Power Is Overrated - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/opinion/power-is-overrated.html <comment><USER2> In order to understand why power is coveted, we need to understand human motivation. The best theory I've read on human motivation, comes from Drive. As described by scientific research, once you go beyond our primal need for food, safety and companionship, there are 3 primary factors that motivate us. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

Mastery is the ability to master and perfect a craft you care about. This can most likely be achieved without having power over others. No problems here.

Autonomy is exactly what is described in the article. The freedom to avoid being micromanaged. On the face of it, you don't need power over others to be autonomous either.

Purpose, however, is a lot trickier. If like the author, your purpose in life is simply to engage in the arts, you're all set. You don't need power over others, and you won't understand why anyone would want that.

But suppose your purpose in life is to save millions of lives, like what Bill Gates has done with his foundation. Or to help all Americans get universal healthcare, like what Sanders wants to do. Or to help mankind become an interplanetary species, like what Musk is aiming for.

It is near impossible to fulfill such purposes without wielding power. Either political or economic or cultural. There are some purposes, even the noble kind, which can only ever be accomplished by shoring up a lot of power.

To go one step further, a lot of people try to fulfill their life purposes through their jobs. They want to help people, and so they work at a non- profit. Or they want to further scientific progress, so they work in a research lab. Which is great, except that by becoming a cog in a powerful machine, they are surrendering their autonomy in the process. They find themselves having to choose between autonomy and purpose. Regardless of what they choose, they fantasize about having enough power so that they can have both. They dream of being rich enough to start their own non-profit, not just work in one. They dream of heading a research lab, not just being a cog in someone else's.

People like the author are in an enviable position, of having their cake and eating it too. For others with a different purpose in life, power is the only way of having the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER3> I think it's simpler than that. Humans desire political power because there's an evolutionary advantage to being in charge of your tribe. Primates care about the politics of their tribes, so do we. No need to delve into secondary, non-specific human needs. It's a direct, intrinsic motivation.

<comment><USER4> No, people desire power (political or not) for more than one singular reason.

Outside the realms of true global (or even country, or state level...) power, I've been driven to "power" before because I felt that my part of the community was being wronged and I had the attributes to fix it. When I fixed that wrong, I relinquished that power and went back to my place of relative obscurity (the way I like it).

Was I motivated by some basic thirst towards being the leader of my community? Nope. I was driven by anger and injustice for my community.

Are there are basic instincts at play? Probably, maybe, I don't know, but the simple point I'm making here is that you can't reduce it to evolutionary advantage of being in charge, otherwise people would never relinquish the power.

Humans are social creatures, and wildly vary in what they offer the group, and when they feel the need to.

<comment><USER5> > I relinquished that power and went back to my place

Sulla resigned the dictatorship -- as he said he would -- and that was a surprise to many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The freedom to do what you want is entirely predicated upon those with power. It so follows that in order to truly secure the freedom to "do what you want", the only real long term viable solution is to attain power. Try telling those living under an autocracy that they should give up any hope for power and just be happy doing whatever they want. Nietzsche describes this perfectly in _On the Genealogy of Morality_ and _Beyond Good and Evil_. The only way to truly be master of ones destiny is in creating the circumstances under which one will exist, not simply living at the whims of another. Those who think they are achieving true actualization through the shunning of power are simply deluded, or lucky enough that their local circumstances have provided a modicum of stability and freedom.

<comment><USER7> You're confusing power over other people and power over your own circumstances.

<comment><USER8> The very beginning of the article asserts that they're essentially the same. In a world with more than one person alive and interacting, it's true.

<comment><USER7> The beginning of the article says the exact opposite.

<comment><USER9> Yes and its wrong

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sure, more power than what you have is overrated if you have enough power to control your own destiny. For those who don't have the privilege to fully control their own destinies, power is not overrated at all.

The older I get, the more that I see power is incredibly underrated. When you are young you think that the world is fair and that if you do the right thing, you will be fairly rewarded. When I got older I realized that power and the ability to obtain it is vastly more important in your ability to make the change you wish to see on the world.

Those with power and the ability to use it and gain more of it will always effect greater change than those who focus on doing the "right" thing.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. Power is like money or sex or oxygen: it's only important when you don't have enough of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ask any French kid about "Les Animaux Malades de la Peste"[1] (in English [2]). You need power to survive / for a better life, freedom is not enough. When times are good, be happy and forgetful. But when times turn bad (plague, war, financial crisis, family problems), it might be too late to struggle for power.

[1] [https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/les-animaux-malades- de...](https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/les-animaux-malades-de-la-peste)

[2] [https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/animals-sick- plague](https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/animals-sick-plague)

</comment><comment><USER13> The point of being a boss isn't just to have power over others (although I'm sure some do enjoy that) but to get more stuff you want done by delegating it. Of course a danger is eventually you don't get to do any of the stuff you want to do yourself because you are spending all your time supervising the people who are actually doing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The other way of looking at it: The point of being a boss is to help your people get more done by organizing them and coordinating their efforts.

<comment><USER8> That's the point of view where the thing being done is a free variable; "whatever it is they're doing, my job is to help them be better at it". It makes sense at the low-tier management level, but someone somewhere has to have a goal, or the whole enterprise is a colossal waste of time and resources. This kind of thinking infecting top-executive level is IMO one of the problems with a lot of big companies.

<comment><USER14> >but someone somewhere has to have a goal, or the whole enterprise is a colossal waste of time and resources.

free economies overall perform very well without having anybody setting goals. In healthy environments productive activity can very well be emergent without any sort of dictat.

In fact long plans and visions at big companies are often exactly what makes them slow, they operate like old tankers that set course on some pre-planned direction and aren't flexible enough to switch course simply _because they organise decisions top-down._

<comment><USER15> _free economies overall perform very well without having anybody setting goals. In healthy environments productive activity can very well be emergent without any sort of dictat_

My understanding is that internal corporate stuff tends to not be subject to the same market forces that are what _make_ free economies work well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pretty much any time I hear discussion of power I think of Jesus' famous exchange with Pilate in John 19

When the chief priests and the guards saw him they cried out, "Crucify him, crucify him!" Pilate said to them, "Take him yourselves and crucify him. I find no guilt in him."

7 * The Jews answered, "We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God."

8 Now when Pilate heard this statement, he became even more afraid,

9 and went back into the praetorium and said to Jesus, "Where are you from?" Jesus did not answer him.

10 So Pilate said to him, "Do you not speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you and I have power to crucify you?"

11 Jesus answered [him], "You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above. For this reason the one who handed me over to you has the greater sin."

<comment><USER17> I've contemplated this exchange a few times over the years, but I never feel like I really understand the point that Jesus is making.

<comment><USER18> Pontius pilate has the power to choose yes or no, but he also must choose yes or no, and this is enforced by the people with power over Pilate. His job to act as the justice system. The people who handed over Jesus forced pontius pilate to make that decision, but could have just as easily not done anything.

Think about it this way: suppose you know someone who smokes a lot of weed at home in an illegal state, and their neighbor rats them out, and police discover an ounce in the person's house. That person goes to jail for a month and gets a felony. Who has been more unethical: the person who snitched for adversarial reasons, or the people in the justice system which did their job enforcing the rules given to them?

<comment><USER19> This may be a trick of translation, but couldn't " _The one_ who handed me over to you has the greater sin" refers to God (the Father)?

<comment><USER20> I'm no theologian, but I'm pretty sure the Judeo-Christian God is "perfect" and without sin so no. To sin is to go against God's will or nature. Only humans and I guess the devil can do that because of implied free will.

Once again, not a theologian.

<comment><USER19> Haha IANAT either, but they have at best a tenuous claim to authority in an discipline that's unfalsifiable.

I thought the idea is that everything is or at least was created by God, so that would include Sin. It's same as that "could God create a rock so heavy even He couldn't move it" paradox.

Anyway, to me the quote indicates Jesus's loyalty despite knowing the torture and death He's about to experience, as well as indicating Pontius Pilate's relative insignificance in the whole thing. As the parent says, PP is mostly a gear in the machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >I would define power as the ability to make other people do what you want

I don't think anyone agrees or uses the word 'power' that way, instead, power ought to be defined as:

>the ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality.

Getting this definition wrong confuses the author throughout the article:

>So freedom is a kind of power; but a certain kind freedom also comes with powerlessness

Okay, the definition the author provided literally stated power is the ability to make other people do what you want and freedom is the ability to do what you want. I fail to see how in that mode freedom is a kind of power. I think the author doesn't really believe their own definition.

The author goes on to question if great leaders (e.g. Alexander the Great) have freedom, comparing him to the homeless philosopher Diogenes. That's ultimately a personal question; if Freedom is indeed the ability to do what you like, you have to ask "could I do more of what I like as Alexander the Great or Diogenes?"

>Underlying the pathetic quest for all power is fear: the fear of death.

Underlying the pathetic quest for mediocrity is fear: the fear of failure. We can sit here speculating about the psychology of the average and the ambitious all day, but it provides nothing useful other than additional zings for $ECHO_CHAMBER to enjoy.

>The sanest people, I think, are those happily unafflicted with ambition

Cattle are pretty happy, sure. Expounding on the mental health of "the ambitious" (whatever that means to the author) seems pretty disingenuous and like an attempt to control the creative expressions of others.

