bugs-1.1477766)

[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/department- of-...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/department-of-national- defences-new-1-billion-facility-falls-short-on-security/article31685234/)

<comment><USER3> What a bunch of pure bullshit.

1\. None of those links provide anything like evidence or support of your accusations.

2\. It's absolutely remarkable that Huawei had somehow committed all these crimes and yet nobody has ever managed to prove anything significant in a court of law.

All we get are wild accusations and law suits that get thrown out.

Here's the really remarkable aspect here: the US government doesn't need to actually force propaganda on its citizens. If there's one thing we can learn very clearly from this entire ridiculous episode it is that American citizens and the American media will happily propagandize themselves. They will eagerly believe the most far fetched claims without a shred of proof, despite all actual evidence to the contrary, and they will spread those claims to each other in a kind of extremely intense decentralized disinformation machine. There's nothing else like this in the planet. You would think after Iraq Americans would learn even the tiniest bit of skepticism... But no.

I won't even bother pointing out any more how HN has devolved into a 24/7 racist anti-China Two Minute Hate system. At this point it's beyond clear that the community has abandoned any kind integrity. I don't think there's anything to be done which is why I'I've left and had to go through the embarrassing exercise if unrecommending the site to people I've previously recommended it to. People will say this is just a phase but I doubt it. When a community abandons any kind of Truth standard and just embraces bullshit I don't think it recovers.

<comment><USER4> Nice comment history.

<comment> whitexn--g28h Definitely a good read, reminds on when I was in Hong Kong and my guide would always say June 4 Incident around tourists from the PRC. The mainlanders would always immediately start defending the government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems like a lot of accusations against the Chinese and their tech is being force fed down our throats lately. Not surprising, since we are currently within a trade war and any opportunity to drive out Chinese competition would be taken - especially since Huawei would have been a huge competitor in the smartphone market (I heard their camera quality is currently the best).

I"m skeptical, as some of these accusations are not that far-fetched. What I'm more concerned of, is whether or not this is driven by some higher entity so that mass-hatred for the Chinese and their tech is accumulated, which would mean state driven media.

Despite all of these accusations of being one step behind, Huawei seems to be on the forefront of a lot of things - especially in the field of 5G, so it would seem possible that the US would pull some propaganda antics to make us reconsider Huawei and Chinese Tech

Its tough trying to read and discern for yourself anything on the web nowadays - as for this matter, I'm putting my thoughts on Huawei and Chinese tech on hold since I think both cases are true - That there are some concerns with tech theft against the chinese, but its also being extremely exaggerated.

<comment><USER6> The passive voice here is fascinating. Huawei did something! What did they do? They got accused.

Who is accusing them? AKHAN Semiconductor (and the FBI), a small company in Illinois whose primary product is these diamond-coated screens. Past their founder, the second person on their about page is their "Vice President of Government Affairs;" the third person listed on their about page is their "Global Security and Intelligence Advisor," a former senior CIA officer who joined the company in May.

If the roles were reversed - a small display-tech company in China that recently got a senior Party member and intelligence officer to join made accusations about America with the help of the Chinese national police organization, and Xinhua was reporting on it - I think we would be very skeptical!

<comment><USER7> I had a friend at Huawei about a year ago tell me how they had lawyers come in and prep them on the exact procedures they should follow in the event of an FBI raid. This was well before I heard anything in the news about China, Huawei, etc tensions.

Knowing this, I personally give quite a bit of weight to any accusation against the company. I have a hard time justifying in my mind that a company operating legitimately in the US would prep their employees on how to respond during an FBI raid.

<comment><USER8> Uber prepared their employees for this:

"At least two dozen times, the San Francisco headquarters locked down equipment in foreign offices to shield files from police raids."

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/uber-s- se...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/uber-s-secret-tool- for-keeping-the-cops-in-the-dark)

<comment><USER9> Uber, the paragon of virtue when it comes to following the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I had hoped to see discussed about these IP thief story is, what is our IP protection system doing. The patent and copyright system that has been the bane of every IP court case, are those system simplify disfunctional is the one use case that they're suppose to address?

Are huge corporation like Nortel/Samsung/Cisco suddenly too small to defend for themselves, in the US and EU, where I would assumed to be the biggest market? Is the Samsung that got sued for rounded-corner phone not thought of to patent their technique to put oled onto curved glass? (which sounds extremely patent worthy)

edit: grammar

<comment><USER11> These IP policies only work nationally, and internationally among friendly countries that respect IP treaties (Hint: China isn't one of them).

Next, these countries still get to export goods containing the stolen technology back to countries where the IP was stolen (perhaps via third-party distributors), since there is typically no provision barring that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unrelated but in their Bangalore office, they had sleeping bunks and showers in office premises and managers were routinely setting impossible deadlines and employees encouraged to work all day and night and sleep/shower in office if needed.

<comment><USER13> Sounds like the typical working conditions of an Apple Inc satellite. Also unrelated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cisco was a rip off of The Stanford Blue Box. AFAIK the deans of the biz school and CS school founded Cisco with tech created by Stanford and were almost sued. Stanford decided that it wasn't worth the potential bad press to be sueing faculty.

<comment><USER15> "Someone else does it too" isn't a very strong argument.

We may be approaching a world where all critical infrastructure must be open hardware and software, or face a Balkenizd patchwork of suppliers local to each market.

(Not a Cisco or Huawei fan myself.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wall Street Journal has recently published an article [1] detailing some of the most high profile technology thefts and espionage related to Huawei.

According to the article, here's a list of thefts and espionage attributed to Huawei, employees of Huawei, or people related to Huawei.

1\. Stealing tech at tradeshows:

On a summer evening in 2004, as the Supercomm tech conference in Chicago wound down, a middle-aged Chinese visitor began wending his way through the nearly abandoned booths, popping open million-dollar networking equipment to photograph the circuit boards inside, according to people who were there.

A security guard stopped him and confiscated memory sticks with the photos, a notebook with diagrams and data belonging to AT&T Corp. , and a list of six companies including Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp.

2\. Secure rooms impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei's U.S. offices :

Alarm bells included the discovery around 2012 of secure rooms impenetrable to electronic eavesdropping built in Huawei's U.S. offices, akin to facilities in intelligence stations around the world, American security officials say.

3\. Former staff admits stealing :

"They spent all their resources stealing technology," said Robert Read, a former contract engineer from 2002 to 2003 in Huawei's Sweden office. "You'd steal a motherboard and bring it back and they'd reverse-engineer it."

4\. Stealing tech from Cisco :

Eighteen months before the Supercomm imbroglio erupted, Cisco accused Huawei in January 2003 of copying its software and manuals—the first time Huawei had to fight a major international allegation of its theft.

"They have made verbatim copies of whole portions of Cisco's user manuals," Cisco said in its lawsuit. Cisco manuals accompany its routers, and its software is visible during the router's operation; both are easily copied, Cisco said.

The copying was so extensive that Huawei inadvertently copied bugs in Cisco's software, according to the lawsuit.

5\. Stealing tech from Motorola :

Email fragments recovered from Mr. Pan's laptop and included in Motorola's complaint show Mr. Pan wrote to Mr. Ren after the meeting, "Attached please find those document [sic] about SC300 specification you asked." Huawei later made a similarly small device, weighing half the SC300, which it marketed to rural communities in developing markets.

5\. 5G related tech theft:

Mr. Barker had never heard of "user specific tilt," which could multiply the number of signals from an antenna and tilt them to provide greater accuracy in communicating with mobile phones.

Mr. Barker had, however, heard of a conceptually identical technology, "per user tilt." He coined it seven years earlier, according to a Quintel lawsuit alleging misappropriation of trade secrets by Huawei. Quintel said it had shared the technology with Huawei in September 2009 after Huawei proposed a business partnership.

The partnership never came through. Huawei filed papers to secure a patent for the concept a month after their first meeting, using a document still emblazoned with Quintel's name and the words "commercial in confidence."

6\. Camera theft :

Rui Oliveira, a 45-year-old Portuguese multimedia producer, told the Journal he flew to Huawei's Plano offices in May 2014 to meet Huawei executives, who were interested in his patents for a camera attachment to smartphones.

In a conference room, surrounded by a dozen empty chairs, Mr. Oliveira recalls, two Huawei executives listened as he shared data on his product which he hoped to license manufacturing to Huawei. He recommended pricing it at $99.95.

"We'll talk later," he says Huawei told him.

Three years later, a friend in Portugal asked him why Huawei was selling "his camera."

"Huawei? That's impossible! What?" he remembers saying.

7\. Stealing songs :

Paul Cheever, a bespectacled preschool teacher who records music as The Cheebacabra, said his life has become overrun with paperwork and costs since he sued Huawei in California last year for taking his song "A Casual Encounter" and pre-loading it on Huawei smartphones and tablets for free distribution to its customers.

Mr. Cheever said in his court filing that he discovered the alleged theft after noticing user comments on YouTube that associated Huawei devices with his song.

8\. Stealing Tappy, the mobile phone testing robot, from T-Mobile :

In the U.S., Huawei engineer Xiong Xinfu had endured a nine-month fusillade of demands from Huawei's China-based engineers for information on how to replicate a robot called Tappy developed by T-Mobile to mimic an ultra-fast human finger and test a smartphone's responsiveness. In May 2013, Mr. Xiong eventually stole part of Tappy at Huawei's behest, U.S. prosecutors say.

9\. Stealing Solid State Drive technology from Silicon Valley :

In October last year, Yiren "Ronnie" Huang, a longtime Silicon Valley engineer and co-founder of San Jose's CNEX Labs Inc., accused Huawei in a lawsuit of stealing his firm's solid-state disk storage technology, used for managing data generated by artificial intelligence. CNEX said at a hearing in April that Huawei deputy chairman Eric Xu issued a directive that led to a Huawei engineer in June 2016 posing as a customer to steal CNEX secrets; Huawei denied wrongdoing. The suit is ongoing.

10\. finally, forcing employees to be dishonest :

Jesse Hong, a software architect at Huawei's California unit, said in a lawsuit that his bosses ordered him in November 2017 to use fake company names to register himself for an industry conference organized by Facebook Inc. The social-media giant had invited other companies to a Telecom Infra Project meeting, a collaboration on network design, but excluded Huawei. The suit was confidentially settled in April.

Mr. Hong said he refused to carry out the directive, leading his supervisor to unleash a stream of abuse and a threat: "If you don't agree on this, then you quit right now."

After Mr. Hong declined, Huawei fired him. The company says it acted in good faith.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is- litte...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-littered- with-accusations-of-theft-and-dubious-ethics-11558756858)

<comment><USER17> Most of this is not stealing, but instead copying and spying.

<comment><USER18> Curious pattern here where knowledge of secrets is considered stealing or not stealing depending on the subject.

I wonder if it's just different people reading or if the community itself views it differently.

After all, "it's not stealing if you have your copy" does mean parent is right.

<comment><USER19> Agree/disagree is not the only factor involved in voting - another one that I suspect is in play here is "interesting/uninteresting in the context of the present discussion".

<comment><USER18> A fair point. Surely in the question of intellectual property, it is just as relevant here as it is there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> wasn't samsung's foldable tech stolen as well? makes sense considering how fast huawei was able to get it.

<comment><USER21> I posted this a while back about why Samsung rushed the release of their foldable phone:

a) Samsung spent a ton of money and research in building foldable OLED screens.

b) This technology is allegedly stolen by a supplier and sold to BOE Display: [https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Samsung- supplier-...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Samsung-supplier-..).

c) Huawei uses the foldable BOE Display technology in its Mate X smartphone and is on track to be the first to release it.

d) Samsung panics as it learns that the technology it built might be released by a competitor earlier than them and consumers might think of them as less of an innovator. May sound silly but the Chinese companies have been getting a lot of traction recently e.g. P30 Pro.

e) In addition Samsung goes into lock down as it fears there might be more leaks to other companies.

f) Combination of d) and e) means that there is less real world testing of the device than for other phones. And hence how we got to this point.

<comment><USER22> I remember reading this post. What has changed since then is the on-track-ness of everyone =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think most people who follow the smartphone space will recall when Samsung accused Huawei of stealing their foldable screen technology and sure enough a few months later Huawei is demonstrating folding phone prototypes. I know the row with the US government is more about security threats, but I like to think of Huawei's implosion as the consequences of refusing to respect the rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER24> Would like to see Nortel given their assets.

<comment><USER2> The shambling corpse of the Nortel DWDM/optical transport/carrier transport product line was acquired by Ciena.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm curious of the political implications of this situation. You have one side (the anti Huawei side) that is aided by a very unpopular US president and US government institutions that are highly mistrusted. You also have the narrative that companies like Google and nations like Canada have been coerced into supporting this "assault" on Chinese interests.