It's frightening that people actually think this way.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Doing what I want, and not being made to do things I don't want to do

I'm beginning to think the complete opposite (at least to some degree). I'm terrible at making choices that make me happy whilst I'm pretty good at finding value in serendipity. Generally nowadays I'm trying to make meta- choices if that makes sense - committing to things that remove the number of options I face whilst having a reasonable chance of providing fruitful activity.

</comment><comment><USER23> We, humans, are social animals. Which it also means that we organize in hierarchies. Ideally, these hierarchies are competence-based hierarchies; but the reality is that at times these hierarchies are hacked by a few to establish power-based hierarchies, which are not stable.

Be it a PTA, or a social group, or a team, or a start-up, or a HOA, or a government entity, from a small town to a huge country; competence-based hierarchies and hence power lead to prosperity and to the greater good, while the arrogance of a pure-power based hierarchies lead to continuous issues.

We've all seen those.

</comment><comment><USER24> Couldn't boredom be a reason for people chasing power?

Blaise Pascal had interesting thoughts on it: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." ― Blaise Pascal, Pensées ([https://amzn.to/2I6kTpv](https://amzn.to/2I6kTpv))

We have an inherent desire to engage with the world and other people, to reach out for new stimuli. Often the most interesting path is the one where you influence people and that is by nature a form of power.

Reminds me of the video that was recently posted: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcBzOesw7sc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcBzOesw7sc) This is truly a man without ambition. For me, that way of living seems like the definition of hell.

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant > _Underlying the pathetic quest for all power is fear: the fear of death. > Some billionaires are building posh survival compounds and funding > Frankensteinian research programs to defeat genetic decline and death._

Where the hell did that come from? Is the author saying we shouldn't even _try_? Why, because trying to reverse ageing (and its consequences) is _unnatural_? Because corpses in a fridge are _disgusting_? Because our fictions are full of tyrants and supervillain trying to achieve immortality? Because there's some natural "balance" that would require the many to die so the few could be immortal?

I sense a cognitive dissonance here. As far as I can guess, most people living now will die in less than 120 years. Possibly everyone. If we do achieve significant life extension, there's a good chance it will only be accessible to rich people, at least for a time. And the longer we live, the wider inequalities may rise. That's unfair, so it's better if _everyone_ dies, right?

Wait a minute, you'd solve inequalities by _killing everyone_?

I'm tired of those stabs at transhumanism that don't even try to justify themselves. Yes, many post humanists scenarios are a hell even Lovecraft couldn't comprehend. See Robin Hanson's speculations on mind uploading to get a taste. But assuming that _all_ such scenarios are bad is a failure of the imagination, I think.

\---

To the author's credit, the paragraph ends with a Woody Allen quote about "living on in [his] apartment" that is spot on. Almost contradicts what I've quoted, so I'm not sure what the author actually thinks.

<comment><USER25> A rare gem of an opinion to find on HN. There are a sea of unjustified and incomplete stabs at transhumanism and anything in that realm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The key quote:

> Ambition has led me to spend 20 years of my life in a clamorous, filthy city > I cannot afford, and to devote far too much attention to the soul-shriveling > business of self-promotion.

</comment><comment><USER27> This article, and it's sentiment, reminds me a lot of the very current "zero waste" movement.

Bear with me ...

When you are sufficiently detached from every mode of production and delivery and generation (like growing food, or building houses or working in the back of a kitchen) then it's very easy to look around your (modern, remodeled, beautifully appointed, first world) kitchen and ... stop buying plastic baggies or only use reusable containers, etc.[1]

But in reality, several levels below your level of life and consumption, _an enormous amount of waste_ is being produced just to maintain the very modern life you lead. It's really not that interesting or impactful that you cut out most of the 1% that you actually touch inside the walls of your house.

This article sounds like the same kind of self-delusion ...

After violently conquering a continent, enslaving or killing or (otherwise subjugating) the indigenous population, and maintaining a political and economic lock on more than half the world (through direct and indirect warfare, economic colonization, and otherwise), the author, who holds an equal share with all of us on whose behalf this was done, opines (possibly from that same kind of kitchen) that he can't think of any use for power over others.

In reality, an _enormous amount of power and violence_ has been, and continues to be, wielded on the author's behalf. It's really not that interesting or impactful that he doesn't want to "boss other people around".

[1] All very positive actions and not to be impeached.

<comment><USER28> I remember my friend arguing with my other friend that he is not responsible for what the US does as far as intervening in other countries' affairs. My friend clapped back and said are you not reaping the rewards of cheap oil and low-cost labor?

<comment><USER29> There's something that always tugs at the back of my mind about these arguments, and I think I've worked it out. It's the difference between responsibility and blame.

Say your parents went deeply into debt in an excessive and unnecessary way to raise you, but they genuinely thought they were doing the right thing, and you've found yourself needing to pay their debt off. You may or may not be _responsible_ for the debt, but you're definitely not to _blame_ for it. It's an imposed and somewhat unfair duty rather than the consequence of your own actions.

To me it intuitively feels like some responsibility is demanded by profiting from an outcome, while blame is only transferred by intent. A lot of arguments don't make it clear that there's a difference between the two. Your friend might be responsible for making US foreign policy less belligerent, but he's not to blame for it: his responsibility is a moral weight that's been unfairly foist upon him by other people, and it doesn't mean that he, personally, caused every death in the middle east since he was born.

<comment><USER30> I have always believed that in a democracy every citizen bears some responsibility for what the state does.

If you didn't vote then you basically supported the winner. Inaction is a kind of action when someone must win and a decision must be made.

And if you did vote and your "side" didn't win, then did you try to convince anyone? Not getting involved is a decision of some kind.

The way I see it, if you fail in that basic of responsibility (voting and trying to convince people to support your view) then you share some blame for whatever the state does. If you support what the state does or the outcome then you definitely own a share in the blame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Whenever I watch shows like House of Cards or Narcos, the thought that I keep having is, "why? why do you want this so badly? what's the point?"

My theory is that seeking power is very evolutionarily satisfying, and it has no ceiling. This means that, even for people smart enough to see its diminishing returns as a means to actual happiness, it can provide an everlasting narrative for one's life, which can create a kind of happiness. It can fill an existential void for certain people who a) choose to ignore the question of what it's all for, and b) are sociopathic enough to not care what effect it has on others. You always have something to work towards. Satisfying existential quandaries is a highly desirable goal in itself.

<comment><USER32> Whatever powerful attribute you are aiming for (money, looks, fame, pure power), it's much easier to get more of the same than to extend to other attributes.

The CEO of Alibaba tried to make a movie, but it was crap, he didn't become a famous movie star.

Kim dot com tried DJing, he failed, he's just a rich guy as well.

Famous people can easily fail in their business as well: Jamie Oliver just closed a lot of restaurants, even though he had loads of play money and his name on them.

Of course there are exceptions, for example investing is easy if you are famous enough to personal get help from great investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just because you don't understand the desire for power doesn't make it "pathetic" or a "fear response" as the author puts it. This sounds more like post-rationalization than actual introspection.

Success in large scale projects always goes to the better organized. Without a unifying, guiding plan, confusion reigns, and projects fail. And that plan needs to come from someone not only with vision, but also the ability to enlist the labor of his fellow man. In other words: power.

"Underlying the pathetic quest for all power is fear: the fear of death." \- This is a very narrow point of view, and completely discounts the useful and good ways in which power is used.

"funding Frankensteinian research programs to defeat genetic decline and death." \- Notice the use of loaded words to dismiss attempts at dealing with the oldest affliction known to man: aging. Even if it doesn't lead to immortality, imagine living to 80 in the body of a 20 year old! Imagine the improvement in the quality of life for everyone! We're learning how the cellular degradation process works, and how to fix it. Why would you want to disparage that? Because you want someone to blame for your ennui, and the "billionaire tycoons" and by extension anything they like makes for an easy target.

"The sanest people, I think, are those happily unafflicted with ambition — whether for power, wealth, fame or achievement — who want only to work at some useful job, to love someone and to live in a nice place with some wind chimes on the porch."

This is beginning to sound like the Communist Manifesto.

<comment><USER34> > The sanest people, I think, are those happily unafflicted with ambition — > whether for power, wealth, fame or achievement — who want only to work at > some useful job, to love someone and to live in a nice place with some wind > chimes on the porch.

The passage above reminded me of this:

I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbour -- such is my idea of happiness. And then, on the top of all that, you for a mate, and children perhaps -- what more can the heart of man desire?¹

1: Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness (1859)

<comment><USER35> >A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them

"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." [2]

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Actually I think power is underrated and poorly understood, you have to understand how power functions to understand a lot of society. A lot of how it operates is shrouded in secrecy and deception.

</comment><comment><USER37> How much life advice do people want to take from NYTimes journalists? Seriously, I'm sure if you met one at a party you wouldn't be prioritizing their advice over anyone else's

<comment><USER38> If you met one at a party you'd be slamming your drink so you have an excuse to exit the conversation.

<comment><USER39> I might find them interesting and engaging enough to talk to at a party. I won't speak for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> As much as parts of the article resonate with me, what isn't addressed is that freedom from external forces doesn't necessarily include freedom from one's own impulses -- which can be as, if not more, restrictive.