It also doesn't help that there is a "trade war" in effect where many people believe collateral damage is going to happen, just or not... that it's simply a reality of a (proxy) war. Finally, you have the Huawei customers/supporters (from all over the world) that feel strongly these accusations are fabricated and entirely self serving to the US.

How do we navigate this mess and get to the core facts in an age where expert opinions and fact checking is undervalued? And, as it relates to China, where is the line between xenophobia and justified concern?

<comment><USER26> The US didn't chose Canada as an ally in this fight arbitrarily. One of the top other comments on this thread will tell you all you need to know about why Canadians are 100% down with going after Huawei: they killed off Nortel via IP theft.

I watched as friends' parents lost their jobs, as one of the leading telecom companies in the world was undercut by a competitor who has stolen their source code, IP, products, everything.

Trump doesn't like Huawei? Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

<comment><USER27> FWIW the Obama administration issued the original warning of distrust for Huawei, so none of this should really come as a surprise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> surprised? I don't think so, after all Huawei had admitted in video: 'We lie, we cheat, we steal!', and Chinese applauded! shame on them!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OifY3sqrmXQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OifY3sqrmXQ)

<comment><USER29> "Good artists copy great artists steal" [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Do these companies ever actually innovate and build social/intellectual capital beyond reverse engineering skills or are they gaming to pollute the waters so much that they risk sacrificing the golden goose to whom they steal ideas? This all sort of reminds me of the quip communism or socialism only works until those in charge spend all the money of those who are productive. If IP and the R&D expenses never become profitable and companies go under what then?

<comment><USER31> Well, in the USA, American industry got its start by stealing British technology.

At this point, China copying foreign technology is just the path of least resistance.

Eventually, China will be doing the innovating.

<comment><USER32> I really despise this kind of reasoning. You're literally comparing 200 year old history and justifying modern IP theft, and projecting forward.

<comment><USER33> Stealing works. If the benefit > risk, they should do it.

<comment><USER32> What an insane argument. Murder, Theft, Deceit, Assault, Terrorism "works" as well. Being a crow in the population of doves has short term benefits to the individual, the crow in this case, but soon more crows will pop up and the societal balance turns into chaos.

I'm sure we need not argue this obvious fact. Are you really condoning that stealing OK if it works? I'm speechless.

<comment><USER33> >Murder, Theft, Deceit, Assault, Terrorism "works".

Depending on the context, yes. Murder, for example, if I'm in a remote island and someone is going to kill me and they are weaker than me, then yes murdering them first works, the benefit > risk.

Likewise,in the context of Huawei, stealing works.

Note that I'm not saying the US shouldn't do anything to prevent/retaliate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> According to the interview with NPR the product was sent to the US and returned via mail, presumably a US carrier.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'd be throwing my phone in the trash right about now. I would venture to guess all Huawei data is going to China.

<comment><USER17> Do you really own a Huawei phone? I think anyone that do trust them to the same degree now as when they bought it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Huawei Accused Of Technology Theft

In other news, water is wet.

<comment><USER37> debatable

<comment><USER38> You are right water being wet is debatable

<comment><USER39> Depends on the temperature and pressure of the water I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Again?

</comment><comment><USER40> It's kind of funny to speak of "stealing tech" when it's the foreign companies themselves who give Chinese manufacturers all that's needed to set up production lines to make the tech. Like, what did you expect, that they wouldn't run third shifts or sell the stuff to whoever paid them for it?

<comment><USER41> > Like, what did you expect, that they wouldn't run third shifts or sell the > stuff to whoever paid them for it?

Yes. Because of those pesky things called "laws" and "trade agreements". It's still theft even if it wasn't always difficult to do.

<comment><USER42> I mean, you have a point, but it's inevitable. If a person pays you to do something, then you find out they are selling your work for an order of magnitude more than you're making, it's human nature to at least question this, at best mimic it, laws be damned.

<comment><USER41> You seem to be justifying crime because it was so easy to commit that you might as well.

Yard ornaments might be easy to steal, I mean, heck, people just leave them in their front yard over night. But it's still theft, it's still illegal, and even though the people made it easy there should still be a penalty for the theft.

<comment><USER42> I think most people would agree that idealogical theft is far different than physical theft.

Not saying I agree with said theft, but when making deals with known questionable actors, it's a bit of a given.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How a No-Name Chinese TV Brand Came to Dominate the Amazon Charts - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/sethporges/2016/11/14/how-a-no-name-chinese-tv-brand-came-to-dominate-the-amazon-charts/ <comment><USER2> TCL is a top brand with high quality products in China. Also has large market cap ([https://www.google.com/finance?q=SHE%3A000100](https://www.google.com/finance?q=SHE%3A000100)). It just didn't have a presence in US before. Calling it a No-Name Chinese brand only shows ignorance of the author.

<comment><USER3> You need to understand irony in English culture before accusation, or author won't be writing about this brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They certainly invested a ton in their CES presence around the time when they launched. Their booth was rivaling in size other large, long established electronics giants.

Additionally, they bought the naming rights for the famous Chinese Theatre in Hollywood around the same time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Forbes requires that you turn off your ad blocker to see their page. Is there another way to read this article?</comment>


How To Land a Job at Google - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/06/12/how-to-land-a-job-at-google/

<comment><USER2> Mashable/Bryan did a nice job on this article, but I wanted to share a few notes on the process:

1) Phone screens: If you aren't referred or we don't really get a good feel from your resume what kind of developer you are, there are preliminary phones screens which can seem...insulting to experienced programmers. Then you get a phone screen with an engineer.

2) On-sites: These are often with people who are -not- on the team you may be joining. We try to avoid team interviews for a number of reasons. But you are likely to talk with 1 or 2 people from a future team .

3) In engineering interviews, you shouldn't see stupid manhole questions. You should see 'how would you do' questions, preferably ones that allow you to talk about how it should be solved, write on the whiteboard code that would solve it, and then what kind of optimizations you would apply to the problem, etc... Through this discussion we can see what kind of developer you are. This should ideally be a discussion among peers about how to approach a programming/Google relevant/computer science problem.

4) Get a reference. Want the best kind? Write open source code that gets used and point it out in your cv/res. That'll lead to Googlers who you can use to put your resume in the system (the best way to go, trust me) A reference that has familiarity with your code and a subsequent link to that code in your cv is gold if you are a decent programmer. I've see people who interview really poorly be saved by their code submissions.

Happy to answer other questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello cdibona! Your notes make a lot of sense and will prove to be useful!Thank you for that! Also, I think point number 1 is pretty rarely done nowadays, correct me if i am wrong! Plus, Google's way of recruiting is changing continuously and i think we can't make a certain comment on how it would be in the future. What you are telling here applies for now, and it's good and i really think no. 4 is a brilliant point! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We stopped doing phones screens a little while ago (work at a small startup in seattle). Check out mrinterview.com</comment>


Ten beautiful computers - <AUTHOR> http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/05/14/beauties.html

<comment><USER2> I loved some of these - that Cray "Bubbles" picture is classic, and even though I never saw a ZX Spectrum, the color scheme is awesome 80's. Some are a miss, though - the CPC 464?

If I were making a list, I'd add the Connection Machine CM-2: [http://www.digibarn.com/collections/parts/connection- machine...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/parts/connection-machine- chip/cm2-500.jpg) Now that's what a supercomputer should look like, not all these boring racks of commodity systems we get nowadays.

There should also be something from SGI - a bunch of pics are here: <http://www.geocities.com/sgipics/>

I'd also add the Tera MTA, a supercomputer system I'd bet few people have seen: <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6270/su-tera.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm surprised they omitted the NeXT Cube, the original Macintosh, Silicon Graphics Indigo, and the Be Box. Oh well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

</comment><comment><USER4> I remember lusting over a Sam Coupe as a cool upgrade to our Spectrums as a kid. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SAM_Coupé.jpg>

Also some of the Amstrad machines were quite beautiful in their ugliness <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Amstrad_PPC512_open.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER5> Without getting into computer nostalgia, I'd like to mention the Amiga 600. Although I can't say I ever gave much thought to the looks of it as a kid, I think it would still look great on my desktop today.

<http://www.amigau.com/aig/a600.jpg>

<comment><USER6> ugh, I remember how we used to mock 600 - mostly because of the specs, but it was kind of ugly too. 1200 on the other hand had the specs and the looks out of all amigas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice... but to me there's nothing like the stark retro-futurism of the Commodore 8032-SK: [http://www.1000bit.it/lista/c/commodore/8032sk/8032sk_mio2.j...](http://www.1000bit.it/lista/c/commodore/8032sk/8032sk_mio2.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER8> My dad's first computer was a DAI. So rare that I never heard anyone else mention it. It still looks good though.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DAI_Personal_Computer.jpg>

<comment><USER9> Wow - we had once of those at school - 2mhz 8080 w 48k. ISTR it had some interesting bugs in the BASIC interpreter that would trigger a stack overflow. The first clue was the screen RAM filling with the runaway stack - on it's way to overwrite the as yet unsaved program.

It did a very good job of highlighting just how good the newly released BBC micros were that displaced it.

<comment><USER8> ah! According to the Wikipedia page, the BASIC interpreter was written from scratch and quite rapidly. It was apparently much faster than the contemporary MS Basic. Wouldn't be surprising if it was buggy, although my dad did a lot of programming on it and without to much trouble as far I remember.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This made me laugh:

"D-Wave Systems of British Columbia announced a prototype _quantum computer_ in January, 2007. _It can play Sudoku_."

Woohoo!

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but it can play _every game of Sudoku ever_ \- all at the same time!!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice, I have a ZX80 and a 48k Spectrum (as well as a ZX81) on my bookcase. They are as nice to look at as they were to play with.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not a computer system but a Holographic Modulator looks pretty nice: <http://bayimg.com/CaPEMAAbL></comment>


SQL, Java Top List of Most In-Demand Tech Skills;Python and AWS Coming on Fast - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/sql-java-top-list-of-most-indemand-tech-skills <comment><USER2> This was mostly based on this article: [https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/today's-top-tech- skills...](https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/11/19/today's-top-tech-skills/)

What's is interesting is to go half way down the page where it says "Suggest Skills" where you can type in other entries. For example Golang or Rust or Fortran or Cobol or whatever.</comment>


Discover domain names with the world's first domaining game. - <AUTHOR> http://www.domainhole.com/domaindrop/

<comment><AUTHOR> All domains you see in the game are available for registration. If you see something you like, go register it!

</comment><comment><USER2> unique idea but way too easy, repetitive, with too many breaks in the action.

<comment><AUTHOR> You must be a fast typer!</comment></comment>


Perfectly preserved bronze age wheel unearthed in Cambridgeshire - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/19/archaeologists-excavate-bronze-age-wheel-cambridgeshire <comment><USER2> >> In the fire, possibly started by a cooking blaze that got disastrously out of control

>> A skull... possibly originally casually buried in the river bank just outside the door of the larger house

>> The wheel... may originally have been hanging on a wall.

>> the people of this settlement lived on and in the water and were rich enough to all but ignore the abundant food a few feet away... Instead the bones and food traces reveal that they were eating quantities of lamb, along with pork, beef and venison, and various grains.

What is with the overabundance of conjecture with no evidence to back up such claims? Whose first impression of a settlement burned to the ground is that it was likely caused by an out of control cooking fire? Why speculate about a wheel hanging from a wall? A skull is assumed to have come from a burial? The lack of fish bones implies they ate no fish?

I'm curious how much of this comes from the archeologists versus the writers of the article. When I hear "settlement fire" and "skull", I imagine an assault on the settlement involving an intentionally set fire. But I wouldn't publish my baseless speculations in an attempt to fluff the number of words in an article.

<comment><USER3> > What is with the overabundance of conjecture with no evidence to back up > such claims?

Welcome to archeology.

<comment><USER2> Haha, I suppose that's true. There will always be the few tidbits where there is enough evidence to make factual statements about what is found at a site. The rest is going to be speculation; some of it based on educated guesses, and some of it pure imagination.

I can understand the wonder and excitement that comes with imagining how the pieces fit together. Everyone likes to dig (pun!) their teeth into a mystery. If an article is going to contain more than the proven facts, I just wish they'd lay out multiple possible scenarios rather than a single "it was probably _this one convoluted option_ ".

Then again... as long as they explicitly label all the conjecture with "maybe/possibly/probably", they're at least not being outright misleading - which leaves room for each person to wring their own brain for other options. I guess I want the people who know the most about these things to lay out more reasonable possibilities for me, instead of making me put in the effort to imagine it all for myself. :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting definition of perfect preservation. Also, I have a nit here. Why do these types of articles show like 1 shot with the actual object (typically out of focus and in the background)?