True freedom not only remove external restrictions but also requires purpose beyond ones self.

</comment><comment><USER41> The form of freedom he describes is just another form of what he's calling power, and he even admits to that in the article, when he writes: _Freedom is the defensive, or pre-emptive, form of power_.

I have recently come to the realization that a lot of people seek or defend "freedom" as another form of power, and that is a very egotistical definition of freedom that has a lot of the same anxiety-inducing side-effects as the most vain power-seeking behaviors. Being free doesn't mean that you can't also yield to others and get over your selfishness. We should all have times, maybe lots of them, in which we yield to others and admit that many instances of our own personal notions of "freedom" are basically a whiny temper-tantrum when we fear not getting what we want.

<comment><USER42> Why should one get over one's selfishness?

<comment><USER41> Selfishness will cause you anxiety and guilt. It will cause pain to others. It will make you a jerk.

A society of jerks inflicting pain thrives less than one where we are appropriately empathetic and charitable to others.

If you're going to argue against selfless empathy, etc. I suggest we have different axioms and this is not a discussion that will go well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> _Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other._

Carl Gustav Jung

<comment><USER44> He says that, but he married the richest girl in Switzerland. So, yeah, I guess watch what people do and not what they say?

<comment><USER43> That's irrelevant; Jung is making no claim about himself there.

It's also a cheap shot, unless you have some special ability to read the inner state of another person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> An important topic that warrants a lot more discussion, but the article is a bit shallow.

Ambition is connected to power but not identical. Power is often about power over people, but not always. Some people want to be free and some don't (at least in some contexts).

Freedom is closely tied to understanding, but the world is so complex now, how can we understand? We are all like an 8-year-old king surrounded by a bunch of people who also don't really understand the world.

Freedom is also a source of identity in the US. Could it be used to bring people back together here?

</comment><comment><USER46> "You know, 'cause like, people say money's not everything, But money, you need money to do what you wanna do, like money is power, honesty is power, truth is power, but at the same time they tell you like Ain't nothin' more important than the mula You ain't really eatin' boy, you gotta get your food up" \- Donald Glover

Maybe the "Rat Race" is inevitable and is main cause for strive of power, but maybe we too narrowly define power in this discussion.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is this writer, much like myself, a representation of what Dr Calhoun's experiment revealed as "the beautiful ones"?

"During his studies, Calhoun coined the term "behavioral sink" to describe aberrant behaviors in overcrowded population density situations and "beautiful ones" to describe passive individuals who withdrew from all social interaction." [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun)]

I too have little if no desire to lord over anyone. Is this passivity? Withdrawal? But what I lack in that ambition for power I magnify in my desire for autonomy. Yeah, I have my usual moments of feeble aggression which can be mistaken for a deeper and more permanent desire for power (eg. stuck on the road, impatient in a queue, wanting a prospective sale to go through etc) where I fantasize power to influence outcomes - but the moments pass just as quickly when I realise the absurdity of that sort of wish.

Autonomy OTOH is sacred for me. Absurdly, I will fight till starvation than be co-opted into someone else's creative ideals (especially when I do not agree). I'd rather go hungry than submit to power dynamics in this regard.

Loved the article.

<comment><USER48> The ability to withdraw is an expression of power in and of itself. Autonomy is the power that many (most?) are looking for. It's just that many are incapable (or believe they are incapable) of achieving autonomy without getting others to do work for them.

Programmers try to find the best of both worlds: they try to get machines to do work for them, so that they don't need to impose on people to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> There are sentiments in this article that I think will mislead people into doing nothing with their lives. For example,

> "Ambition for the more obvious and boring forms of power — political, > financial — may not always be inherently evil, but it does tend to have > unfortunate side effects in the form of poverty, slave labor, pogroms and > unwelcome territorial advances."

This is how ambition works in a zero-sum world. It doesn't mention technology improving the lives of people. There's a related essay by Paul Graham, "How to Make Wealth" [1]. The "Wealth and Power" section is relevant.

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

</comment><comment><USER50> "With great power comes great responsibility." I heard that in Spiderman. It still resonates with me. I think it applies to any level of power. Whenever we are responsible for something, we have some power over it.

I'm responsible for my children. I have some power over them, whether I want it or not. Responsibility is skin in the game. If we aren't responsible, we will eventually be disposed of power.

When some want power, but not the responsibility, that's a red flag.

<comment><USER51> Everyone wants power but not responsibility, nobody _wants_ to accept that their actions have consequences, they just accept them, sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> > Underlying the pathetic quest for all power is fear: the fear of death. Some > billionaires are building posh survival compounds and funding > Frankensteinian research programs to defeat genetic decline

Yes. I think it's important to understand the M.O. of the people who quest after power, and what types of systematic errors come along with that.

</comment><comment><USER53> For most of history, and I suspect for a lot of future too, you could only be free if you had the power to make others not fuck with you. Even with the best intentions, if you are not powerful you will be crushed anywhere but in the fraction of developed, civilized countries which may go poof at any time.

</comment><comment><USER54> Does anyone have a list of smart career options and career advice for people that fall in to this camp (or resources that help navigate)? It's really really hard to chart courses that don't seem to eventually bump up against the accumulate power or falter hurdle.

<comment><USER55> Humility

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> the author of this article fundamentally misunderstands what power is. Power is not just the ability to get other people to do what you want. Anything that allows you to achieve a desire is "power". To say "I don't want power" is like saying "I don't want to ever fulfill my goals."

</comment><comment><USER57> Power isn't zero sum. Through complexity, power can be manifest along new dimensions.

</comment><comment><USER58> Power is important. The author himself writes about how he has spent X years trying to get more power/money when he can now just move to the countryside and enjoy life. And write when he wants. This is power.

Which to me, is not something an Intern would right, as you have student loans to pay, perhaps dreams to build. When you are successful and write for NY Times, or code for Google for a few years, it is easy to write "Ah, fuck this shit! I can now move to the country side and do whatever I want, but I don't do this. Will this be my last year here?", because even though you don't notice, you are very powerful. You have financial independence to do this, because you have fought very hard to go big on your career. So essentially, you have power, even if you don't write for NY Times, or if you aren't POTUS anymore. You made some big bucks or respect, that enables you do to things most people can't even dream of.

Then it looks "Overrated". What I think is Overrated is being poor and left behind. Financial independence is one of the most powerful things one can have. Sure, most of the people after they have it, they still work and run after more power and money. But having a little bit of power and money is one of the most important things in life, without that, you have no leverage in society to be free.

If after this you will chose to seek more power, that's your choice. Coming back to my initial example, if you were the intern that can barely eat lunch with your colleges and your mom is sick and need money... shoveling shit to become more power seems like a good thing.

<comment> david-gpu I would differentiate between power and freedom, as the author does.

Power would be the capacity to affect other people's actions, often arising from having a position of authority over them, but can also occur in the form of influence over them (soft power).

Freedom would refer to having the means to choose our own actions with fewer or weaker external constraints.

The author has achieved some degree of financial freedom, but not much power from what I can see, beyond the limited power that his modest net worth can buy.

<comment><USER59> Freedom requires power over others. You can't avoid work unless others are providing you food. You can't get shelter unless you can keep others from taking it from you.

The real confusion is living in a society where most power is hidden and records are given meaning.

<comment><USER60> Freedom requires power over _yourself_ , and a lot of people cede that power. Including Mr $100M up there.

<comment><USER61> Mind expanding on this? I'm curious as to what you are alluding to.

<comment><USER60> This guy has a company doing $100M and I bet you his kids wish he was at home more. He talks a good talk about cashing out but he has already done enough. What is he waiting for? Theory: he doesn't know how to stop. Being a captain of industry is tied into his identity and he can't give it up. It has power over him.

One definition of addiction is when you engage in a behavior despite its deleterious effects on other aspects of your life. A lot of things we do to "feel control" are closer to that end of the spectrum than they are to healthy behavior.

People live beyond their means and their boss can make them violate their ethics simply by threatening to fire them. In many, many cases this is a bluff, and someone who's financially stable can tell their boss no, or take a risk on a new job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> >The wish to have power over others is altogether alien to me;

There is experimental evidence that endorphins are released, especially for males, when dominating or winning. Humans seek endorphins. If the concept is alien to you, it is not the concept that is foreign... you are the alien.

</comment><comment><USER63> "Like gravity and acceleration, these are two forces that appear to be different but are in fact one. " AGGHHH! Had to stop reading.

<comment><USER64> It continued to be a pretty tedious article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Lost me at "Like gravity and acceleration, these are two forces that appear to be different but are in fact one"

<comment><USER66> That's a reference to general relativity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Yeah but freedom isn't power. You can lose yourself in possibilities

</comment><comment><USER68> Power is very addictive to certain personalities. Give me money, any day.

</comment><comment><USER69> Please don't send url where you have to login.

</comment><comment><USER70> > but if a president accidentally lets slip an authentic, uncensored thought > it's called a "gaffe" and costs him approval points.

That was true before Trump.

</comment><comment><USER71> Here's a quote by Frank Underwood / House of Cards:

 _Money is the McMansion in Sarasota that starts falling apart after 10 years. Power is the old stone building that stands for centuries. I cannot respect someone who doesn't see the difference_

Amusingly, I find it's the other way round. Power dies with with the people who have it. Money can last for many generations, especially when put to good use.