<comment><USER5> I agree that articles like this usually suck for pictures. But in this case the video attached actually provides a great summary and a good deal of close ups.

<comment><USER4> Ahh. I avoided the video due to the custom player. Typically, those are more trouble than they are worth.</comment></comment></comment>


Browser wars go back to future over video formats - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2011/01/guest-post-browser-wars-go-back-to.html

<comment><USER2> Is Google really that concerned with saving a measly $6M per year? It looks like they would pay it back anyway ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361442> \-- less efficient codecs, greater server loads ).</comment>


Unique fingerprint due to 3-year-old bug in Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/4nq56v/you_have_a_unique_fingerprint_due_to_3_year/ <comment><USER2> This is utterly nonsense. The settings there are the defaults. It even says so on the website. "Default Preferences"

Just a quick trivial check of my local preferences and those "exposed" on the site show stuff either missing or not as per my tweaks.

In other words, this is exposing what the version of firefox you're running is.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the Reddit comments: apparently this is false, the "leak" is just showing FF's defaults.

<comment><USER4> Maybe, but panopticlick is still able to fingerprint me to the point where I'm unique.... over 17 bits of identity in my browser (means you can identify me in a pool of up to 2^17th people).

Try it yourself.

[https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

(click "Test me" then "show full results"

<comment><USER5> There's a few means of fingerprinting which are pretty much impossible to protect against, most obviously what fonts you have installed, which in combination with user agent and screen-size actually gets you a heckuva long way with fingerprinting.

Hopefully we can try and vastly reduce the leakage from navigator.plugins, but that might be hard to do without breaking the web, sadly.

<comment><USER6> I wish they would show the rarest fonts, so that I could contemplate their removal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Extension which attempts to fix the problem

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no- resource-u...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/no-resource-uri- leak/)

Bugzilla report [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=863246](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=863246)

</comment><comment><USER4> So this information is in a reply, but it deserves a top level reminder: most browsers leak your identity.

panopticlick is still able to fingerprint me to the point where I'm unique.... over 17 bits of identity in my browser (means you can identify me in a pool of up to 2^17th people).

Try it yourself.

[https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

(click "Test me" then "show full results")

<comment><USER7> They _really_ overstate their statistics by pretending each variable is independent.

6 bits from my screen resolution. Another 2 from browser plugin details. 5 from my Http_accept headers. 5 from system fonts. It's an iPad. Every single iPad is going to match on every one of those variables. You don't get to just add them up and say "Yep, 100 bits of info, I can uniquely identify this device!"

Similarly, the 10 bits of WebGL fingerprint and 7 of canvas fingerprint might narrow it down to a single model of iPad, but I doubt the "extra bits" of the canvas fingerprint tell you anything that the WebGL fingerprint didn't already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Honestly why do we care? Yes Tor and stuff should have fixed this but honestly for 90% of users things like user agents give away versions anyway

</comment><comment><USER9> The sample size is <very> small. I was the only person to use Safari Technology Preview beta 6 so I was "1 in 133,647".

Having said that, I tested it with Firefox and found some unused plugins that I either removed (Google Talk) or set to never activate (Picasa - couldn't find how to remove it from Googling, Firefox or the Picasa app).

</comment><comment><USER10> This report is apparently invalid, but it is true that Firefox has a pretty huge number of old bugs, some of which probably have unexamined security implications. Some will be old enough to vote in a few years. Most are "obviously" minor, but I worry about interactions. Is there something like Metcalfe's law for defects?

</comment><comment><USER11> Not sure about it, I've tried with my FF Beta and it seems it can't fingerprint my browser in such details.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does this affect TorBrowser?

<comment><USER13> Yes

> Information from resource:// is leaked, including the fact that I'm using > Firefox, the platform, the browser's language (not just the content of the > Accept-Language header), and whether or not I was using Tor Browser Bundle.

<comment><USER14> The fact that you're using Tor is obvious based on your IP address. I believe TBB uses the same set of defaults for the other parameters across all platforms (i.e. Linux, OS X and Windows users all appear to be using Windows 7), so that fingerprint would be the same for all TBB users (meaning it's not really much of a fingerprint).

<comment><USER15> TBB tries to conceal the actual OS you're using. Apparently this breaks that protection and makes it possible for website to detect the actual platform and that it's TBB. See [https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8725](https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8725)

<comment><USER14> Okay, that's pretty bad if it leaks the actual platform. My assumption was that that the way they spoof the platform (and related values) in windows.navigator and the user agent would apply here as well. If that's not the case, that fingerprint protection is pretty much useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Has this just flown under the radar for three years? Why wasn't it noticed and fixed?

</comment><comment><USER17> is this the secret behind the FBI's apparent tor fingerprinting ability they have been parallel constructing around lately?

</comment><comment><USER13> I think that's not a news anymore, that Mozilla is too busy with IoT now.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I teach freshmen about Web 2.0 (and maybe entrepreneurship)? - <AUTHOR>

I may have the opportunity to teach/TA a 1-unit exploration course at UCLA - the professor and I think Web 2.0 is a good topic to explore but I'm trying to find out what topics/case studies would be good to spark the imagination and future learning.  I'm planning on calling in my friend who runs his own FML-type venture, if there's anyone in the LA area who would be willing to come by, drop me a line. <comment><USER2> REST and Javascript, at least a high level, they are the backbone. Also Amazon is a great case study of rethinking business as services. This eventually led to EC2 and S3.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought Web 2.0 is old news :p

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I should have been more forward thinking in the terminology :D. Not sure I want to go into speaking about the cloud and moving all our services away from local processing. : )</comment></comment>


Mint has test bank accounts on the production site - <AUTHOR> I am surprised to see that a tool that claims bank level security has these test accounts enabled on the Canadian production website.
How can users trust that the bank login information they are filling in for a specific bank account is actually being redirected to a real bank or some test account under the hood? I know there is no way end users can ensure that but this is pure negligence on Mint's part in my opinion.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/QGlrsBJ <comment><USER2> Banks should have a read only api available to access your account for financial apps like this.

I just can't understand giving your full user/pass for financial accounts to a 3rd party.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's sloppy, but why is redirection a concern? If there's an issue that redirects login information to a test account, it could just as easily be redirected to any other account (test or not).</comment>


Tor Browser Exposed: Anti-Privacy Implantation at Mass Scale - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@movrcx/tor-browser-exposed-anti-privacy-implantation-at-mass-scale-bd68e9eb1e95#.x08nb2cxk <comment><USER2> Step one:

* Attacker gains custody of an addons.mozilla.org TLS certificate (wildcard preferred)</comment>


Explaining the semantic web [Google docs presentation] - <AUTHOR> http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dwzv3r6_143qtq9cf9

<comment><USER2> Good summary.

The biggest question I have for the semantic web people is: what will be the killer app that gives each individual site (and not just semantic web companies) the strong incentive to use a semantic web standard, _even when that standard isn't widespread yet_?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really worth having a look at. Summarises all things semantic web excellently.</comment>


Where We Came From, State by State - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/upshot/where-people-in-each-state-were-born.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=LargeMediaHeadlineSum&module=photo-spot-region&region=photo-spot&WT.nav=photo-spot <comment><USER2> I used to live in Idaho, and its interesting to me to be able to track back trends that we anecdotally could see happening, but had no hard numbers on. For example, one of the major trends has been the population volatility, and particularly California immigration due to the lack of population and low land cost.

In 1950, 1% of Idahoans were from California. In 1960, 2%. In 1970, 4%. In 1980, 7%. In 1990, 7%. In 2000, 9%. In 2012, 12%.

To me, this is particularly cool when compared to a state like Alabama or Tennessee. Literally no change in relative immigration from neighbors except for a slow loss of native children.

In fact, you could create a volatility scale for states (how homogeneous is their immigration over time) and it would go from almost zero in the East to crazy in the West. Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada being particularly interesting / volatile states.

I wonder if there's a correlation to the volatility and the general political leanings of those locations. IE, does politics diffuse along these same lines? If California, was 75% "liberal" and 25% "conservative" over time, could we estimate that Idaho has gotten about 7% more liberal in the last 40 years? or is the immigration self selecting? (people want to live near folks like them?)

<comment><USER3> There are two big trends:

\- External immigration to large population centers in New York, California, Washington state, the Washington DC area and Illinois.

\- Inward migration of Americans leaving those denser areas to states such as TX, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, etc. where land is cheaper and the standard of living is higher for the middle class. This is not represented in the graph because it only shows the origin of state residents. [http://www.governing.com/gov- data/census/2010-census-state-m...](http://www.governing.com/gov- data/census/2010-census-state-migration-statistics.html)

<comment><USER4> I can speak towards migrating to Oregon. My cost of living has dropped by about 25% while my overall quality of life, sans anything money-related, has gone up.

<comment><USER5> SSHHH! You can't let the secret out. Remember what we tell the outsiders:

"It rains here. All the time. We never see the sun. You'd hate it here."

\--says the Oregon resident from Michigan by way of Arizona. :)

<comment><USER6> Shhhh, this is our line in Seattle. Also, it doesn't apply to the eastern parts of either state.

\--says Portland-born but long time Seattle resident who now lives in...Beijing (BTW, the pollution is real and not a story just made up to keep you away).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The NYTimes groups all immigrants as "Outside the United States".

If you are interested in where the immigrants from each state come from, check this out:

Map: Where The Majority of Immigrants Come From By State [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8179477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8179477)

It also plots it excluding Mexico, as Mexico is the #1 for most states.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been looking everywhere for the inverse of these graphs = states that former-residents of each state moved to.

I used to live in a state that many went to college in, but none of those stayed after graduation.

<comment><USER9> Is this along the lines of what you're looking for? [http://www.governing.com/gov-data/census/2010-census- state-m...](http://www.governing.com/gov-data/census/2010-census-state- migration-statistics.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting to me was that there were plenty of foreigners in multiple states before 1960, it then dropped mostly to it's lowest in around 1970 and then grew again to today.

So what happened in the run to the 70s that so few foreigners live in CA, NY, WA etc...

<comment><USER11> Tight immigration restrictions were put into federal law in the 1920s, and as people born before that decade aged, they made up a smaller and smaller percentage of people in each state. The peak period of immigration to the United States, as a percentage of people who had already arrived, was about the turn of the century between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 loosened a lot of restrictions on immigration that formerly applied to whole regions of the world, resulting in a new increase in net immigration (but still not all the way back to historical peak levels).

One pattern that is long-lasting in these data is the extremely low rate of settlement of foreign-born persons in most states in the deep south (that is, the states of the old Confederacy). States that attracted more immigrants tended to be those that were more dynamic and with more personal freedom, and then the presence of immigrants in those states helped preserve the dynamism and personal freedom, setting up a virtuous cycle that attracted other immigrants.

Disclosure: my family background is one of ancestors who arrived in the United States well before the Ellis Island immigration station in New York harbor was even built, well in advance of the first major federal restriction on immigration, which was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. My ancestors through whom I gain my family name arrived, father and son, after being born in New York state and then settling for a while in Wisconsin Territory, to Minnesota Territory sometime in the early 1850s. My wife, by contrast, is a first- generation immigrant herself, who first arrived in the United States in 1985.

<comment><USER12> The extreme low rate of settlement etc. in the deep south had a good deal to do with the weak economy.

<comment><USER6> Also racism and lack of air conditioning, problems that have gotten better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would love to see something similar about Europe. I've always heard Americans move around more. I wonder if it's true.

<comment><USER14> Straight from Eurostat via ([http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....](http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Migration_and_migrant_population_statistics)):

[http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/images...](http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/images/b/be/Main_countries_of_citizenship_and_birth_of_the_foreign_foreign- born_population%2C_1_January_2013_%281%29_%28in_absolute_numbers_and_as_a_percentage_of_the_total_foreign_foreign- born_population%29_YB14_II.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, 25% of people in New Hampshire came from Massachusetts! No wonder our politics have been shifting recently.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how relocations along towns near state boundaries, such as moving from the Arkansas side to the Texas side of Texarkana, reflect overall interstate migrations.

<comment><USER17> According to Google, Texarkana has 32k residents, so I'm betting not much.

But examples of moving within a metro area that has a larger population (NYC->NJ/CT, DC->MD/VA) might actually be statistically meaningful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada were the most interesting to me. They all had considerable migration from every region of the US, plus international.

<comment><USER19> For CO and NV, I'd say it's the Rockies/skiing and Las Vegas respectively, which attract a specific personality type respectively.

Arizona, I have no idea.