<comment><USER72> Royal families make a good counter-point. As do political dynasties, e.g. the Kennedy and Bush families.

<comment><USER73> The Kennedy and Bush clans wield some power, true.

But nothing compared to those who control the media. (Look at the generations of families that run Hollywood.) They control the narrative, which controls the masses, which choose to empower the Bush/Kennedy/Clinton alternatives.

<comment><USER74> Bushes : Bay of Pigs, prime suspects in Kennedy's assassination (means and motive), transforming Irak from the most prosperous third-world country into a hellhole, turning a blind eye to what was brewing just before 9/11 because their best pals Ben Ladens were involved... are you sure about your statement ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> You lost me at not not enjoying Settlers of Catan :p

<comment><USER76> That was my reaction as well. How can one's judgment even be worth considering after such a confession?

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Reminds me of this exchange in Game of Thrones: [https://images.app.goo.gl/AfvQNHv95YhR6L4o7](https://images.app.goo.gl/AfvQNHv95YhR6L4o7)

<comment><USER78> ...and yet nothing happened to him there...

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Unfortunately, to want power might be completely unreasonable thing to do, yet many people might choose to want it.

I mean, dogs still sniff around corners and mark them with piss, even though it is obvious to anyone that this activity doesn't make any sense and is completely useless.

<comment><USER80> Are you judging dogs by the standards of human behavior? It would be completely useless for a human to piss all over the place, but for a dog with orders of magnitude better sense of smell than people, that urine odor will linger and be picked up by other dogs.

A dog's sense of smell is so good that some studies have demonstrated they can reliably detect cancer in human urine.

<comment><USER79> No. Dog is "programmed" to do it. But it objectively doesn't make sense. (It might have made sense 1000 years ago, when dogs were not domesticated.)

So it's not unreasonable to expect that some behavior of humans is completely irrational, yet they do it.</comment></comment></comment>


Israel Hacked Kaspersky, Then Tipped NSA Its Tools Had Been Breached - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/israel-hacked-kaspersky-then-tipped-the-nsa-that-its-tools-had-been-breached/2017/10/10/d48ce774-aa95-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html <comment><USER3> This is what I read between the lines:

An NSA spook was working on his home laptop and playing around with some special NSA malware.

Kaspersky AV detected it - AS IT SHOULD - based on heuristic or behavior-based technology that just about every modern AV has.

The data was sent back to Kaspersky servers. This is also how everyone else does it, because this is how A/V companies create signatures that are pushed out to all other people who use Kaspersky so they can be protected against malware that could quickly go viral.

Israelis were poking around KAV servers and found the malware, and told the US Gov.

Those are the facts, right? Everything else is speculation, no? Did I miss something that proves the thesis of the story and the government accusations?

<comment><USER4> Wait, does it really send (suspected) malware home, without asking the user?

<comment><USER5> Yes it's among most antivirus packages advertised features. And example from everyones favorite anti virus vendor [https://home.mcafee.com/Secure/CloudAV/HowItWorks.html](https://home.mcafee.com/Secure/CloudAV/HowItWorks.html) but they all market a similar feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kaspersky has been known to collaborate with the Russian government and promote Russian interest. They've actively pursued state actors that are hostile to Russian interest, for example The Equation Group ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_Group)), which wouldn't be an organic part of the function or activities of a normal civilian cyber-security company. Such an "innocent" company would have no reason to get involved in cyberwarfare between state-actors, while Kaspersky is heavily involved in such activities and pouring considerable resources into them. This is especially damning since they are clearly targeting state-actors that are antagonistic to Russian interest, such as the US (Equation Group) and its allies (Israel), yet are totally silent on pro-Russian activity.

For anyone who's been at all aware of its history, it is clear that Kaspersky is at the very least actively collaborating with the Russian government, most likely doing its bidding, and possibly can be described as a cyber-security arm of Russian security forces.

I'm honestly surprised their products aren't already banned across all US government agencies.

<comment><USER7> Way down this thread, so time to ask the question: Do American anti-virus, social media, and search companies do exactly the same, but for the US military?

I've always found it suspicious that Russia and China created their own social networks, email providers, and search engines. Almost like they know the power of a capable search engine or social network for intelligence gathering purposes.

Google and US anti-virus companies must work closely with the NSA too.

> Kuok repeatedly expressed fears that he might be dealing with an NSA, CIA or > FBI agent, but continued to negotiate with the undercover officer, even > cautioning him to avoid referencing the items by model number in e-mail, > because "your country has this system to analyze" e-mail for keywords.

[https://www.wired.com/2010/05/kuok](https://www.wired.com/2010/05/kuok)

Also after the "theft" and premature release of Stuxnet by Israel, I wonder how strong the collaboration between the US and Israel is.

> A 43-year-old former Akamai employee has pleaded guilty to espionage charges > after offering to hand over confidential information about the Web > acceleration company to an agent posing as an Israeli consular official in > Boston.

[https://www.pcworld.com/article/239187/akamai_employee_tried...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/239187/akamai_employee_tried_to_sell_secrets_to_israel.amp.html)

> Facebook, for example, previously announced its DeepFace facial recognition > system is capable of determining with 97 percent accuracy whether two images > are of the same person. The company, which itself is accustomed to criticism > that it views users as guinea pigs, is able is make such accurate > identifications because of the network of images from which it draws, > something that could take police agencies a decade or more to build up.

Snowden worked for Dell as a cover for his intelligence work. Russia told their military to move off Linkedin the moment it got acquired by Microsoft. Do Dell and Microsoft work closely with the DoD and should this concern non-US citizens that rely on their software and hardware?

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/15/mapping-israels- marketing-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/15/mapping-israels-marketing- technology-industry/)

<comment><USER8> Facebook has CIA related people on its board.

<comment><USER9> Really? Which ones?

<comment><USER10> Poster is probably referring to Peter Thiel who's company Palantir was funded through CIA contracts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Our company uses the enterprise version of Kaspersky. But if we drop this over surveillance issues then it would be a pretty hypocritical to switch to AV software from the USA. Since they are proven to do the exact thing that Kaspersky is now suspected / blamed of doing.

So, fellow Europeans, what now? Avast? Any other options?

EDIT: Ok so I found a pretty useful Wiki list[1] with European made AV products. I haven't used them so I can't judge to their effectiveness, especially the enterprise versions. But here are some alternatives to US / RU anti virus suites.

Czech Republic: AVAST, AVG, TrustPort

Finland: F-Secure

Germany: Avira, G-Data

Iceland: FRISK (F-PROT)

Romania: Bitdefender

Slovakia: ESET

Spain: PANDA security

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

<comment><USER12> Use Linux :) there is no other option

<comment><USER13> Many open source projects are infiltrated. You may use Linux but if you run on x86 you are already owned.

<comment><USER14> Not via Linux, but via the IME that Intel puts on every CPU with full access to all memory and the network cards.

<comment><USER13> One source of entropy in Linux is the RDRND instruction. If you control or predict its output you can do a lot of harm.

<comment><USER14> It really depends on a lot of the software as well. Linux doesn't inherently trust just the CPU instructions for entropy. In fact, it recently borrowed a new feature from OpenBSD and added it called getrandom():

[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c6e9d6f38894798696f23c8084ca7edbf16ee895)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Article from 2015: "Israel, NSA May Have Hacked Antivirus Firm Kaspersky Lab"

[https://www.tomsguide.com/us/kaspersky-hack-israel- nsa,news-...](https://www.tomsguide.com/us/kaspersky-hack-israel- nsa,news-21084.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> So, if I understand this right... some NSA TAO employee was doing work on their home computer (???), where they installed Kaspersky AV (reasonable), and Kaspersky promptly identified the malware _they were working on_ as malware and uploaded it?

And then Israel hacked Kaspersky 'cause that's what they do or something, found the NSA development malware, and was like "Hey NSA, you should figure out how this got here"?

This seems like a very different story from any of the Kaspersky stuff I've been hearing. I'm sort of surprised Kaspersky had servers vulnerable to Israel, but I'm _really_ surprised it was acceptable for NSA TAO employees to do work on their personal machines. I merely work in algorithmic trading, and everyone in the industry is paranoid about code leaving the building (at least one employer I know of straight-up doesn't have a VPN at all, from what I've heard). How is _the NSA_ not as paranoid here?

<comment><USER17> >Kaspersky promptly identified the malware they were working on as malware and uploaded it?

If the news story is to be believed, Kaspersky was scanning for classified data using US intelligence codewords as a selector.

>I'm sort of surprised Kaspersky had servers vulnerable to Israel

I'm not, everyone's servers are vulnerable. Intelligence agencies can buy exploits. If they want in, they get in.

>but I'm really surprised it was acceptable for NSA TAO employees to do work on their personal machines.

I don't believe it is allowed. That said controlling access to data is hard, lots of people probably do work at home with classified stuff when they are told they shouldn't.

<comment><USER18> > If the news story is to be believed, Kaspersky was scanning for classified > data using US intelligence codewords as a selector.