<comment><USER18> I know Arizona is big for retirement. Mild weather, low taxes, lots of outdoor leisure activities like golf.</comment></comment></comment>


GM Puts IT Outsourcing in the Rearview Mirror - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506746/with-computerized-cars-ahead-gm-puts-it-outsourcing-in-the-rearview-mirror/

<comment><USER2> I work in an enterprise environment larger than GM. Our leaders could learn a lot from this quote:

 _"Everybody can make a decent enough powertrain. But what differentiates you is what you can do with your software," he says of car makers generally. "Companies have to be careful that they don't outsource the crown jewels."_

Slowly but surely, I hope that we can learn that when used correctly, IT is more than a cost center, it is a competitive advantage, even if you don't think your product is IT related.

<comment><USER3> and that's why US cars suck ass compared to German ones. because, no, actually it is really hard to build a good powertrain. and this is what customers actually buy from you. your customers don't give a shit what you can do with your software unless it leads to better products for them.

but hey, IT stroke-fests are fun.

<comment><USER4> GM builds the automatic transmissions for many BMWs. Clearly some Germans think that GM knows what they're doing.

<comment><USER5> Being a diesel fan, and a 4x4 enthusiast I am pretty familiar with transmissions from different vendors. GM and their Allison division are know for producing some of the most reputable transmissions available. Their TH400 line is a staple in drag-racing, off-roading and most any high power application. In high power applications it is a given that the GM TH400 will be the transmission selected even if it is a Ford or Mopar powered vehicle.

They are correct in their assumption that software more and more is becoming the defining factor. Software has improved the automatic transmission to the point where humans cannot perform as well as shift points being set by software. We are amazing creatures that can instinctually feel many variables but if you can account for all of those variables and more in software we can be outperformed. Power train technology has reached that point and even vendors like Ferrari have taken notice. Vehicle connectivity and automation is the next revolution. Moving parts will be reduced to a minimum as software controls replace mechanical control parts. It has been a long time coming but software has reached the point where embedded controllers are expected and do provide the longevity of the mechanics it is replacing. The process started a long time ago with fuel management but much like the PC revolution and the mobile revolution, the proper convergence at the proper time has not taken place in the automotive market. I think it may be here now, and I think the shakeup in Detroit was needed to bring it about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Boeing technical fellow LJ Hart-Smith wrote an spot on paper about outsourcing, his point was when the work is outsourced all of the profits associated with the work will be outsourced as well. GM seems to have gotten this.

[https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith- on-...](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/69746-hart-smith-on- outsourcing.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> It's not about who does the work, it's about how the work is done. You need continuous delivery and tight feedback loops with the end-user. Outsourcing typically fails because of long iteration cycles and feedback through contract negotiation. An insourced IT department can fail in the same way. The successful outsourcing i've seen did two week sprints with a strong local product owner who spoke directly with stakeholders. The worst outsourcing i've seen was contracting out whole projects that spent six months building "stuff" to do a big bang delivery at the end. That's the model that people doing outsourcing prefer, and it's the model almost guaranteed to fail.

I do agree about the risk of outsourcing the core business, but outsourcing makes sense if it's not core, as long as you use the right model. Ironically you have to really know how to build software well to recognize which outsourcing partners are any good. The companies best equiped to outsource are least likely to because they are already in control of their IT processes.

<comment><USER8> Of course, every hour you are asking of the stakeholders is an hour they aren't working. Many of these people prefer to work on a Maker's schedule as well.

I've also seen these stakeholder meetings devolve into political battles that end up tearing the project apart due to bikeshedding concerns. These sort of projects are best outsourced to Product Owners with no organizational political affiliations. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is coming full circle for GM - they, not long ago, bought EDS and had all of their IT run internally. It got so uncomfortable, they had to separate EDS out to not much avail because of the stranglehold EDS had gotten on GM's operations.

Having in-sourced IT can work, but it takes a lot of work to make sure you don't end up with just a boat load of B & C players that become complacent and work just hard enough to keep the status quo.

I suppose since GM has now experience both ways they can make it work this time. They are hiring many of the same old EDS (now HP) employees though [1] - hopefully they'll turn the old mindset around and be succesful in getting things done the way they intend to.

[1]<http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20121018-712331.html>

</comment><comment><USER10> Long overdue. There are multiple layers of contractors and subcontractors living off the Big 3; 100M dollar corporations that do nothing but increase the rate on the billable hours. The amount of bureaucratic waste is astonishing.</comment>


Foam cap on beer is actually good - unlearned what I learned in college - <AUTHOR> http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/lifestyle/columnists.nsf/adamjadhav/story/3F32B9542B478F90862575D600649043?OpenDocument

<comment><USER2> >> we filled our red plastic cups to the brim with Bud or Miller Lite or Icehouse...

I would say that if that's the caliber of beer you're drinking - which makes up a significant portion of most people's college beer - then screw the head, and just fill that red cup up all the way. No one drinks Icehouse or Bud for the flavor; they drink it to get drunk. You could pour some Bud perfectly into a freshly cleaned glass, and it would still taste bad.

Once you've moved on to better-quality beer, then yes - bring on the head.</comment>


Espresso-hole – EspressoBin-based personal router with ad blocking - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/arturgs/espresso-hole <comment><USER2> Oh the Espressobin. The poor thing has a dozen or so variants, and each one requires a different u-boot image. Fortunately they ship with the u-boot image on SPI flash, so in theory you could just let it be and not worry about the variants... except for the massive security issue where the stock u-boot bridges all ethernet ports.

With a stock u-boot, from the time the bootloader brings up the ethernet switch until Linux takes over it with dsa and bridge-utils, your LAN ports are directly bridged with your WAN port.

<comment><USER3> I'm really curious, as someone with little knowledge of these kinds of security considerations, why is it bad to have the wan port and the lan ports bridges?

<comment><USER4> wan = outside firewall

lan = inside firewall

You don't want to bridge them because then it just bypasses the firewall.

<comment><USER5> That's not true.

LAN traffic is still going through the router, where the firewall supposedly runs.

Regardless of other devices having a public IP, if the router blocks forwarding packets (which is one of the main functionalities of a firewall), then the device(s) behind it are just as protected as if they had private IPs.

It's just a bit easier to setup forwarding as it doesn't require NAT, and it's also easier to open up by accident but having a public IP does not bypass the firewall.

<comment><USER6> Depends, a typical use case of this device would be a router, or a firewall, so the point GP makes is very much valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Throwaway account. Proceed with caution. This board was the only one which fitted our requirements for a commercial product. We actually found it more stable than for instance the people on the Armbian forums. But in the end we've moved on.