Assuming you mean the linked article, it doesn't say that. It says that Kaspersky uses "silent signatures", which are supposed to be indicators of malware, but could hypothetically be adapted to search for classified data instead. But it doesn't allege Kaspersky was actually doing that.

(edit2: But the NYT report [2] does seem to allege that! This reporting is such a mess…)

Apparently, silent signatures are a technique to test new signatures where instead of blocking files with the signature, the AV reports the finding back to a server, allowing the vendor to identify false positives before fully deploying the signature. The question is _what_ exactly Kaspersky is/was reporting to their server. I googled 'silent signature' and found a patent [1], issued to Kaspersky, which describes sending only hashes of the executable with the signature. But this article seems to suggest that they were sending the executable in full - at least if the leak of NSA tools occurred via that mechanism. (The article doesn't say it did, but it sounds like a plausible route for a customer's executable to find its way to Kaspersky's network.) If this is the case, it sounds extremely troubling from a privacy perspective even without any intelligence services getting involved.

edit: Actually, I think the body of the patent does disclose sending the whole file to a server, which isn't mentioned in the summary. The text is a little vague, though.

> If no threat is detected in step 720, statistics regarding the executable > file and the frequency of launches of the executable file are collected in > step 740. Then, in step 750, the file is downloaded and sent for a further > analysis in step 760. After the analysis, either a white list or black list > can be updated with a signature of this executable file.

[1] [https://www.google.com/patents/US20110126286](https://www.google.com/patents/US20110126286)

[2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/technology/kaspersky- lab-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/technology/kaspersky-lab-israel- russia-hacking.html)

<comment><USER19> > But this article seems to suggest that they were sending the executable in > full

It doesn't necessarily need to be an executable.

Imagine this filter:

\- File type: __.docx

\- Silent Signature: "TOP SECRET//COMINT//NOFORN"

That means all word documents with:

\- the " _top secret_ " classification

\- in the " _Special Intelligence(ComInt)_ " area

\- marked as " _No Foreign Nationals_ "

will automatically be sent back to servers for review.

<comment><USER16> Why the heck is a file that says "TOP SECRET//COMINT//NOFORN" on anyone's personal laptop? Isn't that, like, not just a firing offense but also a criminal offense?

Again, in my industry I'm not allowed to take code home with me; I have to remote into work and edit it on my work desktop. And the worst-case scenario of code leaking is basically that a competitor makes money that we would otherwise have made. Can't people who literally have (in their belief, at least) the fate of the free world in their hands be at least this careful?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess Kaspersky is rumoured to be to the Russian government what Apple / Google / Microsoft / Facebook are proven to be to the US government.

Secret FISA courts rule away all of your basic privacy rights? Fear not. Russia is the enemy.

<comment><USER20> Correct. Russia IS the enemy.

Secret warrants by a secret court is also the enemy.

One is just more important and dangerous than the other (look out of the window).

Perfect example of whataboutism BTW.

<comment><USER21> > Russia IS the enemy

In what sense?

<comment><USER22> In a very direct sense.

It's a de facto totalitarian dictatorship. Its proliferation harms human rights, poses real danger to Ukraine, claims lives. ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Ukrainian_cr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Ukrainian_crisis#Total_deaths) , corruption also claims lives [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eO8ZHfV4fk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eO8ZHfV4fk) )

<comment><USER21> But you could say much of the same about the US.

<comment><USER22> Much of the same?

Do you refer to military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, ...?

Do you dispute that these countries/areas are/were different from Ukraine?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Israel (Mossad?) can hack something in Russia, see tools and recognise those tools as top secret NSA gear. Do you wonder how they made that recognition? Were they shared with Israel so they knew, in which case the source could have been Israel being hacked, right? Or they knew because hacking the NSA is something multiple nation states have done. I'd be completely amazed if the NSA wasn't absolutely full of spies acting for foreign powers and organised crime.

At this point should you just fire everybody in the NSA and start again? If not, why not? I'm struggling to see genuine competence in improving the security of Americans amongst the constitutional attacks on the citizenry, attacks which most definitely have the opposite effect.

<comment><USER24> I can look at a Git commit and tell you exactly which of my coworkers wrote it without looking at %cn. Code has style, like spoken language has accents.

One could argue that e.g. German spy tools copy the American style so that those decompiling it will think it is American. I argue that is a lot harder that it sounds. Code style is much deeper than whether or not to use braces around lone if clauses. The whole way of thinking, layout of data structures, use of getters/setters or properties, breakdown of what goes where and into which classes, breakup of large methods, etc etc etc. These signatures and many more give one a feel for the software's origin. Not proof, but a very solid foundation for suspicion.

<comment><USER25> You might find De-anonymizing Programmers via Code Stylometry ( [http://www.princeton.edu/~aylinc/papers/caliskan- islam_deano...](http://www.princeton.edu/~aylinc/papers/caliskan- islam_deanonymizing.pdf) ) an interesting read.

I suspect that coding style guides are detectable in compiled output too.

As an aside, a bit that caught my eye here:

> This material is based on work supported by the ARO (U.S. Army Research > Office) Grant W911NF-14-1- 0444, the DFG (German Research Foundation) under > the project DEVIL (RI 2469/1-1), and AWS in Education Research Grant award.

<comment><USER26> >I suspect that coding style guides are detectable in compiled output too.

I strongly doubt that (while I concur that source coding style is often recognizable).

More or less a decompiler (when it works properly) attempts to interpret the machine code and translate it into the source. In order to do so, it must have some "templates" corresponding to regognizable "patterns" in the code, so the source derived from the decompilation will reflect these templates and not the "original".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Kaspersky Finds New Nation-State Attack—In Its Own Network

[https://www.wired.com/2015/06/kaspersky-finds-new-nation- sta...](https://www.wired.com/2015/06/kaspersky-finds-new-nation-state-attack- network/)

"There was one victim, however, that didn't fit the profile of other targets. Raiu says this was an international gathering for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps"

"But perhaps the most interesting targets were the venues hosting the P5+1 meetings. P5+1 refers to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, who have been in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear activities."

</comment><comment><USER28> In fine, that NSA is not that super agency filed with very talented n math/crypto/cs people like the majority depict in their mind. They are employing average folks who use average tools and get caught by average issues. The only difference might be that they are educated and trained to be very efficient at doing one very specific job and that's all.

<comment><USER29> It's the same with any such "mystical" organisation. There are no Hollywood super-humans anywhere. It's regular people cooperating and doing their jobs all the way down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can't recommend Empty Wheel enough for in-depth analysis on these stories. For example: [https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/10/11/on-the-kaspersky- hack/](https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/10/11/on-the-kaspersky-hack/)

These stories still are almost certainly revealing just a fraction of the story. All ignore Kaspersky's reports laying out US and allies' spying tools (explaining why Israel might hack Kaspersky and share the details, if not the work). And the most logical explanation for the FSB démarche is that Kaspersky — as they said at the time — reported the hack to their relevant law enforcement agency, which is the FSB, who in turn yelled at the CIA.

See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15441516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15441516)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It would be really surprising if Kaspersky survived this.

<comment><USER31> Do you mean the company or the man?

<comment><AUTHOR> The company. The man will be fine.

<comment><USER32> Tell that to McAfee

<comment><USER33> What about McAfee? He divested from the software/company shortly after it was created. He has a colorful personal life, but I doubt that has much of anything to do with the software that he hasn't been involved with for a around 2 decades.

(Other than the software made him rich/a minor celebrity.)

<comment><USER34> > He has a colorful personal life

I think the gp was referring to what accusations people have made of McAfee since he sold the company.

Showtime aired up a documentary[1] about him. I think "colorful personal life" can only be interpreted as a euphemism since he was accused of murder, rape, running a local armed gang, fleeing the country from the police, etc.

I have no reason to believe Kaspersky will have similar issues as I suspect McAfee was eccentric from the start.

[1] [http://www.sho.com/titles/3437264/gringo-the-dangerous- life-...](http://www.sho.com/titles/3437264/gringo-the-dangerous-life-of-john- mcafee)

<comment><USER35> He also ran for POTUS as a Libertarian.

<comment><USER36> He was born in Scotland so that was never going to work, lol

<comment><USER37> Born on an Army base to an American father. John McCain was born under similar circumstances, Ted Cruz and George Romney were both born abroad and neither was seriously considered disqualified. The only difference between McCain and McAfee afaict is both McCain's parents were US citizens at the time of his birth. That may be relevant, that part of the law can change, but simply being born oversees doesn't stop a person from being a "natural-born citizen".

<comment><USER36> Didn't know that, cool!

I'm not American so not that clued up on the specifics.

<comment><USER33> Its a common misunderstanding among Americans "you have to be born in the US to become president." I'm not sure where that came from but it's not exactly true. The Constitution says you have to be a "natural born citizen" to become president. "Natural born citizen," however, is _not_ defined.

IMO, I think the reason it wasn't defined is because the meaning is obvious, there's two ways to be a citizen, - by birth ("natural") or by naturalization.

Tons of discussion on the topic here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural- born-citizen_clause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born- citizen_clause)

As mentioned above, Ted Cruz was a serious contender for POTUS yet was born in Canada as well as George Romney, who was born in Mexico. Those two about as close as we got to "settling" the issue.

John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone which, at the time, was an unincorporated territory of the United States. Does that "count" as being "the United States" if you're going to interpret "natural born citizen" that way? People may disagree. They also may disagree if military bases "count" the same way as the Panama Canal Zone. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_Zone#Citizenship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_Zone#Citizenship)

US Senate passed a non-binding resolution that McCain was a "natural born Citizen" of the United States.

There have been several Presidents who have one non-citizen parent, the most recent being Barrack Obama.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Note that Windows Defender also uploads files on scans which is opt out.

<comment><AUTHOR> All the mainstream endpoint protection software does this, so if you're going to run it at all --- don't --- you're going to have to pick which company you trust not to do what Kaspersky apparently did.

<comment><USER39> This makes me curious. How many companies in the Fortune 500 are going without AV software on their Windows PCs? AV software surely is crappy, but it still seems to be standard within a big majority of the large corporations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What is the timeline on this? If Israel knew this in 2015, why is Kaspersky tools just being banned in the US now? Was this only shared recently?

<comment><USER41> > If Israel knew this in 2015, why is Kaspersky tools just being banned in the > US now?

Now _that_ is an excellent question. Why didn't the Obama administration do more to protect U.S. government computer systems from this threat?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Perhaps he/she had the data on a SAN while performing development from a more "secure" computer and one of his personal computers with AV installed was connected to the same SAN. A likely scenario as far as scenarios go.

<comment><USER43> One other possibility is that Kaspersky stole nothing, that it found the malware on computers it was tasked with protecting. And one should wonder did they add signatures to their A/V product to find and protect against this malware or not?

<comment><AUTHOR> NYT:

 _Israeli intelligence officers informed the N.S.A. that in the course of their Kaspersky hack, they uncovered evidence that Russian government hackers were using Kaspersky's access to aggressively scan for American government classified programs, and pulling any findings back to Russian intelligence systems. They provided their N.S.A. counterparts with solid evidence of the Kremlin campaign in the form of screenshots and other documentation, according to the people briefed on the events._

As reported, this isn't incidental collection.

<comment><USER44> That paragraph reeks of either journalistic license or a journalist who doesn't seem to understand what antivirus does.

 _Every_ antivirus program aggressively scans for malicious programs and sends them back to the security firm for inspection and creation of fingerprints. If the collection wasn't incidental, what mechanism could the FSB exploit to non- naively identify tools that it didn't already have, and flag them for retrieval?

<comment><AUTHOR> Your comment doesn't really say anything. Obviously, most AV software relays files back to the AV vendor's servers. But that's not what this graf implies. The graf suggests that Russian hackers are sending selectors down to the installed base of AV software to retrieve specific files, and that, once they obtained files that way, they passed the files on to Russian intelligence.

<comment><USER44> You seem to miss the part where I say

>If the collection wasn't incidental, what mechanism could the FSB exploit to non-naively identify tools that it didn't already have, and flag them for retrieval?

Emphasis on "non-naively." Antivirus seems like a highly ineffective tool for espionage of the sort being claimed in the article. You either have to blindly fish for something or already have a fingerprint of what you're looking for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously, they have fingerprints of what they're looking for.

<comment><USER44> To have a hash of a file, you need the file (or a large portion of the file), especially in the context of antivirus, which searches for very specific files and needs to have a very low false positive and false negative rate. Consequently, they would already have to have the tool (or a large portion of the tool) to find it and retrieve it. A little non-productive, don't you think?

Saying that they "obviously have fingerprints of what they're looking for" is an active attempt to make the events fit a narrative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Why would anyone unaffiliated with NSA be alarmed that its tools had been breached? What legitimacy does it have at this point? Serious question.

<comment><USER46> The NSA is angry that their toys were lost because of their incompetence of using a tool that was just doing its job (to find malware) on a system that also hosted their secret toys. They're even more angry that they didn't notice themselves so their buddies from Israel had to tell them. _That_ must have burned.

Since the cover-up among relevant folks failed, and since Russia is slowly elevated to "not really friendly" status again by the US gov't, there's a great opportunity by the US deep state to send a big f*ck you to Kaspersky for their impertinence of doing their job.

<comment><USER47> > The NSA is angry that their toys were lost because of their incompetence of > using a tool that was just doing its job

That is not true at all. The software was run on an employee's home computer, who had illegally brought classified content home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Which antivirus should I use? "Find & Replace" Kasperskey with McAffe and FSB with NSA, you end up with American 3 letter agencies that have all your data. Every company has a home country, and every country a rule to decipher data.

</comment><comment><USER49> At this point you just assume that any sufficiently large company based in Russia with capabilities of misusing their power in a way to profit Russian state government will be coerced into doing so or go out of business at some point. Russian thugs have no issues applying pressure till the victim collapses or agrees to cooperate even against their interests. I lived in Russia for 25 years and I saw that happen many times.

<comment><USER50> Unfortunately, it does happen here as well(1,2).

1-[https://theintercept.com/2017/10/10/recordings-capture- bruta...](https://theintercept.com/2017/10/10/recordings-capture-brutal-fbi- tactics-to-recruit-potential-informant/) 2-[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/08/lavabit-e...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/08/lavabit- email-shut-down-edward-snowden) 3-[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer)

<comment><USER51> If your company is in Russia, China or the US, and the government in that country has any interest in the data you collect, you will have to give it away. In Russia and China they just do it, in the US it's a matter of "National Security". I'm not sure why this would surprise anyone - <USER2> because most of us are on the side of the latter.

<comment><USER52> Russian and China coercion are on a completely different scale, and we all know it. Especially after the Snowden backlash.

Imagine any major Chinese IT company pushing back against government requests like Dreamhost did. Even the biggest ones can't/won't. It helps that the government is a huge investor in most of them, of course.

"Chinese IT company rebuffs government demand for user information on its website". This headline does not exist.

<comment><USER53> A lot of that is because Russia and China don't feel very secure compared to the US for various historical/geopolitical reasons. The US govt is known to act ruthlessly when it feels there's an existential threat.

<comment><USER54> As a Ukrainian Jew, the idea that Russia doesn't act as, if not more, ruthlessly than the U.S. is pretty laughable.

<comment><USER55> As an Arab Muslim, the idea that the US is any better is laughable.

<comment><USER54> You must not live in Afghanistan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> What a wonderful Orwellian world we live in! Government agencies that develop dangerous hacking tools which end up in the wild are the good guys and the anti-virus company who finds them out is the vilain of the story.

</comment><comment><USER57> Interesting that Check Point Technologies use(d) Kaspersky AV engine embedded in its UTM platforms for many years up until the US government mandates this year (resulting in a non KAV install option). Check Point trust them but not the US government.

</comment><comment><USER58> So, Israel Hacked Kaspersky, and discovered Kaspersky had been helping hack NSA tools, which in part show NSA was hacking Iran..

</comment><comment><USER59> Is the Unit 8200 involved in this operation?

<comment><USER60> Given that 8200 is their unified SIGINT enterprise, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> So everybody is spying on everybody. How can we use that to our advantage?

</comment><comment><USER62> I world prefer to keep distance from US government rather than Russia/China. I do not have any activity in those countries and this is irrelevant to me whether they have profile on me or not.

</comment><comment><USER63> Kaspersky should spin this into an ad campaign on how their machine learning malware A.I uncovered secret NSA malware and uploaded the files for analysis, thus, preventing another Stuxnet/Olympic Games outbreak.

<comment><USER64> There's no realistic spin for Kaspersky for anyone who wants to protect their data from the Russian government. True or not, the reputational damage is complete.

<comment><USER65> "Israeli government hackers saw something suspicious in the computers of a Moscow-based cybersecurity firm: hacking tools that could only have come from the National Security Agency".

The Israelis seem to be able to poke around on other people's servers whenever they want....

<comment><USER66> I think that is the message being missed. They are poking around American servers as well. Future problem I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> It seems very plausible that the FSB is using Kaspersky to alert them every time the software finds something of interest. It would then make further sense that the FSB would locate the target and investigate. It's probably how they found this NSA Employees PC. Entry to the device was probably rather simple since they already had some level of access through the Kaspersky product.

Quite brilliant to use a popular Anti Virus software to scan millions of computers for interesting software. The FSB probably couldn't believe its luck when they found this target. I am in disbelief that the US Government would even use Kaspersky in the first place. I am just a simple consumer and would never trust their software knowing how the Russian system operates. There is no such thing as independence from oversight.

Leave it to the Jews to figure all this out. Super smart, it's in their genetics.....Bravo...</comment>


Mailgo – A Different Mailto - <AUTHOR> https://mailgo.js.org <comment><USER2> A propos Email address obfuscation: the only way to avoid spamming is not to post an human readable email address in the web. You can safely assume _anything_ human readable as being machine readable. Form mailers with strong captchas are the solution to avoid spam.

Having said that, does anybody know a strong captcha code which does not require Google dependencies?</comment>


The Discrete 741 - <AUTHOR> http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2014/the-xl741/

<comment><AUTHOR> Personally I think building this thing should be required in all EE curriculums :-) This is a very nicely done implementation of a very useful IC.