Lesson learned (probably sounds obvious, but hey): SBCs are nothing without software. The quality and commitment of the developer to kernel support is everything. All boards have issues, and they can be worked around in software.

The espressobin got a lot of community support, but even with that it still isn't quite enough.

We need more boards like this that aren't just a copy of the raspberry pi. For personal use I would buy one of these tomorrow.

With hard core documentation and support this thing could have been the start of something great. Lets hope that can still happen.

Not to take anything away from the hard working folk who are currently supporting this. And from Marvell. Your efforts are greatly appreciated. I just hope there is a way to get you more resources

<comment><USER8> How about this one?

[http://www.banana-pi.org/r2.html](http://www.banana-pi.org/r2.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks promising but lacks official support from ARMBIAN, which was crucial for choosing the espressobin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who has an espressobin at home, and uses it as a personal router, this device is great.

However, after enough configuration ( vlans, etc ), you'll find that it is not capable of routing gigabit traffic.

Mine is currently CPU bound ( ksoftirq ) at approximately 300 mb/s.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't know a ton about single board computers. Can anyone comment whether the use of an EspressoBin board here has some significance over, say, a Raspberry Pi?

<comment><USER2> the espressobin(2xA53) is way less powerful than an rpi3(4xA53), let alone 4(4xA72), but has a minipcie slot enabling you to add a WiFi card of your choice.

Additionally, the Espressobin has a Topaz ethernet switch onboard with 4 ports (1 to the SoC, 3 as gigabit ethernet rj45). This is both really spiffy and scary (see my other post). The spiffiness is that the switch can be controlled by Linux and is integrated with bridge-utils. It looks and mostly behaves like a software bridge, but the packets never hit the CPU, only the topaz chip.

<comment><USER11> The RPi 4 is the first one with an Ethernet interface that isn't connected over USB. All the earlier RPis are seriously handicapped for networking usage by that limitation.

<comment><USER2> sure, but the espressobin has a gigabit _switch_ onboard. and that switch is controllable from Linux, and treated as a bridge device, easily manipulated from brctl.

while the rpi3 spanks the espressobin on CPU, the espressobin destroys pretty much every other dev board (including rpi4) in the price range with regard to network functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is cool, but I would not even bother with the WiFi dongle, just get a proper AP wired to it.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wouldn't touch EspressoBin products with a mile long pole if I could. The board is a mess and as undocumented as it can get to the point where even labels on the board don't match what the uboot images is flashed to it. Even when using their suggested images for ubuntu, the board is unstable and cannot run without kernel panicking every 15-30 minutes.

Flashing new uboot image is a mess too. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Why? Who knows. Since boards are often mislabeled, flashing most of the time does brick the board making it useless paperweight that eats 12V5A power supply.

All in all, stay away from it if you can. There are much better SBCs on the market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, my experience with custom kernels or the suggested Ubuntu version were totally frustrating as well. I would stay away from these. However, ARMBIAN is stable and the board becomes fully usable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This would be a really fun weekend that I would soon curse as I have to support it for years after I forgot everything about how I set it up. Just like my Pi DNS server that uses PiHole backed by a DNS over HTTPS server. I think...

</comment><comment><USER15> I read about a project once - maybe anyone here can help me find the name of it again. As I recall:

\- popular in Europe, particularly Germany or the Netherlands?

\- some kind of mesh routing, but connected to the Internet

\- reports of people using it having better connectivity to the Internet at large than just by connecting to their ISP unaugmented. If I recall correctly, this was because the "magic" mesh detected routing problems (such as censor blocks) and routed traffic through other nodes

 _Did I dream this up or does this ring a bell with anyone?_

<comment><USER16> Hi!

Think Freifunk[1] is what you're looking for, it's rather cool in anycase!

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

<comment><USER15> It is rather cool. But I don't think that was it. Maybe it was [http://guifi.net/en/](http://guifi.net/en/) which seems similar to Freifunk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It would be optimal if it includes a local DNS over HTTPS resolver. Otherwise it becomes a choice of running a separate local resolver upstream or avoiding DoH for the sake of ad blocking.

Does anyone know if pi-hole supports TLS SNI?

</comment><comment><USER18> I have one of these. While the device is great, be advised that if you upgrade your kernel you'll most likely hit a cpu bug. The only way to avoid this is by limiting cpu freq at 600mhz.

<comment><AUTHOR> With ARMBIAN I keep updating the kernel without any problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wonder if DPI/IDS could be setup on this or if it is too slow, I've been looking for a cheap DIY IDS.

<comment><USER20> It's pretty slow TBH. I use mine to run pihole and samba and samba will max out the CPU.

I tried to use mine as a firewall for my Google Fiber but w/ just basic rules enabled it would max out around 500mbps, I imagine I could probably get 50-100mbps out of it running a decent IPS ruleset, but I haven't tried.

The Topaz switch chip uses the RGMII 1gbps uplink to the CPU so even though there's 3 1gbps ethernet ports you'll only ever get 1gbps through the device if you have to do any software level processing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know it's more but sg-1100 is this device but the extra $ helps fund pfsense and you can support. I just really like pfsense but never tried pi hole so not making a comparison.

<comment><USER22> Seems like a little much to sell the same hardware for triple the price.

Edit: Is this contraversial? It is literally the same hardware with pfsense installed and a case. $155 for an ARM A53 is a crazy markup.</comment></comment>


Open letter to Airbrake.io - <AUTHOR> http://leonsbox.com/blog/2012/11/20/open-letter-to-airbrake-dot-io/

<comment><USER2> I hear concerns like this a lot. It's one of the reasons we built <http://honeybadger.io> \- The modern alternative to AB.

<comment><USER3> does it have a free option?</comment></comment>


MI5 to install 'black box' spy devices to monitor UK Internet traffic - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2274388/MI5-install-black-box-spy-devices-monitor-UK-internet-traffic.html

<comment><AUTHOR> No where to hide: What drones won't see, black boxes will.</comment>


Soft robotic jellyfish in the Atlantic - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2018/10/06/soft-robotic-jellyfish-get-pumped-in-the-atlantic <comment><USER2> Cool.

I'm hoping someone adds baleen style filters. Then we can start mitigating all the microplastics.

</comment><comment><USER3> Would turtles try to eat these?

<comment><USER4> Yes, probably. And some fishes also would try a bite. Looks the kind of thing that a Moray Eel would try to chase inmediately. Cool gadget in any case.</comment></comment>