<comment><USER2> One of the funniest memories I had of grading undergrad elec labs was from the course for nonmajors:

"It turns out that opamps are not actually shaped like triangles. :("</comment></comment>


HP plans to release first memristor, alternative to flash and SSDs in 18 months - <AUTHOR> http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/10/hp-plans-to-release-first-memristor.html <comment><USER2> This article is mostly made of quotes from an EEtimes article[1], adds no information or value to it, and is (to me at least) less readable.

[1]:[http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4229171/HP-Hynix-to- laun...](http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4229171/HP-Hynix-to-launch- memristor-memory-2013?pageNumber=0)

<comment><USER3> EE Times article submitted here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3080963>

<comment><USER4> And here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3081273>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The really exciting part here, to me, is the idea of fabricating large amounts of nonvolatile memory on top of a CPU. Modern processors already spend a huge amount of their time waiting on memory, and a great amount of power trying to hide that memory latency. If these guys can lower memory latency dramatically -- and it looks like they can -- computers would get a lot faster.

<comment><USER6> This would be a huge boon for scientific computing. The data is often huge, but all of it must be constantly pushed through the CPU every iteration.

<comment><USER7> As the number of cores per socket is steadily increasing it is becoming more difficult to keep all of the cores on a single computer operating efficiently. A higher clock rate per core, or more cores per socket, is not very useful if they are all waiting on memory.

<comment><USER5> Now imagine a large amount of memory connected to the cores through tiny metal wires on the chip itself. Now imagine that it's split into a bunch of small independent memories with enormous bandwidth, with data automatically migrating between them to cut down on wire delays. Give it a few years, and this could be reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Watch HP research's Stanley Williams describe the memristor and what they are working towards in more detail on YouTube:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY&sns=em](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY&sns=em)

<comment><USER9> The no more hard drive and persistent ram thing should be really interesting. Completely change how we do things.

Also, application specific processing... writing instruction sets for each application will be really interesting. Cell processing et al will be a thing of the past.

<comment><USER10> All of those years spent trying to educate my family and non-technical friends on the difference between RAM and HDD and explaining how it is confusing when they tell me they couldn't install a program because their laptop was "out of memory".... wasted!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great to see some positive press on HP. Hope HP can innovate their way out of the current slump.

</comment><comment><USER12> So how would this affect what languages we use? How different data structures perform? etc. Will this amplify the end of the free lunch?

I'm especially curious how Rich Hickey's approach to state, time, and identity in a functional language fit in?

</comment><comment><USER13> Here we have HP on the verge of profoundly transforming our industry and a CEO (who should be aware of this) wanting to turn the company into an SAP, because that's the future...

I hope Meg Whitman does better than Leo Apotheker. Shouldn't be hard.

<comment><USER14> But will Meg take it in the right direction either? Her experience is consumer-facing... I hope there is an empowered VP or 2 who will make that initiative a success.

<comment><USER13> I think the greatest impact of the memristor is in the consumer space. When you have a 1000-fold (or million-fold) quantitative change you are bound to have a qualitative change as well...

What would a computer with petabytes of non-volatile RAM look like? How would you package software for it? Will it reboot from time to time? What does a reboot mean when your memory is non-volatile? I have my hunches, but the effort to find answers to my few questions is dwarfed by the effort to find out what the relevant questions will be in this brave new world and if we can answer them. Or even understand them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Enlarge the data bus and...are we finally finding a way out of the von Neuman architecture?

<comment><USER16> Is the Von Neumann architecture related to the data bus?

<comment><USER17> It operates by pushing data back and forth across it. Backus argued that that "Von Neumann bottleneck" of not being able to access program and data at the same time ought to be done away with somehow in his "Can Programming Be Liberated From The Von Neumann Style" <http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf>

<comment><USER16> I... wish I understood. I'm just a lowly Blub programmer.

An executable is often less than 1MB, and certainly always less than 100MB. In contrast, a 14GB video game still loads pretty quickly, and the data that goes across the bus per frame is often a couple orders of magnitude larger than the program executable itself.

I know I'm missing something obvious...

<comment><USER18> Modern computers are extremely fast, and can still do tremendous amounts of computations despite the limitations of the Von Neumann architecture. But make no mistake, the Von Neumann bottleneck is a serious and fundamental problem. The CPU has to spend a lot of effort shuttling data back and forth. Worse yet, it has to spend a lot of time _waiting_ on data (swapping to/from disk, for example). Even when you're CPU is at 100% utilization the vast majority of cycles are spent doing nothing but waiting. That has huge ramifications, affecting everything from performance to power efficiency, etc.

Consider a typical snippet of CPU's life. The next instruction is read from memory, it tells the CPU to move a value from memory into a register. The next instruction after that is read from memory, it tells the CPU to move a different value from memory into a different register. The next instruction is read from memory, it tells the CPU to do some operation with the values in those two registers. The next instruction is read from memory, it tells the CPU to test whether the result from the previous instruction is 0, if it was then jump to a specific address. Since it was the CPU fetches the next instruction from that location in memory. And so on. It only takes following this process for a little while to see how tedious it is. We've managed to significantly improve it by adding fast local memory caches to the CPU but even if the memory operated at the speed of the CPU it would still be inefficient.

Now, imagine if instead of megabytes of low latency cache you have gigabytes. Now, imagine if instead of having a low latency cache at all the processor is directly wired to the RAM as if the RAM was just a large collection of registers. Instead of "fetch me X, fetch me Y, add X + Y, put the result back to Z" all of that could be a single CPU instruction. Moreover, it would be far, far rarer for the CPU to be waiting for data merely due to local latency. This would improve the effective computing power and power efficiency of CPUs by several orders of magnitude. The impact it would have on computing is truly mind boggling.

Let me express it in a different way. Imagine if your cell phone had the same raw computing power as a top of the line GPU does today, with the same battery life and with the same transistor count and clock speed on the CPU, just with a different architecture and different RAM.

<comment><USER16> I think... Maybe... I'm getting it. Kind of. Probably not.

By wiring the CPU directly to the RAM, to use your metaphor, then we can entirely bypass the ASM stage of "a program" (but then what is a program if not a sequence of instructions?) and therefore we may better predict which data our program needs at runtime? Thereby caching that data more effectively than the random access patterns of Von Neumann?

Basically, instead of "accessing a pointer causes its data to be cached into L1", it would be... Well, I have no idea. Something else?

Here are my points of confusion, sorry:

1) in this non-Neumann paradigm, there will still be "data", in the traditional sense, right? (Or is "everything a program"?)

2) then... There will surely still be "caches" for that data, yeah? (Or is that what I'm missing? But without caches, I don't understand how it could be faster.)

But yeah, I don't want to waste anyone's time... certainly not anyone of your guys' caliber. Don't feel compelled/obligated to reply or anything. :)

<comment><USER18> Nope, still missing it.

When you wire the RAM to the CPU you don't need a cache. Imagine you have a billion or even a trillion registers, or more. That's a non-Von Neumann architecture. You're not shuffling data around on buses, the data is directly connected to the CPU.

Look at the example I gave again. Consider a simple addition command. The first CPU instruction says "take the word at this memory address, and move it to a register", the second does the same with a different address, the third adds the two values in the registers, the fourth then puts the result back in some other memory location. But what if there's no difference between the memory and registers? Instead you just have one instruction that says: add the values at these two locations, put the result at this other location. Now you've replaced 4 clock ticks with one clock tick. More than that, you save however many clock ticks it would have taken on average for the data to get to / from main memory (sometimes cached, sometimes not). Such an architecture would mean that you only have to wait on things you really have to wait on, like network and device latency, etc.

The structure of programs need not be terribly different per say, it can still be a sequence of instructions in memory. There are other non-Von Neumann architectures which would work differently (such as neural networks), but those are even more complicated.

<comment><USER19> Except addressing that amount of memory is still going to need a bus, it doesn't matter if the memory is sitting right on top of the CPU core or in the next room. It simply isn't going to be possible to provide direct access to every single memory cell when there are billions of them. This is still going to be a von Neumann (actually Modified Harvard) architecture, it's just going to be blazingly fast.

Now, once we start applying memristor implicational logic data processing we will have truely left the confines of the von Neumann architecture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What are the implications for back end development? Will this greatly reduce server complexity (need for redundancy)? Could AWS just give you a machine in the cloud, and you wouldn't need to worry about databases and database backups and so on, you could just keep all your data locally in natural data structures?

<comment><USER20> This would not necessarily affect back end development as you would still want high availability for the application by using an active-active setup across two availability zones in EC2.

With regard to your question on data structures, yes - they would have to change. MySQL and most other databases use b-trees since they were meant to live on disk. Just running MySQL on memsistor-backed storage would result in a considerable waste of CPU and storage capacity (b-trees are not very compact).

Running a database like MemSQL on memsistors would make the most sense since it uses data structures meant for DRAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not if they continue cutting their hardware divisions, it won't.

<comment><USER22> > Asked about the competition, Williams said: "Samsung has An even larger > group working on this than we do."

As a consumer, I'm indifferent to who does it. As long as it gets out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Whatever happened with Nantero?

</comment><comment><USER24> A memristor TouchPad would've been really hot.

I wonder how these theoretical projects will survive in an HP that is only concerned with how much profit each project makes to appease shareholders...

</comment><comment><USER25> The bad side-effects of this memory technology: you can't just power-off your computer to hide your current activity; decrypted passwords in memory still will be readable after shutoff.

<comment><USER26> This is silly. Just because memory is non volatile storage doesn't mean the OS can't do reasonable things like clearing out some state as it goes to sleep.

<comment><USER25> Ok. So your computer is in lock-screen mode requiring you to enter a password before resuming your interactive session. Someone with physical access to your computer certainly can find a way to divorce the memory from the rest of the system without letting the OS do its thing ... your live program memory is compromised. This memory often will have more sensitive info than your (possibly encrypted) mass storage.

<comment><USER26> I disagree.

Firstly, the fabrication process everyone is excited about puts the memrister cells directly atop the cmos logic gates as just another layer to the die. No external memory bus to tap into. So you'd need the sort of equipment used to remove layers from dies to expose the cells for reverse engineering, testing, etc. If someone with these resources is after you, you're already fucked regardless of the exact technological vector.

Secondly, a system designer could trivially add some amount of volatile storage for holding security sensitive data. Various schemes of encrypted pages that are decrypted using a key stored in volatile SRM within the CMS could be used. In other words, we could do the same things we currently do with hard drives between the memrister array and SRAM that acts as a decrypted cache.

Thirdly, you're applying an expectation to all memristers that is not applied to existing storage technologies. It might be a fair criticism of a concrete product that operates in an insecure way, but it's absurd to apply this expectation to an entire technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article mentions both 18 months and summer 2013. That's not entirely consistent.

<comment><USER28> It's an estimate not an exact length of time. 18 months takes us to April 2013, so maybe they rounded April into "summer" or maybe they rounded 20 months to the nearest .5 of a year. Or maybe they class April as summer anyway.

It's not like those two times are way different.

<comment><USER29> Well summer is December to February, so April is a fair way off...

Perhaps they could do away with the stupid idea altogether and say 2nd quarter 2013 if they can't be more specific.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I doubt HP itself will exist in 18 months.

<comment><USER31> Hyperbole much?

<comment><USER32> All day, every day!

<comment><USER33> Eight days a wee-eeek!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inside the 'Tunnel' Elon Musk Is Already Digging Under Los Angeles - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/01/inside-tunnel-elon-musk-already-digging-los-angeles/ <comment><USER2> "We're just going to figure out what it takes to improve tunneling speed by, I think, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 percent," he said Sunday during a hyperloop design competition at SpaceX. "We have no idea what we're doing—I want to be clear about that."

Definitely the money quote.

</comment><comment><USER3> Click baity title. He's digging a trench on his own property.</comment>


Introducing streamy-db: a deterministic database on a stream processing engine - <AUTHOR> https://domsj.info/2018/12/30/introducing-streamy-db.html <comment><AUTHOR> Lots of Kafka + Cassandra out there looking for a replacement. I wonder if this is the one.</comment>


3 women who radically changed the course of technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.rexsoftware.com/ada/ <comment><USER2> Grace Hopper didn't invent the compiler in the sense that we understand the term now (a semantics preserving translation from a source language to a target language). What her team did, was to produce a linker, the A-0_System.

It is also wrong to say that Hopper is "largely the reason coders no longer need to write in ones and zeros". K. Zuse's Plankalkuel [2] is from the 1940s, and the first high-level programming languages. And formalisms like the lambda calculus or mu-recursive functions are even older, Turing complete and hardly based on 0s and 1s.

It's also wrong to say without Lovelace we might not have computers, or indeed that she was the first programmer. Humans have been working on automata (that evolved into computers) by making them more powerful, e.g. the Antikythera mechanism [3]. It's also wrong to say that Lovelace was the first programmer. As far as one can see from the notes, she helped Babbage write down, and popularise his ideas.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl)

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

<comment><USER3> Interestingly, Plankalkuel was predated by Ada Lovelace's notes on calculating Bernoulli numbers.

Then for Lovelace, lets go back even further. Mathematics itself already contains the base principles that enable the formalisms of lambda calculus.

Additionally, the Antikythera mechanism was predated by many admittedly more crude but still important calculating mechanisms like the abacus. So its wrong to say that those automata would have existed independently.

Its almost as if everyone's work is built upon the work of those before them and wouldn't be possible otherwise. Does that invalidate their achievement?

<comment><USER4> > Its almost as if everyone's work is built upon the work of those before them > and wouldn't be possible otherwise. Does that invalidate their achievement?

I think that "x wouldn't have happened without y" statements in questions of scientific discovery are almost always false, at least partially for this reason.

In some ways it does invalidate their achievement, to the extent that they are portrayed as being the sole agent of radical change when, in all likelihood, they are just the person who got there first (and often by a slim margin, as the history of scientific priority disputes shows).

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, the competition makes their achievement even more valuable because they were in a race and got there first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hedy Lamarr, movie star and mathematician, should be worth a mention. The story about frequency hopping radios is an unlikely and fascinating read.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. We had a story about her on a local news site. It was a bit disingenuous "The actress who invented the wifi", had to look up the patent to get a less biased picture though.

<comment><USER8> Lamarr & Antheil invented frequency to help the Allies, so their remotely steerable torpedoes could not be pwned en route.

One should not fail to mention Antheil, it was a collaboration.

<comment><USER8> s/ frequency/ frequency hopping/r

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Helen_Worsley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Helen_Worsley) is Beatrice Helen Worsley left out? While Ada Lovelace might have written the first algorithm Worsley helped to write the first actual program and wrote a PhD on basically bridging Turing machines and real machines.

<comment><USER10> On a list of three, there's allways n-3 left out...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here is the piece[1] where Adele Goldberg explains how she warned Xerox executives about not giving away the kitchen sink to Steve Jobs (taken from Robert Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds" documentary)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw#t=453](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J33pVRdxWbw#t=453)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reference, mate!

<comment><USER11> No problem! Thanks for the great post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >When we think of innovators of the technology space we largely think of blokes like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk

No, we most certainly do not. And of course one of the 3 spots is wasted on the myth of Lovelace, as usual. Don't bother picking someone who actually mattered.

<comment><USER13> > _like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk_

I wish the cult of personality would go away, and instead of credit going to an individual we could say, "innovators like Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Tesla/SpaceX".

<comment><USER8> I agree with opposing a cult of leaders getting credit, but replacing it with corporate credit ?

There is a long unjust tradition of stealing deserved credit from engineers, employees & research assistants[1].

Sometimes individuals _are_ solely resposible for important ideas and implementations, credit should be accorded accurately to teams and individuals.

[1] Jocelyn Bell, discoverer of radio-pulsars, robbed of the Nobel by her research supervisor, stealing credit for it.

Avoiding personalities should we merely say radio-pulsars were discovered at Jodrell Bank ? Seems less accurate, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Related, Emmy Noether was extremely important to modern mathematics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether#Seminal_work_in_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether#Seminal_work_in_abstract_algebra)

<comment><USER8> Indeed. Noether's formilisation of algebra allowed Church & Turing to develop the lambda-calculus & invent modern programming & computation.

All modern physics stands apon Noether's 1st theorem, that every differentiable symettry of physical action is conserved.

Not to mention rings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was hoping to read something in this article that could be used to inspire today's girls/women who are not programmers, but aspire to be (or have at least given it some thought). Unfortunately, it's hard to see things like "genius-level mathematician" and "studied maths religiously for her first thirty years" having anything other than an off-putting effect. The most common reaction to this would be, "I'm just not like that. Not everyone was born to be a programmer..."

</comment><comment><USER16> Hm... Did Ada Lovelace actually _change_ the course of technology? Or was she just a genious who was (unfortunately) _way_ ahead of her time and thus unable to apply her talents in practice (somewhat like Leonardo da Vinci)?

<comment><USER17> From what I understand Babbage would not have achieved what he had without their collaboration; and I do not mean that in a sexist _" supportive wife- surrogate to the world's most famous hater of organ grinders"_ kind of way, but as a full partner in developing cutting edge technology.

<comment><USER2> From what I understood, Babbage invented his computers himself. Lovelace was helpful to him because of her high-society connection. He was hoping to popularise his work and get more funding.

<comment><USER3> Have a read of the "Notes by the Translator":

[http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html](http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html)

Do you now think Lovelace was only useful to Babbage in the manner you describe?

<comment><USER2> Which of the original content is from Babbage, which from Lovelace?

<comment><USER3> Maybe Julius Caesar was just two women taped together in a Roman Emperor suit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Margret Hamilton, who made programming an engineering discipline by inventing system modelling & software testing at NASA, which famously helped save Apollo 11.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't say I've read enough about Margaret, but she surely was a foundation to some of our modern software design principles.

I didn't know about Apollo 11 details involving Hamilton! Cheers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Title should be "computing technology". There are many types of technology (medical and x-rays for diagnosis comes to mind).</comment>


Good clipart site? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of a good quality clipart site with a license that will allow me to use the clipart on a website? <comment><USER2> Take a look at the Open Clip Art Library, the Creative Commons search engine, and the lists of lists that Smashing Magazine is well known for.

<http://www.openclipart.org/>

<http://search.creativecommons.org/>

<http://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/graphics/>

By the way, you haven't told us what type of website you've got. That's important when, for example, you find clipart that has a Creative Commons Non- Commercial license.</comment>